Truth and Justice - Fern Michaels Page 0,26
the table and looked at one another. The silence was unnerving. Maggie bounded to her feet and spun around. “I’m not getting any of this. What’s up with all of you? By now someone, usually you, Nikki, or Annie have at least a half plan of action or else the whole thing. Why do I feel like I’m swimming upstream and the water is running low?”
“Maggie is right. What is it about Bella and her case that’s got us in this funk?” Kathryn demanded, her voice so irritated, the others blinked, wondering if something else was bothering the long-distance truck driver.
“Maybe because her husband was injured and died, and no one told her for over eleven months?” Yoko said softly. “I think that might make me a little crazy, to say the least.”
“Eleven months of writing letters and believing her husband was going to come home to her and they were going to raise a family might have something to do with it,” Alexis said, a catch in her voice. “I know that would bother me. How do you get over something like that?”
“It’s everything,” Nikki said quietly. “Bella is just simply too young. To us, she’s still a kid. Well, sort of. You know what I mean, young. I know it happens, but she’s our . . . our first up-close-and-personal case where love is involved. I think I read somewhere that the military, the army in particular, is so careful about stuff like this. All that time Andy . . . I guess it’s okay to call him Andy . . . was in a hospital almost within walking distance of where Bella lived, and no one told her. This is just eating at me. I want to . . . to do something to someone. I want a payback, and I want it now. I know that’s impossible at the moment, but I feel better having expressed myself out loud.”
“Whoa! Whoa!” Maggie bellowed. “Before we start dishing out blame, we need to look to Andy. It was his job to notify the military of his new status. I get the in-love part, the two-day honeymoon, and I get the deployment. Even so, Bella and making sure she was taken care of should have been the only thing on his mind. It was his idea to have her freeze her eggs, his idea to donate his sperm. So he was thinking ahead in that regard. Meaning he might come back impaired or not come back at all. So if he was thinking of all that, why didn’t he think to do the paperwork that would see that his new wife was taken care of if something happened to him?
“I’m thinking of his military life insurance, not to mention his military pay. Where did he think that was going to go? We need to find out where it was going prior to the marriage. It doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever. Not to Maggie Spritzer, private citizen, Maggie Spritzer, Vigilante in training, and it sure as hell doesn’t compute to me as Maggie Spritzer, Washington Post reporter.”
“Maggie’s right. She summed it up perfectly,” Myra and Annie said in unison.
“That means we’re back to square one,” Nikki pointed out. “Let’s do a rehash of what we know. Everything Bella told us and everything we were able to pull out of her with the exception of the one thing she can’t remember,” Nikki said.
“Before we do that, I want to go on the record saying it bothers me that Bella knows so little about the man she married. Speaking for myself here, Alan and I had a short courtship before we got married. And yet I knew every single thing there was to know about him, practically from the moment he fell out of his mother’s womb. Just the way he knew everything about me. I get it that Bella and Andy were in love and into each other. But so were Alan and me, and yet we talked and talked, kissed until our lips were bruised, and made love twenty-four/seven, and we still talked and learned all there was to know about each other. Tell me it wasn’t the same with all of you. Go ahead, I’m waiting,” Kathryn said angrily. “And yeah, I’m mad as hell here, so there!”
“I for one agree with Kathryn,” Alexis said.
Heads bobbed up and down in agreement with Kathryn.
“It’s almost like there’s some secret to Andy’s past he didn’t share,” Yoko said.
“Then we