Truth and Justice - Fern Michaels Page 0,29

down from the dais.

“All right, this is what we know, and we only know what we know because it is what Bella told us. Is it all true? We do not know it to be true or false with any certainty. Yet. Would Bella lie to us to gain our help? Possibly, but she did not seek us out, Alexis volunteered our help; so the answer is likely no, she did not lie to us. We need to remember that if we start to parcel out blame here. I, for one, believe that the young lady is on the up and up, so to speak,” Myra said.

“We know Bella’s three-year courtship, such as it was, was not basically physical for the most part since Major Nolan was deployed most of the time. E-mails, occasional phone calls, some FaceTiming whenever they could. Then they had two two-day furloughs. We’re talking intimacy here, or sex if you prefer that word instead, then the one week of a hard and heavy courtship, when they were glued to one another the entire time and got engaged at the end of the week. That’s about the sum total of their relationship. Then the major was deployed again, managed to get a forty-eight-hour leave, and they got married. They had a two-day honeymoon, and that was the sum total of the relationship after the week-long courtship. As far as we know,” Kathryn said. Always the outspoken one, she added, “The whole thing sucks. What’s bothering me, and I said it before, is that Bella knows next to nothing about the man she married. That absolutely does not compute for me. It shouldn’t compute for any of you, either.”

“You’re right, it doesn’t compute for any of us, Kathryn, but we aren’t Bella. There is simply no accounting for love-starved people, and that’s what I think Bella was. I don’t have a fix on the husband yet,” Yoko said.

“Well, he must have loved her as much as she loved him; otherwise, why marry her? Where is it written he has to marry her? That’s because it isn’t written anywhere. Major Nolan, all on his own, made the decision to ask Bella to marry him,” Maggie pointed out.

“Well then, he should have damn well followed through and done what he was supposed to do, see to it that his brand-new wife was taken care of. Which he did not do,” Isabelle snapped. “He did not arrange for her to receive his military pay. He did not have her named the beneficiary of his military life insurance. The blame goes to him, not Bella, and yes, I’m sorry he’s dead, but he was still alive when the time came to make the life-altering decisions one expects a husband to make about his wife’s welfare.”

“Maybe that’s the way Midwesterners do things,” Myra said.

“This is what we know. Major Nolan was from Oklahoma and Bella from Kansas. They first met in San Francisco; then Bella followed the major here to Washington. I think I have that right,” Annie said.

“Yes, dear, you have it right. That’s what Bella shared with us,” Myra said. “Bella really has no family with the exception of a distant cousin somewhere in North Carolina. She said she barely knows her. It’s more of a case of she knows of her rather than knowing her as we think of knowing each other. I’m thinking it’s a Christmas card thing and maybe a phone call once a year, something like that. That’s why Bella was going to relocate to North Carolina. The cousin is all she has in the way of family, so it’s understandable. Even a distant cousin is better than no cousin at all when that’s the end of the bloodline.”

“Major Nolan had a sister that Bella really knows nothing about. Or did know nothing about until the army apprised her of what they had on file, which we now have and which is skimpy at best,” Annie said.

“Bella said Andy never talked about her other than to mention that he had a sister. I believe her name is Sara, and according to Andy’s records, she was at one point married to someone named Steven Conover, from whom she was later divorced. I don’t think we know the when, the why, the how of it all because Bella didn’t share any of that, so it probably means she never knew. Or cared, for that matter. I have the impression brother and sister were not close. At least that’s