Truth and Justice - Fern Michaels Page 0,43

they now needed to find out. “Tell us what you can about Andy’s parents.”

Surprisingly, it was Henry Olsen who took the lead, but first he looked at Annie and apologized for what he called his bad attitude. Annie graciously nodded that she was okay with his apology. However, she did not return her six-shooter to the small of her back. She continued to stroke the shiny metal as she listened to him speak, almost reverently, of the Nolans.

“Maddie and I were friends and neighbors with the Nolans for thirty years. Seems like we knew them all our lives. Dan had just married Sonia when they moved next door to us. We were all young back then. Dan had been married very young to a lovely young lady who was killed by a drunk driver. Sonia was his second wife. The first wife, her name was Melanie, had a two-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. That husband wanted nothing to do with a two-year-old little girl, so Dan took her in. To this day, Maddie does not believe that Dan legally adopted Sara. Speaking for myself, I was never quite sure if he did or didn’t. I think Dan thought if he said he was Sara’s dad, then he was her dad. End of story right there.”

“The Nolans were as poor as we were back then,” Maddie said. “There would not have been any money for lawyers, and Dan was still paying for his first wife’s funeral on time payments,” Maddie volunteered.

“When Sara started school, she used the name Nolan. But somewhere over the years I heard, and it wasn’t from the Nolans that I heard it, that Sara started using the name Windsor. It was none of our business, so we never asked them about it,” Henry said.

“A year after they moved in next door to us, Sonia, Andy’s mother, got pregnant, and so did I. We became even closer then. I had a baby girl, and Sonia gave birth to Andy. The children were born just a month apart. We all hoped the two of them would grow up to become a couple. That never happened,” Maddie said wistfully.

“Next spring, Maddie and I are going to take a road trip to Washington, D.C., and we plan to go to Arlington Cemetery. We’ll take some flowers for Andy’s grave, if it’s allowed. If not, we’ll go, kneel, and say some prayers. I think Sonia and Dan would like us to do that. I know they’d do it for us if the situation were reversed,” Henry said.

“We need to know about the daughter, Sara. What we’ve heard so far is not good,” Myra said.

“A bad seed, that one. I know I keep saying that, but there’s no other way to describe that girl. Well, she wasn’t a girl anymore, a young lady I guess,” Henry said ominously. “She hated young Andy with a passion, always trying to get him in trouble. She’d lie, cheat, steal. Like I said, a bad seed. Sonia was at her wits’ end. Dan . . . he just couldn’t control her, so she ran amuck and pretty much did what she wanted to do. She was never held accountable for anything. Wild and uncontrollable. Even knowing all that, young Andy adored her. He often told me she was the prettiest girl in school. He told me when he came back here before deploying the first time that he had given her his power of attorney. We wanted to tell him that was a mistake, but we didn’t. Now I regret not doing that every day,” Henry said.

“Who died first, Mr. or Mrs. Nolan?” Annie asked.

“They both died in a tragic bus accident at the same time. The root cause was a tornado that sprang up out of nowhere that day. Maddie and I were supposed to go on the senior bus trip with them, but we both came down with the flu. The trip was to Las Vegas. A big truck, one of those eighteen-wheelers, lost control, crossed the lane, and smacked headfirst into the bus. Everyone on board died, and so did the bus driver. It was just awful,” Henry said. “They found the bus and the bodies strewn everywhere along that highway after it was all over. It was in all the papers and on television for weeks. Maddie and I, sick as we were, had time to get to our shelter in the basement. Months later, we saw on the news that the