Truth and Justice - Fern Michaels Page 0,46

the time Annie suggested a walk around the block, but then changed her mind, and said, “Let’s just walk up to the corner. This place depresses me. So we’re going to the Commodore Hotel to meet up with Avery, is that right?”

Myra said it was.

“Are we staying overnight or flying back home? I need to call Peter and let him know.”

Myra shrugged. “I’m okay either way. I’m sure we can buy whatever we need in one of the shops in the hotel if we stay over. Seriously, though, Annie, I doubt we can accomplish anything here that Avery can’t with his people. The Olsens pretty much summed it up. Sara left, and we got all there was to get of the back story, so I’m thinking we should meet Avery, share what we have, and head home. We can probably do more from our home base, anyway.”

“That works for me, and I agree with you for a change.” Annie laughed. “Here comes our ride, right on time. How do they do that, get it to the minute like that?” Annie fretted. “He said eleven minutes, and it is exactly eleven minutes.”

“You know what, Annie. I don’t know the answer, nor do I care. Do you really care?”

“I-do-not!” Annie linked her arm with Myra’s. “Don’t ever change, Myra,” she said, opening the door of the Uber car.

“I won’t if you won’t.” Myra giggled as she slid into the back seat, Annie right behind her.

“Please take us to the Commodore Hotel.”

“Sure thing, ladies.”

Chapter 10

Nina Lofton, aka Sara Windsor Nolan Santiago Bernard Conover, exited the main terminal, dragging the designer suitcase that cost more than her airline ticket from Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., to Tulsa International Airport. She exited the main terminal, looked around to get her bearings, and walked over to a line for Uber pickups. She took her place behind two casually dressed older women. She heard them call each other by name. Myra and Annie. Old-fashioned names, she thought to herself. They looked pleasant. Even motherly.

She missed not having a mother. Once, she was told, she had a real mother. Then, when she was older, she was told that her mother, her real mother, had died, and she was going to get a new mother whose name was Sonia. She had someone she was supposed to call Dad, but he wasn’t a real dad, either. Just two people whom she lived with. She worked hard at not calling either one Mom or Dad. For some reason, she just couldn’t get her tongue to work to say the words. In her mind and in her thoughts, she called them Sonia and Dan. She hated both of them even more than she hated a two-headed snake. But she had endured because of . . . because of . . . Andy.

Those people, Sonia and Dan, said Andy was her brother. It was a lie. She didn’t have a brother, just like she didn’t have a mom or a dad. Andy was theirs. Andy belonged. She didn’t belong. She wasn’t theirs. She was just tolerated. She hated that they thought she was too stupid to figure it all out. Wasn’t it Plato who said, “Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools speak because they have to say something”?

She, Sara Windsor, fell in love with Andy Nolan when she was seven years old and tasked with watching over her three-year-old little brother who really wasn’t her brother, little or otherwise.

Andy adored her, that much she knew. It was hard not to smile and laugh with him. She had fun playing with him, reading him stories, and pretending to be the characters she was reading about. But she did all of that out of sight of Sonia and Dan. What feelings she had for Andy were private, even way back when she was a little girl who was wise beyond her years. Of course, she didn’t know that then, though she came to know it with each passing year. She wondered how that had happened because it was such a long time ago. Where did those smarts come from? Her real mother maybe. It made her feel good to think that.

A gust of wind whipped through the tunnel-like area where she was standing with the line of people who were all grumbling about the lack of, and the slowness of, the Ubers they’d all called for.

The two ladies in front of her seemed to be the loudest, calling each other