Truth and Justice - Fern Michaels Page 0,61
she liked very much. Magical. A feeling that she never had growing up in the Nolan household.
Sara sat down and immediately went to work. She kept shaking her head as she tried to come to terms with the fact that she’d taken a five-hour nap. Five hours! She couldn’t remember if she had ever slept five hours straight in her whole life. She shook her head again to clear it before she opened up her laptop and her phone. In the blink of an eye, she made three medical appointments. A heartbeat later, she had an appointment for an extensive blood work-up, compliments of her OB-GYN.
Two hours later, satisfied that everything was on schedule, Sara finished the online shopping spree that left her positively giddy as she tried to imagine the weight gain from her pregnancies and how she was going to look in her swanky, designer maternity clothes. She’d take a lot of selfies and stick them up on the wall in what would be the baby’s dressing room. Maybe what she could do was have a really good picture of Andy blown up and put on a cardboard mount with a back to it so it could stand alone. She wouldn’t call it Andy. “No, I’m just going to call the lifelike cutout Daddy,” Sara squealed happily. “Maybe I might even get one of myself and call it Mommy.” Sara giggled. Mommy and Daddy looking after their brood.
Sara’s thoughts meandered down another road. What to name the firstborn. Andy, of course. And if it was a girl, it would be Andrea. She also needed to think of another, better name for the second child if it was a girl. She sucked in her breath. She knew she had to be careful. Sara and Andy . . . Someone might put two and two together and come up with Sara Windsor and Andy Nolan. She could absolutely see that happening at some point. Well, she had all the time in the world to think about names, disguises, and ways to blend in and ways to hide out.
All the time in the world.
Sara filled her glass with a new batch of ice cubes. The night loomed ahead of her. She needed to work on her various lists. Put things in order so that her plans flowed flawlessly.
The first list had only one task on it. More like a question. Not caring what time it was, Sara dialed a number she knew from memory, certain she would get a robotic message directing her to leave a message at the sound of the tone. Instead, she was surprised to hear a gravelly voice say, “This is Clint Aldrich. What can I do for you at this ungodly hour of the evening?”
Sara cleared her throat. “Hello, Clint. This is Jackie Pope,” Sara said, using one of her many aliases. “I’m sorry about the time. I lost track of it today for some reason. I think the weather might have something to do with it. Supposed to rain. Barometric pressure and all that. Before I retire for the evening, I wanted to know if you have anything new on Bella Ames.”
“Her name is Nolan. Not Ames. You keep mixing it up, Miz Pope.”
Sara giggled. “I do, don’t I? I’m so sorry. I’ll try to be more careful. Do you have any news? Do you know where she is?”
“Well, of course I do. I am a detective after all. Mrs. Nolan left today to go to Virginia to visit someone named Myra Rutledge. She’s married to a veddy veddy British gentleman named Sir Charles Martin. He once worked for the queen. That would be the Queen of England. Scuttlebutt has it that they were friends in the sandbox. You aren’t paying me for background material, so I keep it to a bare minimum.
“I followed Mrs. Nolan to Pinewood, but once she drove through a security gate, I could not enter without proper credentials, so I drove back around, parked, and took up a position in a small, well-tended forest. From where I was hunkered down, I could see directly into the courtyard and the parking lot, and I could also see the contents of the kitchen through the kitchen window. I stayed till four o’clock, when it became obvious to me, Mrs. Nolan was not going to leave.”
Sara bristled angrily. Her voice was just as angry when she said, “How can you be sure she wasn’t going to leave?”
“Because at three thirty she opened the