Bella blinked. “Absolutely.”
Bella listened; then she laughed. Out loud. “I’m in. I knew there was something about you the minute I walked into this building, and the hair went up on the back of my neck when I walked into this room with the two of you. Back in the day I donated twelve dollars to your defense fund. It was all I could afford at the time. I cheered you guys on till I was hoarse and so did my friends. And now here I am actually talking to two of the members of the infamous Vigilantes. This just makes my day. I’ll do my best to pay you something, and if it takes me the rest of my life, I will do it. For now, my thanks is all I have to give. Do we have a deal?”
“We do,” Alexis and Nikki said in unison.
“All right, then, tomorrow is Saturday. We’ll call a special meeting at Pinewood so you can meet the others; then we’ll get down to business. Alexis, text Myra and ask her what is a good time to meet up.”
A minute later, Alexis said, “Ten!” She looked over at Bella.
“I can make ten. Just give me an address. I’ll plug it into my GPS. I can’t thank you enough for agreeing to help me.”
“We live for this,” Alexis said, and giggled. Nikki burst out laughing; then Bella started to laugh herself. She was certain now that she was in good hands.
* * *
Bella wondered how she could feel so breathless when all she’d done was drive here to Pinewood. She sat outside the gates and stared at the awesome, intricate, wrought-iron gates. All she had to do was press a button, look into the magic eye, and the gates would open. And then . . . and then . . .
Better not to think that far ahead. Just press the button and sally forth. “ ‘Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,’ ” she chortled, then laughed out loud. She was in good hands now. Famous hands. If someone had told her she would be meeting with the famous Vigilantes, she never, not in a million years, would have believed them. And yet, here she was. Suddenly, she wasn’t nervous anymore. She hoped the others were as nice as Alexis and Nikki. She rather thought they would be. Otherwise, how could they have . . . um . . . conducted their . . . um . . . outside activities. She laughed again. And she was part of it now.
Bella parked next to a golf cart and walked toward a back porch. Within seconds, a pack of barking dogs circled her, begging for attention. She dutifully complied because she loved animals. She looked up and saw a group of women waving to her.
Her saviors.
Bella grinned when the dogs scampered off to do whatever they did in this wonderful, magical place called Pinewood.
Alexis and Nikki hugged her as they ushered her into the old-fashioned yet state-of-the-art kitchen, where she was introduced to the others. A monster fire blazed in a fireplace big enough to roast an ox. Bella immediately fell in love with the room and loved the women at first sight as they hugged. None of that handshaking business for these women. A hug meant, “You are now one of us, or at least on our side.” A handshake meant the jury was still out.
Coffee cups came out, coffee was poured, and everyone sat down at the old, scarred kitchen table. The centerpiece of bright yellow mums in a yellow ceramic bowl was low enough on the table so that it didn’t interfere with face-to-face conversations. The coffee ritual was the get-acquainted part before they escorted their new client down the secret, moss-covered stairs to the old dungeons that were now known as the war room.
Normally, a half hour was allotted to detailed introductions like, “Hey, I’m Yoko, and I own a nursery. I’m married to Harry . . .” with the others following suit so Bella would be able to keep track of who was who.
“We’ll get to the boys later,” Myra said. “We don’t want to inundate you with too much on your first visit.” Bella just nodded. She wasn’t exactly overwhelmed. It was more like being awed that she was even here. She said so. Everyone laughed, Annie the loudest as she pulled out her gun and dramatically blew smoke at the end. Bella’s eyes almost bugged out of her head.
“Annie can shoot the eye of a rattler from a mile away,” Myra whispered. “That means she’s a crack shot. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.”
Bella blinked and blinked again. “Uh-huh,” was all she could think to say. The girls went off into peals of laughter.
“You’ll do,” Isabelle said, patting Bella on the back. “We’ll clean this all up later. Now it’s time to get to work. Just follow us and don’t be nervous.”
“Okay,” Bella mumbled as she got in line.
She blinked again when she heard Myra tell Lady, the big golden retriever, “GUARD!”
Annie pressed the rosette at the top of the book and curio cabinet. She stepped back to allow the secret door to open. She pressed a switch, and a light came on over a steep pair of steps that were covered in velvety green moss. “Be careful, Bella, the steps are slippery and slick. We’re used to them, but you aren’t.”
Lordy, lordy, what have I gotten myself into? Bella wondered as she followed behind Kathryn, with Alexis directly behind her. She knew she would find out sooner rather than later.
All Bella could do was gape and gasp when she saw the huge screen with Lady Justice presiding over what Alexis said was the war room.
“Everyone, take a seat, and we can get to it,” Myra said. “Annie, call the meeting to order and put that damn gun away. You don’t need to shoot anyone today.”
“Oh, I forgot I was still holding it. My apologies, everyone. I am now calling this meeting to order. Who wants to go first?”
“I will,” Alexis said.
Bella sighed, then leaned back in her chair as she listened to Alexis tell Bella’s story. How sad it sounded, she thought, tears pooling in her eyes.
Chapter 6
It was late afternoon, almost time to start thinking about the dinner hour, when Annie called a halt to the hot-and-heavy discussion that was underway.
“Time out!” Annie said, whistling sharply, her eyes spewing sparks. “We are not getting anywhere but under each other’s skin. We need to go upstairs, get a cup of coffee, and think about a sandwich or ordering in. In other words, it’s time to eat. We’ve been at it for almost six hours, and speaking for myself, I’m more confused now than when we started. What’s going on here? We’ve never had this problem before.” The girls perked up as they recognized the irritation in Annie’s voice.
Kathryn let out a sharp whistle of her own. “Do ya think it maybe might have something to do with the client sitting down here in the war room with us? We’ve never done that before. No offense, Bella, but this is not how we normally do things. What makes this young lady special or different? Well, someone say something, or I’m outta here. We just wasted six hours. Six hours! Time is money, people!” If anything, her voice was even more irritated than Annie’s.
Every hand in the room went up. Time out!
The Sisters looked at one another and shrugged. Expressions were sheepish. None of them had an answer. Kathryn was right, and they knew it. And Annie had a right to be irritated.
Bella just looked confused. She looked around, wondering what she should do. She didn’t know these people, not really. What did they expect from her? She’d talked for hours, told them everything she knew. She didn’t ask to come down here to this dungeon; they had invited her, and now they were saying they wished they hadn’t. Even she knew something was wrong. It had to be her, what else could it be? Good Lord, what had she gotten herself into? She started to feel sick to her stomach.
Even though she didn’t know these women personally, she could tell that the women were out of sync all afternoon. Their tone was sharp, almost belligerent with one another. At one point, she thought they were a hair away from a knock-down-drag-out fight with one another. It was her. There was something about her and her case that was bothering them, but Bella had no clue what it was, and she didn’t think they knew, either. Myra, the one who seemed to be the boss, had it right when she said they needed to fall back and regroup. And she needed to get the hell out of here. She hated the way the one named
Kathryn was giving her the fish eye. That was one lady she knew she never wanted to meet up with in a dark alley. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Bella fell into line and followed the women up to the main part of the house.
Upstairs in the kitchen, Bella cleared her throat and asked if she could speak. Heads bobbed up and down, and hands waved in all directions, urging her to articulate. She took a moment to notice how different the women were here in the kitchen. They looked calm, and they were smiling. She wondered if it was her or them, or if they were just crazy like a bunch of female foxes.
“I’m glad to be here. Well, sort of. I am happy you all want to help me, but I think that my being here in person is throwing all of you off. I have nothing more to offer right now, so there doesn’t seem to be much point to my staying here with you all. You could light matches under my toenails, and I couldn’t give you one more iota of information. So, having said that, I’m going to go back to town and see if I can get my old job back—hosting nights at the lounge where I used to work—if I am going to stay in town a while longer. I appreciate all you’ve done, bringing me here and all. It goes without saying I will never ever divulge any of this to anyone. Your activities are sacred with me. I’m just grateful you all agreed to help me, so without further ado, I’m going to leave now. It was nice meeting you all. Oh, looks like you have company,” she said, pointing to the parking area outside the kitchen.
Instant pandemonium followed.
The dogs barked and yelped and yowled as they made a beeline for the door. “It’s Maggie! She’s the Post’s star reporter and one of us. She was on assignment and couldn’t get here with the others. I’m glad you are going to get to meet her before you leave,” Myra said, as the intrepid reporter blew into the kitchen, tussling with the dogs every step of the way as she called a greeting to one and all.
“I swear that the wind is blowing sixty miles an hour. I really had to hang on to the steering wheel, the car was all over the road. Hi, I’m Maggie, and you must be Bella; pleased to meet you. I need coffee.” She continued to babble as she surprised Bella by hugging her. “By now, you must realize that we’re all huggers.”
Bella laughed out loud. “Nice to meet you, too. Hello and goodbye.”
“Was it something I said?” Maggie looked baffled as Bella closed the door behind her.
“It’s complicated. Who wants a ham sandwich? It’s all there is in the refrigerator unless we cook up some pasta, but there’s no cheese. Someone needs to go food shopping,” Kathryn said. The irritation was back in her voice. Kathryn had the same ginormous appetite as Maggie.
“It’s on my to-do list,” Myra muttered. “We’ll all take a ham sandwich, dear. There’s a loaf of bread in the freezer. Thaw it out in the microwave. I must say it has been a taxing afternoon for all of us. As I said earlier down in the war room, we need to fall back and regroup, and I think that will be easier once we relax and eat a little food. So let’s get to it. A caffeine fix will go a long way to settle us down. I can’t remember the last time we went six hours without coffee.”
“Try like never,” Nikki said, laughing.
Things did indeed fall into place with Myra’s words, and the coffee was poured. The girls did what they always did then, worked in tandem as an assembly line. Or as Annie put it, “Now we’re back in our own groove.”
Within minutes, the women had all relaxed and were bantering back and forth, with Maggie doing most of the chattering as she waited to be brought up on everything that happened down in the war room. “I want to hear everything, and don’t leave anything out no matter how trivial it may seem.”
“This is on me,” Alexis said. “I never should have brought Bella out here to Pinewood, much less suggest we take her down to the war room. It’s not that I don’t trust her, I do. It’s just . . . I don’t know, it didn’t feel right. And then she was there, and it was too late. I just want to say I own it, and it will never happen again. I’m sorry I wasted all our time.”
“Something other than what you all said went down in the war room seems to have a running undercurrent here. Did I miss something, or did you all forget to tell me something? What is it that’s bothering you? Is it the case overall? Is it Bella? What?” Maggie demanded, as she bit down into her sandwich and rolled her eyes in delight. Maggie did love her food.
The room was silent for a few minutes while everyone stopped eating to think about Maggie’s question; then they all started to jabber at once.
Nikki flexed her lips, then whistled sharply between her teeth the way Jack had taught her to do when they first met. She remembered how impressed she’d been to know she had the capability to let loose such an earth-shattering sound. “Whoa! Whoa! One at a time. Sounds to me like we’re all saying the same thing with a few added words of our own. If I’m wrong, tell me, but I think we’re all bothered by what Bella wasn’t able to tell us. She knows she heard something she thought was important, not at the time, of course, but she knows now that she can’t remember what it is. I, for one, can buy into that. We all understand how that goes, been there, done that kind of thing. She probably has information locked in her mind that we could use, but she can’t remember. Eventually, hopefully, she will.”
Yoko reached for a pickle spear and bit down. “It’s probably the one piece of information that will really help us, but you’re right, eventually she’ll get around to remembering it. As we all know, the more you try to force yourself to remember, the less likely you are to succeed. With luck, we might be able to work without the missing piece of information, whatever it turns out to be. But I suspect that it would be a whole lot easier if we had it.”
“I find this whole thing really sad,” Maggie said.
“We all do, dear,” Myra said. “First, Bella loses her husband. She is just way too young to be a widow. Imagine finding out your husband has been dead for eight months, and you didn’t know it because no one told you. How cruel is that? How do you get over something like that? And then to find out your, um . . . your eggs have been stolen, which means that all ties to your dead husband are gone forever. However, we still do not know if Bella’s husband’s sperm deposits were taken. I don’t even want to go there right now, even in my thoughts. Was there anything else that bothered anyone?”
The girls looked at one another. “We all made notes. I think we picked Bella’s brain clean,” Isabelle said. “Now we just have to put it all together and decide what we are going to do. Are we going to work this evening or call it a day?”
The girls voted to work through the evening, and agreed to stay over and pick up in the morning in order to get the ball rolling as quickly as possible.
They all moved quickly, in lockstep, the way they always did when it came to cleanup. “Thirteen minutes!” Yoko chortled, as the dishwasher hummed to life. She did a little dance before she skipped ahead of the others to head down to the dungeons.
As always, they smartly saluted Lady Justice before they took their seats at the huge, round table.
“First things first. We need to call Avery Snowden to see if he is available to help us out. The boys might have commandeered him since they’re on a case of their own.”
“I’ll do it,” Alexis said, as she typed out a text to send to the old spy. The return text arrived in seconds. Alexis’s fist shot in the air. “He’s available and on his way. He said he’s in Seattle. He’ll be here by late tomorrow morning. His part of the mission with the boys is over, but they may have to stay another week or two to complete the mission.”
“Listen up, everyone!” Annie said. “You all understand, do you not, that we are taking on the United States Army, right?”
“Your point is, Annie—and get to it without a bunch of jabbering. But before you do that, what makes the United States Army any different than taking on the President of the United States, the Secret Service, the World Bank, and a host of other notables? Surely you are not insinuating we should be intimidated. That’s not what you’re
saying, is it, Annie?” Myra’s tone of voice clearly said it had better not be what she was saying.
“Good Lord, no. I just meant there will be miles and miles of red tape to wade through. We’re talking the army here, Myra. You spell that a-r-m-y. Abner, our resident in-house hacker, is not available to us,” Annie said. “Did you hear me when I said miles and miles of red tape?”
Isabelle’s arm shot in the air. “What? I’m chopped liver! Did you forget that Abner has been teaching me the art of hacking for over a year now, and he actually said I’m almost as good as he is? I realize the operative word here is almost, but I am good. I think I can hack into the Pentagon without breaking a sweat because Abner showed me how to do it when he did it. You can apologize now, Countess de Silva,” Isabelle said with a bite to her voice.
“I’m sorry, dear, I sincerely apologize. I don’t know what I was thinking. I keep forgetting how talented you are. It won’t happen again,” Annie said contritely.
Isabelle grinned and hugged Annie. “I know. Sometimes, even I forget that I can do these devious things. Who knew!” she said, imitating an infamous commercial about cashing in one’s life insurance and throwing up her arms dramatically. “Don’t go pinning any medals on me yet. Hacking the United States military isn’t like hacking the local drugstore to see what drugs your neighbors take. Not that I would ever do that,” Isabelle added hastily.
“Now, having said that, I think I will wait for morning, when I’m fresh and clicking on all cylinders, to dive into that particular hornet’s nest. And I like to map out a strategy first, the way Abner taught me. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll do that while you all do whatever it is you plan on doing. If you need me, do what the song says and just call my name.”
Truth and Justice Page 6
