What Stella Wants

I arched an eyebrow and tried not to notice the way his eyes were traveling the length of my body, stopping at all the good parts—the parts that had so readily responded to his touch just hours before.

“Jake, it’s my aunt, for God’s sake! She’s been widowed what, six months, and some mysterious guy from her past surfaces and she doesn’t say word one about who it is or what he wants, and you think I shouldn’t be so sensitive? He could be a con man. He could be a killer. He could be…”

I stopped, trying to come up with more possibilities, which gave Jake the window he was looking for. “He could be looking to get laid. Aunt Lucy’s old, but she’s not dead!”

I punched him, and his responding grunt was loud enough to let me know I hadn’t lost my touch. Police training and conditioning is no joke, and I wasn’t about to let it go by the wayside just because I was no longer a cop. Private investigators need muscles and endurance, too, maybe even more. They don’t have an entire police force ready to back them up—they just have a partner or two if they’re lucky. Jake was solid muscle and ex-Special Forces, but he was only one guy. I was the other half of the team. I needed to retain my edge…even if I was only tailing my elderly aunt at the moment.

As we watched, the back door suddenly flew open and my aunt Lucy came rushing down the steps, a white plastic trash bag in hand and a grim look on her face. She headed straight for the garage.

“Hide!” I yelped and dove behind a bunch of boxes.

Jake wasted no time joining me and together we crouched, waiting for my aunt to pull open the old wooden door and head for the trash cans that lined the far wall.

“Nothing good comes of spying on relatives,” I muttered.

“It was your idea,” Jake reminded me.

I wanted to smack him but didn’t dare with Aunt Lucy mere seconds from entering the ancient garage.

“It’s for a good cause,” I reminded him. “I’m only saying that, even if our intent is good, God might not look too kindly on the effort, that’s all.”

“And God doesn’t take intent into account?”

I pinched his earlobe, the only readily available, exposed flesh I could reach.

“Ouch!”

“Shhh!”

The garage door creaked open and Aunt Lucy could be heard walking briskly across the concrete floor to the battered metal trash cans. She pulled a lid off, dumped her bag inside, replaced the lid and started to stomp off. Without warning she stopped, parallel to our hiding place and as we listened, she sniffed, loudly, cautiously, and I was certain she’d discovered us.

“Humph!” She snorted. “Nothing worse than the smell of dead fish!”

Then, without further comment, she left, slamming the garage door securely behind her and continuing on her way across the rectangular back yard. A moment later we heard the back porch door slam and knew we were in the clear.

“I thought she was going to nail us,” Jake said. “The woman’s psychic, I swear she is.”

My cell phone began to vibrate, humming softly in the still garage.

I fished it out of my parka pocket, flipped it open and said, “Valocchi Investigations.”

Jake gave me his usual and customary hard look as I said the name. For some reason the man thought that because we were partners, his name should be on the door. I wasn’t sure I was ready for the partnership to become permanent, so why change things before I had a feel for the potential duration? Look what happened the last time we tried to form a partnership…I’d wound up hurt and alone, trying to explain running away to marry Jake to my disappointed aunt Lucy and uncle Benny. No, I needed to wait this relationship out before I made another foolish commitment.

“Stella, is that you?” The voice, female and anxious, sounded distinctly familiar.

“Yes?”

“Stella, it’s Bitsy Blankenship—well it’s Margolies now, but it was Blankenship. Marygrace Llewellen said you’d moved back home and opened a private investigation office. I need to see you. Right now!”

I closed my eyes. Elizabeth “Bitsy” Blankenship. Blond, cheerleader, airhead and high maintenance in high school. Sounded like nothing had changed, at least not in the maintenance department. I remembered hearing she’d married a junior diplomat and was now leading the high life of embassy parties and overseas assignments. Figured she’d land on her designer heels. But the demanding, “everything’s urgent and about me” tone to her voice brought out the rebellious adolescent in me.

“Uh, sorry,” I said. “My first available appointment won’t be for another…” I opened my eyes and stared up at the old garage rafters, aware of Jake’s confused expression because he knew we were next to unemployed in terms of busy. “I guess I could squeeze you in tomorrow, late morning.”

“No! I mean, please, Stella, this is an emergency. I need to see you now!”

I sighed, pushed the sleeve up on my parka and looked at my watch. It was almost noon. “Okay, I suppose I could see you at two, but I might be a few minutes late. We’re in the middle of an important surveillance.”

“Two?” Bitsy’s anguished wail was almost satisfying, especially when I remembered that Jake had briefly dated Bitsy, shortly after he’d failed to show for our elopement to Maryland. “Really, Stella, you can’t see me any sooner?”

Damn, what did the woman want, blood? “I’m sorry. Two is my absolute earliest time and I’ll be pushing it at that.”

I could hear the sound of a car’s engine in the background as Bitsy considered whether to take the appointment or not. She was driving, and I wondered if she were in town yet or on her way in from D.C.

“Oh, all right! I’ll do two. I suppose I can waste a couple of hours visiting my grandmother in the nursing home or something.”

Visiting her grandmother was a waste of her time? Oh, I was so glad I was putting Mrs. High-and-Mighty on the back burner!

“Okay, you know where the office is? It’s across from the old newsstand, off Main.”

“I’ll find it. And, Stella, listen, it’s really important that you don’t tell anybody about this, okay? I don’t want anyone to know I’m in town or that we’re meeting. It could be a matter of life and death.”

I rolled my eyes at Jake. What had he ever seen in this dingbat? Jake frowned and mouthed the words, “What? Who is it?” But I just smiled and shook my head.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell a soul. See you at two!”

I snapped the phone shut and smiled even bigger at Jake. “Guess what, buddy? Your old girlfriend, Bitsy, is coming to town and she wants to hire me.”

“Us,” Jake corrected, still stuck on the pride of ownership. “She wants to hire us.”

“She didn’t mention you,” I taunted. “If she’d wanted you, I suppose she would’ve called you.”

“What’s wrong with Bitsy?” Jake was all concerned now.

I shrugged and returned my attention to my aunt’s kitchen window. “Don’t know, don’t care. I just hope she has deep pockets. Why don’t you slip back around front and see if you can get the guy’s license plate number when his driver comes back? I’m going to see if I can get a little closer to the house.”

Jake started to protest, caught himself, and shrugged. “It’s your party,” he said. I could tell he thought sneaking around in broad daylight was a bad idea, but what else could I do? Aunt Lucy hadn’t entertained the guy at night. So far, all she’d done was disappear during the daytime, only to return a few hours later with this stupid smile on her face and vague answers when we asked where she’d been and with whom.

Even Lloyd the Dog was left out of the loop. Considering the fact that, until very recently, Aunt Lucy had considered my Australian shepherd to be her deceased husband, Benny, reincarnated, I found her reluctance to confide in him troubling. True, Lloyd the Dog had found love himself in the form of an overwhelmingly large part-wolf named Fang, but that was no reason for Aunt Lucy’s sudden secrecy.

I watched as Jake eased out the back door of the garage and into the alley before I considered my stealth opportunities. Aunt Lucy had been anxious to get us out of the house for the day. She’d found a very necessary and quite convoluted errand for my scattered cousin, Nina, and her girlfriend, Spike, to run in downtown Philadelphia. She’d asked me and Jake to run out to Lancaster to take a set of architectural plans to her Amish carpenter friend, Max. She’d been so insistent we leave that I’d known for certain this was the big day; the day Aunt Lucy had invited the mysterious man to her home.

So we called Max and blew him off. We made a big show of driving away from Aunt Lucy’s ancient, brick row house and returned in a borrowed conversion van with tinted windows to park and hide. A mere twenty minutes later our efforts were rewarded by the arrival of a long, black, chauffer-driven sedan.

I was expecting someone as huge as the limousine, someone large, ostentatious, maybe a Donald Trump type. What we got was a short, elderly, white-haired man in a charcoal-gray overcoat carrying a small bouquet of purple violets.

“What the hell?” Jake murmured. As we watched, the little man ascended the steps to the brownstone and rang the doorbell.

Aunt Lucy answered the door moments later, looked down the street in both directions and hastily pulled her visitor inside. This forced us out of the van and around the back of the house to the garage where we hoped to watch my aunt entertaining her visitor in the kitchen. Aunt Lucy always brought company back to her kitchen. Except for this visitor. What was up? I had to get closer to the house. I had to know what was happening inside.