What Stella Wants

“Great!” I said. “Look at you.”

Jake looked down and shrugged. “Well, it’s not like you gave me an option,” he grumbled. “You threw open the door and I did the best I could.”

I looked across the street at my aunt’s front door. “What are we going to do now?”

It was a rhetorical question. I moved past Jake and climbed back into the van, this time settling myself in the passenger seat where I waited for him to slide behind the wheel.

“Where to, boss?” he asked as we pulled away from the curb.

I shrugged. I was already going to hell, what did it matter where we went in the interim? And then I remembered Bitsy Blankenship.

“The office. If I’m going to need to rent an apartment, I’d better start making enough money to pay for it. Let’s do a little background work before Bitsy comes at two.”

Jake nodded. Neither one of us was as enthusiastic as we would’ve usually been about the prospect of new business, not with Aunt Lucy feeling as she did. How had our good intentions suddenly turned to shit?

I reached into my jacket pocket, retrieved my cell phone and punched in my younger cousin, Nina’s, number. I needed to share the misery.

She answered on the first ring. “Peace, baby!” she cried. She sounded so happy I almost hated to burst her bubble with my worries, but the hesitation was overridden by the need to find a soft shoulder to cry on.

“Oh, no, you didn’t.” Nina sounded horrified.

So much for sympathy.

This was followed by more questions, muffled relays of information to her girlfriend, Spike, the former assistant D.A. turned performance artist, and more cries of disbelief. Apparently, Nina “resonated” with my aunt’s “cosmic energy” and was as appalled as Aunt Lucy had been.

“I don’t know, Stel,” she said finally. “I’ve gotta look up your chart again. I think your sun is in some serious retrograde.”

“Let me talk to Spike,” I said, disgusted.

“Where are you?” Spike said without preamble.

“Heading into the office. We’ve got a new client in about an hour and a half.”

“We’ll meet you there,” she said and severed the connection.

That was Spike for you. Sensible. Level-headed. The polar opposite of my cousin, Nina. How the two ever fell in love was a complete mystery to me, but love it was. They’d been seeing each other for almost two years and they never seemed to hit a bump in the road. Their love just grew with every passing day. Why couldn’t I be certain that a man could love me like Spike loved Nina?

“They’re going to meet us at the office,” I told Jake.

He nodded, lost in his own thoughts. He looked as miserable as I felt.

Neither of us spoke on the short drive across town. Glenn Ford, Pennsylvania, is idyllic in many ways. It sits an hour outside of Philadelphia, close to Amish country, and is lush with verdant farmland and historic fieldstone houses. It was a wonderful small-town environment to grow up in and a great place to return to when my life fell apart in Florida, but today it was just a bit too small for my liking. There was nowhere to hide from the reminders of the importance of Aunt Lucy in my life.

She was everywhere; in the park behind the elementary school where she’d spent hours with me after my parents’ deaths, consoling, talking and, more often than not, just sitting silently, a witness to the tears of loss and longing. I remembered countless shopping expeditions to Guinta’s Grocery Store or Reeder’s Newsstand, or any number of small shops that lined Lancaster Avenue. By the time we’d reached the offices of Valocchi Investigations, it was all I could do to hold back the tears.

Jake avoided looking at me as he unlocked the front door to the entryway that led to our office and climbed the flight of steps to the second floor. I knew he felt my misery and was giving me time to pull myself together.

Once inside, I went immediately to the computer, determined to throw myself into busywork until Bitsy Blankenship arrived for her two-o’clock appointment.

I Googled Bitsy’s name, her maiden as well as her married name, Margolies, and began searching for anything that would tell me about her life since high school. It was just better to know a bit about potential clients before they came strolling in to give you a story that usually had gaps or outright fabrications included. Knowing Bitsy from high school precluded the matter of aliases, so catching up, I figured, would be easy.

Not so. Bitsy, deceptively brilliant for a blond, cheerleader, girly-girl type, had attended Virginia Tech after high school, majoring in electrical engineering of all things. The next fifty or so articles detailed Bitsy’s engagement and subsequent marriage to David Margolies, whom she apparently met sometime during her college career. Margolies was a junior diplomat, an attaché with the U.S. mission in Slovenia. He was also apparently a shining star because he and Bitsy had been moved around frequently as David gained more authority and climbed the diplomatic ladder.

I was reading a detailed account of a party Bitsy and David had attended at the British Embassy when Nina and Spike arrived. Nina’s face was flushed and she was out of breath from her run up the flight of steps to the office. Her blond hair, streaked this week with metallic purple, stood out at wild angles all over her head. Spike followed her at a more leisurely pace. Cool, calm and collected as usual, she strolled into the room with not one long brunette hair out of place.

Nina, as usual, did the talking for the two of them, her words accented by wild arm movements.

“Oh. My. God!” she cried. “I’m sorry we’re late, but ohmigod! We were at the mall, you know, and like, there was just total chaos!”

I looked past Nina to Spike for verification. She nodded, as if Nina was absolutely right and the mall was a complete mob scene.

“Really? Big sale, huh?”

Nina’s eyes widened. “No! Do you two not listen to the radio or what?”

Jake came into my office, drawn by Nina’s increasingly excited tone.

“What’s all the excitement?”

I rolled my eyes. “Nina was at the mall and it was a zoo.”

Nina stomped her foot impatiently. “No, really! We thought we’d never get out, I think every fire truck and police car in town was there. They cordoned off the entire west side of the mall parking and they were hustling people out of the area and telling them the mall was closing!”

“Bomb scare?” Jake prompted.

Nina shook her head. “No, a bomb. A real bomb!”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Turn on the news if you don’t believe me. Some lady’s car blew up with her inside it! It was like, just so totally gruesome!”

She had our complete attention now.

Spike walked over to the tiny television set that sat on my bookcase, picked up the remote and hit the power button. Sure enough, a reporter stood in front of the mall, the yellow crime-scene tape running the length of the screen behind her, fire trucks and police cruisers everywhere. She looked grim as she leaned forward to speak to her audience.

“The sedan, a late model Lexus, had diplomatic plates, but the victim, a woman in her late twenties, has not been formally identified pending a positive identification and notification of her family.”

I looked up at the clock on the wall and realized it was 2:10. Somehow time had slipped away from me. I looked back at the burnt-out shell of a car in the mall parking lot with growing apprehension. Bitsy Blankenship was ten minutes late.

Chapter 2

Back in the day when we attended Glenn Ford High School, Marygrace Llewellen was the “go-to” girl for any and all information pertaining to the comings and goings of our other classmates. She was also an expert at forging parental signatures. This added to her repository of information, as she knew who was skipping and with whom. It also gave her the capacity to blackmail any and all of us at any time, should she desire additional tidbits of gossip that had somehow eluded her.

While Marygrace never exactly extorted information from anyone, the threat was always there when she came to you for information. She was sweet about it. She never used her powers for evil, preferring mostly to matchmake her fellow classmates or gently sway them into various activities that she felt strongly about, like Save the Planet Day or Senior Skip Day. I admired Marygrace’s easy way with others. Everyone liked her while simultaneously fearing her. It was a pretty cool talent she had there and she knew it.

So when she appeared in the doorway of Valocchi Investigations the day after my Aunt Lucy fiasco and Bitsy’s probable death, I was glad to see her and also a bit apprehensive.

“Hi, guys!” She greeted me as if it hadn’t been twelve years since we’d last seen each other and as if it were the most normal and casual thing in the world for her to be stopping by. My internal alarm bell didn’t even ring.