What Stella Wants

“Who in the—” I gasped, struggling into my jeans.

“They’re in there. I saw them!”

“No, no, no!” I moaned softly. Sylvia Talluchi, the world’s most active busybody and self-appointed watchdog for the entire neighborhood, had seen us and pulled the alarm.

“Stella, are you in there?”

Oh, we were dead. Aunt Lucy was banging on the other side of the van. There was going to be total hell to pay.

Jake looked at me, wide-eyed, as the same realization hit him.

“Let me handle this.” I pushed my way past him, pulling on and zipping my parka as I went. I didn’t even wait for Jake to answer me. It was my aunt and my execution.

I flung open the door and was momentarily blinded by the brilliant winter sunlight.

“Stella! Marone! What are you doing in there?”

“Lucia, you don’t know?” Mrs. Talluchi’s querulous tone grated like fingernails on a chalkboard. “They were doing the nasty if you ask me!”

My eyes adjusted in time to see my aunt shoot her best friend a dark look before she leveled the same gaze at me.

“Well?”

I forced a broad smile and stepped down the two metal stairs onto the sidewalk where Sylvia Talluchi and Aunt Lucy stood waiting. Jake stood framed in the doorway behind me and I prayed he had the sense to smile as well.

“No, of course we weren’t ‘doing the nasty’ as you so succinctly put it, Mrs. Talluchi. Jake and I were about to stop back by the house before we went out on surveillance. You see, we were on our way to Lancaster to see Max when we got this call and…”

I stopped in midsentence. At the far end of the street, a limousine slowly crept past on Johnston Avenue.

“Who is that?” I demanded, pointing so there’d be no doubt about the vehicle in question.

Aunt Lucy and Sylvia Talluchi spun on their heels just as the long black sedan’s tail lights vanished from view.

“Who was what?” my aunt asked, turning back to face me. “Never mind that! What were you doing out here? Have you no sense of common decency? In the van, for all the world to witness? Have you no shame?”

Jake stepped down out of the van to join me on the sidewalk. “Mrs. Valocchi, we noticed you had company and I said we shouldn’t disturb you, so we were just waiting.”

I wanted to slap him. How could he think my aunt, a former CIA chemist, could possibly be so stupid? But it was too late. Jake had wandered into the minefield.

“You noticed I had company? How did you notice that, Jake?”

“Well, we saw the limousine pull up and…”

“Saw the limousine, did you?” she echoed dangerously.

Jake nodded. A slight smile tugged at the corners of Sylvia Talluchi’s lips as my aunt let Jake swallow the bait.

“So you’ve been waiting outside my house for almost an hour, have you?”

Jake, former Special Forces operative, suddenly realized now how badly he’d underestimated my aunt.

“Yes, ma’am.” It was a weak tone for such a big man.

“Right out here in the van, were you?”

He nodded.

“Both of you?” she murmured, her eyes boring into my soul.

“Aunt Lucy, you’ve been disappearing for hours at a time without any explanation ever since we got back from the beach. We were worried. There were those flowers that kept arriving mysteriously and then the notes. You gotta admit, you were worried, too. We were only trying to protect you!”

Damn. Too late for Stella Valocchi the Brilliant Former Cop, too.

“So, I suppose it didn’t occur to you that if I was no longer worried and if I chose not to say where I’d been that I might no longer feel concerned about my secret admirer? Furthermore,” she said, her voice rising just enough to let me know the depth of emotion that lay behind the words, “did it ever occur to you that perhaps my private life is none of your business?”

“And what if this man was conning you? What if he…”

My aunt cut me off with a look. “So, now I’m not capable of discerning danger for myself? Now I’m suddenly feeble-minded and incompetent? What next, we have a hearing and I get placed in one of those homes?”

“Sweet mother in heaven!” Sylvia Talluchi cried. “Betrayed, by your own family!” She crossed herself and looked up at the sky above our heads. “Father, forgive them,” she whispered.

“No, nothing like that!”

“Humph! I think it’s exactly like that.”

Okay, not withstanding the fact that Aunt Lucy thought Lloyd was Uncle Benny reincarnated, she was one of the sanest women I knew. And I had hurt her beyond all comprehension. I saw it in her eyes.

“Aunt Lucy, I was just worried. I’m sorry. I should’ve know better.”

Aunt Lucy slowly shook her head, looking at me with a mournful gaze that completely broke my heart.

“Yes, cara mia, you should have known better, but you didn’t.”

She let her gaze shift to Jake, the man I knew she loved almost more than she loved me, the man more like a son to her than a family friend. Slowly her eyes traveled the length of his body, down to his feet and back up again.

“And you,” she said. “Stunade! You have broken my heart.”

“Aunt Lucy, I…”

“You lied to me! Both of you lied to me!” Her eyes glittered with anger and pain.

“We only wanted what was best for you. We didn’t want to see you get hurt!” I cried.

Aunt Lucy sniffed imperiously.

“I don’t need that kind of help,” she said softly. “I need love and I need family, but I don’t need to be treated like a child. If I want privacy, you should respect my wishes.”

Now my back was up. I had acted out of love. I wanted to protect my aunt.

“Well, I was only trying to look out for you,” I said, stung. “I didn’t realize you needed so much privacy. I thought we were closer than that. Maybe you need more privacy than I thought.” Jake dug his elbow into my ribs in a warning but I was too far gone to stop. “Maybe I’ve overstayed my welcome.”

“Maybe you have,” Aunt Lucy said quietly. Without another word, she turned and walked back across the empty street, up the steps to her row house and inside, closing the door firmly. In the echoing silence that followed I heard the solid click of the dead bolt as it shot home.

Mrs. Talluchi, not to be outdone, glared at me. “Put-tan!” she spat. Turning to Jake, she narrowed her eyes and stared hard at his chest. “Ha! I was right!”

She stomped off down the street and up the spotless marble steps to her row house. I turned to Jake, puzzled until I caught sight of his chest. He’d buttoned his shirt wrong, making his shirttails uneven and leaving no doubt as to what we’d been doing in the van. To further seal the verdict, his fly was undone and he was only wearing one sock.

“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.

“Marygrace!” Jake rushed over to pick her up in an affectionate bear hug. She squealed, a short butterball of exuberance and enthusiasm, her little feet dangling in the air as Jake whirled her around. “I haven’t seen you since…” He broke off, trying to remember.

“Since you married that bimbo you call your ex-wife. I gave you guys a toaster. You know, I knew you were headed down the wrong road with that one. She never even wrote me a thank-you note. I think she was threatened by me. Poor breeding will do that to you every time, won’t it?”

Jake was momentarily thrown by Marygrace’s summation, but I saw Nina grinning in agreement.

“So,” she said, turning her radar my way, “I hear you two are finally an item. Good, right?” Her hazel eyes bore into mine like lie detectors, and I felt my face flame.

“It’s all good, Marygrace,” I said. “How’ve you been?”

Marygrace still wore her strawberry-blond hair the way she had in high school. It fell just below her chin in a pageboy bob that somehow suited her. When she shook her head as if putting off my question, her hair swung back and forth like a shampoo commercial. I found myself staring at it, unconcerned that she had no intention of answering me and was now asking a new question.

“How come you two are partners but it only says Valocchi Investigations on the door?”

That got my attention. Unfortunately, it got everyone else’s attention, too, including Nina’s. For some reason, she decided to save me.

“Hey, Marygrace, who was in the car at the mall?”

Marygrace almost seemed to quiver, the way a dog does when it catches scent of something really, really good.

“The police haven’t released her name to the media yet, but I already know on account of them telling her mother and calling me. It was Bitsy Blankenship,” she said, turning to me. “That’s why I’m here. See, her grandmother is a patient of mine.” Marygrace caught my puzzled expression and rushed on. “I’m a social worker now, Stella, out at Brookhaven Manor Nursing Home. I know, I know.” She held up her hand. “Why is a good social worker working in a nursing home? You think only loser social workers work in rest homes but that’s just a myth. There are some really good social workers taking care of the elderly, but that’s not why I’m here.”

Marygrace barely seemed to stop for breath between thoughts. I had to work hard to follow her.

“Bitsy’s grandmother is one of my patients.” Marygrace looked at us with an anxious furrow between her brows. “This is confidential, what I say in here, isn’t it?”

“Well, technically, Marygrace, only if you’re a client, and then only within certain parameters,” Spike said, being cautious. “Is that why you’re here? Do you want to hire us?”

Marygrace cocked her head to one side and seemed to consider the matter for a second before answering.

“Well, yeah, I guess. I mean, Bitsy’s grandmother is a lost ball in high weeds. Some days she thinks we’re working at the paper mill and some days she seems just fine, but obviously she can’t hire you!”

“Huh?” Even Nina was getting lost now.

Marygrace looked around the room at the four of us. “Do I need to sign papers first or give you a check or what?” Before anyone could answer, she sped on. “Well, I’ll just tell you. It’s not like Baby Blankenship’s gonna sue me or anything. Like I said, she can’t even remember who I am half the time, so she sure won’t sue me for telling you about her! Besides, everybody knows social workers aren’t in it for the money, and Baby wouldn’t be in a nursing home if she had the money for private care, so there you are!”

“Is this about Bitsy’s death?” I asked, wishing Marygrace had a shortcut button.

Marygrace’s eyes widened. “Well, that’s why I’m here. Somebody breaks into the woman’s room and takes her stuff, then Bitsy turns up dead. Call me paranoid, but I gotta wonder.”

“Wouldn’t that be a police matter?” Jake asked.

Marygrace looked at him, hands on hips, with a frustrated frown. “Oh, yeah, right, like they’ll give a rat’s ass. Baby’s just an old lady to them. There wasn’t anything of any real value in her room. I told you, she’s poor. Don’t you know anything about nursing homes? Stuff gets stolen out of people’s rooms all the time. If it isn’t nailed down—and sometimes even if it is—it gets stolen.”

“Okay, so, you want us to find out if there’s a connection between Bitsy and whoever’s stealing worthless stuff from Baby Blankenship’s room even though she doesn’t probably even remember what it is and probably doesn’t care?” I tried not to look as if I thought Marygrace was nuts, but I was beginning to wonder.

“Who said she doesn’t know what’s going on or what’s missing? I told you, some days she doesn’t remember who she is, but the rest of the time, Baby’s a sharp old cookie. She told me someone came into her room and believe me, when I went in after the head nurse called, Baby’s room was trashed. She said someone came in and was looking everywhere and they took something.”

“So, what did they steal?” I asked.

Marygrace shrugged and for the first time seemed a little bit disconcerted. “She doesn’t know. She can’t remember. That’s what you guys are supposed to find out. You’re detectives aren’t you?”

“Whoa!” Nina said softly. “Now that’s totally a case to sink your teeth into!”

“You think?” I said reflexively.

“Aw, come on, man!” Marygrace said impatiently. “She’s an old woman. Her granddaughter’s just been killed, maybe by terrorists, and someone came into her room and took something. I’m asking you guys to do something, as a public service. It’ll be good publicity. Don’t you need to get the word out about your agency?”

I shook my head, hoping to clear the confusion of facts and questions in Marygrace’s rapid-fire statement.

“Hold up here, girlfriend,” I said, hoping to apply the brakes to Marygrace’s mouth before I became eternally lost in her next rush of words. “Let me just get a few things straight.”

“What makes you think it was a terrorist?” Jake interrupted me and set Marygrace off again.

“Hey, I watch TV. I can read between the lines. Her husband’s a diplomat. Bitsy’s car was just sitting there. It’s not like she threw a match in the gas tank or anything. It had to be terrorists. Who else? I hear Bitsy’s mama is just all to pieces.” Marygrace turned bright red and clapped a hand over her wayward mouth. “Oh, Lord, I mean she’s upset, not all to…pieces!”

Jake looked at me over the top of Marygrace’s head. She would have no way of knowing about Bitsy’s urgent phone call. It had been almost the only thing Jake and I had thought about since hearing of the mysterious explosion at the mall. Now here was Marygrace saying Bitsy had definitely been the one in the car and her grandmother was the victim of petty larceny. Maybe that’s why Bitsy had called for an appointment. Maybe she’d wanted us to look into her grandmother’s problem. If there was a connection, we’d need to make sure the authorities took it seriously.

A wave of relief washed over me. The load of guilt that had been sitting on my shoulders since I’d heard about the explosion lifted a tiny bit. Maybe Bitsy hadn’t been calling me about a matter of life and death. She probably wanted her grandmother to feel as if something was being done. Bitsy wasn’t dead because I spitefully put her appointment off when I could’ve met her earlier.

Except—Bitsy had called me before going to the nursing home. How could she have known about the theft?

“Sure, Marygrace,” I said. At that point, with my roller coaster of emotions, I would’ve promised Marygrace anything. “I would be more than happy to investigate Baby Blankenship’s missing belongings, whatever they are.” I sobered up, thinking of Bitsy and how much her death would affect her family. “She must be devastated by Bitsy’s death. How’s she doing with that?”

Marygrace sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “Well, I hate to say it, but I doubt Baby even remembers Bitsy. She hadn’t seen her in years before yesterday. If Baby remembered Bitsy at all, it was as a little girl.”

Well, at least Baby got to see Bitsy grown-up one time. Poor Bitsy. Wonder what made her decide to stop by and see her grandmother after so many years? I glanced over at my cousin, the believer in all things New Age. She’d probably tell me Bitsy had unconsciously sensed her impending demise and wanted to tie up loose ends.

“So, why did Bitsy stop by to see her grandmother yesterday, I mean, after so many years?” I voiced my question.