"She is impressive," Della signed.
"Well...I guess." Hazel shrugged. "I still say you have a chance. They are going out. Maybe to a party?"
"Follow them!" Della mouthed and pointed to the car.
Hazel visibly blanched. "No."
"Yes," Della signed. "Come on. You wanted an adventure; this is it."
"When did I tell you that I wanted an adventure?" Hazel hissed. "I just said I would take you to 112 Norbrook Drive. I didn't know that this was going to be a stakeout or a car chase."
Luca's vehicle pulled out of the driveway and the gates opened automatically.
"Don't let him get away," Della signed but she was so excited she was practically twitching in her seat. It was her chance to finally learn more about Luca.
"Okay, okay." Hazel started the car and turned in the cul-de-sac. She followed Luca’s vehicle at a measured pace, trying not to drive too close to him but always keeping him in her sight. The traffic was very light, which made it easier.
"I wonder if she lives with him," Hazel asked, "or if they are just dating?"
Della shrugged. She hoped they were neither living together nor dating, but this was definitely proof that Luca and the lady were into something and as usual, the familiar jealousy was not far away.
They followed the SUV through the neighborhood as he turned onto the main road and toward Manor Park.
Hazel grunted. "I did not sign up for this; man chasing is not in my nature."
Della laughed, clapping her hand on her leg. Though Hazel was trying to sound grumpy it was obvious that she was enjoying the interlude to an otherwise boring holiday.
"He's turning toward Stony Hill," Hazel said, excitement lacing her voice. "Della, you owe me big time. I think he is going to Rizzle."
"Rizzle?" Della mouthed.
"Yup. He is going to Rizzle." Hazel murmured. "It is a very exclusive restaurant owned by the Deckers and they are having a charity function today where the philanthropists and the people who can afford it pledge money to the Deckers' charity, Hands for Help--they have a fabulous view that overlooks the city."
"How'd you know about it?" Della asked when Hazel glanced at her.
"Because of Baron. They invite him to functions that involve him donating funds. He had to pass on this one because he is not feeling well. And I basically know everything about the Deckers. They stole my son, remember. I know that they own Rizzle."
Hazel stopped the car. "You know what? We should go to Rizzle today. I have two invitations. Mr. and Mrs. Baron. It was even done in gold lettering."
It was Della's turn to protest.
"I am not dressed."
Hazel laughed. "That's why we are going back home to change. My clothes will be a tad short on you but they will have to do."
"My boobs are bigger too." Della pointed to her breasts.
"So we improvise." Hazel started the car and headed back down the hill. "You can spy on Luca and I can spy on the Deckers. It's perfect."
*****
They reached Rizzle almost an hour later. Della had had difficulty putting together an outfit from Hazel's closet. Hazel was petite at 5' 3" and she was 5' 10". Every dress had been too short and fitted her oddly.
She had finally found a lemon yellow A-line dress which was made of the softest suede material. It fit her a little bit too perfectly. The bust was snug. Hazel had thrown a scarf around Della's neck, which served the dual purpose of covering her scar and a good portion of her bust.
She had no problems fitting into a pair of Hazel's strappy sandals. They had always basically worn the same shoe size.
"Did I tell you that you look awesome?" Hazel asked when they were in the parking lot. "You kinda look like Padma Lakshmi."
Della grinned. "The host of Top Chef? Your favorite show? You are too kind."
"No, seriously," Hazel said contemplatively. "You ever think you might be related to her?"
"Nooo." Della shook her head. Then she thought about it and smiled at Hazel. As usual, Hazel was being whimsical and fanciful.
When they were younger they would watch television and fantasize about who they resembled or who could be an unknown family member. When a child was abandoned by their family or had serious memory holes like she and Hazel, it was a given that they always looked for similarities to everybody, even the people on television, and the game of searching was something that Hazel was particularly good at.
"It's true; you kind of have that look. Maybe you are not from here. Maybe you have some Indian in your genes."
Della laughed. "Sometimes I wonder who is the most screwed up between us two."
Hazel grinned. "I am."
"Being abandoned at a shopping mall trumps throat slash, memory loss, and muteness?" Della raised her eyebrow. "You want to bet?"
"Okay, you win." Hazel laughed. "You always win. You are worse than I am."
"Thank you." Della nodded. "Now let's go."
They walked up to the courtyard.
Hazel stopped and looked around. "If the Deckers are so rich and can afford all this, why on earth did they adopt Sebastian from me, an unknown girl from Magnolia House? Why him? Why my baby? They are an older couple with children of their own; why did they want my son?"
"They were probably being generous," Della signed. "Maybe we should just accept things and stop stressing over them."
"Can you?" Hazel looked at Della skeptically. "Can you accept things and just move on?"
Della signed, "You know I can't. I have a scar on my neck, which constantly reminds me that I was almost killed when I was a child."
"Neither can I forget," Hazel said. "I carried Sebastian for nine months and I never wanted to give him up and yet they took him from me."
*****
It didn't take long for Della to spot Luca in the well-dressed crowd. The place screamed exclusive. They hadn't entered properly before a waiter brought them champagne.
"Mrs. Baron, so happy that you could make it." Baron's lawyer found Hazel a few seconds after they entered the stylish inside of the restaurant area.
There was a large balcony on the outside of the restaurant, and people were milling around. That's where she saw Luca. His girlfriend had her arm around him possessively, and he was talking to a man who looked like a popular television personality.
Della drifted closer to the balcony, leaving Hazel behind as the lawyer introduced her to various people who were only too happy to meet the young Mrs. Baron. She would be readily accepted into their ranks. She was young, pretty, and married to a seriously rich man. The only thing left for some of them to do was to genuflect at her feet.
Della smiled and made her way to the balcony. This was a side of Stony Hill that she had never seen, and it was truly beautiful with its plush vegetation. Rizzle felt as if it was located on the top of a forest.
Patricia had a cousin who lived up here in the hills, and they had often come up to Stony Hill to visit her, but she had lived in much humbler quarters than this and she did not have this view.
She inhaled and leaned on the railing. She was far enough away from Luca and his girlfriend and most of the other people, but she could still spot where he was standing with a drink in his hand, talking and laughing with other smiling people.
The sun was out and touching her face but she didn't really feel it. The air was getting to be bitingly cold. She was happy for the thick scarf that Hazel had thrown around her neck.
She wrapped her arms around herself and looked over at the rolling hills and out toward the city. It looked hazy in the distance.
"At night the lights come on and it looks like a flat Christmas tree," said a husky voice beside her.
Della swung around and found herself almost eyeball-to-eyeball with Luca Lawson.
He stared at her and then a slow smile spread across his face. "Wow. You have gorgeous eyes."
"Thank you," Della mouthed. She couldn't believe that he was talking to her. This was more than she had hoped for. “You have gorg
eous eyes too,” she wanted to say while she helplessly stared at him.
"Luca Lawson." He held out his hand and Della looked at it for a little while before she put hers into his larger hand.
She wished that she could speak.
He looked at her and raised one eyebrow. He was waiting for her to tell him her name while her traitorous hand trembled in his.
She pulled her hand from his reluctantly and mouthed, "Sorry about that; I can't speak."
She pointed to her lips. Her hands were trembling and she had this breathless feeling of surrealness enveloping her.
Luca stared at her lips for a while and then he smiled. "You have a throat bug, huh? Overtaxed your voice recently?"
Della shook her head slowly. He misinterpreted her when she said she couldn't speak.
"So, I didn't get your name." He moved even closer to her and Della had to inhale to steady herself. This was what it felt like when dreams came true. Here was Luca Lawson right in front of her, staring at her with brooding intensity. It was obvious that he was interested in her. The tension was so thick between them it was palpable.
The dusk came down suddenly around them and the balloons of light on the balcony came on, giving the place a golden glow.
Just then a soft voice called Luca's name and he spun around before she could tell him that she was Della Gold, and the electrifying moment was lost.
"Josephine!"
She looked behind him. It was his girlfriend in a blue off-the-shoulder dress with some ruffles on the shoulder. Close up she looked even better than she had at the wedding. She also looked older than she had thought. She was definitely in her thirties, maybe late thirties.
She gave Della a withering, dismissive glance, as if she was insignificant and Luca had been talking to thin air.
"Luca, I told you I would find Janice. Here she is." Her voice was bright and enthusiastic and it instantly gave Della a headache.
There was an older lady beside her, Della belatedly registered. The older lady turned to Luca and hugged him.
"Luca, I wanted to thank you personally for what you did for me a few weeks ago. I stopped by but you were not at the office."
"No problem, Janice," Luca said. "It was my pleasure to help...I want to..."
Della slipped away from them before he turned around and tried to introduce her.
She hurried into the main hall area. Her head was hurting in earnest now. She wanted to go home.
Chapter Ten
Dear Luca,
I still can't believe we actually met. You approached me at Rizzle. It is beyond my wildest dreams and believe me, I have had some wild ones. It's one week later and I am still pinching myself.
I could feel the tension between us, the sheer raw chemistry. But it could be one-sided. Do you like me, Luca? I saw how you looked at me. I could barely breathe when you came over. I was nervous and elated and shaking like an idiot. I am still despairing that I did not act as sophisticated as I could have.
But it was like a dream come true and I was taking a while to process the whole thing. You know, when I got home I had a huge headache but I fell asleep smiling and I did not have a single dream. I woke up so happy, and with my headache gone I smiled at everyone for the whole day. I smiled even brighter when I got my exam results and found out that I passed them all, with good grades.
But then, I thought about it--I have nothing to really smile about, do I? You are with Josephine.
I heard you call her Josephine. That's a pretty name. She is obviously your girlfriend and the thought of the two of you, well...it's causing me headaches, a hard slashing kind of headache, like the kind of ache you would have when light is suddenly flashed in your eyes after being in a dark room. That's the best I can describe it, and this ache is like clockwork now. I have begun to expect it. I got it when I saw you two at the wedding I followed you to and I got it after Rizzle. It is frustrating.
Besides that, Josephine is constantly in my dreams. She's at this poolside every time I come out of the water. My subconscious keeps churning her out, dream after dream.
A psychiatrist will probably tell me that because I am a jealous cow and think about you all the time, that your girlfriend has become an obstacle in my subconscious or something like that. I have been to enough psychiatrists and counselors to know exactly what they will say.
You know, I was taken to a psychiatrist when I was ten. My dreams were almost as intense then as they are becoming now.
The psychiatrist suggested to Patricia that they could hypnotize me and help me to patch back my memories from the past. Of course, he explained that there could be side effects.
Patricia had thought that it would have been traumatic for me to relive the day when my throat was slashed and she and Matron had theorized that maybe the memories of my younger days were so gruesome that my mind could not process them and so they decided that they would allow me to heal naturally.
But seriously, I think now that I can handle whatever happened. I have been through every available scenario in my head. Maybe it's my parents who slashed my throat, or another family member. Maybe I was supposed to be a child sacrifice in a weird cult and something happened. I don't know. I don't think it will have such a devastating effect on me now if I find out what really happened but whatever it is, this year I want to find out. This is the year to do it.
I am going to hit twenty-two this year. Maybe I am already twenty-two. Who knows?
I am going to get a new higher paying job somehow and then I am going to book Dr. Fry and find out if he can hypnotize me.
I don't care about the side effects. I think right now I just want to know.
*****
Della's phone beeped for a text message and she stopped writing and picked it up reluctantly.
Happy New Year, my darling Della. I already called your sisters. I found out that Hazel got married. Why on earth didn't any of you tell me?
Anyway, I called my cousin, Gerald Bujam. Remember him? Tall, grizzly guy who is obsessed with cricket. I told him you needed a job and he said he has a space for a junior accountant. He knows you have speech limitations. He said he wants you to work on a trial basis starting next week Monday. If you are good, you are hired. All the best!
Della couldn't quite believe what she was seeing. When Patricia said she wouldn't be back until after summer she had seriously thought that she would have addressed her job issue then.
She texted Patricia and told her thank you and then the thought that she would be working in her field and that she would not have to encounter Ted again pierced her with a shaft of excitement.
She jumped from the bed and did a little jig. No more supermarket. No more Ted. No more Luca.
The thought gave her pause and she sat back down on the bed. No more Luca. She hadn't thought about that, which meant that they would not encounter each other again. Unless, of course, she did the stalking thing that she did with Hazel the other day, but she had already vowed that she wouldn't do it again.
She put her head in her hands and thought about it. It was just a strange sort of attraction, a crush, a glitch in her otherwise humdrum life; why was she so glum about not seeing him again?
"You have got to see my new pink dress that Scott's mother bought for me as a gift to wear to church with them next week," Keisha shouted through the door. "It is so girly and so frou-frou and so unlike me, you will die from laughing."
Della got up and opened the door and Keisha pulled her toward the settee, where a garish pink dress with frills was spread out.
Keisha was shaking her head. "Della, I don't know if I can wear this thing. It looks like a curtain."
"A frilly girly curtain for a child who loves fairy princesses," Della signed.
"Yes that's right, fairy princesses." Keisha rubbed her chin. "And I am not going to wear it."
"You are going to make an enemy of the mother-in-law." Della touched the lace material and a pinprick of sharp pain thumped her head out of nowhere.
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She had touched lace like this before. Pink lace. In a bedroom. She closed her eyes and she could see the room in her mind's eye. It was a spacious room decorated in shades of pink. There was a pink curtain at the window and a neatly-made bed that had several dolls, and teddy bears were where the pillows should be. It was a girl's room obviously.
There was a picture of a girl on the white dresser; it was smack in the middle of the dresser. The girl was posing beside a dog.
The dog was a fluffy cream-colored Chow-Chow dog with a purple tongue. Instinctively she knew his name was Barnes and the girl in the picture was her! A younger version of herself. Her hair was parted in two fat ponytails and she was hugging the dog with a smile of contentment on her face.
"Della!" A voice was at the door. She spun around to face the door as it slowly opened.
*****
"Della!" Keisha was shaking her. "What on earth is wrong with you? You looked like you saw a ghost and went all quiet and still."
Della blinked and looked at Keisha. "I remembered something. Something from when I was little. I had a dog named Barnes. I had a pink room. With curtains like this dress."
She clutched her head.
"Oh my." Keisha sank down in the settee beside her. "Scott's mother's dress was a curtain sometime in your past? This is worse than I thought."
Della felt the urge to laugh through her headache as she glanced at Keisha's woebegone expression. "You are so funny."
"Sorry." Keisha sighed. "Are you sure it was a real memory?"
"Yes." Della winced as shards of pain ricocheted through her temples, sweat dampened her upper lip and the veins at the side of her head throbbed like they wanted to be let loose out of the confines of her head.
"I had a dog named Barnes." She closed her eyes, waiting for more memories to pop up unexpectedly like the one she just got, but there was nothing. She felt a curious emptiness now, as if remembering had drained all her energy.
She lifted her head slowly. It felt heavy; her hands felt heavy. "Keisha, do you know anybody with a Chow-Chow dog?"
Dear Mystery Guy (Magnolia Sisters Book 1) Page 7