Dear Mystery Guy (Magnolia Sisters Book 1) (9 page)

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 gorgeous 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.

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?"

"I don't even know what a Chow-Chow dog is." Keisha frowned. "How do you even know there is a dog called a Chow-Chow?"

"Because I had one, a puppy; his name was Barnes. They have purple tongues," Della signed. "And they have a thick coat of hair. It gives them a cuddly look, like a teddy bear." She pictured Barnes in her mind's eye.

Keisha grabbed her laptop, which was under the dress and typed Chow-Chow in the search engine. She looked at Della after scrolling through the images of Chow-Chow dogs.

"This is not like the ordinary dogs that I know around here. Maybe you lived somewhere other than in the tropics because these dogs have very thick fur, unless your parents had him in the air conditioner constantly or you lived in one of the cooler sections of Jamaica like Blue Mountains or Mandeville."

Or Malvern, Della thought. Or somewhere other than the tropics. Della's mind raced. Seriously, was what I remembered a real memory? Yes it was. It had been a memory. She was certain of it. She had had a dog named Barnes.

A single kernel of hope flared in her chest. She wanted more of these memories. Keisha's frilly pink dress had opened the door to something more.

"Can I borrow your dress?" Della asked Keisha.

"Sure, take it," Keisha said, grinning. "It would be very interesting if you wore it."

"No," Della fingered the lacy cloth. "Just want to see if it jolts my memory again."