Chapter 1

She was a newly graduated girl from St. Michael's Convent School. She had not wanted to attend an all girl school but her father thought it best. Just before high school her best friend and step-mother had suddenly died. It had been cancer. It had been agony for the whole family. Her father had married Elizabeth when Barbara had been three years old. Her birth mother was Cornelia Crown. (Yes the Cornelia Crown!) Her daddy had divorced her when she 'made a mistake'.

Barbara laughed to herself. She still disliked making any kind of mistake but when she was younger she always worried that her father might find out when she made one and 'divorce' her. She was in third grade before he found out about her fear. It had made him cry. No, not from laughter but tears from the fear in his daughter that he had caused by the use of a 'euphemism phrase.

He sat her down and talked quite frankly about what had caused his first marriage to fail. Then he told her that sometimes mistakes do occur but he would always love her and never divorce her. Besides he made mistakes too. All humans make mistakes. It had been Elizabeth that had told him of her reactions to any type of mistake that she made. Barbara was forever grateful that Elizabeth had helped them.

Just after her step-mother died Barbara talked to her dad about taking her step-mother's maiden name as her last legal name out of respect and love. Her dad told her that sometimes it is just as easy to 'use an alias' or 'stage name' like her birth mother.

So she had become Barbara Baker. A month later she found out about the trust fund left to her. It had been a lot of money. It was far more than her daddy had received and he didn't have to work anymore if he didn't want to.

Elizabeth's death had hurt her daddy deeply. While Barbara may have gone to a public school otherwise she didn't want to reject his wish for her to attend the Convent school so soon after Elizabeth's death. There she found some friends she had made in elementary school. Then it seemed so easy to make some more friends. While she knew several girls who wanted to become nuns she and her friends weren't about to be persuaded. They were into learning and becoming women who could make a difference in the real world, So after the first semester she knew that she didn't want to leave anyway so she stayed. Her trust fund had supplied money for her books and clothes. She saved the rest of her monthly allowance.

Near the end of her sophomore year, her best friend George, (Georgina) told her that her father had been laid off and she would have to leave. They couldn't afford the expenses. They both cried for hours.

She told her dad and he comforted her for a few minutes. Then he suggested she use her savings as a 'scholarship fund' for George. It was to be 'The Irish-American fund for Catholic girls' to be given to girls named George or Georgina.

Since there were no others in the school it worked beautifully. The following week Barbara got an excited call from George. She told Barbara all about the scholarship. She would be able to stay at the Convent school with her friends. Very few people knew about Barbara's trust fund so the kind hearted deception worked.

Her birth mother had never stopped seeing her. She was away a lot but sometimes they had gotten to go to a play or see a movie. Once instead of her birth mother coming to see her, Barbara had gone on a train to visit her birth mom in Hollywood. Her stepmother had traveled with her but had given her birth mother alone time with her. Frankly she felt she never could enjoy being with Cornelia. When Cornelia betrayed her dad and left Barbara it had caused a hurt too deep to be forgiven easily. Yet Cornelia was a vivacious woman and she could feel the deep love Cornelia had for her.

Many people had mentioned to her how much she looked like her birth mother. Even Elizabeth had told her. While she had her mother's looks Barbara's mind was more like her father's. She didn't need a lie detector to tell her when a person was telling a lie. A good look at a crime scene gave her a permanent picture to review when needed. She was also a fighter. More than once she had popped someone in the nose. Most of those occasions had been when she was a kid. Her father had given her bottom a few spanks as a punishment. It didn't really hurt but shamed her mainly.

Despite the way women were portrayed as heads of companies or their own businesses, this was not the way it was in real life. No, her mother, Cornelia, had work in an area where women were glorified as actresses but not used as producers or directors. That German dictator had used a woman to direct some of the Nazi party films. Whether they were good or not, that she was used for propaganda purposes hurt other women too. Most states had laws on what women could own as personal property. When they got married everything went to her husband.

Sometimes the law could be fooled too. Barbara had set up a dummy corporation. She controlled it and it was going to own a private detective agency! She had met with the owner. She liked him immediately. Of course she had made the usual inquiries into his background and the agency's. It was smaller now than it had been but that wasn't so unusual in this economy. He had been looking to retire and so her tentative offer was negotiated into an actual deal.

'A New Deal' she laughingly thought to herself. 'It is my own New Deal! Now I need to get dressed for a little bit of acting. My new partner suggested I hire a trainee. He knows that he can't handle some of the physical demands any longer. Also a man is needed more to reassure clients so business can grow.'

So here she was dressing for a man. Yet it wasn't a date. It was a 'tail'. He had to follow her without being detected. The background check revealed a man who wasn't very old trying to get work. He came from a good family and had done many 'odd jobs'. He had even helped out in a soup kitchen.

She had skipped his description on purpose. She wanted to see how much time it took for her to spot him. Frankly she didn't expect to take longer than three minutes. If she took much longer than that then they would hire him.

She adjusted her stockings for a final time. The new nylons were expensive but looked so nice and were tighter too. 'Oh, I forgot how stockings keep your legs warm! MMMmmm, it's like they're electric! I just got a shock from the static! But that may be the only thing I don't like about them.'

There was another thing that happened to her that was eye opening. A sudden 'run' in her stocking occurred. It had happened after the 'new guy' had supposedly started to follow her. She had been looking for some time but there had been a lot of people shopping. Then it started at the inside of her left ankle and traveled rapidly up the inside of her leg to the top of her leg band. She almost wet her panties from the erotic feeling it gave her.

'Masturbation had never worked that fast!' She thought as she found a place to sit and compose herself. It took a couple of minutes before she was able to continue on her way. It took some time before she spotted him. Something happened that made him lose his anonymity. It also gained her respect for him as a man.

His boss had told him he had been hired because he looked 'ordinary'. He did look older than his age which wasn't that unusual for his generation. Most employers didn't bat an eye when he told them he was eighteen. His boss had laughed at him and told him that he had better not play poker. He knew most people wanted to be different in some way. The comment about him being ordinary hadn't bothered him. He smiled to himself about it. He had a job now and that was what mattered. There were a lot of extraordinary people out of work. Luckily for him and some others the job market had gotten better, not great but better than the depression. Now he could help his folks out with some money. Maybe he could save some too.

He lived now in a boarding house with a couple of other guys. He did have his own room. One of the guys had told him that before the Great War this area had been the location of some very prosperous families. The road was off of the larger avenue and was mainly brick pavers. This section of road had been done around the turn of the century. It looked it. There were a couple of gaps where the winter freeze and spring thaw had lifted the pavers out of the surface. Most of the houses built on this road were rather nice conservative Victorians.

There was a row of brownstones also. The brownstone boarding house itself had been rumored to be a 'house of ill repute'. The appearance of his own room made him think that the rumors were probably true. His room was not the usual small bedroom built for a family. It was roughly fifteen feet by twenty feet with a fireplace. The high ceiling was made of tin stamped squares of floral patterns. Cupids and naked nymphs cavorted on the wallpaper. He had an old chandelier with numerous glass crystals. The windows were very long. They extended from close to the floor to near the ceiling. The ceiling was made of printed tin plate. An ornate grape pattern was stamped into each one of them. Wooden louvered window doors provided shade to full sun. By opening the bottom window a bit, keeping the top window down a few inches and keeping the window doors shut, a noticeable breeze persisted in the room when it seemed too hot for anything to stir in the summer. In the winter and early hours of the summer the louvers could be opened for the sun.

There were no closets but he had a good-sized ornately carved armoire. Small matching cherry wood bed stands on either side of his bed provided room for two lamps. They had frayed electrical cords plugged into the single outlet his room had. His bed was a wooden four poster with a mirror built into the top. It too was cherry wood. The down mattress was too soft for him but he slept well anyway. It was scented with an almost suffocating pervasive lilac perfume. At least there were no bedbugs and the place was clean.

His roommates were typical guys. Most of them had just found jobs and were learning their new jobs. Two of them had been at the boarding house for several years. The older boarder had announced that he would be getting married soon. He was marrying the boss's daughter, He had a photo of her and Ken was shocked to discover that she was pleasant to look at. He was glad that none of them were drunks.

'What a babe! He'll probably own the business when his father-in-law retires. If she isn't a shrew he might have it made.' Ken thought enviously.

The landlady said she was an old widow. She looked like she was in her early forties. She had mostly gray hair with streaks of dark brown. There was a snapshot taken in the late 'teens of a bunch of cute girls. He could locate where she was in the photograph. She had been a real beauty at that time. The photograph had been taken in front of the brownstone by a Kodak he thought. If anything the place appeared gaudier than it did now. There had even been a tree in front of the house.

She also cooked their breakfasts and suppers. He tried to not miss them. She was a real good cook. Most were of the basic meat and potatoes type but sometimes she had 'French' night or 'German' night. His mother was a good cook but couldn't match the landlady's knack. His mother said it was because she learned to cook on a wood burning oven and stove. Now that she had a gas oven she had to learn all over again. All Ken knew was his landlady had no problems with hers. Her smile when he thanked her was a treat too.

She did the wash and ironing for a weekly fee but he gladly paid it. It was definitely less costly than several shops that did that service. The same guy, who told him about the history of the house, told him she even 'helped out' if you had a tough time sleeping. His father had told him that it wasn't a healthy idea to 'fool around' with a 'working girl'.

Another useful utility his boarding house had was a telephone. She had some tough rules about using it however. There was an egg timer to limit usage to three minutes. Also it cost a dime for every minute whether you dialed up or just answered it.

He didn't have any money to pay for her extra services anyway. He had about enough to pay for the room and board. Besides she looked too much like his mother. He wasn't like that. He had heard about Freud and knew he didn't yearn for his mother. Heck he didn't even have a girl friend.

He didn't have a lot of clothes, which was like most everyone else. But with his job he needed a change ready when he was working. He was close to his boss's build so his boss had said he would allow Ken to borrow a suit when he needed it.

At this point though he had to concentrate on how not to look obvious following the woman he was told to follow. In the town he was from, if it looked like some stranger was following a girl, any girl, that stranger would be lucky to just spend a night in the town jail. If he wasn't so lucky he spent it in the hospital.

Ken wore a hat, a cheap borrowed suit and a raincoat, which he put on and took off, depending on the weather. He had a newspaper that he pretended to read every once in a while. He also wore a set of wire-framed glasses. He didn't really need them and they were plain glass anyway.

There were articles about the opening of the World's Fair all over that day's front page. In one corner was a short one he hadn't read yet about when Germany had walked into the rest of Czechoslovakia. Years before his father had told him that he wouldn't be surprised if Japan or Germany started a war with us. He was a bit concerned. If you looked at the map of the world it looked like either the communists or the Nazi socialists had most of it. Spain was going quickly. Would they join Germany in a war? It looked like the Slavic countries were in an uproar too. That area was always in turmoil. Also France seemed torn between the Nazis and the communists with few in their country on the side of democracy. He was glad that the U.S. was staying out of it. It was a big mess with no outlook for any happy ending. 'Maybe they would fight among themselves and leave us alone. For now I am lucky enough to have a job to do.' he thought.