Mama's Boys Need Not Apply

By R. Jimon

You think your boss is bad?

The eccentric head of Becca Keck’s company has not only taken on a diet corporation as a new client, but he is actually forcing Becca to live according to the diet plan for as long as the project runs.

However, gnawing hunger pangs don’t seem to be the only ugly side effect of Star Losers. Becca finds herself fighting to rein in her temper with the offensive mama’s boys and flaky women she’s obliged to work with. And if that isn’t bad enough, someone seems determined to sabotage the diet program by trying to kill off some of its promoters.

The question remains whether Becca can deal with all of these weighty matters while surviving on an extreme reduction of calories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. Jimon
• Release date: Apr 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311973788

R. Jimon

R. Jimon has a master's in German literature and linguistics from the Technical University of Darmstadt and has lived over 20 years in Germany; about 1/2 of them in a village similar to the one where Becca Keck lives. Coming Clean in Lerpe is the first book of the Becca Keck mystery series. Mama's Boys Need Not Apply is also out now, and both works are in the process of being translated into German.

Book preview

MAMA’S BOYS

NEED NOT APPLY

R. Jimon

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction and the characters, incidents, and dialogue come from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, either living or dead, or to actual events is entirely coincidental.

MAMA’S BOYS NEED NOT APPLY

Copyright © 2013 by R. Jimon

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

To my mother

Thanks for everything!

Also by R. Jimon

Coming Clean in Lerpe

Chapter 1

The man standing across from me left his native Mexico almost two decades ago when he was in his early twenties. He left behind the scorpions and rattlesnakes on his grandfather’s farm and the uncontrollable corruption and brutality of some of his relatives, whose only career endeavor is to kidnap people and hold them for ransom, not hesitating to snatch a stray cousin or two if pickings are slim. From the time he books his plane ticket to go back to visit until he arrives safely on German soil again, he has a look of anxiety on his usually placid, brown face. No wonder. And no comparison to the genuine fear showing in his dark, almond-shaped eyes right now as he faced his ticked-off wife.

Me.

"You did what?!" I choked out.

We were standing in front of the glass patio door leading to the back yard. All my husband wanted to do was give me a peck on the cheek on his way out the door to feed his beloved chickens. But then he said something oh-so-wrong to me.

But, Becca…I didn’t see any reason not to accept their invitation.

I clamped my lips together at his response and kept glaring at him. Isidro was probably wishing he were in Mexico right now, drinking Dos Equus and eating his aunt’s tamales while his cousins planned how much to demand for their next victim—and nervously hoping it wasn’t him.

After making him suffer a bit under my extraordinarily peeved expression, I finally relented. The poor guy really had no idea of his faux pas. I don’t like them and they only invite us when they want something.

Or want to give us something they don’t want anymore.

They were Connie and Ralf, a seemingly innocent, well-off couple, who live several miles away from us in a wealthier section of the region of Germany known as Bergisches Land, which lies in the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen and encompasses the well-known cities of Düsseldorf and Cologne. Our encounters were more often than not used as an opportunity to snipe at each other. The ammunition being unwanted house pets which our children had grown tired of taking care of. The last time I saw Connie, I presented her son with one of my son’s cast-off ball pythons for his birthday. But I was just reciprocating (or extracting revenge, however you want to look at it) for the two rabbits they gave our daughter Marianne last September. The rabbits—which I have to feed—now taking up space in our living room with their cage—which I have to clean. Marianne was too young to properly care for them herself, and when we first got them they were biters. Connie and Ralf are one of those couples who pop up in your life once in a while—in our case on Sundays, since we all went to the same sauna—but whom you don’t miss when they’re absent. A strained acquaintanceship, you might say.

I didn’t know you felt that way. Connie said they missed us, since they haven’t been to the sauna in a while. They want to barbecue on Friday night and invited us to come. She also asked us to bring Ilo and Carsten.

Hmmm…now I really wondered what they were up to. Isidro continued to watch my expression carefully, hoping for some sign that he hadn’t totally screwed up and would suffer the consequences of my German-Irish temperament.

I pursed my lips with distaste. They probably want Ilo and Carsten there so if they can’t foist an animal off on us, they have another pair to fall back on.

They don’t have any pets, as far as I know. Just the two rabbits they gave to Marianne.

You know how they spoil Kevin. They might have gotten him another animal at some point. Something vicious and not housebroken, I’m sure. And anyway, they have Axel.

They have Axel? The voice came from the butter-colored armchair four feet away from us where my son Tobias had been slouching.

His blonde head appeared over the back of the chair. When he spoke up, it scared the crap out of me, as it always does when I don’t know he’s there.

Why do they have Axel? His green eyes focused sharply on me, his sixteen-year-old radar sensing a pretext to exhibit some adolescent outrage.

I gave him to Kevin as a birthday present.

"You did what?"

This from both my son and my husband. My son’s tone was outraged, and my husband’s simply astonished.

"How could you do that? You didn’t even ask me! Axel is my snake!"

Tobias stood up as if the injustice of my actions were too much to bear sitting down.

I glared at my son, unmoved by the histrionics. Axel has been gone since November, and you care so much about him that you don’t even notice until I tell you six months later? You haven’t been taking care of the snakes, I have. Anyway, you still have Doug.

My son saw how rational my decision was and grinned at me sheepishly. You’re right, I didn’t notice. It’s all right that you gave one of my snakes away, but you should have kept Axel and given them Doug.

And I had really wanted to do that, too. Axel is a gentle snake; you can pick him up and hold him without a problem. Doug is a foul-tempered reptile who lies rolled up in a corner ninety percent of the time. He lunges at you if you get too close. And he leaves turds bigger than a cat’s. Doug is the reason snakes are associated with Satan.

I couldn’t do that. I admitted.

See, you have a soft spot for them after all, said my husband with relief.

"I mean I couldn’t do that to Kevin. I’d fill his parents’ underwear drawer with copperheads if I could get away with it."

Isidro winced and probably thanked some saint that there weren’t any copperheads in Germany. It’s just one evening. You’ll survive. Tamara can babysit Marianne on Friday so they can’t use her as leverage to increase our family zoo.

Good plan. I looked at him and nodded once—the queen graciously agreeing to delay the decapitation until there’s a good reason for it. Which I was sure I would have on Friday, despite Isidro’s optimism. He smiled, relieved that the storm front had passed, and, to the sound of Tobias’s fake gagging noises, we made up for our quarrel on the spot.

That’s settled, then, Isidro said when we came up for air. Now I need to feed the chickens. He went through the door, whistling on his way to the chicken coop.

My husband keeps several roosters and chickens in a makeshift chicken coop in the backyard. Despite the plethora of fauna, we do not have a farm. He just does it as a hobby. It reminds him of summer vacations spent on his grandfather’s farm in Cuernavaca. Isidro himself grew up in Mexico City.

I remained standing there, a large black hair clip between my lips, staring at the patio through the glass door while I twisted my long hair into a neat coil and thought about what Connie and Ralf could possibly want from us. The spacious room at the back of the house I was standing in is half living room, where Tobias was camouflaged in the armchair, and half dining room, where our dark-gray German shepherd Paris was presently squeezing herself between the chairs to lap up the crumbs under the dining table.

I noticed there were not only crumbs on the floor but the ubiquitous tufts of light gray fur Paris leaves all over the house, no matter the season. Or so it seems. Though her fur is mostly dark gray, she has an undercoat of lighter-colored fur which is perpetually in upheaval.

You didn’t sweep the floor today, did you? I asked my son, finally satisfied enough with my twisting to fix my hair in place with the clip.

I spoke to him in English since it was just the two of us, and I use almost every opportunity alone with the kids to speak to them in my first language. Our kids are growing up here and speak German like natives, and both Isidro and I had been married to Germans in former lives, making the family language German.

Yes I did. He returned his attention to his cell phone.

My son even texts while brushing his teeth. Mein Gott!

I sighed and let Paris clean the floor. At least one of us did. All of a sudden she scrambled backwards and skittered down the tile hallway to the front door, barking all the way. The door opened and my aunt, who also happens to be my best friend, fought off Paris’s boisterous greeting and came down the hall to me. Our house is built in typical German fashion: The front door opens onto a long hallway which the rooms are accessible from, and all the rooms have doors, even the living room.

Whew! She gasped and dropped her purse and briefcase on the long Russian oak dining table. Then she dropped the rest of herself in a chair. I am beat. Isidro won’t mind if I stay for dinner, will he?

I went to the kitchen and got a glass and a bottle of mineral water and poured some for Ilo. Then I sat down across from her.

When has he ever minded? I asked. She chugged the sparkling water and then poured some more into her empty glass.

The more appropriate question is—when has he ever noticed, what with all your animals and kids? She laughed, her gray eyes crinkling.

She had a new hair color and cut since the last time I saw her. Ilo is always trying different things with her hair. This time it was dyed black and cut in a pixie, her bangs elegantly brushing her forehead. She was wearing a short-sleeved, apricot-colored silk top and a black A-line skirt, with appropriate-for-business costume jewelry hanging from her ears and around her neck. She obviously had met with several potential clients that day. Ilo is a quality assurance consultant for clinical studies and sometimes has to dress like a grown up. If she had been working undisturbed in her home office today she would most likely have shown up in a mini skirt and some kind of top showing lots of cleavage and the fairy tattoo above her left breast. There’s a lot of teenager left in Ilo.

My aunt Ilo is only twelve years older than I am. She just celebrated her fiftieth birthday in April, which meant that the big four-oh would be looming over my head soon. She’s about my size and shape, and I had regarded her as an older sister growing up. She’s the illegitimate daughter of my late paternal grandfather and was orphaned in her late teens. After her mother died, she took off from her native Germany and showed up at the doorstep of her older half-brother—my father, who’s been living near Philadelphia since he left Germany to study in the States ages ago. He is presently a professor of biology at his alma mater. His half-sister’s name is Ilse Rose, a name very difficult for a young American child to pronounce, especially the pronunciation of the German e at the end, which is spoken like eh. So I started calling her Ilo, and the name stuck. She lives on the hill across from ours, has been dating a tattoo artist for several years, and she’s right about our having lots of children and pets.

Aside from the chickens, rabbits, ball python, and German shepherd, we also have four canaries, two aquariums full of angelfish with several of those dark gray fish that suck at the sides of the glass, a corn snake, and a beehive of black German honey bees in the backyard. The bees are in hibernation and will first become active next month. Oh, and we also have anywhere up to four children biologically linked to at least one of us in the house at one time, depending on their social lives. My two teenage children from my first marriage, Tobias and Tamara, live with me and visit their father in Darmstadt, where I studied and lived for over ten years, for the occasional weekend. Isidro’s son Philip lives only about a mile away with his mother. He usually splits vacation times between parents and stays with us every other weekend. Marianne is six years old and was born two years after Isidro and I married.

Our children are a strange mix due to their various parentages: Philip, eighteen, has dark brown hair and eyes, an obvious influence of Isidro’s genes since his mother is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Teuton. Tobias, sixteen, resembles his German father with his blonde hair, green eyes and height (his father is tall, I’m barely five feet). Tamara, fourteen, has my light brown hair and the clear, gray eyes common to the Keck family. She is already about two inches taller than me. Marianne resembles Isidro more than Philip does. Her hair is darker, though it isn’t black like Isidro’s was before the gray started to take over, and her dark-brown eyes are the same almond shape as his. Her skin is also a couple of shades darker than Philip’s, but not as dark as her father’s. Isidro and I have the longest hair in the family; mine reaches almost to my butt and Isidro usually wears his in a long braid hanging down his back.

We’re a rather exotic bunch in this quiet, German village, which is located some nineteen miles east of Cologne and where we bought a house eight years ago. But people are used to us. We’re not the only foreigners living here anyway, and there are even other foreigners living on our street. Isidro has been residing in the village ever since he came to Germany almost twenty years ago and has become firmly anchored as a member of the community. And he’s one of those at the inner circle of village gossip, mainly thanks to his late mother-in-law, who told him all there was to know about everyone in Lerpe—pronounced Lehrrrpeh—while she shared her recipes for knödel and sauerkraut with him. Isidro loves to cook.

Despite his exotic, foreign look, Isidro Mendoza Salinas is at the top of the ranks in the German steel industry. He’s the director of production for a major steel conglomerate and commutes every day to the company over sixty miles away in Aachen. I originally came to Germany to study German linguistics and literature and, despite having achieved a master’s degree in just that, started working with Ilo in clinical research after my first marriage broke up. Somehow I’ve managed to stay in clinical research ever since. I changed companies last November and have been working from my home office as deputy of quality assurance and a monitor for clinical studies. Once in a while I have to travel to clinics or hospitals to check on the information gleaned from patients to see what effect a new drug is having, but mostly I work from home. I had always held onto the notion in the back of my head that I would someday dig out the outline I made of my doctor’s thesis and actually write the darn thing. Now that I’m approaching forty, I’ve given that idea up. That and the fact that I’m perfectly happy with my career choice because it’s interesting and gives me the opportunity to work with Ilo once in a while.

The cellar door in the hallway opened, and several seconds later Marianne came bounding into the living room, clutching one of her numerous stuffed animals.

Where’s your sister? I asked her.

She’s in Facebook.

Which meant she was staying in her room for a while. The cellar houses the laundry room and two of the kids’ rooms plus, Gott sei dank, a second bathroom. Marianne scrambled onto Ilo’s lap and buried her face in her shoulder. Ilo kissed the top of her head.

How’s school? Ilo asked her.

Good.

Marianne is in first grade. She gave me a crafty look suddenly; a signal all too easy to read when it comes from a six-year-old.

Did you do your homework? I asked.

She pouted, gave me a dirty look and slowly climbed down from Ilo’s lap. She turned to give me another dirty look before going down the hall to her room, ostensibly to do her homework.

You shouldn’t let her act like that, said Tobias, who has been driving me crazy with parenting tips since taking an educational science class at school. She should be showing you more respect.

Oh, you mean like you did when you were her age?

Tobias gave me a pleading look, hoping I wouldn’t bring up the embarrassing details of the tantrums he used to throw when I interrupted his playtime to make him do homework.

Is Carsten coming over too? He asked Ilo, in a transparent attempt to change the subject.

"Nein, he’s babysitting Leah today and cooking for everyone."

Carsten is Ilo’s boyfriend, and Leah is Carsten’s granddaughter. Her parents are building a house in Sonnecken, and Carsten often has her with him lately, so her parents can badger the construction workers to behave themselves rather than having to badger the construction workers and a four-year-old to behave themselves.

Okay. Tell him I said ‘hi’ when you see him.

Will do.

Tobias, certain that the danger had passed, picked up the remote and turned the TV on.

Isidro came through the back door and smiled at Ilo in greeting. The phone rang and he picked up the cordless in the living room and went out on the patio to hear over the television.

Do you and Carsten have plans for Friday evening? I asked.

Ilo gave me a wide-eyed look with her gray Keck eyes. Her way of saying What’s up?

Isidro and I received an invitation to dinner—a barbeque, and we’re supposed to bring you two as well. I stopped speaking.

After several seconds her eyes began to look mildly annoyed since she knew perfectly well I was stringing her along. She put an elbow on the table, cupped her chin in her hand and continued to gaze at me.

Well? She stretched out the word in exasperation.

Okay, I relented, Connie called and told Isidro we’re all invited to her place on Friday. Isidro already accepted.

Ilo kept gazing at me as if expecting me to say something else. That’s it? You were acting as if something tragic would happen on Friday.

With Connie and Ralf something tragic probably will. My mood started to sour again.

Ilo laughed. Don’t be so pessimistic. Maybe Connie’s willing to bury the hatchet.

I gazed skeptically at Ilo with my own set of gray Keck eyes.

If she’s not, I said through clenched teeth, you had better be prepared to keep me from strangling her.

Isidro came back in and hung the phone up.

You don’t have to visit a hospital or something tomorrow, do you? he asked me.

"Nein, why?"

Then you can go to Hell. He grinned.

Chapter 2

Hell is only about an eight-mile-drive from my house in Lerpe and is the shortened form of the company name, Dr. Erik Hellemann & Partner, a clinical research organization where I have been employed for the past six months. It is also the nickname given to the boss Dr. Hellemann by his employees, who are well aware of the implications of the English word. At least they call him that when he’s not in the office, and he doesn’t come to the office in Falkenthal often because he moved to the Côte d’Azur several years ago. I have never been introduced to the man personally, and when I ask my supervisor Sabine why the boss is referred to as Hell, I just get an enigmatic smile as well as a you’ll find out someday in response.

So I was on my way to Hell that morning. The usual style of dressing for work is more casual here than in the States, but I was wearing an emerald green blouse made of some silky material and black cloth pants with pumps, just in case the occasion called for business dress. Wearing green really brings the Irish coloring in me to the forefront. The color enhances the sprinkling of light brown freckles on my pale skin, and my light brown hair, which takes on reddish highlights in the sun, seems to turn redder. My hair and freckles are from my Irish mother while the clear gray eyes come from my father’s genes. A Keck is easily identified by the eyes. In honor of my visit to Hell, I had French-braided my long hair. At home I usually wear it in a ponytail or use a clip to keep it out of my eyes.

I slid down the window of my little Kia as I drove up the hill towards Falkenthal. My car’s air conditioner—which is not a standard feature for cars in this country and may cost extra, so watch it!—wasn’t working and the weather this May had turned unusually warm right after kalte Sophie, or Cold Sophia. After you get used to the beginning of mild, spring temperatures, the weather phenomenon known as kalte Sophie reverts the temperature to bring back the frost one last time. Since this occurrence usually falls around the feast day of St. Sophia on May 15th, it was named after her. But the temperature could still drop suddenly, depending on what the clouds were up to, even though we were headed into June in the next couple of days. I had yet to get used to a climate in which the early morning temperatures are sometimes twenty degrees warmer than in the afternoon. Even in high summer we rarely get the sit and sweat weather I know from back home on the East Coast, since the humidity factor is missing here.

My drive to work is not only blissfully short but scenic as well. I passed verdant fields and woods on both sides, with the occasional farm or tiny, picturesque village. There are lots of half-timbered houses painted in typical fashion: white stucco walls with the dark brown frame of timber beams showing through, though some of them are only painted to resemble half-timbered houses, since many of the original buildings in the area were destroyed during the Second World War.

I came to the top of the hill which remains level for a stretch. The building housing the offices of Dr. Erik Hellemann & Partner is settled in the midst of a small group of houses on the top of the hill and used to be the school house. Now the kids here take the bus to go to school somewhere else, I guess. I don’t even know if you could refer to Falkenthal as a village since it only has two roads with maybe twenty houses clustered at the edge of some woods and is surrounded by farmland otherwise.

I usually make it to Hell in about twelve minutes; seventeen if I get stuck behind a tractor along the way, which doesn’t happen very often. I pulled into the parking lot and made my way to the building. I passed Ilo’s little yellow compact parked by the entrance. Hmm…something must be up. Ilo is a freelance consultant for clinical research and not an employee of Hell. She must have been called at the last minute to come here, or she would have mentioned something to me yesterday. The secretary Tatjana got up from her desk at the front when she saw me at the door and let me in.

"Guten Tag, Becca. Go on back to the conference room. We’re still waiting for one more person to show up."

She had pulled her thin, light brown hair away from her pale face with a barrette, emphasizing the bony angularity of her cheek bones. The style was as unfashionable as it was unflattering for her. I really liked Tatjana and had to suppress the urge to give her makeup and hair tips every time I saw her—as if I were such an expert in those areas.

I walked down the long hall past the employee work stations until I came to the conference room at the back of the building. Several people were already sitting at the huge conference table.

Before taking off to live in a milder climate, Dr. Hellemann had furnished the company space elegantly and expensively. The chairs around the conference table are cushioned black leather and absolutely unsuitable for taking notes during a meeting. You sink into those things like melting butter. The chairs are so comfortable that I have a hard time staying awake when the acting director Gunther begins to drone on about the results of some study. Now that I think about it, maybe it’s not actually the chairs that put me to sleep.

I greeted Gunther and Sabine, who is my immediate supervisor and the director of quality assurance at Hell, and smiled at Ilo. She squeezed my arm affectionately when I sat down next to her.

We’re waiting for another monitor to show up. Her name is Maraike Steffens and she’s coming in from Bonn, Sabine said to me.

As usual, she was dressed in stylish and expensive business attire, although her colleagues mainly show up to work in jeans. Sabine is very image-conscious.

I frowned, not happy with the thought that we may end up stuck in the conference room for a while. Bonn is twenty-four miles southeast of Lerpe and that means Maraike is using the same autobahn as commuters on their way to Cologne. Some of those autobahns turn into parking lots during rush hour, thus tarnishing their reputation as the high-speed race tracks of Europe.

But Maraike obviously had good autobahn karma that day, because she came in only about a minute or so after I settled myself in a heavenly leather chair next to Ilo. Maraike was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and jeans stretched to capacity, encasing a large rump and heavy thighs. When she turned around to close the door behind her, the pocket centered on each of her oversized butt cheeks like a postage stamp on a balloon. Her body tapered upwards to her narrow shoulders, which were only about half as wide as her broad hips. She had shoulder-length, fly-away, frizzy blonde hair and pale blue eyes unenhanced by makeup. She looked to be about sixteen years old but must have been in her late twenties at least. Sabine had mentioned that all monitors presently working at Hell had master’s degrees in biology and about four years of experience in the field.

Maraike gave each of us a shy smile, and Gunther took it upon himself to make the introductions because Ilo and I never met Maraike before. Though I’ve been working here since last November and do come to the office once in a while, the monitors are often out making visits to hospitals and doctors offices to check up on the data for participants in clinical studies, so I haven’t met all of them yet.

The door opened once again, and Tatjana came in, closing it behind her. She had a pad of paper and a pen in her long, thin fingers. She was obviously there to take the minutes of the meeting.

Gunther cleared his throat.

We’re supposed to call Hell about a new project, he said.

Gunther was tall and skeletal, with a shock of strawberry blonde hair sprouting unkempt from his head and a sprinkling of old acne scars across his cheeks. He couldn’t have been forty years old yet and already looked as life had chewed him up and spit him out. I really hoped that his appearance had nothing to do with our boss, but since all of those who know what the boss is like refer to him as Hell, I wasn’t too optimistic of having my hopes fulfilled.

Tatjana, another employee who is rail thin, looked around the table at all of us. She held her finger poised over the telephone.

We ready?

Everyone nodded or mumbled in response.

She pressed the loudspeaker on the conference room phone at one end of the huge, glossy, mahogany table. The dial tone sounded loudly in the room. She smiled to herself and shook her head while dialing the number, strands of hair which had escaped the barrette swaying against her cheeks.

I almost hate to do this to you without at least warning you…. She looked at me apologetically.

There is no way to warn anyone. They have to experience it to believe it, said Gunther.

Ilo and I looked at each other in confusion. What was going on? I thought we were going to have a discussion with Hell. I was about to have the first taste of what my boss was like, and for some reason I had the urge to flee.

We heard the phone ringing once…twice…

"Halllooooooo meine lieben!" shrieked an effeminate male voice into the receiver.

Ilo and I both jumped in shock, but the others remained calm, obviously no longer affected by the traumatic greeting of the infamous Dr. Erik Hellemann.

"Guten morgen, Herr Dr. Hellemann," Gunther, Tatjana, Maraike, and Sabine intoned monotonously.

The veteran Hell employees rolled their eyes at each other. Ilo and I exchanged a look of shock, too flabbergasted to return the greeting. A reputable German physician-turned-businessman should not shriek hello, my dears! like a flamboyant Hollywood hairstylist when he answers the phone. Sabine had her elbows on the table and her chin cupped in her hands. She caught my eye and winked at me.

Are the Frau Keckssss also present? continued the voice with a contrived lisp.

I don’t mind gay men, but find the ones who make every effort to fit the stereotype a test of nerves. A test which I was bound to fail. Ilo and I still had our hearts in our throats, so Sabine took over for us. She tried hard to suppress her laughter.

They’re both here, Herr Dr. Hellemann, she managed to say before clapping her hand in front of her mouth.

Gunther, Maraike, and Tatjana also held hands in front of their mouths, trying not to laugh out loud. All of them were enjoying Ilo’s and my first experience with Hell.

I leaned towards the phone cautiously, as if it could levitate from the table and wrap its cord around my neck. "Uh, guten morgen, Herr Dr. Hellemann. It’s nice to be able to speak with you at last."

"Ja, Ilo choked on the one word, trying to regain her composure. I’m very happy that you thought of me for the new project."

Ssso glad you two could come. You’re related, I underssstand?

I gave Ilo a sideways look and a frown, showing my annoyance at his fake and exaggerated speech defect.

Ilsse Rosse Keck iss my aunt, I said, adding a slight, mocking lisp to my voice.

Ilo raised her eyebrows in alarm and squeezed my knee in warning. She usually sneaks her hand behind me and pulls on my long hair to shut me up, but she was out of luck today. The others just stared at me with raised eyebrows.

"Wunderbar! Wunderbar!" Dr. Hellemann cried out, using the same exuberant tone I had used on Marianne when she was finally potty-trained.

There was a sudden silence. When it continued uncomfortably long, I looked at Sabine questioningly: was something else expected of me? Sabine shrugged and sat back, crossing her arms and legs. She leaned her head on the back of the chair and closed her eyes. Gunther, Maraike, and Tatjana had taken up similar positions. There was an obvious protocol in dealing with our eccentric boss. I would just have to learn what it was.

Ssssooo, Dr. Hellemann finally spoke. Asss I already told Herr Beck, Frau Steffens, and Frau Schhhaffer, Dr. Erik Hellemann & Partner hasss been assskt to conduct a commershhhal sssstudy.

A commercial study? I had never heard of that. Is that similar to a clinical study? Sssimilar and yet very, very different.

Not exactly a helpful response.

I mean, does this have to do with patients with a specific health condition?

"Nein, not patientsss, per sssay, but people who cccertainly aren’t at their healthiessst."

Then these are sick people?

Dependsss.

I