SLEEPING CLUB- AUNTY STELLIG AND AGENDA ITEM #14

One of the more eccentric members of the sleeping club was Catherine “Aunty” Stellig, heiress of the Stellig tire fortune. She lived as a recluse in a hilltop villa above Rancho Mirage, California. Preferring complete solitude she had become a hermit by choice. Her housekeepers and staff, even those who had been in her employ for several years, had never so much as laid eyes on her. Only one person, a man named Steven Welcome, had any regular contact with her. Steven was a personal secretary of sorts. He had obtained the job simply by answering an ad in the paper. He had been the first to respond to the ad, and when he called the phone number listed one of Aunty’s housekeepers answered and told him that he was hired.




“What?” he had asked, “I’m hired? Just like that?”



“Yes,” said the housekeeper. “I have been instructed to hire the first person that inquires about the job, and I will be sending you an information packet in the mail. Your starting salary will be $200,000 a year, and you are to begin work on Saturday morning at 10:00 am.”



For reasons that were never clear to Steven, Aunty trusted him completely- a trust which he never abused. They met every Saturday morning from 10:00-11:30 am. On Thursday of each week, Steven would receive an e-mail from Aunty containing an agenda for their upcoming meeting as well as any special menu requests, which he would dutifully forward to Mario Lazar, the head cook in Aunty’s kitchen. During the meeting itself, Steven and Aunty would work their way through the agenda, and when their business was complete Aunty would exit the room, and nobody would see her again until Saturday morning at 10:00 am.



Over the years, the meetings settled into a predictable routine and the agendas from week to week became more or less identical, but in late July of 2009 Steven noted with interest that an entirely new agenda item had been added. Line #14- “Discussion of ongoing sleep issues and the purchase of property at the corner of Alvarez and Sunset.”