Chapter 1

1: With nothing but the mean taunting pizza coupons from her mailbox and an answering machine with a huge red glowing zero to welcome her home from work, Mina Renard sat in her apartment looking out her window at the sunset. Pizza was an extravagance on her slender budget.  Cheaper pizza was still pizza.  The only person who ever called was her boss so any number other than zero would be just as unwelcome.  Arizona sunsets with all their dazzling purples, oranges, pinks and whites did little to lift her spirits.  Over the years she had prided herself in taking some spectacular photographs of them, but even that had lost its lustre.  She stopped bothering to do that anymore because nobody ever looked at the pictures anyway.  Not even herself.
  Mina was all of five feet and four inches tall.  Her hair was shoulder-length and a rich brown in color.  Simple was the only word to describe her wardrobe.  Mostly solid-colored shirts and jeans, some of which were draped over chairs, tables and her bed to dry due to a broken dryer in the apartment complex's laughable laundromat.  She owned exactly two pairs of shoes and one of them was the not-so-white pair of fuzzy slippers she wore around the apartment.
  Her home was a tiny studio apartment which was all she could afford on what little money she was able to pull in from her job as a copy editor for the Marble Cliffs Today newspaper.  The room had mercifully come furnished with a small refrigerator, rusty yellow oven with three-fourths of a working stove top, dining table with two chairs, squeaky twin bed and wobbly wrought-iron night stand.  From yard sales she had gotten herself some dishes, silverware, cookware, a fold-out lounging lawn chair, bed sheets, a 9-inch TV and a laundry basket.  Everything was fabulously mismatched which was just fine with her because no one ever visited anyway.  Various bags of cereal, each with less than a bowlful left added up to provide her a measly dinner with not enough milk to help it go down any easier.
  Pursuit of her education had brought her here, away from her hometown of Tucson, Arizona.  Seven years in this isolated, dusty old town of Marble Cliffs where the only things to see were the Happyville Playland amusement park and a bunch of retirement communities and golf courses was her reward for moving here.  She knew nothing about her real parents as she grew up with foster parents in Tucson.  As soon as she had graduated from high school she moved to this desolate town in search of a fresh start and never cast a backward glance.  She'd had only a few hundred dollars she had been able to scrounge together from babysitting jobs and grocery store bagging.  All her hopes were pinned on getting a degree and becoming her own person.
  By the sweat of her brow bartending, pouring endless rounds of Regal Lager and Cisler's Cheap Scotch for the local college crowd was how she was able to put herself through classes at Marble Cliffs College.  A Bachelor's degree in Creative Writing and one in Literature were all she had to show for it and what had they gotten her?  There was no mistaking that she was a good copy editor, but that was only an entry-level position and she had been in it for nearly a year now.  Her real dream was to be a writer at some capacity for the newspaper, but that dream seemed far out of reach.
  With only frustration to be had by remembering all this, she threw her keys onto the nightstand and turned on the TV to get her mind off her dead-end life.  Of no surprise to her, all five of the channels that her tiny idiot box was powerful enough to pull in had nothing interesting on.  The news was talking about some detective who carried a talking parrot on his shoulder.  He had rugged, European looking features and wore a trench coat like some kind of movie detective who kicks down doors with guns a blazing when he finds the bad guy.  How kooky.  "Don't they have anything better to talk about?" she said out loud even though she was alone.  She turned the TV off and went to bed exhausted.