Chapter 8

8: Bill was still shaking with grief and adrenalin when the mysterious man stopped the car and asked him to please stay put while he went into the house they had parked in front of.  All the man told Bill was that he was a detective named Kenn Varson.  Kenn had reported the murder anonymously to the police at a payphone as soon as they had left the house.  He said that they needed to get away from the scene of his wife's murder for Bill's safety.  Bill didn't know what to think now.  All he knew was that the woman he loved was gone.
  Kenn was just over six feet tall and had closely-cropped brown hair.  He wore black slacks and a dark brown buttoned up shirt with the top three buttons undone.  He looked perhaps to be of German descent.  His brown leather shoes looked as if they'd seen their share of action and years.
  Now this strange detective came out of this house, which had only been a short drive away from Bill's home, with a young woman who was obviously quite shaken up and distraught.  Kenn came back to the car and asked Bill if he would come into the house with him and the woman.  Bill unbuckled his seat belt and got out of the car.  The three of them crossed the threshold into the living room.  Kenn invited Bill and Mina to have a seat on the couch as he sat in a cobalt blue metal fold-out chair.
  Bill sat at the very edge of the light brown, tweed couch on the opposite side of Mina.  He seemed to be just a lump taking up space.  His thoughts were miles away from this little room in a bathtub filled with blood.  Mina sat straight up, looking like she might bolt at any time.  She held her pen and paper as if they were the only things keeping her from falling off a cliff.  She sat as far from Kenn as possible, though she felt slightly safer with Bill in the room with them.
  Kenn reclined comfortably in his chair, facing Bill and Mina.  This was more from fatigue than from any real comfortability afforded by that hard ass metal chair.  It had been quite a strange day and he was anything but comfortable.  Time to sort out this sticky situation which ended up with two strangers in his living room.  "You two are probably wondering who I am and what is going on."  He got out of his chair and moved over to a box that was covered with a sheet which was sitting in a corner of the room.  With one swift hand motion, he whipped the sheet off the box which turned out to be a large bird cage.  The bird was mostly the color of lime rinds with red feathers on his head.  "This is Stratford, a talking parrot."
  "Hello, Bill, Mina," the parrot squawked.
  "How the..." Mina rasped.  They could have used a picture of her face to illustrate the definition of the word 'dumbfounded' in the dictionary.
  "Let's start by addressing a rumor that has been going around about me.  Some have accused me of being a vampire, but if you'll kindly look at the mirror in the hall, you will see three people and one parrot sitting in this room. Am I not mistaken in saying so?"
  Take that aforementioned dictionary and thumb a few pages to the left to the word, 'confused' and wouldn't you know it, there's Mina's picture again.  So far, this man was only creating more questions than answers.  After pulling her out of the closet, he had told Mina that he had been expecting her because Barney from the paper had called him.  He just hadn't been expecting her to be in his closet.  Maybe he's just old-fashioned that way.  He told her he was Kenn Varson.  She had never heard the rumor that he was a vampire.  It was a ludicrous thought anyway.  There were too many questions to know where to begin.  "OK, let's try to go about this in a systematic way starting by getting our names straight.  You're Kenn Varson.  I'm Mina Renard."  She turned to the man sitting on the couch beside her and asked, "Who are you?"
  "I'm Bill," he said quietly, but seemed to have his mind on other things.
  "Thank you, Bill.  Well, I'm a reporter and I've been sent to interview you, Kenn.  To begin with, I've never heard anything about your being a vampire."
  "Well, shit.  That's kinda awkward."  Kenn chewed on his lower lip.
  "I mean, you know?  If there was a rumor going around that I was a zebra, I certainly wouldn't feel any urgent, pulling desire to have to show you proof that I'm not, in fact, a zebra.  I'd hope this truth would be self-evident."  There was an uncomfortable silence which lasted for twenty three consecutive seconds which definitely seemed to feel as if they were more like twenty three business seconds not counting weekends and holidays.  It was time enough for Mina to realize that she wasn't absolutely sure that she didn't have something embarrassing hanging out of at least one of her nostrils.  She rubbed her nose and stammered, "Don't get me wrong.  I assure you I am very glad to see that you do have a reflection.  I only saw your picture for the first time on the news last night and again in the paper this morning.  What I did hear is that you're a detective and that you have a parrot who helps you solve your cases."
  "Yes, I am a detective and I guess you can say that Stratford here is my psychic sidekick."
  "Oh, huh.  I see what you did there with the little rhyming alliteration thing with the thing or whatever.  Anyway, um.  So, that kind of answers my question as to how Stratford knew to call us Bill and Mina.  Well, not really, but at least we're getting somewhere.  Why weren't you here in the house when I got here earlier and why was the door open if you were gone away and why did you leave Stratford here if he helps you?"
  "Well, alright.  Whoa, one at a time.  Earlier today, as I told you, I got the call from Barney saying that you'd be coming to do a piece on me.  I was sitting here munching my way through a bag of Ignacio's Pistachios, waiting for you when Stratford there yelled out, 'She's in trouble.  You've got to save her now!'  He gave me an address and I knew I didn't have time to take him.  I thought he was talking about you.  I just flew out of the door and drove off to see if I could save whoever it was Stratford was talking about."
  "So you left in a hurry, leaving the parrot behind and the front door wide open?"
  "Yeah, then I drove over to this man's house and I followed a trail of clothes to an upstairs bathroom.  Inside, I found a dead woman lying in a bathtub full of blood."
  Mina dropped her pen noiselessly to the carpet.  "Oh, my god!  What happened?"  Mina was shocked and suddenly understood Bill's sullen silence.

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.