I used to be a Norma Normal sort of person in my little town of Arcadia, Louisiana. After all those years of working in the town’s library, which was rather short of greater literature, I often thought that most of the library shelves are loaded with books containing unimaginative and hideous descriptions. I mean romances, all kinds of them, historical, medical, contemporary or those with a super extra doze of sex scenes. Each day I sighed heavily watching those romance readers. One glance at the cover and I knew everything.
This morning was different than those of the past months. I was woken up by a telephone call, too sleepy to think logically or to recognize the voice on the other side of the line.
“Alice? Is that you?” Asked someone melodically.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I replied hesitantly. “And you are…?”
“Don’t play the fool, Alice. It’s me, Kristin, your brother’s room mate.”
“Oh. Sorry, hi,” I yawned. “What’s up?”
Believe me or not, but I still don’t understand why parents should name their son Kristin. He was the same age as my brother, Mike. Frankly speaking, I haven’t heard from Mike for about a year. I’ve seen Kristin once in my life, just before Mike left to Shreveport. We chose our own ways. I spent my quiet life in Arcadia and he moved to Shreveport to share a room with the Kristin guy of Irish descent. That’s why I was so surprised by the call. My brother led his life in another city and our contacts were limited to sending occasional greetings cards, nothing more.
“Have you been in touch with Mike recently?” He asked with a slight tension in his voice.
“If lately means sending me a X-mass card last year.” I tried to sound ironic, but I became suddenly aware of the fact that something was going on.
“No… it’s that…” He mumbled, he couldn’t find a word or what?
“What?”
“Mike is missing,” he said in an uneven voice.
“How come?” I thought he was making fun of me, but then I flooded him with questions. “How
long? Isn’t he at his friends’ place or something like that? And why do you call me? You obviously know that he wouldn’t have come by here to say ‘hi’.”
Kristin made a pause resembling those scary moments of dead silence.
“Mike was absent minded for a couple of weeks. He got himself a new girlfriend, not one of those glamorous babes with Cosmopolitan as their Bible,” I knew he was worried, but he sounded sort of guilty of something. “Well, I’ve already called all of his friends. I’ve even talked to several bartenders working in bars he liked to visit. No one saw him for the past two days.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Yes, but they said I should wait,” he answered in a low impatient voice.
“Then wait…” I began to ponder over what will happen if I find my dear brother drunken as a skunk in a brothel or in any of similar public utilities. “I’ll come to Shreveport in about three hours and I want you to wait for me at the Greyhound bus station.”
“OK. Thank you Alice, I’m really worried about Mike. If anything happened to him…I couldn’t…”
“I know Kristin. See you in three hours. I’ll call you when I’m almost there.”
All I had to do now was to phone the head librarian, pack myself and go to Shreveport in search of my beloved brother. Action and mystery, here I come.
Three and a half hours later I was standing in front of the Greyhound bus station on Fannin Street in Shreveport, waiting for Mike. As I was just about to phone him and ask where the hell he was, Mike appeared in a lilac Mustang convertible. I would say I was a bit astonished, for I remembered my brother’s friend as a quiet artistic guy with hair pinned up like those of ancient Greek women. Now he looked like a mixture of a drag queen and an intellectual, and all this packed in a lilac car.
Several minutes later we were going up in an elevator to the top story, which was inhabited only by Mike and Kristin. Kristin unlocked the door and I saw the apartment. It was spacious and decorated in an arty way. Walls in the living room looked like a flowery meadow, furniture was in Scandinavian style. After a moment Kristin showed me the way to Mike’s room.
“It’s just as he left it, I didn’t touch anything,” he said opening the door.
“Uh-huh,” I said looking about the room.
“I’ll make us some coffee.” he mumbled not knowing what to do and went to the kitchen.
The room was tidy. Did my brother learn at last how to clean his room? It was too good to be true. He was always messy. I came to the little bookshelf in the corner of the room near the window and looked at the book titles. They were mostly sci-fi, few books about vampires, several psychological guides and a photo album. I took the album and opened it. I wasn’t surprised. It was full of my Mike’s pictures with random girls in the same bars. Having scanned it briefly, I was about to close it when something fell out and landed on the carpeted floor. I stooped to pick it up. It was a bar leaflet. I examined it carefully. Vampyr was the bar’s name. Silly name if you ask me. I wondered about what Mike would do in such a bar. Kristin came in with two coffees. I showed him the leaflet.
“Have you ever been there?” I asked when he was handing me the mug with hot coffee.
“I don’t recall that, sorry,” he answered instantly.
“So maybe you know where is Industrial Drive?” I took a sip of coffee and waited for the answer.
“I can take you there today after the nightfall,” he tasted his coffee.
“OK, you told me that Mike had a girlfriend just before his disappearance,” I started.
“Yes, he had,” he answered in a slightly cold voice.
“What was her name? You probably know that,” I asked and checked the time. It was about two hours before nightfall and I needed to know something more.
“Well, it was something plain… Mary or Maggie sort of thing. I think it was Mary, there are lots of Maries here. Almost Maryland,” he tried to be funny and in other circumstances I would laugh at this pun, but it wasn’t the place and time for this.
“I get that,” I said thinking intensively. “I’ll look around this room, take a shower and then we can go to that club.”
“As you wish,” he answered in a servant style and went out of Mike’s room.
I didn’t find much more in his room, so if something was still there it was probably well hidden. Kristin was a good driver, not speeding too much, no bravado. After about fifteen minutes, we were on the parking lot just in front of the club located in a suburban shopping area. I must say there were strange people out there. Like Goths for example, wearing shiny leather clothes which uncovered more than covered. Some of them wore studded collars. I had never seen such weirdos in my entire life. We got out of the car and walked to the entrance. Standing next to the entrance, there was a tall slim blonde wearing a black corset and a tight-fitting skirt, acting like a bouncer. Kristin left somewhere behind me, so I approached the blonde all by myself. Gosh, she was very pale, maybe because of the light, but she looked quite scary and intimidating.
“The party is closed,” she said in a bored voice and rolled her green eyes.
“But I only,” I started.
“No, you can’t come in. The party is closed,” she repeated in an equally bored voice.
“Hey, you Missy!” I became angry, how come this weirdo won’t listen to me? “I only wanted…”
“Marigold, is there a problem?” I heard a very low voice coming from the club. A second later, a huge man stepped through the door and stood beside the woman. He was blond, blue-eyed hunk and if it could be possible I’d make a wager that he was a Viking or at least had a drop of Viking’s blood in his veins. I had never heard such a low voice. He spoke with a slight accent, but I couldn’t distinguish it.
“This glamour girl won’t understand that she can’t enter” Ms Bored replied.
“You’re a glamazon yourself,” I was clearly loosing my temper and Kristin was chatting with a girl just a few feet away. “I wanted to ask you a question.”
Ms Bored again rolled her eyes while the Viking guy scanned me from top to toe, scary.
“So what is the question?” He asked staring at me after a short pause.
“Have you seen this guy here?” I showed them the picture of Mike which I always carried in my wallet. They looked at it for a moment in silence.
“Nope, never seen him, but we’ve seen your friend. She didn’t come by for a couple of months,” he answered pointing in Kristin’s direction who was talking with the girl.
“Thank you for your time,” I said, ready to go, for I didn’t learn anything useful.
“You’ll visit us some day,” the man whispered incredibly softly and disappeared.
As we were going back, I told Kristin that I didn’t find anything new and that they had never seen Mike. We returned in silence and went to sleep. In the morning I found a notice from him that he would be late this evening and that he had phoned the police, still with no results. I called them once more, but to my surprise they claimed that no one had informed them that Mike was missing. I didn’t know what to think about that. After a breakfast and a shower, I figured that the best thing I could do now was to wait. I might as well wait while watching some DVD on the plasma screen in the living room. Everything was under control, but I couldn’t find movies. I thought of borrowing something from Kristin. I checked his door. It was unlocked. I entered and looked around in search for movies. To my surprise, I couldn’t find any, but I saw something interesting, a photo of a young woman, something around twenty. She was a spitting image of Kristin. Did he have a twin sister? I looked at the back of the photo and froze. It was signed “Kristin, 2000.” How come? And then I saw something else and I didn’t know which one was worse. One of Kristin’s walls was wallpapered with Mike’s photos and girlish drawings. I understood that Kristin might have had a bit feminine looks few years ago but now I discover that he loves my brother and it’s not love between friends, God! Did Mike know about that? Shit, Kristin was gay, not that I cared who was gay or not. That would explain the flat’s decoration, the car’s color and his looks!
My glance rested on a small jar with some tablets. I came closer and examined the description of the medicine. I was astonished once more. It was a hormone treatment, a huge doze of testosterone. Why should a man take such drug? Wait a sec, MAN? It came to me as if it was obvious from the beginning. Kristin wasn’t initially a man. He was a woman. He, well, she had a gender reassignment. She did it just before meeting Mike, and then she felt madly in love with him or even was obsessed. That guy from Vampyr didn’t mean the girl Kristin was talking to. He meant him, oh, her. She lived in the same apartment with Mike and yearned for him, but my brother wasn’t a steady kind of person in relationships. He was a womanizer or a wolf if we use more archaic word. Poor Kristin she had to stand that all those years. OK, but I still didn’t know where my brother was.
I went to the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. But were was it? The worst thing about staying at someone’s place is that you have to search for everything. I looked into several cupboards. Just when I needed it so badly in the morning there was no sign of this brown product containing caffeine. After a while I spotted a box which was similar to those used to store coffee, so I grabbed it and opened. Oops, not coffee, not this time Mrs Holmes in search of caffeine. The box was full of photos. There were several of Mike, some with him and Kristin, oh, that was funny. In one of them Mike snogged the girl with whom Kristin talked yesterday. It wasn’t the only photo like that. I turned it and read the sign aloud “Mike and Mary”. So this was Mary. I had to gather up my suspicions and facts. Both of them didn’t look like my initial assumptions. There was a missing link. Why did Mary speak yesterday with Kristin? Was he or she questioning her if she had seen Mike? Or was it something else?
I didn’t have much time to think about that. It was already evening and my mobile was ringing. I answered it and sighed with a considerable amount of relief. They were in the hospital, beaten up rather badly. The nurse wanted me to donate blood. I didn’t know the cub’s phone number, so I went to Mike’s room and browsed through the Internet. Having called for a cab, I waited impatiently downstairs. The driver was a nice White middle-aged guy who complained about young people’s brutality all the way to the hospital.
It was quite easy to find the room in which Mike and Kristin were placed as there were two police officers in the hallway. I introduced myself. They instantly wanted to ask me a few questions, but I told them that firstly I must get a few answers from the victims. So I entered the room and gave Mike a rebuking look. Then I exchanged glances with Kristin, sat on the chair between two beds and rolled my eyes. Police officers also decided that they should enter.
“We have found those fellas when they were given the thrashing. We spotted several Goths one of them was a woman, but with those long haired it is always hard to tell,” the younger one said.
“Ms Rickhold, do you happen to know why did this happen?” The other asked.
“Where should I start?” I asked with a grimace. Weren’t they capable of solving that great mystery themselves?
“Preferably at the beginning,” the younger one said.
“My brother Mike started dating Mary the Goth girl. But after a few times with her, he decided that he was a true polygamist and that one woman wasn’t enough, so he encountered another girl and they were both discovered by Mary at her place. She was furious. She went to her cousin, Kristin to, let’s say, complain. Meanwhile, Mike tried to hide from Mary and her gang. Kristin wanted to ease the situation, but it didn’t work. The second attempt took place last night in front of the Vampyr bar. It was rather a non-event. Today, Kristin was told by Mary that she would kill the bloody bastard, so Kristin went to prevent such a pitiful end of my dearest brother,” I paused to take a breath. “Goths are fickle, if you know what I mean. That’s why you found them in this physical condition.”
Kristin tried to nod to confirm the truth of my speech, but it was too painful for him, well, her.
“Ma’am, how did you come to that?” The younger one asked with genuine astonishment.
“You know, the power of the Internet, a couple of Internet diaries and a handful of accidentally found photos make an amateur detective,” I twisted my mouth into a smile.
blonde Eric (<3) and black-haired Bill. Though the name ‘Sookie’ sounds a bit deprived of intelligence as well as appropriate for the Louisiana setting it can be justified. Just listen to the girl talk. ‘Eric’ is a somewhat Gothic name of a centuries old Viking vampire, yeah fearful and amusing lad. And we come to ‘Bill’ . My immediate association is the cartoon Blinky Bill, but maybe I’m just carried away.The guy was made a vampire during the Civil War and amuses us with his chivalry and dedication to Sookie. Gimmie a break. Another ‘edwardish’ or ’stefanish’ character. Not that I consider every carrying character a sort of moron which can only appear in romantic comedies or mills&boons. Also, I’m not pessimistic, rather realistic. Girls want such things in guys but they behave differently and far away from the Edward Cullen ideal guy set of character traits. It may turn out that girls will stop thinking about Mr Right or a Prince and his white horse. We’ll have a dreamy white-skinned vampire lover. Sorry, vampires don’t exist. Emotional ones do, but I doubt if any girl would like to date such, unless she is a masochistic lamb and he’s a (stupid) lion.
And what do
