I had come to think of this absence of feeling as a symptom of the distance separating me from humans; a distance that time had steadily increased. But lately I’d begun to wonder if I might not have it all wrong. Maybe I wasn’t being honest with myself. Maybe my detachment was a way of protecting myself, not from the gap separating me from humans, but from the narrowness of that gap. As the years passed, I had told myself I was moving farther and farther away from humanity. I believed this growing separation was inevitable, a result of the physical conditions of my existence. I lived far longer than humans. I was not vulnerable to human diseases. My senses were far keener and my physical prowess beyond comparison. And on top of all that, I drank human blood, which reduced the human population to a food supply.
But at the same time, as the essential differences between human and vampire became more inescapable, I was gradually growing more conscious of an equally inescapable similarity; a similarity that would never go away. We, vampires and humans, both tell ourselves stories about ourselves, and about each other. I could not evade the fact that this was a part of me that was fundamentally and permanently human. This process of story telling was the very tool I used to understand those things that supposedly distanced and distinguished me from people. In other words, the explanations I gave myself of how different I was were themselves an ineradicable mark of sameness.
I had a knack for dawdling over this sort of speculation, but I had to cut it short. There were more immediate concerns. Taking Francine's left hand, I held her arm above the water’s surface and, with the razor blade I had brought along for the purpose, made a deep incision along the length of the vein in her wrist. There was a brief pause before blood began to pulse out of the cut. I leaned over and placed my lips around the opening, taking what I had come for. When she was close to death, I lowered her arm into the water.
Only a couple more things to do, to encourage the police to handle her death as a routine suicide. I cleaned my prints off the razor blade, then carefully pressed the thumb and forefinger of her right hand several times onto the blade, making sure it was covered with her prints, then dropped it into the bath. I had drunk most of her blood, so there wasn’t enough in the bath water to indicate that she’d bled to death. To fix that, I carefully loosened the drain plug so that the water would slowly drain out. By the time someone discovered her body, the tub would be empty and dry. It would look like her blood had simply gone down the drain along with the water.
I went back to the bedroom and folded her clothes, stacking them neatly on the bed. Noticing the photo of her husband on the dresser, I thought it would be a nice touch, in the absence of a suicide note, to use the photo as a poignant gesture of farewell, and moved it to the bed next to her folded clothes. Then I remembered the trunk in the closet. The night before, I’d been about to open it when Francine had gotten up from the sofa and come into the bedroom. I didn't have any particular reason to be interested in the trunk’s contents, beyond a certain fascination with people's mementos. More often than not, what I found curious about the artifacts humans chose to invest with sentimental value was their dreary uniformity, but that never seemed to curtail my curiosity.
It was early and I didn’t have anything else to do, so I turned on the closet light and slid the trunk out from under the hanging clothes. The contents were about what I’d expected, the usual junk stacked in sedimentary layers: a few old toys and memorabilia from childhood, a little league uniform, baseball glove, a box of photos, high school yearbooks, college diploma, and so on. Another little treasure chest of mediocrity. These artifacts were hardly evidence of a unique life. But then, maybe people just needed to remind themselves that they were normal. This guy’s name was Dean, and if the memorabilia could be trusted, he was pretty normal.
There was, however, one item of interest: a manila folder wedged in the back with the word “LIES” printed in block letters on the front. The envelope contained a collection of newspaper clippings and other documents relating to Dean Arnaud’s death. I was curious about what “LIES” referred to, so I sat down on the floor of the closet and began to read.
The newspaper clippings chronicled Dean’s unsolved murder, along with the scandal of an alleged connection to drug trafficking. His body had been found by a maid in a Vacaville motel. Someone had put a single small-caliber bullet in the back of Dean’s head. There were traces of cocaine in the room, both on the nightstand and in the bathroom, and the coroner’s report showed cocaine in Dean’s blood. The whole business was apparently an embarrassment for the Sheriff’s Department. Arnaud was not officially involved in any drug-related cases and was off duty at the time of his death. The sheriff’s investigation was inconclusive. No arrests were ever made.
Along with the newspaper clippings were copies of several letters Francine had written to various
