Escort For The Witch: The Mystery of Psyche's Ruby - стр. 8
" Oh, damn it!" I muttered and dropped my aching head into my hands.
"Yep. And you also threatened to kick everyone’s ass down at the station."
"And how did you know I was at the station?" I turned to mom, who had been quiet the whole time, putting on airs.
"You know, my dear son, sometimes I look at you and wonder what lucky stars had aligned when you were born?"
"Guess that’s your area of expertise… Mom, come on, enough already! So then I used my post-booking phone call right, didn’t I? "
"No, my dear! You weren’t exactly fit to do so at the time," she quipped. " It was your luck that last night, the father of one of my top students was on duty. He was kind enough to call me and ask me to pick my terribly ill-mannered, hopelessly drunk child up."
"Actually, he just asked her to pick you up," Brenda corrected, hoping to make me feel better and earning a sharp glance from Mrs. Renton.
"Well, as they say, all is well that ends well!" I said amiably, forcing a feeble semblance of a smile. " Anyway, the point is Dad doesn’t know… It would hurt him to not have been invited."
" He does," Brenda whispered, fear returning to her eyes.
There it was: the guilt of not inviting my own father to my, his only son’s, bachelor party came crashing down on my already throbbing head like a sledgehammer. He will never live this down, even though this was probably the most disastrous stag do in the history of New Orleans – which, of course, will be readily confirmed by my eccentric
“friend” Derek, who has now firmly secured his position as a valid member of our small family and…
“Where’s Derek?” I asked Brenda, suddenly remembering my cheerful hippie bloodsucker. After all, he was the reason why our innocent boys’ night out at the bar had turned into a “bachelor brawl.” I stared at Brenda, who, by the looks of it, was on the verge of crying. “Brenda, what else don’t I remember?” I asked, relieved to notice that the whiskey I had downed was finally doing its job. The ringing in my head ceased, the nausea subsided, and my mind cleared up a bit. “Spit it out already!”
“Yes, Brenda. Tell him. Tell him everything! Let him feel ashamed for once,” Mrs.
Renton interjected.
“Mom…”
“Shame on you, son!”
“Well, I don’t even know if I should…” Brenda began, but Mrs. Renton wasn’t having it.
“Do you have any idea what your father and I went through after that police phone call in the middle of the night, telling us to come to the police station at once? We raced there, only to find you completely drunk and disorderly and shouting profanities, and it made me feel sick just realizing we were… directly related.”
“Oh, Mom, please!”
“And then an officer came up to us and said, ‘Brace yourselves. We have bad news. Your son Derek passed away on the way to the hospital!”
I couldn’t believe my ears! The last sentence, uttered by my mother, hit me so hard that I instantly sobered up, gaping in shock.
“What? Your who? Passed away? On the way to the hospital? What hospital? And what do you mean ‘passed away’? He can’t pass away! He’s a vampire!”
“That’s exactly our problem,” Brenda noted quietly. “Your dad’s been racking his brains over how we sneak ‘the body’ out of the morgue unnoticed and without the body breaking into song.”