Three Twisted Knots

I’m still playing with pastels, and I’m OK with drawing myself with them, but drawing other people is always a challenge and I’m just more comfortable with pencils and charcoal. I know that probably sounds funny, but adding colour is a challenge for me; it always has been. I mean, even here, in this pastel drawing, the colour on my blouse isn’t quite right, and my drafting table isn’t quite that yellow.

Anyway.

The other night, I heard a gunshot, right in my flat! Not like the gunshot was coming from my flat. I heard it from my flat.

I gave it a few minutes; then, when there weren’t any other shots, I wandered vaguely in the direction of the sound, until I found a crowd. Which turned out to be right in front of the hotel, and included a guy I think might have been Mr Creepy from the coffeeshop the other day, but I’m not sure. As I arrived the crowd was dispersing, and I felt a bit out of place.

So I did what you always do in situations like this: I pretended to be madly texting on my phone while actually overhearing the conversation between the only two people left: Officer B&A and the guy who turned out to have shot the gun– and who also turned out to be the crazy DJ from WCOV, Devo Button.

Finally, I’m learning to take surreptitious photos with the iPhone; as I was “texting”, I got a shot of Devo, only I didn’t know he was Devo at the time, so I could sketch from it later. I forgot how easy it was, with the phone on mute and decent lighting (well, streetlights, but hey), to take photos of people without their noticing. So I will be doing a lot more of that in future in order to get sketch fodder.

Officer B&A was saying something to Devo about possibly having been roofied at the Harp and Whatsis, which is exactly the same pub I was in the other night! That gave me an excuse to go over and ask a question, so I took the opportunity and asked if this sort of thing happened often in the pub; as I was new in town, I didn’t want to take any chances. Officer B&A assured me that it was a very rare occurrence and the town was very, very safe. Not sure I believed that, given the kidnapping conversations and that talk of a murder on the radio, but I let him reassure me. Meanwhile, Devo revealed his identity and asked me out for a drink! I’m sure he was just being flirty, but it felt nice that he’d say he’d like to go out for a drink with me sometime. I mean, I’m sure he’s an arse, and I do have a boyfriend, but. Well. Sometimes a girl just wants to go out and be seated across from a guy with a nice face, you know?

That was really it. The most exciting thing about it was the initial gunshot, to tell you the truth. I was thinking maybe there’d been another murder and I could at least get some idea of what’s going on around here. I did talk to someone on CoveNet the other night (wish I could remember the handle!) who said she was friends with the kidnapped girls and that the whole thing was really weird. She told me about the town curse: I really should look at that pamphlet about town history, or check something out from the library, see what I can find out. But I am beginning to get some idea of why Alec picked this place to do his study.