In a few days time, I found myself visited by a pleasant but serious man. He was a detective that my flighty friend had directed to me. Needless to say I was rather offended by this gesture—my house was nowhere near clean enough for guests for Christ’s sake!—but I treated the man hospitably anyway. It would be rather callow of me to take out my frustration on a complete stranger after all, and at least he was polite to me. Shaking off whatever resentment I had at that moment, I invited the young man in so that he could finish his business and that I could finally be rid of him.
At first his visit was quite stereotypical of his breed; sparring little time for pleasantries, he went right down to business and asked, “What did I do on x day and at what time?” “What do I do?” “Do I know of such-and-so?” And, of course, the all too famous one that follows if your answer is “yes”, “Do you know of anyone that might bear a grudge against them?” My responses, though different in phrasing, basically told the detective that I didn’t have any information to give him though.
After finally registering this fact into his persistent skull, the detective gave me one of those frustrated sighs of defeat and was about to exit my sanctuary when he spotted some of my treasure. His eyes instantly grew wide and started to dash about the room to witness more of my nectar. When I saw this I thought to myself, “Ah! At last I have met someone with good taste!”
My dear detective—bless his soul—was left breathless at my fine collection. Jumping in before he could say anything I asked, “Do you like what you see?” Perhaps he was more awestruck by the nectar then I originally thought because all he could do was continue to stare. I didn’t let that stop me though. “If you think this stuff is good, just wait until you see what I’ve got in the back.”
“There’s more?”
Swelling with pride, my answer started with a child-like grin and ended with a simple, “Naturally.” To my delight the detective seemed genuinely interested in…ah…“investigating” some more.
First, I presented him the kitchen, the very place where I extracted my nectar. Sadly, most of the space was dedicated to necessary equipment such as silverware, towels, spices, and scalpels. Even more regrettable was that I didn’t even have a means of showing the detective how exactly I extracted the nectar. Thankfully, the detective was content enough to just listen to the process step by step.
From there we moved on to the office, guestroom, and the bathroom. As I told him, the pride and joy between these three rooms was that the jars of nectar in each space were the closest to being the same exact shade of crimson as opposed to the oddballs in the front rooms. Once or twice I had contemplated granting these rooms their own type of jar for some extra pizzazz. My only problem, however, was that I was never absolutely certain what type of theme to go for each of them. I knew that I definitely didn’t want a seashell theme in the bathroom; seriously, that is over and above the call of unoriginal. I also knew that I wanted to use mason jars with…white?—no—yellow ribbon on the tops as a motif, but I never could decide which room I wanted them in more. Out of curiosity, I asked the detective for his opinion on the matter.
“Actually,” he began all serious-like, “I’m more interested in whether or not this is all you have in your collection.”
“Ah, yes of course.” I was a little offended by this, but then again I do tend to appreciate people who can carry out their business without too many distractions. “To answer your question: no, this isn’t all I have in my collection. The last of what you’ll see is nothing short of the best. Come this way to the master bedroom and I’ll show you what I mean.”
