[Collinsport. The once successful fishing village of Collinsport has over the years transformed not only into a flourishing tourist attraction but a haven for artists. Some come seeking the isolation of the Maine Coast, some come seeking inspiration from the depths of the verdant woodlands, and some come seeking an opportunity to find themselves and to be found. One young writer has discovered herself now in the most unlikely of locations for artistry – The Collinsport Star. In the dimming light of a struggling industry, the daily newspaper, Stella Kolchak, is becoming a star in her own right. And Tobias T. Tillnghast, ever the opportunist, hopes to keep himself warm by the heat she radiates.
He felt as if the morning was getting away from his control. The match flared to life, he placed it at the tip of the cigar and puffed, getting the end to glow a cherry red as he frowned and looked down now from the editor’s loft into the newsroom below. The desks were empty. The typewriters silent. Not a single key was clacking. Tobias T. Tillinghast glanced up at the flat screen monitors he had installed in order to keep up with the breaking news between the endless cable news dramas – and seemingly never endless jabbering of the “former and retired” — those that had once been something and now were really nothing more than just paid consultants hired to sit before a camera and jabber. He turned, hands clasped behind him, and he prepared to begin his pacing anew. Where the hell was Stella—he had his own damned breaking news and his best reporter was nowhere to be found.
He had had to put his own version of the Old New Jerusalem Lot Road murders in this morning’s edition – filled it with his usual flourish to disguise that he had little in the way of facts. It would suffice, but it just was not Stella’s. Stella – Stella had style. Stella had that special turn of the phrase. She knew how to take a story and turn it into a page-turner. She knew how to reach out and grab the reader so tightly they just could not put a story down until they came to her thirty.
Tillinghast strode over to the top step of his office loft and placed a large, stubby fingered hand upon the bannister as his deep voice, echoed throughout the deserted Collinsport Star, “STELLA!”
There was only silence.
“Where the hell is Stella!” He muttered to himself as he took his cigar from his clenched teeth, “Miss Trevelyan—“he bellows, “Have you gotten any word of Stella, yet.”
There is no answer from below.
Tobias T. Tillinghast frowns; he pops his cigar back into his mouth and hurries down the stairs to the landing and stands fists on his hips, looking down at the old hotel front desk he had purchased from an estate auction in Bangor several years ago, and stares at the tall, shapely blonde who stands behind it. He takes the cigar once again out of his mouth, “It’s near 9:30. Miss Trevelyan.”
Miss Trevelyan turns her head slowly to glance up at him standing there on the landing looking down at her, and she replies in voice of serene calmness, “I am well aware of the time Tobias. And no, I have not heard from her, just as I told you less five minutes ago.”
He waves his hand with the smoldering cigar at the newsroom, “Where is everybody?”
Miss Trevelyan gives him a look of slight annoyance, “You sent them all out on various stories, sir.
“So I did,” he says distractedly, “So I did.”
There is the sound of footsteps running across the hardwood floor, heels hitting the scuffed boards quickly, as Stella Kolchak suddenly appears from the newspaper’s morgue as she tries to balance a large stack of papers in her arms, “Here I am – are you looking for me?”
“Am I looking for you?” Tobias T. Tillinghast asks, shaking his head and looking now at Miss Trevelyan. Miss Trevelyan looks back at him with a look that says do not even get started with me this morning. “The whole of The Star is looking for you. Where have you been?”
“Doing some research sir.” She answers.
“Well—thank God you are finally here – now, come on up here to my office. Now!”
Stella Kolchak gathering the papers in her arms clumsily as she tries to collect herself as she walks across the front of The Star’s lobby and looks over at the reception desk and Miss Trevelyan, who only returns her gaze with a rather passively raised eyebrow . . . as Miss Trevelyan still cannot fathom Miss Kolchak. She really all that naïve – or is it merely an act. Kolchak is after all Tillinghast’s best reporter and everyone knows it, and yet she still doesn’t seem to get that fact, nor how she could exploit it.
With the stack of old papers in hand, Stella Kolchak ascends the stairs leading up to the Tillinghast sanctum, where she finds him seated behind his desk. He has feet propped atop it, crossed at the ankles; the stubby fingers of his hands interlocked, behind his head, as he leans back in his swivel chair and puffs on the ever present cigar. Where moments ago he seemed anxious and agitated, he now appears rather tranquil. She approaches the desk skittishly almost as if trying to hide behind her bundle, “Here sir . . . I am . . . . here I am.”
“Stella have I ever told you just how much I love this crazy town?” He says puffing his cigar like an old steam engine.
She glances nervously around, “Yes sir . . . when you hired me,” muttering ever so softly as if scared to say more, “. . . about six weeks ago sir”
“Vampire Killers on the loose. Tourists beheaded in foul restrooms at deserted rest stops. God, how I love it.”
Stella Kolchak flinches thinking about the blood and gore that had been spread not only across the abandoned warehouse floor, where the last victim of The Vampire Killer had been found, but across the front page of The Star, lately.
“Stella I need you to work your magic on this beheading story. I need you to start digging into it like you normally do, “ He looks up at her with this intense eyes, “I need you to find those things that no one else as thought of.”
He takes the cigar out of his mouth and looks at her, “Okay, I’m only going to say this once, since no one’s around, but, you do know, you are the best damn reporter I got,” and he points his cigar at her.
Her eyes widen a bit, “Sir . . . I am sure there are more experienced journalists here . . .who could do . . . . just as well – I mean, you Sir, you wrote the initial story for today’s edition.”
“But no one has your nose for not only for the news, but for the obscure, the telling detail that most just overlook. Damn it Stella, you find things no one else even suspects. People tell you things they shouldn’t—you have a talent my girl, a positive talent, for getting me what I need, news that takes peoples eyes off their TV screens.”
He takes his feet of the desk, “I know there is something as whacky as the name Collins is involved in this decapitation business, and so, I want you on this story.”
Stella Kolchak clings to her collection of old papers as if they were a security blanket, “Yes sir, The Collins, sir . . . and, well . . .”
“What is it?”
“I heard something, it might not mean anything at all, but . . . and so, that’s why I’ve been looking through the paper’s morgue this morning and well, there was some similar – well,” She hesitates not having all the facts as yet, “Maybe, I still need to do the research, so I am not sure, right at the moment, as it happened a long time ago. . . “
“History? The History – Yes, that’s the thing Stella, that’s what I mean . . .” He smiles wickedly, “I had not thought about using the History, damned Stella you’re good – someday you’ll . . . well, maybe not, but anyway – I want you to juice it up, the story, use that creative writing talent of yours.”
“Yes, sir.”
He slides the cigar to the other side of his mouth, “I want people waking up to read the Star, to see who else has lost their head.”
“Yes, sir.”
He frowns, “Just make sure you don’t lose yours.”
She bites her lip and takes a deep breath “You can count on me sir! I won’t let you down. When people read my story they’ll think they’re the ones who died . . . “ and she blushed deeply as that last bit sounded so much better in her head. – and maybe too much like him.
Tillinghast’s big hands smack together, “That is what I love to hear, enthusiasm! A love for the printed word.” He slides the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, “Now, I want it to be truthful you hear, it doesn’t have to be factual, you understand. Got me.”
She blinks a few times and then nods, “I got it sir”
He shifts his shoulders and leans his elbows on the desk, “Now as you already know, this Lieutenant Mills, she’s tough, but go on over and see her, find out what the hell was going on at the CPD in the middle of the night. Car chases and such. I wrote it up, but there’s got to be more to it than I know at the moment. Oh, and check with that new Medical Examiner – Izzy Collins. I don’t trust her all that much, after all she is a Collins, so go and find out what she’s not telling. Oh, and there’s this ex-FBI profiler – his name is Black I think, cold as ice, there’s something about him,. He’s staying over at the Collinsport Inn. He was supposed to be have only been here on the Vampire Killer case – but he hasn’t left, Why? Talk to him – and you do know that the nut case got sprung from the nuthouse last night. Two crazy dames in love with him form what I hear – don’t worry about that one, I’m going to cover it,” His wicked smile returns, “It’s got political implications all over it and so I’m going to make sure to bring them all to light. He had connections to the police, he was a consultant for them – so what did they know, and when did they know it?”
“Follow the money.” She nods.
“Right. Now get out to the Rest Stop, check it out, see what you can find—I mean why the hell would anyone be stopping there to begin with. The place is horrid, absolutely horrid. I wouldn’t even take a leak there myself. The only reason anyone would be out there that time of night in that kind of weather, is sex . . . or drugs. Or both! Yeah, could be some kind of a drug deal gone badly. Check on those tourists – were they tourists? or were they running drugs. Virginia to Maine – what’s the connection? Is there a Cartel behind it? Sounds like it, head’s chopped off. Did they use a machete? Say hello to my little friend!” His hands now rise as if displaying a headline, “Yeah – I can see it, Cartel Beheads Out of Town Mules?” Then he shakes his head, “Naw, that’s too clichéd. It needs something, it needs, “ He looks to her, “It needs that Stella Kolchak spark to liven it up.”
“Sex. . . ?” She mutters to herself a bit too loudly – her knowledge of the rest stop was that the place was beyond filthy.
Tobias T. Tillinghast’s hand slams down on the desk, “Now you got it Kolchak! SEX!”
She looks at him quizzically.
“Get me sex, and more of it. I want some sex into this somehow. Lover loses head? Naw, sounds too much like the Post.”
Stella Kolchak smiles broadly now, her mind racing with possibilities as her note pad almost ignites from the friction of her rapid pen – it’s how they worked, he talked, and her imagination turned on.
“My money is on sex and drugs,” A cloud of cigar smoke rising above his head, “Some strange new fetish, maybe even some sick club, you know – go out get high and then have sex in filthy restrooms and where else to find them but out of the way rest stops . . . something crazy you know, like that movie . . . where they liked sex in car crashes.”
She looks at him for a moment not saying anything.
“And then some whack job comes and cuts off your head.”
She giggles to herself at a very dirty headline that comes to mind.
Tobias leans over and starts typing on his keyboard, “You know, speaking of whack jobs, this Vampire Killer . . . I just thought of something – you know, the nut case, he was there with St. Clair, the Chief of Police, when she got shot.”
Stella tilts her head slightly, “You think he?”
“Maybe . . . by the time I finish writing this I may convince myself.”
She looks at him, “huh?”
“So, what are you doing standing there Stella, the days just beginning. Who knows what it will bring.”
“Yes Sir” And she scurries back down the stairs, carefully balancing the pile of old newsprint. She glances up to see Miss Trevelyan, as she stands with arms crossed at the receptionist desk watching as Stella descends the stairs and then heads over to her desk.
Stella drops the old newspapers upon the clutter that lies across the top of old desk and pulls back her chair. She opens a drawer and takes out a Moleskin reporter’s notebook. She flips it open and finds a new page where she writes at the top: Bedford. 1803, Otis Green. And then she writes, Sex and puts a question mark beside it.
She looks up to the loft office and starts to laugh to herself.
Cue Music End of Episode