Regina's Song (4 page)

“She could audit a few courses for a couple of quarters,” I suggested.

“Audit?” Les sounded startled.

“It’s not like an audit by Internal Revenue, boss,” I assured him. “All it means in a college is that the student sits in and listens. Twink wouldn’t have to do any course work, or write any papers, or take any tests, because she wouldn’t be graded. Wouldn’t that take the pressure off her, Doc?” I asked Fallon.

“I’d forgotten about that,” he admitted.

“It isn’t too common,” I told him. “You don’t come across very many who take classes for fun, but we’ve got a special situation here. I’ll check it out and see what’s involved.”

“That’d put it in an entirely different light,” Fallon said. “Renata gets the chance to broaden her social experience without any pressure. What kind of work does your sister do, Les?”

“She’s a cop.”

“A police officer? Really?”

“She’s not out on the street with gun and nightstick,” Les told him. “Actually, she’s a dispatcher in the precinct station in north Seattle. She works the graveyard shift, so her days and nights are turned around a bit, but otherwise she’s fairly normal.”

“How does she get along with Renata?”

“Quite well—at least during the few times she visited us when Renata was on furloughs from your sanitarium. Mary was always fond of the twins.”

“Why don’t you have a talk with her? Explain the situation, and tell her that this is something in the nature of an experiment. If Renata’s able to deal with the situation, well and good. If it causes too much stress, we might have to reconsider the whole idea. Mark here can keep an eye on her and let us know if this isn’t working. Renata trusts him, so she’ll probably tell him if the arrangement gets to be more than she can handle.”

“That still baffles me,” Les admitted. “They didn’t seem all that close before—” He broke off, obviously not wanting to mention Regina’s murder.

“It’s like the buddyship you and Dad picked up in ‘Nam, boss,” I told him. “The Twinkie Twins grew up believing that ‘Markie can fix anything.’ Maybe that’s why Renata recognized me and couldn’t recognize anybody else. I’m Mr. Fix-it, and she knew that
something
had to be fixed.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Fallon observed, “but I think it comes fairly close to explaining Renata’s recognition of Mark. As long as it’s there, let’s use it. I think we should give this a try, gentlemen. Renata’s environment can be reasonably controlled, there won’t be any pressure, and she can expand her social contacts and come out of her shell. Let’s ease her into it gradually, and see how she copes. Just be sure she doesn’t start missing her Friday counseling sessions. I’ll definitely want to keep a close eye on her myself.”

I’d known Mary Greenleaf since before the twins had been born, because she’d been a frequent visitor at her brother’s house in Everett when I’d been the center of attention there. We’d always gotten along, and when the twins had come along, she’d been nice enough to keep on paying a little bit of attention to
me
, instead of dropping me like a hot rock, the way everybody else seemed to do.

She was about ten years younger than her brother was, and she lived in the Wallingford district in Seattle, about two miles from the university campus. I think her proximity to the campus might have played some part in Twink’s decision to take a run at the university rather than the local community college.

Mary’d married young, and it hadn’t taken her very long to discover that her marriage had been a terrible mistake. Her husband turned out to be one of those “Let’s all get drunk and then go home and beat up our wives” sorts of guys.

She got to know a fair number of Seattle policemen during those years, since they routinely picked up her husband for domestic violence and hauled him off to jail.

Then there’d been counseling, which didn’t work; and eventually restraining orders, which didn’t work either, since Mary’s husband viewed them as a violation of his right to slap his wife around anytime he felt like it.

Then Mary had filed for a divorce, which upset her priest and sent her husband right straight up the wall. He nosed around in several seedy taverns until he found some jerk willing to sell him a gun. Then he’d declared an open season on wives who object to being kicked around.

Fortunately, he was a rotten shot, and the gun he’d bought was a piece of junk that jammed up after the third round. He
did
manage to hit Mary in the shoulder before the cops arrived, and that got him a free ride to the state penitentiary for attempted murder.

Mary sort of approved of that.

She knew that he’d get out eventually, though, and that was probably what led her to take up a career in law enforcement. A cop is
required
to carry a gun all the time, and Mary was almost positive that sooner or later she was going to need one. A more timid lady would probably have changed her name and moved to Minneapolis or Boston, but Mary wasn’t the timid type.

Right at first, she’d spent a lot of her spare time at the pistol range practicing for her own personal version of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Her church didn’t approve of her divorce, but Mary had come up with an alternative—instant widowhood. As it turned out, though, her husband irritated the wrong people in the state pen, and he suddenly came down with a bad case of dead after somebody stabbed him about forty-seven times.

Mary didn’t go into deep mourning when she heard the news.

I liked her: She was one heck of a gal.

Les Greenleaf wasn’t happy about Twink’s decision to move to Seattle. I think he hoped his sister would reject the idea of having her niece move in with her. But Mary shot him right out of the saddle on that one when he and I drove to Seattle in August of ’97 to talk it over with her.

“No problem,” Mary said. “I’ve got plenty of room here, and Ren and I get along just fine.”

“You
do
understand that she’s just a little—” Les groped for a suitable word.

“Screwball, you mean?” Mary asked bluntly. “Yes, I know all about it. I’m used to screwballs, Les. Half the people I work with aren’t playing with a full deck. Renata’s going to be fine here with me.”

“Well,” he said dubiously, “I guess we can try it for one quarter to see how she does. But if it starts giving her problems . . .” He left it hanging.

“I’ll be here, too, boss,” I told him. “I’ll get a room nearby and, between us, Mary and I can keep Twink on an even keel.”

“You’re going to have to let go, Les,” Mary told him. “If you try to protect her for the rest of her life, you’ll turn her into a basket case. I love her, too, and I won’t let you do that to her. She comes here; and that’s that.” Mary wasn’t the sort for shilly-shallying around when it came to making decisions.

The chore of moving Twink to Seattle fell into my lap. Her father had a business to run, and I wasn’t doing anything important anyway. There was a lot of driving back and forth between Everett and Seattle involved in easing Twink into her new situation, and the whole procedure took the better part of two weeks. There are people who can move halfway across the country in less time, but we all wanted to take it a little slow with this move. Stress was the last thing Renata needed.

“Why’s everybody so uptight about this?” she asked me while I was driving her back to Everett to pick up some more of her clothes. “I’m a big girl now.”

“We just want to make sure you’re not going to come unraveled again, Twink,” I told her.

“My seams are all still pretty tight,” she said. “Actually, I’m looking forward to this. Les and Inga keep tiptoeing around me like I was made out of eggshells. I wish they’d learn how to relax. Mary’s a lot easier to be around.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.” I hesitated slightly, but then I sort of blurted it out. “Your dad’s got a real bad case of protective-itis, Twink. He’s not happy about this whole project, but Doc Fallon overruled him. Fallon believes it’ll be good for you—as long as we can keep the pressure off. Your dad would much rather wrap you in cotton batting and keep you in a little jewel box.”

“I know,” she agreed. “That was my main reason for suggesting the university instead of the community college. I’ve
got
to get out from under his thumb, Markie. That house in Everett is almost as bad as Fallon’s bughouse. I need to have
you
somewhere nearby, but Les and Inga are starting to give me the heebie-jeebies. Whether they like it or not, Twinkie
is
going to grow up.”

That caught me a little off guard. Twink had been kind of passive since she’d come out of Fallon’s sanitarium, but now she sounded anything
but
passive. This was a new Twinkie, and I wasn’t sure where she was going.

It was a dreary Sunday in early September when I went cruising around the Wallingford district to find a place for
me
to live. I stuck mostly to the back streets, where there were older houses that had seen better days. Almost all displayed that discreet ROOMS TO LET sign in a front window. Generations of university students had fanned out from the campus in search of cheap lodgings, and property owners all over north Seattle obligingly offered rooms, many of which took “cheap” all the way down to the flophouse level.

The thing that attracted me to one particular house was an addition to the standard ROOMS TO LET placard. It read FOR SERIOUS STUDENTS ONLY with “SERIOUS” underlined in bright red ink.

I pulled to the curb and sat looking at the self-proclaimed home for the elite. On the plus side, it was no more than five blocks from Mary’s house, and that was fairly important. It wasn’t in very good condition, but that didn’t bother me all that much. I was looking for a place where I could sleep and study, not some showplace to impress visitors.

Then a bulky-shouldered black man came around the side of the house carrying a large cardboard box filled with what appeared to be scraps from some sort of building project. The black man had arms as thick as fence posts, silvery hair, and a distinguished-looking beard.

I got out of my car when he reached the curb. “Excuse me, neighbor,” I said politely. “Do you happen to know why the owner of this house is making such an issue of ‘serious’?”

A faint smile touched his lips. “Trish has some fairly strong antiparty prejudices,” he replied in a voice so deep that it seemed to be coming up out of his shoes.

“Trish?”

“Patricia Erdlund,” he explained. “Swedish girl, obviously. The house belongs to her aunt, but Auntie Grace had a stroke last year. Trish’s sister, Erika, was living here at the time, and she put in an emergency call to her big sister. Trish is in law school, and Erika just finished premed, so they weren’t
too
happy to be living in the middle of a twelve-week-long beer bust. I’ve lived here for six years, so I’ve more or less learned to turn my ears off, but the Erdlund girls aren’t that adaptable. They announced a no-drinking policy, and that emptied the place out almost immediately. Now they’re looking for suitable recruits to fill the place back up.”

“I don’t want to be offensive,” I said carefully, “but aren’t you a bit old to be a student? You
are
a student, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “I’m a late bloomer—I was thirty-five before I got started. My name’s James Forester,” he introduced himself, holding out his hand.

“Mark Austin,” I responded, shaking hands with him.

“What’s your field, Mark?”

“English.”

“Grad student?”

I nodded. “Ph.D. candidate. What’s your area?”

“Philosophy and comparative religion.”

“How many people do the Erdlund girls plan to cram into the house?”

“We’ve got two empty rooms on the second floor. There are a couple of cubicles in the attic and several more in the basement, but they’re hardly fit for human habitation. Auntie Grace used to rent them out—el cheapo—to assorted indigents who always had trouble paying the rent, maybe because they routinely spent the rent money on booze or dope. That’s where most of the noise was coming from, so Trish and Erika decided to leave them empty and concentrate on finding quiet, useful people to live in the regular rooms.”

“Useful?”

“There are some domestic chores involved in the arrangement. I’ve got a fair degree of familiarity with plumbing, and I can usually hook wires together without blowing
too
many fuses. The house has been seriously neglected for the past dozen or so years, so it falls into the ‘fixer-upper’ category. Have you had any experience in any of the building trades?”

“I know a little bit about carpentry,” I replied. “I’ve spent a few years working in a door factory up in Everett. Let’s say I know enough to back off when I’m out of my depth.”

“That should be enough, really. The girls aren’t planning any major remodeling. Replacing wallboard that’s had holes kicked in it is probably about as far as it’ll go.”

“No problem, then.”

“I think you and I could get along, Mark, and I’m definitely outnumbered right now. It’s very trying to be the only man in the house with three ladies.”

“Who’s the third girl?”

“Our Sylvia. She’s in abnormal psych—which is either her field of study or a clinical description of Sylvia herself. She’s an Italian girl, cute as a button, but very excitable.”

“You’re all alone here with two Swedes and an Italian? You definitely need help, brother.”

“Amen to that.” He paused. “Do you happen to know anything about auto mechanics?” he asked me then.

“Not so’s you’d notice it. I can change a flat or replace spark plugs if I have to, but that’s about as far as it goes. My solution to any other mechanical problem is to reach for a bigger hammer. Does somebody have a sick car?”

“All three girls do—or think they do. Auto mechanics seem to turn into rip-off artists when a girl drives into their shop. That’s why these three want to have an in-house mechanic. Last winter, Sylvia was ready to sue General Motors because her car wasn’t getting the kind of mileage GM promised. I tried to explain that warming the car up for an hour every morning
might
have had something to do with it, but she kept insisting that as long as the car wasn’t moving, it shouldn’t make any difference.”