Regina's Song (7 page)

“It’s an inheritance,” I told him. “My folks were killed in a car accident, and there was some mortgage insurance involved in the estate.”

“Ah,” he said and let the matter drop.

We reached my house in north Everett, and I backed the truck up to the front porch. Then we hauled out my furniture and box after box of my books. Books aren’t
quite
as heavy as salt, but they come close. James and I were both sweating heavily by the time we finished up. “Now I see why you needed so much shelf space,” he observed.

“Tools of the trade,” I said. “I guess I’m one of the last precomputer scholars, so my books take up lots of room—which is fine with me. When I read something, it’s on a real page, not a monitor. No hysteria about rolling blackouts.”

I had to shift my emotions into neutral as I made a quick survey of the now-empty house—I didn’t want to start blubbering.

“Tough, isn’t it?” James said sympathetically.

“More than a little. I grew up here, so there are all sorts of memories lurking in the corners. There’s a big cherry tree in the backyard, and the Twinkie Twins used to spend hours up in that tree eating cherries and squirting the pits at me.”

“Squirting?”

“You put a fresh cherry pit between your thumb and forefinger and squeeze. If you do it right, the pit zips right out. The twins thought that was lots of fun. It was a summer version of throwing snowballs.”

“You have twin sisters?”

“Not exactly. They were the daughters of my dad’s best buddy.”

“Were?”

I hesitated for a moment. The story was almost certain to come out eventually anyway, so there wasn’t much point in trying to hide it. “One of them was murdered a few years ago. The other one went a little crazy after that and spent some time in a private sanitarium. Now she’s starting to come out of it—sort of. She’s staying with her aunt down in Wallingford—about five blocks from our place. Her headshrinker thinks that going to college might help her.”

“I’m not sure that U.W.’s the best place to go looking for mental stability,” James noted, as I locked the front door.

“Her aunt and I will be keeping a fairly tight grip on her,” I told him. Then we closed and latched the back door of the U-Haul van and climbed into the cab.

“You seem to be quite involved with this surviving twin,” James said rather carefully.

“There’s none of that kind of thing going on, James,” I told him, starting the engine. “The Twinkie twins were like baby sisters to me, and once you’ve seen a girl in messy diapers, you’re not likely to have romantic thoughts about her. I’ve just always looked out for them.”

“Twinkie Twins?”

“In-house joke,” I admitted. “Nobody could tell them apart, so I got everybody started indiscriminately calling them both ‘Twink.’ They pretty much stopped being Regina and Renata and started being Twink and Twink.”

“I’ll bet you could send Sylvia straight up the wall with that one,” James said, chuckling. “The concept of group awareness might damage her soul just a bit.”

“Bees do it, and so do ants. In a different sort of way, so do horses and wolves—and lions and elephants, if you get right down to it. If animals do it, why not people?” I carefully drove the truck off the front lawn and pulled out into the street.

“Did the cops ever catch the murderer?”

“No, and even if they do, I’m not sure they could convict him.”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

“Nobody can be positive which twin was murdered.”

“What?” He sounded incredulous.

“Well, nobody could ever tell them apart, and the hospital lost the footprints they took as newborns.”

“Why not just ask the surviving twin?”

“She doesn’t know who she is. She doesn’t remember anything.”

“Amnesia?”

“Almost total.”

“What about DNA?”

“Identical twins have the same DNA. So if they ever catch the guy, they might be able to prove that he killed
somebody
, but I don’t think they’ll ever be able to prove
who
. A good lawyer might get him off scot-free—which’d be OK with me.”

“What? You lost me again.”

“Hunting season opens up along about then. If Twink’s aunt doesn’t bag the sumbitch, I might take a crack at him myself. I’m sure I could come up with something interesting to do to send him on his way. If I happen to get caught, I’ll hire Trish to defend me.”

“I still think the courts would send him away, Mark. Murder is murder, and if Jane Doe is the best the cops can come up with, he’ll go down for the murder of Jane Doe.”

“You live in a world of philosophical perfection, James. The real world’s a lot more ‘catch as catch can.’ That’s why we have lawyers.” Then I remembered something and laughed.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Chaucer got arrested once—back in the fourteenth century.”

“Oh?”

“He beat up on a lawyer.”

“Some things never change, do they?” he said, as we pulled out onto the freeway heading south.

When we got to the boardinghouse, James and I carried all my stuff upstairs and stacked it in my room. All in all it’d taken longer than I’d thought it would, so I decided to motel it for one more night. I’d already put in a full day, and I was feeling too worn down to start setting things up. I took the truck back to U-Haul, paid them, and retrieved my Dodge. Then I went by Mary’s place to check on Twinkie—I still felt guilty about the way I’d ignored her for the past week.

Mary was nice enough to invite me to dinner, and the three of us sort of lingered over coffee afterward.

“That sanitarium is pretty fancy, isn’t it?” Mary said.

“I didn’t quite catch that,” I said.

“My weekly visit to Dockie-poo,” Twink explained. “You forgot about that, didn’t you, Markie?”

“I guess I spaced it out,” I admitted. “How did it go?”

“Nothing new or unusual,” Twink replied. “Fallon asked all those tedious questions and scribbled down my answers in that stupid notebook of his. I told him enough lies to make him happy, and then Mary and I dropped by the house and had supper with Les and Inga.”

“Doesn’t all that scampering around crowd you?” I asked Mary.

She shrugged. “Not really,” she said. “Ren and I took off from here about three, so we missed the five o’clock rush.”

“If it gets to be too much, I could run Twink on up there on Fridays. That’s a light day for me most of the time.”

“We can pass it back and forth, if we have to. I don’t think it’ll give me any problems, though.”

“Did Fallon make any suggestions?” I asked Twink.

“Nothing I haven’t heard from him before,” she replied. “I’m supposed to avoid stress. Isn’t that an astonishing suggestion? I mean, wow!”

“Be nice,” I told her.

She made an indelicate sound and changed the subject.

About nine o’clock, I went back to the motel and fell into bed. Moving really takes a lot out of you.

By noon on Sunday, I had my bed and desk set up and most of my clothes hung in the closet. Then I started putting books on the shelves. After an hour or so of unloading boxes and randomly shelving, I stopped and stood in the center of the room, glowering at my bookshelves. They were an absolute masterpiece of confusion. Hemingway and Faulkner were jammed in cheek by jowl with Chaucer and Spenser, and Shakespeare was surrounded by Mark Twain, Longfellow, and Walt Whitman. “Bummer,” I muttered. I knew that if I didn’t organize the silly thing right from the start, it’d probably stay confused in perpetuity. Owning a book is very nice, but you have to be able to put your hands on it.

I sighed and started stacking books on the floor, separating English literature from American and throwing the miscellaneous stuff on the bed. I came across books I’d forgotten I owned.

By evening, I’d finally put things into some kind of coherent order, and that gave me a sense of accomplishment. Fortress Austin was now complete and ready to hold off the forces of ignorance, absurd clothing, and bad music. With my help, God could defend the right—or the left, depending on His current political position.

After dinner that evening—my first Erdlund Epicurean Delight—I called Twink to make sure she was still on the upside. She was all bubbly, so things seemed to be pretty much OK.

“You might want to start thinking about going to class, Twink,” I told her. “The quarter starts two weeks from tomorrow. The class I’ll be teaching starts at one-thirty in the afternoon, so you won’t have to do that cracky-dawn stuff. I can stop by and pick you up, if you’d like.”

“That’s why they invented buses, Markie. I’m a big girl now, remember?”

“We’ve still got a while to kick it around, Twink. I’ll be a little busy for the next two weeks, though. I’ve got a lot of things to take care of on campus.”

“Quit worrying so much, Markie. It’ll give you wrinkles. Sleep good.”

The next morning, I drove to the campus to check in with Dr. Conrad.

“And how did you spend your summer vacation, Mr. Austin?” he asked me with a faint smile.

“Did you want that in five hundred words, Doc?”

“I think a summary should be enough—I probably won’t be grading you on it.”

“Actually, I spent quite a bit of time conferring with a headshrinker.”

“Has our load been shifting?”

“I don’t think so, but I’d probably be the last to know. Actually, the daughter of a family friend just graduated from a private mental hospital, and she’ll be taking some classes here. First, I had to get her moved in with her aunt up in Wallingford, and then I had to relocate myself as well: I got a place not far from her aunt’s. It’s a boardinghouse with a few grad students from departments scattered all across campus—but don’t worry, I’ll try to hold up our reputation.”

“I’m sure that if I’m patient, you
will
start to make some sense here.”

“I wouldn’t count on it, Doc. It’s been a pretty scrambled summer. I think I’ll go hide in the library for a couple of weeks to get my head on straight again.”

“That sounds like a plan,” he said sarcastically.

I spent the rest of the day in the library, and I didn’t get home until about eight that evening. Trish got on my case for missing supper, but after some extensive apologies, she relented and fed me anyway. The mother instinct seemed to run strong and deep in our Trish.

After I’d eaten, I went into the living room to use the community telephone. I dialed Mary’s number, but it was Twink who answered. I heard some weird noises in the background, and at first I thought we might have a bad connection.

“No, Markie,” Renata said. “It’s not the telephone. I’m listening to some music, that’s all.”

“It doesn’t sound all that musical to me, Twink. What’s it called?”

“I haven’t got a clue. Somebody—maybe even me—taped something and forgot to label it.”

“It sounds like a bunch of hound dogs that just treed a possum,” I told her.

“I think they’re wolves, Markie—at least on this part of the tape. Later on, the wolf howls gradually change over and become a woman’s voice.”

“You’ve got a strange taste in music, Twink.”

“Would you prefer some golden oldies by the Bee-doles? Or maybe ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a Clown-dawg’ by Olvis Ghastly?”

“Try the Brandenburg Concertos, Twink,” I suggested. “Avoid teenie-bopper music whenever you can. It’s hazardous to your hearing, if not your health. Did your aunt go to work already?”

“She’s taking a bath. I’ve got an awful headache for some reason.”

“Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

“Fun-
nee
, Markie. Funny, funny, funny. Go away now. My wolves want to sing to me.” Her voice sounded sort of vague, but there was a peculiar throaty vibrance to it that I’d never heard before.

Then she abruptly hung up on me, and I sat there staring at the phone and wondering just what was going on.

CHAPTER FOUR

James woke me at quarter after seven on Tuesday morning. “Breakfast,” he announced. “Oh, right,” I said, coming up a little bleary-eyed. It was obviously going to take me a while to get used to regular hours. For the past couple of years, I’d eaten whenever it’d been convenient, but now I was living in a place where the meals came at specific times and were served in specific places—breakfast in the kitchen and dinner in the dining room. Lunch was sort of “grab it and growl,” largely because our schedules wouldn’t match once classes started.

I got dressed and staggered to the bathroom to shave and brush my teeth. Then I followed my nose to the kitchen. I really needed some coffee to get my engine started.

The girls, still in their bathrobes, were bustling around preparing breakfast, and they looked terribly efficient. Evidently, when the Erdlund aunt had been running the house, it’d been one of those “kitchen privileges” places where the boarders were permitted to cook their own meals, since there were still two refrigerators and a pantry. You almost never see pantries in contemporary housing. Like sitting rooms and parlors, they seem to have fallen by the wayside in the twentieth century’s rush toward minimal housing made of ticky-tacky.

The cupboard doors, I noticed, were a little beat-up, and the linoleum on the floor was so ancient that the pattern had been worn off in places where there’d been heavy traffic. The worn places looked almost like game trails out in the woods.

“Mark!” Trish snapped at me, “Will you
please
get out from underfoot?”

“Sorry,” I apologized. “I think that after the bookshelves, we might want to take a look at this kitchen. It’s seen a lot of hard use.”

“Later, Mark,” Erika told me, grabbing me by the arm and hustling me out of the work zone. She pointed at a chair off in one corner. “There!” she told me, snapping her fingers. “Sit! Stay!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied obediently.

Then she brought me a cup of coffee and patted me on the head. “Good boy,” she said. Erika tended to be more abrupt than her sister. If she was going to practice medicine, she’d probably have to work on her bedside manner. She was going to take some getting used to, that much was certain.

So was her coffee. Erika obviously believed that the only substitute for strong coffee was stronger coffee. It was good, mind you, but it was strong enough to peel paint.

Sylvia set the table, and Trish was flipping pancakes with a certain flair. It was all sort of homey and pleasant, and things smelled good. I was sure I could learn to like this.

Then James and Charlie came down and we all took our places at the table and attacked Trish’s pancakes.

“These are great, Trish,” Charlie said. “I haven’t had pancakes like these since the summer when I worked in a logging camp.”

“I thought you were a Boeing boy, Charlie,” James said.

“That came later on,” Charlie replied. “I’ve worked lots of jobs—some good, some bad.”

“You ever pull chain?” I asked him.

“Oh, gosh yes,” he replied. “That one goes in the bad column.”

“Amen to that,” I agreed. “All the way down at the bottom.”

“Anyway,” Charlie continued, “you wouldn’t
believe
the breakfasts they used to feed us in that logging camp—and an ordinary, run-of-the-mill dinner in a logging camp is pretty much like Thanksgiving. A logger can put away a lot of food. You aren’t going to swing an eight-foot chain saw very long on a steady diet of Rice Krispies. That’s why the kitchen’s the most important building in a logging camp. If the boss is dumb enough to hire a bad cook, the whole crew’s likely to quit after about a week—and the word gets around fast. By the end of May, that boss won’t be able to find anybody who’ll work for him.” Charlie leaned back in his chair. “You get some strange people in logging camps. The hiring hall’s a tavern on Skid Road here in Seattle, so there are a lot of drunks out there in the brush. We had a powder-monkey who showed up in camp the summer I worked there who had the shakes so bad that he’d set the bunkhouse to trembling as soon as he came through the door—and this was a guy who worked with
dynamite
, for God’s sake! He drank up all the shaving lotion and hair tonic in camp by Wednesday, and then he caught the train back to Seattle. The camp was
way
back in the woods, so the train only came by three times a week—Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday—and that was the only way to get there.”

“No roads?” James asked.

“Hell, no. We were forty miles back in the timber. The train hauled our logs out, so we didn’t really need a road. The bull-cook was a dried-up old boy, and it was part of his job to build fires in the bunkhouse stoves in the morning. That was our alarm clock when we were moonlighting. He used gasoline to start the fire in the stove, and that can be noisy.”

“Moonlighting?” Sylvia asked curiously.

“That’s when you have to get up at three in the morning,” Charlie explained. “When the fire danger gets up to a certain point, the Forest Service tells the loggers they have to be out of the woods by ten o’clock in the morning. Working in the dark with an eight-foot chain saw can get sort of exciting.”

“I imagine so,” James said. “Oh, by the way, Trish, Mark has a legal question he’d like to ask you.”

“Are you in trouble with the law, Mark?” Trish asked me.

“Not that I know of,” I assured her. Then I told them all about the twins, and about Regina’s rape and murder, much as I had told James. “Assuming they ever
do
catch the guy,” I asked, “would they have to prove the identity of the victim before they could get a conviction?”

“Haven’t they ever heard of DNA?” Sylvia asked.

“No good,” Erika told her. “Identical twins have the same DNA. I gather that the baby footprints are missing?”

I nodded. “I guess somebody at Everett General Hospital misfiled them. Well, Trish, what’s the word? Can they convict if they can’t identify the victim?”

“I’m sure they can.” She didn’t really sound all that positive, though. “I’ll bounce it off one of my professors just to make sure.”

“Did the surviving girl ever recover?” Sylvia asked. “I’d sure like to meet her.”

“I could probably arrange that—she lives just few blocks away. But I don’t want you to start crowding her.”

“My,” Trish said, “aren’t
we
possessive?”

“Our families were close, so I was sort of a big brother to the twins. I told James, if the cops get lucky and turn up the sumbitch who killed Regina, I almost hope he
does
get off. I can come up with some very interesting things to do to him—things that go
way
past the tepid sort of stuff allowed by the criminal justice system. Fire and white-hot steel hooks—that kind of thing.”

“Whoo!” Erika said. “This one’s a real savage, isn’t he?”

“Who was the surviving twin’s psychiatrist?” Sylvia asked me then.

“Fallon. He runs that private sanitarium where she was staying.”

“I’ve heard of him. He’s supposed to be very good.”

“Maybe so, but could we talk about something else?”

“Of course, Mark,” Trish said quickly, and she adroitly changed the subject to resurfacing the kitchen floor instead.

After breakfast, I drove down to the campus; I’d encountered something I wanted to examine. It appeared that there’d been some fairly extensive contacts between Walt Whitman and an English group known as the pre-Raphaelites.

We tend to get compartmentalized in our thinking. It’s almost as if British literature and American literature evolved on two different planets. The mail
did
get through, though, and we
do
speak approximately the same language the Brits speak. The possibility of transoceanic influence could be of genuine academic interest, so I headed to the library to pursue it a bit further.

I stopped by Mary’s place on my way home.

“Where have you been?” Renata’s aunt demanded when she opened the door. “I tried to call you, but nobody answered.”

“I was facedown in the library,” I explained. “I guess the rest of the gang at the boardinghouse had things to attend to on campus as well. Is something wrong?”

“Renata had a bad night. She was still awake when I got home from work.”

“Did she tell you what was bothering her?”

“It was some kind of nightmare, and whatever it was, it must have been pretty awful. Evidently she was flailing around while she was dreaming, because she’s got a lot of bruises on her arms.”

“Maybe I’d better stay here tonight,” I suggested.

“That won’t be necessary,” she told me. “I’ve got tonight off, so I’ll be here to keep an eye on her.” Then she gave me a speculative look. “Can you keep something to yourself, Mark?” she asked me bluntly.

“If you want me to, yes.”

“I gave her a sleeping pill, and I’d rather that her psychiatrist didn’t find out about it.”

“Over-the-counter stuff?”

“No, a little heavier than that. Just about everybody who works graveyard shift has an open-ended prescription for sleeping pills. I won’t make a regular practice of it, but anytime Ren starts getting all wired-up, I can put her down. Sometimes we have to bend a few rules.”

“I don’t have any problem with that. I’ll give you a buzz later on this evening to find out how she’s doing.”

“
If
she wakes up. If she was as wrung-out as she seemed to be, she might sleep all the way through until tomorrow morning.”

“It would probably be good for her. I’ve got a hunch that this back-to-school business might have her wound a little tight. We were hoping that auditing classes instead of taking them for credit might keep the pressure off her, but maybe we’re still rushing things a bit.”

“I’ll watch her. If it gets to be too much for her, she can either drop the classes for a few weeks—or let it all slide until next quarter.”

“I don’t know about that, Mary,” I said dubiously. “If the boss gets wind of anything like that, he might insist that she come back home.”

“Then we’ll just have to make sure that he doesn’t find out, won’t we?”

“We can try.” I glanced at my watch. “I’d better get moving. If last night was any indication, the ladies get all torqued out when I’m late for meals.”

When I got back to the boardinghouse, Charlie had his door open, and he was going at his walls with a paint roller. I stared into his room. “Boy, are
you
going to get yelled at!” I told him.

“Trish said I could paint the room any color I wanted,” he said defensively.

“I don’t think she’s going to like it much,” I predicted. “You don’t come across very many rooms painted black.”

“It’s a neutral color. Nobody flips out when he sees a room painted white—or gray.”

“Black’s different. What made you decide on black?”

“It’s sort of outer-spacey, don’t you think?”

“It’s definitely spacey. Are you thinking about adding stars later?”

He squinted at the dull black ceiling. “I don’t think so. I think I’d like to keep the infinity effect. The ceiling’s as close or as far away as I want it to be, and it moves kind of in and out when I look at it. The whole idea is to make it indefinite. I’ll be working with some equations later on that won’t have spatial limitations, and I’ll need to be able to visualize them. I think those black walls and ceiling are going to help.”

“I still think it’ll make Trish flip out.”

“She’ll get over it. Did you happen to catch the news today?”

I shook my head. “I was down in the bowels of the main library. Is something going on I should know about?”

“We might have to start wearing flak jackets to class,” he replied. “Some guy got knifed on campus—down by the crew dorm.”

“Crew?”

“The rowing team—the guys who row those long, skinny boats in races. Their dorm’s down by the edge of Lake Washington. The last word I picked up on TV was that the cops thought it was a gang-related killing.”

“Whoopee,” I said flatly. “As far as the cops are concerned, jaywalking’s gang-related.”

“They
do
sort of lean on it now and then, don’t they?”

“They might be pushing this one a little. Gangs normally use guns, not knives.” I shrugged. “I doubt that we’ll get
too
much in the way of details from TV. The cops clam up when they’re investigating something.”

“Hello, up there,” Trish called from downstairs. “We’re home. Is everybody decent?”

“We’re dressed, if that’s what you mean,” I told her.

“I’m coming up.”

“Feel free.” I called, then looked at Charlie. “You might want to close your door,” I suggested.

“She’ll see the paint job sooner or later, anyway,” he replied. “Let’s get the yelling and screaming over with.”

Trish surprised the both of us, though. When she reached the top of the stairs, she glanced through Charlie’s doorway and shrugged. “Interesting notion,” she observed.

“You’re taking the fun out of this, Trish,” Charlie complained.

“It’s your room, Charlie,” she replied. “You have to live with it. Have you gentlemen heard anything about that murder on campus last night?”

“Just what came over the idiot box,” Charlie told her. “Is the campus coming down with nervous?”

“The girls in the dormitories are a little worked up, and Erika and I
do
spend quite a few evenings in on-campus libraries. If some screwball’s running around on campus, we might have to start taking a few precautions.”

“From what I hear, the cops think it was one of those gang things,” Charlie told her. “Those aren’t usually dangerous for innocent bystanders—particularly when the guy who’s doing the killing uses a knife. It’s when they start shooting at each other that you have to take cover. City kids are rotten shots. What’s for dinner tonight, babe? I skipped lunch today, and I’m starving.”

The ladies fixed pork chops that evening, and they were way out in front of anything you’d get in any local restaurant. James arrived a little late for supper, and the girls scolded him at some length. I mentally confirmed “don’t be late for supper” under my list of house rules.

“Are you guys up for a jaunt over to the Green Lantern Tavern this evening?” Charlie asked James and me.