Regina's Song (16 page)

“Is she asleep?” I asked quietly.

“Like a baby,” Twink replied. “I left her a note.”

“Good. Let’s split.”

“You seem sort of antsy today, Markie.”

I shrugged. “Midterm fidgets, I guess. It gets to be a habit after a few years. You’d better bring a coat. It’ll probably rain before the day’s out.”

“Rain? Here? How can you
say
such a thing?”

I let that pass, and we went out front to my car. I drove down toward the campus and then eased us into the northbound lane of Interstate 5. The traffic had slacked off, and it was easy going.

“Is it always this nervous during the midterm exams?” Twink asked me. “Everybody I run into acts like the world’s coming to an end.”

“It’s like a dress rehearsal for finals week, Twink,” I told her. “
That’s
the one you’ve got to watch out for. The whole student body starts to come unraveled during finals week—probably because about half of them are wired up on pep pills.”

“Do those things actually work all that well?”

“Not really. They
will
keep you awake, but your thinking gets pretty fuzzy after the second or third day.”

She laughed. “Boy, does
that
sound familiar,” she said. “Is the whole world zonked out most of the time?”

“I don’t think the trees are.”

“I was talking about people. There seems to be a pill for almost anything, doesn’t there? There are pills to pep you up and pills to calm you down, pills to put you to sleep and pills to wake you up. You name it, and there’s a pill for it. The world of normies isn’t much different from the world of loonies, is it? We all live on a steady diet of pills.”

“There’s one slight difference, Twink. Loonies take their pills with water. Us normies wash ours down with booze.”

“That could do some strange things to your head, Markie.”

“Yeah, strange. Unfortunately, it sometimes leads to an overpowering urge to hop in the car and drive off to Idaho at about a hundred and fifty miles an hour.”

“Loonies hardly ever do that.”

“Probably because they’ve got better sense.”

“Maybe that’s why loony bins are called ‘asylums.’ It’s a place where loonies can be protected from those awful normies.”

“Take that up with Doc Fallon, Twink. It’s out of my field.”

Dr. Fallon seemed disappointed that Sylvia hadn’t been able to make the trip that Friday. I think he
really
wanted those tapes she was cutting.

I got him off to one side where Twink couldn’t hear us and filled him in on our plan to tape Twink’s next nightmare.

“Now
that’s
the tape I really want,” he said enthusiastically.

“I
thought
that might light your fire, Doc,” I told him.

After her session with Fallon, Twink and I stopped by her folks’ place for supper.

Les Greenleaf and I had a little talk while Inga and Twink were busy in the kitchen. “Are you sure Renata’s all right, Mark?” he asked me in a worried tone.

“Most of the time she is, boss,” I told him. “She has bad days every so often, but I think we’ve come up with a way to get a handle on that.”

“Oh?”

I told him about our scheme to tape Twink’s ravings after the next siege of nightmares.

“Is she
still
having those?” He seemed surprised.

“She sure is. They don’t come along very often, but they usually put her out of action for a day at least. Doc Fallon seems to think that those bad dreams are about the only thing that’s stalling her complete recovery. Once we get a handle on those, I’ve got a hunch that we’re home free.”

“I certainly hope so.”

“You’re not alone, boss. The whole Twinkie rooting section is behind her all the way.”

After dinner, Twink and I went back to Seattle. She fell asleep once we got out onto the interstate, and I drove on in silence.

It was about ten o’clock when I pulled up in front of Mary’s house. “We’re home, baby sister,” I told her, gently pushing her shoulder.

“Did I doze off?”

“Almost immediately,” I said. “You didn’t snore very loud, though.”

“I
never
snore!”

“You want to bet?”

I walked her to Mary’s front door, and then I went back to the boardinghouse to get some sleep.

On Saturday morning I went to my little workshop in the basement and put the last coat of stain on the shelves for Trish’s room. By now I had the whole procedure down pat, and I was fairly sure I could have the shelves in place before the day was out.

Trish looked in from time to time, but she generally stayed out from underfoot. By noon things were coming right along, and I guess her curiosity got the better of her, so she sat at her desk watching. “I wasn’t really all that sure about this notion when you first started, Mark,” she admitted, “but it’s a definite improvement. When Erika and I took over here, our whole idea was to upgrade the place, then sell it. I’m not so sure now, though. Even after we graduate and move on, we could put a manager in here and hold on to the house. It’d provide Aunt Grace with a steady income.”

“Only if you can keep the party boys out, Trish,” I told her.

“Graduate students don’t party all that much, Mark. You might not be aware of it, but the house is getting quite a reputation. Every week or so I get inquiries about vacancies. Peace and quiet are a rare commodity in student housing.”

“The reputation of the place might be based on the current inmates, Trish,” I suggested. “We’ve turned into a fairly tight group here.”

“There
is
that, I suppose,” she admitted. “We all sort of clicked together right from the start, didn’t we? We’re almost like a family, really.”

“I
do
seem to be getting mommied a lot here lately.”

“Mommied?”

“Sorry, Trish. I picked that up from Twinkie. She threatened to mommy all over me once when I was feeling sorry for myself.”

“She’s the strangest child sometimes.”

“Of course she is. She got out of the nuthouse not too long ago.”

“In a peculiar way, she’s brought us all even closer together, hasn’t she? We all want to take care of Renata.”

“She’s addictive, probably—she hooks just about any unsuspecting person who happens by.” I squinted at the bookshelves. “Getting closer, Trish. I think I’ll be able to whup this out by suppertime. If you’re real extra nice to me, I might even help you reshelve all your books.”

“You
had
to remind me, didn’t you?” she said with a gloomy sigh.

I turned in my midterm grades on my freshman class on Monday, and the rest of the week marched briskly toward Thanksgiving break: Fall quarter gets chopped up by assorted holidays and special events. We had a break in the weather, though, so those crisp, clear autumn days lifted the perpetual gloom that hovers over the Puget Sound area after Labor Day every year.

I concentrated most of my attention on Milton that week, plowing my way through Milton’s
Christian Doctrine
—the translation, not the Latin original. I’ll admit that I choked a bit on his bland acceptance of predestination. That’s been used as a justification for all kinds of misbehavior over the centuries. Once I pushed that out of the way, though, I saw most of the parallels between that work and
Paradise Lost
that scholars much better than I’ll ever be had noticed. It was heavy going, and I finally gave up on Wednesday evening, put it aside, and went to bed.

I was a little punchy when Charlie woke me up on Thursday morning to tell me that I had a phone call.

I pulled on some clothes and stumbled down to the living room where the phone was. “Yeah?” I said into the mouthpiece.

“Mark?” It was Mary.

“It’s me, Mary. What’s up?”

“You’d better get over here, and bring the girl with the tape recorder. Ren’s having problems.”

“We’ll be right there,” I said shortly. Then I hung up. “Sylvia!” I shouted.

“What’s up, Mark?” Charlie called from the kitchen.

“Twink’s flipped out again. Where the hell’s Sylvia?”

“She’s getting dressed,” Trish told me.

“Please tell her to hurry.” I went back upstairs, put on my shoes and socks, grabbed a coat, and made it back down in under a minute. Sylvia looked a bit scrambled, but she was ready to go.

“Did Mary give you any details?” Sylvia asked me, as we hurried to my car.

“No, we’ll have to play it by ear when we get there. I don’t think I’d push her this time, Sylvia. Let’s just get this one on tape.”

“You’re probably right,” she agreed. “Dr. Fallon’s the one who’ll make the decisions about how to proceed.”

The drive only took us about five minutes, and Mary had left her front door standing open. We could hear Twink as soon as we got out of the car. It was a lot worse than I’d expected. Mary’s term “bad day” glossed over some pretty awful sounds. Twink was crying, screaming, and making animal-like noises.

I led Sylvia back to Twink’s bedroom. Mary was still in uniform, and she was holding our hysterical girl in her arms and rocking back and forth. “Thank God you’re here!” she said to Sylvia and me. “This is a bad one. They seem to be getting worse.”

“When did you get home, Mary?” I asked.

“About a half hour ago. She was completely out of it when I came through the door.”

“Markie!” Twink cried out, struggling to free herself from Mary’s grasp. She held her arms out to me imploringly. “We need you!”

That “we” gave me quite a jolt. I hadn’t heard
that
since before Regina had died.

“Go to her!” Sylvia gave me a push. “Quick!”

I went to the bed and gently took the sobbing girl from Mary. Then I wrapped my arms around her and held her, rocking back and forth.

“Make them stop, Markie,” she pleaded. “The wolves are howling again. Please make them stop.”

There was that business about wolves again. I didn’t have the faintest idea what it meant.

“Blood!” she wailed in a voice filled with horror. “It’s all over me! I’m covered with blood!”

Then she began to tremble violently. “Cold!” she said. “The water’s so terribly cold!” Then she suddenly started whispering, her lips very close to my ear—and she wasn’t whispering in any language I could understand.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“I think that’s about as far as we want to let her go,” Mary said bleakly, as Twink kept murmuring to me in twin. “I’d better hit her with a pill now.”

“Couldn’t we hold off on that for a little longer?” Sylvia asked. “She might give us a little more to work with if we just . . .” She left it up in the air.

“You’re not going to get anything you’ll be able to understand,” Mary told her. “Once she starts babbling like that, she keeps it up for the rest of the day, and by noon they’ll be able to hear her in Tacoma. I’ve been through this before, so I know what’s coming. It’s time to shut her down.”

“She’s right, Sylvia,” I agreed. “We don’t want this to get much worse.”

Sylvia sighed. “You’re probably right,” she said regretfully. “If she’d just keep speaking English, we might be able to get to the root of the problem.”

“It doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid,” Mary said. “I’m going to put her to sleep. You’ve got all you’re going to get that’ll make any sense.” She went into the bathroom and came back a moment later with a small pill and a glass of water. “Open your mouth, Ren,” she said gently.

Twink obediently opened her mouth, and Mary placed the pill on her tongue. “Drink the water now,” Mary said then. I got the feeling that Twink actually welcomed the pill.

It took about ten minutes for it to start to work, and Twink murmured to me more and more slowly as the barbiturate closed down her mind. Finally, she sighed and stopped talking. After a moment or two, she started to snore.

“Let’s get her undressed and under the covers,” Mary said to Sylvia.

I handed Twink off to the ladies and went out to the living room. I was a bit shaken by what had just happened. Mary’s term “bad days” pretty much glossed over what was really going on when Twink came unraveled. There’d been an intensity to it that I hadn’t really expected.

“Was that more or less the way things have gone every time she’s had these nightmares?” Sylvia asked Mary as they came out of the bedroom.

“Not always,” Mary replied. “It’s a little different each time. Sometimes she’s already switched over to gibberish before I get home. There doesn’t seem to be much pattern to it.”

Sylvia frowned. “That’s odd,” she said. “Disturbed people almost always repeat these incidents in exactly the same way every time.”

“There are some things that stay the same,” Mary told her. “There’s always talk about wolves and blood and cold water.”

“The bit about ‘blood’ is fairly obvious,” Sylvia said. “These nightmares are almost certainly a reliving of that night when her sister was murdered. When she’s awake, her amnesia has all memory of her sister totally blotted out. At the subconscious level, though, she’s aware of her sister
and
of what happened to her. Every now and then it surfaces in the form of a nightmare.”

“Then she’s repeating that night over and over again?” I asked.

“Probably so. She doesn’t understand it, though. Dreams are filled with symbols. ‘Blood’ probably really means blood, but the wolves and the cold water could be symbols for something else. Dreams are filled with symbols that don’t make much sense when we wake up. Dr. Fallon might recognize them. He had Renata under observation for quite a while at the sanitarium, so he might have cracked the code.” She patted her purse. “I think this tape’s going to be worth its weight in gold. Up until now, all we’ve been able give Dr. Fallon have been some rather vague descriptions of what Renata says during these incidents. The tape will give him everything she said. I think maybe you should go with us tomorrow, Mark. You probably know her better than anyone else, and I’m sure you caught a lot more of what just happened than I did.”

“She’s got a point, Mark,” Mary agreed. “This might just be the break Fallon’s been looking for. We don’t want to let it slip past.”

“You’re probably right,” I conceded, “and we might want to go up there a little earlier than usual. I’ve got a hunch that Fallon might need more than an hour to sort through this.”

I wasn’t able to get very much done the rest of that day. Mary had always glossed over what Twink went through on a “bad day.” Now that I’d actually seen one, I couldn’t imagine how she was able to bounce back so fast. Evidently, she was a lot tougher than she looked.

We kicked it around at the boardinghouse that evening, and Sylvia let the others hear what she’d recorded.

“That’s one sick baby,” Erika observed, after we’d heard the tape. “Have the other days been like this one?”

“Mary says that this one was fairly standard,” Sylvia said. “We’ll see if she can recover fully by tomorrow, the way she has up ’til now.”

“If she can bounce back in twenty-four hours after something like that, she must be made of cast iron,” Charlie noted.

“Oh, by the way, Trish,” James said then, “I’ll have to beg off on fix-it Saturday this week. I have to pick up a friend at Sea-Tac—family emergency.”

“Something serious?”

“Well, we hope not. I’ve got a friend up in Everett whose wife is very sick. His son’s taking a leave from law school at Harvard, and I promised to pick him up at the airport.”

“He’s walking away from Harvard in the middle of the autumn term?” Trish asked incredulously. “Isn’t he taking an awful chance?”

“I didn’t get the details,” James admitted, “but I guess the dean bent a few rules for Andrew—that’s the young man’s name, Andrew Perry. As I understand it, though, he’s doing very well there—and, of course he’s a black student, so Harvard doesn’t want to make waves. He’ll be able to make up after he goes back.”

“What’s his mother’s condition?” Erika asked.

“Ovarian cancer,” James replied. “The doctors at the hospital in Everett
think
they’ve caught it in time, but you never really know with something like that.”

I hit my Milton seminar on Friday morning, and Sylvia was waiting for me when I got back to the boardinghouse.

“Everything’s set,” she told me. “Fallon wants Mary to sit in, too. She’s been through all of these bad days, so she knows more about them than either you or I could possibly know. Fallon wants you and Mary to go up early and give him the tape. He says he’ll need all the details
before
I deliver Renata. I’ll take her shopping or something while you two fill him in. Then you and Mary should leave before Renata’s appointment, because he doesn’t want Renata to know what we’re doing.”

“More sneaky stuff?”

“Not entirely. He just doesn’t want Renata to realize that we’re ganging up on her. If she catches on, she might clam up, and that’d make things difficult.”

“No worse than if she starts answering all his questions in twin-speak,” I added. “I’ve got a hunch he’d go wild if she did that to him.”

“I called Mary and set everything up,” Sylvia said. “I’ll pick Renata up early, and we’ll dawdle around in the Northgate Mall before we go on to Lake Stevens. Give me about ten minutes, then pick Mary up. That’ll give you two time to fill Fallon in on what happened yesterday and take off again. He wants everything to seem run-of-the-mill and ordinary.”

Sylvia was a little sweetie, but she
did
tend to belabor the obvious sometimes. I gave her about fifteen minutes to get Twink out from underfoot, and then I picked Mary up.

“Do you think Fallon’s still all torqued out about my sleeping pills?” she asked me as we drove north.

“I haven’t heard any screaming from him lately. I think he finally realizes that you’re not popping Twink every five minutes.”

“I think I’ll nail that down when we get there. People who treat me like some brainless amateur irritate me, for some reason.”

“You’re just oversensitive, Mary,” I kidded her.

“It’s a failing of mine,” she replied sardonically.

Mary and I got along very well. She was one tough cookie sometimes, but that’s probably what Twinkie needed.

It was about ten-thirty when we were ushered in to Dr. Fallon’s office. “This is Twink’s aunt Mary, Doc,” I introduced them.

“We meet at last,” he said.

“It’s probably overdue,” she agreed. “Mark has the tape Sylvia made yesterday. Do you want to listen to it before we get down to business?”

“Maybe you should fill me in first on exactly what happened when you came home,” he suggested.

Mary shrugged. “It was pretty much the way it’s always been on one of Ren’s bad days. It’s happened often enough before that I wasn’t particularly surprised. I got home from work about quarter to eight, and I could hear her raving as soon as I opened the front door. I knew what was going on, so I called Mark before I even went into her bedroom. Ordinarily, when I come home and find her like that, I just tap her out with a sleeping pill—I know you don’t like the idea, Dr. Fallon, but I
do
know what I’m doing. I’ve seen enough hysterical people to know that if we don’t do
something
, they’ll go off the deep end. It usually takes a good strong sedative to get them past the crisis. Anyway, there’s nothing on the tape that I haven’t heard before. Ren’s always hysterical when I come home on one of those days, and she’s always going on about animals howling, blood, and cold water. And then she launches into that made-up language of hers. I’ve learned not to let that go on for too long. Once she gets wound up, it takes quite a while for the sedative I give her to take effect.” Then she looked him straight in the face. “I’m a police officer, Dr. Fallon, and we’ve got access to some fairly heavy-duty sedatives. Every now and then we need something to deal with violent prisoners.”

“Is that legal?” He seemed a bit startled.

“We don’t broadcast it, so it doesn’t come up in court very often. There
are
a few alternatives, but they’re fairly direct and not very pleasant. People start frothing at the mouth about ‘police brutality’ if a few bones get broken while we’re subduing a violent prisoner. A good strong sedative gets the job done without anybody getting hurt.”

“We more or less follow the same procedure with violent patients,” he admitted.

“I’m sure you do, since chaining people to the wall’s gone out of date. Anyway, Ren usually goes through the same routine every time she has one of those nightmares. I’ve heard it often enough to know just about how far along she is when I get home. First she rambles on about animals howling; then she talks about having blood all over her; and she winds up whimpering about cold water. After that, she switches over to the private language she and Regina invented when they were babies.”

“Is she talking to
you
in that language?”

“I don’t think she is. I get the feeling that she’s talking to Regina.”

“Sylvia’s fairly sure that the nightmares Twink keeps having are a rerun of the night when Regina was murdered,” I added. “Evidently she’s going to play that over and over until somebody finds a way to turn it off permanently.”

“I don’t think we want to do that, Mark,” Fallon disagreed. “It’s in the open right now. If we put a lid on it, it’ll keep seething around in her subconscious, and sooner or later, it’ll boil over again. If that happens ten years from now, it could be an absolute disaster. I’ve seen things like that happen before, and it usually turns the patient into a vegetable and a permanent resident in some custodial institution.”

“That’d be a clear win for the other side, wouldn’t it?”

“It sure would,” he agreed, his eyes troubled. He looked at Mary. “How did Renata behave this morning?” he asked her.

“Pretty much the same as always,” Mary told him. “She usually seems a little silly on the day after one of these spells—bright, bubbly, and neck deep in cute. Then she settles down and seems more or less normal for a week or two. Then another nightmare comes along, and she goes through the whole thing again. It’s almost like a cycle. After the first time or two, I thought her period might have something to do with it, but the numbers don’t match up at all.”

“Let’s run that tape,” he suggested. “I’d like to hear it all the way through once. Then we’ll play it over a few times, and you two can tell me exactly what Renata was doing at each stage.”

Mary and I got back to Seattle about one-thirty. I dropped her off at her place, went back to the boardinghouse, and fought with Milton for the rest of the day. By now I’d pretty much resigned myself to producing a pedestrian paper at the very best. I’d come up against the same sort of thing when I’d tackled Spenser in my undergraduate years: some writers—poets for the most part—just don’t click for me.

It was about four o’clock when Charlie came up the stairs. “The Slasher strikes again!” he announced in a grossly overdone tone of voice.

“Gee!” I replied. “I wonder if he’s been sick or something. It’s been—what?—three whole weeks since Gasworks, hasn’t it?”

“Maybe he took a vacation—went to Disneyland or something.”

“Where was this one?”

“Way down south—Des Moines.”

“The Slasher’s gone to Iowa?”

“No,
this
Des Moines is west of Kent, right on the edge of Saltwater State Park.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that park. Is it one of those rinky-dink half-acre places?

“Not hardly. It’s a big one that fronts on Puget Sound. It’s just north of Federal Way, so it gets more traffic out of Pierce County than from Seattle.”

“How far is that from here?”

“Eighteen, maybe twenty miles. We sure as hell ain’t talking walking distance.”

“Our cut-up seems to be branching out—and switching his time schedule. He’s never taken anybody out on a Friday before.”

“It didn’t happen this morning, Mark,” Charlie said. “That park’s a biggie, and it doesn’t get much traffic in winter. The body was stone cold before anybody found it. It’s going to be a while before the medical examiner can pinpoint the time of death. The TV folks are all excited about this ‘change of venue,’ but I think that all it really means is that the Slasher’s having trouble finding anybody to carve up in north Seattle. Everybody in this part of town’s pretty well spooked about parks, so they’re all staying clear of them after the sun goes down—
and
, of course, the cops have been patrolling this end of town pretty regularly. A guy can’t do a truly artistic job when there’s a cop hiding behind every tree.”