Regina's Song (19 page)

Twink lingered after class. “You’re a mean person, Markie,” she accused.

“I try,” I said smugly. “Did you ride your bike today?”

“No, one of the sorority girls picked me up.”

“Are they trying to recruit you?”

“They might be. I’ve kept my stay at the bughouse a deep, dark secret.”

“You’ll need a lift back to Mary’s place, then.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

“Let’s split, then.”

We strolled out to the parking garage and climbed into my old, trusty Dodge.

“I think I’ll drop another free one on you, Markie,” she told me as we headed back toward Wallingford. “I haven’t written a paper for you for a long time now.”

“Are we feeling creative, Twink?”

She shrugged. “I just feel like writing a paper, and this might be a good time to try another one. I like the topic, and I’ve learned whole bunches of stuff this quarter.”

“I’m sure you have. Are you going to do another barn burner like that first one?”

“I’m not sure, Mark,” she said in a throaty voice. “It’s more fun to write without too much planning sometimes.” She coughed then. “Frog in my throat,” she said absently. “I must be coming down with something.”

The little group get-together at St. Benedict’s Church had made a big thing about our voice-change theory, and now it seemed that it might be collapsing around my ears. Twink’s offhand “frog in my throat” shot it full of holes.

Now that I’d finished the bookshelves, I didn’t have any fix-up chores scheduled for Saturday that week, and that bothered me for some reason. I found myself wandering around the house with my tape measure looking for something to do.

Finally, I rapped on the door to Trish’s room. “Have you got a minute?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she replied. “Is there a problem?”

“I can’t find anything to do.”

“Are you feeling all right, Mark?” she asked, laughing.

“It bugs me, that’s all. I’ve gotten used to working on Saturday, and goofing off makes me feel guilty. What about those kitchen cabinets and drawers? They’re pretty beat-up, and I could refinish all that exterior woodwork—spiff things up to match the new flooring.”

“Whatever turns you on,” she said with a shrug. “When you get right down to it, though, I think your bookshelves more than paid your dues in this place.”

“I’m a creature of habit, Trish,” I explained. “I’m supposed to do honest work on Saturday, and not having anything to do makes me antsy.”

“Do doors and drawers then, Mark,” she told me in a tone that was almost maternal.

“Yes, Mama Cat,” I replied with some relief.

On Tuesday of the last week of the quarter, my freshmen turned in their final paper. Once I’d thinned out the herd with my terror tactics during the first couple of weeks, I’d actually grown almost fond of the survivors. They’d turned into a moderately competent group, and some of them even showed a few sparkles of genuine talent.

After I’d collected their papers and stowed them in my briefcase, I looked at the class. “That’s pretty much it, fun-seekers,” I told them. “I’m going to give you a break. Since you’re all probably busy boning up for your exams, why don’t we scratch tomorrow’s class? How you spend the time is up to you, but my advice is not to waste it. Concentrate on whichever course is giving you the most trouble and bear down on it. Let’s bump up those grades. Life is fleeting, but your academic record is permanent. A D-minus grade in some Mickey Mouse course that doesn’t mean a damn thing can haunt you for the rest of your life. Pop by for the Thursday class to pick up your papers, and we’ll part friends, OK? Class dismissed.”

Boy, did
that
empty the classroom in a hurry. Twink and her sorority-girl chum were among the first ones out the door. I’d never really had much use for the Greek Group—those assorted Phi Delta Whatevers and Sigma Who Gives a Damns—but Twink’s little friend seemed to be a cut above the average sorority fluffhead whose main goal at the university was finding a suitable husband. It was just as well that Twink hadn’t gotten around to mentioning the time she’d spent at Fallon’s bughouse. It may be fashionable for sorority girls to be broad-minded, but probably not
that
broad-minded.

Back at the boardinghouse, I parked myself at my desk and pawed through the papers until I found Twink’s gratuitous essay. I pushed the others aside and prepared to get my socks blown off.

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED THIS QUARTER

By Twinkie

The very first thing I learned is that normies are even more strange than bugsies are. You normies take yourselves much too seriously. Don’t you know how to laugh at yourselves? That’s the very first thing we bugsies pick up.

You ought to try it sometime. It makes life so much more fun.

Then I learned that clocks and calendars are terribly important to normies. Haven’t you ever heard of ‘close enough’? Will the world really come to an end if you’re a minute and a half late?

Do you actually believe that the world cares that much?

The next thing I noticed about normies was that you all seem to believe that there’s a difference between right and wrong. We bugsies all know that they’re really the same thing if you look at them in the proper way. They aren’t separate, you know. There’s lots of right mixed in with wrong and oodles of wrong dripping off the corners of right. It all depends on how you look at things.

Lighten up, Normies.

Then I learned that normies seem to bunch up, and they’re terrified that they might be just a teeny bit different from all the other normies in the world. If everybody wears a blue ribbon, you’d rather die than wear a red one.

Do you really think that anybody cares, or that it makes the slightest difference?

When Dockie-poo Fallon finally released me from his fancy nuthouse, I knew that I shouldn’t tell the normies where I’d been. Normies are scared to death of us bugsies—probably because we do things normies would never think of doing. We have very good reasons to do the things we do, and just because you don’t understand those reasons, it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong.

Does it?

The most important thing I’ve learned this quarter is that I have to hide what I’m thinking, because if the normies find out about it, they’ll send me right back to the bughouse, and I’m not ready to go there yet.

I’m very tired now, but soon—very, very soon—I’ll sleep, and when I sleep, my dreams will be all right, and nothing will ever go wrong again.

“What the hell?” I muttered. This paper started out like the first one Twink had written, but somewhere along the line, the cutesy-poo ran out and things got very strange and very serious.

The mention of ribbons
really
got my attention. It seemed merely puzzling at first glance, but it set off some bells when I read through the paper again. Twink
could
have said “green and pink,” but she didn’t. “Red and blue” came through loud and clear, as in the red and blue ribbons the twins had always traded off as kids. That connection back to her forgotten childhood carried some strong hints that our Twink was gearing up for a return engagement at Fallon’s bughouse.

I ran several copies off on my klutzy, secondhand copy machine. I knew Sylvia would want one, another for Dr. Conrad, and Doc Fallon would scream bloody murder if he didn’t get one, too.

I finished grading about half of the papers before supper, and I figured that I’d pretty much earned my pay this quarter. The surviving members of my freshman class had turned in papers that were quite a bit above average. The Dr. Conrad approach—“I won’t accept crap”—seemed to be valid. Students will usually do what you expect them to do. If you don’t expect much, you won’t get much. If you expect the moon, you might not get it, but you’ll probably get quite a few tries at it. That made me feel pretty good. I was turning a bunch of above-average students loose on the rest of the faculty, and that’s what teaching is all about, isn’t it?

Renata’s paper was still nagging at me at supper that evening, so I must have been acting gloomy.

“What’s got you down in the dumps, Mark?” Charlie asked me. “The Christmas blahs, maybe?”

“Heck, I can live with Christmas if I don’t have to watch
too
many commercials on TV. No, Twinkie turned in another one of those freebee papers today, and some stuff came out that’s got me worried.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sylvia demanded.

“I just did. I made copies, so I’ve got one for you and another for Doc Fallon. Maybe you could fax it to him?”

“What seems to be her problem?” James asked me.

“I’m not entirely sure. Her last paper was all bright and bubbly. This one starts out that way, but then it seems to wander off. Here.” I pushed one of the copies across the table to him. “You’re the one with the oratorical voice.
You
read it. I’d probably start to splutter if
I
tried. Twink’s definitions of right and wrong are a tad unusual.”

James glanced at the copy I’d just given him. “I see that you’ve moved up a ways from ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation,’ Mark,” he observed.

“What’s this one?” Charlie asked him.

“ ‘What I Have Learned This Quarter,’ ” James replied.

“Thirty pages long?” Erika asked.

“Five hundred words,” I told her. “I wanted to find out if they could get to the meat.”

“Let’s hear it,” Sylvia said to James.

He cleared his throat and read the paper to us.

“Now
that
is one strange puppy,” Charlie said, when James had finished. “What the hell was she talking about there at the end?”

“I haven’t got the foggiest idea,” I admitted.

“Her load’s shifting again, isn’t it?” Erika asked Sylvia.

“It doesn’t sound good,” Sylvia admitted.

“The business about ribbons
really
bothered me,” I said. “When the twins were about three or so, their mother used red and blue hair ribbons to tell them apart, and the girls played swapsie with the ribbons every time Inga’s back was turned. Twink mentioned those colors specifically, you noticed, so maybe she’s starting to catch some echoes out of the past.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” she conceded.

“I thought that everything about those nightmares was being blotted out,” Trish said thoughtfully, “but right there at the end she sounded like she knows there’s something very wrong with her dreams.”

“She’s coming at us from about seven different directions, that’s for sure,” Charlie said.

“I think I’d better take a run on up to Lake Stevens tomorrow,” Sylvia said then. “Things seem to be coming to a head, and we’d better wire Dr. Fallon in. Maybe
he
can come up with some way to keep Renata from crashing.”

“I sure hope so,” I said. “If Twink completely loses it, it’ll be a clear win for the other side.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Sylvia took off for Lake Stevens early on Wednesday morning. Apparently Twink’s paper had her more than a little worried, since her master’s degree was hanging in the balance. If Twinkie happened to go completely bonkers again and got herself locked up, Sylvia’s case history might go down the tubes.

I went to my Milton seminar after breakfast. I’d already finished my paper, and it was ready to go, so I was basically marking time.

I swung by Mary’s place after class to see how Twink was doing. Her gratuitous essay had me pretty worried. The notion of having her audit a class had seemed like a good one last summer, but I wasn’t all that sure about it now. Maybe we’d jumped the gun and thrown her into deep water before she was ready.

Mary hadn’t gone to bed yet when I got there, and she answered the back door when I knocked. “Is she OK?” I asked.

“She’s down with a cold,” Mary replied. “She’s been barking like a Great Dane ever since I came home.”

“Is she running a fever?”

“That’ll probably come later. She’s mostly just coughing now, and she sounds like a bullfrog on a lily pad when she tries to talk.”

“That shoots down the two different voices theory, doesn’t it? I mean, if she’s been coming down with bronchitis or something, that different-sounding voice wouldn’t have anything to do with a mental condition, would it?”

“See what Sylvia has to say about it. She’s the one who’s supposed to be the expert.”

“Is Twink awake?” I asked.

“She was a few minutes ago. Did you want to talk with her?”

“Maybe I should. I’m supposed to take her home for Christmas vacation. If she’s coming down with something serious, it might be better if I held off a while. A little touch of the sniffles is one thing, but double pneumonia’s a whole ‘nother ball game.”

“Yeah, it is. Let’s check her out before she drifts off to sleep.”

We went to Twink’s bedroom, and I could hear her coughing before Mary even knocked on the door. “Mark’s here, Ren,” Mary said. “Are you up for a visitor?”

“As long as he doesn’t come too close,” Twink replied in a hoarse voice. “He doesn’t want to catch this.”

Mary and I went on in. “How are you feeling, Twink?” I asked her.

“Rotten,” she told me in a raspy voice. “Stay back, Mark. You don’t want any part of this one.” She had a box of tissues on the bed beside her and a large paper bag on the floor near the bed about half-full of used ones.

“Why don’t you scratch tomorrow’s class?” I suggested. “Stay inside where it’s warm and dry. All I’m going to do tomorrow is hand back the papers and say bye-bye, so you won’t miss much.”

“Did you like
my
paper, Mark?”

“I think you set fire to another barn, Twink.”

“I’m glad you approve.” She started coughing again. “What a drag,” she said. “I’m going to try to sleep. I’ve been coughing since yesterday, and I’m pooped.”

“Sleep lots,” I told her. “Santa Claus is coming to town, so you’d better get back on your feet.”

“Whoopee,” she rasped flatly.

When I got back to the boardinghouse, I went up to fight my way through grading that stack of freshman papers. I hate having things like that hanging over my head.

It was about noon when James came upstairs and rapped on my door. “There’s been another killing, Mark,” he rumbled.

“Doesn’t that guy have anything better to do?” I said. “How many does this make?”

“Eight,” he replied, “if you want to count the one near Woodinville.”

“Where was this one?”

“Discovery Park, over on the military reservation. Our cut-up took out a sailor this time.”

“That’s a switch. Are the TV guys all warped out again?”

He smiled faintly. “They all seemed a bit relieved,” he said. “It’s been almost a month since the Mercer Island killing, and the TV boys had pretty much exhausted the subject; they were starting to get desperate trying to find something to say that’d keep them on camera. Oh, the sailor was a black man, by the way.”

“Affirmative action strikes again, huh? Doesn’t that give you a warm little glow, James? Our local cut-up doesn’t seem to be a bigot. He’ll kill anybody who comes along. He might even have quotas.”

“Get serious,” James rumbled.

“Sorry. I’ll come down and watch the TV guys jump up and down as soon as I finish grading these papers. First things first.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

I finished the last of the papers by midafternoon, and then I went downstairs to watch the hysterics on television. Somebody had obviously clamped down a lid on details about this latest killing, and that
really
bugged the reporters. Name, rank, and serial number was about all they’d been able to get, and that made for a fairly skimpy news story. The military seemed to be holding firm on their “none of your damn business” position, and certain orders had been issued about talking to reporters.

“I’m not permitted to discuss that” drives a reporter absolutely wild. It was almost fun to watch.

The details the reporters
did
get were that the victim’s name was Thomas Walton, and he’d been wearing civilian clothes when the Slasher had taken him out. He’d been a seaman second class, which seemed a bit unusual, since he’d been in his second six-year hitch. He’d evidently been in trouble a few times, but the Navy didn’t want to talk about how or why or when. That didn’t make the reporters too happy.

After supper, Charlie, James, and I made our customary jaunt to the Green Lantern to see if we could get the straight scoop on the Walton killing from Charlie’s brother.

Bob West seemed to be moderately pissed off about the Navy’s attitude. “They won’t talk about Walton’s record,” he fumed, “and they even refused to release the body so that our medical examiner could perform an autopsy. They say that the Navy doctors are going to do it, but military doctors don’t know beans about pathology.”

“Can’t King County just step in and take the body away from the Navy?” James asked.

Bob shook his head. “The body was found on the military reservation. That’s federal land, so King County doesn’t have jurisdiction. We expect a certain amount of cooperation in a murder case, but we’re not getting any from the Navy on this one. I’m wondering if we’ll see some kind of cover-up. Walton had obviously been in trouble quite a few times, but the Navy refuses to talk about it. They don’t want any dirty laundry flapping around in the breeze, so they clam up. This is just a guess, but I’d say that Walton screwed up on a fairly regular basis, and he got off with a slap on the wrist for things he should have done hard time in the slammer for. Now the Navy’s trying to cover its own ass, so they won’t give us diddly-squat on Walton’s record.”

“Can’t you get a subpoena?” Charlie asked.

“Against the Navy? Get serious. This is touchy ground, kid. Nobody’s going to stick his neck out on this one on the off chance that something useful might turn up. I’m afraid this killing’s going to turn out to be a dead end.”

Sylvia got me off to one side after breakfast on Thursday morning. “I think we might have a problem, Mark,” she told me.

“Oh?”

“Dr. Fallon’s almost positive that Renata’s right on the verge of flying apart again. Her paper really upset him.”

“I think he might be reading more into it than was really there,” I disagreed. “Every now and then a freshman student writes himself into a corner and doesn’t know how to wriggle out of it. Twink took a wrong turn in her essay and hit a dead end, that’s all. That last bit about dreams was just a tack-on to give the paper a conclusion.”

“I’m not sure about that, Mark. Those nightmares are the core of her problem, after all, and she fervently hopes that she can get rid of them.”

“Maybe so, but I still think it was just an afterthought. Twink’s at the freshman level, so ‘rewrite’ isn’t part of her vocabulary. As far as a freshman’s concerned, everything he puts down on paper’s set in concrete. He’s incapable of reading his own stuff critically, and he’s positive that ‘revision’ is an obscene word.”

“We don’t see it that way in my field, Mark. I think that last bit about dreams was a Freudian slip. She might not have meant to say it, but it popped out anyway. I think Dr. Fallon agrees.”

“We’ll see what happens, but probably not until after Christmas vacation. I’m going to take her home tomorrow—if her cold doesn’t get worse—and a lot of things might change during the next few weeks. I’ve managed to back her dad off a little, but I still might have to do some fast talking to even get permission to bring her back to Seattle. Her dad’s still not very happy about Fallon’s decision to turn her over to Mary last fall, and if he finds out that she’s having serious problems, he might put his foot down.”

“Oh, dear,” Sylvia said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You’d better, Sylvia, because it
could
happen.”

I made a quick run to Mary’s place to see how Twink’s cold was coming along. If she was running a high fever, I sure as hell wasn’t going to take her out in the weather on Friday.

“I think it’s mostly sniffles, Mark,” Mary told me. “She still sounds hoarse, and she’s using up Kleenex by the boxful, but she doesn’t have a fever. I’ll pack a couple of suitcases for her, and you can run her up to Everett tomorrow.”

“She has to go see Fallon tomorrow, doesn’t she?”

“If you’re going to be busy, Inga can take care of that.”

“I don’t have anything urgent on the fire, Mary,” I told her. “After I get Twink settled in, though, I’ll probably come back. I’m not going to blow two weeks watching Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer on TV. I should be able to get a lot of work done during the vacation.”

“You’re turning into a grind, Mark.”

“I know. Depressing, huh? Get some sleep, Mary. You’re starting to look a little frazzled again.”

“Up your nose!” she flared.

“That’s our girl,” I said, grinning at her.

After lunch I drove down to Padelford to hand the papers back to my freshmen. They looked a little antsy, so I kept it fairly short. “All in all, you’ve done pretty well this quarter, gang,” I complimented them. “Sometimes your logic’s a little on the shaky side, but you’ll get better at that as you go along. Some of you are still a little stiff, but that’ll probably wear off with more practice. Keep those MLA style sheets handy—particularly if you’re dealing with the History Department. The history people are sticklers for the correct format when it comes to footnotes. One last thing, and then we’ll split. Give some serious thought to scribbling down an outline before you jump feetfirst into a paper. If you try to wing it without knowing where you’re going, you’ll have about a fifty-fifty chance of falling flat on your face, and the odds of that go up the longer you wait to get started. If a paper’s due on Wednesday morning, don’t wait until midnight on Tuesday to start writing. Give yourself enough time to do it right. It
will
improve your overall grade-point average. Have a nice Christmas, and drive carefully. Class dismissed.”

All right, I was a little pompous; so what? None of them were likely to remember anything I’d said anyway, so what the hell?

I hit my Milton seminar on Friday morning to turn in my paper. Despite my irritation with John-boy’s rigidity on theology, I had to admit that he
was
a major poet. I just wish it hadn’t always taken him so long to get to the point.

After our gentle professor had wound up the course by reciting the entirety of “Lycidas” to us, he let us go, and I drove to Mary’s place to see how Twink was doing. The sky was fairly murky, but at least it wasn’t raining yet. I decided that if she were about halfway ambulatory, I wouldn’t be taking too many chances if I ran her on up to Everett. Mary had to go to work every night, but Inga didn’t have to leave home for anything, so she’d be able to keep an eye on Twink and get her to a doctor if that cold got any worse.

Twink was sitting in the kitchen when I got there. She was still in her bathrobe, but at least she was up and moving around. “How are you feeling, Twink?” I asked her.

“A little better,” she replied. Her voice was still sort of hoarse, but at least she wasn’t coughing anymore. “I think it wasn’t really a cold, Mark,” she added. “It’s more likely that it was some thirty-seven-and-a-half-hour bug.”

“The short ones are the best, I suppose. Where’s Mary?”

“She’s taking a bath. She always does that after work. You should know that by now.”

“Are you feeling up to the trip to Everett?”

“Do I really
have
to spend two weeks with Les and Inga?” she asked.

“Yup,” I told her.

“Are we going back to that damn ‘yup’ routine, Mark?” she demanded.

“Yup.”

“I hate you!”

“No you don’t, Twink. You’re just grouchy because that bug bit you and gave you the sniffles. Look on the positive side of ‘yup.’ It’s short, to the point, and it doesn’t leave room for arguments. You’re going home for Christmas to stay on the good side of Les and Inga. Help Mommy in the kitchen and bring Daddy his pipe and slippers when he gets home from work. Keep a tight lid on the buggy stuff, and do your very best to act like a normie. Les can pull the plug on the ‘Twinkie goes to college’ game plan at any time, so keep him happy. Look upon it as an investment in the future.”

“You’re probably right, Mark,” she agreed. Then she gave me a sort of sidelong look. “Since it’s come up, what’s the game plan for winter quarter? Am I going to audit your class again?”

“I suppose you can if you want. Wouldn’t you rather branch out, though?”

“Do any of the rest of the gang at the boardinghouse teach classes?”

“James teaches an Introduction to Philosophy course, and every so often I think Sylvia takes a section of Basic Psychology. I’ll have to find out if she’s doing one next quarter.”

“I’d like to stick with familiar faces, if it’s possible,” she told me. “They already know that I’m a little bugsie, so I won’t have to explain everything to them.”

“I’d suggest auditing those classes, Twink,” I told her. “You’ve been having quite a few ‘bad days’ here lately, so you don’t need any pressure just yet. Take things easy, hang out with the sorority girls, and get well before you start taking courses for credit.”