Regina's Song (20 page)

“We’ll see,” she said, clearing her throat as she stood. “I
wish
this damn frog would find someplace else to play,” she growled irritably as she padded down the hall to get changed.

It was about ten-thirty when we pulled into the driveway of the Greenleaf house. I unloaded Twink’s luggage and loafed around while she unpacked and got settled in. “Why don’t you doze a while, Twink?” I suggested. “We’ve got to run up to Lake Stevens this afternoon, and you’re looking a little pooped-out from all that coughing.”

“Yeah, pooped,” she agreed. “Do you think I could get away with calling in sick?”

“I wouldn’t bet on it. Doc Fallon yearns for your company, and he’d get all pouty if you pulled a no-show on him.”

“You’re probably right, Mark,” she agreed. “Go pester Inga for a while, and I’ll try to sleep.”

I found Inga in the kitchen watching a small TV set tuned to a Seattle station. Some earnest young lady was ranting about—what else?—the Seattle Slasher.

“Les and I’ve been very concerned about this maniac in the university district, Mark,” Inga said. “Do you think Renata might be in danger?”

“No, not really,” I told her. “The Slasher cuts up guys, not girls, and he works at night. We don’t let Twink go out alone after dark. If she wants to go someplace, I drive her—or Sylvia does. Charlie West’s brother is a cop, and he told us that it might be safer if we travel in groups until after the Slasher gets busted. Twink’s as safe as we can make her.”

“Yes, but how’s she
really
doing, Mark? Dr. Fallon tries to put the best face on things, but I don’t think he tells Les and me the whole story.”

“She’s still having some problems, Inga,” I told her. “Every so often, she goes through a siege of nightmares. She bounces right back, everything seems fine for a couple of weeks, then the nightmares pop up again.”

“Has Renata been going to church regularly?” she asked

“It runs in spurts—two or three Sundays in a row, and it seems to do her a lot of good. Then a couple Sundays off. She really likes Father O. Of course, everybody likes him. That Irish brogue of his has a lot of charm to it. He doesn’t
quite
get into ‘Faith and begorrah,’ but he comes pretty close sometimes.”

“I’ve met him,” she said with a faint smile.

“Then you know he’s a good guy, and he’s pretty sharp, too. Father O was the one who noticed that Twink’s voice changes every so often. He picked up on that in the confessional.”

“He’s not supposed to tell anybody about that!” she exclaimed.

“He didn’t talk about
what
she said, Inga. All he told us was that her voice isn’t always the same. Sylvia thought that the voice change might be some sort of early warning signal, but that doesn’t really float, since Twink’s picked up some bug, and she sounds a lot like a foghorn right now.”

“She is a little hoarse,” Inga agreed. “The twins used to come down with that every so often. I think there might be some kind of allergy involved.”

“I’ll pass that on to Fallon this afternoon. If nothing else, he could probably write her a prescription for something that’ll clear it up. If all it really amounts to is the sneezy-snifflies, a good allergy medication should take care of it, and we can stop wasting time on this ‘mysterious voice-change’ crap.”

Twink was still a little hoarse when we went up to Lake Stevens that afternoon, so I kept the car heater turned up. I certainly didn’t want her taking a chill just before Christmas.

“Aren’t you feeling well, Renata?” Fallon asked her when he heard her raspy-sounding voice.

“A little snarky, that’s all,” she replied hoarsely. “I think it’s some kind of virus. It doesn’t seem to be a full-bore cold.”

“Inga thinks it might be an allergy,” I chipped in. “She told me that the twins used to come down with sneezing and coughing fairly often when they were kids. Aren’t there some antiallergy pills that’d clear it up?”

“Several,” he replied. “How are you feeling otherwise, Renata?”

“I’m sort of at loose ends, Dr. Fallon,” she told him. “After the holidays, I’ll have to sign up for a different class—or even two. I’ve gotten used to the people who were taking Mark’s class, and now I’ll have to meet a whole new bunch. That might be a little disturbing. Bugsies need stability, and the whole world changes at the beginning of each new quarter at U.W. I’m not ready to start taking classes for credit, not just yet. I’ve still got some things I need to clear away before I tackle real studenthood. A little more time as an imitation student probably wouldn’t hurt.”

“Would you like to talk about these problems you want to put behind you?” he asked her.

“Talking about them wouldn’t do much good, Dr. Fallon,” she replied. “I’m dealing with them in my own way, and I’m not even sure I could put them into words.” Then she gave me one of those sly sidelong looks. “How does ‘actions speak louder than words’ strike you, Mark?” she asked.

“Tired, worn-out, pompous, threadbare—take your pick, Twink. Clichés are like that most of the time.”

“That doesn’t take away the truth, though, does it? I’m still having those ‘bad days’ Aunt Mary talks about, but I’m getting closer to a solution. It’s trying to hide from me, but I’ve got its number, so it won’t be able to hide much longer. As soon as I see its face, Twinkie can go back to being a normie. Isn’t that neat?”

I pondered that cryptic announcement as I drove back to Seattle that evening. Twink was obviously being deliberately obscure, but I honestly feared an impending crisis. The only problem was that Twink wouldn’t tell anybody just exactly what she was dealing with. She’d seemed almost inhumanly confident that she was going to come out on top, and that struck me as a one-way ticket back to the house with rubber rooms.

Back at the boardinghouse, Trish, Erika, and Sylvia were putting a Christmas tree in the living room, for God’s sake!

“What’s this all about?” I asked them.

“ ‘Tis the season to be jolly, Mark,” Erika replied. “Hadn’t you heard about that?”

“It just seemed like a good idea,” Trish told me. “We’ll all be spending Christmas Day with family, but we can have our own private little celebration here. How does Sunday grab you?”

“The day after tomorrow? Sure, I guess.”

“We’ll even relax the rule about no in-house booze and have a few nips of eggnog,” Sylvia added, draping tinsel over the branches of the artificial tree.

“Hanky-panky’s still an official no-no, though,” Erika said. “We’ll see how Trish feels about it after she gets half in the bag, so don’t give up hope yet.”

“All right, Erika,” Trish told her sister, “quit clowning around.”

“You’re turning into a real drag, Trish,” Erika replied. “You really ought to lighten up once in a while.”

“Let’s not get carried away on any Christmas presents,” Trish told us all at the breakfast table on Saturday. “That might be sort of embarrassing.”

“A ten-buck limit, maybe?” Charlie suggested.

“That sounds about right to me,” Erika said. “I probably wouldn’t get
too
upset if you wanted to buy me diamonds, but the neighbors might start to talk.”

“Nothing over ten dollars, then?” Trish asked, looking around at us.

“Are we putting it to a vote?” James asked her.

“The chair will entertain a motion to that effect,” Trish replied.

“So moved,” I said, remembering the times I’d gone to union meetings.

“Seconded,” Charlie chimed in.

“All in favor say aye,” Trish said, falling into line.

We all sort of agreed.

“The motion is carried,” Trish said then, rapping her knuckles on the tabletop.

“You left out ‘opposed,’ ” I scolded her.

“Did you object, Mark?”

“No, but you’re supposed to make the offer.”

“That’s silly.”

“
Robert’s Rules of Order
says that you’re supposed to give the opposition the chance to say ‘no.’ Haven’t you ever been to a union meeting?”

“I’ve never belonged to a union.”

“Shocking!” Charlie said. “Let’s organize the workers and lead them out on strike, Mark.”

“I’d be just a little careful there, Charlie,” James rumbled. “Things might start getting hungry around here if you take that
too
far. The International Sisterhood of the Ladies Who Do the Cooking might set up a picket line at the kitchen door, and we don’t cross picket lines, do we?”

“He’s got a point, Charlie,” I agreed. “It might be best if we don’t rock the boat.”

“You guys sound almost like our dad,” Erika told us. “He’s a devout member of the carpenter’s union. He thinks that
everybody
should belong to a union and go out on strike at least once a year—just to keep the boss honest.”

We clowned around over breakfast for a while. We didn’t have any classes hanging over our heads, so we had time to kick back and take it easy. The past three months had brought us closer together, and by now we were almost like a family. We didn’t make an issue of it, but we all knew that it was there. I think that was probably the reason behind our private little Christmas party. The time would come when we’d all move on, of course, but for right now we were all here, and “right now” was a good enough reason for a celebration.

We gathered in the parlor after dinner on Sunday, and there’d obviously been a fair amount of kidding around involved in the last-minute Christmas shopping. You can’t buy serious presents for under ten dollars. I’d say that the grand prize for goofy went to Erika. I’m not sure where she found it, but the necktie she’d picked up for Charlie was absolutely hideous. Nobody in his right mind would ever wear something like that in public.

After we’d opened all the presents, we sat around drinking eggnog and enjoying ourselves.

“How’s our favorite nutcase, Mark?” Charlie asked me. “She hasn’t been around lately.”

“She’s sort of upsie-downsie,” I told him. “Some days she’s all bright and bubbly, and other days she starts coming apart. She’s driving her headshrinker straight up the wall, though.”

“What do you mean?” Sylvia asked in a worried kind of voice.

“I ran her up to Lake Stevens on Friday. It seems that our grand theory about the earthshaking importance of the changes in her voice didn’t really float. Twink’s got allergies, that’s all. Her mother says the twins used to have sneezing fits on a regular basis—depending on which weed was in bloom. Anyway, last Friday she was all business. She told Fallon that she’s shopping around for some other introductory classes she can audit.”

“Send her around,” James suggested. “I’ll be teaching Introduction to Philosophy.”

“Or you could hand her off to me,” Sylvia stepped in. “I’m stuck with a psychology class during winter quarter.”

“Now there’s a mix that’d send just about anybody off to the bughouse,” Charlie noted, “and since Twinkie likes to write papers she’s not required to write, she’ll probably whip out a few that’ll send a couple of department chairmen off to the funny farm. She’d have a ball with ‘Existential Paranoia’ wouldn’t she?”

“I’d go with ‘Stoic Manic Depression,’ ” Erika said.

“ ‘Schizophrenic Utilitarianism?’ ” Trish offered.

“I think we might be in trouble, Sylvia,” James said. “If you and I try to double-team Renata this next quarter, she might very well send the both of us ‘round the bend.”

“At least we’d keep her in the family,” Charlie said. “That girl’s a treasure, so we should do our best to hang on to her for as long as we can.”

THIRD MOVEMENT

APPASSIONATA

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

There always seems to be a lot of scurrying around during registration for winter quarter, probably because New Year’s Day tends to interrupt things. Fortunately, getting Twinkie signed up to audit the classes James and Sylvia were teaching was no big chore, since there isn’t much paperwork involved in auditing classes.

I’d persuaded Dr. Conrad that I’d served my time as a graduate teaching assistant, so he’d almost grudgingly agreed to let me out on parole. It wasn’t as if I really needed the stipend to keep me eating regularly, and I wanted to wash the taste of Milton out of my mouth with a couple of seminars in modern American fiction. It might have been a little arrogant, but I took on Hemingway and Faulkner in the same quarter.

I stopped by Conrad’s office after I’d finished registering. It’s always a good idea to stay in touch with the boss.

“Did you have problems, Mr. Austin?” he asked me.

“Not really, Dr. Conrad,” I replied. “I gather you put in a good word for me, because I breezed through.”

“I didn’t have to pull any strings, kid,” he told me. “Your master’s thesis is still ringing quite a few bells. How’s your protégée coming along?”

“Twinkie? She’s having some problems. I’ve got a hunch that she’s just about due for a return engagement in the house with rubber rooms. We’re keeping her in the family this quarter, but I’m still not sure she’ll make it to spring.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Did you get any clarification from her on that last paragraph in her second paper?”

“Not so much as a peep. She sidestepped some questions from her headshrinker about it.”

“You’re passing those papers around? Are we contemplating a career as a literary agent?”

“Not too likely. Her paper was medium-whacky, though, so we ran a copy for Doc Fallon—along with copies of the tapes abnormal Sylvia’s been recording on the sly.”

“Abnormal Sylvia?”

“In-house joke, boss. Sylvia’s majoring in abnormal psychology, and she’s doing a case history on Twink for her master’s degree. If Twink happens to burp, Sylvia’s probably got it on tape.”

“You live in a very strange environment, Mr. Austin.”

“I know—fun, though. A regular live-in symposium of six different disciplines.” I glanced at my watch. “I’d better go hit the bookstore, boss. My library’s a little light on Faulkner.”

“Enjoy,” he said.

“Thanks a bunch,” I replied sardonically.

“Aw, don’t mention it.”

I should know better than to try to top Dr. Conrad.

Sylvia was all tied up that Friday, so about noon I picked Twink up for her weekly visit to Doc Fallon’s funny farm. She seemed edgy, for some reason. “What’s bothering you, baby sister?” I asked as we pulled out onto the freeway.

“Is it always like this at the beginning of a quarter?” she responded. “I mean, everything gets scrambled, doesn’t it? New courses, new teachers, different times, different classmates—it’s almost like stepping into a whole new world.”

“Get used to it, Twink. It happens three times a year—four, if you take summer courses. Like they say, ‘variety’s the spice of life.’ ”

“I’d rather stick to bland. We bugsies don’t like change all that much.”

“But you’re not a bugsie anymore, Twink. Aren’t you supposed to be masquerading as a normie?”

“That’s just for show, Markie. Deep down where it really counts, I’m still moderately whacky.”

“Fake it, Twink,” I suggested. “If you act like a normie long enough, it might get to be a habit.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” she told me.

We drove north in silence for a while.

“How does somebody go about finding the name of the registered owner of a certain car, Mark?” she asked me finally.

“If you’ve got a license plate number, it’s no problem at all—particularly not for you. Mary’s a cop, remember? Give her a number, and she can punch it into one of the computers at the cop shop and give you the owner’s name, address, police record, blood type, and probably copies of his fingerprints in about thirty seconds.”

“I never even thought of that,” she admitted a bit sheepishly. “I must have had my head turned off.”

“Is it important, Twink?” I asked her. “Are you trying to track somebody down?”

“No, I was just curious, is all. It came up in a conversation before Christmas. One of the sorority girls said that the cops can’t hand out that information. She thought it was restricted—or ought to be. ‘Right to privacy,’ or something like that.”

“Not hardly, baby sister,” I told her. “That’s part of the fun of living in the computer age. There’s no such thing as privacy anymore.”

“Charlie could probably fix that, couldn’t he?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. “He probably
could
jerk somebody’s name out of every computer in the world with a click of a couple of buttons. That could turn out to be a gold mine, couldn’t it? A lot of people out there would pay big bucks to become nonpersons. We could set up a corporation—Anonymity Incorporated, or something. It’d send every computer nerd in the world straight up the wall, wouldn’t it?”

“It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people,” she said smugly.

For some reason our silly little conversation about computers seemed to unwind Twink’s spring, and she appeared calm and rational during her session with Fallon that afternoon. There’s a lot to be said for kidding around when you’re talking to a nutcase, I guess. “Laughter is the best medicine” is a pretty tired old cliché, but it still seems to have a certain validity—particularly in Twink’s case. Both of her papers had strongly hinted that normies take themselves too seriously and that they needed to learn how to laugh at themselves. If a few laughs would bring Twinkie back to earth, I’d go out and buy joke books by the dozen.

The session with Fallon went pretty well, and Twink was all bright and bubbly on our way back to Seattle. Maybe we’d all been a bit too uptight about her. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t really ready to go back to Fallon’s bughouse just yet.

On a hunch I hauled into a gas station when we got to Seattle, went to the pay phone, and called the boardinghouse. Trish answered.

“What are we having for dinner tonight, Trish?” I asked her.

“Spaghetti and meatballs. Why?”

“Would there be enough if I brought Twinkie home with me?”

“Is she all right? I mean she’s not climbing the walls or anything, is she?” Trish sounded a bit dubious.

“She’s fine, Trish. It’s one of her cutesy-poo days. She doesn’t get out very much, so I thought it’d be good for her if I invited her to dinner.”

“It’s fine with me, Mark. She’s a lot of fun to have around when she’s behaving like a normie. It’s when she’s bugsie that people get nervous.” Trish laughed. “Now she’s got me doing it,” she said. “I never used those terms until I met her. Bring her along, Mark. There’s plenty of spaghetti.”

And so it was that Twinkie joined us for dinner that evening, and she was a smash hit again, since she had the volume on cute turned all the way up. All in all, it seemed to me that it’d been a very good day for her.

I’d pretty much exhausted the possibilities of those Saturday chores around the house, so I spent the next day puttering around my little workshop down in the basement. It seemed to me that a workbench might be useful, along with some shelves for tools, since Charlie’s tools were stacked in one corner, James had his in another, and mine were scattered all over the place. Maybe if things in the shop were better organized, I wouldn’t have to spend so much time looking for a particular tool when I was right in the middle of a project.

I sketched out some plans and checked my supply of scrap lumber. I don’t know if I accomplished much that Saturday, but I managed to keep busy.

James had spent quite a bit of time in Everett during the holidays, and he’d told us that Mrs. Perry’s doctors were fairly certain that they’d caught her cancer in time. He seemed very relieved about that. “Cancer” is a word that you don’t want to hear very often.

At supper on Saturday James told us that he’d be making a run to Everett Sunday morning. “Now that Andrew’s sure that his mother’s going to recover, he thinks it might be time to check back in at Harvard.”

“I’m sure it’s still there,” Charlie said. “It’d probably take quite a while to pick it up and move it. Transplanting all that ivy could be a real bear.”

“What time does his plane leave?” Trish asked.

“About seven tomorrow evening,” James replied. “Why?”

“Why don’t you invite him to dinner here, then?” she suggested. “We’d like to get to know him.”

“I’ll give him a call and see what he has to say,” James agreed.

It was about noon on Sunday when James and his young friend arrived and joined us in the kitchen. Andrew Perry was a slender young fellow who didn’t seem to be overly impressed with himself the way some Ivy League students are. At least the word “Harvard” didn’t crop up in every other sentence. James introduced him, Erika poured him a cup of coffee, and he seemed to blend right in.

Trish had quite a few questions for him, naturally, and she seemed a little wistful when he told her the names of some of his professors. Every discipline has its celebrities, I guess, and Harvard seems to have more than its share of the heavy hitters on its faculty.

“James was telling us that this house is picking up quite a reputation at U.W.,” Andrew told us. “He said that just about everybody wants to live here.”

“All except for the party boys,” Charlie said. “They might lust after our ladies, but our prohibition policy turns them off. Party boys
do
like their booze.”

“We were lucky,” Erika said. “The right people showed up on the doorstep at the right time. And our assorted disciplines make for some interesting conversations at the supper table—especially Sylvia’s case history.”

“Oh?” Andrew said curiously.

“The Twinkie story,” Charlie told him. “Mark introduced us to a real-live nutcase. She’s a screwball, but she
is
sort of fun.”

James snapped his fingers. “I almost forgot something,” he said to Sylvia. “I think Andrew’s got the answer to one of your problems. He knows why Renata keeps talking about wolves howling after she has those nightmares.”

“Is this Twinkie person the girl whose sister was murdered in Forest Park a few years back?” Andrew asked him.

“That’s the one. Mark knows her family, and he introduced her to us during the fall quarter. Go ahead and tell them about it.”

“There’s not really a lot to tell,” Andrew said. “Our house isn’t far from Forest Park, and we all remember the night of that murder vividly. One of our neighbors has a kennel, and he’s been experimenting with a crossbreed dog—part Alaskan husky and part timber wolf. It’s not working out too well for him—the wolf keeps popping up, and wolves aren’t good house pets. Anyway, on the night that girl was murdered in the park, those wolf-dogs went absolutely crazy. They howled all night and kept at it even after the sun came up.”

“I never saw anything about that in the newspapers,” I said.

Andrew shrugged. “We told the police about it.”

“So
that’s
why Renata keeps moaning about wolves howling!” Sylvia exclaimed. “It didn’t make sense until now. We were right, Mark. Renata’s recurrent nightmares
are
a reliving of the night when Regina was murdered. I’ve got to pass this on to Dr. Fallon.”

I had a few doubts about that, though. If the sound of howling wolves terrified Twink, why would she play that unmarked tape with some woman singing along with the wolves for hours at a time? If wolf howls were part of nightmare city, she shouldn’t really be hooked on that tape. . . .

There were still some things that didn’t quite match up.

Sylvia was all fired up about what Andrew had told us, though, so I kept my suspicions to myself. I knew one thing for certain, however. By hook or crook I
was
going to get a copy of that tape.

Classes began on Monday the fifth of January, and not having that freshman English class hanging over my head was a pure joy.

My Hemingway seminar met for the customary two hours early on Monday morning and Faulkner followed hot on Hemingway’s tail. Now, that’s a stylistic jolt for you. Hemingway seemed to be hell-bent on writing one-word sentences, and Faulkner’s sentences wandered around to the point that it was virtually impossible to pinpoint the subject.

My schedule that quarter was a grad student’s dream. My classes were both in the morning, so my afternoons were free. I almost felt a little guilty about that—just a little.

I felt a slight sense of a vacancy, though, and it finally dawned on me that I’d miss seeing Twinkie’s face in the middle of a classroom four afternoons a week. I’d made a few smart-alecky remarks about foisting her off on James and Sylvia, but she was still
my
responsibility. Having her in my freshman class had given me the chance to keep an eye on her, but that chance was gone now, and I’d have to rely on secondhand reports—
or
spend most of my wonderful free time at Mary’s place.

That took a lot of the shine off my day.

Sylvia’s introductory class met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but James only had Tuesdays and Thursdays to cram several thousand years of philosophy down the throats of assorted underclassmen. Sylvia’s course, like mine, was pretty much required of all students, so she got more than her share of reluctant dum-dums. James, the lucky dog, taught an elective course, so
his
students hadn’t been dragged kicking and screaming through the door.

“Did Twink seem to be OK today?” I asked Sylvia at the supper table that evening.

“A little withdrawn, maybe,” Sylvia replied. “Of course, we weren’t there for long. All I do on the first day is gather the enrollment cards and give out a reading assignment. Nobody’s head is functioning on the first day of class, so I don’t waste time trying to get through to them.”

“The technical term for that is ‘goofing off,’ isn’t it?” Charlie suggested, grinning at her.

“No, it’s not!” she flared.

“Watch it, Charlie,” James cautioned. “Our Sylvia’s got a short fuse sometimes.”