Regina's Song (24 page)

About noon on Sunday, James rapped on my door.

“What’s up?” I asked when I opened it.

“Have you got a minute, Mark?” he asked quietly.

“Sure. Come on in.”

He came into the room and closed the door. “What’s bothering you, Mark?” he asked me, keeping his voice very soft. “You’ve obviously got a problem of some kind; maybe I can help.”

James was probably as close a buddy as I’d had in years, and I felt a strong temptation to lay the whole thing right out in front of him. I pulled back from that at the very last moment, though. My suspicions about Twinkie were based on a hunch that I couldn’t even come close to proving, and I wasn’t about to do a Burpee imitation just to pass the time. “I don’t know, James,” I said. “Partly it’s just the weather—fog always depresses me. A big part of it, though, has to do with my Blake-Whitman theory. It’s falling apart on me. I thought I could nail Whitman’s hide to the barn door, but the old boy’s too slick for me. I’m positive that the connection’s there, but Walt’s smooth enough not put it right out in plain sight. I could bust my butt trying to nail him, and it probably still wouldn’t float. Now I’m going to have to scrounge around and find another topic for my dissertation, and that sure doesn’t wind my watch very tight.”

“Really?” he said then with a faint smile. “I thought it might be something a little more personal.”

“You aren’t going to get much more personal than having your dissertation collapse on you, James. Isn’t that the academic version of a natural disaster?”

“It
would
come fairly close, I guess,” he agreed. He sounded dubious, though. I was obviously going to have to watch my step. Evidently, I was giving too much away.

I attended my seminars on Monday morning, then spent the rest of the day reading Faulkner. Hemingway stuck to the real world, so it wasn’t too hard to stay with him. Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County puts him in the world-builder class, and that takes some getting used to.

Since Mary had Monday night off, I didn’t have to go out to play in the foggy darkness that night, so I managed to get quite a bit of work done.

On Tuesday, February 3, I went down to the library to dig into some of the critical works on Faulkner. The more recent opinions took him to task for his failure to be “politically correct.” The N-word shows up frequently in Faulkner’s writings, and that immediately starts some critics to frothing at the mouth. The fact that he was quite accurately recording the culture and speech patterns of early-twentieth-century rural Mississippi seems to have escaped those critics.

By midafternoon, the fog had thinned out, but the weather forecast wasn’t too promising. Evidently we were in for at least another week of fog and below-freezing nights. If Twinkie
did
go hunting this week, trying to follow her could be a real bitch-kitty.

After supper that evening, I changed clothes again to keep the “Mark’s got a girlfriend” scam afloat. I decided that my mythical honey found me handsome and mysterious in dark colors—which was fortunate, since those dark sweaters blend into the background pretty well on a dark night.

Nobody said anything to me when I left the house, but they were thinking pretty loud.

I took up my usual position about a block and a half from Mary’s house to keep an eye on the place. At five after ten—right on the nose—Mary came out and got into her car. You could set your watch by Mary.

I waited until she’d had time to get out of the immediate vicinity, then I drove down the block so that I could see the house better. That damned fog was complicating things, that’s for certain.

The light in the living room was still on, the same as it’d been all the other times I’d watched. This was getting to be a drag. Twink was sitting tight, and all I was doing was losing sleep. About my only entertainment came from firing up the car so that I could turn on the windshield wipers. That fog was settling down fast.

Then the light in Twink’s bedroom came on. That didn’t quite fit her usual routine, but there could have been a dozen reasons for it.

Just on a hunch, though, I drove to the end of the block to a place where I could keep an eye on that back porch.

Then the light in Twink’s bedroom went out, and the kitchen light came on briefly. “She’s probably just hitting the refrigerator for a can of pop or something,” I muttered.

But then the back door opened, and Twink stepped out onto the back porch. She locked the door behind her and fumbled around unlocking the chain on her bike. I’d brought my binoculars, so I could see her clearly.

I discovered that I was holding my breath. I let it out slowly and kept watching.

She trundled her bike down the back-porch steps and pushed it back to the alley. Then she climbed on and rode off to her right.

I fired up my car, wrapped a U-turn at the end of the block, and sped to the intersection. I didn’t turn on my lights, though.

By the time I got to the intersection, Twink was already down at the far end of that cross-street block. As she passed the streetlight, I got a fairly good look at her. She was wearing that glossy, black raincoat and was pumping right along.

I sped up to keep her in sight. She didn’t seem to be in any big hurry, but the fog—and that damned black raincoat—made it difficult to see her. The clock on my dashboard said 11:10, and that told me that Twink had left the house at eleven on the dot—exactly when Mary was punching in to start her shift at the cop shop. This wasn’t looking good. The previous nights—when I’d watched Mary’s house and nothing had happened—had about half convinced me that my suspicions were totally unfounded. Now they came rushing back again, and that black raincoat Twink was wearing added another dimension.

She was riding east on Thirty-ninth Street through a residential neighborhood, and then she hooked a right at Sunnyside. I wasn’t too far behind her, but I didn’t have my lights on, so I don’t think she knew that I was following her. When I got to the intersection of Thirty-ninth and Sunnyside, though, she was nowhere in sight.

I spent about two hours cruising around in the fog, but all I accomplished was to waste a lot of gas. By midnight, I couldn’t see much more than a half a block because of the damned fog. I finally gave up and drove back to Mary’s place. The living room light was still on, but a quick swing down the alley showed me an empty back porch. Twink’s bike hadn’t slipped back to where it belonged while I’d been out in the fog.

Now what the hell was I going to do? Confronting Twinkie—
if
indeed she’d been out in some park cutting some poor guy into dog meat—wouldn’t be a good idea. I was
almost
positive that she wouldn’t try it on me, but there’s a lot of uncertainty in “almost,” isn’t there?

I parked down the block from Mary’s place and opened the window on the driver’s side so that I could watch the house without running the windshield wipers every five minutes. The humidity level must have been about 200 percent, because that fog was piling up on anything that wasn’t moving, and there was that mournful sound of water dripping off telephone lines, tree branches, and the outsides of the rain gutters on every house in the neighborhood.

I cruised through the alley about every fifteen minutes to check the back porch, but when Twinkie rode home about two-thirty, she came right down the street instead of sneaking in the back way. She pushed her bike around to the back of the house, and a moment later the kitchen light came on. Then the living room light went out, and the one in the bathroom came on. From the outside, the house looked so ordinary that nobody driving by would give it a second glance. God only knows what kind of horror was going on inside, though.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I didn’t sleep very well that night, for obvious reasons, and I even gave some thought to skipping my classes in the morning. If some late-breaking news popped up on television, I wanted to be right on top of it. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d do if there
had
been a murder during the night, but I wanted to catch the news just in case.

There was the core of my problem. If Twink really
was
Joan the Ripper, and if I happened to get lucky—or unlucky—enough to catch her in the act, what was I going to do about it? I certainly wasn’t going to turn her over to the cops. I still thought that my best bet would be to lay the whole thing in front of Doc Fallon. If Twink
had
butchered some guy last night, she’d be bonkers today, and Mary would zonk her out with a sleeping pill. If I moved fast enough, I could have her back in Fallon’s bughouse before the sun went down. It wouldn’t be a very happy solution, but it’d sure beat some lurid murder trial. If everything went smoothly, we could quietly get Twink off the streets and into a safe environment with no one the wiser.

The Ripper murders would remain unsolved, but that wouldn’t bother me.

The only problem with my brilliant solution was the lack of a murder. If Twinkie
had
been out hunting that night, she’d come up empty. Now I was staring down the bore of night after night camped on Mary’s doorstep.

Erika came into the kitchen about six. “What are you doing up so early, Mark?” she asked me.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I told her.

“Why didn’t you turn the coffeepot on?”

“Is it ready to go?”

“Of course it is. Where have you been? I set it up every night. All you have to do is punch the button, dummy.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Men!” she grumbled, rolling her eyes upward. “Is there anything new and exciting on television?”

“The fog probably won’t let up for another week or so,” I replied.

“Wow! Stop the presses! It’s foggy in Seattle!”

“Smart aleck.”

“Come here. Now.”

“No hitting,” I said.

“Do as you’re told.”

I slid out from behind the table.

“This is the coffeepot,” she said. “Am I going too fast for you?”

“Be nice.”

“This is the on-off button.” She pushed it, and the light came on. “You see how it works? All you have to do to get coffee is push that button. If you’re the first one up, push the button. It’s a moral obligation: The first one up turns on the coffeepot. Have you got that straight?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She patted me on the head. “Good boy. Now get out of the way. It’s my turn to make breakfast, and I don’t need you underfoot while I’m doing it. Scoot.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Erika obviously needed at least one cup of coffee to get her fire going in the morning, and you didn’t want to get in her way before she’d had her morning fix.

I didn’t pay very close attention during my seminars that morning. I had a lot on my mind, and I
really
wanted to get back to that TV set to find out if Twinkie
had
scored the previous night.

After my Faulkner seminar, I bagged on back to the boardinghouse and camped on the living room TV set for the rest of the day. As Hemingway might have put it, I got whole bunches of
nada
. Then, to cap off a notably unproductive day, I was treated to a big helping of frosty at the supper table. My “Mark’s got a girlfriend” scam was definitely mildewing the sheets at Castle Erdlund.

I spiffed up again about nine o’clock, and hit the bricks—looking sharp—at nine-thirty.

I pulled into my usual parking place and watched Mary’s house. As expected, Mary came out at five after ten on the dot. I let her get out of the neighborhood, then I pulled in closer to the house to keep an eye on things.

After about a half hour, I noticed something that was almost certain to give me problems. The damn fog was freezing up on my windshield. I’d have to keep the motor running and the defroster turned up to high. If my windshield iced up, I’d be out of business.

It was a good thing I caught it when I did, because about ten minutes to eleven, the light in Twink’s bedroom came on, the same way it had the previous night. Evidently Twink had travel plans.

Once again, she came out the back door at precisely eleven o’clock, unlocked her bicycle, and rode off down the alley to Thirty-ninth Street again. I trailed about a half block behind her, and
this
time I was close enough to see her turn into an alley after she’d hooked a left on Sunnyside.

I drove to the end of the next block, but I didn’t see her come out of the alley. I couldn’t figure out how, but she’d gotten away from me again.

I tried cruising around the general vicinity with my headlights on—but as close as I could tell, she wasn’t anywhere in the neighborhood. So finally I drove back to that alley and parked at the curb. There had to be some reason Twink kept coming back to that same place. I got out of my Dodge and walked on into the alley. There was all the usual junk there, and I knew I couldn’t drive through—not unless I wanted to bash in one side of my car.

There was a Dumpster about halfway down, and that was the thing that was really blocking the alley. Sometimes the guys on garbage trucks get a little careless when they set a Dumpster back down. The things
do
have wheels, though—maybe I could push it back a foot or so to give myself a little room. It looked pretty full, but I leaned on it to see if I could budge it.

It was as solid as a rock. It occurred to me that there might be something behind it that had it blocked. I went around to the back side to see if I could possibly clear it.

There, neatly concealed behind the Dumpster, was Twinkie’s bike.

This didn’t make any sense at all. There weren’t any parks in the immediate vicinity, so what had possessed Twink to stash her bike in that alley?
Something
sure as hell didn’t fit.

Then it occurred to me that she might be meeting some guy who lived nearby. I tried to dismiss that notion, but if she
did
have a boyfriend on the side, it’d explain a lot of things. Talk about brain-freeze: I’d been willing to accept the possibility that she was a murderer, but the notion of a secret boyfriend shocked me.

We all get strange now and then, I suppose.

I tried to collect my thoughts. Whatever she was doing, she’d obviously gotten away from me again. She might possibly have spotted me trailing along behind her and stashed the bike to get me off her back. The combination of the fog and that black raincoat would make her damn near invisible, and—if she was hunting—she’d could hide out almost anyplace in the neighborhood. After I went home, she could come back, pick up her bike again, and ride off into the night to hunt down her next victim.

I gave up and went on back to Mary’s place.

Twink rode in shortly after two in the morning, went inside, and, as closely as I could tell, went to bed.

I gave up and went home.

I didn’t have any classes on Thursday, so I camped on the living room TV set to find out if Joan the Ripper had scored again. I knew that Mary would have advised us if Twink had gone bonkers again, but I wanted to be absolutely certain. After the foul-up of the Montlake Park killing, Twink might have modified a few things.

James came home about eleven. “Are we watching soap operas now, Mark?” he asked me with an amused expression.

“Just catching up on the news, old buddy,” I replied. “Did Twinkie make it to your class today?”

“Oh, yes. She’s taking these classes she audits more seriously than a lot of students who take them for credit.”

“Did she seem to be OK?”

“As far as I could tell, she was.” He looked at me speculatively. “You’ve got something on your mind that’s troubling you, haven’t you, Mark?”

I meant to just shrug it off, but I’d reached the point where I
had
to talk to somebody. “This is strictly between you and me, James,” I said, “OK?”

“If that’s the way you want it.” He sat down in one of the easy chairs. “What’s up?”

“The whole town’s jumping up and down about this Joan the Ripper stuff.”

“I’ve noticed that,” he said.

“Something came to me a while back, and it’s bugging the hell out of me.”

“Oh?”

“After the cops found that footprint that sort of proved that the Slasher’s a woman, I did some checking. As it turns out, every time the Slasher’s wasted somebody, Twinkie has one of her ‘bad days.’ ”

“Do you think there’s a connection? Renata sees those lurid stories on the news and starts climbing the walls—or something along those lines?”

“I don’t think the TV stories have anything to do with it, James. Twink goes bonkers even before the cops find the body.”

“You’re not serious!”

“Stay with me on this. I’m
hoping
that you’ll spot some great big hole and shoot this theory down. Then I might be able to get some sleep. When Twinkie came out of the fog at Fallon’s bughouse, she had no memory whatsoever that Regina had ever existed.”

“That’s what Sylvia tells us,” he admitted.

“Fallon says that she
does
know, though—at the subconscious level—and that’s what these nightmares she keeps having are all about.”

“That’s just a theory, Mark.”

“I know, and I think it’s way off base. I
don’t
think Twink’s having nightmares. I think she’s reacting to something a lot more recent than Regina’s murder. Every so often some sexual predator gets butchered, and if
anybody’s
got a motive to take out rapists, it’d be Renata.”

“Well—maybe. But I don’t think she’s capable of the things the Slasher’s doing to these people.”

“Not when her head’s on straight, I’ll go along with that.
But,
if she’s flipped out, her head’s anything
but
straight. After she comes out of it, she’s got some scattered memories of the gory details, and they blow her away. I don’t
want
to believe it, James, but the possibility keeps coming back and whopping me up alongside the head. Come on, show me where I’m wrong.”

“Don’t rush me,” he rumbled, frowning. “Why didn’t you drop this on Sylvia instead of me?”

“Sylvia’s not equipped to handle it, you know that. Twinkie’s got Sylvia wrapped around her little finger. Sylvia could catch Twink red-handed, and she
still
wouldn’t believe it.”

“You could be right about that . . .”

“Besides,” I added, “the ladies are pissed off at me right now. They’re buying into Charlie’s theory that I’ve got a girlfriend stashed away somewhere. I don’t see where it’s any of their business one way or the other, but
they
seem to think it is.”

“Women can be very possessive, Mark. Sometimes it doesn’t make too much sense, but that’s the nature of the beast.”

“Beast?”

“Poor choice of words, maybe. Let me brood about this theory of yours. It might take a while for me to get used to. There
could
be a remote possibility that it’s valid, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.”

I didn’t quite have the nerve to admit that I was already keeping Twink under surveillance. It
was
sort of silly, after all.

I left the boardinghouse at the usual time that evening, but I didn’t bother to get all gussied up. I figured I’d established my cover by now, so I didn’t have to beat it into the ground anymore. James gave me an odd look, though.

The fog was
really
thick that evening, and when I got to my usual stakeout spot, I couldn’t even see Mary’s house. I took a chance and eased up a little closer.

Mary left for work at the usual time, and I settled in to watch. I’d noticed that Twink was as punctual as her aunt about certain things, so if she had any plans for a hunting expedition on a given night, she’d probably hit the bricks on the stroke of eleven.

Eleven came and went, and the lights in Mary’s house didn’t go on and off in the sequence that’d preceded Twinkie’s previous outings. Evidently, she’d scratched any plans she might have had for that particular night. I think the fog might have had a lot to do with that. You’ve got to be able to see what you’re doing when you’re hunting.

I decided to hang it up at eleven-thirty. It was fairly obvious by then that Twink was going to sit tight.

I attended my seminars on Friday, and Sylvia and Twink had already left for Lake Stevens when I got back to the boardinghouse.

I spent the afternoon reading
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Sometimes we tend to shrug Hemingway off. His interest in bullfights and big-game hunting puts him in the macho crowd, and that’s generally considered politically incorrect these days. But the old boy could really write up a storm when he set his mind to it.

Mary called me about four-thirty, and she seemed a little grouchy. “You just
had
to run your mouth, didn’t you, Mark?” she demanded.

“What’d I do now?”

“Ren’s been hanging out with a bunch of sorority girls, and I guess one of them’s developed a lech for some guy who drives a beat-up old pickup truck. She told Ren what the license plate number was, and then you pop up and tell Ren that
I
could find out who owned that junker.”

“Well, you
can
, can’t you?”

“Of course I can, but now every time one of those fluffheads wants that kind of information, she’ll sic Ren on me to get it.”

“Sorry, Mary. I didn’t think of that,” I admitted. “To be honest, I was surprised that Twink hadn’t figured it out for herself.”

“She probably would have eventually, kid,” Mary conceded. “I just needed to put the blame on somebody.”

“If it makes you feel better, what the hell.”

Then she laughed. “Don’t worry, I think the Sigma-whatever girl got the number scrambled. The name that came up when I ran it through the computer was Walter Fergusson. He’s pushing forty, and he’s some kind of construction worker. I don’t think he’d be the sort that’d make a college girl get all gaga.”

“Maybe he bought the truck from some handsome young dude.”

“No. He’s owned that pickup for at least ten years. He lives over near Green Lake, so he’s probably puttering around in this part of Seattle on his days off. I still think the girl misread the license plate, though.”