Regina’s Song

When Twink heard that I was now a Master of Arts, she launched into an overdone imitation of Renfield in the original Dracula movie. I got a little tired of that “Yes, Master! Yes, Master!” business, but Twinkie had a lot of fun with it, so what the hell?

I took the summer of ‘97 off. I could have taken a couple of courses during summer quarter, but I needed a break, and now that Renata was an outpatient at Dr. Fallon’s private nuthouse, I wanted to be available in case her load started to shift again. Of course, Fallon wasn’t about to let her stray too far. Twink had a standing appointment to visit him every Friday afternoon for an hour of what psychiatrists choose to call “counseling”—at 150 bucks an hour. Twink wasn’t too happy about that, but, since it was one of the conditions of her release, she grudgingly went along.

It was probably my connection with the university that nudged Twink into deciding to enroll there. That made her parents nervous, but Twink was way ahead of them. “I can probably stay with Aunt Mary, Les,” she told her father. “She is a relative after all. Imposing on relatives is one of those inalienable rights, isn’t it?”

The boss looked dubious. His sister had violated one of the more important rules of the Catholic Church when she’d divorced an abusive husband, and her frequent comments about “the Polack in Rome” had offended Les more than a little. “Maybe,” he said evasively. “Let’s find out what Dr. Fallon has to say.” It was fairly obvious that old Les was trying to pass the buck. I had a few doubts about the idea myself, so I tagged along when the boss went to lay the idea in front of Dr. Fallon.

“It’s an interesting idea,” Fallon mused. “Your daughter’s been a bit reclusive since she left here, and the college experience might help her get past that. The only problem I can see is the pressure that goes with attending classes regularly, writing papers, and taking tests. I don’t know if she’s ready for that yet.”

“She could audit a few courses for a couple of quarters,” I suggested.

“Audit?” Les sounded startled.

“It’s not like an audit by Internal Revenue, boss,” I assured him. “All it means in a college is that the student sits in and listens. Twink wouldn’t have to do any course work, or write any papers, or take any tests, because she wouldn’t be graded. Wouldn’t that take the pressure off her, Doc?” I asked Fallon.

“I’d forgotten about that,” he admitted.

“It isn’t too common,” I told him. “You don’t come across very many who take classes for fun, but we’ve got a special situation here. I’ll check it out and see what’s involved.”

“That’d put it in an entirely different light,” Fallon said. “Renata gets the chance to broaden her social experience without any pressure. What kind of work does your sister do, Les?”

“She’s a cop.”

“A police officer? Really?”

“She’s not out on the street with gun and nightstick,” Les told him. “Actually, she’s a dispatcher in the precinct station in north Seattle. She works the graveyard shift, so her days and nights are turned around a bit, but otherwise she’s fairly normal.”

“How does she get along with Renata?”

“Quite well—at least during the few times she visited us when Renata was on furloughs from your sanitarium. Mary was always fond of the twins.”

“Why don’t you have a talk with her? Explain the situation, and tell her that this is something in the nature of an experiment. If Renata’s able to deal with the situation, well and good. If it causes too much stress, we might have to reconsider the whole idea. Mark here can keep an eye on her and let us know if this isn’t working. Renata trusts him, so she’ll probably tell him if the arrangement gets to be more than she can handle.”

“That still baffles me,” Les admitted. “They didn’t seem all that close before—” He broke off, obviously not wanting to mention Regina’s murder.

“It’s like the buddyship you and Dad picked up in ‘Nam, boss,” I told him. “The Twinkie Twins grew up believing that ‘Markie can fix anything.’ Maybe that’s why Renata recognized me and couldn’t recognize anybody else. I’m Mr. Fix-it, and she knew that something had to be fixed.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Fallon observed, “but I think it comes fairly close to explaining Renata’s recognition of Mark. As long as it’s there, let’s use it. I think we should give this a try, gentlemen. Renata’s environment can be reasonably controlled, there won’t be any pressure, and she can expand her social contacts and come out of her shell. Let’s ease her into it gradually, and see how she copes. Just be sure she doesn’t start missing her Friday counseling sessions. I’ll definitely want to keep a close eye on her myself.”

I’d known Mary Greenleaf since before the twins had been born, because she’d been a frequent visitor at her brother’s house in Everett when I’d been the center of attention there. We’d always gotten along, and when the twins had come along, she’d been nice enough to keep on paying a little bit of attention to me, instead of dropping me like a hot rock, the way everybody else seemed to do.

She was about ten years younger than her brother was, and she lived in the Wallingford district in Seattle, about two miles from the university campus. I think her proximity to the campus might have played some part in Twink’s decision to take a run at the university rather than the local community college.

Mary’d married young, and it hadn’t taken her very long to discover that her marriage had been a terrible mistake. Her husband turned out to be one of those “Let’s all get drunk and then go home and beat up our wives” sorts of guys.

She got to know a fair number of Seattle policemen during those years, since they routinely picked up her husband for domestic violence and hauled him off to jail.

Then there’d been counseling, which didn’t work; and eventually restraining orders, which didn’t work either, since Mary’s husband viewed them as a violation of his right to slap his wife around anytime he felt like it.

Then Mary had filed for a divorce, which upset her priest and sent her husband right straight up the wall. He nosed around in several seedy taverns until he found some jerk willing to sell him a gun. Then he’d declared an open season on wives who object to being kicked around.

Fortunately, he was a rotten shot, and the gun he’d bought was a piece of junk that jammed up after the third round. He did manage to hit Mary in the shoulder before the cops arrived, and that got him a free ride to the state penitentiary for attempted murder.

Mary sort of approved of that.

She knew that he’d get out eventually, though, and that was probably what led her to take up a career in law enforcement. A cop is required to carry a gun all the time, and Mary was almost positive that sooner or later she was going to need one. A more timid lady would probably have changed her name and moved to Minneapolis or Boston, but Mary wasn’t the timid type.

Right at first, she’d spent a lot of her spare time at the pistol range practicing for her own personal version of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Her church didn’t approve of her divorce, but Mary had come up with an alternative—instant widowhood. As it turned out, though, her husband irritated the wrong people in the state pen, and he suddenly came down with a bad case of dead after somebody stabbed him about forty-seven times.

Mary didn’t go into deep mourning when she heard the news.

I liked her: She was one heck of a gal.

Les Greenleaf wasn’t happy about Twink’s decision to move to Seattle. I think he hoped his sister would reject the idea of having her niece move in with her. But Mary shot him right out of the saddle on that one when he and I drove to Seattle in August of ‘97 to talk it over with her.

“No problem,” Mary said. “I’ve got plenty of room here, and Ren and I get along just fine.”

“You do understand that she’s just a little—” Les groped for a suitable word.

“Screwball, you mean?” Mary asked bluntly. “Yes, I know all about it. I’m used to screwballs, Les. Half the people I work with aren’t playing with a full deck. Renata’s going to be fine here with me.”

“Well,” he said dubiously, “I guess we can try it for one quarter to see how she does. But if it starts giving her problems…” He left it hanging.

“I’ll be here, too, boss,” I told him. “I’ll get a room nearby and, between us, Mary and I can keep Twink on an even keel.”

“You’re going to have to let go, Les,” Mary told him. “If you try to protect her for the rest of her life, you’ll turn her into a basket case. I love her, too, and I won’t let you do that to her. She comes here; and that’s that.” Mary wasn’t the sort for shilly-shallying around when it came to making decisions.

The chore of moving Twink to Seattle fell into my lap. Her father had a business to run, and I wasn’t doing anything important anyway. There was a lot of driving back and forth between Everett and Seattle involved in easing Twink into her new situation, and the whole procedure took the better part of two weeks. There are people who can move halfway across the country in less time, but we all wanted to take it a little slow with this move. Stress was the last thing Renata needed.

“Why’s everybody so uptight about this?” she asked me while I was driving her back to Everett to pick up some more of her clothes. “I’m a big girl now.”

“We just want to make sure you’re not going to come unraveled again, Twink,” I told her.

“My seams are all still pretty tight,” she said. “Actually, I’m looking forward to this. Les and Inga keep tiptoeing around me like I was made out of eggshells. I wish they’d learn how to relax. Mary’s a lot easier to be around.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.” I hesitated slightly, but then I sort of blurted it out. “Your dad’s got a real bad case of protective-itis, Twink. He’s not happy about this whole project, but Doc Fallon overruled him. Fallon believes it’ll be good for you—as long as we can keep the pressure off. Your dad would much rather wrap you in cotton batting and keep you in a little jewel box.”

“I know,” she agreed. “That was my main reason for suggesting the university instead of the community college. I’ve got to get out from under his thumb, Markie. That house in Everett is almost as bad as Fallon’s bughouse. I need to have you somewhere nearby, but Les and Inga are starting to give me the heebie-jeebies. Whether they like it or not, Twinkie is going to grow up.”

That caught me a little off guard. Twink had been kind of passive since she’d come out of Fallon’s sanitarium, but now she sounded anything but passive. This was a new Twinkie, and I wasn’t sure where she was going.

It was a dreary Sunday in early September when I went cruising around the Wallingford district to find a place for me to live. I stuck mostly to the back streets, where older houses that had seen better days. Almost all displayed that discreet ROOMS TO LET sign in a front window. Generations of university students had fanned out from the campus in search of cheap lodgings, and property owners all over north Seattle obligingly offered rooms, many of which took “cheap” all the way down to the flophouse level.

The thing that attracted me to one particular house was an addition to the standard ROOMS TO LET placard. It read FOR SERIOUS STUDENTS ONLY with “SERIOUS” underlined in bright red ink.

I pulled to the curb and sat looking at the self-proclaimed home for the elite. On the plus side, it was no more than five blocks from Mary’s house, and that was fairly important. It wasn’t in very good condition, but that didn’t bother me all that much. I was looking for a place where I could sleep and study, not some showplace to impress visitors.

Then a bulky-shouldered black man came around the side of the house carrying a large cardboard box filled with what appeared to be scraps from some sort of building project. The black man had arms as thick as fence posts, silvery hair, and a distinguished-looking beard.

I got out of my car when he reached the curb. “Excuse me, neighbor,” I said politely. “Do you happen to know why the owner of this house is making such an issue of ‘serious’?”

A faint smile touched his lips. “Trish has some fairly strong antiparty prejudices,” he replied in a voice so deep that it seemed to be coming up out of his shoes.

“Trish?”

“Patricia Erdlund,” he explained. “Swedish girl, obviously. The house belongs to her aunt, but Auntie Grace had a stroke last year. Trish’s sister, Erika, was living here at the time, and she put in an emergency call to her big sister. Trish is in law school, and Erika just finished premed, so they weren’t too happy to be living in the middle of a twelve-week-long beer bust. I’ve lived here for six years, so I’ve more or less learned to turn my ears off, but the Erdlund girls aren’t that adaptable. They announced a no-drinking policy, and that emptied the place out almost immediately. Now they’re looking for suitable recruits to fill the place back up.”

“I don’t want to be offensive,” I said carefully, “but aren’t you a bit old to be a student? You are a student, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “I’m a late bloomer—I was thirty-five before I got started. My name’s James Forester,” he introduced himself, holding out his hand.

“Mark Austin,” I responded, shaking hands with him.

“What’s your field, Mark?”

“English.”

“Grad student?”

I nodded. “Ph.D. candidate. What’s your area?”

“Philosophy and comparative religion.”

“How many people do the Erdlund girls plan to cram into the house?”

“We’ve got two empty rooms on the second floor. There are a couple of cubicles in the attic and several more in the basement, but they’re hardly fit for human habitation. Auntie Grace used to rent them out—el cheapo—to assorted indigents who always had trouble paying the rent, maybe because they routinely spent the rent money on booze or dope. That’s where most of the noise was coming from, so Trish and Erika decided to leave them empty and concentrate on finding quiet, useful people to live in the regular rooms.”

“Useful?”

“There are some domestic chores involved in the arrangement. I’ve got a fair degree of familiarity with plumbing, and I can usually hook wires together without blowing too many fuses. The house has been seriously neglected for the past dozen or so years, so it falls into the ‘fixer-upper’ category. Have you had any experience in any of the building trades?”

“I know a little bit about carpentry,” I replied. “I’ve spent a few years working in a door factory up in Everett. Let’s say I know enough to back off when I’m out of my depth.”

“That should be enough, really. The girls aren’t planning any major remodeling. Replacing wallboard that’s had holes kicked in it is probably about as far as it’ll go.”

“No problem, then.”

“I think you and I could get along, Mark, and I’m definitely outnumbered right now. It’s very trying to be the only man in the house with three ladies.”

“Who’s the third girl?”

“Our Sylvia. She’s in abnormal psych—which is either her field of study or a clinical description of Sylvia herself. She’s an Italian girl, cute as a button, but very excitable.”

“You’re all alone here with two Swedes and an Italian? You definitely need help, brother.”

“Amen to that.” He paused. “Do you happen to know anything about auto mechanics?” he asked me then.

“Not so’s you’d notice it. I can change a flat or replace spark plugs if I have to, but that’s about as far as it goes. My solution to any other mechanical problem is to reach for a bigger hammer. Does somebody have a sick car?”

“All three girls do—or think they do. Auto mechanics seem to turn into rip-off artists when a girl drives into their shop. That’s why these three want to have an in-house mechanic. Last winter, Sylvia was ready to sue General Motors because her car wasn’t getting the kind of mileage GM promised. I tried to explain that warming the car up for an hour every morning might have had something to do with it, but she kept insisting that as long as the car wasn’t moving, it shouldn’t make any difference.”

“You’re not serious!”

“Oh, yes. Sylvia has absolutely no idea at all about what’s going on under the hood of her car. She seems to think that warming the car up to get the heater running has no connection at all with putting it in gear and driving it down the block. Every time I tried to explain it, I ran into a solid wall of invincible ignorance.” He shook his head sadly. “Now that you’re aware of some of our peculiarities, are you at all interested in our arrangement?”

“I wasn’t really thinking about a room and board kind of situation,” I replied dubiously. “I keep irregular hours, and I’ve been living on Big Macs for the past few years.”

“Erika’s likely to tell you that a steady diet of Big Macs is the highway to heart surgery, Mark. The girls tend to overmother everybody in the vicinity. And they scold—a lot. You get used to that after a while. Nobody here is really rolling in money, so the room and board’s quite reasonable. The food’s good, and the girls take care of the laundry. To get the benefits, though, you lose your Saturdays. Saturday is national fix-up day around here. If you’re interested, I can show you around the place.”

“Aren’t the ladies here?”

“No. They’re all off visiting before classes begin.”

“I might as well have a look,” I agreed.

“Come along, then,” he said, starting toward the antique front door with its small, ornate glass inserts.

“Are there any other house rules I should know about?” I asked when we reached the porch.

“They aren’t too restrictive. No dope sort of fits in with the no booze policy, and the no loud music stipulation doesn’t really bother me.”

“I can definitely agree with that one. Any others?”

“No in-house hanky-panky is the only other restriction. The girls aren’t particularly prudish, but they’ve encountered problems in that area in the past.”

“That’s been going around lately,” I agreed, as we went on into the entryway.

“The rule runs both ways,” he continued. “The girls are off-limits, but the boys are, too. We’re not supposed to make passes at them, and they’re not supposed to make passes at us. No physical stuff on the premises.”

“It makes sense,” I agreed. “Emotional involvement can get noisy.” I looked around. The entryway had a pre-World War II feel about it. A wide staircase of dark wood led up to the second floor, and an archway opened into a living room that was quite a bit larger than the ones in more contemporary houses.

“The downstairs is girl territory,” James told me. “Boy country’s upstairs.” He led me on into the living room. The ceilings were high, the windows all seemed tall and narrow, and the woodwork was dark. “Elegant,” I noted.

“Shabbily elegant,” James corrected. “It’s a bit run-down, but it’s got a homey feel. The dining room’s through those sliding doors, and the kitchen’s at the back. It’s got a breakfast nook, where the girls and I’ve been taking most of our meals. Let’s go upstairs, and I’ll show you the bedrooms.”

We went up the wide staircase to the second floor. “My place is at the end of the hall,” he told me, “and the bathroom’s right next to it. The two at this end are vacant.” He opened the door on the right.

The room had the sloped ceiling you encounter on the second floor of older houses, and it’d obviously seen some hard use over the years. It was quite a bit larger than I’d expected, and the contemporary furniture looked dwarfed by the generous size of the room.

“The fellow who lived here before prohibition came into effect was a drunken slob,” James told me, “and he was hard on furniture. He wanted to get physical when Trish kicked him out after the third time she caught him sneaking whiskey in here, but I reasoned with him and persuaded him not to.”

“Persuaded?”

“I threw him down the stairs, then tossed all his stuff out the window.”

“That gets right to the point, doesn’t it?”

“I’ve had a fair amount of success with it—one of the advantages of being bigger than a freight truck. The rest of the party boys who lived here got the point, and they were all very polite to Trish after that. What do you think about the place, Mark? Would you like to take a stab at it?”

“I think I might give it a try. A quiet place to study sort of lights my fire. When are the girls likely to come home?”

“Tomorrow—or so they told me. I’ll give you the phone number, and you can check before you come by. I’ll put in a good word for you with the ladies. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble getting admitted.”

“Thanks, James. I’ll keep in touch.” We shook hands, and then I went out to my car. James had a “Big Daddy” quality that I liked. I was sure he and I could get along. The girls, of course, might sour the deal, but I decided to keep an open mind until I met them. The overall arrangement seemed almost too good to be true, but I wasn’t about to buy into some kind of absolute dictatorship where I’d be low man on the totem pole. I was going to have to wait until tomorrow to find out exactly which way the wind blew.

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