By DAVID EDDINGS
Published by Del Rey Books:
THE BELGARIAD
Book One: Pawn of Prophecy
Book Two: Queen of Sorcery
Book Three: Magician's
Gambit
Book Four:
Book Five: Enchanters' End
Game
THE MALLOREON
Book One: Guardians of the
West
Book Two: King of the Murgos
Book Three: Demon Lord of
Karanda
.Book Four: Sorceress of
Darshiva
Book Five: The Seeress of
Kell
THE ELENIUM
Book One: The Diamond Throne
Book Two: The Ruby Knight
Book Three: The Sapphire
Rose
THE TAMULI
Book One: Domes of Fire
Book Two: The Shining Ones
Book Three: The Hidden City
HIGH HUNT
THE LOSERS
By David & Leigh Eddings
BELGARATH THE SORCERER
POLGARA THE SORCERESS
THE RIVAN CODEX
THE REDEMPTION OF ALTHALUS
For Angela
and Pat-for providing theological and political advice before they went back to
A Del Rey© Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group Copyright © 2002 by David
Eddings and Leigh Eddings
All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published
in the
Del Rey is a registered
trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.delreydigital.com
Library of
Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eddings, David.
ISBN o-345-44898-7
I. Eddings, Leigh.
II. Title. PS3555.D38 8454
2002 813'.6-dc2 1 2002276813
Manufactured in the
Designed by BTDnyc
First
Edition: July 2002
PRELUDE
Andante
Les Greenleaf and my dad, Ben
Austin, had served in the same outfit during the Vietnam War, and twenty-five
years later they could spend whole afternoons swapping war stories. They both
grew up in Everett, a town thirty miles north of
Aside from that, they couldn't have
been much more opposite. Les Greenleaf was a Catholic, a Republican, and a
member of the National Association of Manufacturers. My dad was a Methodist, a
Democrat, and a member of the AFL-CIO. Les Greenleaf had investments, and Ben
Austin lived from paycheck to paycheck. They were on opposite sides of just
about any fence you could think of.
"Buddyship," though,
tends to jump over all kinds of fences. I guess that when people are shooting
at you, you get attached to the guy who's covering your butt.
Back during
the late sixties, staying out of the army and the war in '
Les
and my dad both graduated from high school in 1967. My dad promptly married
pretty Pauline Baker, his high-school sweetheart and went to work at Greenleaf
Sash and Door.
Les
Greenleaf enrolled in the
My
dad had evidently had a little spat with mom, and just to show her how
independent he was, he enlisted in the army-something
he might not have done if he'd been completely sober. He was,
however, sober enough to sign on for only two years rather than the customary
six.
As
it turned out, Les Greenleaf was inducted on the same day, so they started out
together. My mom had been pregnant-with me-during her little argument with dad,
which might have explained why she'd been so grouchy.
Anyway,
Ben and Les went off to war, and mom stayed home and sulked.
I
was about a year and a half old when they got out of the army, and I was among
the guests at the wedding of Mr. Lester Greenleaf and Miss Inga Wurzberger. I
was the one who slept through the whole ceremony. Inga was obviously of German
extraction-Bavarian, I think-and she'd been a sorority girl at U.W. while Les
was concentrating on cutting classes. The wedding had taken place in a Catholic
church, and I guess my dad had been a little uncomfortable about that-but
buddyship prevailed.
Inga and my mom got along well
together, and starting back when I was still a toddler, we often visited the
Greenleafs in their fancy home in a posh district of Everett. Since I was
absolutely adorable in those days, I was al-ways the center of attention during
those visits, and I thought that was sort of nice.
My
time in the limelight came to an abrupt halt in 1977 when Inga blossomed and
bore fruit-a pair of twin girls,
There was a whacko social theory at
that time to the effect that twins would grow up psychotic if they were dressed
alike. Inga blithely ignored it and followed the ancient custom of putting the
girls in identical dresses every morning, the sole difference being a red hair
ribbon for
Those two had all sorts of fun with
that twin-game, but now when I think back, maybe they were trying to tell us
something. The pretty little blond girls had no real sense of individual
identity. I don't think either one ever used the word "I" It was always
"we" with
That bugged their parents, but it
didn't particularly bother me. My solution to the "identification
crisis" was to simply address them indiscriminately as Twinkie and to
refer to them collectively as the Twinkie Twins. That made the girls a little
grumpy right at first, but after a while it seemed to fit into their conception
of themselves, and they stopped using their given names and began to address
each other as either Twinkie or Twink-even when they were using their private
language.
In
a peculiar way, that got me included in their private group. Our families were
close to begin with, and because I was seven years older than they were, the
chubby, golden-haired twins looked upon me as a big brother. I had to tie their
shoes, wipe their noses, and put the wheels back on their tricycles when they
came off. Every time they broke something they'd as-sure each other that
"Markie can fix it." Every now and then, one of them would slip and
say something to me in twin-speak, and they always seemed a little disappointed
and even sad when I didn't understand what they were saying.
As their official surrogate
brother, I spent a lot of my childhood and early adolescence in the company of
the Twinkie Twins, and I learned to ignore their cutesy-poo habit of whispering
to each other, casting sly looks at me, and giggling. By the time I moved up
into high-school-an event most adolescents view as something akin to a
religious experience-I was more or less immune to their antics.
In
May of my sophomore year, I turned sixteen and got my driver's license. My dad
firmly advised me that the family car was not
available, but he promised to check at the union hall for job opportunities
for young fellows in need of a summer job. I wasn't too hopeful, but he came
home with an evil sort of grin on his face. "You've got a job at a sawmill, Mark," he told me.
"No
kidding?" I was a little startled.
"Nope. You go to
work on the Monday after school lets out.”
“What am I going to be doing?"
"Pulling chain."
"What's
‘pulling chain’?"
"You
don't really want to know."
I found out why I wouldn't after
I'd joined the union and reported to work. I also found out why there were always job openings in sawmills when the
job involves the green chain. Sawmills convert logs from the woods into planks.
After a green hemlock log has spent six or eight weeks in the millpond soaking
up salt water, it gets very heavy,
and it's so water-logged that it sends out a spray when it goes through the
saw. The planks come slithering out of the mill on a wide bed of rollers called
the green chain. They're rough, covered with splinters, and almost as heavy as
iron. "Pulling chain" involves hauling those rough-sawed planks off
the rollers and stacking them in piles. It's a moderately un-fun job.
More-modern sawmills have machines that do the sorting, pulling, and stacking,
but the sawmill where I worked that summer hadn't
changed very much since the I920s, so we did things the old-fashioned way. I
didn't like the job very much, but I really, really wanted my own car, so I stuck it out.
I'd been an indifferent student at
best up until then, but after the summer of '86, my attitude changed. There
might just be a doctoral dissertation in psychology there-The Motivational Impact of the Green Chain maybe.
I became a much more serious student after that summer, let me tell you.
Pulling chain did earn me enough
money to buy my own car, of course, and that's very important to red-blooded
sixteen-year-olds, since it's widely known in that group that
"You ain't nothin' if you ain't got wheels." The Twinkie Twins
weren't very impressed by my not-very-shiny black '74 Dodge, but I didn't buy
it to impress them. They were only
third graders and by definition unworthy of my attention. They were blond,
still chubby with the remnants of baby fat, and they were at the tomboy stage
of development.
Time rushed on in the endless
I think the highlight of my first
year at the door factory came on the day when all the kids in
Just
for kicks, I took an evening course at the local community college in the
autumn quarter of that year, and I aced it. I was a little surprised at how
easy it'd been.
I
took another course during the winter quarter, and that one was even easier.
I
latched on to a steady girlfriend at the community college that winter, and we
both skipped the spring quarter. We broke up that summer, though, and I started
taking courses as a sort of hobby. I didn't really have any kind of academic
goal; you might just say I was majoring in everything.
Wouldn't
Everything 101 be an interesting course title?
That went on for a couple years,
and by then I'd racked up a fairly impressive number of credit hours. My dad
didn't say anything about my snooping around the edges of the world of
learning, but he was keeping track of my progress.
There was another strong odor of
collusion about what happened in late November of 1992. We'd been invited to
the Greenleafs' for Thanksgiving dinner, and after we'd all eaten too much, my
dad and the boss got involved in a probably well-rehearsed discussion of an
ongoing problem at the door factory. There were only four saws, and orders were
starting to back up because each saw could only cut so much door stock in eight
hours. This meant that the boss had to pay a lot of overtime, which was great
for the sawyers right at first, but after it got to be a habit, there was a lot
of grumbling about ten- or twelve-hour days. The solution was fairly simple.
It's called swing shift. One sawyer would have to work from four in the
afternoon until
Guess
who got elected for swing shift. And guess who'd now have all kinds of free
time during the normal daytime hours at
I
think the Twinkie Twins got more entertainment out of this elaborate scam than
anybody else did. They were high-school freshmen now, but they'd reverted to
whispering in twin-speak, giving me those sickeningly cute smirks, and
giggling.
I carried a full course load in
both the winter and spring quarters in 1993, and that satisfied the
requirements for graduation. It'd taken me four years to reach the point that a
full-time student achieves in two, but I was now an Associate in Arts and Sciences-with
honors, no less. And I had a major in English, but with a lot of those
"everything" courses that didn't apply.
I went through the cap and gown
ceremony with the Austins and Greenleafs in the audience, and after the
ceremony we all went back to Greenleaf Manor for another of those "let's
steer Mark in the right direction" sessions at which I was usually outnumbered
six to one.
Inga Greenleaf led the assault.
"What in the world were you thinking of, Mark?" she demanded, waving
a copy of my transcript at me. "Your grades are very good, but half the
courses you took weren't even remotely connected to your major."
"I
didn't have a major when I started,
Inga," I explained. "I was just browsing. It was only after a year or
so that I finally settled on English."
"There
are some definite holes in this," she told me, still brandishing my
transcript. "I've checked with the
I
threw a quick look at my dad. We'd already discussed that at some length. He shook his head slightly.
"I'm sorry, Inga," I said
flatly. "Let's just forget that student loan business. Sooner or later,
I'm going to have a mortgage on a house biting chunks out of my paychecks, and
probably car payments as well-that of Dodge can't run forever. I'm not going to
add a student loan on top of that. I
won't hand three-quarters of my paycheck to the Last National Bank to pay
interest. I'll look for a part-time job, but no jobbee, no schoolie, and that's
final."
"Oh, goodie!" one of the
twins said, clapping her hands together. "We get to keep him!"
"Shush, Twink," her
mother snapped. I don't think she even realized that my Twinkie invention had
crept into her vocabulary.
The
boss was squinting at the far wall. "When you get right down to it, Mark,
you've already got a part-time
job."
"It's
full-time, isn't it?" I replied.
"Of course it is," he
replied sardonically. "A guy who works by the hour paces himself to make
the job fit the time. If you bear down, I'll bet you could finish up in four or
five hours a night, and if it starts to pile up, you could clear away the
leftovers on Saturday."
"And
if you're really serious about getting an education, you can live at home and
commute to the university," my mom added. "Your dad and I can't send
you to Harvard, but we can give you a place to live and regular meals. That
way, you won't have to rent an apartment or buy groceries."
"Our
big brother's going to get away from us after
all," one of the twins lamented in mock sorrow.
"Nothing
lasts forever, Twink," I told her.
"Who's going to tie our little
shoes?" the other twin said. "Or glove our little hands?" the
first girl added.
"You'll
both survive," I told them. "Be brave and strong and true, and you'll
get by."
They
stuck their tongues out at me in perfect unison.
"This
is going to crowd you, Mark," Les warned me. "You won't have very
much free time. Don't make the same mistake I made when I went there. I managed
to party my way onto the flunk-out list in just two years.”
“I'm
not big on parties, boss," I assured him.
"Listening to a bunch of half-drunk guys ranting about who's going to make
it to the Rose Bowl doesn't thrill me. We can give the university a try I
guess, and if it doesn't work out-ah, well."
I
filled in the gaps on my transcript that summer, and on a bright September
morning, I drove down to the
I
took a stab at the "full-bore" business the boss had mentioned, and I
found that he was right. I cleared everything away in just under
five hours. That made me feel better.
Classes
began the following Monday, and my first class, American Literature, started at
eight-thirty. There was a kind of stricken silence in the classroom when the
instructor entered. "It's Conrad!" I heard a strangled whisper just
behind me.
"Good
morning, ladies and gentlemen," the white-haired professor said crisply.
"Your regularly scheduled instructor has recently undergone coronary
bypass surgery, so I'll be filling in for him this quarter. For those of you
who don't recognize me, I'm Dr. Ralph Conrad." He looked round the
classroom. "We will now pause to give the more timid time to beat an
orderly retreat."
Now,
that's an unusual way to start a
class. I thought he was just kidding around, so I laughed.
"Was it something I
said?" he asked me with one raised eyebrow. "You startled me a bit,
sir," I replied. "Sorry."
"Perfectly
all right, young man," he said benignly. "Laughter's good for the
soul. Enjoy it while you can."
I glanced around and saw that fully
half the students were grabbing up their books and darting for the door.
Professor Conrad looked at those of
us who'd remained. "Brave souls," he murmured. Then he looked
directly at me. "Still with us, young man?" he asked mildly.
His superior attitude was starting
to irritate me. "I'm here to learn, Dr. Conrad," I told him. "I
didn't come here to party or chase girls. You throw, and I'll catch, and I'll
still be here when the dust settles."
What a dumb thing that was to say! I soon discovered just
how tough he really was. He crowded me, I'll admit that, but I stuck it out. He
was obviously an old-timer who believed in the aristocracy of talent. He
despised the term "postmodern," and he viewed computers as
instruments of the devil.
He
had his mellower moments, though-fond reminiscences about "the good old
days" when the English Department resided in the hallowed, though rickety,
Parrington Hall and he was taking graduate courses from legendary professors
such as Ebey, Sophus Winther, and E. E. Bostetter.
I maintained my "you throw it
and I'll catch it" pose, and that seemed to earn
me a certain grudging respect from the terror of the department. I wouldn't go
so far as to say that I aced the course, but I did manage to squeeze an A out
of Dr. Conrad.
I was a bit startled at the
beginning of winter quarter when I discovered that I'd been assigned to a new
faculty advisor-at his request.
Guess
who that was.
"You've managed to arouse my
curiosity, Mr. Austin," Dr. Conrad explained, after I rather bluntly asked
him why he'd taken the trouble. "Students who work their way through
college tend to take career-oriented classes. What possessed you to major in
English?"
I shrugged. "I like to read,
and if I can get paid for it, so much the better."
"You plan to teach,
then?"
"Probably so-unless I decide
to write the Great American Novel."
"I've read your papers, Mr.
Austin," he said dryly. "You've got a long way to go if that's your
goal."
"It beats the hell out of
pulling chain, Dr. Conrad."
"Pulling chain?"
I explained it, and he seemed just
a bit awed. "Are you saying that people still do that sort of thing?"
"It's called ‘working for a
living.' I came here because I don't want to do that no more."
He
winced at my double negative.
"Just kidding, boss," I
told him. And I don't think anybody'd ever called him "boss" before,
because he didn't seem to know how to handle it.
By
the end of winter quarter that year I'd pretty well settled into the routine of
being a working student. There were times when I ran a little short on sleep,
but I could usually catch up on weekends.
I
finished up the spring quarter of 'q4 and spent the summer working at the door
factory to build up a backlog of cash. Things had been a little tight a few
times that year.
The Twinkie Twins were high-school
juniors now, and they'd definitely blossomed. Their hair had grown blonder, it
seemed-chemically modified, no doubt-and their eyes were an intense blue.
They'd also developed some other attributes that attracted lots of attention
from their male classmates.
Looking back, I'm sometimes puzzled
by my lack of "those kinds of thoughts" about the twins. They were
moderately gorgeous, after all-tall, blond, well built, and with strangely
compelling eyes. It was probably their plurality that put me off. In my mind
they were never individuals. I thought of them as "they," but never "she."
From
what I heard, though, the young fellows at their high school didn't have that
problem, and the twins were very popular. The only com-plaint seemed to be that
nobody could ever get one of them off by herself.
It
was during my senior year at U.W that I finally came face to face with Moby Dick. The opening
line, "Call me Ishmael" and the climactic, "I only am escaped to
tell thee" set off all sorts of bells in my head. Captain Ahab awed
me. You don't want to mess around with a guy who could say, "I'd smite the
sun if it offended me." And his obsessive need to avenge himself on the
white whale put him in the same class with Hamlet and Othello.
Moby Dick has been
plowed and planted over and over by generations of scholars much better than I,
though, and I didn't really feel like chewing old soup for my paper in the
course. Dr. Conrad was our instructor, naturally, and I was fairly certain that
he'd take a rehash of previous examinations of the book as a personal insult.
Then
I came across an interesting bit of information. It seems that when Melville
was writing Billy Budd, he kept
borrowing
Dr. Conrad found that kind of
interesting. "I wouldn't hang your doctoral dissertation on it, Mr.
Austin," he advised, "but you might squeeze an MA thesis out of
it."
"Am
I going for an MA, boss?" I asked him.
"You bet your hippie you
are," he told me bluntly. "Bippie?"
"Isn't
it time for you to get back to
I considered the notion of graduate
school while I was trimming door stock that evening. It was more or less
inevitable-an English major with-out an advanced degree was still only about
two steps away from the green chain. With an MA, I could probably get a
teaching job at a community college-a distinct advantage, since the idea of
teaching high school didn't wind my watch very tight.
I
had a sometime girlfriend back then, and she went ballistic when I told her
about my decision to stay in school. I guess she'd been listening to the
ghostly sound of wedding bells in her mind, which proves that she didn't
understand certain ugly truths. Her father
was a businessman in
This is very painful for me, so
I'll keep it short. In the spring of 1995, the twins attended one of those
"kegger parties" on a beach near Mukilteo, just south of
As
best the authorities were able to reconstruct what happened,
The next morning the twins were
discovered near the zoo. One was dead, raped and then hacked to death with
something that wasn't very sharp. The other twin was sitting beside the body
with a look of total incomprehension on her face. When the authorities tried to
question her, she replied in a language that nobody could understand.
The authorities-assorted cops,
detectives, the coroner, and so un-questioned Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf
extensively, but they didn't learn much: the boss and the missus were shattered
and even in the best of times, they couldn't translate the girls' private language-they
couldn't even tell the girls apart. So after the cops discovered that
But nobody could prove it. The
footprints routinely taken of all newborns turned out to be missing from the
records at
Les
Greenleaf nearly flipped when he saw his daughter listed as an
"unidentified female" in official reports.
The surviving twin continued to
answer all questions in twin-speak, and so the Greenleafs had no choice but to
put her in a private sanitarium in the hope that the headshrinkers could wake
up her mind. They had to fill out papers, of course, and they arbitrarily
listed their surviving daughter as Renata-but they couldn't prove it either.
The
murder remained unsolved.
My folks and I attended the
funeral, of course, but there was no sense of that "closure" social
workers babble about, because we couldn't be certain which girl we were burying.
We didn't see very much of the boss
at the door factory that summer. Before he'd lost his daughters, he'd usually
come strolling through the yard a couple of times a day. After the funeral, he
stayed pretty much holed up in his office.
In August of that year that I had an even more
personal tragedy. My folks had visited the Greenleafs one Friday evening, and as they
were on their way home, they encountered what the cops refer to as a
"high-speed chase." A local drunk who'd had his driver's license
revoked after repeated arrests for "driving while intoxicated" got
himself all liquored up in a downtown bar, and the cops spotted his car
wandering around on both sides of Colby Avenue, one of the main streets in
Everett. When the lush heard the siren and saw the red light flashing behind
him, he evidently remembered the judge's warning when his license had been
lifted. The prospect of twenty years in the slammer evidently scared the hell
out of him, so he stomped on his gas pedal. The cops gave chase, of course, and
it was estimated that the drunk was going about ninety when he ran a red light
and plowed into my folks. All three of them died in the crash.
I
was completely out of it for a week or so, and Les Greenleaf took over making
the funeral arrangements, attending to legal matters, and dealing with a couple
of insurance companies.
I'd
already enrolled for my first quarter of grad school that fall, but I called
Dr. Conrad and asked him to put me on hold until winter quarter. My dad had
been shrewd enough to buy mortgage insurance, so our modest home in north
I'd
have really preferred different circumstances, though.
I kept my job at the door
factory-not so much for the wages as for something to keep me busy. Sitting at
home wallowing in grief wouldn't have been a very good idea. I've noticed that
guys who do that are liable to start hitting the bottle. After what'd happened
in August, I wasn't too fond of
drunks, or eager to join the ranks of the perpetually sauced-up.
I
made fairly frequent trips to
It was in late November, I think,
when Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf and I actually got some good news for a change. Renata-we had agreed among ourselves by
then that it almost certainly was Renata
in that private sanitarium-woke up. She stopped talking exclusively in
twin-speak and began answering questions in English.
Our
frequent contacts with Dr. Fallon, the chief of staff at the institution, had
made us aware that twin-speak was common-so common, in fact, that it had a
scientific name-"cryptolalia." Dr. Fallon told us that it shows up in
almost all cases of multiple births. The secret language of twins isn't all
that complicated, but a set of quintuplets can invent a language so complex
that its grammar book would run to three volumes.
When
Renata stopped speaking in cryptolalia, though, her first question suggested
that she wasn't out of the woods yet. When a patient wakes up and says, "Who
am I?" it usually gets the psychiatrist's immediate attention.
The
private sanitarium where she was being treated was up at
The rest home was several cuts
above a state-supported mental hospital, which is usually built to resemble
various other state institutions where people are confined. This one was back
among the trees on about five acres near the lakeshore, and there was a long,
curving drive leading to a large, enclosed interior court, complete with a gate
and a guard. It was obviously an institution of some kind, but a polite one. It
was a place where wealthy people could stash relatives whose continued
appearance in public had be-come embarrassing.
Dr. Wallace Fallon had an imposing
office, and he was a slightly balding man in his midfifties. He cautioned us
not to push Renata.
"Sometimes all it takes to
restore an amnesiac's memory is a familiar face or a familiar turn of phrase.
That's why I've asked you three to stop by, but let's be very, very careful.
I'm fairly sure that Renata's amnesia is a way to hide from the death of her
sister. That's something she's not ready to face yet."
"She
will recover, won't she?" Inga demanded.
"That's impossible to say
right now. I'm hoping that your visit will help her start regaining her
memory-bits and pieces of it, anyway. I'm certain that she won't remember what
happened to her sister. That's been totally blotted out. Let's keep this visit
fairly short, and we'll want it light and general. I have her mildly sedated,
and I'll watch her very closely. If she starts getting agitated, we'll have to
cut the visit short."
"Would
hypnotism bring her out of it?" I asked him.
"Possibly, but I don't think
it'd be a good idea right now. Her amnesia's a hiding place, and she needs that
for the time being. There's no way to know how long she'll need it. There have been cases where an amnesiac never
recovers his memory. He lives a normal life-except that he has no memory of his
childhood. Sometimes, his memory's selective. He remembers this, but doesn't
remember that. We'll have to play it by ear and see just how far she's ready to
go."
"Let's
go see her," Inga said abruptly.
Dr. Fallon nodded and led us out of
his office and down a hallway. Renata's room was quite large and
comfortable-looking. Everything about it was obviously designed to suggest a
calm stateliness. The carpeting was deep and lush, the furniture was traditional,
and the window drapes were a neutral blue. A hotel room in that class would
probably cost a hundred dollars a night. Renata was sitting in a comfortable
reclining chair by the window, placidly looking out at the rain writhing down
to sweep the lake.
"Renata," Dr. Fallon said
gently, "Your parents have come to visit you, and they've brought a
friend."
She
smiled rather vaguely. "That's nice," she replied in a fuzzy sort of
voice. Dr. Fallon's definition of "mildly sedated" might have
differed from mine by quite a bit. It looked to me as if Renata was tranked to
the eye-balls. She looked rather blankly at her parents with no sign of
recognition.
Then
she saw me. "Markie!" she squealed. She scrambled to her feet and
came running across the room to hurl herself into my
arms, laughing and crying at the same time. "Where have you been?" she demanded, clinging to me
desperately. "I've been lost here without you." I held her while she
cried, and I stared at her parents and Dr. Fallon in absolute bafflement. It
was obvious from their expressions that they had no more idea of what was going
on than I did.
FIRST
MOVEMENT
CHAPTER
ONE
What's happening here?" Les
Greenleaf demanded, after Renata had been sedated into a peaceful slumber and
we'd returned to Fallon's office. "I thought you told us that she has
total amnesia."
"Evidently, it's not quite as
total as we thought," Fallon replied, grinning broadly. "I think this
might be a major breakthrough."
"Why
does she recognize Mark and not us?" Inga sounded offended.
"I haven't got the faintest
idea," Fallon confessed, "but the fact that she recognizes somebody is very significant. It means
that her past isn't a total blank."
"Then
she'll get her memory back?" Inga asked.
"Some
of it, at least. It's too early to tell how much."
Fallon looked at me then.
"Would it be possible for you to stay here for the next few days,
Mark?" he asked. "For some reason, you seem to be the key to Renata's
memory, so I'd like to have you available."
"No problem, Doc," I
replied. "If the boss can drop me off at my place, I'll grab a few things
and come right back up the hill."
"Good.
I'll want you right there when Renata wakes up. We've made a connection, and we
don't want to lose it."
Les and Inga took me back to my
place when we left the sanitarium. I tossed some clothes and stuff into a
suitcase, grabbed some books, and drove my old Dodge back to
"We
don't necessarily have to mention this to her parents, Mark," Fallon told
me when I reported in, "but I think you'd better be right there in the
room when Renata wakes up. Let's not take any chances and lose this. All the
rooms here have surveillance cameras, so I'll be watching and listening. Don't
push her or say anything about why she's here. Just be there."
"I
think I see where you're going, Doc," I told him.
The shot Dr. Fallon had given her
kept Twink totally out of it until the next morning, and that gave me time to
think my way through the situation. I was still working through my grief at
losing my parents, but it was time to put my problems aside and concentrate,
here and now, on Twink. If she needed me, I sure as hell wasn't going to let
her down.
I
pushed the reclining chair over beside her bed, pulled the blanket up around my
ears, and tapped out.
When I woke the next morning,
Renata was still sound asleep, but she was holding my
hand. Either she'd come about halfway out of her drug-induced slumber and found
something to hold on to, or she'd just groped around for it in her sleep. Then
again, it might have been me who'd
been looking. It was sort of hard to say.
One of the orderlies brought our
breakfast about seven, and I tugged on Twink's hand a couple of times.
"Hey, sack-rat," I said, "rise and
shine. It's daylight in the swamp."
She
woke up smiling, for God's sake!
That's sick! Nobody smiles that early
in the morning!
"I need a hug," she said.
"Not 'til you get up."
"Grouch," she accused me,
her face still radiant.
That
first day was a little strange. Twink watched me all the time,
and she had a vapid look on her face every minute. I tried to read, but it's
awfully hard to concentrate when you can feel somebody watching you.
There
was also a fair amount of spontaneous hugging.
I checked in with Dr. Fallon late
that afternoon, and he suggested that I should probably let Twink know that I
wasn't going to be a permanent fixture. "Tell her that you'll have to go
back to work before too much longer. Let her know that you'll visit her often,
but you have to earn a living."
"That's
not entirely true, Doc," I told him. "I've got a few bucks stashed
away."
"You don't need to mention
that, Mark. We don't want her to become totally dependent on your presence
here. I think the best course might be to gradually wean her away. Stay here
for a few more days, and then find some reason to run back to
"You're the expert, Doc. I won't do anything to hurt her,
though."
"I think she might surprise
you, Mark."
There was another bout of hugging
when I got back to Twink's room. That seemed just a bit odd. There hadn't been
much physical contact between the twins and me in the past, but now it seemed
that every time I turned around, she had her arms wrapped around me.
"Renata," I said finally,
"you do know that we aren't alone, don't you?" I pointed at the
surveillance camera.
"These
aren't those kinds of hugs, Markie." She shrugged it off. "There are
hugs and then there are hugs. We don't do the other kinds of hugs, do we? And I
wish you wouldn't call me ‘Renata.' I don't like that name."
"Oh?"
"I'm Twinkie, remember? Only
people who don't know me call me 'Renata.' I knew that I was Twinkie the moment
I saw you. It was such a relief to find out who I really am. All the
'Ren-blah-blah' stuff made me want to throw up."
"We don't get to pick our names,
kid. That's in the mommy and daddy department."
"Tough
cookies. I'm Twinkie, and I'm so cute and sweet that nobody can stand
me."
"Steady
on, Twink," I told her.
"Don't you think I'm cute and
sweet, Markie?" she said with obviously put-on childishness, fluttering
her eyelashes at me.
I
laughed. I couldn't help myself.
"Gotcha!" she crowed with
delight. Then she threw a sly glance at the surveillance camera. "And I
got you too, didn't I, Dockie-poo?" she said, obviously addressing Dr.
Fallon, who was almost certainly watching. "Dockie-poo?"
I asked mildly.
"All of us cute and sweet
nutcases make up pet names for the people and things around us. I have long
conversations with Moppie and Broomie all the time. They aren't too interesting, but a girl needs somebody to talk to, doesn't she?"
"I
think your load's shifting, Twink."
"I know. That's why I'm in the
nuthouse. This is the walnut ward. They keep the filberts and pecans in the
other wing. We aren't supposed to talk with them, because their shells are awfully
brittle, and they crack up if you look at them too hard. I was kind of brittle
when I first got here, but now that I know who I really am, everything's all
right again."
She was sharp; she was clever; and
she could be absolutely adorable when she wanted to be. I definitely hoped that Doc Fallon was watching. I was certain that
her distaste for her name was very significant. Now she had "Twinkie"
to hold on to, so she could push "Renata"-and "
I stayed for a couple more days,
and then I used the "gotta go to work" ploy Fallon had suggested to
ease my way out-well, sort of. I didn't really stay away very much. As soon as
I got off work at the door factory, I'd bag it on up to
Once she'd made the name-change and
put "Renata" on the back burner, Twink's recovery to at least partial
sanity seemed to surprise even Dr. Fallon. Evidently, her switchover to
"Twink" was something on the order of an escape hatch. She left
"
Dr. Fallon decided that she was
doing well enough that it'd probably be all right if she took a short furlough
for Christmas.
It was a subdued sort of
holiday-1995 hadn't been a very good year for any of us. Twink's aunt Mary, her
dad's sister, was about the only bright spot during the whole long holiday
weekend, which might seem a bit strange, in view of the fact that Mary was a
It was on Christmas Day that I
braced myself and finally broke the news to Twink that our schedule was about
to change. "I'll still be living at home, Twink," I reassured her,
"but I'll be going to classes at the university instead of working at the
door factory. I'll have to study quite a bit, though, so my visits might be a
little shorter."
"I'll be fine, Markie,"
she said. Then she gave me one of those wide-eyed, vapid looks. "Have you
heard the news? Some terribly clever fellow named
Mary
suddenly exploded with laughter.
"All right, Twink" I felt
a little foolish. "Would it bother you if I gave you a phone call instead
of coming up there?"
"As
long as I know that you care, I'll be fine. I'm a tough little cookie-or hadn't
you noticed?"
"Maybe
you two should clear that with Dr. Fallon," Inga suggested, sounding
worried.
"I'll be fine, Inga,"
Renata assured her. For some reason, Twink had trouble with "Mom" and
"Dad," so she called her parents by their names instead. I decided to
have a talk with Fallon about that.
After the holidays, I returned to
the university and started taking seminars, beginning with Graduate English
Studies. That's when I discovered just how far down into the bowels of the
earth the main library building ex-tended. I think there was more of it
underground than above the surface. Graduate English Studies concentrated on
"how to find stuff in the Lye-berry." That deliberate mispronunciation used to make Dr. Conrad crazy, so
I'd drop it on him every now and then just for laughs.
I was still commuting to
Renata's amnesia remained more or
less total-except for occasional flashes that didn't really make much sense to
her. Her furloughs from the hospital grew more frequent and lasted for longer
periods of time. Dr. Fallon didn't come right out and say it, but it seemed to
me that he'd finally concluded that Twinkie would never regain her memory.
Inga Greenleaf, with characteristic
German efficiency, went through Castle Greenleaf and removed everything even remotely
connected to
When the fall quarter of 1996
rolled around, Dr. Conrad decided that it was time for me to get my feet wet on
the front side of the classroom, so he bullied me into applying for a graduate
teaching assistantship, the academic equivalent of slavery. We didn't pick
cotton; we taught fresh-man English instead. It was called Expository Writing,
and it definitely ex-posed the nearly universal incompetence of college
freshmen. I soon reached the point where I was absolutely certain that if I
saw, ". . . in my opinion, I think that . . ." one more time, I'd be
joining Twinkie in the bughouse.
I endured two quarters of
Expository Writing. But when the spring quarter of 1997 rolled around, I
tackled my thesis and I demonstrated-to my own satisfaction, at least-that Billy Budd was a seagoing variation of Paradise Regained, with Billy and the
evil master-at-arms, Mr. Claggart, contending with each other for the soul of
Captain were. Since Billy was the hands-down winner, Melville's little parable
was not the tragedy it's commonly
believed to be. My thesis ruffled a few feathers in the department, and that
was enough to get my doctoral candidacy approved and my MA signed, sealed, and
delivered.
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
after-noon for an hour of what psychiatrists choose to call
"counseling"-at 15o 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
"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
"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
"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
She was about ten years younger
than her brother was, and she lived in the
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
Then there'd been counseling, which
didn't work; and eventually re-straining 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
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
"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 suit-able 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
"Why's everybody so uptight
about this?" she asked me while I was driving her back to
"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 for-ward 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
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
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
"That should be enough,
really. The girls aren't planning any major re-modeling. 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
up-stairs." 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.CHAPTER TWOMary Greenleaf met me at the
front door when I got there, touching a finger to her lips. "She's
sleeping," she said softly "All this scampering around has her worn
down to a frazzle." She stepped out onto the porch, quietly closing the
door behind her.
"She
is all right, isn't she?"
"Sure,
it's just the moving and settling in."
"I've got some things to take
care of here tomorrow," I told her, "so I'll grab a motel room for a
couple of nights. If Twink's feeling unsettled, I'd better stay close."
She nodded. "I wonder why it
is that you were the only one she could recognize when she finally came to her
senses."
"I got this here dazzlin'
personality," I kidded her. "Hadn't you noticed that?"
"Sure, kid," she said
dryly. "You want a beer?"
"Not right now, thanks all the
same."
"Did
you find a room?"
"I
think so. The landladies are away today, but I'll talk with them tomorrow. I
think it's going to work out. The house rules should keep things quiet."
"Sounds
good, Mark," she noted.
"The place is sort of
shabby," I told her, "but quiet's a rare commodity in student
housing."
"We've noticed that at the cop
shop. The riot squad's on permanent standby alert at the north precinct. When
the parties start spilling out into the street, we get lots of nine-one-one
calls."
"I can imagine. Oh, there's
something I've been meaning to ask you-you're a dispatcher, right?"
"That's
what they tell me."
"Do you have to wear a gun to
work?" I already knew the answer, of course, but I wanted to pinpoint the
location of that gun. Twink was a
re-cent graduate of Fallon's sanitarium, after all, and you don't really want a
gun lying around unattended in a situation like that.
Mary smiled faintly and pushed up
the bottom of her sweater to show me the neat little holster on her left side.
"She has to be with me all the time," she told me. "I thought
everybody knew that. If you're a cop, you wear a gun-whether you're on duty or
off."
"That
could be a pain in the neck sometimes."
"You bet it is." Then she
frowned slightly. "Do you happen to know if Ren ever took driving
lessons?" she asked.
"Of
course she did. Why?"
"It must be one of the things
she blotted out, then. I suggested to her that maybe her dad should buy her a
car-it's a good two miles to the campus from here. But she told me that she
doesn't drive."
"She didn't, not very often.
"Maybe that explains it.
Anyway, she told me that she's got a ten-speed bicycle at home. Next time you
go up to
"Hell,
Mary, if she wants to go anyplace, I'll pick her up and drive her there. This
is rain country, and I've never seen a bike with windshield wipers."
"You're missing the point,
Mark. Ren doesn't want a chauffeur;
she wants independence. If you volunteer to become her own private taxi driver,
it'll just be an extension of that cotton batting my idiot brother wants to
wrap her in. She may not actually use the bike very often, but just knowing
that it's here should give her a sense of self-reliance. That's really what
this is all about, isn't it?"
"You're one shrewd cookie,
Mary. It would have taken me months to work my way through that one."
"Oh, there's something else,
too. Ren forgot a box of tapes and CDs. She brought the player, but she left
all her music at home."
"Count your blessings," I
told her. "Kid music hasn't got much going for it but loud."
"I think Ren might surprise
you, Mark. She's into Bach fugues and Mozart string quartets."
"I
didn't know that."
"I think it might have been
"You've got that right. The
human mind is the native home of strange. I'd better go rent a motel room
before everything gets filled up. Tell Twink that I'll stop back later-or give
her a call."
"I'll
let her know."
I found a vacancy in a motel just
off
I called Twink along about
suppertime. She seemed OK, so I kept it short.
Monday
was drizzly. What else is new? It's almost always drizzly in
"Tell them I'll be right
over," I said, pulling on my coat as I grabbed my keys.
James met me at the front door.
"I put in a good word for you, Mark," he told me. "I think
you're in."
"You're
a buddy," I told him.
"You can hold off on those
thanks until after you've met the
ladies," he cautioned. "Trish takes ‘serious' out to the far end,
Erika takes it in the other direction, and you never know where Sylvia's coming from. They're in the kitchen."
"Let's
go see if I can pass muster," I said.
Like all the other rooms in the
house, the kitchen was fairly large, and it had the breakfast nook James had
mentioned to the right of the arched doorway.
The three ladies in the kitchen
were obviously waiting for me, and it occurred to me that James might have
overstated my qualifications. There was a certain deferential quality hanging
in the air as I entered.
One of the Erdlund sisters was a
classic Swede, tall, blond, and busty. The other one was more
svelte, and she had dark auburn hair. The third girl was, as James had
told me, cute as a button, tiny, olive-skinned, and with huge, liquid eyes and
short brunette hair.
"Here's our recruit,
Trish," James told the blond girl. "His name's Mark Austin. He's a
graduate student in English and a member of the carpenter's union. Mark, this
is Trish, our glorious leader."
"I wish you wouldn't do that,
James," she scolded, standing up and looking at me speculatively. Trish
was nearly as tall as I am, but that's not un-usual in
"Sorry, Trish," James
apologized. "Not too sorry. More like medium sorry"
"He teases us all the
time," she told me, smiling. "I'm pleased to meet you, Mr.
Austin." She held her hand out and when we shook, I noticed that she had a
fairly firm grip.
"Did
James fill you in on our house rules?" she asked.
"No booze, no dope, no loud
music, and no hanky-panky," I recited. "I understand that you've got
some renovations in mind as well."
"They're
part of the arrangement, Mr. Austin. I think you'll find our room and board
rate very reasonable, but that's because Erika and I expect a certain amount of
physical labor as well. Our aunt's going to be in a nursing home from here on
out, and my sister and I want to fix the house up so that we can put it on the
market and sell it. We'll try to confine the work to Saturdays so that the rest
of the week's quiet. James deals with electricity and plumbing, and you'd be
our resident carpenter. Would that cause you any problems?"
I
shrugged. "Probably not. I'm a fairly good
knock-around carpenter. As long as we stay clear of the building code, I can
probably handle things. I gather you want to avoid building permits and
inspections, right?"
"Definitely. If we get into building
permits, we come face-to-face with union-scale carpenters, and we don't have
that kind of money."
"We could always take up
begging, Trish," the auburn-haired girl suggested. "Sell pencils on
street corners with a little tin cup."
"My sister Erika," Trish
said sourly. "She's the smart-mouth in the family."
"How can you say that,
Trish?" Erika asked with wide-eyed innocence. "As long as we're
introducing ourselves," the small, cute brunette at the table said,
"I'm Sylvia Cardinale."
"We refer to her as the
Godmother, Donna Sylvia," James told me, grinning at her.
"Would you like to have me
make you one of those offers which you can't refuse, James?" she asked in
an ominous tone.
"Oops,"
he replied casually.
"We're obviously clowning
around, Mr. Austin," Trish apologized. "We'll get around to being
serious after classes start-at least I
hope so. Would you like to look at the vacant rooms?"
"James
showed them to me yesterday," I replied. "I'd like to have an-other
look at the one on the right side of the stairs, though. I've got an idea that
we might want to talk about."
"Of course," she said,
and led us all upstairs. A battered bed stood against the wall I was interested
in, so I pushed it out of the way and pulled out the tape measure I'd brought.
"I think this might actually work," I muttered, half to myself.
"What
have you got in mind, Mr. Austin?" Trish asked.
"Permanent bookshelves,"
I told her, thumping the heel of my hand against the wall in search of the
studs. "Fourteen inches," I mused. "This baby's well
built." Then I turned. "Here's the idea," I told the group. "Most
students use the standard brick-and-board arrangement for bookshelves, but
that's wobbly, and occasionally the whole makeshift thing collapses. It
occurred to me that permanent bookshelves wouldn't wobble, and they'd provide a
lot more shelf space. I need lots of shelf space, because I've got books by the
yard."
"Won't
that be sort of expensive?" Trish asked me.
"Not really," I told her.
"Unless you start getting into exotic woods, lumber's fairly cheap around
here. Oh, one other thing. James tells me that there are some empty rooms in
the basement. If it's okay, I'd like to put this furniture downstairs and bring
in my own."
"You have your own
furniture?" Erika asked. "That's unusual. Most students travel
light."
"I've got a house up in
Trish looked around at the room.
"If we're going to empty the room out anyway, we might as well paint it
before you move in."
"I gather that we've all sort
of agreed that I'll be living here?" I said, looking at the others.
"I think we'll be able to get
along with you, Mark," Erika said, "and the house rules should protect
you from any predatory instincts that crop up in the downstairs part of the
house."
"Erika!"
Trish said in a shocked tone.
"Just kidding, Trish. Don't get worked up."
"There
is something you might want to consider, Trish," James said.
"This place will probably
always be student housing, and permanent book-shelves in every room would
definitely up the market value, don't you think?"
"It would, wouldn't it?"
she agreed. "How long do you think it'll take to build your bookshelves, Mark?"
I shrugged. "Two or three days
is about all, and once I get the process down pat, the
shelves in the other rooms won't take nearly that long."
"All that sawing and pounding
is likely to disrupt things," Sylvia protested.
"Not if I take good
measurements," I disagreed. "The guys at the lumberyard can cut the
boards to my numbers, so there won't be very much sawing, and I'm not going to
use nails. Books are heavy, and nails tend to work loose. I'll use wood screws
instead. I want this puppy bolted to the wall."
"You
are going to paint it, aren't you?" Trish asked me.
"No, a couple coats of dark
stain would be cheaper, and stain dries faster."
"We want you," Erika said
with ominous intensity. "Steady, toots," Sylvia told her.
"When would you like to move
in, Mark?" Trish asked. "Today's what-the eighth?"
She
nodded.
"Classes start on the
twenty-ninth, but I'd like to get settled in a couple of weeks before that.
Moving my furniture and building the bookshelves won't take too long, so why
don't we zero in on the fourteenth for move-in day.
"Sounds
good to me," she agreed.
I checked out of the motel and
drove to
When I got to my house in north
I called Twink that evening. She
seemed to be pretty much OK, so I kept it short. Then I went back to sorting
and boxing.
By midafternoon on Tuesday, I had
things fairly well organized, so I went by the office of the rental agency that
was going to take care of the house for me and gave them a spare set of keys.
"I'm a little pushed for time right now," I told the agent.
"Could you make arrangements with a moving and storage company for me and
have them pick up the furniture?"
"We'll take care of it for
you, Mark," the agent told me. "That's one of the things you're
paying us for."
"I guess," I said. "Oh, another thing. The place needs a good cleaning.
Could you get hold of some professional housecleaners to go in and make things
presentable?"
"We'd do that anyway. We've
had a lot of experience with this sort of thing."
"Good. I'm a bit out of my
depth. I've chalked a big red ‘X' on the door of my room. My books, clothes,
and the furniture I'll be taking are in there. Tell the movers and cleaners to
leave that room alone. I'll pick that stuff up this coming weekend."
"Right," he agreed.
"Don't worry about a thing, Mark. We'll take care of everything for
you."
Yeah,
he would-for a hefty chunk of the monthly rent.
Then I went over to the door
factory to check in with Les Greenleaf. "How's Renata doing, Mark?"
he asked me with a worried look.
"She seems to be settling in,
boss. It took her a few days to get used to your sister's work schedule, but
she seems pretty much OK now."
"I still think we're rushing
into this." Then he sighed. "Did you find a place to live?"
"Yeah. It's only
a few blocks from Mary's house, so if Twink starts coming unglued, I can be
there in a flat minute."
"I appreciate that, Mark. Inga
and I worry a lot about Renata, but you're the one she seems to turn to."
I shrugged. "Listen, I think
I've come up with something that might ease her into things at U.W It might not
be a bad idea if the first class Twink audits is mine.
That'll put a familiar face at the front of the room on her first time out, so
she won't get wound up quite so tight. After she gets her feet wet, she'll be
able to move on, but let's not throw her into deep water right from the
git-go."
"That might be the best idea
I've heard all day, Mark. Just knowing that you'll be around if she needs you is taking a lot of the pressure off me.”
“That's what friends are for, boss." I stood up. "I'll stay in touch.
If Twink starts having any serious problems, I'll pass the word, and we can
jerk her out of
"You're
taking a lot of time and trouble with this, Mark."
"It's that big-brother thing,
boss. Oh, I almost forgot-Twink wants me to pick up her ten-speed and a box of
tapes and CDs she left behind. If it's OK, I'll swing by your place this
evening to pick them up." Then I remembered something. "Would it be
OK if I tapped the mill scrap heap a few times?" I asked him.
"Are
you building a house?" He looked amused.
"I've already got a house,
boss. It's in the wrong town, but it's mine. No, the place where I'll be
staying needs a few modifications-bookshelves, mostly. If I can rummage through
the junk lumber in the scrap heap, I might save the landladies a few bucks."
"Help
yourself," he said.
"Thanks, boss. I'd better bag
on up to
But the doctor was a little vague
when I asked him about warning signals. He made a fairly big issue of
"compulsive behavior."
"Define
‘compulsive,' Doc," I suggested.
"Anything she takes to
extremes-washing her hands every five minutes, ignoring her appearance, radical
changes in her eating habits. You know her well enough to spot anything
unusual. If something seems abnormal
to you, give me a call. You might want to have her aunt keep an eye on her as
well."
"If you were going to bet on
her recovery, what would you say the odds are, Doc?" I asked bluntly.
"Right now I'd say
fifty-fifty. This first term at the university is crucial. If we can get her
past this one, the odds should get better."
"We're still in the ifsy-andsy
stage, then?"
"That comes close, I'd
say."
"If she goes bonkers again,
she'll have to come back here, won't she?" He winced at my use of the word
"bonkers," but he didn't make an issue of it. "She'll probably
have to come back here a few times anyway, Mark. Recovering from a mental
illness is a long, slow process, and there are al-most
always setbacks. That's why those Friday sessions are so important. I'll need
to reevaluate her on a weekly basis just to stay on the safe side.”
“You're a gloomy sort of guy, Doc,
did you know that?"
"I'm in a gloomy profession.
Just watch Renata very closely for the first few weeks and report any peculiar
behavior to me."
"I'll
do what I can," I promised.
I drove back to
Mary was still asleep when I went
by the next morning, but Twink was up and moving. "You actually
remembered," she said when I carried her box into the kitchen. "Did
you bring my bike, too?"
"Naturally. It's tied to the top of my
car. Where do you want it?"
"Put
it on the back porch for now."
"You've
got quite a collection here," I said, tapping the box.
"I can't remember much of
it," she admitted. "After I went home from the nuthouse, I spent a
lot of time listening, but none of it stirred up any memories. What were you
doing up in
"I had to pick up a few things
and arrange to have the furniture put into storage. I'm not going to be living
there, so I'm going to rent the place out.
"Nothing ever stays the same,
does it, Markie?" she said sadly. "In theory, it's supposed to be
getting better, Twink"
"Oh, sure."
"Cheer up, baby sister. In my
infinite wisdom, I've decided to let you sit in during a class conducted by
Super Teacher."
"Super Teacher?"
"Me. I'll teach your socks
off, kid. I'm so good that sometimes I can barely stand myself
"
"Be
serious, Markie."
"I am. I teach a section of
English 131, and Dr. Fallon wants us to ease you into things here-familiar
faces and all that stuff. It seems to me that the two things sort of click
together. You get exposed to the world of education by somebody you know, and I
get to keep an eye on you at the same time I show you how unspeakably brilliant
I am. Isn't that neat?"
"You
just want to show off."
I shrugged. "If you got it,
flaunt it, kid. What time does Mary usually get up?"
"About two-or so. She doesn't get off work
until seven."
"Are you going to be all
right, Twink?" I asked her. "I've got a bunch of stuff I should take
care of."
"I'll be fine, Markie."
She patted the box I'd just delivered. "I've got my music now."
"Keep the volume down, Twink.
If you wake Mary up, she might get grouchy, and she packs heat."
"Heat?"
"She wears a gun. She is a
cop, you know.”
“I've got earphones. She won't hear
a thing.”
“I'll call you this evening, Twink.
Stay out of trouble.”
“I'll be good," she promised.
I drove over to the boardinghouse
to take some measurements for my bookshelves. My room was empty now, and I'd
decided to get the carpentry and painting out of the way before I rented a
truck to pick up my furniture.
Trish
stood in the doorway watching. "Why do you keep taking the same
measurement over and over, Mark?" she asked.
"It's
one of the rules, Trish-measure three times, because you can only cut once.
It's real hard to un-saw a board."
"I can imagine. I definitely
think permanent bookshelves in every room is an
excellent idea. Students always need places to keep their books." She came
in and sat down on the single chair I'd left in the room. "What's a
carpenter doing majoring in English?" she asked curiously.
"I
came in through the back door, Trish. I like to read, and if I major in
English, I can get paid for it."
"Our dad works in a sawmill up in
"No,
we're from Marysville-not that you can tell anymore where
"You've got that right, Trish.
Give it a few more years, and everything from
"Our dad sort of pushed Erika
and me into what he called ‘the professions,' " she replied. "He didn't want us to grow up to be waitresses or
store clerks. Erika's at least twice as smart as I am, so she was a shoo-in for
a scholarship here, but after I graduated from high school, Dad finagled a job
for me in a local law office. It was the senior partner there who pulled enough
strings to get me a scholarship in the pre-law here."
"Boy,
does that sound familiar," I noted. "My dad worked at Greenleaf Sash and
Door up in Everett, and after I'd taken a few courses at the community college
up there, I had whole bunches of people herding me in the direction of the
university. It's almost like a slogan sometimes-'Workers of the world unite!
Send your kids to college!' "
"Upward
mobility," she said. "It's all right, I suppose, but we tend to grow
away from our parents, don't we? Erika and I don't have too much in common with
our folks anymore. Erika sprinkles her conversation with medical terms, and I'm
starting to talk fluent legalese. Half the time I don't think Mom and Dad
understand what we're saying. It's sort of sad."
"At
least they're still there, Trish," I told her. "I lost my parents in
a car wreck a couple years ago."
"Oh,
Mark!" she exclaimed. "I'm so sorry"
"Things like that happen,
Trish. We grow up thinking that everything in the world is permanent. It isn't,
though. Things change all the time." Then I smiled faintly. "Aren't
we starting to poach on James's territory? I'm supposed to talk about split infinitives,
and you're supposed to talk about tarts."
"That's
‘torts,' Mark," she corrected me.
"Ah," I said.
"What's your preference, Trish? Do you like strawberry torts or raspberry
torts?"
She
burst out laughing. "You're a funny person, Mark."
"It's probably a fault.
Sometimes I think we take ourselves too seriously. A little laughter now and
then's probably good for us."
"We
don't laugh much in law school," she said, "or in the law firm where
I work either, for the matter."
"You're
still working for a living, then?"
"I'm a law clerk in a big firm
downtown-more finagling by my old boss in Marysville. My scholarship covers
tuition and books, and my downtown job puts groceries on the table."
"Been there," I said,
taking another measurement. "Done that.”
“I'm sure you have."
"Has
Erika got an outside job, too?"
"Oh, yes. She puts in a lot of
hours at a medical lab-blood tests and all that.
Erika's so good with a needle that she can pull a quart or two out of you
before you even know what she's up to. It's none of my business, but how do you
make ends meet? Are you building houses on the sly, maybe?"
I sighed. "No, Trish," I
told her. "The insurance on my folks gave me plenty of money. I can
probably get by for quite a while before I have to go looking for honest work
again."
"How
many shelves do you think you'll be able to put along that wall?" she
asked, quickly changing the subject.
"Quite
a few, actually. These ten-foot ceilings give me a lot of room to play
with. Of course, books come in all sizes, so there might be variations. I'll
probably have to play it by ear in each room. Your law books are fairly
uniform, so your shelves should be nice and even. Mine could end up pretty
higgledy-piggledy."
She stood up. "I'd better go
get started on supper," she said. "Have fun," I told her, going
back to my measurements.
CHAPTER
THREE
As
luck had it, the rain let up-briefly-on Thursday morning, so I made a quick
trip to the nearest lumberyard. Working with wet boards is a real pain, so I
took advantage of the break in the weather. A pickup truck would have made
things a lot easier, but I didn't have one, so I lashed the boards to the top
of my car instead. It's not the best way to transport lumber, but if you pad
the top of the car, it'll work-and it wasn't as if the house was all that far
from the lumberyard.
When
I pulled up in front of the house, there was a scruffy-looking young fellow
standing on the porch ringing the bell.
"They're not home right
now," I called to him when I got out of my car. "Any idea of when they're
likely to be back?" he called.
"It
shouldn't be too long. They were going to hit the grocery store this morning.
The pantry's running low."
"You
live here?" he asked me, coming down off the porch.
"Not
yet, but I will be by next week. Are you looking for a room?”
“Yeah. It'd be a long commute from Enumclaw. What's this ‘serious'
business?" He gestured at the sign in the front window.
"The
landladies have opinions," I told him, struggling with the knots that held
the boards to the top of my car.
"Let
me give you a hand," he offered.
"Gladly. We'll have
to lug these boards around to the side. I'd like to get them into the basement
before it starts raining again."
"You
said something about opinions," he said, while we were untying all my
knots.
I outlined the basic setup while he
helped me off-load the lumber, ending with the no-no list: "No booze, no
dope, no loud music, and no fooling around on the premises. The term they use
is ‘hanky-panky.' Their main objective is to keep the noise level down so that
everybody can concentrate on study."
"I
could probably live with that," he told me as we carried the boards around
to the outside basement door.
"You're
a student, I take it?"
"It wasn't entirely my
idea," he said glumly. "I work for Boeing, and they leaned on me to
go to grad school. It was too good a deal to pass up, so I'm stuck with it.
They cover the tuition and pay me my regular salary to hit the books. In
theory, my major's aeronautical engineering, but I'm not supposed to talk about
what I'm really working on."
"Top-secret stuff?"
"Sort of, yeah-Star Wars kind
of crap.”
“I'm Mark Austin, by the way."
"Charlie West," he
introduced himself, and we shook hands. "Are the Erdlund girls thinking
about total prohibition?" he asked then. "I usually have a few beers
after work, so I probably couldn't always pass a breathalyzer test."
"They don't take it quite that
far, Charlie," I assured him. "They just don't want us getting all
lushed-up on the premises. Far as I know, we're not talking about blue-nosed puritan
morality here, just peace and quiet."
"I
can go along with that. Do they get worked up about cooking in the rooms?"
"It's
a room and board setup. The girls do the cooking and the laundry."
"What
do the guys do?"
"The
heavier stuff plumbing, carpentry, that kind of thing. That's why
we're lugging all these boards inside: I'm building bookshelves. Right now
they're on the lookout for somebody who knows a little bit about fixing cars.
They've been burned a few times by mechanics who
specialize in making out the bills. Do you know anything about auto
mechanics?"
"I could probably build a car
from the ground up, if I really wanted to. That's my pickup out front. It
doesn't look too sharp on the outside, since I haven't gotten around to the
paint job yet, but you should see the engine. You don't
hardly ever come across a Mach-3 pickup."
"You're
kidding, of course."
"I wouldn't swear to it. I've
never punched it all the way out. The speedometer only goes up to 12o, and I
can bend the needle in about two blocks."
"That
sort of makes you a serious candidate, Charlie. Would living in the same house
with a black man give you any problems?"
"No. A green one might make me
nervous-they tell you to watch out for them. They've got all kinds of bad
habits-mating with spruce trees, eating public buildings, worshiping sewage
treatment plants, all the weird crap. What's your major, Mark?"
"English. Do you think Boeing might want to pay me to
sit around reading Chaucer?"
"I
wouldn't bet on it, but with Boeing, you can never be sure. Who's the black
guy?"
"James-he's in philosophy.”
“Heavy," Charlie said
admiringly.
"You wouldn't want to mess
with him," I cautioned. "He's got a George Foreman build, and he
backs up the Erdlund girls by looking mean and flexing his muscles. When Trish says ‘jump,' James tells you how high. He handled
most of the evictions when the no-booze policy went into effect. You usually
only have to throw a guy downstairs once to get your point across."
"This
sounds like a real fun place to live."
"The girls should be back
before long. I'm not sure exactly where Sylvia
is-possibly over in the psych lab trying to drive all the white mice crazy.”
“Is she another one of the Erdlund
girls?"
"No, they're Swedes. Sylvia's
Italian-in abnormal psych.”
“Fun
group."
"Are
you interested?"
"You
sound like a recruiting sergeant."
"We've just got one empty room
left, and I'd like to get somebody in there before classes start. If it stays
empty, Trish might send the rest of us out trolling for prospects. I'm a little
busy for that, what with putting up all these bookshelves. Trish likes the idea
so much that I'll probably be building bookshelves in bathrooms and closets
before the end of the school year. I just hope that wood screws are going to be
beefy enough to hold the weight."
"Use lock
screws," he suggested. "They expand when you tighten them, so they're
locked in place. If you put your shelves up with those babies, they'll outlast the house itself."
"I'll
give it a try."
We were coming back around the
house when the Erdlund girls pulled up out front. Trish was driving, and her
car was stuttering and popping as she drove up.
"Little problem with the
timing," Charlie noted.
"Can you fix it?" I asked
him.
"Piece of cake."
The girls got out of the car and
started hauling out bags of groceries. "Hey, babe," I called to
Trish, "this is Mr. Goodwrench, and he's thinking about signing on."
"Why does everybody think he's
a comedian?" she said, rolling her eyes upward.
"Sorry" I apologized.
"This is Charlie West. Boeing's paying him to go to graduate school, and
he tinkers with cars in his spare time."
"Really?"
Charlie
was looking at the tall Erdlund girls with an awed expression.
"Swedish girls come by the
yard, don't they?" he muttered to me. "I bet those two could play a
wicked game of basketball."
We went over to the car, and I
introduced the girls to Charlie. "How did you get Boeing to pay your
way?" Erika asked him.
"It was their idea, not
mine," Charlie replied. "Boeing's always interested in guys who might
come up with ideas they can steal and patent. I'm involved in a program I'm not
supposed to talk about, and if I happen to stumble across some whiz-bang new
technology, Boeing's going to own it, and they won't even have to pay me any
royalties for it."
"I
thought the cold war was over."
"The old one is," Charlie
replied. "The new one's just getting under way. The aerospace industry
absolutely hates peacetime, because
it cuts down the money-tree. Of course, if Boeing goes belly-up,
"I
didn't quite follow that," Erika admitted.
"Shakespeare," I
supplied. "Richard II Charlie
here seems to be a Renaissance man."
"But
I don't do ceilings," Charlie added.
I think his reference to the
Sistine Chapel missed the girls. "Did Mark fill you in on the house
rules?" Trish asked him.
"I can live with them,"
Charlie replied with an indifferent sort of shrug. "I take a beer once in
a while, but it's not my life work. Mark tells me you've got an empty room.
Could I take a look at it?"
"Of course," Trish told
him. "Let's get the groceries inside first, though, Erika."
"I'll give Mark a hand with
the rest of his lumber," Charlie said. "Then you can show me where to
flop."
"Don't let him get away,
Mark," Erika told me with a peculiar fierceness.
"Those are a couple of spooky
ladies," Charlie said, while we carried the rest of my boards around to
the side.
"Swedish
girls lean toward intensity," I agreed.
After we'd finished, Trish gave
Charlie the tour. He only glanced briefly into the room across the hall from
mine. "It'll do," he said almost indifferently. "I'll go back to
Enumclaw and pick up my junk. Would it be OK if I put my tools in that basement
room where Mark's got his lumber? I don't want to leave them in my truck. Good
tools fetch fancy prices in pawn-shops, so I don't want to take chances on
having somebody swipe them. If it's OK, I'll move in on Monday."
"That's
fine with me, Charlie," Trish told him.
"Would you mind if I painted
the room?" he asked then. "Pink walls aren't my scene."
"It's
your room," Trish told him. "Pick any color you like."
I spent the morning in the basement
staining the boards, then I went to a hardware store and bought those lock
screws Charlie had mentioned, came back, and started installing the shelves. It
went quite a bit faster than I'd thought it would, and I was better than
halfway through the job when I knocked off for the day.
I called Miss Mary's house when I
got back to the motel, and Twink answered the phone. "Where have been,
Markie?" she demanded. "I tried to call you four times today."
"I
was building bookshelves. Are you all right?"
"I was just lonesome, that's
all. I thought that maybe we could go to a movie or something."
"Is
there anything showing that you'd like to see?”
“Not really. I'd just like to get
out for a while.”
“Have you eaten yet?"
"I was going to pop a TV
dinner into the microwave.”
“Why don't I take you out to dinner
instead?”
“That'd be nice."
"I'll
take a shower and change clothes. I'll be there in about forty-five minutes,
OK?"
"Anything
you say, Markie."
I
realized that I'd been neglecting Twink for the past few days. I'd been busy,
of course, but that was no real excuse.
I took her to a Chinese restaurant,
and we pigged out on sweet-and-sour pork. Then we sat over tea and talked until
the restaurant closed. Twinkie seemed relaxed and even quite confident. She was
coming right along.
I was certain that I'd finish up
the shelves and the painting on Friday, so I'd only have one more night in the
motel before I'd be able to settle into my own room.
I got up fairly early and started
painting as soon as I got to the Erdlund house. I wanted the paint to be good
and dry before I moved in my furniture.
James
stuck his head in through the doorway about
"I'm
just a growing boy," I replied.
"Sure, kid. Who's this Charlie
guy the girls are all up in the air about?”
“He's an aerospace engineer who
works for Boeing. His hobby is cars, and that made the Erdlund girls wiggle
like puppies."
"Is
Boeing really paying him to go to
school? Or is he just blowing smoke in everybody's ears?"
"I
think he's giving us the straight scoop. He's a sort of slob who quotes obscure
passages from Shakespeare and knows more about the Italian Re-naissance than
you'd expect from an engineer. He's a sharp one, that's for sure. He'll be
moving in on Monday, and then you can judge for yourself.”
“Nobody
ever offered to buy me an education."
"We're
in the wrong fields, James."
"It looks like you're almost
finished," he observed. "Three more shelves on top, then it's all done.”
“Do you really have that many books?"
"Not
quite, but I'm giving myself room for expansion. When you major in English,
your library grows like a well-watered weed. I'll get those last few shelves
installed as soon as I finish painting. I want to polish it all off before the
local U-Haul place closes. I'll rent a truck this afternoon and bag on up to
"I'll go along," he
rumbled. "Loading furniture into a truck is a two-man job."
"I was sort of hoping you
might make that offer," I said, grinning at him.
"Have you got everything up
there all packed?”
“It's ready to roll." Then I
went back to painting.
I finished up by midafternoon, and
then I went to the U-Haul place and rented a truck.
James and I got an early start the
next morning. It was Saturday, and of course it was raining. It always rains on
weekends, or had you noticed? Monday through Friday can be sunny and bright,
but come Saturday, you get rain. James and I talked a bit on the way north, and
James told me that he'd started at the university after his wife had died of
cancer. "I needed something to distract me," he said rather shortly.
He clearly didn't want to go into any greater detail.
There was an awkward silence for a
while as we drove past
"What
got you into English, Mark?" he asked finally.
"Dumb luck,
probably." I launched into a description of my years at the
community college and my early major in "everything."
"You sound like a throwback to
the Renaissance-Mark da Vinci, maybe, or possibly Mark Borgia."
"It was an interesting time,
that's for sure. Isn't that an old Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting
times'?"
"I
seem to have heard that."
"I was just dabbling,
James," I explained. "I wasn't even working toward a degree-I took
courses in anything that sounded interesting. What got you into
philosophy?"
He shrugged. "The usual stuff ‘The meaning of life,' or the lack thereof." He seemed
to hesitate a moment. "It's none of my business, but how is it that a
young fellow who works for a living came to own a house? That usually doesn't
come along until quite a bit later."
"It's
an inheritance," I told him. "My folks were killed in a car accident,
and there was some mortgage insurance involved in the estate."
"Ah,"
he said and let the matter drop.
We reached my house in north
"Tools of the trade," I
said. "I guess I'm one of the last precomputer scholars, so my books take
up lots of room-which is fine with me. When I read something, it's on a real
page, not a monitor. No hysteria about rolling blackouts."
I
had to shift my emotions into neutral as I made a quick survey of the now-empty
house-I didn't want to start blubbering.
"Tough,
isn't it?" James said sympathetically.
"More
than a little. I grew up here, so there are all sorts of memories
lurking in the corners. There's a big cherry tree in the backyard, and the
Twinkie Twins used to spend hours up in that tree eating cherries and squirting
the pits at me."
"Squirting?"
"You put a fresh cherry pit
between your thumb and forefinger and squeeze. If you do it right, the pit zips
right out. The twins thought that was lots of fun. It was a summer version of
throwing snowballs."
"You
have twin sisters?"
"Not
exactly. They were the daughters of my dad's best buddy.”
“Were?"
I
hesitated for a moment. The story was almost certain to come out eventually
anyway, so there wasn't much point in trying to hide it. "One of them was
murdered a few years ago. The other one went a little crazy after that and
spent some time in a private sanitarium. Now she's starting to come out of
it-sort of. She's staying with her aunt down in Wallingford-about five blocks
from our place. Her headshrinker thinks that going to college might help
her."
"I'm not sure that U.W's the
best place to go looking for mental stability," James noted, as I locked
the front door.
"Her aunt and I will be
keeping a fairly tight grip on her," I told him. Then we closed and
latched the back door of the U-Haul van and climbed into the cab.
"You seem to be quite involved
with this surviving twin," James said rather carefully.
"There's none of that kind of
thing going on, James," I told him, starting the engine. "The Twinkie
twins were like baby sisters to me, and once you've seen a girl in messy
diapers, you're not likely to have romantic thoughts about her. I've just
always looked out for them."
"Twinkie
Twins?"
"In-house joke," I
admitted. "Nobody could tell them apart, so I got everybody started
indiscriminately calling them both ‘Twink.' They pretty much stopped being
"I'll bet you could send
Sylvia straight up the wall with that one," James said, chuckling.
"The concept of group awareness might damage her soul just a bit."
"Bees do it, and so do ants.
In a different sort of way, so do horses and wolves-and lions and elephants, if
you get right down to it. If animals do it, why not people?" I carefully
drove the truck off the front lawn and pulled out into the street.
"Did
the cops ever catch the murderer?"
"No, and even if they do, I'm
not sure they could convict him.”
“I don't quite follow you."
"Nobody can be positive which
twin was murdered.”
“What?" He sounded
incredulous.
"Well, nobody could ever tell
them apart, and the hospital lost the foot-prints they took as newborns."
"Why
not just ask the surviving twin?"
"She doesn't know who she is.
She doesn't remember anything.”
“Amnesia?"
"Almost
total.”
“What about DNA?"
"Identical
twins have the same DNA. So if they ever catch the guy, they might be able to
prove that he killed somebody, but I
don't think they'll ever be able to prove who. A good lawyer might get him off
scot-free-which'd be OK with me."
"What?
You lost me again."
"Hunting season opens up along
about then. If Twink's aunt doesn't bag the sumbitch, I might take a crack at
him myself. I'm sure I could come up with something interesting to do to send
him on his way. If I happen to get caught, I'll hire Trish to defend me."
"I
still think the courts would send him away, Mark. Murder is murder, and if Jane
Doe is the best the cops can come up with, he'll go down for the murder of Jane
Doe."
"You
live in a world of philosophical perfection, James. The real world's a lot more
‘catch as catch can.' That's why we have lawyers." Then I remembered
something and laughed.
"What's
so funny?" he asked.
"Chaucer got arrested
once-back in the fourteenth century”
“Oh?"
"He
beat up on a lawyer."
"Some things never change, do
they?" he said, as we pulled out onto the freeway heading south.
When
we got to the boardinghouse, James and I carried all my stuff up-stairs and
stacked it in my room. All in all it'd taken longer than I'd thought it would,
so I decided to motel it for one more night. I'd already put in a full day, and
I was feeling too worn down to start setting things up.
I took the truck back to U-Haul,
paid them, and retrieved my Dodge. Then I went by Mary's place to check on
Twinkie-I still felt guilty about the way I'd ignored her for the past week.
Mary was nice enough to invite me
to dinner, and the three of us sort of lingered over coffee afterward.
"That sanitarium is pretty
fancy, isn't it?" Mary said.
"I didn't quite catch
that," I said.
"My weekly visit to
Dockie-poo," Twink explained. "You forgot about that, didn't you,
Markie?"
"I
guess I spaced it out," I admitted. "How did it go?"
"Nothing new or unusual,"
Twink replied. "Fallon asked all those tedious questions and scribbled
down my answers in that stupid notebook of his. I told him enough lies to make
him happy, and then Mary and I dropped by the house and had supper with Les and
Inga."
"Doesn't
all that scampering around crowd you?" I asked Mary.
She shrugged. "Not
really," she said. "Ren and I took off from here about three, so we
missed the
"If it gets to be too much, I
could run Twink on up there on Fridays. That's a light day for me most of the
time."
"We can pass it back and
forth, if we have to. I don't think it'll give me any problems, though."
"Did
Fallon make any suggestions?" I asked Twink.
"Nothing I haven't heard from
him before," she replied. "I'm supposed to avoid stress. Isn't that
an astonishing suggestion? I mean, wow!"
"Be
nice," I told her.
She
made an indelicate sound and changed the subject.
About
By
I
sighed and started stacking books on the floor, separating English literature
from American and throwing the miscellaneous stuff on the bed. I came across
books I'd forgotten I owned.
By
evening, I'd finally put things into some kind of coherent order, and that gave
me a sense of accomplishment. Fortress
After
dinner that evening-my first Erdlund Epicurean Delight-I called Twink to make
sure she was still on the upside. She was all bubbly, so things seemed to be
pretty much OK.
"You
might want to start thinking about going to class, Twink," I told her.
"The quarter starts two weeks from tomorrow. The class I'll be teaching
starts at one-thirty in the afternoon, so you won't have to do that cracky-dawn
stuff. I can stop by and pick you up, if you'd like."
"That's why they invented
buses, Markie. I'm a big girl now, remember?”
“We've still got a while to kick it
around, Twink. I'll be a little busy for the next two weeks, though. I've got a
lot of things to take care of on campus."
"Quit
worrying so much, Markie. It'll give you wrinkles. Sleep good."
The next morning, I drove to the
campus to check in with Dr. Conrad. "And how did you spend your summer
vacation, Mr. Austin?" he asked me with a faint smile.
"Did
you want that in five hundred words, Doc?"
"I
think a summary should be enough-I probably won't be grading you on it."
"Actually, I spent quite a bit
of time conferring with a headshrinker.”
“Has our load been shifting?"
"I don't think so, but I'd
probably be the last to know. Actually, the daughter of a family friend just
graduated from a private mental hospital, and she'll be taking some classes
here. First, I had to get her moved in with her aunt up in
"I'm
sure that if I'm patient, you will start to make some sense here."
"I wouldn't count on it, Doc.
It's been a pretty scrambled summer. I think I'll go hide in the library for a
couple of weeks to get my head on straight again."
"That
sounds like a plan," he said sarcastically.
"Would
you prefer some golden oldies by the Bee-doles? Or maybe ‘You ain't nothin' but
a Clown-dawg' by Olvis Ghastly?"
"Try
the Brandenburg Concertos, Twink," I suggested. "Avoid teenie-hopper
music whenever you can. It's hazardous to your hearing, if not your health. Did
your aunt go to work already?"
"She's taking a bath. I've got
an awful headache for some reason.”
“Take two aspirin and call me in
the morning."
"Fun-nee, Markie. Funny,
funny, funny. Go away now. My wolves want to sing to me." Her voice
sounded sort of vague, but there was a peculiar throaty vibrance to it that I'd
never heard before.
Then
she abruptly hung up on me, and I sat there staring at the phone and wondering
just what was going on.
I
spent the rest of the day in the library, and I didn't get home until about
eight that evening. Trish got on my case for missing supper, but after some
extensive apologies, she relented and fed me anyway. The mother instinct seemed
to run strong and deep in our Trish.
After I'd eaten, I went into the
living room to use the community telephone. I dialed Mary's number, but it was
Twink who answered. I heard some weird noises in the background, and at first I
thought we might have a bad connection.
"No,
Markie," Renata said. "It's not the telephone. I'm listening to some
music, that's all."
"It
doesn't sound all that musical to me, Twink. What's it
called?"
"I haven't got a clue.
Somebody-maybe even me-taped something and forgot to label it."
"It
sounds like a bunch of hound dogs that just treed a possum," I told her.
"I
think they're wolves, Markie-at least on this part of the tape. Later on, the
wolf howls gradually change over and become a woman's voice.”
“You've
got a strange taste in music, Twink."
CHAPTER
FOUR
James woke me at
"Oh,
right," I said, coming up a little bleary-eyed. It was obviously going to
take me a while to get used to regular hours. For the past couple of years, I'd
eaten whenever it'd been convenient, but now I was living in a place where the
meals came at specific times and were served in specific places-breakfast in
the kitchen and dinner in the dining room. Lunch was sort of "grab it and
growl," largely because our schedules wouldn't match once classes started.
I got dressed and staggered to the
bathroom to shave and brush my teeth. Then I followed my nose to the kitchen. I
really needed some coffee to get my engine started.
The girls, still in their
bathrobes, were bustling around preparing breakfast, and they looked terribly
efficient. Evidently, when the Erdlund aunt had been running the house, it'd
been one of those "kitchen privileges" places where the boarders were
permitted to cook their own meals, since there were still two refrigerators and
a pantry. You almost never see pantries in contemporary housing. Like sitting
rooms and parlors, they seem to have fallen by the wayside in the twentieth
century's rush toward minimal housing made of
tacky-tacky.
The
cupboard doors, I noticed, were a little beat-up, and the linoleum on the floor
was so ancient that the pattern had been worn off in places where there'd been
heavy traffic. The worn places looked almost like game trails out in the woods.
"Mark!" Trish snapped at
me, "Will you please get out
from underfoot?”
“Sorry" I apologized. "I
think that after the bookshelves, we might want to take a look at this kitchen.
It's seen a lot of hard use."
"Later, Mark," Erika told
me, grabbing me by the arm and hustling me out of the work zone. She pointed at
a chair off in one corner. "There!" she told me, snapping her
fingers. "Sit! Stay!"
"Yes,
ma'am," I replied obediently.
Then she brought me a cup of coffee
and patted me on the head. "Good boy," she said. Erika tended to be
more abrupt than her sister. If she was going to practice medicine, she'd
probably have to work on her bed-side manner. She was going to take some
getting used to, that much was certain.
So was her coffee. Erika obviously
believed that the only substitute for strong coffee was stronger coffee. It was
good, mind you, but it was strong enough to peel paint.
Sylvia set the table, and Trish was
flipping pancakes with a certain flair. It was all
sort of homey and pleasant, and things smelled good. I was sure I could learn
to like this.
Then James and Charlie came down
and we all took our places at the table and attacked Trish's pancakes.
"These are great, Trish,"
Charlie said. "I haven't had pancakes like these since the summer when I
worked in a logging camp."
"I
thought you were a Boeing boy, Charlie," James said.
"That came later on,"
Charlie replied. "I've worked lots of jobs-some good, some bad."
"You
ever pull chain?" I asked him.
"Oh, gosh yes," he
replied. "That one goes in the bad column.”
“Amen to that," I agreed.
"All the way down at the bottom."
"Anyway," Charlie
continued, "you wouldn't believe the
breakfasts they used to feed us in that logging camp-and an ordinary,
run-of-the-mill dinner in a logging camp is pretty much like Thanksgiving. A
logger can put away a lot of food. You aren't going to swing an eight-foot
chain saw very long on a steady diet of Rice Krispies. That's why the kitchen's
the most important building in a logging camp. If the boss is dumb enough to
hire a bad cook, the whole crew's likely to quit after about a week-and the
word gets around fast. By the end of May, that boss won't be able to find
anybody who'll work for him." Charlie leaned back in his chair. "You
get some strange people in logging camps. The hiring hall's a tavern on Skid
Road here in
"No
roads?" James asked.
"Hell,
no. We were forty miles back in the timber. The train hauled our
logs out, so we didn't really need a road. The bull-cook was a dried-up old
boy, and it was part of his job to build fires in the bunkhouse stoves in the
morning. That was our alarm clock when we were moonlighting. He used gasoline
to start the fire in the stove, and that can be noisy."
"Moonlighting?"
Sylvia asked curiously.
"That's when you have to get
up at three in the morning," Charlie explained. "When the fire danger
gets up to a certain point, the
"I imagine so," James
said. "Oh, by the way, Trish, Mark has a legal question he'd like to ask
you."
"Are
you in trouble with the law, Mark?" Trish asked me.
"Not that I know of," I
assured her. Then I told them all about the twins, and about
"Haven't
they ever heard of DNA?" Sylvia asked.
"No good," Erika told
her. "Identical twins have the same DNA. I gather that the baby footprints
are missing?"
I nodded. "I guess somebody at
"I'm sure they can." She
didn't really sound all that positive, though. "I'll bounce it off one of
my professors just to make sure."
"Did the surviving girl ever
recover?" Sylvia asked. "I'd sure like to meet her."
"I could probably arrange
that-she lives just few blocks away. But I don't want you to start crowding
her."
"My,"
Trish said, "aren't we possessive?"
"Our families were close, so I
was sort of a big brother to the twins. I told James, if the cops get lucky and
turn up the sumbitch who killed
"Whoo!" Erika said. "This one's
a real savage, isn't he?"
"Who was the surviving twin's
psychiatrist?" Sylvia asked me then. "Fallon.
He runs that private sanitarium where she was staying.”
“I've heard of him. He's supposed
to be very good."
"Maybe so, but could we talk about something
else?"
"Of course, Mark," Trish
said quickly, and she adroitly changed the subject to resurfacing the kitchen
floor instead.
After breakfast, I drove down to
the campus; I'd encountered something I wanted to examine. It appeared that
there'd been some fairly extensive contacts between Walt Whitman and an English
group known as the pre-Raphaelites.
We tend to get compartmentalized in
our thinking. It's almost as if British literature and American literature
evolved on two different planets. The mail did
get through, though, and we do speak
approximately the same language the Brits speak. The possibility of
transoceanic influence could be of genuine academic interest, so I headed to
the library to pursue it a bit further.
I
stopped by Mary's place on my way home.
"Where have you been?"
Renata's aunt demanded when she opened the door. "I tried to call you, but
nobody answered."
"I was facedown in the
library" I explained. "I guess the rest of the gang at the
boardinghouse had things to attend to on campus as well. Is something
wrong?"
"Renata had a bad night. She
was still awake when I got home from work."
"Did
she tell you what was bothering her?"
"It was some kind of
nightmare, and whatever it was, it must have been
pretty awful. Evidently she was flailing around while she was dreaming, because
she's got a lot of bruises on her arms."
"Maybe
I'd better stay here tonight," I suggested.
"That won't be necessary"
she told me. "I've got tonight off, so I'll be here to keep an eye on
her." Then she gave me a speculative look. "Can you keep something to
yourself, Mark?" she asked me bluntly.
"If you want me to, yes."
"I gave her a sleeping pill,
and I'd rather that her psychiatrist didn't find out about it."
"Over-the-counter stuff?"
"No, a little heavier than that. Just about everybody who
works grave-yard shift has an open-ended prescription for sleeping pills. I
won't make a regular practice of it, but anytime Ren starts getting all
wired-up, I can put her down. Sometimes we have to bend a few rules."
"I
don't have any problem with that. I'll give you a buzz later on this evening to
find out how she's doing."
"If she wakes up. If she was as wrung-out as
she seemed to be, she might sleep all the way through until tomorrow
morning."
"It would probably be good for
her. I've got a hunch that this back-to-school business might have her wound a
little tight. We were hoping that auditing classes instead of taking them for
credit might keep the pressure off her, but maybe we're still rushing things a
bit."
"I'll
watch her. If it gets to be too much for her, she can either drop the classes
for a few weeks-or let it all slide until next quarter."
"I
don't know about that, Mary" I said dubiously. "If the boss gets wind
of anything like that, he might insist that she come back home."
"Then we'll just have to make
sure that he doesn't find out, won't we?”
“We can try" I glanced at my
watch. "I'd better get moving. If last night was any indication, the
ladies get all torqued out when I'm late for meals."
When I got back to the
boardinghouse, Charlie had his door open, and he was going at his walls with a
paint roller. I stared into his room. "Boy, are you going to get yelled
at!" I told him.
"Trish
said I could paint the room any color I wanted," he said defensively.
"I
don't think she's going to like it much," I predicted. "You don't
come across very many rooms painted black."
"It's
a neutral color. Nobody flips out when he sees a room painted white-or
gray."
"Black's different. What made
you decide on black?”
“It's sort of outer-spacey, don't
you think?"
"It's
definitely spacey. Are you thinking about adding stars later?"
He
squinted at the dull black ceiling. "I don't think so. I think I'd like to
keep the infinity effect. The ceiling's as close or as far away as I want it to
be, and it moves kind of in and out when I look at it. The whole idea is to
make it indefinite. I'll be working with some equations later on that won't
have spatial limitations, and I'll need to be able to visualize them. I think
those black walls and ceiling are going to help."
"I
still think it'll make Trish flip out."
"She'll
get over it. Did you happen to catch the news today?"
I shook my head. "I was down
in the bowels of the main library. Is something going on I should know
about?"
"We might have to start
wearing flak jackets to class," he replied. "Some guy got knifed on
campus-down by the crew dorm."
"Crew?"
"The
rowing team-the guys who row those long, skinny boats in races. Their
dorm's down by the edge of
"Whoopee," I said flatly.
"As far as the cops are concerned, jaywalking's gang-related."
"They
do sort of lean on it now and then, don't they?"
"They might be pushing this
one a little. Gangs normally use guns, not knives." I shrugged. "I
doubt that we'll get too much in the way of details from TV The cops clam up
when they're investigating something."
"Hello, up there," Trish
called from downstairs. "We're home. Is everybody decent?"
"We're dressed, if that's what
you mean," I told her. "I'm coming up."
"Feel free." I called, then looked at Charlie. "You might want to close your
door," I suggested.
"She'll see the paint job
sooner or later, anyway," he replied. "Let's get the yelling and
screaming over with."
Trish surprised the both of us,
though. When she reached the top of the stairs, she glanced through Charlie's
doorway and shrugged. "Interesting notion," she observed.
"You're
taking the fun out of this, Trish," Charlie complained.
"It's your room,
Charlie," she replied. "You have to live with it. Have you gentlemen
heard anything about that murder on campus last night?”
“Just what came over the idiot
box," Charlie told her. "Is the campus coming down with
nervous?"
"The girls in the dormitories
are a little worked up, and Erika and I do spend quite a few evenings in
on-campus libraries. If some screwball's running around on campus, we might
have to start taking a few precautions."
"From what I hear, the cops
think it was one of those gang things," Char-lie told her. "Those
aren't usually dangerous for innocent bystanders-particularly when the guy
who's doing the killing uses a knife. It's when they start shooting at each
other that you have to take cover. City kids are rotten shots. What's for dinner
tonight, babe? I skipped lunch today, and I'm starving."
The ladies fixed pork chops that
evening, and they were way out in front of anything you'd get in any local
restaurant. James arrived a little late for supper, and the girls scolded him
at some length. I mentally confirmed "don't be late for supper" under
my list of house rules.
"Are you guys up for a jaunt
over to the Green Lantern Tavern this evening?" Charlie asked James and
me.
"Here
we go again." Erika sighed, rolling her eyes upward.
"We're not going to get all
bent out of shape, toots," Charlie promised. "I want to have a talk
with my older brother about that guy who got killed on campus last night. My
brother's a cop, and he'll know a lot more details than we got from the news
reports. He hits the Green Lantern just about every night on his way home from
work. I can probably wheedle the story out of him. Then we'll know whether it's
something we need to worry about."
James
shrugged. "I don't really have anything better to do," he replied. "I'll
come along. I can count the number of beers you drink and rat you off to Trish
when we get home."
"You
wouldn't!" Charlie said.
"Only
kidding, Charlie. Relax. I never fink on a buddy.”
“Male
bonding in action," Sylvia said sardonically.
"And Budweiser's the glue in
most cases," Erika added. "Take ten guys and a keg of beer, mix well,
and they're stuck together for life."
"It's one of those guy things,
Erika," I told her. "It crops up during hunting season-or just before
the Super Bowl. I don't watch football on TV, so I'm sort of an outcast. Well,
gentlemen, shall we tiptoe off to the Green Lantern and abuse our livers?"
Sgt. Robert West was a plainclothes
detective with the Seattle Police Department, and he and his younger brother
seemed to be fairly close, de-spite a pretty good number of differences between
them. Charlie had bounced from job to job for a number of years, but Bob had
taken aim at the Seattle Police Department when he'd been about fourteen, and
he'd never even considered an alternate profession. He was a solid citizen with
a wife, two kids, and a mortgage. He lived in the
After Charlie had introduced James
and me to his brother, he got down to cases. "I don't want you to bend any
rules, big brother," he said, "but we'd like to know if we ought to
start wearing bulletproof vests to class. If the gangs are moving onto the
campus, it could turn into a war zone. What's the scoop on the guy who got
knifed last night?"
Bob looked at James and me.
"This won't go any further, right?" he asked us in a low voice.
"It
stops right here," James assured him.
"All right, then. The victim
was a fairly high-ranking member of a Chicano gang, and somebody obviously wanted
to pass a message on to his pals. What happened down by the lakeshore last
night wasn't your average, run-of-the-mill stab in the back. Somebody went to a
lot of trouble' to make it very messy."
"Who
was the dead guy?" Charlie asked.
"His name was Julio Muñoz, and
his gang's recently moved out this way to try to attract customers from the
student body for various feel-good products. U.W students have been doing dope
for years, but they usually had to go to other neighborhoods to buy it. Julio
and his buddies decided to set up a branch office in the university district.
Evidently, another gang had the same idea, and they weren't too happy about the
notion of a price war.
"Any
ideas about which gang decided to
carve up Julio?"
"Nothing
very specific. Lieutenant Burpee thinks it might have been Cheetah,
but Burpee's sort of obsessed with Cheetah. He's been trying to nail that one for about the last three
years."
"Burpee?" James asked mildly.
Bob smiled faintly. "We don't
call him that to his face. His real name's Belcher."
"It does kind of fit, I guess," James agreed. "Who's this
Cheetah?" I asked.
"A downtown drug lord. He's a mixed breed
psychotic-part black, part Mexican, part oriental, part
rabid bird dog. That's one guy we'd really
like to get off the streets. He swings big-time drug deals and amuses
himself with random murders. We haven't been able to pin him down because he
hasn't got a fixed address. He never sleeps in the same bed twice, and he's got
two or three hundred aliases. Muñoz had a rap sheet as long as your arm, but
Cheetah's never been busted, so we don't even know what his real name is. We've
got a rough description of him, and that's about all. I sort of hate to admit
it, but old Burpee might be right this time. Cheetah tends to be exotic, and
the cutting last night was at least exotic.
I've seen a few guys that were fairly well cut up, but whoever went after Julio
scattered pieces of him all over the grass down by the lake. There's no way an
under-taker's going to be able to put him back together again, so we're
probably looking at one of those closed casket funerals."
"You
saw the body, then?" Charlie asked his brother.
"I sure did. I got to the
scene right after the uniforms did. That one's going to give the coroner a real
headache. Whoever took Munoz out didn't stab him the way most knife killers do.
It was a carving, not a stabbing, and I'd guess that it took Munoz a long time
to die. It wasn't for money, that's certain. His wallet was still in his back
pocket, and it was loaded."
"It
was strictly a drug business thing, then?" James asked.
"That's our current thinking.
Most of Julio's arrests were drug-related. He's been busted for that a half
dozen times. He's been a suspect in several shootings and a couple of rapes,
but we could never pin him to the mat on those. We haven't nailed him on a dope
deal for over a year now, though. Evidently, he graduated from street dealing
and moved up to being a supplier. There's more money in that, I guess, but last
night it looks like he came up against one of the occupational hazards of going
big time."
"The rubout?" Charlie guessed.
"The
slice-out in this case. I don't think there was much rubbing involved.
Whoever took him out might have had some experience as a meat cutter, since it
sort of looked like he was trying to bone out the carcass even after Munoz
died."
"Homicidal maniac stuff?" Charlie asked.
"Pretty
much. It looked to me as if the cutter was pretty well worked up.
We'll probably have to wait for the autopsy to find out what kind of knife was
involved. There didn't seem to be any stab wounds. It was all slices. What's
surprising about it is that nobody in the vicinity heard anything. I'm sure it
took Munoz a long time to die, and nobody I've talked to heard any screaming.
The only thing anybody heard was a dog howling."
"Then you don't think anybody
on campus had any kind of connection with the killing?" Charlie asked him.
"Probably
not. It's more likely that Munoz was doing a drug deal down by
the lake, and the opposition-whoever it was-caught up with him there. I don't
think you're going to need a police escort to take you to and from class,
Charlie, if that's what's got you so worried."
"Up
yours," Charlie told him.
"Always nice talking with you,
little brother," Bob said with a faint smile. Then he glanced at his
watch. "Oops," he said. "Running late."
He stood up.
"Say hi to Eleanor and the
kids for me," Charlie said. "Right. Stop by
once in a while, huh?"
"I'll
make a point of it," Charlie promised.
CHAPTER
FIVE
I
volunteered to drive Twink to
Oddly enough, Friday was all bright
and sunny, and I didn't even have to turn on my windshield wipers as Twink and
I went north on Interstate S. Dr. Fallon spent the customary hour with Twink,
and he seemed to be fairly satisfied with her progress. At least he didn't put
her in a padded cell. After the session, Twink and I went back to
The following week really dragged
on. I was ready to start classes, but the university wasn't quite up to it yet.
I did a lot of puttering around with my bookshelf project and hit the library
several times, but I didn't accomplish much.
The fall quarter began on Monday,
September 29th, and I finally had to come face-to-face with John Milton. You
don't walk into the Ph.D. exams in English unless you've got graduate seminars
in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton under your belt. Shakespeare and I get
along fairly well, and Chaucer's a good buddy, but
The
I didn't want to wake Mary, so I
went around to the back door and tapped on the window. Renata opened the door,
touching one finger to her lips. "She's still asleep, Markie," she whispered.
"No
kidding? Gee, the day's half-over."
"Quit
trying to be funny. Do you want some coffee?"
"Thanks, Twink, but I've had
four cups of Erika's already, and that'll probably keep me wired until about
"Is
her coffee that strong?"
"Industrial-strength. I just
came by to tell you that I'll pick you up about twelve-thirty. Our class starts
at one-thirty, and that'll give us plenty of time to get there."
"You
don't have to do that, Markie. I've got my bike."
"Yes, Twink, I know all about
the bike. This is the first day of class, though, and I want to show you
exactly where Padelford Hall's located, where my office is, and how to find the
classroom. After you've got the lay of the land, you can pedal around in the
rain all you want."
"Oh,
all right." She sounded peevish about it. "What is your problem,
Twink?”
“Everybody's
treating me like a baby. I'm a big girl now."
"Save
the declaration of independence, Twinkie-poo. I just want to make sure you've
got the lay of the land before I turn you loose to roam around campus by
yourself."
"Twinkie-poo?"
she said. "Are we going back to baby talk?"
"Just kidding, Twink. I know
most of the trees on campus by their first names, so I can save you a lot of
time by showing you shortcuts and places where the traffic piles up at certain
times of day. Let's just call this ‘show Twinkie the ropes day.' I'm not trying
to insult you or infringe on your constitutional right to get hopelessly lost
down in the hard-science zone. Just humor me today, OK?"
"Yes, Master," she said
with a vapid expression. "Yes, Master.”
“I thought we'd gotten past that
stuff, Twink."
"The old ones are the best,
aren't they? If you want to baby me, I suppose I can put up with it for a day
or so. But don't make a habit of it.”
“Oh," I said then, "as
long as I'm offending you today anyway, let's get something else off the table.
Don't get too carried away with how you dress. The kids here are pretty
laid-back when they go to class. Blue jeans and sweatshirts are just about the
uniform of the day-every day. You probably wouldn't want to wear fancy clothes
in the rain anyway, and it's always raining here in muck and mire city."
"Aww," she said in mock
disappointment. "I was going to make a fashion statement."
"Save it for a sunny day,
Twink. A lot of freshman girls try that on their first day of class, and they
get pretty embarrassed when they find out that they're overdressed."
"What
books am I going to need?"
"I'll
give you some of mine. I've got lots of spares."
"I can afford to buy my own
books, Markie. I've even got my very own checkbook. Les made a big point of
that. There's oodles of money in there, and someday I
might even be able to make it balance."
"Never turn down freebies,
Twink-particularly when you're talking about books. I'll see you about
twelve-thirty, then. I'm going back to the boardinghouse now to start rummaging
around in Paradise Lost, and I'm not
looking forward to it very much. I don't think Milton and I are going to get
along well at all."
"Aw,"
she said, patting my cheek, "poor baby."
"Oh, quit," I told her.
Then I left and drove back to the boardinghouse to dig into
I hung it up about
"Thanks all the same, Erika,
but I'm still trying to shake off the four cups I had at breakfast."
"Suit yourself"
She was wearing a heavy-looking pair of horn-rimmed glasses that made her look
older and more mature. They seemed to complete her. That deep auburn hair and
golden skin had made her seem somehow almost unreal to me.
"Are
the glasses something new?" I asked her.
"No, they've been around for
years. I'm just giving my eyes a rest from the contact lenses."
"Trish says you've got an
outside job," I said, rummaging in the refrigerator.
"At a medical lab," she
told me. "It's not challenging, but it pays the bills. What are you looking for, Mark?"
"Sandwich
makings. I've got the munchies.”
“Go sit down. I'll fix you
something."
"I
can take care of it, Erika."
"Sit!"
she commanded. "I hate it when people tear up the kitchen. Aunt Grace was
too timid to scold the party boys, and the mess they made used to drive me
right up the wall."
"James told me that you were
living here before your aunt got sick," I said, moving out of her way and
sitting down in the breakfast nook.
"I was strapped for
cash," she replied. "I'd been working at a lab over near
“Cured?"
"I threw a cup of scalding
coffee in his face.”
“Ouch," I said.
"He felt pretty much the same
way about it," she said with an evil little grin. "Anyway, Aunt Grace
had an empty room, and she let me stay here until I got back on my feet."
She started putting some sandwiches together. "That's what set off our ‘serious
student' program. You wouldn't believe how
noisy it used to be around here. After Aunt Grace had her stroke, I yelled for
help, Trish came running, and we clamped down."
"James told me about that when
I first found the place," I told her. "He said he backed your
decision all the way."
"Oh, yes. And nobody in his
right mind crosses James. Truth is, I had to nudge Trish to persuade her to put that ‘no
drinking on the premises' policy into effect. She was a little timid about
it."
"Timid?
Trish?"
"She was worried about the
rent money. That was all that we had to pay Aunt Grace's medical expenses. I
told her not to be such a worrywart. I knew that sooner or later we'd get the
right kind of people here, and things would turn out OK."
"You're putting a whole new
light on things around here, Erika," I said. "I assumed Trish was
running the show, but you're the one calling the shots, aren't you?"
"That's been going on since we
were kids, Mark. Trish wants people to notice her. I don't need that, so I let her stand around giving orders. As long
as she gives the orders I want her to give, I don't interfere." She came
over and handed me a plate with two fairly bulky sandwiches on it.
"Here," she said. "Eat."
"Yes,
boss," I said obediently.
She let that pass. "I'll bring
you a glass of milk.”
“I've sort of outgrown milk,
Erika."
"It's good for you," she
said. She poured me a glass of milk and brought it to the table.
This
girl was going to take some getting used to, that much was certain.
After I'd finished eating, I went
back to Mary's place to pick up Twink. I was fairly sure that Mary was still
asleep, so I went around to the back door again to avoid
waking her.
Twink was waiting for me, and she
had one of those black plastic rain-coats that always seem to make a lot of
noise. They keep the rain off well enough, I guess, but they crackle with every
move.
"Did
you bring my books?" she asked.
"We'll pick them up at my
office," I told her. "I don't keep my spares on my own bookshelves.
They take up too much room. Let's hit the bricks, Twink. I want to get in and
out of my little clothes-closet office before the suck-ups get there and go
into the usual feeding frenzy."
"Suck-ups?"
she asked.
"The
ingratiators. The second-rate students who swindled their way
through high school by laughing at the tired jokes of third-rate teachers, and
the personality kids who'd really like to be my friend so that they can smile
the C-minus they'll earn up to a B-plus."
"You're
in a foul humor," she accused, as we went out to my car.
"It'll pass, Twink," I
told her. "I always come down with the grouchier on the first day of
classes. I know for an absolute fact that I'm going to come up against a solid
wall of ineptitude, and it depresses the hell out of me."
"Poor,
poor Markie. You can cry on my shoulder, if you want. Maybe if I
mommy all over you, it'll make you feel better."
I laughed-I don't think I'd ever
heard "mommy" used as a verb before. "When did
you get mommified, Twink?" I took it one step further.
"Probably while I was in the bughouse," she replied. "Dockie-poo
Fallon always prescribed mommification-or daddyfication-when one of the bugsies
went brain-dead. He'd either mommify us or embalm us with Prozac. And believe
me, if you really wanted to, you could probably calm a volcano down with
Prozac."
We clowned around all the way to
the campus, and I realized as I pulled into the Padelford parking garage that
Twink had banished my grumpies. I was supposed to be taking care of her, but she'd neatly turned the tables.
"Where
do you want me to sit when I go into your classroom, Markie?" she asked me
when we climbed out of the Dodge. "Since I'm not a real student yet, am I
supposed to hide under a desk or something?"
"Pick
anyplace you want, Twink. The other people in the class won't know that you're
only auditing, and I wouldn't make an issue of it. Just blend in."
"What
am I supposed to call you?"
"Mr.
Austin, probably. That's what the others are going to call me. Let's
keep the fact that we know each other more or less under wraps-the other kids
don't need to know. Doc Fallon says that you're here to get to know more
people-'broaden your acquaintanceship,' he calls it. I may not altogether
agree, but let's play it his way for now. I'll give you some time for the
after-class chatter before we go back home. Try to keep it down to about a half
hour. Oh, don't get all bent out of shape about some of the things I'll say
today, OK? It's a little canned speech I picked up from Dr. Conrad. It's called
‘thinning the herd.' My life's a lot easier if I can scare the incompetents
enough to make them go pester somebody else."
"You're a mean person, Markie.”
“God knows I try."
Inside the building, I showed Twink
where my office was, gave her the books she'd need, and led the way to the
classroom. "Hang around out here in the hallway until the place starts to
fill up," I advised. "Then drift in with the rest. Don't sit up
front, but don't try to hide at the back of the room, either-that's where the
hopeless cases usually are. Try to blend in as much as possible."
"You sound like a bad spy
novel," she accused. "Next you'll be talking about code words,
disguises, and invisible ink."
"Maybe
I am being a little obvious," I admitted.
"Real obvious. I'm a big
girl, and I know all about blending into the scenery."
"OK.
Today's class won't be too long. We'll do the bookkeeping, I'll de-liver my
speech, and then I'll split before anybody can pin me to the wall. You mingle a
bit, then go back out to the garage. I'll be in the
car."
"Why
not wait in your office?"
"Because
I don't want to spend the rest of the day here. The
suck-ups will home in on that place like a pack of wolves. Are you going to be
OK here?"
"I'm fine, Markie. Quit
worrying.”
“OK, I'll see you after class,
then."
I
went back to the garage to gather up the official-looking junk I had in the
backseat, then I ran over my canned speech to make sure I'd hit all the high
points. The first class session sets the tone for the rest of the quarter, so I
wanted to be sure I had it right.
I
kept a close eye on my watch and hit the classroom door at precisely
one-thirty. I went directly to the desk, opened my briefcase, and took out the
stack of papers I kept in there. Then I faced this year's crop of fresh-men.
"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen," I said briskly. "This is
section BR of English 131 r, Expository Writing. My name is
There was the usual stirring around
while they tried to find the enrollment cards among all the other papers they'd
been given on sign-up day. "Quickly, quickly," I nudged them.
"We've only got an hour, and we've got other fish to fry."
It
didn't do any good; it never does. It still took them the usual ten minutes or
so to get the cards to the end of each row. Then I gathered the cards and
distributed the course descriptions.
"All
right, then," I said after that was finished, "Let's begin. For most
of you, this is your first day of college. You'll find that things here are
quite a bit different from what you've been accustomed to. You're adults now,
and we expect more from you. You're here to study and to learn. You're not here
to occupy space; you're here to work. If you don't work, you'll fail, and then
you'll get to do it all over again. This is a required course, and you won't
get your degree until you've managed to get a passing grade from me or from one
of my colleagues. Our goal is to teach you how to write papers that your
professors can understand. Writing was invented several thousand years ago as a
way to pass information back and forth between humans. Since most of you are
human, it's a fairly important skill." I paused and looked around.
"Nonhumans, naturally, aren't required to take this course, so all
nonhumans are excused."
It
got the same laugh it always got. It was a silly thing to say, but a few laughs
never hurt.
"Would
you define ‘human' for us, Mr. Austin?" a young fellow near the front of
the room asked.
"You'll have to take that up
with the folks in anthropology," I told him. "I operate on the theory
that anybody whose knuckles don't drag on the ground when he walks is probably
human. But we digress. As students, you'll need to communicate with your
professors in a way slightly more advanced than grunts and whistles. That's why
you're here. I'm supposed to teach you how to write, so we're going to write-at
least you are-and you're going to start now. Your first assignment is a
five-hundred-word essay, and just for old times' sake, why don't you take a run
at the ever-popular ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation'? Since you've all probably
been working on that old turkey since
about the fifth grade, you should have a head start on it. You'll be graded on
grammar, spelling, punctuation, and thought content. It's due on Wednesday, so
you'd better buckle down." There were sounds of serious discontent.
"Hey,
gang," I said, "if that makes you unhappy, the door's right over
there. You can walk out anytime you want."
There was the customary shocked
silence when I dropped that on them.
Teachers at the high-school level almost never invite their students to leave.
"I'm
not your friend, people," I told them bluntly. "I'm not here to make
you happy. If your papers aren't up to standard, you'll get to do them over
again-and again-and again. You'll keep doing them over until you get them
right, and that won't alter the fact that you'll be writing other papers as
well, and you'll probably be rewriting those also. Things will definitely start
to back up on you after a while if you keep turning in tripe."
"How much credit for class
participation, Mr. Austin?" the young fellow who'd asked for a definition
of human asked in a slightly worried
tone. I get that question every quarter-usually from speech majors who'd sooner
die than actually put something down on paper.
I shrugged. "None.
You're here to write, not to talk. If you want to say something to me, write it
down. Then type it, because I won't accept hand-written papers. Use pica type
and standard margins. You might want to pick up a copy of the MLA style sheet.
That's the final word on academic style."
I saw the usual look of blank
incomprehension. "The Modern Language Association," I translated.
"Try to write complete sentences; incomplete ones irritate me. Oh, one
other thing. You'll encounter people out there who'll try to sell you papers.
Don't waste your money. I've already seen most of them, so I'll recognize them.
If you try to foist a secondhand paper off on me, you'll be taking this course
over again, because I'll flunk you right on the spot. You should probably know
that my flunk rate doesn't even come close to the bell curve. If I happen to
get an entire class of incompetents, I'll flunk the whole bunch. Now, then, if
you want to drop the course or change instructors, go to the Registrar's
Office. Don't pester me with your problems."
I
let that soak in just a bit. "Any questions?"
I asked.
There was a sullen silence, and I
was fairly sure that my deliberate mention of the registrar was ringing a few
bells.
I
looked around. "Not a word?" I asked mildly. "Not even a few
whimpers? Aw, shucky-darn."
There
was a nervous laugh. Evidently I'd gotten through to most of them. "You
seem to have grasped my basic point, then," I told them. "The policy
here is ‘my house; my rules.' As long as you remember that, we'll get along
fine. Class dismissed." I scooped up the enrollment cards, stowed them in
my briefcase, and was out the door before any of the suck-up crowd could get in
my way. A strategy of abruptitude works quite well when you want to make a
clean getaway during those early sessions. Shock and run cuts the sniveling
short; linger-longering just encourages it.
I went out to the garage, unlocked
my car, and leafed through the enrollment cards to take a body count. There
were too many, of course. There always are. My unfriendly speech in the
classroom had been de-signed to correct that. Academic terrorism does have its
uses, I guess.
I read some more of Paradise Lost while I waited for Twink,
and after about a half hour she showed up. "You weren't really serious
about all that grumpy stuff, were you, Markie?" she asked as she climbed
in.
"Pretty much, yes. Did it hurt their
feelings?"
"They were awfully pouty about
it. They all agreed that a writing assignment on the first day of class was a
violation of their constitutional rights or something."
"Gee,
what a shame."
"You're terrible,
Markie," she said with a wicked little giggle. "When we were coming
down here you were saying something about a canned speech. Do you unload like
that on every class you teach?"
I nodded as I started the car.
"Yep-and it works. I've even made the PE. Department's
blacklist."
"That
went by a little fast."
"Physical education involves
the big, strong, dumb kids who make up the assorted teams that wear purple
uniforms and try to whup the teams from
"I'm so proud of you,"
she gushed, as we pulled out of the parking garage.
"Steady
on, Twink."
"Some of the names your
students were calling you were naughty.”
“Good. I got their attention,
then."
"The smart-mouth who asked you
to define ‘human' was even trying to put a petition together to lodge a protest
with the administration about how mean you were. Not too many people were
interested in signing it, though. Quite a few of them said they were just going
to drop your class."
"Good.
That's the whole idea. What you saw today was part of an academic game, Twink.
The university administration tries to get a lot of mileage out of the teaching
assistants by cramming as many freshmen as possible into those classrooms. Some
teaching assistants are softies who yearn for the approval of their students.
I'm tough, and I don't make any secret of it. After the first week or so, I've
usually weeded out the dum-dums, so I've got
the cream of the crop, and my warm, fuzzy associates get the garbage. My
students probably don't even need me, since they can al-ready write papers
that'll cut glass from a mile away. The warm-fuzzies get the semiliterates who
couldn't find their way from one end of a sentence to the other if their lives
depended on it. I picked up the business of academic terrorism from Dr. Conrad.
Just the mention of his name scares people into convulsions." While we
talked, I hooked into
"I think you're going to love my paper, Markie," Twink
bubbled at me. "You're just auditing the course, Twink, remember? Why
write a paper if you don't have to?"
"I
want to write one, Markie. I'm going to blow your socks off.”
“Why? You won't get a grade out of
it."
"I'm
going to prove something, big brother. Don't start throwing challenges around
unless you're ready to back them up. I can whup you any day in the week."
She paused briefly. "It's your own fault, Markie. Sometimes I get
competitive-particularly when somebody challenges me. You said you wanted a
good paper. Well, you're going to get one, and you won't even have to grade it.
Isn't that neat?"
That took me completely by
surprise. Renata hadn't been quite that aggressive before-neither of the twins
had. I'd known that they were clever, certainly, but they'd never flaunted it.
Of course, Renata was older now, and the time she'd spent in Dr. Fallon's
institution had probably matured her quite a ways past her contemporaries. The
average college freshman comes to us carrying a lot of baggage from high
school. High-schoolies are herd animals for the most part, and they're usually
deathly afraid of standing out from the crowd. Once they move up to college,
the brighter ones tend to separate themselves from the herd and strike out on
their own. It usually takes them a year or so, though. Renata, it appeared, had
jumped over that transition, and she'd come down running.
I definitely approved of this new
Renata, and I was fairly sure Dr. Fallon would as well. This was turning out
better than either of us had expected.
After I'd dropped Twink at Mary's
place, I went back to campus to continue my examination of the connection
between Whitman and the Brits. I hung it up just before
"I'm supposed to tell you that
Charlie's going to be late, Trish," James rumbled, as we gathered in the
dining room. "I guess that something came up at Boeing, and the head of
the program Charlie's involved with called an emergency meeting."
"That sounds ominous,"
Erika said. "When Boeing starts calling emergency meetings, it suggests
that we might all need to go find bomb shelters."
"He wasn't too specific,"
James added, "but I got the impression that something fell apart because
some resident genius at Boeing neglected to convert inches to centimeters on a
set of fairly significant specifications. Charlie was using some very colorful
language when he left."
"That might just make it
difficult to hit what you're shooting at," I noted. "A millimeter
here and a millimeter there would add up after a while."
"Particularly if you're taking
potshots at something in the asteroid belt," James agreed.
"Have you got anything serious
on the fire this evening, Sylvia?" I asked our resident psychologist.
"Is
your head starting to come unraveled, Mark?"
"I hope not. I'd like to get
your reading on something that happened today, is all."
"Whip
it on me," she replied.
I let that pass. "The Twinkie
twin I was talking about did something a little out of character today.
Evidently, she's not quite as fragile as we all thought she was. She seems to
be breaking out in a rash of independence. She even gets offended if I offer to
drive her anyplace because she's got that ten-speed bicycle. Rain or shine, she
wants to bike it."
"That's
probably a reaction to the time she spent in the sanitarium, Mark. People in
institutions usually aren't allowed to make many decisions."
"Rebellion, then?"
"Self-assertion might come a
little closer," Sylvia replied. "In a general way, we approve of
that-as long as it doesn't go too far. Could you be more specific? Exactly what
did she do today that seemed unusual?"
"Well, she's auditing a course
I teach-freshman English-basically pre-tending to be a student to get the feel
of the place."
"Interesting notion,"
Erika said. "All you're really doing is moving her from one institution to
a different one."
"Approximately,
yes," I agreed. "Well, I assigned a paper today. She knows she
doesn't have to write one, but she says she's going to do one anyway, and then
she promised me that it'd be so good that it'll blow me away."
"You assign a paper on the
first day of class?" Trish demanded incredulously. "You're a
monster!"
"Just
weeding out the garden, Trish," I told her. "It's the best way I know
of to scare off the party people. Evidently, Renata took the assignment as a
challenge, and now she's going to jump on it with both feet."
"She's making a pass at you,
Mark," Erika said bluntly. "She wants to write her way into your
heart."
"Get
real," I said. "There's none of that going on."
"I
wouldn't be so sure, Mark," Sylvia said thoughtfully. "It's not
uncommon for a psychiatric patient to have those kinds of feelings for the
therapist."
"I'm
not Twink's therapist, Sylvia,"
I objected.
"Oh,
really? You worry about her all the time, you do everything you
possibly can to make her life easier, and you get all nervous if she does
any-thing the least bit out of the ordinary. You're trying everything you can
think of to make her get well. In my book, that makes you her therapist."
"I think you might be missing
something, Sylvia," James said thoughtfully.
"Oh?"
"Mark's been a brother figure
for Renata since she was a baby, and he's the only person she recognized when
her mind woke up. Isn't it possible that this ‘I'll write a paper that'll blow
you away' announcement is an effort to gain Mark's approval?"
"He's
a father figure, you mean?"
"Something
along those lines, I suppose," he rumbled.
"Thanks a bunch, gang," I
said sarcastically. "Now we've got a toss-up. Is she aggressively showing
off, or is she just yearning for approval?"
"It
amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?" Erika suggested.
"I've got to meet this girl, Mark," Sylvia said. "For right
now, though, maybe you'd better talk with Dr. Fallon about it. He knows her, so
he'll probably have some idea of what's really going on. It might not be
anything very significant, but on the other hand . . ." She left it
hanging.
I began to wish I'd kept my mouth
shut. Twink was my problem, but now
I'd opened a door that maybe I should have left closed. My house-mates all
seemed very interested in Renata's behavior, and I wasn't sure I wanted them to
start muddying things up.
On the other hand, I didn't really
have any idea of what was going on in Twink's mind, and maybe one of the
inmates here could come up with a clue. At this point, I'd take all the help I
could get.
CHAPTER
SIX
I
didn't sleep very well that night, and when I finally drifted off, I had some
peculiar dreams involving Milton, Whitman, and Twinkie. For some reason, they
were all ganging up on me, and the green chain kept turning up to complicate
things all the more.
Anyway, I was a little foggy when I
stumbled downstairs the next morning. James, Charlie, and the bathrobe brigade
were clustered around the small television set on the kitchen counter, watching
and listening intently. "What's up?" I asked, homing in on the
coffeemaker.
"A small-time hood got himself wasted last night," Charlie replied. "The
TV reporters say it's a rerun of the Muñoz killing a couple weeks ago."
"Another one of those carve-up
jobs?" I asked, pouring myself a cup of Erika's coffee.
"Was it ever," Charlie
said. "Some of the reporters looked green around the gills. I guess there
were body parts and guts all over the place."
Trish
made a gagging sound. "Do you mind?"
she snapped at Charlie. "Sorry, babe," he apologized.
"Anyway, this one was even closer to home than the Munoz killing. They
found the carcass along the
"Evidently the killing was
close enough to the zoo to upset the animals," James added. "A couple
of reporters mentioned that earlier. I guess everybody who lives in the
vicinity heard lions roaring, elephants trumpeting, and the wolves howling up a
storm. Somebody put in an emergency call to the zookeepers, and it was one of
them who found the body and called the police."
"Anyway," Charlie
continued, "the cops and the reporters are all sagely stroking their
beards and announcing that there might just possibly be some connection between
this murder and that one two weeks ago down on campus. Isn't that astounding?
Two guys get gutted out in the same part of town within a couple of weeks, and
the cops suggest that there might be a connection? Well, goll-lee gee!"
"Quit
trying to be such a clown, Charlie," Sylvia scolded.
"People who announce the
obvious with a straight face always bring out the worst in me," Charlie
replied. "These reporters are all trying to look grim and serious while
they go on and on about a ‘serial killer,' but there's nothing like a few messy
murders to fill up the blanks in the day's news."
"They've already come up with
a name that I'm sure we'll have to listen to over and over for the next month
or two," Trish told me. "They're talking about ‘the Seattle Slasher'
as if it's something of international significance instead of a turf war
between a couple of rival gangs. You know how reporters can be."
"Oh, yes," I agreed.
"I'm waiting for the day when one of the weather guys has a grand mal
seizure-on camera-because there's a fifty percent chance of rain tomorrow. Was
this latest dead guy another Chicano dope dealer?"
"Not with a name like Lloyd
Andrews, he wasn't," she replied. "He seems to have had a fairly
extensive police record, though, and drugs were involved in a few of his
arrests-along with the usual low crimes and misdemeanors."
"He
was a small-timer," Charlie added. "He might have sold a bag of crack
once in a while, but he bought more than he sold. It looks to me as if he was
one of those poor bastards who never did anything right. If he tried to steal a
car, the tires would all go flat. If he thought some chickie had the hots for
him, he'd get busted for attempted rape. If he planned a burglary, he'd pick
the one house on the block with an alarm system. He was the sort of guy who
gives crime a bad name. He definitely wasn't in the same class with Muñoz which
pretty much shoots old Lieutenant Burpee's theory full of holes. Cheetah
doesn't dirty his hands on small-timers. He goes after the big boys."
Trish
glanced over at the kitchen clock. "Oops," she said, "we're
starting to run behind, girls. We'd better whip up some breakfast, or our boys
will start wasting away."
The
three of them bustled around, getting things ready. "Go watch the set in
the living room," Erika commanded, pointing toward the front of the house.
"Get out from underfoot while we're working."
"Yes,
ma'am," James rumbled. "Shall we adjourn to the parlor,
gentlemen?"
The
three of us went through the dining room to the silent front of the house.
James turned on the smeary old television set, and we all sat down to watch.
"---murders
are only the latest in a long string of serial killings here in the
Northwest," a reporter was sententiously reminding us. "The
authorities are still searching for clues to the identity of the
"We
might want to keep waving that in front of the ladies," James suggested.
"They're a little nervous about murders in our own
backyard-understandably, since there's somebody out there with a sharp
knife."
"We
might want to give some thought to the convoy principle," I added.
"Maybe tack on a new house rule: ‘Nobody goes out alone after dark,' or
something along those lines-at least until this quiets down, or the Slasher
wastes somebody in
"Makes
sense," Charlie agreed. "I don't think they're in any real
danger-those two killings seem to be gang stuff but maybe we ought to get real
protective until the TV guys find something else to babble about. Maybe they
can go back to blubbering over Princess Diana. 'Pavane for a Dead Princess' is
a nice piece of music, but it gets old after you've heard it forty or fifty
times. The funny thing about that story is that the ‘media' keeps trying to
gloss over its own responsibility for that car crash. If they hadn't declared
open season on Princess Di, the vultures with cheap cameras wouldn't have been
chasing her."
"How did your emergency
meeting turn out last night, Charlie?" I asked him. "James told us
some half-wit got inches and centimeters mixed up?"
"He sure did. Engineering's in
the clear, though. The drawings clearly specified centimeters. It was a buyer
who dropped the ball, not us. Dear old Boing-Boing just spent a million bucks
of taxpayer money on a component that won't fit because some lamebrain in
purchasing never heard of the metric system. We'll hand it off to accounting,
and they'll juggle the books for us and smooth it over. Their jaws were a
little tight about it, though. The balanced budget crowd's tightening the
screws on the Defense Department, so we don't have the keys to
"Aw,"
I said in mock sympathy, "poor babies."
"Come on, Mark. Look at all
the wonderful things the defense industry's given us-the H-bomb, the neutron
bomb, nerve gas, smart bombs, laser sights, and all those cute little bacteria
that give people diseases no-body's ever heard of before-'bubonic leprosy,'
'tuberculanthrax,' and ‘the seven-century itch.' How could we possibly get
along without stuff like that?"
"I don't know," I
replied. "It might be nice to try it and find out, though."
After breakfast, we scattered to
the winds again. We hadn't yet encountered each other down on the campus, since
the various disciplines were pretty well segregated. I don't think an
antisegregation policy would ever float on a university campus. The races and
sexes may be desegregated, but the disciplines? Never happen.
I
fought with
Then
Twink didn't show up for my one-thirty class, and I got concerned. Maybe she
was having second thoughts about all her blustering and show-offery following
the Monday class. That promise to blow me away had been a bit on the arrogant side; maybe now she was too
embarrassed to look me in the face.
That
option wasn't really open to her, though. Whether she liked it or not, Twink
and I were going to spend this
quarter in lockstep. I'd made promises, and I was going to keep them. When it
became obvious that she wasn't just late for class, I decided that I'd thrash
this out with her. If she didn't like it, well, tough
noogies.
My class of freshmen was seriously
diminished now. My canned speech on opening day had significantly thinned out
the herd. Now it was time for the second canned speech, which had to do with
reading critically, rather than accepting everything that shows up in print as
if Moses had handed it down from
Before
we adjourned, I pointedly reminded them that their "How I Spent My Summer
Vacation" papers were due the next day. I was fairly sure that would clear away the rest of the
goof-offs and only leave the good ones. That was the whole idea behind my
"Professor Grouchy" act.
Mary was still in her bathrobe when
she answered my knock, and she was looking a little frazzled.
"Where's
Renata?" I asked. "She didn't make it to class today."
"She had another bad night,
Mark," Mary replied. "These nightmares of hers are starting to worry
me. She was shaking like a leaf in a windstorm when I came home from work. If
this doesn't clear up, she might have to go back to
"It
can't be that bad!"
"It's not good. I zonked her
out with another sleeping pill, but I don't want to make a habit of that."
"Maybe I'd better call Doc
Fallon," I said. "I've been trying to keep the pressure off Twink,
but I might be doing something wrong. If nothing else, maybe he can prescribe a
tranquilizer to unwind her spring a little."
"Tranks
are only about one step away from heroin, Mark," she cautioned.
"Let's not go down that road if
we don't have to."
"Let's see what Fallon has to
say. We can hope that this is just
something temporary that'll pass once Twink gets used to the university. Guess
I'd better stay here tonight when you go to work at the cop shop."
"That
won't be necessary, Mark," she told me. "This is my day off,
remember?"
"That's right, isn't it? I
must have spaced it out." I looked at her a little more carefully.
"You look awful, Mary" I told her bluntly.
"Up
yours!" she flared at me.
"What I meant was that you're
looking almost dead on your feet. You haven't been to bed yet, have you?"
"I
dozed on the couch a bit. It's a good thing that I don't have to go to work
tonight. Sleeping on the job's an official no-no."
"Was
Twink doing anything unusual before you went to work last night?"
"She said she was writing a
paper for your class-though I don't know how she could concentrate. She had the
volume on her tape player turned way up."
"Kiddie music?"
"Not unless the kids have
changed a lot here lately. It sounded like some woman singing to a pack of
wolves."
"Oh,
that tape.
She's hooked on that one. It was mixed in with that box of tapes and discs I
brought down from
"What's
it called?"
"Who knows? One of the twins
taped it off another tape-or maybe a CD-and forgot to label it. Twink gets kind
of spacey when she listens to it." Then I snapped my fingers. "Now
that I think back, she was listening to it on the evening before her last visit to nightmare alley."
"Maybe we ought to root around
and find it-and then accidentally lose it or something. If that's what's
causing these nightmares of hers, she doesn't need to have it floating around
where she can get her hands on it."
"I'll take it up with Fallon
when I talk with him. There are all sorts of possibilities kicking around. Both
times happened on a Monday, so maybe it's Monday that sends her up the wall-or
something else. Let's see what Fallon has to say before we lock anything in
cement."
"That might be best," she
agreed. "Try to get some sleep, huh?”
“Sure, kid."
When
I got home I dug out Dr. Fallon's phone number and punched it into the phone in
the living room.
"Hey, Doc," I said when
he came on the line, "this is Mark Austin. Renata's been having some
problems with nightmares. They must be moderately awful, because they've pretty
much put her out of action."
"It's
not uncommon, Mark. Outpatients are frequently troubled with nightmares."
"Could you write her a
prescription for some kind of tranquilizer? Her aunt's been zonking her with
sleeping pills, but I wanted to check with you before it went much
further."
"What
kind of sleeping pills?" His voice was a bit sharp. "Hell, I don't
know, Doc."
"Over-the-counter,
or prescription?”
“Prescription, I think."
He
started to swear.
"I
take it you don't care for the idea."
"Sleeping pills are the last
thing Renata needs right now, Mark. The basic ingredient in prescription
sleeping pills is a barbiturate, and nightmares are one of the symptoms of a
withdrawal from barbiturates."
"They're
addictive?"
"Obviously. We have to
use them on inpatients here sometimes, but we control the dosage, and we always
bring the patient down very slowly. A short siege of withdrawal from
barbiturates can throw years of therapy out the window. You're not supposed to
be passing the damn things around like popcorn."
A cold certainty suddenly came over
me. "You had Twink all spaced out on sleeping pills as soon as she arrived
there, didn't you, Doc?"
"It's
routine. A psychotic patient has to be stabilized before we can start any kind
of therapy. We control the dosage, though, and we keep barbiturates locked up
as tightly as opiates. If Renata's aunt leaves them lying around the house, God
knows how many Renata's been popping on the sly.
"She
wouldn't do that, Doc."
"Don't kid yourself. Does the
term ‘junkie' ring any bells for you, Mark?"
"They're
that bad?"
"At
least that bad-particularly when you're dealing with a psychotic."
"Psychotic? Come on, Doc.
Renata's a little spacey sometimes, but she's hardly a raving lunatic."
"Oh, really? She comes through the door
speaking a language only she can understand, and when she finally becomes
coherent, she doesn't even know her own name. If that's not psychotic, it'll do
until the real thing comes along. You tell her aunt to lock those damned pills
away somewhere Renata doesn't know about. Let's not leave temptation lying
around in the open. How's she doing otherwise?"
"It's a little early to tell.
This is only the first week of class.”
“Maybe that's what's bringing on
these nightmares."
"Hell, Doc, she's taking to
this like a duck takes to water. She's only auditing my class, but she's
already writing papers that she doesn't have to. That's one of the things I
wanted to talk to you about. Plus she gets belligerent every time I offer to
give her a lift. She wants to ride that ten-speed of hers no matter what the
weather's doing. I was talking it over with my housemates last night, and one
of them's majoring in abnormal psychology. She thought this sudden outbreak of
independence has to do with the time Renata spent at your place. Since a mental
patient's life is pretty tightly controlled, Sylvia thinks that Renata might be
going through a little spell of self-assertion to get the taste of that out of
her mouth."
"That might come very close.
Your friend there at the house might be useful. Has she met Renata yet?"
"Not
so far, but she wants to, and the others are interested as well. We're all
grad students, though, so we sort of outrank Twinkie. I don't want to
intimidate her."
"Is
your group aware of Renata's situation?"
"In a
general way. I gave them a bare-bones synopsis of what Twink's
been through."
"Maybe I'd better have a talk
with the one in abnormal psych-Sylvia, did you say? You're personally involved
with Renata, and this Sylvia can probably be more objective, notice things that
you'll miss. Why don't you have her call me?" He seemed to hesitate. "Are
there any relationships floating around in your group that I should know
about?"
"That's against the rules,
Doc. I'm fond of Sylvia, but there's none of that involved. She's an Italian
girl and sort of excitable, but she is sharp.”
“Ask her to call me," he said
again.
"Will
do. She knows your reputation, so she might be a little gushy
right at first, but she'll settle down. Meanwhile, I've got to hit the books,
Doc.
"Learn
lots," he told me in an amused sort of way.
After supper that evening, Charlie
suggested that the guys might want to visit the Green Lantern to get the real
story on the
Charlie's brother was sitting at
the bar nursing a beer and sourly watching the local TV reporter desperately
trying to ride the "Seattle Slasher" story into the big leagues.
"Don't
you get enough of that crap at work?" Charlie asked him.
"It's the bartender's set,
Charlie," Bob replied, "and he's the one who runs the controls. The
whole town's going wild about this ‘Slasher' business. Do you want to call mom?
She's been trying to get hold of you for the past week."
"She's
OK, isn't she?"
"She worries, Charlie. Mothers
are like that-particularly when one of the puppies forgets to touch base every
now and then."
"I've
been pretty busy, Bob."
"Don't blow smoke in my nose,
kid. It'll only take you five minutes. Do it. Get her off my case."
"All
right, don't tie your tail in a knot, I'll call her. What's the skinny on this
latest rubout?"
"Are
you changing your major? Are we yearning to become a TV personality now?"
"Get real, Bob. You couldn't
pay me to take a job like that. Everybody makes a jackass of himself once in a
while, but those people do it on cam-era. No, we've got three ladies at the
boardinghouse, and all this ‘Seattle Slasher' stuff's starting to make them
jumpy. If Mark and I can get the straight scoop on what's going on, maybe we
can calm 'em down."
Bob
looked around. "Let's grab a booth," he suggested. "We're not
sup-posed to talk about these things in public."
We
adjourned to one of the back booths, and Charlie and I each ordered a beer.
"If
the ladies in your boardinghouse are really spooked about this ‘Slasher' crap,
your best bet would be to arm them with some of those little spray cans of
Mace-or maybe pepper-spray," Bob told us. "If you squirt a guy in the
face with one of those, it puts him out of action immediately."
"We
hadn't thought of that," I admitted. "Where could we pick up stuff
like that?"
"Any gun store should have
it," he said. "I could swipe some for you, but our cans are bulky.
The ones they make for ladies are usually attached to a key ring."
"Convenient.
I'll look into it."
"They'll probably never have
to use them, but just having them handy should give them a sense of
security."
"So,
what's really happening out there, Bob?" Charlie asked. "All we're
getting from TV is a bunch of dog doo-doo."
"You didn't really expect the
truth from a TV set, did you, Charlie? Television's
entertainment, not truth. OK, about all we've got to go on so far are
the similarities between this murder and the one on campus two weeks ago. We've
got two semiprofessional criminals who got themselves cut to pieces in a
parklike area late at night. Muñoz was a real pro, but this Andrews guy was
more of a wanna-be. Andrews did have some gang connections here in north
"Are
we saying that this ‘Seattle Slasher' stuff doesn't float?" Charlie
demanded.
"I'm
not convinced yet," Bob replied. "It's possible we're looking at ‘trademark'
killings."
"I
don't follow you," I admitted.
"It comes along every so
often," Bob explained. "If you've got a gang out there that wants to
put up ‘no trespassing' signs on its own personal, private turf, chopping
assorted rival gang members into mincemeat would probably get the point across
in a hurry. These two killings might
be the work of a single hit man, or it could be a new standard operating
procedure. There's no real reason to keep on carving on the carcass after the
guy's dead, is there?"
"Then
you think it might just be some sort of advertising gimmick?" Charlie
suggested. "Like ‘look what's going to happen if we
catch you poaching'? Is that what you're saying?"
“It's
a possibility. There's no other connection between Andrews and Muñoz that we've
been able to find."
"Then Burpee's theory about
Cheetah might hold water after all," Charlie suggested.
Bob shook his head. "This
isn't Cheetah's part of town. He's strictly a downtown boy. Far as he's
concerned, north
"You're
expecting more, then?" I asked.
"Isn't everybody? The whole
damn town's holding its breath in anticipation." Bob looked at his watch.
"I've got to run," he told us. "Call Mom,
Charlie. Do it tonight, before you
forget."
"I'll
get right on it, Bob," Charlie promised.
"Sure you will," Bob said
sarcastically. Then he turned and left the tavern.
"What do you think,
Mark?" Charlie said. "Should we sound the all clear for the
girls?"
"I don't think so. We don't
know enough to start taking chances now. Let's stay close to the ladies until
this guy moves on."
"If he moves on."
CHAPTER
SEVEN
I was a little foggy during my
I stopped by a gun store after
class and bought three of those pepper spray key rings Bob West had
recommended. The little cartridge didn't look very big, but it probably carried
enough to disable a single attacker. Our ladies weren't likely to need something
for crowd control.
Then I went back to
Just after
But
I make a mighty fine sandwich, if I do say so myself.
I finished eating and glanced at my
watch. It was almost twelve-thirty, and I decided to call Mary. It was raining
again, and I thought I'd better find out if Twink was up and moving. If she was
coming to class today, she'd need a ride.
"She left about ten minutes
ago," Mary told me. "She said she wanted to bike it."
"It's
raining, for Chrissake!"
"She's
got a raincoat, Mark. Don't get all worked up."
"Did she get over whatever it
was that knocked her out yesterday?”
“She's fine-all bright and bubbly.
Everybody gets the blues now and then, but Renata bounces right back. I think
it's a good sign, don't you?”
“We can hope so. Oh, I talked with
Fallon about those sleeping pills. He sort of flipped out about it. I guess
Twinkie was pretty well hooked on them in the sanitarium. They brought her down
easy, but you might want to hide the ones you've got from her. Fallon thinks
she might be a secret sleeping-pill junkie or something like that."
"That's
ridiculous!"
"I'm
just passing on what he said."
"Tell him to get stuffed. I
know exactly what I'm doing. The only time I hit her with one of those pills is
when she starts going around the bend, and that doesn't happen often enough for
her to get hooked."
"Glad
to hear it. Listen, I'd better get going," I told her. "It's time to
teach up the young again."
"She'll be in your class
today. Quit worrying so much.”
“Yes,
ma'am."
Once I got to Padelford, I checked
my mailbox. As I'd expected, there were quite a few dropout cards. I went to my
little clothes-closet office and quickly revised my class list. It was
definitely getting closer to target. About one more heavy
belt would bring it down to a reasonable size.
I hit the classroom door at exactly
one-thirty. Since I was going to make a big issue of doing things on time, I
thought it might be best to set a good example.
Twink was sitting near the center
of the room, and she had a smug smile on her face. I took the roll and called
in their papers.
"Now
then, ladies and gentlemen," I began, "it's time to raise the issue
of documentation. We refer to these friendly little messages to the reader as ‘footnotes,'
probably because they're at the bottom of the page. Documentation is the
academic way to justify random pilferage. You can steal any idea you want-if
you document in the traditional way. Don't just come right out and admit that
you swiped this idea from Aristotle or Tom Paine. Your
professor's going to know that you're
swiping stuff, so you don't have to rub his nose in it. Follow all the
conventional rules, and you won't disturb him while he's sleeping his way
through your paper. If you get to be good enough at it, you can coast your way
to a bachelor's degree without ever coming close to having an original thought.
That's why we're here, isn't it? Immerse yourselves in mediocrity, and you're
home free. Originality makes people think, and most of
them would rather not."
I still don't know what set me off
on that tack. Maybe it was
I chalked out various footnote
formats on the blackboard and generally piddled away the rest of the period. To
be perfectly honest about it, I didn't feel much like teaching that day.
I wanted to have a word with Twink
to make sure that she was OK, but she was a little too fast for me, and a
couple of suck-ups short-stopped me before I could get to the door. They
babbled on and on about how "absolutely fascinating" they'd found my
discussion of footnotes, and I had a hell of a time getting away from them.
I stopped by my cubicle to check
off the papers I'd collected against my current class list, and about midway
through the stack I came across the paper Renata had threatened to drop on me.
I knew it was hers because she'd used Twinkie as her byline.
I
set the other papers aside and took up hers ...
HOW I SPENT MY VACATION By Twinkie
I spent my
vacation in the bughouse, listening to the other buggies screaming and laughing
just to pass the time away. Normal people can't seem to under-stand how nice it
is to be nuts sometimes, and that's very sad. People out there in the world of
normal have to face reality every day, and reality is usually flat and grey and
ugly, and time only runs in one direction, and doorknobs can't talk. A true
nutso doesn't have to put up with that. We can make our world as beautiful as we want it to be,
since it has to do what we tell it to do. Isn't that neat?
In the
world of nuts, nothing is real, so we can change anything we don't like. If a
day is beautiful, we can make it last for a thousand years; if it's ugly, we
can just throw it away. If the sun is too bright, we can send it to its room,
and if the stars are too dim, we can tell them to burn more brightly, and they
will, just to make us happy.
That's what
makes the world of nuts so much nicer than the world of normies. Our truth wags
its tail and licks our fingers; their truth snarls, and it bites.
Sometimes,
sometimes, those of us in the world of nuts think about the world of the
normies, and we've pretty much decided that it might be sort of fun to visit it
once in a while, but we certainly wouldn't want to live there. It's just too
desperate and ugly, and the normies never seem to get the things they want, no
matter how hard they try, and that's very sad.
People from the world of the
normies used to visit us in the bughouse now and then, but they weren't really
very much fun. They always looked so serious and worried, and they almost never
laughed. Normies just can't seem to see the world the way we buggies see it, so
they can't even begin to see how funny it is. They couldn't seem to relax, and
their eyes got all wild when the nutso down the hall started to practice
screaming. Don't they know that screaming is a fine art? In the Olympic games
of the world of nuts, a perfect ten scream wins the gold medal every time.
I've moved
back to the world of the normies now, and I know that I'm supposed to be
serious and never laugh, but sometimes-sometimes-I scream a little bit, just
for old times' sake. I make it a point to scream politely, though. It's not
nice to wake the neighbors in the gray world of the normies. A few quiet little
screams aren't really all that disturbing, though, and I always seem to sleep
better after I scream.
And when I
sleep, I sometimes dream of the world of nuts, aid my door-knob sings to me,
and my walls hold me tight, and I drift above the sky and look down at the
desperate, grubby, ugly world of the normies where everybody is serious and
worried, and never, never, ever smiles.
And I laugh.
"Jesus!"
I said, gently putting the paper down. Damn! This girl could really write!
I
had to find out if the paper was as good as I thought, so I went looking for
Dr. Conrad. As luck had it, he was in.
"Are you busy, boss?" I
asked him. "Do we have a problem, Mr. Austin?"
"Not
really. I think I just struck gold, is all. If you've got a few minutes, I'd
like your opinion about this." I handed him Twink's paper.
He
glanced at the title. "You didn't!" he said, almost laughing. "'How I Spent My Vacation'?"
"It's a freshman class, boss.
Most of the students are still at the ‘Run, Spot, run' stage. This one's a cut
or two above average, though. Tell me what you think."
He read through Twink's paper.
"Dear God!" he said when he finished. "I felt the same way,
boss," I said smugly.
"Don't
let this one get away, kid," he told me.
"Not much chance of that.
She's the one I was telling you about a few weeks ago."
"Then
she really was in an asylum?"
"Oh, yes. Her twin sister was
murdered, and she went completely bonkers for a while. Now she's auditing my
class. She didn't have to write that paper, but she did it anyway. Every so
often she likes to show off. She is a sharpie, though."
"You've got that part right.
If she stays even the least bit sane, do the department a favor and steer her
in our direction. Somebody like this only comes along once or twice in a
generation." He swiveled his chair around and turned on his copy machine.
"You don't mind, do you?" he asked.
"Not
a bit, boss. I may run off a few dozen copies myself."
It hadn't quit raining when I
headed back to the boardinghouse, and Mil-ton still hung over me like a dark cloud, but I was suddenly all bright and
happy. Twink's paper had erased the gloom that'd been perched on my shoulder
all day.
Not
even grading that stack of papers could sour my day.
I went down to the kitchen while
the girls were fixing supper. "I've got presents for you ladies," I
told them.
"Oh?"
Trish said. "What's the occasion?"
"Charlie and I had a chat with
his brother last night, and big Bob suggested something that made a lot of
sense. I picked up these neat little key rings for you-which I want you to have
with you every time you leave the house." I laid the three rings on the
kitchen counter.
Erika
picked one up. "What's this little doohickey attached to the ring?"
she asked me.
"Pepper
spray," I told her. "Don't play with it, because it's loaded. You
flip that little knob over, and it's ready to go. If you happen to encounter
the world-famous Seattle Slasher, a quick squirt of that stuff will absolutely
ruin his day. He'll be totally out of action for at least an hour-or so the
clerk at the gun store tells me."
"Don't we need permits to
carry those?" Trish asked me dubiously. "Bob West didn't say anything
about permits, Trish, and he's a cop, so he knows the rules."
"I don't know, Mark," she
said. "I think having that thing in my purse might make me a little
nervous."
"Nervous is better than
dead," Erika told her. "Those spray things make sense, so do as
you're told."
Trish grumbled a bit, but she did
what her younger sister commanded. There was something about Erika that made
Trish automatically snap to attention.
"What's got your clock all
wound up, Mark?" James asked me at the supper table that evening.
"You're acting like you just won the lottery"
"That comes fairly
close," I admitted. "I ran head-on into talent today-in a freshman
English class, of all places."
"Flowers do grow in the weed
patches sometimes," he conceded. "Some snappy
little bon mot, perhaps?"
"Beyond
that, old buddy," I said smugly.
"You
are going to share this with us, aren't you?" Sylvia asked
pointedly. "I thought you'd never ask. I just happen to have a copy with
me.”
“What a coincidence," Erika
observed dryly.
"Be nice," I scolded.
"My class turned in a paper today, and I found this tucked in amongst all
the usual junk." I handed Twink's paper to James. "Here you go,
partner," I said. "Wash the sour taste of Hegel out of your mouth
with this."
James took the paper. "How I
Spent My Vacation," he read aloud in that deep voice of his, "by
Twinkie."
"Isn't that the girl you've
been baby-sitting, Mark?" Erika asked me. "That's her. Go ahead,
James. Whip it on 'em."
He read Twink's paper to us, and
there was a stunned silence when he finished.
"Wow!"
Charlie murmured after a moment.
"Yeah,
wow," Sylvia agreed. "I've got to
meet this girl, Mark."
"Did they actually turn this
young lady loose?" James demanded. "It doesn't seem to me that she
was ready yet."
"She's
just showing off," I told him. "She didn't even have to write the
paper. She's only auditing the course."
"You
don't come across too many people who write papers just for fun," Charlie
said. "Was that why they locked her up in the bughouse?"
"Not really," I told him.
"She had a few other problems as well. And don't joke about it-her
headshrinker thinks she might have to go back in-side a few times. I guess
that's sort of standard-like kicking the cigarette habit."
"Psychosis
is addictive?" Charlie asked.
"You heard her paper,
Charlie," I replied. "The world of nuts is nicer than the world of
normies. Your doorknob won't say things to you that might hurt your feelings,
and it's only in the bughouse that you can try out for the Olympic Screaming
Team. I showed Twink's paper to my faculty advisor, and he ordered me not to
let her get away. Even if she's only playing with half a deck, she can still
write circles around just about everybody else on campus."
"Does
she behave at all normally?" Trish asked.
"Define ‘normal,' " I
suggested. "She doesn't walk on the ceiling or
believe that she's Napoleon, but she does
get a little strange now and then. She has good days and bad days, but I
guess that's part of the process of recovery"
"She's got a crush on you,
Mark," Erika told me. "You did know
that, didn't you?"
"Get
real," I scoffed. "She thinks of me as her big brother, that's all.
Both Twinkie Twins felt that way when they were little."
"Where's
she staying?" Sylvia asked me.
"She's living with her
aunt-about five blocks from here. Why?”
“Because we want to meet her, of
course," Trish said bluntly.
"Do you think her aunt might
let her out for an evening?" Sylvia chimed in. "Maybe she could come
for dinner-like tomorrow evening." Then I remembered something. "I
think I goofed," I apologized to Sylvia. "I was talking with Doc
Fallon yesterday, and he wants you to give him a call."
"Me?"
she asked. "What for?"
"We were talking about a
problem Twinkie's having, and I mentioned your major. The notion of having a
trained observer on-site appealed to him, since he's fairly sure that I'm
missing things. So if everybody here's just dying to meet her anyway, we might
as well get some mileage out of it."
James
burst out laughing.
"What's
so funny?" Trish demanded.
"Mark's suggestion fits right
into this place, doesn't it?" he noted. "We are something on the
order of an institution here, aren't we? We all have rules to obey and duties
to perform. The sudden appearance of Mark's friend even defines what kind of
institution we are, wouldn't you say?"
"I
don't think that's funny at all," Trish told him disapprovingly.
"I wouldn't push it,
James," Charlie advised. "Don't offend the ladies who run the
kitchen. That's a good way to get a boiled two-by-four for breakfast-with
built-in toothpicks."
We played around with that for a
while, and then we all went back to our studies.
As luck had it, Twink made it to
class on Thursday, and I even managed to catch her before she could get away.
"What?"
she said irritably when I took hold of her arm.
"Don't be such a grouch," I told her.
"Are you busy this evening?"
"I was going to save the
world, but I suppose that can wait. What did you have in mind?"
"I'm
supposed to invite you to dinner at the boardinghouse."
"All right," she replied
almost indifferently. "I'll pick you up about five."
"No.
I'll bike it. It's not that far from Aunt Mary's."
"How did you know that? I
don't remember that I've ever given you the address."
"You can't hide from me, Markie, you should know that by now. I'll be there about
five." Then she disengaged her arm from my grasp. "See ya," she
said, as she went off down the hall.
If
she was trying to irritate me, she was doing a good job of it.
I retreated to the boardinghouse
and spent the rest of the afternoon grading papers. If you want to ruin your
day, spend an hour or two with freshman English papers. It was four-thirty when
I finally set the papers aside and went down to see how the ladies were coming
along with the cooking. This was the first time I knew of that we'd ever
invited anybody to dinner, and it seemed to me that we were all a little jumpy
about it.
"Are you going to go pick her
up now?" Trish asked me. "I offered, but she said she'd ride her bike
instead.”
“But it's raining," Sylvia protested.
"What else is new? It's only
four or five blocks, and she's got a raincoat. She says she knows where the
house is, but I'm going out to the front porch to flag her down, just to be on
the safe side."
"
"Probably
not," Erika disagreed.
I glanced at my watch. "I'd
better get out there," I said. "I don't want her to zip on
past."
I saw that it was raining harder
when I went out onto the porch. Twink's stubborn attachment to that bike was
going to keep her fairly soggy if she didn't get over it.
It
was almost exactly five when she came pedaling around the corner with that
silly plastic raincoat sticking out behind her like the tail assembly of a 747.
As she pulled up in front of the house, she popped a wheelie by way of
greeting.
"Show-off,"
I called to her.
"If you got it, flaunt
it," she threw my own smart aleck remark back in my teeth.
We chained her bike to the banister
around the porch, then she pulled off her raincoat and
shook off the water. "Am I presentable?" she asked, holding out her
arms and turning around for inspection.
"You'll
do," I replied. "Oh, before we go in I should probably tell you that
my roomies here have all heard your paper."
She
shrugged. "The price of fame, I suppose," she said with an
exaggerated sigh. "Did they like it?"
"It blew them away. That's
what this invitation's all about. You might want to keep your guard up when
Sylvia starts asking questions. She's majoring in nutsos, so she might try to
probe around and find the real you."
"Fat
chance," Twink replied. "I lost track of the real me a long time ago.
How did you like my paper, Markie?"
"It
loosened my socks, Twink. It definitely gave me something to brag about. How
are you feeling? Mary told me you were out of it on Tuesday." She
shrugged. "It was just one of those bad days, that's
all. I'm fine now-all cutesy and sweetsie again."
"Let's
go on in and get the introductions out of the way. They're a pretty nice bunch,
so don't get uptight because they're strangers. Your pa-per impressed the hell
out of them, so they're all geared up to like you.”
“That's
nice. Quit worrying so much, Markie. It'll give you ulcers."
We went inside and down the hall to
the kitchen. James and Charlie had joined the ladies, and everybody had that
expectant look. "Guess who's coming to dinner," I announced. It was a
goofy thing to say, but it seemed appropriate.
"Has
he always been like this?" Trish spoke directly to Renata.
"Usually, yes," Twink replied.
"Sometimes he's worse; sometimes not quite so bad. It might have to do
with the phases of the moon, or something.”
“I thought so," Trish said.
"Maybe it's one of those guy things. I'm Patricia Erdlund, by the way. I
usually go by 'Trish,' maybe because the in-mates here have trouble pronouncing
three-syllable words."
"Be
nice," Erika murmured.
"My sister, Erika," Trish
advised Twink, "the terror of the medical school. The cute teenie-weenie
is Sylvia of Abnormality; the shaggy young fellow with greasy fingernails is
Top Secret Charlie, who's not allowed to tell anybody what his major is, and
the distinguished gentleman with the silvery beard is James, who thinks all the
time-when he's not busy being the in-house bouncer."
Twinkie
suddenly giggled.
"Was
it something I said?" Trish asked.
"This is almost like coming
home," Twink explained. "I just got out of one bughouse, and here I
am in another one."
"
"I've noticed that,"
Twink agreed. "Old blabbermouth Mark here tells me that he blew my cover
yesterday and started running up and down the halls waving my paper around, so
there's not much point in trying to hide my shady background, is there? I'm
moderately crazy, but I don't eat the furniture or insist that everybody should
worship me-even though I am God. That shows up fairly often in the nuthouse.
All the nuts there knew that they were God-which is probably why they were
there. You'd think that gods would know enough not to brag about it, but a
nuthouse might be nothing but a home for dumb gods who aren't smart enough to
keep their mouths shut."
"There's a doctoral
dissertation for you, Sylvia," Erika said with a perfectly straight face.
"If you present The Divinity of the
Insane, you'd get a chance to study one of the local asylums from the
inside."
"Go
set the table, Erika," Trish said. "Dinner's almost ready."
We had ham for dinner that evening,
and the ladies had gone all out with it, probably in deference to our guest.
Twink had turned the volume all the
way up on her cutesy-pootishness, and she almost sparkled.
Sylvia,
for obvious reasons, dominated the discussion at the dinner table. She had
questions for Twink-lots of questions. Sylvia's major had exposed her to
textbooks and learned theorists in her field, but she'd seldom had a chance to
talk with a coherent subject. What her somewhat convoluted approach really
boiled down to was the single question, "What's it really like?"
"Not very nice," Twink
told her. "The keepers always seem to want to treat us like bad people-as
if we were doing bad things on purpose. That's why we cheat a lot. We say
things to the keepers that aren't really true, because it's fun to watch their
eyes bug out, and there isn't much else to do for entertainment. Mostly,
though, we're able to slip around them. They ask us questions that we don't
want to answer, and there are dozens of ways to avoid them. After a few months
in the nuthouse you get good at that. The other nuts give lessons, and you can
learn a lot by watching during the little group therapy sessions. The keepers
think that talking can cure any-thing. All you have to do is say what they want
to hear, and they'll wiggle like puppies and leave you alone. If they get too
pushy, you can abolish them by putting on a blank face and pretending that they
aren't there at all.
"They're
only trying to help," Sylvia protested.
"Of course they are,"
Twink replied in a voice dripping with sarcasm. "They take lots of notes
and wave them around during the keeper meetings to impress the boss. That's all
they're interested in, isn't it? If they can't stay on the good side of the
boss, they might have to go out and get an honest job and do real work. That
was our advantage. They were afraid, and we weren't. The worst thing that could
ever happen to us had already happened. We all knew that something awful had happened to us; we just weren't
exactly sure what it was."
A
slightly stricken look came over Sylvia's face.
"I'm sorry" Twink
apologized. "I shouldn't have said that, should I?" She impulsively
took Sylvia's hand. "You're cute and sweet and awfully sincere. The nuts
won't pick on you when you go to work in the loony bin. They'll say things that
you'll want to hear, and that'll make you feel good. The things they'll tell
you won't be the truth, but who really cares? Nutsos take care of the people
they like. We're a lot more generous than normies."
"It's
all a scam then, isn't it?" Charlie suggested.
"Of course it is. I thought
everybody knew that by now. If somebody really wants to get out of the
bughouse, all he has to do is say things the keepers want to hear."
"Is
that how you got out?" Charlie pressed.
"I thought I just said that.
I'm probably still as wacky as I was when they locked me up, but once they
stopped pumping me full of pills, I saw right away what I had to do. The only
real problem I had was that I couldn't remember very much of what had gone on
before I woke up. I can remember Markie here, but I didn't even recognize my
parents. I guess I used to have a sister, but you couldn't prove it by me.
Every so often I have little flashes about the past, but they don't make very
much sense. I've learned not to worry about them. There's no point in worrying
about the past, because it isn't going to come back. As soon as I realized
that, I was ready to leave the bughouse. It took a while to persuade
Dockie-poo, but I kept snowing him until he finally gave up and let me
go." She looked fondly at Sylvia again. "That's the way things really
are in the bughouse, small person. We say what we have to say to get the things
we want and need."
"And
just exactly what is it that you need?" Sylvia asked.
"What I need more than
anything else is to have people stop asking me that question. The past-whatever
it might have been-is all over now. Something happened back then that made me
go bonkers. If I go back and look at it the way everybody seems to want me to,
I'll probably turn right around and go bonkers all over again. I need to bury
it and never try to dig it up. The nut-keepers can't stand that, so I made up
some interesting lies to make them happy, and that's all it took to get me out
of the bughouse."
"You do know that the
awful-awful's likely to come sneaking back, don't you?" Sylvia suggested.
"No, it won't. I've closed
that door and bricked it shut. From here on, my past began in the nuthouse when
I was twenty years old. Nothing that happened before that-except for Markie-has
any real importance. I'm going to pretend that I'm a normie, and I'll keep on
doing that until I get it right. Now why don't we talk about the weather or
something else that might mean something? The past is dead, and I'm going to
make sure it stays that way."
Sylvia's face took on a stricken
look. Renata had just effectively slammed a door in her face, and Sylvia wasn't
the least bit happy about that.
To be honest about it, Twink's
declaration of independence from the past caused me some problems as well. It seemed sensible, but once I dipped below
that surface I got into a bucketful of worms. Those periodic nightmares of hers
strongly suggested that the door to her past wasn't quite as tightly closed as
she wanted to believe it was, and something kept sneaking through to claw at
her mind while she was asleep. She could pretend to be a normie when she was
awake, but I knew in my bones that she wasn't out of the woods yet.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Saturday being national fix-up day
at the boardinghouse, I persuaded Charlie that we should take a run on up to
"I
really got a kick out of that screwball friend of yours the other night,"
Charlie said as we went north on Interstate 5. "She sure cut the ground
out from under Sylvia, didn't she?"
"Twink's
good at that," I told him. "She'll only let snoopy people go so far,
and then she jerks them up short. It was probably good for Sylvia, though. A
quick dose of humility might tone down that know-it-all attitude of hers."
"Fat
chance," Charlie snorted. "That whole department's stuck on that ‘do
you want to talk about it' routine. The Twinkie girl probably ruined the whole
quarter for Sylvia when she said that the nutsos make up fairy tales to tell
the keepers."
"What
a dirty, rotten shame," I said. "Have you talked with Bob lately?
If the cops have come up with
something new on the local cut-up artist, we probably ought to know about
it."
"About all they're sure of is
that it's gang stuff," Charlie replied. "Burpee's still frothing at
the mouth about Cheetah, but the rest of the cops aren't buying it. The north
end cops are fairly sure that there's a new gang moving into the area, and
they're using this butcher-shop approach to scare off the other gangs."
"Doing autopsies on guys who
are still alive and kicking probably gets the message across. ‘Get out of town
or I'll gut you' is nice and simple." There was a grizzled old watchman at
the gate of the door factory, and he waved us through when he saw me. I
recognized him, but I couldn't remeber his name. "Hook a right at the far
end of the yard," I told Charlie. "The scrap heap's on the other side
of that long shed."
"Got
it," he replied.
It was still drizzling, naturally,
and pawing through wet lumber brought back not-so-fond memories of the green
chain. It took Charlie and me about an hour to rummage through and pick out the
boards that might work for us. There was quite a bit of good lumber in that
scrap heap, but that's par for the course. Doors are right out where people can
see them, so boards with visible flaws are usually discarded. My general plan
was to use good lumber for the eye-level shelves and junk lumber near the bottom
where all anybody could see would be the outside edge.
There
are lots of ways to cut corners if you know how.
When we got back to
"That Greenleaf girl's kind of
evasive, isn't she?" James observed while I was writing down measurements.
"She sidestepped just about every one of Sylvia's questions. And that
paper she wrote opened some doors I didn't even know existed."
"It
was a doozie, wasn't it?" I agreed.
Just
then, Trish yelled up the stairs. "You've got a phone call, Mark."
"Be
right there," I called back. I went down the stairs two at a time and
picked up the phone in the living room. "Yeah?"
I said.
"It's me, Mark," Mary's
voice came over the phone. "Ren and I went up to
"Sure,"
I told her.
"Good.
I'll take her to confession this afternoon, and she'll be all set to go.
"What's she got to confess?
Even if she did something wrong way back when, she won't remember it."
"It's tradition, Mark. You go
to confession before you take the sacraments."
"Even
if you don't have anything to confess? That doesn't make sense.”
“Religion doesn't have to make sense, Mark. When you get
right down to it, I don't think it's supposed to. Do you know where St.
Benedict's Church is?"
"Up
by
"Right. It's on
“Swedish
guy?"
"Quit clowning around, Mark.
Ren wants to go to the
"Yes, ma'am."
After I hung up the phone, I went
looking for Sylvia. The only time I'd ever been inside a Catholic church had
been at
"Nobody's going to get too
excited if you miss a few things, Mark," she assured me. "They'll
know you're not Catholic as soon as you walk in.”
“Oh?"
"There
are things we do automatically, right from when we enter a church. Even if you
tried to fake it, they'd spot you. Don't worry,
nobody's going to scold you."
"Good. Churches make me a
little nervous. I go to weddings and funerals, and that's about the extent of
my involvement. Did you happen to call Dr. Fallon and fill him in on Twink's
performance Thursday?"
She nodded. "He told me that
we shouldn't take her too seriously when she goes running off through the weeds
like that. I guess she's turned evasion into an art form. We've got a fairly
unique situation here, Mark. Usually the patient's the one who has the deep,
dark secret, and the therapist has to go digging for it. This time, we all know exactly what's troubling
Renata, and she doesn't. We have the
answer, but Renata doesn't want any part of it."
"Well, the ball's in your
court now, Sylvia. I'd better get back to work. If Trish catches me goofing
off, I'll get yelled at."
At dinner that evening, though,
Trish came up with something that had nothing to do with bookshelves. She'd
caught her foot on the edge of one of those worn places in the linoleum while
the girls had been preparing supper. She hadn't fallen, but I gather that some
dinner rolls made a break for freedom "How big a project would it be to
resurface the kitchen floor, Mark?" she asked me.
"It's nothing too major,
Trish," I told her. "That linoleum in there probably dates back to
the fifties. In those days, linoleum was pretty much like carpeting. You'd buy
it in big rolls-along with a couple gallons of glue and a linoleum knife. Then
you got to spend a week or so on your knees inventing new swear words. Now it
comes in boxes. They refer to them as tiles, which isn't
very accurate, but people know what it means. The tiles are a foot square,
they're made of no-wax vinyl, and they're peel and stick. You peel the paper
off the back, put the tile in place, and then stomp on it. It goes fairly fast,
and the great part is that you can stop when-ever you feel like it-you don't
have that cumbersome roll of linoleum stretching across the middle of the
floor. The only tricky part is cutting the tiles to fit around doorframes and
along the edge."
"Is
it very expensive?"
"Not really-twenty, maybe
twenty-five dollars for a box of thirty. They've got sample books they'll lend
you, so you can pick the one you like."
"Let's look into it-that
floor's starting to get dangerous.”
“I'll check it out on Monday,"
I promised her.
It wasn't raining on Sunday
morning, and I thought that might be a good sign-if there really are such things as signs. I shaved
carefully and put on my best dress-up jacket and pants. It took me a while to
get the knot right in my necktie, but I finally got it even. I made a mental
note to pick up one of those clip-on ties. I don't dress up often enough to be
very good at tying my own.
Mary
was just pulling into her driveway when I got to her place. I'd never seen her
in uniform before, and she looked very official. The gun on her hip may have
had something to do with that. She gave me a quick inspection before we went
inside. "Don't you have a suit?" she demanded.
"I never got around to buying
one. I don't run with the suit-and-tie crowd all that often."
"Well,
it'll have to do, I guess," she said. "Let's see how Ren's holding
up. She was a little nervous about this before I went to work last night. She
hasn't been to church for several years now, and she seems to be afraid that
she might forget a few things."
"I'll be surprised if she
remembers any of the things she's
supposed to do. Isn't that what the word ‘amnesia' means?"
"You
obviously haven't been around very many Catholics, Mark. The rituals are
ingrained in early childhood. You never forget
them, no matter what's happened to
you."
"If
you say so," I said, holding the door for her.
We found Twink in the kitchen,
obviously agitated. "Where have you been?"
she demanded, glaring at me.
"It's
only
"Everything's going just fine,
Ren," Mary assured her. "Don't get all worked up."
"Could
we go now?" Twink asked me. She seemed on edge.
"Scoot," Mary commanded,
"and don't make too much noise when you come home. I'm going to take a hot
bath and crash."
"Sleep lots," I told her.
"I'll take Twink out to brunch after church."
Twink shot me a nervous grin.
"Isn't he just the nicest boy?" she said to her aunt.
"He'll
do," Mary said with a yawn. "Go. Now."
Twink and I went back out to my
car. "I wish she wouldn't worry so much about me," Twink said.
"She hasn't been sleeping very well lately.”
“We'll putter around this
afternoon," I told her, as we pulled away from the curb. "If we stay
away, maybe she can catch up on her sleep."
"That'd
be nice," she said.
St. Benedict's Church sits on
I assumed that I'd just stay at the
back of the church during the Mass, but Twink wasn't having any of that. She
got a death grip on my arm as we went inside and hauled me forward. I don't
know which of us felt more awkward as we took our seats near the front, but
when the organ began playing, Twink relaxed, and gave
me a gentle smile.
There were several rituals that I
didn't understand, but Renata moved effortlessly through the ceremony. I heard
some people sitting nearby refer to the priest as "Father O," and I
wasn't quite sure how to take that. Maybe it was a variation of
"Daddy-O." They used it affectionately-sort of like a pet name. Maybe
it had something to do with the lilting Irish brogue in which he spoke. I'd
heard people fake a brogue before-usually on St. Patrick's Day, when everybody pretends to be Irish-but the
real thing has a flow to it that you can't really imitate.
I
also didn't understand much about the ceremony involved in taking the
sacraments. I'm sure there was a lot more going on than there appeared to be on
the surface, but Twink seemed peaceful, even serene when she rejoined me
afterward. I made a mental note that anytime she started to unravel, I should
drag her off to St. Benedict's and let "Father O" settle her down.
After the service, there was that
customary "meet and greet" business at the church door. Twink was
glowing as she introduced me to "Father O," and he gave me a rather
curious look. "So this is the big brother Renata speaks of so often,"
he said.
"I think somebody's been
telling tales out of school, Father O'Donnell," I said, as we shook hands.
"Would
I do that?" Twink asked with exaggerated innocence.
"I think we should talk, Mr.
Austin," Father O told me. "Soon, if it's
possible."
That got my attention almost
immediately. "I can swing by late tomorrow, Father O'Donnell," I
suggested.
"Fine,"
he said. "About three-thirty?"
"Right," I agreed, as the
crowd moved us along toward the open door. "What was that all about,
Markie?" Twink asked, as we strolled back to my car.
"How should I know? I haven't
talked with him yet. Do you want to have brunch in that restaurant up on top of
the Space Needle?"
"You're
going to fly me to the moon?"
"Not
right away. The man in the moon's booked solid this
year."
We clowned around as I drove
downtown. Twink seemed to be a lot more relaxed than she'd been for a long time
now. If a quick trip to church was all it'd take to wind her down, I'd make a
standing appointment with Father O and take her to St. Benedict's twice a day.
On
Monday morning our silvery-haired
Yes, I thought, Paradise Lost was definitely a barn
burner, but my paper would be on more solid ground if I stuck to his prose
works.
After class, I went back to the
library to continue my investigation of Whitman's British connections. I found
definite proof that Whitman had received
a copy of the Poetic Works of William
Blake in the early 1870s. Try mixing Milton, Blake, and Whitman all
together in a single morning. It definitely stretches your head.
I grabbed a burger about
twelve-thirty and hit the door of my freshman class right on the button at
one-thirty. Twink was in her seat, so she obviously hadn't had another one of
those bad nights. I returned the papers I'd spent hours grading, and then I assigned
another one-"Why Am I Here?"-which brought the usual groans. Freshmen
groan a lot, I've noticed.
"All right, fun-seekers,"
I began, "shall we stop feeling sorry for ourselves and go to work? Your
papers revealed a certain flaw that needs correcting. Let's take a look at the
lowly preposition for a while. I know that it's the ‘in' thing lately to omit
prepositions, despite the fact that it makes the ‘in' person sound like an
idiot. People 'depart
That got their immediate attention,
and they listened intently for the rest of the period.
Twink hung around after I'd
dismissed the class. "What's got you on the prod today, Markie?" she
asked.
"Grading papers filled with
sloppy language, Twink. That's the un-fun part of teaching."
"It's
your own fault. If you wouldn't assign so many, you wouldn't have to grade
them. I'm supposed to say ‘thank you.' Aunt Mary was all rested when you
dropped me off yesterday. She slept until almost
"Good. She was looking
frazzled when we left for church. She really needed that sleep."
"As
long as it's ‘let's all thank Markie' time, I'd like to add a few of mine to
the heap. I really enjoyed our little jaunt to the Space Needle yesterday. I
didn't know that the restaurant up there rotated like that. It gives you a view
of the whole city, doesn't it?"
"Sure,
unless there's a low-lying cloudbank blotting everything out.”
“Say
hi to the gang at your boardinghouse for me, OK? I had lots of fun there the
other night."
"I'll
pass that on," I promised.
"Good," she said.
"I've got to run now. See ya." And then she was gone. It was fairly
obvious that we'd done something right
lately. Twink seemed almost normal.
Then I checked my watch and headed
for the parking garage. I'd almost forgotten my appointment with Father
O'Donnell.
He
was just coming out of a little booth along the side of the church when I got
there, and an elderly lady was near the altar working her way through her
rosary beads. Father O nodded to me as I came down the center aisle, and I
joined him near a small door to one side of the altar. He led the way along a
narrow hallway and into a book-lined office. "Have a seat, Mr.
Austin," he said.
"Just Mark, Father O'Donnell.
I clutch up when people call me ‘mister.' "
"All right, Mark it is. I asked you to come by
today because I'm concerned about Renata Greenleaf, and it seems that you know
her better than anybody else."
"I'm
a longtime friend of her family, Father."
"You are aware that she's very
troubled, aren't you?"
"If you think she's bad now,
you should have seen her a couple of years ago.
Twink-that is, Renata-is a recent graduate of a mental institution."
"I thought it might be
something like that. She was almost incoherent when she came to confession on
Saturday, and every now and then she'd say things in a language I couldn't even
recognize, much less understand."
"Maybe I should fill you in.
There are some fairly complicated things about Renata that you probably ought
to know."
"I'd appreciate that, Mark.
Right now she has me so baffled that I don't know which way to turn."
"I'm not sure this'll help
very much. Twink's making a career out of baffling people." I leaned back
in my chair and gave him the whole sad, sordid story-right up to the paper
Twink had written, and how it made everybody sit up and take notice.
Father O'Donnell seemed
shell-shocked when I finished. "I'd like to see that paper, Mark."
"I've got copies, Father. I'll
drop one off for you. Did any of what I just told you help at all? Twink's a
little strange sometimes, but that's because she's crazy-not too crazy, but
crazy all the same. She's trying to get well, but she's having some trouble
with it-for fairly obvious reasons. If the cops ever catch the guy who killed
her sister, she might get well immediately, but I don't think that's too
likely. It's been over two years now, so he probably got away clean."
"He'll
answer for it, Mark. Believe me, he'll answer for it."
"That's in the next world,
Father O. I'd like to get my hands on him in this one."
"We sort of disapprove of
that, Mark. God's supposed to take care of it.”
“I just want to help out, Father.
God can have what's left after I'm done with him."
"We might want to talk about
that someday. I think I understand Renata a little better now."
"That's assuming that Twink
really is Renata. If she's
"You
had to bring that up, didn't you?" he said ruefully.
"Just
trying to brighten up your day, Father O."
The rest of the week rolled merrily
along as we all settled back into harness.
The
newspapers and television kept trying hard to ride the "Seattle
Slasher" story, but the saddle was starting to slip on that horse. Our
local cut-up appeared to have put his knife away, and the media got slightly
sulky about that.
Sylvia
stayed right on top of me, demanding daily reports on Twink's behavior. I
started to suspect a research paper in progress there, and I wouldn't have been
surprised to discover the fine hand of Dr. Fallon some-where in the background.
James,
Charlie, and I hit the Green Lantern a couple of times that week to stay in
touch with Charlie's brother. The police investigation of the "Seattle
Slasher" case seemed to be at a standstill. Bob more or less admitted that
the cops were marking time, waiting for another murder. "We don't have
enough to work with yet," he told us Thursday evening. "The general
opinion is that the killings are gang-related, but there's always the
possibility that we've got a homicidal maniac roaming around out there. If the
two killings are just part of a turf war, two might be the end of it. If it's a
crazy, though, there's certain to be more. Crazies kill people for crazy
reasons, and they usually keep on killing until they get caught."
"You're
just chock-full of good news, Bob," Charlie told his brother. "Are
you guys looking into the possibility of a werewolf? Or maybe
a vampire?"
"We're
keeping an open mind, kid."
"You
had to ask, didn't you Charlie?" James rumbled. "Now we'll have to
break out the garlic and the silver bullets." Then he looked at Bob.
"What is the proper procedure when you arrest a vampire?" he asked.
"Do you read him his rights before or after you drive the stake through
his heart?"
"I'd have to look that
up," Bob replied with a perfectly straight face. "It doesn't come up
very often."
Mary called me after she and Twink
had returned from the weekly visit to Dr. Fallon and invited me to dinner.
While we were eating, I told her that we'd been picking Bob West's brains for
information about our local celebrity.
"West's a good man," she
told me. "He's solid and very thorough. He's a long way in front of
Burpee, that's for sure."
"Who's
Burpee?" Twink asked curiously.
"His real name is
Belcher," Mary explained. "Burpee has a tendency to do things
backward. A good cop follows the evidence to the suspect. Burpee picks a
suspect at random-possibly by drawing straws or laying out a deck of tarot
cards. Then he tries to find evidence that'll back his theory."
"He really wants to nail Cheetah for these killings in this part of
town, doesn't he?" I asked.
"Burpee's a joke," she
snorted. "Cheetah wouldn't be caught dead out of downtown
"What
got him so fired up about Cheetah?" I asked.
"Burpee was working out of the
downtown precinct a couple of years ago, and an informant gave him a good solid
lead on where and when he could put his hands on Cheetah. Burpee blew it by
running his mouth when he should have kept quiet. That's what got him
transferred to the north precinct, and he's desperate to get back to the head
office where he can pretend to be a big shot again."
"Police department politics
get kind of murky sometimes, don't they?" Mary grinned at me. "Fun
though," she added.
Saturday morning I finished up the
bookshelves in James's room by
A word in passing right here. It's not a good idea to
give a group of ladies too many choices in the area of home improvement.
Paralysis sets in almost immediately when you put twenty or thirty
possibilities in front of them. I think Keats referred to it as "negative
capability."
"Did
you really have to do that,
Mark?" James growled at me late that afternoon. "If I get much more
of that 'What do you think of this one?' I'll go
bananas."
"It
was a blunder," I admitted. "I should have just picked up two of the
damn things-one fairly nice and the other awful. That would have simplified
things a bit."
"No day in which you learn
something is a complete waste, I guess," he conceded.
I let that go by. "I'll see if
I can crowd the girls a bit. I do have to get that sample book back by this
evening."
It
took a little pushing, but by suppertime the ladies had narrowed the choice
down to five different samples. Then I took the book away from them, went back
to the supply store, and bought one of each variety for the girls to play with.
As an afterthought, I picked up a linoleum knife. I was fairly certain I had
one somewhere among my tools, but I wasn't sure exactly where, and it probably
wasn't in very good shape anyway.
I
called Twink later to ask her if she wanted to go to church in the morning, but
she didn't seem too enthusiastic about the idea. That surprised me a bit. But
then I remembered how worked up she had been before our trip last weekend, and I decided to let it pass.
The week moved smoothly along. The
students had more or less settled down, my own studies advanced nicely, and
nothing very remarkable was happening in the real world. Then on Thursday
morning, the newspapers and all the hyper television reporters got the break
they'd been breathlessly waiting for.
CHAPTER
NINE
We
gathered in the kitchen, drank Erika's coffee, and watched that small TV set as
the story-what little there was-unfolded. The latest victim had been another
small-timer with a fairly extensive police record. His name was Daniel
Garrison, and he'd been in trouble with the law since he'd been about fifteen.
He'd served one year in the state reformatory before he'd graduated to the
penitentiary at
"This
one's going to ruin poor Burpee's day, I'll bet," Charlie noted. "I
haven't heard a word about any dope deals yet."
"Our local cut-up seems
hell-bent on deleting minor criminals," James rumbled. "This one
seems to be a carbon copy of the one who got himself scattered around in
"Maybe he's a conservative
who's taking the butcher knife approach to tax cuts," Charlie suggested.
"It costs a lot of money to keep these small-time punks locked up-about
thirty-five thousand bucks a year per head, the last I heard. This guy with a
knife has already saved us about a hundred thousand a year, and he's only
getting started."
"I don't think that's likely
to put him in the conservative hall of fame, Charlie," Erika disagreed.
"He'll have to take out several battalions of these minor leaguers before
he'll make much of a dent in the state budget."
I spent the morning in the library
hammering out a tentative bibliography on
Twink missed class again. That was
starting to become a habit. I decided that I should have a little talk with her
about that. It didn't make much difference as long as she was just auditing,
but if she moved up to taking courses for real, class-cutting was a sure road
to flunk city.
That evening, Charlie, James, and I
dropped in at the Green Lantern to see if we could pry some more details on the
Windermere killing from Charlie's brother Bob.
"We're pretty much convinced
that the Slasher's picking his victims at random," Bob told us.
"There doesn't seem to be any connection between them-except that they've
all got fairly extensive police records. This Garrison punk wasn't really into
dope dealing. He probably used dope
now and then, but we've never busted him for selling it. As far as we can tell,
the poor bastard just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Serial
killing stuff?" Charlie asked.
Bob shook his head. "The
so-called serial killer almost always has some kind of sex hang-up, and his
victims are either women or children. So far, the victims are all guys, and
they seem to have been straight. There's something else involved, and we
haven't been able to run it down yet. The thing that's bugging me about these killings is the lack of
noise. These guys were carved up like Christmas turkeys, and we haven't had a
single report of any yelling or screaming. Somebody should be hearing all the racket and
calling in. These guys are taking a long time to die. The coroner tells us the
whole thing takes fifteen or twenty minutes at least. The
Slasher's going out of his way to prolong the business and to make it as
unbearable as possible. The locations are sort of secluded, but screams
carry a long way, particularly at night, and so far nobody seems to be hearing
anything."
"Maybe people have heard the noise, but they just
don't want to get involved," I suggested.
"Don't kid yourself,
Mark," he told me. "If a dog barks more than twice, we start getting
nine-one-one calls almost immediately."
"I
thought that number was strictly for emergencies," James said.
"It is," Bob said,
"but different people have different definitions of the word, ‘emergency.'
A boom box two blocks away after
"I
was talking with Mary Greenleaf the other day, and she told me that poor old
Burpee got himself kicked out of the downtown precinct because of a major
screwup," I said.
"You
know Mary?" Bob asked, sounding surprised.
"Yeah. My dad and
her brother were army buddies in '
"He did that, all right,"
Bob agreed, laughing. "He got a tip from one of his informants, and he had
a clear shot at Cheetah. But Burpee's always been desperate to be the center of
attention, and this time he started bragging before he went to pick Cheetah up. The only trouble there is that
Cheetah's got more informants than the entire Seattle Police Department's got,
and word got back to him pronto. Burpee took a whole platoon of uniforms and
surrounded a third-rate hotel in downtown
"That would explain his
obsession with Cheetah, though," James suggested. "I guess he has to
make amends for that blunder."
"Does
he ever," Bob agreed.
"Since dear old ‘cut and run'
has been concentrating on butchering guys, would that suggest that the ladies
in our house are probably safe?" Charlie asked his brother.
"I wouldn't take any
chances," Bob told him. "I don't think we know enough about this guy
yet to know what sets him off. He's been killing people in parks after
"That pretty much takes us
back to square one, doesn't it?" Charlie suggested. "The girls are
carrying that pepper spray, but I still think we'd better ride shotgun on them
anytime they go out after dark."
"Look on the bright side,
Charlie," I told him. "Here's your chance to be chivalrous-knightly
duty, and all like that there."
"Whose
knight night is it tonight?" he asked me.
"Somehow I knew that was
coming," James said, as we all stood up to leave.
I hit my Milton Seminar on Friday
morning, then dropped by Dr. Conrad's office to fill
him in on the Blake-Whitman connection. "It all fits together, boss.
Whitman wasn't a painter-or engraver-the way Blake was, so his poetry wasn't
quite as visual as Blake's, but even Swinburne spotted the similarities. Of
course, that was before Swinburne sobered up, so his perceptions might have come swimming up out of the bottom of a bottle. Over the
centuries, we've lost a lot of great poetry because of booze and dope, haven't
we?"
"It
tends to get overemphasized, Mr. Austin. I'm not sure that 'Kublai Khan' would
have gone much further even if Coleridge hadn't been nipping at laudanum. Are
you thinking about taking another ride on the derivative horse? People have
been comparing Whitman to Blake for over a hundred years now."
"It
is a possibility, boss. Whitman kept revising Leaves of Grass until the day before he died. If the Brits got him
all fired up about Blake, isn't it possible that hints of Blake's stuff might
have crept into some of those later revisions?"
"You're staring a variorum
edition of Leaves of Grass full in
the face, Mr. Austin," he told me.
"I
know," I replied glumly, "though Whitman's always irritated me, for
some reason. I think Blake was a better poet. He looked out at the rest of the
world, but Whitman was too stuck on himself to look beyond the end of his own
nose. Anyway, I'm in the right place if I want to do a variorum of Leaves of Grass. The main library has
copies of all the first editions of the damn thing, so I wouldn't have to go
roaming around in computer land looking for texts. Working with a guard
standing over me wouldn't be too thrilling, but what the hell?"
"Those first editions are
valuable, Mr. Austin. What are you aiming for? Did you want to indict poor old
Walt for plagiarism?"
"I
wouldn't go that far, boss-I just want to find out if Blake's stuff had any
influence on the later editions of Leaves
of Grass. We get hung up on compartmentalization in the English Department.
Chaucer scholars don't speak to Faulkner specialists, and everybody sneers at
the Victorians. It's all the same language, and good poetry-or prose-can come
from almost anyplace."
"Even
from a lunatic asylum. How's that girl coming along, by the way?"
"She went to church a couple
of weeks ago, and she confused hell out of the priest when she confessed in
twin-speak. That's something to ponder, isn't it? Is a confession valid if the
priest hasn't the faintest idea of what you're saying to him?"
"I don't do theology, Mr.
Austin," he said dryly. "I don't do windows, either. Keep me posted
on your protegee's progress, all right? If she happens to come up with any new
variations of ‘The Bughouse Blues,' I'd like to see them."
"I'll mention it to her-boost
her self-confidence. Give me a little more time, and I'll have the whole campus
in her cheering section. Of course, if she finally does get well, she'll
probably stop writing the good stuff. How's that for a moral dilemma on a
gloomy Friday? If Twink stays bonkers, she'll keep on writing great stuff; if
she gets well, she might start writing the usual freshman junk."
"Go
away, Mr. Austin," he told me wearily.
"Yes, boss," I replied
obediently. I had a briefcase full of papers to grade anyway, so I went back up
the hill to the boardinghouse to dig into them.
When I got there, though, Renata's
bike was chained to the front porch. That seemed a little odd.
Inside I found Twink and Sylvia
deep in a discussion in the living room. "Did you get lost in the library
again, Markie?" Renata asked me when I looked in on them.
"No, Twink. I was just
checking in with Dr. Conrad. Aren't you sup-posed to go see Fallon today?"
"His secretary called this
morning," she replied. "There's some emergency at the bughouse, and
Dockie-poo didn't have time for me today. That made me feel all lonesome and
unwanted, so I tried to call you. Sylvia answered the phone, and she told me to
come on over. I love Aunt Mary dearly, but all she talks about is the cop shop.
I'm not that interested, really-so I've been telling Sylvia stories about the
bughouse instead."
"She's opened up a whole new
world for me, Mark," Sylvia said. "There's a lot more going on in
mental institutions than I'd ever imagined."
"She didn't know about the
lonely part," Twink told me. "Buggies get fed and watered, and they
get clean sheets on their beds, but nobody's got the time to just sit and talk
with us-without taking notes. Lonely sets in when that notepad comes out."
She stood up then and came across the room. "I need a hug," she told
me, holding out her arms.
"Oh," I said,
"right." I set my briefcase down and wrapped my arms around her.
"Markie hugs good," Twink told Sylvia. "You ought to try him
sometime."
"Boy-girl
stuff is sort of a no-no here, Renata," Sylvia said. "We're not
supposed to get that close to each other."
"Hugging doesn't have anything
to do with that," Twink replied. "Every house should have an official
hugger-no questions, no comments, just hugs. A few good hugs can take away
acres of lonesome. The people with the notepads don't understand that. They
talk and talk and talk, and it doesn't do any good at all. What we really need
is hugs." She sighed then. "Nobody in the world of normies is ever
going to understand the world of buggies, but you don't have to understand. A
hug lets us know that it's not really important to you that we're crazy, and
that you like us all the same. That's all we want."
"You could call it ‘hug
therapy,' Sylvia," I suggested, "and then you could get yourself into
all the textbooks on the same page with Freud and Jung."
"Quit
trying to be funny, Mark," she snapped. "Oh, Renata's staying for
supper, by the way-we cleared it with her aunt Mary"
"Good.
Now if you ladies will excuse me, I've got papers to grade."
Erika
was in a sour humor at supper. Her computer had been misbehaving, and she was
right on the verge of pitching it out the window.
"Remain
tranquil, baby sister," James told her. "Charlie probably knows more
about computers than Bill Gates does."
"I don't know if I'd go that
far," Charlie said. "Old Bill can make a computer sit up and beg, roll
over and play dead, and shake paws with him. But I don't think he makes house
calls, so I'll take a look-it's probably something minor. Computers get all
huffy if you miss a step during a standard program, and they just love to tell
you that you've made a mistake." Then he laughed.
"What's
so funny?" Erika demanded.
"There's a story that's been
going around at Boeing since the dark ages when people had to use IBM cards to
put information into huge computers that covered an acre or more. Anyway, there
was an engineer who was having an argument with an insurance company about
whether or not he'd missed a premium payment. The only trouble was that he
couldn't get in touch with a human being. All he got was a long string of
letters telling him that he owed them money. He finally got a bellyful of that,
so he went down to the shop, cut a stainless-steel sheet down to the size and
shape of an IBM card, punched a few square slots into it, and then painted it
buff-colored. It looked exactly like one of those old IBM cards. Then he
magnetized it and mailed it off to the insurance company. Some clerk who was
only half-awake fed it into the company's computer, and it erased the whole
damn thing. There was absolutely nothing in their computer."
"That's awful!" Erika
exclaimed, but then she laughed a wicked little laugh. "What did they
do?"
"What could they do?"
Charlie demanded. "If they made too big a fuss about it, word would get
out, and everybody who was having a beef with any company that used computers
could wipe the company out anytime he wanted to. The computer age almost got
derailed right there in its infancy."
"How
did it all turn out?" Twink asked.
"Well, the engineer got to
talk to whole battalions of live human beings for a starter," Charlie
replied, "and they were all terribly polite, for some reason. As it turned
out, he got about five years of free insurance, and all he had to do to get it
was to promise that he'd never do that again and never tell anybody else how to
do it."
"The
original computer virus," James noted.
"That it was," Charlie
agreed. "A computer that's just been turned into a tabula rasa isn't worth
very much."
"I haven't heard that term in
years," James said.
"The old ones are the
best," Charlie replied.
After dinner, Sylvia took Twink off
to her room, and it was almost mid-night before they decided to call it a day.
I was camped out in the living room with
"Good
night, Markie," Twink said.
"What did you have
planned?" I asked her. "I thought I'd go home."
"Not by yourself, you
won't," I said flatly. "I'll drive you back to Mary's place."
"And
leave my bike here? Not hardly."
"You're not going out by
yourself, Twinkie. There's a nut running around out there with a knife."
"Oh, poo."
"You can ‘poo' all you want,
Twink, but you're not going anyplace alone. I'll borrow Charlie's truck and
deliver you and your bike to your Aunt Mary's front door."
"You're
being silly, Markie."
"Humor me. I'm bigger than you
are, Twink, so we'll do this my way.”
“He does have a point,
Renata," Sylvia stepped in. "It's sort of dangerous out there after
dark."
"Oh,
all right." Twink gave up. "I still think it's silly, though."
"Let's
not take any chances. Stay put. I'll be right back." I went upstairs,
borrowed Charlie's keys, and came back down. It only took a couple of minutes
to load the bicycle into the back of Charlie's truck, then Twink and I got in
and took off.
"What's got you all burly and
protective, Markie?" she asked, as I drove us through the rainy, empty
streets.
"It's my job, Twink. I'm
supposed to look out for you. You might as well get used to it."
"You're
as bad as Les."
"Exactly. I thought
you knew that already.”
“You really care, don't you?"
"Of course I do. I've been
looking after you since you were in diapers, and I don't plan to change."
"That's
sweet."
"Don't get gushy about it,
kid. Everybody has responsibilities. You're one of mine. Sometimes you're a
pain in the neck, but that doesn't make any difference. Have we got that
straight?"
"Yes, Master. Yes, Master.”
“Oh, quit."
Sylvia
was still up when I got back. "That's the strongest person I've ever met, Mark," she said. "No
sooner do I think I've got her pegged and identified than she comes up with
something new and different. One day I think she's manic-depressive, and the
next day I'm positive that I'm looking at a classic multiple personality
disorder. She changes so fast that I can't keep up with her."
"That's why she's so much fun,
Sylvia. You never know what she'll do next. Life's isn't boring when Twink's
around."
"I've
got reams of things I want to take up with Dr. Fallon."
"That's why we recruited you,
Toots. Fallon knows that I'm no specialist. We need a resident expert to do
interpretations for us-like, what the hell is ‘multiple personality
disorder'?"
"Go to a video store and rent The Three Faces of Eve," she
suggested. "
"I
think you're pushing that one just a bit, babe. Twink's problem goes back to
"Don't get complacent,
Mark," she told me. "You did know
that she had another ‘bad day' yesterday, didn't you?"
"She
did? This is the first I've heard
about it."
"Mary told me when I called
this afternoon. She says she tried to call us, but we were all gone before she
got Renata settled. Renata mentioned it too, this afternoon, but she didn't
really want to talk about it, so I just let it pass."
I
shrugged. "It's been quite a while since her last one," I said.
"There's probably some sort of sequence involved-thirteen days normie and
then one day bonkers. If things are going the way they're supposed to, the
normie periods will get longer and longer, and the bonkers
days will get further and further apart."
"We
can always hope, I guess." Sylvia sounded dubious, though.
Right
after breakfast on Saturday, James and I shooed everybody out of the kitchen
and started prying off the baseboards and door moldings in preparation for
putting down the new floor tiles.
"Couldn't we just butt the tiles
up against the baseboards?" James asked me.
I
shook my head. "You always get gaps if you do it that way, and those gaps
fill up with gunk every time somebody mops the floor. It starts to get fragrant
after a while, and we do eat in here."
"Ah,"
he said. "I knew there had to be a reason for it."
"That's not the only reason, pard. I'm not all that
great with a linoleum knife, and sometimes the edges I leave are kind of
ragged. When we nail the baseboards back in place, they'll cover a multitude of
sins. Perfection's in the eye of the beholder. You and I may know about these
little goofs, but nobody else will."
"I
may ponder that all day."
"Just
don't tell anybody else about it, OK?"
We started on one side and worked
our way across the floor. The guy who'd come up with "peel and stick"
tiles had made life a lot more pleasant for people who did floors. If you get
the first row good and square, you can cover a lot of floor in a hurry. It's a
piece of cake-right up until you come to the far wall. That's usually when the
swearing starts. Measurements get crucial at that point, and older houses are
almost never exactly plumb and square. Houses settle after a few years. The
doors start to stick, and the floors sag and buckle. Gravity's nice, I suppose,
but it sure makes laying tile a bear.
My
new linoleum knife gave me a lot of help at that stage. You really want a good
sharp point when you get down to detailed cutting.
"That's one ugly
implement," James observed. "I wouldn't want to have to carve a
turkey with that thing."
"It wasn't built for carving,
James," I told him. "The point's all that matters. If you get a good
clean cut on the first pass, you're home free. That's why the handle's so
beefy. You've got to lean into it to get through the vinyl. Things start to go
to hell if you have to make more than one pass-and you've got to be careful
with the silly thing. It'll slice skin even faster than vinyl, and it cuts
long, wide, and deep. One little mistake earns you a quick trip to the
emergency room. It usually gives you nice straight scars, though."
"I'll leave the cutting to
you, old buddy," he told me. "I don't want to go anywhere near that
thing." He glanced at his watch and looked around at our floor. "We
might even finish up today," he said.
"That
depends on how much trouble we have with the doorframes," I corrected. "That's the part I dread. A guy can
spend more time cutting and fitting around the doorframes than he will on all
the rest of the floor. Why don't you go tell Trish that we'd better send out
for pizza or something this evening. You and I might
be at this until
"You're
probably right," he agreed. "I'll go talk with Trish." He looked
at our new floor. "It does look nice, Mark. The girls might complain a
bit, but 1 think they'll be very happy with what
you've done today."
"I
hope so. I sure wouldn't want to have to do it again. Revision's OK when it
comes to essays, but it's a real pain when you're talking about a floor."
CHAPTER
TEN
Twink
had been making noises about wanting to go to church on Sun-day. When I finally
admitted that we couldn't finish up with the floor tiles on Saturday night,
Sylvia volunteered to fill in for me so that James and I could finish up in the
morning. Getting that kitchen back on-line was the number one priority at the
boardinghouse.
Bright and early Sunday morning,
James and I fixed a couple of rough spots, and put the door moldings and
baseboards back in place. Then we picked up all the scraps, put my tools away,
and swabbed the new floor with a damp mop. "Looks good to me," James
said, as we gave it that last look-see.
"It'll do," I agreed.
"There's a couple of boo-boos, but they're not
too visible. Shall we show it off?"
"Might as well," James
agreed. He leaned out into the hallway and called to Trish and Erika.
"It's beautiful!" Trish
exclaimed, when the two of them looked in. "It's just a floor,
Trish," I told her. "It's not exactly a work of art.”
“Don't bad-mouth it, Mark,"
Erika told me. "It makes the whole kitchen look bigger and brighter. You
guys do nice work."
"Very nice," Trish
agreed. "Can we walk on it? I mean, do we have to give it time to dry or
anything?"
"It's all ready to go, babe.
The kitchen's yours again." I gave it a critical inspection. "It does
look better, I guess. Of course the old one was pretty grubby. Did Sylvia
happen to tell you when she'll be coming back? Sun-day's usually my day to keep
Twink away from Mary's place to give the poor lady time to catch up on her
sleep. I've worked graveyard shift a few times myself, and it starts to wear
you down after a while."
"Sylvia wasn't too
specific," Erika replied, "but I think she plans to spend the day
with Renata. They get along pretty well, but I think Sylvia's got some ulterior
motives. She's been talking about a case history sort of thing-and maybe even a
subject for her master's thesis."
"Oh?"
"Renata fascinates her. She
knows that the poor kid's got serious problems, and she wants to see if she can
put a name to them."
"She
hasn't said anything to me about it."
"She wouldn't, Mark,"
James told me. "You're Renata's semiofficial keeper, and Sylvia's probably
trying to sneak around behind you."
"Oh, that's just dandy,"
I said sourly. "Now I've got something else to worry about."
"Sylvia isn't going to hurt
Renata, Mark," Trish assured me. "Abnormals are her specialty, so she
knows what she's doing."
"Nobody knows for sure what's
keeping Twink afloat, Trish, not even Dr. Fallon. I think Sylvia and I'd better
have a talk about this before she goes too much further."
Sylvia didn't get in until late,
though, and the house rules sort of prohibited any conferences between the
upstairs people and the downstairs folks after
She was still all fired up about
her "case history" notion at breakfast Mon-day morning.
"Most
of the time an interview with a mental patient only produces grunts and
mumbles," she told us, "but Renata can think and she can talk.
She can describe not only her own
behavior, but the peculiarities of her fellow patients as well. She could be an
absolute gold mine of information about various mental states, ranging through
all the standard ones and on up into ones that don't even have names yet."
I decided right then to step in
before she went too much further. "Have you got anything on the fire for
tomorrow evening, Sylvia?" I asked her. "What did you have in
mind?" she asked archly.
"Behave yourself,"
I scolded. "I think maybe we should bounce this off Dr. Fallon before you
go much further with this case history of yours. Twink's still pretty fragile,
so you'd probably better have a set of ground rules to go by. There are some
things you don't talk about, and certain questions you don't ask."
"I know what I'm doing,
Mark," she told me in a blunt sort of way. "I'm not going to damage
your precious Twinkie."
"We don't seem to be talking
on the same wavelength here, Toots," I said flatly. "Let me put it to
you right straight out. I can have Renata all packed up and out of
"Whoo,"
Erika said. "This one's a tiger, isn't he?"
Sylvia was glaring at me, and she seemed
right on the verge of exploding.
"Let's back away from these
ultimatums and declarations of war, shall we?" James stepped in smoothly.
"Do you have any objections about this meeting with Dr. Fallon,
Sylvia?"
"Of course not," she
snapped, "but I don't need to have people who don't know what they're
talking about trying to tell me how I should handle things in my field."
"I'm not trying to tell you
what to do, Sylvia," I said, backing away a little. "All I'm saying
is that Dr. Fallon is the real expert, and he can give you a crash course in
how to approach Twink without putting her into melt-down. We both lose if she
goes bonkers again."
"I
don't object to a meeting with Dr. Fallon, Mark," she told me in a more
reasonable tone. "Hurting Renata-even by accident-is the last thing I
want. Don't issue commands and ultimatums like that, though. I can be just as
bad-tempered as you can."
"No kidding," I said
wryly. Then I grinned at her. "Peace?" I offered. "If
you promise to behave."
"Sure."
"All right, then," she
agreed with a bright smile, "peace it is." Then she laughed a bit
ruefully. "We weren't really getting anywhere with all the yelling and
waving our arms around anyway, were we?"
"Not
so's you'd notice it."
After my
"Is
Renata all right?" he asked as soon as he answered.
"She seems fine, Doc," I
told him. "Missing her session with you on Friday didn't upset her. I'm
calling because I think you should talk with abnormal Sylvia. She's the one I
told you about-the girl who's majoring in weirdos. She wants to do one of those
case history things on Twink, and I thought you might want to kick it around
with her. Sylvia's sharp, but it might be a good idea to keep a tight rein on
her until we're sure she knows what she's doing. A few rounds of ‘do this, but
don't do that' before we let her jump in?"
"You've
got that right," he agreed.
"If you aren't going to be
busy tomorrow evening, I thought I might bring her up so that you can talk it
over with her. Telephones are all right, I guess, but sometimes things should
be handled face-to-face."
"Good
point," he agreed. "How about seven-thirty?”
“No
problem, Doc. We'll see you then."
Tuesday was a light day for me. It
seems to turn out that way in grad school. Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually
devoted to research, and Mon-days, Wednesdays, and Fridays are class days.
Sylvia was edgy while we waited for
the
"I
thought you'd never ask," she replied.
We took Interstate 5 north toward
The traffic had thinned a bit when
we took the Snohomish turnoff and went east across the flats.
"That's moderately
depressing," Sylvia noted as we went over the soggy marshland around Ebey
Slough. "How much farther is the sanitarium?”
“Five or
six miles. It's sort of secluded, and there aren't any big signs
pointing the way. The neighbors probably wouldn't like that very much. A
bughouse isn't exactly what you'd call a tourist attraction."
We took a left at Cavalero's Corner
and started up the steep hill toward
"Land isn't too expensive
here," I told her, "and Dr. Fallon keeps the place low-key. A tall
building out here in the boonies might attract attention. Let's go see the man,
Sylvia."
"Oh,
dear," she faltered.
"Don't get uptight, babe. Doc
Fallon isn't hard to get along with. We're all on the same side here, so he
probably won't bite."
Inside, the lady at the front desk
knew me, and waved us through. I led the way along the hall and knocked loudly
on Fallon's door, "It's only me, Doc," I called. "Don't
shoot."
Sylvia gave me a startled look.
"Inside joke," I told her.
"Come
in, Mark," Fallon answered.
I opened the door, and Sylvia and I
went on in. Fallon looked slightly startled when he saw Sylvia for the first
time. "She's small, but she's wiry, Doc," I told him. "This is
Sylvia Cardinale, the lady who wants to major in Twinkie."
"Has he always been like this,
Dr. Fallon?" Sylvia asked. "Or is this some recent aberration?"
"Be nice," I murmured.
"This, of course, is Dr. Fallon, the resident Twinkie expert."
"I'm
honored, Dr. Fallon," Sylvia said.
"Please," he replied,
smiling at her. "Have a seat, Miss Cardinale. Mark tells me that you'd
like to put together a case history on Renata Greenleaf, with a possible eye on
expanding it into your Master's thesis."
"That might depend on how the
case history turns out, Dr. Fallon," she replied. "To be honest with
you, Renata has me baffled. Sometimes, I'm positive that she's
manic-depressive, and other times, I suspect multiple personality disorder. She
changes so fast sometimes."
"Those broad labels don't
always fit the individual cases," he told her. "Over the years I've
found that most patients are unique. They might lean in the direction of one
category or another, but they almost always have personal idiosyncrasies.
Renata's case derives from trauma, and that always complicates matters."
"I've
noticed," Sylvia agreed wryly.
"I thought you might have. How
much has Mark told you about the incident that brought her here in the first
place?"
Sylvia recited the bare facts of
Renata's case, while Fallon nodded approval. Encouraged, she started to review
her own observations. "She mentions ‘loneliness' fairly often,
and I suspect that her sense of loneliness might be symptomatic. At the deepest
level of her consciousness, she's vaguely aware that something or somebody is
missing."
"Excellent,"
Fallon said approvingly. "A lot of people would have missed that. From a
certain perspective, half of Renata isn't there anymore. Her amnesia has
blocked out all memory of
"Oh, yes," Sylvia agreed,
"and now I see why Mark was so concerned about my 'case history'. Some of
the so-called experts in the field seem to believe in the blunt object approach
to therapy. If some half-wit decided to hit Renata over the head with
"Miss Cardinale seems to be a
fortunate find, Mark," Fallon said. "Don't
let her get away."
"And
she's cute, too," I added.
"You aren't supposed to notice
that, Mark," Sylvia scolded. "Pretend you didn't notice my
noticing," I replied.
Sylvia grinned as she turned back
to Dr. Fallon. "I was talking with Renata last week," she said,
"and something came up. You did know that she has a strong objection to
notebooks, didn't you? She as much as admitted that as soon as she sees
somebody taking notes, she starts making up wild stories to hide her real
feelings."
Dr. Fallon nodded. "It's
cropped up before. Renata could probably send poor Dr. Freud right up the wall.
Those of us in the field reach for note-books almost automatically, and as soon
as Renata sees a notebook, she does her best to avoid the truth."
"That's not going to make my
case history any easier," she complained. "Why don't we talk with
Charlie?" I mused. "I'm sure he'll be able to come up with a way to
plant a bug."
"I'm
sure he could," she said. "I hadn't thought of that."
"The great thing about a
planted bug would be that it'll catch every word," I added, "along
with inflections and other things that might reveal anything Twink's trying to
hide. Notes aren't always that accurate, but a tape gets it all. What's even
better, maybe, is that Sylvia can run off copies for you, Doc. You'll know
exactly what's going on." Then I laughed. "This is all starting to
sound like a James Bond movie, isn't it?"
"Whatever works, Mark,"
Fallon said. "I think this might be very useful. To be honest with you,
Miss Cardinale, I had my doubts about this whole idea. The notion of taped
conversations puts a whole new light on it, though. Let's try it and see what
happens."
Sylvia was elated when we went out
to my car. "I owe you one, Mark," she told me. "Dr. Fallon
really bought into this idea when you came up with the notion of taping my
conversations with Renata. Your ‘let's plant a bug' suggestion brought him
around."
She frowned as we drove on out of
the courtyard. "There might still be a problem, though."
"Oh?
What's that?"
"I'll have to make sure that
Renata and I always have our little discussions in the vicinity of Charlie's
microphone."
"Where have you been for the
past several years, Sylvia?" I asked her. "Charlie's right on top of
all the latest technology, and the FBI's been planting bugs in people's
underwear for a long time."
"I hadn't thought of
that," she admitted.
"Hers
or mine?" I wasn't going to touch that one-either way!
It was about ten-thirty when we got
back to the boardinghouse, and I went upstairs to consult Charlie about making
secret recordings.
"Piece
of cake," he told me. "You'd better clear it with Trish,
though."
"Why?" ?
"There's a law or six about
recording conversations on the sly, Mark. Everybody knows that."
"I
thought that only involved recording phone conversations."
"The laws are a little murky,
but we might need a court order to stay out of trouble."
"I hadn't thought of
that," I admitted. "Doc Fallon can probably persuade some judge to go
along, but a
"It's
not like we were going to take it to court, Mark," he said, "but
you'd still better bounce it off Trish and see what she has to say. Bending a
few laws now and then doesn't bother me too much, but if Sylvia's going to try
to float an M.S. degree on this, those recordings had better be strictly legal.
If they aren't, her department might throw her thesis in the garbage can. Then
she'll come after you and me with a baseball bat."
"We'll
clear it with Trish before we take it any further," I assured him.
I
had a certain sense of accomplishment when I went to bed, and I slept very
well. I was feeling all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I went down to the
kitchen Wednesday morning. The crew was all clustered around that little TV set
on the counter, though.
"Not
another one?" I demanded incredulously.
"Oh, gosh yes," Charlie
replied. "It's getting to be a habit in this part of town."
"Anywhere
near here?" I asked.
"Gas Works Park, down on
"Gas Works?"
"Don't ask," she replied,
rolling her eyes upward. "
“Did we lose another junior
hoodling?" I asked.
"Not exactly," James told
me. "This one was forty-seven years old, and he evidently doesn't have a
police record-at least not around here. He moved to
"It shoots Burpee's theory-and
several others as well-full of holes," Charlie added. "This
"What was he doing in a park
on
"I've worked nights a few
times," Charlie said. "The boss doesn't come around much after
I frowned. "He doesn't have
much in common with the ones who got sliced up before, does he?" I asked.
"Not even a little,"
Charlie agreed. "This Slasher guy seems to be spreading out. It's starting
to look like we've got an ecumenical killer out there.
"There
has to be some sort of connection," I protested.
"Maybe so," James said,
"but the police haven't figured it out yet.”
“The strange thing is that nobody
ever hears anything," Erika added. "Not one of the victims died
instantly. There should have been a lot of screaming, but nobody ever seems to
hear it."
"That's bugging my brother,
too," Charlie told her. "He mentioned it right after the Windemere
killing. It's really got him baffled."
"What was this guy's
name?" I asked. "Finley," Trish replied. "Edward
Finley."
"Maybe the Muñoz killing was a
fluke. Andrews, Garrison, and Finley obviously weren't Chicano dope dealers.
There has to be some connection, but the cops haven't spotted it yet-or if they
have, they aren't talking about it."
"I'm still leaning in the
direction of ‘targets of opportunity,' " Charlie said.
"Once our cutter gets all wired up, he'll take out the first guy he
sees.”
“I don't buy it," Sylvia
disagreed. "Everything we've heard so far says ‘psychotic,'
and psychotics don't function that way. The reason may be so warped that we
wouldn't understand it, but there has to be some kind of connection. Maybe all
four victims used the same aftershave lotion, or maybe they were all whistling
the same tune, but there's something that connects them in the Slasher's mind.
The police won't solve this until somebody makes that connection."
"And as soon as he does, the
media folks will all go into deep mourning," Charlie added sardonically.
"Someday-someday-some TV personality's going to announce that nothing
significant has happened lately, then tell everybody
to turn off the TV set and read a good book-or clean up the garage."
Twink
didn't make it to class the next day. That was starting to get out of hand. I'd
been putting off talking with her about it, but I decided that I'd better not
procrastinate anymore. I assigned another paper that day, and the groaning
wasn't too loud this time. I'd pretty well thinned out the goof-offs by now,
and the survivors were all fairly competent. At least they were past the
"Run, Spot, run" stage, and we could get into the more complicated
stuff-like subject-verb agreement and dangling participles.
After supper that evening, Charlie,
James, and I made our customary "after the killing" visit to the
Green Lantern to get Bob West's views on this latest crime.
"I thought you guys might
show," Bob said, as we joined him in one of the back booths. "You're
starting to get predictable."
"We're still in the war zone,
Bob," Charlie reminded him, "and we're sure not getting much in the
way of truth from the newspapers or the TV Did the head honcho at the cop shop clamp the lid down or something? All that's coming out of
the media is name, rank, and serial number. What's the scoop on the
"We don't have much in the way
of scoop to work with, kid. The
"If it's not a residential
area, why would there be any dogs in the vicinity? "James
asked.
"There shouldn't be," Bob
admitted. "We're following up on it, but it's altogether possible that the
dogs came out of the same bottle our wino's pet pink elephants do."
"I think we'd better clamp
down on our girls," James said. "It's starting to get dangerous out
there. The Slasher seems to be killing people at random, and that throws
everything up in the air."
"Way up in the air," Bob
agreed, "and there are girls running around alone all over this part of
town. Half the student body at the university is female, and college girls do
strange things sometimes. The only real human being our wino saw last night was
a girl on a bicycle riding past the park." He leaned back in the booth.
"We've had four murders in the last month or so, all within five miles of
the university campus. That raises the possibility that our Slasher might be a
student. So far, all the victims have been guys, but if James is right about
the Slasher branching out, I don't think anybody's really safe. In spite of
that pepper spray, I'd say that it might be time to enforce your ‘nobody goes
out alone after dark' rule stringently. Lie to your ladies if you have to-tell
them that you have to go pick up a book, or you need a pack of
cigarettes-whatever. It's dangerous out there now, so do what you have
to."
"You're just loaded with good
cheer, aren't you, Bob?" Charlie said. "You guys asked me," Bob
replied. "If you don't like the answer, tough."
So
we started using the buddy system for each and every after-dark excursion.
Fortunately, the girls barely complained at all, and we made it to Saturday
without any untoward incidents.
Early Saturday morning, I moved
Operation Bookshelves into Charlie's room. That black ceiling of his really
bugged me for some reason.
"Don't
look at it," Charlie told me, when I started to complain.
"What's that you're
reading?" I asked curiously. He seemed to be deep in a rather slender
book.
"Kierkegaard,"
he said. "He sure comes up with snappy titles, doesn't he? This one's The Sickness Unto
Death. Great reading for a gloomy day, huh?"
"Aren't
you supposed to be working on Erika's car?"
"The
part I need wasn't on the shelf at the auto supply place. They had to order
it."
"Convenient."
"I thought so." He set
his book aside. "A little bit of that goes a long way," he noted.
"You're a hard-science guy,
Charlie. What the hell are you doing reading philosophy?"
"James mentioned
existentialism. The notion that only a few people are
qualified to make the choices for the rest of humanity sort of got my
attention."
"It's a dirty job," I
noted, "but according to the existentialists, some-body's got to do
it."
"Maybe
I ought to volunteer," Charlie said. "We've got all these
earth-shaking choices out there-which team we should root for in the World
Series; which girls are prettier, blondes or brunettes; whether Fords are
better than Chevys-you know, all that earthshaking crap."
I shrugged. "Your choices
would probably be as good as anybody else's," I said. "Grab the other
end of my tape, would you? I want to be sure I've got this measurement exact.
This job would be a whole lot easier if the damn house hadn't settled so much.
Nothing in the whole building is precisely plumb and square."
"Not even the people who live
here," Charlie added. "We've all got our little off-center
peculiarities, but that's what makes life so interesting, isn't it?"
"As long as we aren't too far
off center, old buddy. If somebody's leaning thirty-seven degrees to the right
or the left, he starts moving into Twinkie territory, and that's a quick ticket
to the bughouse."
"How's
she doing, by the way?"
"I haven't got a clue,
Charlie. Some days she's just fine; other days, she seems to be heading back to
the loony bin."
"Everybody
has ups and downs, Mark."
"True. But if Twink flies
apart again, it's a clear win for the other side.”
“Then we'll all have to concentrate
on keeping her bolted together, won't we?"
"All
we can do is try, I guess."
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Sundays were always pretty
laid-back at the Erdlund house. It was the one day of the week when we could
sleep late if we really wanted to, and breakfast was pretty much when we got
around to it.
It was about
"Hey, sack-rat," Charlie
said, grinning at me, "we thought you might sleep 'til
"Don't pick on him,"
Erika scolded, pouring me a cup of coffee. "At least not until his eyes are open." She handed me the cup, and I took it
gratefully and sat down in the breakfast nook.
"I feel like pancakes this
morning," Charlie said hopefully to Trish. "You don't look at all
like a pancake, Charlie," Erika told him without even cracking a smile.
"Corned beef hash, maybe, but hardly a pancake.”
“Make her stop that, Trish,"
Charlie complained.
"Be
nice, children," Trish told them. "Don't fight."
"It's
Sunday, Mama Trish," James rumbled. "The children always play on
Sunday."
Trish sighed, rolling her eyes up.
"I know," she said. "Where's Sylvia?" I asked, looking
around the kitchen.
"She's getting ready for
church," Erika told me. "She's going to take Renata to
"Sylvia's case history
project's taking a lot of heat off you, isn't it, Mark?" Charlie
suggested.
"You don't hear me
complaining, do you?" I answered. "Did we get an OK on that
bug?"
"I checked with Mr.
Rankin," Trish told me. "He's a senior partner at the law firm. He
didn't see any problems with it from a legal standpoint. He added one
stipulation, though."
"Oh?"
"He said that if Sylvia wanted
to be strictly legal, she'd have to get Renata's permission to tape their
conversations."
"Ouch!"
"Rankin's
one of those ‘dot the i's and cross the t's' sort of
lawyers," Trish said. "He wins a lot of cases, though."
"Sylvia's already taken care
of the problem, Mark," James said. "She came right out and told
Renata that the tape recordings would be a substitute for the notebooks that
seem to cause Renata some serious problems." He smiled faintly.
"There was a certain amount of subterfuge involved, though," he
added. "The recorder was right out in plain sight when Sylvia taped
Renata's permission, but our sneaky little housemate sort of neglected to
mention the hidden microphone that's going to be catching most of their
conversations."
"Is
that legal?" I asked Trish.
"It's probably close enough,"
she replied. "Sylvia's not going to be taking the tapes into court."
"Where
did you put the bug?" I asked Charlie.
"I didn't," he replied.
"I offered, but Sylvia told me to keep my hands to myself. I had to shield
the back of the microphone, though. It's fairly sensitive, and it kept picking
up her heartbeat."
"I don't think we need to
pursue that much further," Trish told us. "Go watch television or
something, gentlemen. Get out from underfoot." James led Charlie and me
through the dining room to the parlor, and we sat drinking coffee while the
ladies made breakfast. "Isn't that tape recorder going to be kind of bulky
and cumbersome for Sylvia to carry around, Charlie?" I asked. "If
they're out roaming around in a shopping mall and Twink says something that's
significant, Sylvia could miss getting it on tape."
"Haven't you ever heard of
miniaturization, Mark?" he asked me with an amused expression.
"They've got recorders now that're about the size of a cigarette pack, and
Sylvia's microphone-the bug-is a sort of tiny radio transmitter. There are some
alternatives, but she wanted it up and running in a hurry, so I kept it fairly
basic."
"Whatever works for her, I
guess," I said. Then I scratched my chin. "I wasn't really all that
happy about Sylvia's case history scheme at first," I admitted, "but
it's sure going to take a lot of chores off my back. She's more or less
volunteered to make those weekly trips to
"Just keep saying that to yourself, Mark," James suggested. "If you say it
often enough, you might even start to believe it."
We were all fairly well settled in
by now. A student's schedule's not at all like doing honest work: I just kept
fighting with John Milton, grading freshman papers, and watching out for
Twinkie.
Then on Wednesday she came apart
again. She missed my class, so as soon as I dismissed the students, I made a
quick run up to Mary's place in
"She
had another one of those damn nightmares," Mary told me when I got there.
"I
thought she was starting to outgrow them."
"Not so's you'd notice
it," Mary said. "I hit her with a sleeping pill again, and it put her
right out. You don't necessarily have to mention that to your little housemate.
If she rats me off to Fallon, there'll be hell to pay."
"He does get a little worked
up about that, doesn't he? You're looking beat, Mary.
Why don't you grab some sleep? I'll keep an eye on Renata.”
“I'll be all right, Mark. My
schedule got juggled this week, so I've got tonight off."
"Are
you sure?"
"I'll be fine. What's the deal
on these tape recordings Ren told me about?"
"It
came up last week," I told her, explaining about the recordings Sylvia was
making-with Twink's permission. "But I don't think she realizes that
Sylvia's wearing that bug, or that Fallon's getting copies of the tapes."
"Slick," Mary said.
"We've had some cases thrown out of court because some eager beaver
planted bugs without a court order."
"Yeah, we're trying to get it
all nice and legal. Plus, Sylvia's making things a lot easier for you and me,
taking over the Friday trips to
"You noticed that," Mary
said slyly. "Les called me on Saturday, and he told me that he and Inga
got quite a kick out of your little friend."
"Hey,
the more, the merrier." Then something sort of clicked
together for me. "Oh, hell," I said.
"What?"
"I just had an idea, Mary.
Maybe that bug's a way for us to get to the bottom of these damned nightmares
that keep zonking Twink out of action."
"I'm all for that. Once we
clear those up, I think Ren's going to be OK. What's this idea of yours?"
"The next time Twink comes
unraveled, hold off on the sleeping pill. Give me a call instead, and I'll
bring Sylvia over. She'll be able to get everything Twink says down on
tape."
"She's
not very coherent, Mark," Mary replied a bit dubiously.
"It might not make sense to
you or me, but Doc Fallon should be able to figure out what it means. If
Sylvia's right here with her bug, she can tape the whole thing. Then we'll pass
it off to Fallon. It'll be almost like he's sit-ting here in person, and once
he gets some details, he might be able to pin-point what's sending our girl up
the wall."
"I
think you might have earned your pay today, kid," she said then. "If
Fallon's got a ringside seat-on tape, anyway-maybe he can turn off these
nightmares, and once those damn things are out of the way, Ren's home
free."
"It's
worth a try. I'll kick it around with Sylvia, and she can bounce it off Fallon
and see what he thinks. Are you going to be all right, Mary? I'll stay if you
want me to."
"Run along, Mark. Ren's dead
to the world, so she doesn't need a baby-sitter."
I tapped on Sylvia's door when I
got back to the boardinghouse. "You rang?" she said, opening the
door.
"Twink's down with nightmares
again," I told her. "Maybe I should go over to her aunt's
place."
"What for? Mary put her down with a sleeping pill, so
all you'd get would be snores. Mary and I came up with a plan, though, and we'd
like to have you bounce it off Doc Fallon and see what he thinks."
"Whip
it on me," she said with a vapid smile.
"The next time Twinkie takes a run through nightmare alley, Mary's going
to call me instead of zapping her with a pill. Then you and I'll bag on over to
Mary's place, and you can get Twink's ravings down on tape. About all we've
been able to tell Doc Fallon so far is that Twink has nightmares now and then.
We've never been able to give him any specifics. If you can nudge Twink for
details about those dreams that wipe her out, Fallon might be able to get to
the bottom of it and come up with a cure-hypnosis, maybe, or some kind of
tranquilizer."
"That's
a very good idea, Mark," Sylvia
told me. "You've got a feel for this sort of thing."
"Not really, babe. It's just
that I've been majoring in Twinkie for the past several years. Mary and I kicked
it around, and we think that getting rid of those nightmares would probably
solve most of Twink's problems."
"It might be a little more
complex than that, but it'd be a big step in the right direction."
"Then it's worth a try. Keep a
supply of batteries for your recorder on hand, Sylvia. These nightmares pop up
without much warning, so we'll need to be ready."
Twink showed up for class on
Thursday, and she seemed to be pretty much OK again. I was almost positive that
if we could get her past those damned nightmares, she'd be on the road to
normal.
My supply of scrap lumber was
starting to run low, so on Saturday Charlie and I ran up to
We got back to the boardinghouse,
and I took my tape measure and notepad into Trish's room to get down the exact
numbers I'd be working with.
"Is it going to take very
long?" she asked me. "I hate having my room all torn up."
"I'll probably be able to
knock them out next Saturday," I told her. "Your law books are all
the same size, so I won't have to juggle the shelves around. That'll make
things go faster. I've got a suggestion, though.”
“Oh?"
"Take a little time when you
pull your books. Stack them over against that far wall, but keep them in order.
They're all the same color as well as the same size. If you jumble them all up,
it'll take you a month to get them squared away. I'm still trying to find a
couple of my books."
"I'll
be careful, Mark."
Midterm
examinations rolled around at the university during the week of November 3.
Older heads on the teaching faculty always look forward to midterm week, since
the freshman class noticeably diminishes after that one. When dear old dad
finds out that junior's been goofing off for six straight weeks, he'll usually
close the checkbook and tell his vagrant son to go find an honest job.
I
dumped my favorite test on my freshmen on Wednesday-"Correct the
grammatical errors in the following paragraph." It's a rotten thing to
drop on just about anybody, but it exposes the incompetent, and it's easy to
grade. If I'd had my wits about me when I first came up with the idea, I'd have
copyrighted the damn thing and lived on easy street for the rest of my life.
At
supper that evening, Sylvia told me that she had an appointment with her
faculty advisor on Friday afternoon. "I'm going to spring the ‘planted
bug' idea on him," she explained. "I want to be sure that he doesn't
have any objections. We tape just about every conversation in the various
psycho wards we visit, but I'm going to be taping Renata out in the real world,
so I want to clear it with him before I take it much further."
"That
makes sense. Always cover your buns."
"I'm glad you approve. But
that means I'm going to be tied up on Friday afternoon. Could you take Renata
to
"Sure, no problem. How many hours of tape have
you recorded so far?”
“Fifteen or so. A lot of it's nothing but random
conversation, though. I'm going to have to do a lot of editing to get down to
the real meat."
"I
don't envy you on that, babe. Trimming out the deadwood can be moderately
unfun."
"You've noticed. How clever of you.”
“Be nice," I told her.
I caught Twink right before class
on Thursday and told her that I'd be taking her to see Fallon Friday.
"Sylvia's
not sick, is she?" she asked, clearly concerned.
"No, it's nothing like that.
She has to talk with her faculty advisor, is all.
"That's a relief. I'm getting
attached to her. Girls need other girls to talk with sometimes. You're nice
enough, Markie, but I don't think you're ready for girl talk-not yet,
anyway."
"I'll
work on it."
"Don't bother,
Sylvia's already got it covered." Then she giggled. "What?" I
demanded.
"Never
mind," she said with a wicked little smirk.
On Friday morning I turned in my
proposal for a paper on
I was at loose ends after class, so
I called Twink and suggested that we might as well bag it on up to
"Just like a real date,
Markie?" she demanded in that empty-headed voice she dumped on me when she
was practicing her cutesy-poo routine. "Why not?"
"I don't have a thing to wear.”
“Cool it, kid."
"I'll behave," she
promised. "Sure you will."
It was one of those cloudy,
blustery autumn days, but at least it wasn't raining-yet. I parked in front of
Mary's house and went around to the back door to avoid waking Renata's aunt. I
tapped lightly, and Twink opened the door immediately.
"Is
she asleep?" I asked quietly.
"Like a baby," Twink
replied. "I left her a note.”
“Good. Let's split."
"You
seem sort of antsy today, Markie."
I shrugged. "Midterm fidgets,
I guess. It gets to be a habit after a few years. You'd better bring a coat.
It'll probably rain before the day's out.”
“Rain? Here? How
can you say such a thing?"
I let that pass, and we went out
front to my car. I drove down toward the campus and then eased us into the
northbound lane of Interstate 5. The traffic had slacked off, and it was easy
going.
"Is it always this nervous
during the midterm exams?" Twink asked me. "Everybody I run into acts
like the world's coming to an end."
"It's like a dress rehearsal
for finals week, Twink," I told her. "That's
the one you've got to watch out for. The whole student body starts to come
unraveled during finals week-probably because about half of them are wired up
on pep pills."
"Do
those things actually work all that well?"
"Not really. They will keep
you awake, but your thinking gets pretty fuzzy after the second or third
day."
She laughed. "Boy, does that sound
familiar," she said. "Is the whole world zonked out most of the
time?"
"I
don't think the trees are."
"I was talking about people.
There seems to be a pill for almost any-thing, doesn't there? There are pills
to pep you up and pills to calm you down, pills to put you to sleep and pills
to wake you up. You name it, and there's a pill for it. The world of normies
isn't much different from the world of loonies, is it? We all live on a steady
diet of pills."
"There's one slight
difference, Twink. Loonies take their pills with water. Us
normies wash ours down with booze."
"That
could do some strange things to your head, Markie."
"Yeah,
strange. Unfortunately, it sometimes leads to an overpowering urge to
hop in the car and drive off to
"Loonies
hardly ever do that."
"Probably because they've got better
sense."
"Maybe that's why loony bins
are called ‘asylums.' It's a place where loonies can be protected from those
awful normies."
"Take
that up with Doc Fallon, Twink. It's out of my field."
Dr. Fallon seemed disappointed that
Sylvia hadn't been able to make the trip that Friday. I think he really wanted those tapes she was
cutting.
I got him off to one side where
Twink couldn't hear us and filled him in on our plan to tape Twink's next
nightmare.
"Now
that's the tape I really want," he said enthusiastically. "I thought that might light your
fire, Doc," I told him.
After her session with Fallon,
Twink and I stopped by her folks' place for supper.
Les Greenleaf and I had a little
talk while Inga and Twink were busy in the kitchen. "Are you sure Renata's
all right, Mark?" he asked me in a worried tone.
"Most of the time she is,
boss," I told him, "She has bad days every so often, but I think
we've come up with a way to get a handle on that.”
“Oh?"
I told him about our scheme to tape
Twink's ravings after the next siege of nightmares.
"Is
she still having those?" He
seemed surprised.
"She sure is. They don't come
along very often, but they usually put her out of action for a day at least.
Doc Fallon seems to think that those bad dreams are about the only thing that's
stalling her complete recovery. Once we get a handle on those, I've got a hunch
that we're home free."
"I
certainly hope so."
"You're not alone, boss. The
whole Twinkie rooting section is behind her all the way."
After dinner, Twink and I went back
to
It was about
"Did
I doze off?"
"Almost immediately," I
said. "You didn't snore very loud, though.”
“I never snore!"
"You
want to bet?"
I walked her to Mary's front door,
and then I went back to the boarding-house to get some sleep.
On Saturday morning I went to my
little workshop in the basement and put the last coat of stain on the shelves
for Trish's room. By now I had the whole procedure down pat, and I was fairly
sure I could have the shelves in place before the day was out.
Trish looked in from time to time,
but she generally stayed out from underfoot. By
"Only
if you can keep the party boys out, Trish," I told her.
"Graduate students don't party
all that much, Mark. You might not be aware of it, but the house is getting
quite a reputation. Every week or so I get inquiries about
vacancies. Peace and quiet are a rare commodity
in student housing."
"The reputation of the place
might be based on the current inmates, Trish," I suggested. "We've
turned into a fairly tight group here."
"There is that, I
suppose," she admitted. "We all sort of clicked together right from
the start, didn't we? We're almost like a family, really."
"I do seem to be getting
mommied a lot here lately.”
“Mommied?"
"Sorry,
Trish. I picked that up from Twinkie. She threatened to mommy all
over me once when I was feeling sorry for myself."
"She's
the strangest child sometimes."
"Of
course she is. She got out of the nuthouse not too long ago."
"In a peculiar way, she's
brought us all even closer together, hasn't she? We all want to take care of
Renata."
"She's addictive,
probably-she hooks just about any unsuspecting per-son who happens by." I
squinted at the bookshelves. "Getting closer, Trish.
I think I'll be able to whup this out by suppertime. If you're real extra nice
to me, I might even help you reshelve all your books."
"You had to remind me, didn't
you?" she said with a gloomy sigh.
I turned in my midterm grades on my
freshman class on Monday, and the rest of the week marched briskly toward
Thanksgiving break: Fall quarter gets chopped up by assorted holidays and
special events. We had a break in the weather, though, so those crisp, clear
autumn days lifted the perpetual gloom that hovers over the
I concentrated most of my attention
on
I was a little punchy when Charlie
woke me up on Thursday morning to tell me that I had a phone call.
I
pulled on some clothes and stumbled down to the living room where the phone
was. "Yeah?" I said into the mouthpiece.
"Mark?"
It was Mary.
"It's
me, Mary. What's up?"
"You'd better get over here,
and bring the girl with the tape recorder. Ren's having problems."
"We'll be right there," I
said shortly. Then I hung up. "Sylvia!" I shouted.
"What's
up, Mark?" Charlie called from the kitchen. "Twink's
flipped out again. Where the hell's Sylvia?”
“She's getting dressed," Trish
told me.
"Please tell her to
hurry" I went back upstairs, put on my shoes and socks, grabbed a coat,
and made it back down in under a minute. Sylvia looked a bit scrambled, but she
was ready to go.
"Did Mary give you any
details?" Sylvia asked me, as we hurried to my car.
"No, we'll have to play it by
ear when we get there. I don't think I'd push her this
time, Sylvia. Let's just get this one on tape."
"You're probably right,"
she agreed. "Dr. Fallon's the one who'll make the decisions about how to
proceed."
The drive only took us about five
minutes, and Mary had left her front door standing open. We could hear Twink as
soon as we got out of the car. It was a lot worse than I'd expected. Mary's
term "bad day" glossed over some pretty awful sounds. Twink was
crying, screaming, and making animal-like noises.
I led Sylvia back to Twink's
bedroom. Mary was still in uniform, and she was holding our hysterical girl in
her arms and rocking back and forth. "Thank God you're here!" she
said to Sylvia and me. "This is a bad one. They seem to be getting
worse."
"When
did you get home, Mary?" I asked.
"About
a half hour ago. She was completely out of it when I came through the
door."
"Markie!" Twink
cried out, struggling to free herself from Mary's grasp. She held her arms out
to me imploringly. "We need you!"
That
"we" gave me quite a jolt. I hadn't heard that since before
"Go
to her!" Sylvia gave me a push. "Quick!"
I
went to the bed and gently took the sobbing girl from Mary. Then I wrapped my
arms around her and held her, rocking back and forth.
"Make
them stop, Markie," she pleaded. "The wolves are howling again.
Please make them stop."
There was that business about
wolves again. I didn't have the faintest idea what it meant.
"Blood!" she wailed in a
voice filled with horror. "It's all over me! I'm covered with blood!"
Then
she began to tremble violently. "Cold!" she said. "The water's
so terribly cold!" Then she suddenly started whispering, her lips very
close to my ear-and she wasn't whispering in any language I could understand.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
“I think that's about as far as we
want to let her go," Mary said bleakly, as Twink kept murmuring to me in
twin. "I'd better hit her with a pill now."
"Couldn't we hold off on that
for a little longer?" Sylvia asked. "She might give us a little more
to work with if we just . . ." She left it up in the air.
"You're
not going to get anything you'll be able to understand," Mary told her.
"Once she starts babbling like that, she keeps it up for the rest of the
day, and by
"She's right, Sylvia," I
agreed. "We don't want this to get much worse." Sylvia sighed.
"You're probably right," she said regretfully. "If she'd just
keep speaking English, we might be able to get to the root of the problem."
"It doesn't work that way, I'm
afraid," Mary said. "I'm going to put her to sleep. You've got all
you're going to get that'll make any sense." She went into the bathroom
and came back a moment later with a small pill and a glass of water. "Open
your mouth, Ren," she said gently.
Twink obediently opened her mouth,
and Mary placed the pill on her tongue. "Drink the water now," Mary
said then. I got the feeling that Twink actually welcomed the pill.
It took about ten minutes for it to
start to work, and Twink murmured to me more and more slowly as the barbiturate
closed down her mind. Finally, she sighed and stopped talking. After a moment
or two, she started to snore.
"Let's
get her undressed and under the covers," Mary said to Sylvia.
I handed Twink off to the ladies
and went out to the living room. I was a bit shaken by what had just happened.
Mary's term "bad days" pretty much glossed over what was really going
on when Twink came unraveled. There'd been an intensity
to it that I hadn't really expected.
"Was that more or less the way
things have gone every time she's had these nightmares?" Sylvia asked Mary
as they came out of the bedroom. "Not always," Mary replied.
"It's a little different each time. Sometimes she's already switched over
to gibberish before I get home. There doesn't seem to be much pattern to
it."
Sylvia
frowned. "That's odd," she said. "Disturbed people almost always
repeat these incidents in exactly the same way every time."
"There
are some things that stay the same," Mary told her. "There's always talk about wolves and blood and cold water."
"The bit about ‘blood' is
fairly obvious," Sylvia said. "These nightmares are almost certainly
a reliving of that night when her sister was murdered. When she's awake, her
amnesia has all memory of her sister totally blotted out. At the subconscious
level, though, she's aware of her sister and
of what happened to her. Every now and then it surfaces in the form of a
nightmare."
"Then
she's repeating that night over and over again?" I asked. "Probably so. She doesn't understand it, though. Dreams
are filled with symbols. ‘Blood' probably really means blood, but the wolves
and the cold water could be symbols for something else. Dreams are filled with symbols
that don't make much sense when we wake up. Dr. Fallon might recognize them. He
had Renata under observation for quite a while at the sanitarium, so he might
have cracked the code." She patted her purse. "I think this tape's
going to be worth its weight in gold. Up until now, all we've been able give
Dr. Fallon have been some rather vague descriptions of what Renata says during
these incidents. The tape will give him everything she said. I think maybe you
should go with us tomorrow, Mark. You probably know her better than anyone
else, and I'm sure you caught a lot more of what just happened than I
did."
"She's
got a point, Mark," Mary agreed. "This might just be the break
Fallon's been looking for. We don't want to let it slip past."
"You're probably right,"
I conceded, "and we might want to go up there a little earlier than usual.
I've got a hunch that Fallon might need more than an hour to sort through
this."
I wasn't able to get very much done
the rest of that day. Mary had always glossed over what Twink went through on a
"bad day." Now that I'd actually seen one, I couldn't imagine how she
was able to bounce back so fast. Evidently, she was a lot tougher than she
looked.
We kicked it around at the
boardinghouse that evening, and Sylvia let the others hear what she'd recorded.
"That's one sick baby,"
Erika observed, after we'd heard the tape. "Have the other days been like
this one?"
"Mary says that this one was
fairly standard," Sylvia said. "We'll see if she can recover fully by
tomorrow, the way she has up 'til now."
"If she can bounce back in
twenty-four hours after something like that, she must be made of cast
iron," Charlie noted.
"Oh, by the way, Trish,"
James said then, "I'll have to beg off on fix-it Saturday this week. I
have to pick up a friend at Sea-Tac-family emergency."
"Something serious?"
"Well, we hope not. I've got a
friend up in
"He's walking away from
Harvard in the middle of the autumn term?" Trish asked incredulously.
"Isn't he taking an awful chance?"
"I didn't get the
details," James admitted, "but I guess the dean bent a few rules for
Andrew-that's the young man's name, Andrew Perry. As I understand it, though,
he's doing very well there-and, of course he's a black student, so Harvard
doesn't want to make waves. He'll be able to make up after he goes back."
"What's
his mother's condition?" Erika asked.
"Ovarian cancer," James
replied. "The doctors at the hospital in
I hit my
"Everything's set," she
told me. "Fallon wants Mary to sit in, too. She's been through all of
these bad days, so she knows more about them than either you or I could
possibly know. Fallon wants you and Mary to go up early and give him the tape.
He says he'll need all the details before
I deliver Renata. I'll take her shopping or something while you two fill
him in. Then you and Mary should leave before Renata's appointment, because he
doesn't want Renata to know what we're doing."
"More sneaky stuff?"
"Not entirely. He just doesn't
want Renata to realize that we're ganging up on her. If she catches on, she
might clam up, and that'd make things difficult."
"No worse than if she starts
answering all his questions in twin-speak," I added. "I've got a
hunch he'd go wild if she did that to him."
"I called Mary and set
everything up," Sylvia said. "I'll pick Renata up early, and we'll
dawdle around in the Northgate Mall before we go on to
Sylvia
was a little sweetie, but she did tend to belabor the obvious some-times. I
gave her about fifteen minutes to get Twink out from underfoot, and then I
picked Mary up.
"Do
you think Fallon's still all torqued out about my sleeping pills?" she
asked me as we drove north.
"I
haven't heard any screaming from him lately. I think he finally realizes that
you're not popping Twink every five minutes."
"I
think I'll nail that down when we get there. People who treat me like some
brainless amateur irritate me, for some reason."
"You're just oversensitive,
Mary" I kidded her. "It's a failing of mine," she replied
sardonically.
Mary and I got along very well. She
was one tough cookie sometimes, but that's probably what Twinkie needed.
It was about ten-thirty when we
were ushered in to Dr. Fallon's office. "This is Twink's aunt Mary,
Doc," I introduced them.
"We
meet at last," he said.
"It's probably overdue,"
she agreed. "Mark has the tape Sylvia made yesterday. Do you want to
listen to it before we get down to business?”
“Maybe you should fill me in first
on exactly what happened when you came home," he suggested.
Mary
shrugged. "It was pretty much the way it's always been on one of Ren's bad
days. It's happened often enough before that I wasn't particularly surprised. I
got home from work about
"Is
that legal?" He seemed a bit startled.
"We don't broadcast it, so it
doesn't come up in court very often. There are a few alternatives, but they're
fairly direct and not very pleasant. People start frothing at the mouth about ‘police
brutality' if a few bones get bro-ken while we're subduing a violent prisoner.
A good strong sedative gets the job done without anybody getting hurt."
"We more or less follow the
same procedure with violent patients," he admitted.
"I'm
sure you do, since chaining people to the wall's gone
out of date. Anyway, Ren usually goes through the same routine every time she
has one of those nightmares. I've heard it often enough to know just about how
far along she is when I get home. First she rambles on about animals howling;
then she talks about having blood all over her; and she winds up whimpering
about cold water. After that, she switches over to the private language she and
"Is
she talking to you in that language?"
"I don't think she is. I get
the feeling that she's talking to
“Sylvia's fairly sure that the
nightmares Twink keeps having are a rerun of the night when
"I
don't think we want to do that, Mark," Fallon disagreed. "It's in the
open right now. If we put a lid on it, it'll keep seething around in her
sub-conscious, and sooner or later, it'll boil over again. If that happens ten
years from now, it could be an absolute disaster. I've seen things like that
happen before, and it usually turns the patient into a vegetable and a
permanent resident in some custodial institution."
"That'd
be a clear win for the other side, wouldn't it?"
"It sure would," he
agreed, his eyes troubled. He looked at Mary. "How did Renata behave this
morning?" he asked her.
"Pretty
much the same as always," Mary told him. "She usually seems a little
silly on the day after one of these spells-bright, bubbly, and neck deep in
cute. Then she settles down and seems more or less normal for a week or two.
Then another nightmare comes along, and she goes through the whole thing again.
It's almost like a cycle. After the first time or two, I thought her period
might have something to do with it, but the numbers don't match up at
all."
"Let's run that tape," he
suggested. "I'd like to hear it all the way through once. Then we'll play
it over a few times, and you two can tell me exactly what Renata was doing at
each stage."
Mary and I got back to
It was about
"Gee!" I replied. "I
wonder if he's been sick or something. It's been-what?-three whole weeks since
Gasworks, hasn't it?"
"Maybe he took a vacation-went
to
“Where was this one?"
"Way
down south-Des Moines.”
“The Slasher's gone to
"No, this
"I don't think I've ever heard
of that park. Is it one of those rinky-dink half-acre places?
"Not
hardly. It's a big one that fronts on
"How
far is that from here?"
"Eighteen,
maybe twenty miles. We sure as hell ain't talking walking distance."
"Our
cut-up seems to be branching out-and switching his time schedule. He's never taken
anybody out on a Friday before."
"It didn't happen this
morning, Mark," Charlie said. "That park's a biggie, and it doesn't
get much traffic in winter. The body was stone cold before anybody found it.
It's going to be a while before the medical examiner can pinpoint the time of
death. The TV folks are all excited about this ‘change of venue,' but I think
that all it really means is that the Slasher's having trouble finding anybody
to carve up in north
"Have
they come up with a name for the victim yet?"
"The cops haven't released it.
Bob probably knows, though. I'm betting on another small-time hoodling. The TV
guys interviewed a sergeant from that district, and he didn't seem very worked up about it. If it'd been a bank president, that would have been a real excited cop."
"That's
out of Bob's jurisdiction, isn't it?"
"Probably,
but I'm sure he'll get filled in. It's still in
The
girls seemed relieved by the news that our local boy was branching out and
finding new hunting grounds, so supper was fairly relaxed.
After we'd eaten, Charlie and I
took off for the Green Lantern. James begged off because he had to pick up the
young fellow from Harvard at about three-thirty on Saturday morning.
Bob
West was sitting in that back booth when we got there. "What kept you
guys?" he asked, when we joined him.
"Feeding time," Charlie
told him. "The girls at the boardinghouse are pretty obsessed with
schedules. What's the scoop on this latest killing?" Bob shrugged.
"He was another small-timer with an extensive police record of assorted
low crimes and misdemeanors. His name was Phillip Cassinelli, but don't start
jumping up and down and screaming ‘Mafia.' He wasn't in that class. Most of his
arrests were for shoplifting or breaking into cars to steal the radios."
"Hardly
a master criminal," I observed.
"You've got that right,"
Bob agreed. "I wish the goddamn reporters would find something else to
babble about. The head-shed downtown's right on the verge of cobbling together
one of those silly task force things, and since I've been involved in the
investigation of a couple of the killings in this part of town, I don't think
I've got much of a chance of squirming out. "Task force sounds impressive, but it's mostly just
a form of damage control. It's supposed to make it sound like we're right on
top of things, but all it really does is keep the reporters off our
backs." He made a sour face.
On Saturday morning I moved
Operation Bookshelves to Sylvia's room, and that didn't make her just too
happy. She was in the process of editing her Twinkie tapes, and I was getting
underfoot.
"Use
your earphones, Sylvia," I suggested. "That way you won't have to
listen when I start swearing."
She
grumbled a bit, but she eventually gave in and did it the way I'd suggested.
By
now I had the procedure pretty much down pat, and I was finishing up by
midafternoon.
"Have
you got a minute, Mark?" she asked, as I was bolting the top shelf in
place.
"Sure,
I'm due for a break. Is there a problem?"
"No,
it's just that I'm running into something a little peculiar, is all.
Renata's voice isn't always the
same. It isn't obvious on the raw tapes, but once I delete all the silly girl
talk, the differences are fairly obvious."
"Are you putting several days'
worth of talk on one tape?" I asked her. "Of
course. Renata and I ramble sometimes, but my editing's taking out the
rambles and concentrating on the significant things she says. Her voice is
usually light and clear-almost girlish. Every so often, though, it gets richer
and more vibrant."
"I wouldn't make a big thing
out of it, Sylvia. Nobody's voice is exactly the same every day-particularly
not here in soggy city. The barometer goes up and down like a yo-yo around
here, and just about everybody in town is either coming down with a cold or
just getting over one. You've got a bouncing barometer and a humidity level
that slides all over the scale. These voice changes might be the result of
clogged-up sinuses. Why don't you check it out with Erika before you make a
federal case out of it?"
"Maybe I'll do that." She
laughed a bit ruefully. "I was right on the verge of saddling up the
multiple personality horse again. If it's just a change in the weather, I'd
have felt pretty silly. Thanks for suggesting it, Mark."
"Buddyship in action, Toots.
We're morally obligated to cover each other's buns."
"I
won't tell Trish if you don't."
"Are
you and Twink going to church tomorrow?"
"Probably. We missed
confession, but I think we'll go anyway. Renata's getting very
attached to Father O'Donnell. It might have something to do with the Irish
brogue of his."
"Say
hi to him for me."
"Has
he been trying to convert you?"
"I
don't think so. We get along well, is all."
I finished driving in the screws on
that top shelf. "It's all yours now, Toots,"
I told her.
"How am I supposed to reach
anything on that top shelf?" she demanded.
"Eat lots of Wheaties. Maybe
they'll make you grow.”
“Up your
nose!"
"You don't really have to use
those top shelves, Sylvia. Put teddy bears or Barbie dolls up there and use the
lower ones for your books. I just build 'em. Filling them up is your
responsibility."
I woke up early on Sunday morning
for some reason, and when I went downstairs, Erika was sitting in the breakfast
nook communing with her coffee and the Sunday paper. She automatically got up
and fixed me a cup of coffee.
"I can do that for myself,
Erika. You don't really have to jump up every time I come into the room."
"Shush," she told me.
Then she sat down again and pushed the front section of the Sunday paper across
the table to me. "Check out the front page, Mark," she said.
"Our local celebrity's been moonlighting, it seems."
"Oh.
Which park did he hit this time?"
"It wasn't a park. Some
workers on a highway construction area up near Woodinville just happened to
uncover a body. It had all the usual cuts and slashes, but it'd been dumped in
a ditch, and dirt had been kicked over it. One of the road guys had lost a
tool, and he and a couple of his friends were looking for it. If they hadn't been
rooting around in the dirt, the body would probably been paved over and would
never have been discovered."
"Oh, that's just dandy,"
I said. "There could be a couple dozen bodies stashed all over
"The paper didn't say. If it's
been more than a week, the autopsy won't be very precise. Decomposition rates
vary a lot at this time of year. It'll depend on mean temperature and how soggy
the ground is."
"Not before breakfast,
Erika," I objected. "Let's hold off on rotting bodies until after
I've eaten."
"Squeamish, Mark?"
"I just got up, Erika. Give me
a little time before we get into the gooey descriptions, OK?"
"Whatever
makes you happy."
The "unofficial" murder
near Woodinville gave us something to talk about at breakfast. Actually, most
of us felt a bit relieved by the discovery. The Woodinville murder and the one
in
"How's your friend's wife,
James?" Trish asked, smoothly changing the subject.
"The doctors at the hospital
seem to think they caught her cancer in time," he replied in that deep
voice of his. "Andrew's going to stick around until after Christmas, though."
"Is his dad the one who owns
Perry Construction Company?" Charlie asked.
"That's him," James
replied. "There's a man who started out at the bottom and worked his way
up. His hand still fits a shovel handle, but he's come a long way since we were
kids."
"I worked for Perry
Construction one summer," Charlie said. "That's where I learned how
to run a backhoe."
"Is
there any kind of job you haven't tried, Charlie?" I asked him.
"Not very many," he
replied. "I was going to sign on as part of the crew on a fishing boat
once-one of those salmon boats that go up the inside passage between Vancouver
Island and British Columbia, but I had to beg off by the time we got to Port
Townsend. As it turns out, I seem to have a bad case of delly-belly"
"Delly-belly?" Erika asked him.
"Delicate tummy," he
explained. "I get seasick pretty easy. I tried all the usual remedies, but
they didn't seem to work. I spent the whole trip to Port Townsend leaning over
the rail and trying to upchuck my toenails. I just
ain't cut out to be a seafaring man. It's a shame: A guy can make a bundle on
one of those salmon boats." Then he looked at James. "Did I hear you
right the other day?" he asked. "Is old man Perry's kid really going
to Harvard?"
"He sure is," James told
him, "and from what I hear, he's tearing the
"Can
they actually do that?" Sylvia asked.
"Harvard's a private
university, Sylvia. They can do just about anything they want. In Andrew's
case, going through the motions of taking the exams is practically a formality.
I'm almost positive he could pass his bar exam right now, if he really wanted
to."
Trish
sighed, but she didn't say anything.
On
Monday, the seventeenth, there was an apparent breakthrough in the Seattle
Slasher case. Charlie was camped on the TV set in the kitchen when I got home
after my freshman English class.
"What's
up?" I asked him.
"Good news, maybe," he
replied. "Some guy walked into the north precinct station about
"Well, now," I said.
"How'bout that? We won't have to run around with our fingers on the button
of our pepper spray anymore."
"Let's hold off on the
celebration until we see what Bob has to say. Something about this doesn't
smell quite right."
After
supper that evening, Charlie, James, and I hit the Green Lantern to see if we
could get the straight scoop on that confession. "I expected you
guys," Bob said. "Let's go back to the booth, and I'll fill you
in."
We
retired to our traditional debriefing booth. "Does this confession you
guys beat out of the suspect answer all the Slasher questions?" Charlie
asked.
"Get
real, kid," Bob told him. "That screwball who confessed this morning
is a whacko who wants to be a celebrity. That sort of thing happens all the
time, and the more fuss the reporters make, the more confessions we get. We
usually manage to keep these fake confessions out of the newspapers and off
TV"
"How
did it get out this time, then?" James asked.
"Can you believe that this nut
made his confession to Burpee, of all people?"
"You've
got to be kidding," Charlie said, laughing.
"Not even a little bit. I
think the desk sergeant's got a warped sense of humor. This whacko shows up
wringing his hands and blubbering, and the desk sergeant hands him off to
Burpee without so much as cracking a smile. Then Burpee takes the nut to an
interrogation room and swallows everything the guy tells him hook, line, and
sinker. Then our mighty hero of truth, justice, and Mom's apple pie calls a TV
reporter and gives him an anonymous tip. The reporter flips out and puts it on
the air without bothering to get verification."
"Somebody's gonna get his ass
in trouble over that one, isn't he?" Char-lie suggested.
"You damn betcha he is,"
Bob replied, chuckling wickedly. "The re-porter's probably going to spend
the next six months reading weather reports, and Burpee's likely to spend his
time writing parking tickets-if he doesn't get kicked off the force
entirely."
"The price of fame just went
up, didn't it?" James suggested with a faint smile.
"You've
got that right, James," Bob agreed. "We've got three guys absolutely
dying to be stars, and they'll do anything to get their names up in lights.
Some nut walks in off the street with a fake confession that's sup-posed to put
him right up there with Ted Bundy. Burpee swallows his cock-and-bull story
without even bothering to check it out. Then the TV reporter goes on camera
with Burpee's tip almost before Burpee finishes talking because he doesn't want
some other reporter to get there first. If Burpee-or the reporter-had taken a
little time to check out the whacko's background, they'd have found out that
he's been in and out of about a half dozen nuthouses in the last ten years.
This three-way rush to fame didn't accomplish a damn thing except to embarrass
the police department and the TV station. Don't relax your security measures,
guys. The Slasher's still alive and well. He's out there somewhere-with
knife-and he hasn't finished up yet."
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
A deep mourning along about then,
since Cheetah wouldn't have been interested in somebody like this latest
victim.
One
reporter actually got off his duff, went over to
The week of November 17th slid
swiftly toward Thanksgiving, and everybody's head seemed to be turned off at
dear old U.W. The word "holiday" always seems to do that to the
student body, and just about anything qualifies as a holiday-Arbor Day, John
Dillinger's birthday, and Groundhog Day. But I'm almost positive that a "let's
break down and do some work" day wouldn't be as popular.
Then on Saturday the twenty-second,
the sliced-up body of another Slasher victim was found near the
James, Charlie, and I weren’t able
to make our usual visit to the Green Lantern to get the inside dope of the
latest victim because Bob West didn't work on Saturday, and he stays clear of
the tavern on his days off. That left us nothing to go on but the usual
hysteria on TV
The dead man was identified as
Anthony Purvis, a thirty-year-old Caucasian with no criminal record. All sorts
of theories fell apart because of the lack of any record on Purvis. Poor old
Burpee most likely went into deep mourning along about then, since Cheetah
wouldn't have been interested in somebody like this latest victim.
Sylvia
wasn't feeling well on Sunday morning, so she asked me to take Twinkie to
church. I didn't have anything hot on the fire for that Sunday anyway, so I
agreed and called Mary to let Twink know about the change in the game plan.
Mary answered. "Who had your
phone tied up all day yesterday?" she demanded. "Ren had another one
of those bad days and I wanted to get hold of Sylvia, but all I got was a busy
signal."
"Damn!" I said.
"Somebody must have left it off the hook. We don't use this room very
much, so we wouldn't have heard it beeping at us. Did we miss anything
important?"
"Probably
not. This one was pretty much the same as the one Sylvia taped a
couple of weeks ago."
"How's Twinkie doing today?
Sylvia's feeling sort of punk, and she asked me to fill in and take Twink to
church. Maybe we'd better scratch the whole idea."
"She's
fine, Mark. You should know that by now. The bad days only last for that one
day. When she wakes up the next morning, it's almost like it never happened. I
don't think she has any coherent memory of those days."
"Maybe we should mention that
to Doc Fallon the next time we see him. It might be important."
"Maybe so, but Ren's getting
ready to go to church, so you'd better suit up. I'll let her know that you'll
be filling in for Sylvia today. Don't make any big fuss about what happened
yesterday. There's no point in getting her all worked up about something that's
over and done with."
"You're probably right, Mary.
Tell Twink that I'll be there in about a half an hour."
"I'll
do that. Don't forget your necktie."
Twink was sitting at the table in
Mary's kitchen when I got there, struggling with her checkbook.
"Problems?" I asked her.
"The silly thing won't
balance," she said, waving her bank statement at me. "The bank's got
one number, and I've got a different one."
"Put it away for now,
Twink," I told her. "Father O's waiting for us.”
“What's wrong with Sylvia?"
she demanded.
"Nothing serious," I
replied. "I think it's just that time of the month.”
“Oh," she said. "Can we
go up to Northgate Mall after Mass? I'd like to do some Christmas
shopping."
"This early?"
"It's only a month away,
Markie. That's why I was trying to balance my checkbook."
"How
far off are you?"
"Six
or eight hundred dollars is about all."
"Good thing you're not
planning to be an accountant. When was the last time you balanced it?"
"August. Maybe September."
"Give it up, Twink," I
told her. "You'll never be able to make it come out right at this stage.
Just use the number the bank gave you and call it square."
"What
if they're trying to cheat me?"
"Banks almost never do that,
Twink. If the Feds catch them, the bank president usually winds up in jail for
twenty years or so. Just write down their number in your check register and
call it good. Put it away for right now, baby sister. God's waiting for
you."
"I
wouldn't say anything like that around Father O, Markie. He might whomp on you
a few times-for your own good, of course," she assured me, folding her
bank statement away.
"Oh, of course," I said
sardonically. "Be nice, Markie," she chided me.
We sat near the back of the church
when we got there. Maybe because Twink hadn't been to confession, she didn't
feel the need to be right down front this time. And I was starting to grow more
familiar with Catholic customs. Many of them still didn't make much sense to
me, but at least I knew they were coming.
There was the usual lineup after
the service as the parishioners filed out of the church, pausing briefly for a
word or two with Father O as they went by. We finally reached Father O, and
after a few pleasantries, he asked me if I could stop by some day that week.
"Sure," I replied.
"Tomorrow afternoon be OK?”
“It's fine with me," he
agreed.
"What
are you two up to now?" Twink demanded.
"Just some guy stuff,
Twink," I told her. "You know, talking about hunting, fishing,
football, cars, chasing girls-that kind of stuff."
"I pretty much avoid that last
one, Renata," Father O told her. "The bishop frowns if we do
that."
"Bishops just can't seem to
relax, can they?" she said with a little smirk.
"Occupational hazard,
probably," he agreed.
Twink
and I went on to the Northgate Mall, and after Sunday brunch, I got to follow
her around to every single store in the whole damned place.
"Shopping" pretty much fits the definition of "cruel and unusual
punishment," ranking right up there with the rack and thumbscrews. A
sentence of five to ten years in a shopping mall would probably be over-turned
out of hand by a unanimous vote of the Supreme Court. But when I said as much
to Twink, she just laughed and asked what I was getting her for Christmas.
I went to St. Benedict's Church
about
"I'm troubled about Renata,
Mark," he told me. "Her mood swings are growing more extreme.
Sometimes in the confession booth, I can't be exactly sure who's talking to me."
"One of my
housemates-Sylvia-said something like that just the other day," I told
him. "She's been taping her sessions with Twink, and she noticed it when
she played them back. I shrugged it off and told her it was probably changes in
barometric pressure, humidity, and stuff like that. But if you're hearing
different voices in the confessional during one session, there wouldn't be much
change in the weather, would there?"
"Not very likely," he
agreed. "There's something else, too. I believe I told you that Renata
sometimes lapses into an alien language in the confessional, didn't I?"
"I
think you did, yes."
"Whenever that turns up, her
voice is definitely the second one. Renata's normal voice is a light soprano;
her other voice is a rich contralto.”
“Now that's something we should tell her headshrinker about. Twinkie
wouldn't have any reason to start using twin-speak just for kicks. The only
other person in the world who'd understand what she'd be saying would be
"Wouldn't that bring up an
interesting possibility?" he said. "Could this voice change and that
alien language be an early warning signal? If I hear them in the confessional
on Friday, Renata will go to pieces on Tuesday-or something along those lines.
Does that make sense?"
"It
might at that, Father O. I'll drop it on Sylvia, and she can mention it to Doc
Fallon-they're working together on this. If we can predict the days when
Twink's going to flip out, it might be a long step toward coming up with some
answers. I'd better give you the phone number at the boardinghouse. Everybody
there's pretty much wired-in on Twink's problem, so they'll pass the word to
me-or to Sylvia. We all assumed that Twink's nightmares were the things that
were triggering the ‘bad days,' but if you're right about this voice-change
thing, something else is triggering the nightmares, and that's the thing we're really
trying to pin down. Maybe I should grab Sylvia and bring her over this
evening so we can talk it over. What time do you lock the doors here?"
"I
don't, Mark. I'm an old-fashioned priest, and I don't believe in locking
churches. My doors are always open. If somebody needs me, I'll always be
here."
"That's
real dedication, Father."
He
shrugged. "It goes with the territory" he said.
I
kicked the idea around with Sylvia when I got home, and she agreed that Father
O'Donnell's early warning notion might be valuable, so after supper we made a
quick run over to the church.
I
hauled into the parking lot, and we went up the stairs, through the wide front
door, and into the vestibule. Sylvia automatically dipped her fingers into the
little basin of holy water, sank down on one knee, and crossed herself. I'm not
certain that she was even aware that she was doing it.
The interior of the church was
dimly lighted, and shadows filled the little alcoves where statues of various
saints looked out over the pews and the altar.
"Hello," Father
O'Donnell's voice echoed through the empty church. I looked around, then spotted him in that little doorway off to one side of
the altar. There's something spooky about coming into an empty church after
dark.
"It's me, Father," I
called to him. "I've brought Sylvia so that we can talk over that notion
we had this afternoon."
"Come
on back," he told us.
Sylvia and I went down the center
aisle, and she repeated that quick drop to one knee in front of the altar.
They'd all told me that these little rituals were so ingrained they were
automatic, but I don't think I'd realized just how automatic.
We
followed Father O down the narrow hall to his office. "How did you know we
were out there?" I asked him.
"There's a motion sensor in
the vestibule," he replied with a slight smile. "I don't lock the
doors, but I do take certain precautions."
"Modern technology? I'm shocked, Father,
shocked."
"Forgive him, Father,"
Sylvia intoned, "for he knows not what he does.”
“Are you two ganging up on
me?" I said.
"You had that one coming,
Mark," Sylvia told me, taking her tiny tape player out of her purse as she
sat down. "The sound quality's surprisingly good, Father," she said.
"I brought a couple of my edited tapes so you can compare the different
voices with what you heard in the confessional."
"Aren't we bending a fairly
important rule here?" I asked them. "I've heard about the sanctity of
the confessional, but I'm not very clear about just how far that goes."
"We're
in the clear, Mark," Father O assured me. "I won't be revealing any
details about Renata's confession-just the different voices."
"You're
the expert, Father, and you're the one who's going to get into trouble with
your bishop if we're out of line."
"Isn't
he the darlin' boy?" he said to Sylvia, exaggerating his brogue.
"He's a clown," she replied. "You'll hear my voice first on
these tapes, Father. I injected dates and times when I deleted the random
conversations that didn't have any bearing on Renata's problem. It was a little
tricky right at first; we're trained to take notes, not sound recordings. The
first time I tried this, I left out dates and times, and it didn't make much
sense at all.”
“Did
you bring the one you recorded that morning when she was all flipped out?"
I asked.
"Of course," Sylvia
replied. "That's the most important one I've got so far." She looked
at the labels on several of her miniature tapes. "I think this one might
be the best," she said. "The differences in her voice really stand
out."
She
inserted the tape in the little player and turned it on. "Thursday,
November sixth-
"Wednesday,
November twelfth.
Sylvia
stopped the tape. "Are those two entries close to the voices you've been
hearing in the confessional, Father O'Donnell?" she asked.
"Absolutely identical," he replied. "That last one raises the
hackles on the back of my neck. It doesn't make much sense, though. Did she
ever tell you what this thing is that she feels compelled to do?"
"Not even a peep," Sylvia
replied ruefully. "It drives me wild every time she does that."
"I'll
check with Mary" I said, "but I believe Twink had one of her ‘bad
days' on Thursday of that week."
"Yes,"
Sylvia agreed, "she did. I've been keeping track."
"That nails it down, doesn't
it?" I said. "The voice switch was on Wednesday, Twink had the usual
nightmare that night, and she was climbing the walls on Thursday. There is a
connection between the voice change, the switchover into twin-speak, and the
nightmares."
"Maybe,"
Sylvia said. "I'd like to have a little more in the way of confirmation
before I start the victory celebration, though."
"Why don't you play the tape
you cut that morning when Mary called us?" I suggested. "Let Father O
hear what she sounds like when she's full-bore nutso."
"Good
idea," she agreed, sorting through her miniature tapes.
Father
O'Donnell seemed a bit awed by the intensity of Twink's voice on the tape, and
when she switched over to twin-speak, he slapped his hand down onto his desk.
"That's it!" he exclaimed. "That's
the language I've heard her speaking in the confessional. The lisping is a
dead giveaway.”
“They
were teething when they invented the language," I explained.
"Doesn't that language suggest
that Renata is aware that she used to have a twin sister?" Father O
suggested.
"Only when she's gone
bonkers," I replied. "She drops twin-speak when she goes back to
being a normie."
"You might want to speak with
Dr. Fallon about the possibility that this change in Renata's voice might precede-or even trigger-her nightmares and the relapses into
psychosis," Father O suggested to Sylvia. "And it probably wouldn't
hurt if you started bringing her to confession regularly. That other voice
doesn't crop up every time she comes
to confession, but if it is an advance warning, we'd better not let it slip
past us."
"Good
idea, Father," Sylvia agreed.
My freshman class on Wednesday
afternoon had their heads pretty well turned off, so there wasn't much point to
trying to teach. I took the roll, cautioned them to drive carefully, and turned
them loose.
"That was quick," Twink
said, after the classroom had emptied out. "They weren't really in there
anyway, baby sister," I told her. "Why waste my breath? Let's hit the
bricks before the traffic starts piling up.”
“Do we really have to spend
Thanksgiving with Les and Inga?" She sounded a little plaintive.
"Yup,"
I told her.
"They
get so antsy when I'm around."
"Pitch in and help Inga in the
kitchen, Twink," I suggested. "Act like a normie. That might calm her
down, and if Inga's calm, it might settle Les down, too."
"I
don't know beans about cooking, Markie."
"Here's your chance to learn.
Your mother's a good cook, so she'll clue you in on all the tricks of the
trade."
"You're going to insist, aren't
you?"
“Yup.”
"I
wish you'd get off that ‘yup' stuff, Markie," she said crossly.
"Cool
down, Twink. We're going home for Thanksgiving, and that's final. It's not
going to hurt you to be nice to your parents, so quit trying to weasel out of
this."
"Oh,
all right," she gave up.
There'd
been a break in the weather, and it was actually sunny and bright as Twink and
I drove north that afternoon. Maybe it was a good omen-or maybe the rain god
was just resting up so he could unload on us at Christmastime.
My
bullying finally got through to Twinkie, and she was at least civil to Les and
Inga. She even took my advice and helped Inga in the kitchen. That gave me the
opportunity to fill Les in on how we hoped to use those voice changes as an
early warning system, and maybe even head off the nightmares.
"There
might be some hope for her after all, then," he said. "I wasn't too
optimistic about that. To be perfectly honest, Mark, I was right on the verge
of pulling her out of
"I
don't think that'd work out too well, boss. If you did that, she'd stay
semibonkers for the rest of her life, and she'd probably end up back in the
bughouse. If we keep her in Seattle where Sylvia can stay right on top of her,
we'll have a lot better chance of finding a real cure and turning her into a
normie. That's what we're really after, isn't it?"
"You're
probably right, Mark," he admitted.
I heaved a sigh of relief. That one
had been closer than I'd realized. The boss had the key right in his pocket,
and he'd been ready to take it out and lock Twink away for the rest of her
life.
Classes
resumed on Monday, December 1, and now the holiday season was turning into a
major distraction. Of course, the holiday season starts right after Labor Day,
as far as the stores are concerned. Jumping the gun is a peculiarly American
characteristic. Everybody wants to get there first. The Brits can elect a new
government in six weeks; it takes us two years.
I
coasted through Monday. I guess everybody's entitled to a goof-off day now and
then. I did caution my freshman class about the dangers of the season, though.
A semiserious student can blow some fairly good grades right out the window if
the approach of Christmas shuts down his head. Of course, the ones who've been
majoring in parties almost always decide at that point that they've already
blown the fall quarter anyway, so they don't even bother to come to class after
Thanksgiving.
At supper that evening, James told
us that Mrs. Perry's doctors were certain that they'd caught her cancer in time
and that her recovery would probably be total.
James, Charlie, and I were going
back upstairs to boy country after supper, and Charlie suggested a quick trip
to the Green Lantern to find out if his brother had anything new on the Slasher
front. "None of us stayed here in town during that four-day weekend, so we
might have missed a few things. If we're going to keep playing our knights in
shining armor game, we'd better stay on top of developments."
"He's
got a point," I told James.
"I think I'd better beg
off," James replied. "I'm running a little behind right now."
"No biggie," Charlie told
him. "Mark and I can fill you in when we come home. Are you up for it,
Mark?"
"Sure.
I'll grab a coat and we can go see what Bob's got to say."
There weren't too many people in
the tavern when we got there, and Bob West was sitting on a stool at the bar.
"What's cooking, big
brother?" Charlie asked as we joined Bob. "Leftover turkey, most
likely," Bob replied. "I get so damned sick of turkey after a
holiday."
"Don't buy the great big
ones," Charlie suggested. "Is there anything new and exciting about
our local cut-up?" he asked then. "Did he maybe carve up another
junior hoodling on Thanksgiving and then eat him-complete with cranberry
sauce?"
"No new carcasses," Bob
replied, "but we got the word on Finley from the
"The
Bob nodded. "Finley had a
police record, right enough, but there weren't any dope deals or burglaries
involved. He was busted several times for sexual molestation and a couple of
attempted rapes. He's listed in their records as a sex offender. He was
supposed to register when he came here, but evidently it slipped his
mind."
"Convenient,"
I said.
"It happens quite a lot. That
sex offender label doesn't work very well. All the guy has to do is cross a
state line and keep his nose fairly clean. The
"That's one of the drawbacks
of a democratic society, isn't it?" Charlie suggested.
"We can usually work our way
around them, kid," Bob said. "A thought for the day, huh, Bob?"
Charlie said.
I
concentrated on my
Sylvia got a call from Doc Fallon
late Thursday afternoon, rescheduling Twinkie's Friday appointment for
"Thanks
all the same, Mark," she replied, "but I'd better take care of it
myself. There are some things I need to talk over with him, and I think they'd
be better face-to-face than over the phone."
I shrugged. "You can't say I
didn't offer," I told her. "You're all heart, Mark," she said
dryly.
I
finished up my
"Nobody's perfect," I
muttered, setting the paper aside. Then I went down to cobble a couple of
sandwiches together. Erika was there, though, and she intercepted me before I
could get into the refrigerator.
"Sit
down," she ordered. "I'll take care of it."
"Sure," I said, "and
thanks. Could you clear your books out of the way this afternoon? I'll take the
measurements today and build your book-shelves tomorrow. I should be out from
underfoot before suppertime.”
“That'll be nice," she said.
After we'd eaten, I took my tape
measure into her room and started writing down the numbers.
Sylvia came home about two-thirty.
"How'd it go this morning?" I asked her.
"About the same as
always," she said. "Have you got anything earth-shaking on the fire
for Monday?" she asked.
"Not that I know of. Why?"
"Dr. Fallon's going to be
attending a conference at the university, and he wants to meet Father O. I
think he might have a Renata seminar in mind-you, me, Mary, and Father
O'Donnell. We're all getting bits and pieces of what Renata's been doing lately,
and he'd like to put them all together and see what turns up-I think Fallon's
worried about this voice-change business."
"You'd better check in with
Father O," I suggested. "If we're going to set up the kind of meet
Doc Fallon seems to want, the church might be the best place for it."
"I
sort of thought so myself," she agreed.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
After breakfast on Saturday morning
I went down to my little workshop in the basement and sawed boards to the
measurements I'd taken in Erika's room Friday afternoon.
"This
might be a little noisy," I warned her when I carried the first load of
boards into her room. "If you want to concentrate, maybe you'd better go
to the library."
She
shrugged. "I don't have anything too important to do today, Mark,"
she said. "It'll give me an excuse to goof off-unless having me watch is
going to bug you."
"No problem," I said.
"I'll try to keep the swearing to a minimum.”
“I've heard people swear before. It
doesn't bother me all that much."
I got the uprights in place first,
and as luck had it, the settling of the house hadn't torqued the studs too far
off plumb, so it went fairly fast. "Speedy," Erika observed.
"I've
done this five times before," I replied. "I've pretty much got it
down pat now. I'll give you some extra room on that bottom shelf for any
oversize books, and you can put paperbacks on that top shelf-assuming that you
even want to use the top one. You'll need a stepladder if you do."
"I
might at that," she told me. "I've got several boxes of books down in
the basement. It'll be nice having them all here where I can get my hands on
them."
"I take it that you're not all
that hot for computerized books." She made an indelicate sound.
"What a thing to say," I
kidded her. "I'm shocked, Erika. Shocked.”
“Computer nerds make me want to throw up."
"I'll
float my stick with yours on that one." I banged the side of my fist on
the uprights to make sure they were all firmly in place. "Good
enough," I said. "I got lucky for a change. I hit a couple of
problems with the up-rights in Sylvia's room."
"How
much further have you got to go on your doctorate, Mark?" she asked me
then.
"A couple more years at least. Why?"
"Just
curious. We've turned into a fairly tight little group here, haven't
we?"
"The
kitchen might have something to do with that. People who eat together always
seem to get close."
"The
feeding trough, you mean? I think it goes a little deeper than that,
Mark." Her tone seemed almost wistful.
"Are
we having some sort of problem, Erika?"
"I'm going to miss this place
when we all move on, and I'll probably miss the group as well."
"We'll keep in touch.”
“I've heard that before."
"I
don't know if Trish has mentioned this, but she was telling me that she's been
getting some inquiries about possible vacancies. We seem to be getting quite a
reputation on campus. The party boys aren't very interested, but there are people on campus who aren't majoring
in parties. If all six of us come out cum laude,
you might get a long line of people waiting to sign on."
"Not until after we've finished. I don't want any
strangers moving in to mess up what we've got going for us here."
"Sentimentality, Erika? I
thought you were the ice cube in the bunch.”
“That's a pose, Mark. It keeps guys
who drool at arm's length. If I pre-tend to be Iceberg Erika, they don't pester
me. I get the same urges everybody else does, but I keep them to myself. That's
one of the things I like about our arrangement here. The ‘no hanky-panky'
policy puts the guys here off-limits, and I don't even have those kind of thoughts about you or James or Charlie-well, not
too many, anyway."
"Erika!"
She grinned at me.
"Gotcha!" she said triumphantly.
"Smart
aleck.
"Why, Mark, how can you say
such a thing?" She gave me one of those wide-eyed vapid looks that seemed
all too familiar.
"Have you been taking lessons
from Twinkie?" I asked her sourly. She'd caught me off guard. I'd almost
come to believe that Erika was one of those all business girls with nothing
even remotely resembling a sense of humor. I'd obviously been wrong about that.
There was a lot more to her than I'd even imagined.
Sylvia'd made all the arrangements
for our little get-together at St. Benedict's, and we homed in on Father
O'Donnell about seven-thirty on Mon-day evening.
Sylvia introduced Doc Fallon and
Father O, and they seemed to size each other up right at first. They did come from opposite sides of a fairly
significant fence, and I guess they both wanted to be sure that they weren't
going to lock horns on certain issues.
"Sylvia mentioned the
possibility that certain kinds of repetitive behavior might precede Renata's
psychotic episodes," Fallon began. "I'd like to hear a few more
details. This could be very important."
"Part of it has to do with
cryptolalia-what I always called 'twin-speak' before Sylvia gave me the
scientific term," I told him. "Since Twink has no
memory of her childhood with
"That might be a slight
oversimplification," Fallon told me, "but let it go for now."
"The
point is that the private language also crops up when Twink goes to confession.
Father O'Donnell mentioned it to me quite sometime back, but I guess I spaced
it out. I'd gotten so used to hearing the twins lisping at each other when they
were kids that it didn't even occur to me that there was anything peculiar
about its reappearance-I mean, if Twink has no memory at all about
"Then
the matter of the two different voices surfaced," Father O picked it up.
"There have been times when I couldn't be positive how many young ladies
were in the confessional with me."
"That's
been bothering me as well," Sylvia added. "It shows up very obviously
when I'm editing the tapes. I was just about to resurrect my multiple
personality theory, but the reappearance of cryptolalia shoots that full of
holes, doesn't it?"
"Let's
not dismiss anything just yet," Fallon told her.
"Anyway," I picked it up
again, "Father O came up with the idea that the different voices and the
reappearance of twin-speak might be something on the order of an early warning.
Once those show up, the nightmares and the day of psychotic raving are almost
certain to come along again. Does that make sense?"
"What
if it's Ren's way to cry for help?" Mary suggested. "She might feel
the bad day coming, and she's begging us to step in and stop it-but she's
begging in a language nobody can understand."
"It's possible, I
suppose," Fallon conceded. "Does she have any memory of these
incidents on the following day?"
"She doesn't seem to. The
first few times they showed up, I'd ask her the next day if she was feeling
better, and she didn't seem to know what I was talking about. Of course, she's
always a little silly on the day after one of the bad ones."
"Could
we possibly be dealing with a fugue here?" Sylvia asked Fallon. "At least a personal variation of the fugue state? Once
she lapses into cryptolalia, she seems to blot everything out."
"Now we might be getting
somewhere," Fallon said. "Fugue?" I
asked. "Isn't that a musical term?"
"It
has a slightly different meaning in the field of abnormal psychology,
Mark," Sylvia told me. "It's a reaction to something that's so
terrible that the patient can't bear even to think about it. It usually
involves a loss of personal identity. Sometimes the patient will wander off and
seem to be perfectly normal. It can go on for hours-or even for days-and when
the patient recovers, he has absolutely no memory of anything that happened
during that period."
"It does sound like it fits
what's going on when Ren flips out," Mary said. "And it might just be
going on for a lot longer than we'd realized," I added. "Maybe it
starts when her voice keeps changing back and forth and words or phrases from
that private language crop up-usually in the confessional. Then she has that
nightmare again; then she wakes up talking about wolves and blood and cold
until she can't stand it anymore. At that point, she shuts down and talks
exclusively in twin. Then the next day comes along, and she has no memory of
anything that happened." I looked at Fallon. "Does that come anywhere
close to what this fugue state is all about?"
"Very close, I think," he
agreed. "Basically, a fugue is a flight from reality, and the patient will
even flee from her own identity to get away from a reality she can't face. In
this case, Renata seems to be taking refuge in the private language-in the same
way she did during the six months after her sister's death. Once she starts
speaking English again, the incident is over, and everything connected to it
has been erased from her memory”
“What is it about going to
confession that sets her off?" Mary asked.
"It
happens more often than you'd think, Mary" Father O told her.
"The act of confession seems
to lower certain defenses. We stress the importance of full confession, and
it's not uncommon for things to come out during confession that the penitent
has completely forgotten."
"What this finally boils down
to is that Renata's quite probably working her way toward another breakdown and
another stay in the sanitarium," Fallon told us. "It's regrettable,
but it's not that uncommon."
"And then my idiot brother
will use that as an excuse to take her home and never let her out of his sight
again," Mary added.
Fallon smiled faintly. "Just
leave that to me, Mary," he said. "I can probably stop him short if
it's necessary."
Sylvia and I were feeling pretty
upbeat after the Twinkie conference at St. Benedict's Church. We hadn't quite
solved all the problems yet, but we
felt we'd definitely made some progress.
Our good feeling lasted all the way
through Tuesday, but then Wednesday rolled around, and Twink went bonkers
again.
I was attending my
Twink had already gone through the
business of wolves, blood, and cold water, though, so all Sylvia got on tape
was an extended oration in twin-speak.
Sylvia wasn't too happy about that,
and she was using some very colorful language when I came home around ten that
morning. "If I'd only got there
a bit earlier!" she fumed.
"You don't have to be there in
person, Sylvia," I told her. "I've been thinking about that, and a
tape recorder that uses standard-sized tapes only costs about twenty-five
bucks. I'll pick one up and show Mary how to use it. She'll be able to get
everything on tape as soon as she walks in and finds Twink climbing the walls.
That way, she won't have to call you and wait around until you get there."
She glared at me for a moment, then she suddenly looked a little sheepish. "Why didn't
I think of that?" she said.
"You don't really want me to
answer that, do you, Toots?" I asked her. "This does shoot down
Father O's theory about the confessional, though, doesn't it? Twink hasn't been
to confession for quite some time now, and she went bonkers anyhow."
"Maybe
it's been percolating in the back of her mind for a few weeks," she
suggested. "I don't think there's any kind of time limit, do you?"
"It's
your field, Sylvia. Half the time you and Fallon are talking to each other in a
foreign language as far as I can tell. Did Mary zap Twink out with a pill
again?"
She nodded. "About a half hour
after I got there. Renata dozed off almost immediately."
"Whatever
works, I guess," I said.
As usual, Twink bounced right back
after she'd shaken off the horrors that'd wiped her out on Wednesday-she showed
up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for my class on Thursday. It seemed peculiar to
me that Twink was always superhyped on the day following one of her bad ones,
but it was obvious that today's ebullience fit the pattern.
It
was a little noisy in the classroom when I entered that afternoon. "All
right, people," I said from the front of the room, "settle down.
We've got something to take care of today. Next week's the last one of the fall
quarter, so I guess we'd better start thinking about a final examination. I
suppose we could all compose hymns of praise to conjunctions or prepositions,
but that might be a little tedious, huh? I don't know about you, but it'd
probably bore my socks off. Why don't we do something a little more exciting
instead?"
I
paused-for effect, of course. Then I snapped my fingers. "Why don't we
write another paper?" I said as if the idea had just come at me from out
of the blue. "You've been college students for twelve whole weeks now, and
the reason we come to college is to learn stuff, right? OK, why don't you tell
me about it? This'll be your last paper, and
it'll be your final exam at the same time. You'll whip in here next
Tuesday, dump your paper on the desk, and then split-unless you'd like some
kind of farewell oration from old superteacher!"
"Don't you mean next Thursday,
Mr. Austin?" one of them asked me. "I'll need a little time to grade
them. Superteacher is not faster than a speeding bullet."
"What's the topic supposed to
be?" another one asked. "How about ‘What I Have Learned This
Quarter'?”
“About English, you mean?"
"Why limit it to something
that pedestrian? If the biggest thing you've picked up here this quarter is how
long it takes the signal light at Forty-third and University to change, write a
paper about it. I hope that some of
you've picked up a few things a bit more interesting, but that's up to you. I'm
looking for thought content, gang. You're supposed to be here to learn how to
think, and I'm supposed to teach you how to think on paper. Let's find out if
we've all done what we're here for."
"That's awfully unspecific,
Mr. Austin," a girl near the front objected. "I know," I agreed.
"I'm leaving it wide-open on purpose. That puts the ball in your court. Go
for it, and give it your best shot-and about five hundred of your best words.
You might want to think it over before ten-thirty
next Monday evening. I don't want to spoil any of your plans, but you should
probably know that a half hour paper's likely to get you a half hour grade-if
you get my drift? Take a little time with this one. Let's bump up the old
grade-point average, shall we?"
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
"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
"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
I
went to my
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
"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?"
"
"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 al-most a month since the
"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 down-stairs 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 re-fused 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
Bob shook his head. "The body
was found on the military reservation. That's federal land, so
"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 fresh-man'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
"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
"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. "Some-times
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
feet first 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
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
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
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
"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."
"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
"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
"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."
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?"
Twink was still a little hoarse
when we went up to
"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,
Twinkle can go back to being a normie. Isn’t that neat?.
I
pondered that cryptic announcement as I drove back to
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 Inter-national 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. No-body 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 upsee-downsie," I told him. "Some days she's all bright and
bubbly, and other days she starts coming apart. She's driving her head-shrinker
straight up the wall, though."
"What
do you mean?" Sylvia asked in a worried kind of voice.
"I ran her up to
"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."
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
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?”
“Twinkle? 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 head-shrinker 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
"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 some-body'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
On a hunch I hauled into a gas
station when we got to
"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
At supper on Saturday James told us
that he'd be making a run to
"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
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 door-step 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
"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
"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
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 fresh-man 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."
"You know, I've noticed that
myself," Charlie agreed.
"I thought I'd noticed you
noticing," James observed.
After supper, James, Charlie, and I
ran over to the Green Lantern to see if Bob had anything new and exciting to
tell us about the Seattle Slasher. "What's the good word, Bob?"
Charlie asked his brother when we'd re-tired to one of the back booths.
"There aren't any, kid,"
Bob replied sourly. "Did you want to hear a few bad ones?"
"I
already know most of those," Charlie replied. "Are you getting any
closer to chasing down old ‘cut and run'?"
"Not really," Bob
admitted. "Do you remember that sailor who got carved up just before
Christmas?"
"The black man?" James said.
"That's the one. I think I
told you guys that the department was all pissed off because the Navy refused
to release the body for an autopsy, didn't I?"
"Yes,"
James replied. "Didn't you say that the Navy doctors were going to do it
themselves, then pass the results on to the
"That's the way it went. Our
pathologists came up with egg on their faces about that one," Bob said.
"They were positive that the Navy doctors didn't know the first thing
about conducting an autopsy, and that turned out to be way off base. Those Navy
boys are real pros. They ran tests that never would have occurred to our guys,
and they turned up something that our medical examiners had totally
missed."
"Oh?" Charlie said.
"What was that?”
“Have you ever heard of
curare?"
"Isn't
that some kind of poison?" Charlie asked.
"Sort
of. It's a concoction of certain plant extracts that some Indian
tribes in the Amazon jungle smear on their arrows. It paralyzes animals-or
people-when it gets into the bloodstream. And there was a whole bunch of curare
in that dead sailor's blood."
"So
that's why nobody's ever heard any screaming when the Slasher starts cutting
chunks off of people who ain't dead yet," Charlie said.
"You got it, kid," Bob
replied, "and after they'd found the curare in the sailor's blood, those
Navy doctors went over the carcass with a microscope. Guess where the needle
mark was."
"In
the guys throat?" Charlie demanded in a
half-strangled tone.
"You guessed 'er,
"Where could anybody get his
hands on a supply of curare?" I asked. "That's pretty exotic stuff,
isn't it?"
"Our pathologists tell us that
it's available in any well-stocked pharmacy. It's a muscle relaxant, and
doctors use it to bring a patient out of convulsions-usually when somebody's
having an epileptic seizure, but I guess there are some other things that cause
convulsions as well."
"Wouldn't that suggest that
the Slasher's a doctor-or maybe a male nurse or a pharmacist?" James
asked.
"Not necessarily," Bob
disagreed. "It almost has to be somebody who knows what curare does, but
that could just be some guy whose sister or cousin was
an epileptic. I mean, it's not some great big secret. Anyway, after we found
out that the Slasher was using curare, one of the guys ran a quick computer
check, and the word ‘curare' turned up in the burglary of a drugstore over in
the Queen Anne district last October. It was unusual, because whoever broke in
passed up all kinds of opiates and other feel-good products and only grabbed
the curare."
"It sounds to me like having
the Navy doctors do the autopsy was a stroke of good luck," Charlie noted.
"Come on, kid," Bob
protested. "Our pathologists have carcasses by the dozen they have to
check out. Sometimes they get rushed, that's all. They're not going to start
looking for poison in the body of a guy who's been gutted out like a
fresh-caught fish. The cause of death is pretty obvious, so our pathologists
concentrate on pinpointing the exact time of death. Those Navy doctors weren't
rushed, so they could go into greater detail. They even started to get exotic.
They took measurements on every single cut and scrape on that sailor's body,
and they came to a very peculiar conclusion."
"Oh?"
Charlie said.
"They seem to think that the
Slasher's using some kind of homemade knife. It's got a blade that's only about
two and a half inches long, shaped like a hook. The Navy guys think that the
Slasher stabs the point in and then pulls the blade through the meat-shoulders,
throat, belly-wherever. The poor bastard getting carved up can't move or make a
sound-because of the curare-so the Slasher can drag it out and make it last for
as long as he wants it to. If he's halfway careful, it could take at least an
hour for his victim to die."
"Ouch!"
Charlie said, wincing.
"Yeah, ouch," Bob agreed.
"We've got to get that maniac
off the streets. A shooting, or a stabbing with a regular knife is one thing,
but this Slasher isn't satisfied with just killing somebody. He wants pain, and
lots of it. I've got a hunch that in the right circumstances he'd do his very
best to keep the guy he's killing fully conscious for a week or more while he
was getting this, that, and various other things cut away. And to make it even
worse, the poor bastard can't move a muscle or even squeal. That's the part that raises the hair on
the back of my neck."
That first week of classes was a
bit scrambled. It always takes a while to make the adjustment. I was reading
Hemingway's "Torrents of Spring" on Thursday morning, having a ball
with that outrageous parody of the ponderous writing of the once-famous
Sherwood Anderson. If we can believe Papa, he churned that one out in ten days,
and it was one of the great literary swindles of the twentieth century.
Hemingway'd gotten a very interesting offer from Scribner for The Sun Also Rises, but he was already
under contract to Boni and Liveright-who were also
It was about
"Be
right there," I called as I dashed downstairs.
It
was Mary. "Ren's flipped out again, Mark," she told me.
"Damn!
I thought she was getting over those."
"Not really. She was going
full-bore when I came home. I got about fifteen minutes of it on tape, then I zonked her out."
"Did
anything at all unusual show up this time?" I asked her.
"No, I think she's going to
keep doing these same things over and over until somebody-Fallon,
or Sylvia-cracks the code. And I don't think we should wait too long, because
we can't be positive about how many more of these blowouts she's got left in
her. The day's going to come before too much longer when she
won't bounce back. At that point, it's back to the funny farm, and this
time, I don't think she'll graduate."
"You might be right,
Mary," I agreed. "We'd better kick some butt and see if we can put
Fallon and Sylvia into high gear. Time could be running out on us."
"See if you can find Sylvia.
Let's get copies of this tape before I lose it.”
“I'll get right on it, Mary,"
I promised her.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Sylvia was on campus that morning,
and I could probably have spent the whole day looking for her. I did have an alternative, though. I had
an old dual-deck tape player-recorder that I'd retired when I'd replaced it
with a better sound system, so I dug it out of the back of my closet, stuck a
couple of blank tapes in my pocket, and carried the heavy recorder downstairs. "What's up, Mark?" Erika asked me.
"Twinkie's flipped out
again," I replied. "Mary got most of it on tape, and I want to run
copies. Sylvia's going to want one, and so will Doc Fallon."
"That's
happening more and more frequently, isn't it?"
"Yeah, it is. Mary seems to
think that if we don't get a handle on it pretty quick, Twink's going to wind
up back in the bughouse, and this time she won't be
coming back out again."
"Damn!" Erika swore.
"At least damn," I
agreed.
Mary
was waiting when I got to her place. "Where's Sylvia?" she demanded.
"She's on campus
somewhere," I replied, "and I don't feel like chasing her down. I can
run copies of your tape on this machine and hand them off to her when she comes
home."
"Good thinking," Mary
agreed. "Let's set up in the kitchen. There's room enough for that big
recorder of yours there, and we won't mess up the living room."
"Sounds
good to me," I agreed.
I ran off several copies of Mary's
tape, and I was just about to pack things up and go home when I had an idea.
"Has Twink ever played her favorite tape for you, Mary?" I asked.
"The one where there's a woman
singing along with a pack of wolves?”
“That's the one. Does she play it
very often?"
"Often enough to make me pretty sick of hearing
it.
Why?"
"You know the way she
complains about wolves howling when she goes bonkers? Doesn't it seem odd to
you that she complains about it on her bad days, but listens to it when she's a
normie?"
"Now
that you mention it, it does seem
peculiar."
"If she's always listening to
it, it's probably in her tape player right now. If you can sneak into her room
without waking her up, I'd like to run off a copy of that tape too. It might
give Sylvia and Doc Fallon a few clues about what's bothering her so
much."
"I won't have to sneak, Mark.
Right now, an earthquake wouldn't wake her up. I'll go pull that tape out of
her player."
"I'd appreciate it, Mary. I've
got a hunch that it might turn out to be pretty important."
"Let's
get some copies of it then."
It was about
I went out into the hallway.
"I'm here," I told her. "You'd better come up. Twink had another
bad one, and Mary got most of it on tape. I made some copies."
"Was there anything new this
time?" she asked, climbing the stairs. "Not that Mary and I picked
up. It seems like a rerun of that one last November."
"Play
the tape," she directed.
The tape started with Twink moaning
about the wolves howling. After Andrew Perry'd told us about the wolf-dogs near
"Her voice is different,"
Sylvia said. "Did you notice that?”
“It seems pretty much the same to
me," I disagreed.
"You probably haven't listened
to the November tape as many times as I have. There's a definite difference,
Mark. She's more strained and filled with horror. Back the tape up and play it
again."
I rewound the tape and then punched
the PLAY button. Then I listened very carefully. "Maybe you're
right," I said, stopping the tape again. "I guess I was listening for
‘what,' not ‘how.' She does sound
more agitated, doesn't she?"
"Run
it on for the rest of the way," she said.
"All
you get from here on is twin-speak, Sylvia."
"That's
not important. I want to hear the tone, not
the words."
The agitation we'd both noticed in
the first part of the tape carried over into the twin-speak section, and if
anything, it grew even more pronounced.
"It
sounds to me like she's coming apart, Sylvia," I said glumly, after we'd
heard the rest of the tape. "Oh, I've got something else for you, too.
There's a tape that Twink plays all
the time, and I cut some copies." I pulled the copy of Mary's tape, and
stuck in the wolf tape. "You'd better brace yourself," I warned her.
"This one's sort of spooky." I punched the PLAY button.
Sylvia's eyes grew wider and wider
as the woman's voice joined in with the howling of the wolves. "Dear
God!" she choked when the tape ended. "What is that awful
thing?"
"I haven't got the faintest
idea," I admitted. "Twink's tape of this doesn't have a label, and
for all I know, it might be something
"I'll have to pass this one
off to Dr. Fallon," she said. "I'm way out of my depth here. I do
think this tape is important, though."
"I'm
glad you liked it."
"I didn't say that I like it,
Mark. It might turn out to be important, but it scares the hell out of
me."
After Sylvia's class on Friday
morning, she took Twink to
After my Friday classes, I went
back to the boardinghouse for lunch, and I found Charlie camped on the kitchen
TV set. "What's up?" I asked him. "They found another
stiff," he said. "It's down near
"Have
they put a name to it yet?"
"They're still working on
it-or else the cops are keeping it under wraps. Bob probably knows, but it's
not really that important.
I fixed myself some sandwiches
while Charlie ridiculed the assorted re-porters and commentators trying to ride
the Slasher story to celebrity. When you get right down to it, TV reporters are
a pathetic bunch. Their desperate need for attention drives them down the path
to absurdity, and their pious babbling about "the public's right to
know" overlooks the fact that most of their viewers were probably sick and
tired of the whole damn thing. I know I was.
After supper that evening, James,
Charlie, and I made our customary pilgrimage to the Green Lantern to get the
inside dope from Bob West. I suppose that if somebody wanted to pursue it, we
were being as silly as all the other empty-heads hungrily watching the TV sets
for the latest bit of dumb-show and noise.
Bob
seemed a little tense when we got to the Green Lantern. "What's got you so
worked up?" Charlie asked him.
"I ran my mouth when I should
have clammed up," Bob said bluntly. "I want you guys to keep what I
told you about curare strictly to yourselves. We don't want that to leak out.
Right now, it's the only solid thing we've got to work with, and if word leaks
out, the guy we're looking for might change the way he operates-or take off for
"I
gather that curare showed up during the autopsy of the fellow they found in
"It sure did," Bob
replied. "The body wasn't in very good shape, but there was enough left
for the coroner to find traces of curare. Evidently, that's been going on since
day one-all the way back to the Muñoz killing last September. We're guessing,
obviously, but we're fairly sure that the guy we're after isn't six-foot-six
and three hundred pounds. He's using cu rare instead of brute force to keep the
victim from trying to fight him off.”
“Have they come up with a name for
the guy in
"Maybe
so, but it does raise some interesting questions, doesn't it?"
"If you think that raises difficult questions, you
should hear her when she gets started on psychosis," Sylvia said.
"She'll even give lectures on that. Her position is that the psychotic is
simply responding to the external world in his own personal way. We think he's crazy, but he knows that he's not."
"Welcome to the wonderful
world of Twinkie," I told them. "Now you two can see why I had so
much fun last quarter."
On Tuesday of that week there was
another confession to the Slasher killings. This time, though, the reporters
took the time to check out the guy's record before
they rushed to the studio to get on camera. Evidently, this was another
nutso who'd confess to just about anything. One reporter who actually had his
head screwed on straight made a very interesting observation. He said that
these guys who confess compulsively seem to suffer from a form of hypochondria.
Instead of "you name a disease and I've got it" though, the guy
making phony confessions takes credit for crimes he couldn't possibly have
committed. The hypochondriac wants the doctors to pay attention to him; the guy
confessing is trying to get the attention of the cops-and the media. A real whacko
will sometimes even go so far as actually to kill a celebrity, just to get his
name in the papers-which takes "Look at me! Look at me!" out to the
far edge.
All this
particular nutcase got out of his performance was a couple of weeks in the
psychiatric ward of a
I got up early on Thursday morning
and spent an hour with Faulkner's The
Sound and the Fury before I went downstairs in the hope that Erika's coffee
would unscramble my head.
Charlie
and Erika were glued to that little TV set when I went into the kitchen.
"The Slasher's coming home to roost," Charlie told me. "He
nailed a guy in
"Hot spit," I replied
sourly. "That guy's starting to make me tired." I actually made it to
the coffeepot before Erika could intercept me. She gave me a hard look.
"Don't get antsy, Erika," I said. "See? I really do know how to
pour myself a cup of coffee." I filled my cup. "Notice that I didn't
even spill much on the floor."
"Smart-ass,"
she said.
"Sorry." I sat down.
"Where the hell is
"Another junior hoodling?" I asked.
"Pretty
much, yeah. He was a crack-cocaine addict, and he'd been busted for that
and some other low crimes and misdemeanors over the past few years. Our cut-up
seems to be getting careless. The cops are
patrolling all the parks here in north
I hit the library that morning, then I stopped by Dr. Conrad's office-just to stay in touch.
"How's that little screwball
friend of yours doing, Mr. Austin?" he asked me.
"Who
can say, boss?" I replied. "She's auditing classes in psychology
and philosophy this quarter, and she's still having some serious problems that
probably don't have anything to do with the courses she's sitting in on."
"You're going to fool around
and let her get away from us if you don't tighten her leash," he warned
me.
"Not my fault, boss-my roomies
sort of appropriated her. But don't worry-she's got
'em spooked already. She's asking some questions they can't answer."
"That's
our girl," he said fondly.
It was almost
"What's
up?" I asked him.
"Renata was behaving
peculiarly in class today, Mark," he told me.
"What else is new?"
"No, I mean very peculiarly. When class first
started, she was talking a mile a minute, and she didn't make any sense at all.
Then she stopped right in midbabble and looked around as if she suddenly didn't
know where she was. Then she grabbed up her books and left the room,
practically running!"
"That
doesn't match anything she's done before."
"I know," he agreed.
"If I've been following what's been happening correctly, this is something
entirely new. I think you'd better track her down, Mark. This might be
serious."
"I'll get right on it."
And I did-I drove straight over to Mary's place, and tapped on the kitchen
door, but nobody answered. Then I went around to look
through the window of Twink's room, but the shades were drawn.
"Damn!" I muttered. I didn't have any choice at that point. I went to
the front door and rang the bell. Mary probably wouldn't like it, but I had to find out where Twink was.
I rang the doorbell again, and
after a few minutes Mary opened the door in her robe, rubbing sleep out of her
eyes.
"I didn't want to wake
you," I apologized, "but I've got to find Renata.”
“She went to class, Mark," she
told me. "You know that."
"She might have gone, Mary,
but she didn't stay. James told me that she was behaving very strangely, and
then she just jumped up and ran out of the classroom. Could you check and see
if she came home?"
"Come on in," she said,
opening the door wider. Then she went back to Twink's door and rapped. There
was no answer, so she opened the door. "She isn't here, Mark," she
called to me.
"Damn!" I swore.
"Now what the hell are we going to do? If James is right, she may have
flipped out completely."
"Is
there anyplace on campus where she usually hangs out?"
"The sorority house, maybe.
She's not a member yet, but she spends a lot of time there."
"Why
don't you give them a call while I get dressed?"
"I
have to look up the number. Have you got a phonebook?"
Just then the back door opened.
"What the hell are you doing, Mark?" Twink demanded from the kitchen.
"You know we don't wake Aunt Mary up in the daytime."
"Where have you been?" I
said. "James told me that you went bonkers during his class and ran out
like a scalded dog."
“When are you people
going to back off?" she said crossly. "Every time I so much as sneeze, you all come unglued. I ate something
that didn't sit right, and now I've got the trots. I had to find a ladies' room
in a hurry"
"Oh."
I felt pretty foolish at that point. "James must have misunderstood. He
said that you were talking very strangely, then you
just jumped up and ran."
She
rolled her eyes upward. "We're reading Plato right now, Mark," she
told me with exaggerated patience. "You
have heard of Plato, haven't you? Anyway, I think I caught the old boy off
base, and I wanted to tell James about it before
I had to make another run to the ladies' room. It was probably just a
little garbled because nature was calling me in a very loud voice." She stopped
abruptly. "Oops!" she said. "Here we go again." She turned
and went quickly to the bathroom.
"Does that solve your problem,
Mark?" Mary asked in an amused sort of way.
"It looks like I goofed,
Mary," I apologized. "My panic switch seems to be a little loose here
lately."
"I
noticed that," she agreed with a yawn.
"Sorry
I woke you up," I said. "I'll go home and hide for a while.”
“Do
that," she said.
It was about one-thirty when I got
back to the boardinghouse, and everybody was in the kitchen locked on to the
little TV set. "What's happening?" I asked.
"You'd better get a grip on
something solid, old buddy," Charlie told me. "The whole city of
"Would somebody translate that
for me?" I asked the rest of the crew. "The word hit the television
news about a half an hour ago, Mark," Trish told me. "Evidently, the
police found a footprint at the scene of the
"I'm not sure that a
footprint's going to be a major breakthrough, is it?”
“This one is," Erika
disagreed. "It appears that our local celebrity wears a pair of those
fancy athletic shoes that rather conveniently has the shoe size imprinted on
the sole."
"Big
deal," I scoffed.
"It
is this time, Mark," Trish told me. "The shoe was a size eight."
"So?"
"It was about an inch and a
half shorter than a men's size eight," Charlie said. "That footprint
was made by a woman's shoe. Evidently, the Seattle Slasher is a woman."
"You're
not serious!"
"The cops are, and the TV
reporters are absolutely ecstatic about it." He grinned at me. "Brace
yourself, Mark. Some lady reporter with a flair for the dramatic came up with
an alternative to ‘Seattle Slasher.' How does ‘Joan the Ripper' grab you?"
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
James,
Charlie, and I took off for the Green Lantern right after supper that evening,
after a brief but fairly intense argument with the ladies. They definitely
wanted to come along. Charlie had to talk fast to persuade them that his
brother would almost certainly clam up if three strangers joined us in the
booth. There was some discontented muttering about that, and the term
"male chauvinist pigs" cropped up a few times.
Bob West was seriously pissed off
when we joined him in our usual back booth. "I think it's just about time
to take that goddamn Burpee to a veterinary hospital and have him put to
sleep," Bob growled. "If he doesn't learn to keep his goddamn mouth
shut, we're never going to get this
killer off the streets!"
"Are
you saying that it was Burpee who leaked the bit about that foot-print in
"I
can't prove it," Bob replied, "but it sure smells like a Burpee foul-up. Anytime a reporter gets to within a
half block of Burpee, that klutz spills his guts all over the sidewalk."
"Have they come up with a name
for the guy who got cut up yet?" I asked.
"Kowalski," Bob replied.
"Roger Kowalski. He was pretty well loaded up on crack cocaine, but there
was definitely curare in there as well."
"A mix like that could do some
real strange things to a guy, couldn't it?" Charlie asked.
"Yeah, strange-particularly if
some lady happens to be slicing off these, those, and thems while you're flying
high."
"If
the cops were that close, how did the killer manage to get away?" I asked.
"Near as they could tell, she
swam away before they even found Kowalski."
"Swam? In January?"
"Getting
away is sort of important, Mark."
"Is it possible that the
footprint could be a ruse?" James asked Bob. "A small man could jam
his feet into a pair of women's shoes, couldn't he?”
“It doesn't float, James," Bob
told him. "There were a few things that Burpee didn't know about, so he
couldn't-thank heaven-leak them to the reporters. I've talked with those two
cops, and they told me that who-ever was butchering Kowalski was singing, for God's sake!"
"Singing?" James asked incredulously.
"I didn't believe it right at
first either, but both cops swore up and down that they heard it. They said
that it wasn't exactly a song-more like some kind of moaning-but it was
definitely a woman's voice."
The guys probably thought that I'd
gone a little spacey after Bob unloaded that
on us. Some things had clicked into place, and my conclusions had made me
go cold all over. I didn't trust myself to say anything at all.
"Are you OK, Mark?"
Charlie asked me after Bob had left. "You're acting like you're not even
in there anymore."
"Sorry" I said.
"This came out of left field, and I'm trying to readjust my thinking, is
all."
"It
puts a whole new twist on things, that's for sure," Charlie agreed.
"I've got a hunch that the
media folks are going to flounder around with this for a while before they get
their act together. Let's hit the bricks, guys. I've got work waiting for me at
home."
"That's assuming the ladies
don't tie you to a chair as soon as we get there," James said. "I
doubt they're going to be satisfied with a brief summary of what your brother
just told us."
James
was right on that one. The girls
wanted all the details when we got home. I let James and Charlie do most of the
talking, though. I wanted time to think my way through some disturbing
possibilities.
We
sat in the kitchen hashing things out until almost
We
finally hung it up and went to bed. I was sure I wouldn't sleep very much.
The
discovery that the Seattle Slasher was a woman had brought me face-to-face with
a distressing possibility. There were quite a few "what-ifs"
involved, and the biggest one was "what if Renata was the Slasher?"
Since most-if not all-of the victims had a record of assorted sexual offenses
and a rapist had murdered
Our
assumption that Twinkie's nightmares were a rerun of the night when
The
thing that'd triggered my growing suspicion had been Bob's almost offhand
revelation that the Slasher'd made good her escape by taking to the water and
swimming away in the dark. That might have been just a spur-of-the-moment means
of escape from a couple of cops who'd been almost on top of her, but what if
it'd just been a standard operating procedure? Cutting somebody to pieces while
he's still alive is likely to be a very messy business. And since there'd been
a lake, or a river, or
That, of course, would mean that
those "bad days" would always follow a murder. There'd been several,
of course, that'd popped up when there hadn't
been any reports of murders, but all that probably meant was that the cops
hadn't found the body yet. If I was anywhere close to right about this, when
Twink had a bad day, there was a dead guy somewhere in the general vicinity.
That brought me up short. There'd
been a killing last night, and Twink had been anything but bonkers in the morning. She'd gone to James's class just like a
normie, and except for that bout of diarrhea she hadn't had any-thing wrong at
all.
Clearly, I was going to have to do
some digging here. What I really wanted
was some clear proof that Twinkie hadn't committed
those murders, and trying to prove a negative is damn near impossible. My best
bet would be to pinpoint a murder that Twink couldn't possibly have committed.
One that'd happened on a night when Mary hadn't gone to work would be the
best-or maybe one that'd come along when Twink hadn't been in town.
"Oh, hell," I said then
as I suddenly remembered something. Twink couldn't possibly be the Slasher; she
didn't have a car. It was quite a ways to Woodinville and even farther to
So
Twinkie was in the clear ... So why were my insides still roiling?
I
knew that this whole idea would bug me until I'd plowed my way through the
entire series of events, matching bad days with murders-and hoping to high
heaven that they wouldn't match after all. The first step-dating the
killings-wouldn't be any problem. The university library had copies of the Seattle Times dating back to the early
twentieth century, so pinpointing murder dates would be a piece of cake.
Dating
those bad days when Twink had gone bonkers might be a little tougher, though.
Unless Mary kept a diary, she probably couldn't be very precise. If anybody
would have those dates, it'd be Sylvia. Her case history might not go all the
way back to the time of that first murder, but anything since early November
was almost certain to be in her notes.
My next problem would be finding
some way to ask Sylvia for those dates without alerting her to what I was doing
and why. That might turn out to be
tougher than I thought....
After my seminars on Friday, I
managed to catch Sylvia before she left to take Twink to
"Have you got a minute,
babe?" I asked her.
"Sure, Mark," she
replied. "What's up?"
"Mary's
got me a little worried," I lied. "This notion of hers that Twinkie's
on the fast track back to Fallon's bughouse is starting to tighten up my jaws.
Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems to me that these days when Twink
flips out are getting more frequent. I was wondering if you've been pinpointing
them in your case history."
"Of course I have, Mark. Dates
are very important in a case history.”
“Then you can probably fill me in
on every one of them that's popped up since early in November, can't you?"
"I
can go back even further if you want me to. Renata checks in with Dr. Fallon
every Friday, remember? He questioned her closely during her visits last fall
when she kept lapsing into the fugue state, and he spotted the blank days
almost immediately. I don't think Renata's fully aware of it, but she's had
quite a few six-day weeks since she moved to
"I'll copy it now," I
said, "and bring it right back.”
“There's no real rush, Mark."
"Let's play it safe," I
told her. "I've got stacks of paper on every flat surface in my room, and
your list might slip off into a black hole if I don't keep my hands on
it." I pounded upstairs, got my little copier running, and ran off a copy
of her list. Then I hurried back downstairs and handed it to her. "I owe
you, Sylvia," I panted.
"Don't worry" she replied
with an impish little grin. "Someday I might need a favor from you, and
I'll remind you about this one."
"I
sort of expected that."
"It's an Italian tradition,
Mark," she told me. "We always collect
these debts." She glanced at her watch. "I'd better get moving. Dr.
Fallon's a stickler for punctuality."
I stowed my copy of Sylvia's list
in my briefcase, then headed for the library, fervently hoping that the dates
wouldn't match.
The Muñoz killing had hit the front
page, largely because he'd been a minor celebrity as a dope lord. The
similarities between that murder and
a couple of the later ones got those killings
onto page one as well. That had been back when the reporters were all riding
Burpee's "gang killing" horse. I was actually grateful for Burpee's
obsession with Cheetah at that point. Andrews and Garrison were such
small-timers that normally they would have rated only a paragraph or two on
page thirty-seven. The possibility of some connections between their murders
and the killing of Muñoz had elevated them to the limelight.
Once the media had come up with
that "Seattle Slasher" designation, though, the assorted nonentities
who'd gotten themselves butchered be-came front-page news, and it didn't take
long to get all the dates and places.
I
had a sick feeling by the time I got into the December newspapers. I had two
lists now, and they matched almost perfectly. Twinkle had suffered three or four bad days when there hadn't been an
"official" murder, but that didn't brighten my day very much. There
were several "unofficial" murders as well as the ones that'd made the
headlines-Woodinville,
I was muttering quite a few
obscenities when I finished up and left the library.
The
newspapers had latched onto that "Joan the Ripper" tag, and it was an
immediate smash hit. It was grossly overdramatic, of course, but the parallels
were fairly obvious, and the news media love
to be obvious. The cloth-heads who breathlessly hang on to anything lurid
and spectacular that hits the TV screen aren't too bright to begin with, so it
doesn't take much to wind them up. People who rely on newspapers are a little
more intelligent ... but not very much. The public in
Under different circumstances, I
might have been amused by this applause for vigilante justice, but I'm sure you
can understand why I wasn't laughing this time.
I
stewed about my growing suspicion over the weekend, and I couldn't concentrate
on much of anything else. Every time I sat down to read Hemingway or Faulkner,
I'd find myself staring at the wall and trying to find some kind of hole in my
theory. I tried my best to keep it under wraps, but I'm fairly sure that the
boardinghouse gang knew that I was having a problem of some kind.
After supper on Monday, James
suggested to Charlie and me that maybe we should make a quick run to the Green
Lantern. "There's something I'd like to check out with Bob," he told
us.
"Oh?"
Charlie said. "What's that?"
James smiled faintly. "I
wouldn't want to spoil it for you," he replied.
"What do you think,
Mark?" Charlie asked me. "Should we humor him?”
“We might as well," I said
grimly. "I'll get my coat."
Bob was sitting at the bar when we
got there, and the four of us adjourned to a back booth. "What's up?"
Bob asked us.
"James has a question for
you," Charlie replied. "Oh?" Bob said, looking at our friend.
"Something occurred to me over
the weekend," James told him. "We've got a workshop in the basement
at the boardinghouse, and I went down there on Saturday to get my pipe wrench.
I spotted one of Mark's tools, and it set me to wondering about something.
Those Navy doctors who performed the autopsy on Walton said that the murder
weapon might be some sort of homemade implement, but I think they might have
overlooked something that's fairly common. Last fall, Mark and I resurfaced the
floor in the kitchen, and when we came to fitting the linoleum around the
doorframes, Mark had a special tool he used to trim the tiles to fit. I'd
forgotten about it, but when I saw it again last Saturday, I started to wonder
if the Slasher's weapon could be a linoleum knife?"
Bob blinked. "Oh, shit!"
he said. "It could be, couldn't it? Boy, did we drop the ball on that one!
It fits exactly-short, hook-pointed, and with the sharp edge on the inside of
the curve. It'd leave wounds exactly like the ones we've been looking at since
last September."
"And you can pick one up in
any hardware store for under ten bucks," Charlie added.
"We
owe you one, James," Bob said.
"I should have thought of it
earlier," James replied. "It wasn't until I saw that knife of Mark's
that it dawned on me that it might be the Slasher's implement of choice."
"You
see, big brother?" Charlie said, grinning,
"Anytime you come up with a problem you can't solve, bring it to us. We'll
take care of it for you. How's Burpee handling the ‘Joan the
Ripper' discovery?"
"He's not a happy camper, I'll
tell you that much." Bob chuckled. "Cheetah left town this past
weekend."
"Aw," Charlie said,
"shuckey-darn. Poor old Burpee! What sent Cheetah off in search of greener
pastures?"
"From
what our informants told us, it was the ‘Joan the Ripper' thing. When Burpee
leaked the word that the Slasher's a woman, I guess Cheetah hit the panic
switch. One of our informants told us that Cheetah's positive that the lady
with the knife's out looking for him-specifically. He's convinced that the
other killings have just been for practice, and Joan’s-girl's ultimate target
is him. I guess that when the news broke on television last Thursday, Cheetah
started hiding under his bed. He was shaking all over and babbling
incoherently. Then he stuffed a week's supply of dope and a pair of clean socks
in a paper bag, ran down to his car, and drove off at about eighty miles an
hour."
"Then
there might be something to all this folk heroine crap
the lady reporters are babbling about," Charlie observed. "Joan managed
to get rid of Cheetah without even reaching for her knife. Did your snitch
happen to tell you where Cheetah was going?"
"He
was headed south the last time our informant saw him," Bob replied.
"He might be headed for
"We'll
miss him terribly," James said.
"Not
as much as Burpee will." Bob chuckled. "Burpee was hanging all of his
hopes for promotion on his whacko Cheetah theory, and Joan the Ripper just
pulled the rug out from under him."
"Aw,"
Charlie said, "what a shame."
"I've got to split,
guys," Bob said then. "I want to hit a hardware store on my way home.
If I'm going to talk with the coroner about the possibility that the murder
weapon in all these killings is a linoleum knife, I'd better have one handy so
that he can see what I'm talking about."
No
matter how hard I tried to shrug off my theory that Twinkie could be the
Seattle Slasher, it kept nagging at me. Too many things fit too closely. The
next question, obviously, was what the hell was I
going to do about it.
I certainly wasn't going to go see
Bob West and rat her off. When I got to the bottom, I realized that I had a
strong tendency to agree with the militant feminist point of view that the
assorted killings were justifiable homicides. There was a distinct possibility
that every victim was a rapist who richly deserved what had happened to him.
That was beside the point, though. Twink obviously had some serious mental
problems that needed medical attention-probably back in Doc Fallon's bughouse.
My best bet would be to get some good solid proof-one way or the other-that she
was or wasn't the Slasher, and if it turned out that she was, to present my
findings to Fallon and persuade him to quietly recommit her. The killings would
come to a halt, and after six months or so the media would find something else
to babble about.
The next question was how to go
about it. How the hell was I going to prove-or disprove-my suspicions?
Does the term "stakeout"
ring any bells for you? It didn't make me very happy, but I was damned if I
could come up with any alternatives. To make matters worse, it'd have to be a
one-man stakeout-I couldn't enlist James or Charlie or anybody else to help me.
I had to keep this strictly to myself, and that meant that I'd probably have to
forgo sleeping. I might be able to last four or five days that way, then I'd
probably lapse into a coma. It wasn't going to work.
Obviously,
I wouldn't be able to keep an eye on Twinkie for twenty-four hours a day for
weeks at a time. The more I thought about it, though, the more I came to
realize that it wouldn't be a
twenty-four-hour job. These killings had all taken place after
That
moved the whole idea into the realm of possibility. I might be a little
sandy-eyed, but I wouldn't fall apart after the first week.
"What
the hell?" I muttered. "Let's give it a try and see what
happens."
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
On Thursday of the week after the
Montlake killing, I took my first try at playing the private eye game. To be
honest about it, the whole thing made me feel silly: I wasn't cut out to be Sam
Spade or Mike Hammer.
I had a couple of cover stories I'd
cobbled together to explain why I'd be taking off late in the evening, but as
luck had it, all the rest of the boardinghouse gang were in their rooms when I
slipped out, so I didn't have to lie to anybody.
It was about nine-thirty when I
drove past Mary's place. Her car was still parked in front of the house, so she
obviously hadn't taken off yet. I pulled into a space about a block away on the
opposite side of the street. I could see the house from there, but I wasn't
parked right across from it. I knew that Mary would recognize my old Dodge, so
I didn't want be too close. After she left, I could move in closer if it seemed
necessary. I wasn't entirely certain whether Twink would spot my car if she
happened to be in the fugue state. For all I knew, she might not even recognize
me. I made a mental note to check that with Sylvia.
It was about five minutes after ten
when Mary came out and got into her car. I was sure she wouldn't drive past the
place where I was parked, but I didn't want to take any chances, so I ducked
down behind the dashboard until she'd driven off.
Then I moved my car up to the
intersection and watched the house. I hoped
that this wasn't going to go on forever. All I really needed to put my
suspicions to rest would be a nice, messy murder on some night when I was
watching Mary's house. If Twink was home in bed while Joan the Ripper was busy
carving out some guy's tripes, it would prove a negative, and logic be damned.
After Mary left, the light stayed
on in the living room until about eleven-thirty. Then the living room light
went out and the bathroom light came on and stayed on for a half hour or so.
Twinkie was probably taking a bath. The chances that she might go out prowling
now were pretty re-mote, I thought.
Then again,
maybe not. I didn't really know enough about the fugue state to be sure
of much of anything. If it was something like sleepwalking, maybe Twink would
have to go to bed and drift off before her alternative identity took over.
I watched the house intently as the
bathroom light went out and the kitchen light spilled out into the backyard. I
made a mental note to find a better parking place: I needed to see the back of
the house.
Then Twink's bedroom light came on.
I could see that one OK from where I was. It stayed on for about ten minutes,
and then the house went dark.
I looked at my watch. It was about
ten after twelve. If Twinkie was Joan the Ripper and she was planning to go
hunting tonight, she'd better get on with it.
The key to the whole thing, I
reasoned, was that bike of hers. It wasn't likely that she'd walk. As long as
her bike was chained to Mary's back porch, she was almost certainly in bed.
At
twelve-thirty, I started my car, drove to the end of the block, hooked left,
and then turned into the alley. I drove slowly past the back of Mary's house.
Twink's
bike was still on the back porch.
I
drove back to where I'd parked before and sat watching.
At
I realized that I'd made a couple
of boo-boos, but it was my first time out. I was sure I'd get better at it with
more practice. Hopefully, though, this wouldn't be a permanent thing. All I
needed was a murder when Twink was right there in Mary's house where I could
see her-or her bike. Then I wouldn't have to play Sherlock Holmes anymore.
I was a little sandy-eyed when
Charlie banged on my door the next morning. "Daylight in the swamp,"
he announced, "and it's feeding time.”
“Tell the girls I'll be right
down," I replied, sitting up. "I'll only be a couple minutes."
This stakeout business had already cut into my sleep time. Four or five hours a
night wasn't going to cut it. I pulled on my clothes, hit the bathroom long
enough to splash some cold water on my face and brush my teeth. Then I stumbled
downstairs.
"Sorry" I apologized when
I went into the kitchen. "I must have forgotten to flip the switch on my
alarm clock."
"How late were you out last
night?" Trish asked. "I heard you leave, but I must have been long
asleep by the time you came home."
"It was about two or so, I
think," I replied evasively. "I had something I had to take care
of."
"Have
we got a new girlfriend, maybe?" Charlie slyly suggested.
For some
reason that didn't go over too well. The ladies didn't say anything,
but there was a definite chill in the air after that. I floundered through a
couple of vague denials, and that seemed to make things even worse.
I wolfed down my breakfast and took
off for the campus. Hemingway and Faulkner were waiting for me.
It
was
"I'm
running on short sleep," I said. "I think I'll crash for a while this
afternoon. Did Twinkie make it to class today?"
"She was there-physically,
anyway. Her head seemed to be turned off, though. After class, I reminded her
that this was 'Friday-go-to-meeting-day,' and she seemed surprised. I actually
think she'd forgotten that we have to run on up to
"She gets spacey every now and
then, Sylvia-you know that. If you get to talk privately with Doc Fallon, you'd
better let him know that Mary's worried. She's almost positive that Twink's
close to the breaking point. If we don't come up with some answers pretty damn
soon, we're liable to lose her."
"You're
just filled with good cheer today, aren't you?" she replied sourly.
I
dozed a little that afternoon, but I was still pretty groggy at suppertime.
"I'm off to the library" I announced after we'd finished.
"I'll
come with you," James volunteered.
"Don't bother," I said,
grabbing up my stuff. I was out the door before the others could object to my
breaking our no-going-out-alone-after-dark rule. "Don't wait up," I
called over my shoulder. It was a none-too-polite way to tell them all to butt
out. I was having enough trouble without any more snooping by my housemates.
I
regretted it before I even got to my car, but by then it was too late.
I did go to the library, but I
didn't accomplish very much. I was still punchy from lack of sleep and worried
that Twinkie might decide it was time to go hunting again.
I got to
Getting out, I locked the car and
strolled toward Mary's place, putting on what was probably a grossly overdone
show of nonchalance. Us private eyes do that every now
and again. Overacting is actually pretty dumb, but I seemed to be coming down
with a bad case of high drama.
I backed up against a conveniently
high hedge about a block and a half from Mary's place and waited.
At five minutes after ten, Mary
came out, in full uniform and pistol belt, and got into her car. She was
predictable, that's for sure.
I hunkered down a bit to stay out
of sight until she drove off. Then I went back and got my car. It was colder
than hell that night, and a chilly fog was drifting in from
I drove back to the place where I'd
parked on the previous night so that I could watch the house.
The light in the living room stayed
on until a
By twelve-thirty, the only light
that was on was the one in Twink's bedroom. When it went out, I fired up my car
and made a pass down the alley behind Mary's house. Twink's bike was still on
the back porch, so I went home to catch up on my sleep.
We always slept a little later than
usual on Saturday mornings, and that gave me the chance to sleep in. This
stakeout business was definitely cut-ting into my sack time.
Trish whipped up some buttermilk
pancakes that morning, and we all pigged out.
"Who's the lucky girl,
Mark?" Charlie asked me, as we lingered over coffee.
"What
lucky girl?" I tried to evade his prying.
"Get real," he said.
"When a guy doesn't come home until way past
"Can
I take the fifth amendment on that, Trish?"
"If it makes you feel
better," she replied in a rather unfriendly tone.
"Let it lie,
Charlie," James suggested. "It's none of our business, you
know."
"Just making conversation." Charlie shrugged it off.
Then he stood up. "Gotta hit the books," he said then.
There
was a definite chill in the air that morning, and I couldn't figure out why. I
went down to my basement workshop, mostly to get away from the ladies. All
three of them were scowling at me every time I turned around. The house rule
against hanky-panky didn't involve a vow of celibacy, but the ladies were
behaving as if I'd broken some rule. Charlie's "Mark's got a
girlfriend" joke wasn't coming off very well. Trish, Erika, and Sylvia
seemed to be offended.
Maybe it was group possessiveness.
Women get strange now and then. When I thought about it, though, I realized
that the "Mark's got a girl-friend" thing might just solve a problem
that was certain to come up in the very near future. I definitely didn't want
my housemates to know about my suspicions or that I was camped out in front of
Mary's house every night. If they were convinced that I was
out chasing some girl, they might get a little grumpy about it, but they
wouldn't catch on to what I was really doing-or why. Probably the best
way to pull that off would be to spiff up before I left the house-dress the
part. It was devious and probably a little dishonest, but we start moving into
"the ends justify the means" territory here.
The more I thought about it, the
better I liked it, and I felt pretty good when I started to cobble together a
rough sort of workbench.
After
supper I went upstairs to change clothes. If I was going to pull off this
"girlfriend" scam, I should probably look the part. This time,
though, nobody offered to keep me company when I hustled out the front door.
It
was already a little foggy when I fired up my car, and there was a fair chance
that the weather would get worse as the night wore on. That could definitely
complicate matters. If Twinkie really was Joan the Ripper and she decided to go
hunting that night, it wouldn't be hard for her to get away after Mary went to
work. Even if I saw her leave the house, she wouldn't have much trouble
slipping out of sight in that damned fog.
I'd left the boardinghouse early,
more to persuade my housemates that I was off to see my fictitious lady friend
than out of any necessity. Rather than just sitting in my car watching the fog
grow thicker, I cruised the alleys in the neighborhood
of Mary's house to get the lay of the land. If Twink left the house on her
bicycle, I'd be at a definite disadvantage. People do park cars in alleys, even
though it's not exactly legal. A bike wouldn't have any trouble slipping
through, but a car would never make it. A little scouting in advance seemed
appropriate.
The streets in residential
neighborhoods are usually fairly tidy, but you wouldn't believe how much stuff piles up in the alleys. There are junk cars,
old refrigerators and stoves, Dumpsters, and beat-up old garbage cans. Driving
a car through an alley is almost like trying to run an obstacle course. That
didn't brighten my evening very much.
At about
That jerked me up short. My goal
was to prove a negative, and here I was scheming up ways to prove that Twink
was in fact the Seattle Slasher. Or Joan the Ripper-or whatever else the media
wanted to call her.
Mary left the house at the usual
time, and after she'd gone off to work, I moved my car closer so I could watch
the house.
At
ten-thirty, the living room lights went out. Then the bathroom light came on.
Then it went out, and the kitchen light followed. Then, even as it had on the
two previous nights, the light in Twink's bedroom came on.
That light stayed on for about
fifteen minutes, and then it went out and the whole house was dark.
I didn't even bother to take a pass
through the alley. I just fired up my car and went home.
Mary
had Sunday and Monday off, so I wasn't going to have to play the stakeout game
until Tuesday. That gave me some time to think things over. So far, all I'd
managed to do was waste a lot of time and lose a lot of sleep. My suspicions
weren't holding water. It was fairly clear that Twinkie did not go out on the prowl every time Mary
left the house.
I'd
done enough ordinary hunting in my own time that I knew that no hunter scores
every time he picks up his rifle or shotgun. And it's pretty much the same with
fishing: Some days they just aren't biting. The Slasher-Ripper-whatever had
managed to score eight times-officially-and probably four or five times
unofficially. The killings in Woodinville and
Actually,
that should have made me feel better. I didn't want to pin the Ripper murders on Twinkie. What I was trying to do
was prove that she wasn't the one
who'd been carving people up since last fall. If the real Joan the Ripper would just cooperate and butcher some minor
hoodling while I was camped on Mary's doorstep making sure that Twink hadn't
left the house, I'd be off the hook.
About
"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
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
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
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
She was riding east on
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 wind-shield wipers every five minutes. The humidity
level must have been about zoo 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.
I spent about two hours cruising
around in the fog, but all I accomplished was to waste a lot of gas. By
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?
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
"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
I pulled into my usual parking
place and watched Mary's house. As expected, Mary came out at
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
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
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
"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
"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 some-where. 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 stake-out
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
I spent the afternoon reading For Whom the
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
"Maybe his kid brother
borrowed the truck.”
“It's possible, I suppose."
"Does this Fergusson guy have
a police record? If he does, maybe Twink should warn her friend about it."
"He seems clean-hell, if he
was dealing dope on the side, he could afford something fancier than an '82
Jimmy pickup. I'm sorry I jumped on you about this, kid. I've got the grumpies.
The other dispatcher's down with the flu, so my work schedule's all screwed up.
It looks like I won't be getting any days off for a while."
"Has
Twink made it back from
"No.
She and Sylvia usually have dinner with Les and Inga on these Fridays. She'll
probably make it back before I have to go to work. I'd better whip up some
supper-I'm starving."
"Enjoy," I told her.
"Sure, kid."
I set the phone back in the cradle
and sat staring at the floor for a while. The story Twink had foisted off on
Mary could have been legitimate. Twinkie did
buddy up to quite a few sorority girls, and one of them might have asked
her to track down that license plate number ... But a guy who drives a
fifteen-year-old pickup truck would have to look like Mr. America to get a
sorority girl's attention. It just didn't ring true.
By eight-thirty that evening, the
fog was thick enough to walk on. I probably could have scratched the stakeout
that night, but I didn't want to take any chances. My main goal now was to
prove to myself that Twinkie didn't have anything to do with all the killings, and that meant that I'd have to camp out near
Mary's house pretty regularly. I was sure missing a lot of sleep, but I didn't
have any real choice.
Fortunately,
Twink seemed to be a creature of habit. If she was going out, she'd be out that
back door at eleven on the dot. If she didn't leave by eleven-fifteen, I could
go home and crash. God knows I needed the sleep.
Mary left at the usual time. I
could barely make her out in that fog, though I wasn't parked far from her
front door.
I took a chance at that point. I
was fairly sure that if Twink did decide
to go hunting, she'd stash her bike behind that Dumpster in the alley off
A thought came to me on my way back
to where my car was parked. If I could pick up a pair of bolt cutters, I could
slip back about three in the morning, cut that chain, and steal Twinkie's bike.
That'd keep her off the streets for a while at least.
I decided against it. If I started
tinkering at this point, I'd probably blow my chances of proving that Twinkie
couldn't possibly be Joan the Ripper.
The
fog hadn't let up much on Saturday morning, and I woke up tired, dejected, and
unpopular. But I was determined to make some progress, and on a hunch I looked
up the name Walter Fergusson in the phone book to get an address. As it turned
out, there were three of them, but one was way off at the south end of town,
and another was in a fairly posh retirement home. That left the one who lived
on
The
more I thought about it, the less convincing I found Twink's story about some
sorority girl's burning interest in a guy in his late thirties who drove a
beat-up fifteen-year-old pickup truck. I had some time, and this Fergusson guy
lived not far from the boardinghouse, so I decided to drive on over and have a
look.
As
it turned out, Fergusson lived in an apartment house on the west side of
The
fog had lifted a bit, and I looked out toward the lake. A park lined the
lakeshore on the other side of the street, and the word "park" set
off some bells for me. If Twink was the serial killer, she'd been taking out
targets of opportunity up 'til now. If she was suddenly homing in on a specific
guy, she must have a pretty good reason for it.
I
walked on to the apartment house and went up to the front door to check the
mailboxes. Fergusson's name was on the box marked 2-A; that didn't help all
that much. The box marked MANAGER was 1-A, and the
name was Sharon Walcott. That gave me an idea. I went back to my Dodge and
drove around looking for a pay phone. I found one at a convenience store,
leafed through the phonebook, and found a number for a Sharon Walcott at that
"Hello?"
It was a woman's voice.
"I'm looking for a Walter
Fergusson," I told her. "There are three of them in the phone book,
and I'm not sure which one is the fellow I'm supposed to contact."
"Why
didn't you just dial his number?"
"I've been trying, but his
line's busy. It's sort of important. The one I'm trying to find is a distant
cousin of mine. There's a family estate involved, and I need to get in touch
with him. He'd be about thirty-five or forty, and the last we heard, he was a
construction worker. If the Walter Fergusson who lives in your building is a
lawyer or investment broker, I'm obviously barking up the wrong tree."
"Walt might be the one you're
looking for," she told me. "He is in his midthirties, and he works
with drywall panels. Is there an inheritance involved in this?"
"I wouldn't call it an
inheritance," I told her. "Our great-aunt passed away, and there are
a few legal technicalities involved in freeing up her house so that her
daughter can sell it. I need to get hold of Walt so I can get his signature on
some papers. Is he likely to be around for the rest of the day? I'm sorry I had
to pester you, but I can't get through on his
phone."
"He almost never gets up
before
"That
would explain it."
"I could push a note under his
door if you'd like. If you give me a phone number where he can reach you, he'll
probably call you when he wakes up.”
“I don't have a local phone number, ma'am; I'm just passing through town on
business. I haven't seen Walt since we were kids, so I doubt if I'd even
recognize him. Could you describe him for me?"
"Midthirties, like you said.
Sort of balding on top, a little overweight, and he wears work clothes all the
time. He keeps pretty much to himself, but he does go out at night fairly
often. If you'll give me your name, I'll tell him that you're trying to get in
touch with him."
"Marlowe." I picked
another fictional private eye name. "Phillip Marlowe. Walt probably
doesn't even remember me. How many apartments are there in your building? I
might have to come by and start knocking on doors.
"There are only four
apartments. Walt lives in the second floor front.”
“I appreciate your taking the time
to fill me in," I said. "I'll get off the line now and quit pestering
you." I put the phone back on the hook.
A lot of things didn't exactly fit,
but if Twink was homing in on Fergusson, now I'd know where to go if she gave
me the slip the next time she left Mary's place to go hunting.
The
fog came back full force that evening, and Twink stayed home again. I watched
until eleven-thirty, then went back home.
Mary
had to work on Sunday night, so I watched the house again, but I drew another
blank. The fog seemed to be settling in permanently, and until it lifted,
Twinkie wasn't likely to suit up for another hunting trip.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
Wind
came up early on the morning of Monday, the ninth of February, and it cleared
away the fog in fairly short order. I was happy to see it gone when I got up,
but the more I thought about it, the more I started to worry. That dense,
freezing fog had kept Twinkie more or less house-bound. Now that it'd cleared
off, she'd be able to go hunting again.
I didn't say much at breakfast that
morning. I had a lot on my mind, and I was half-afraid that if I started
talking, things might start popping out that I really should keep to myself.
When you get right down to it, all I had to go on were several unconfirmed
suspicions. I wasn't about to go galloping down the Burpee path. It'd be best
if I kept my mouth shut until I had something concrete to work with. All right,
Twinkie went out on the town at night every so often. Big
deal. Lots of people go out after dark. It's not as if there was a
curfew in
I
hit my seminars that morning, but I wasn't paying very close attention.
Then I holed up in the library for
the afternoon, mostly to avoid my housemates. I was wound pretty tight, and I
didn't feel like answering questions. This was most definitely not
spill-your-guts time.
I
got home just in time for supper. I wolfed it down without even noticing what I
was eating, curtly excused myself, and got the hell out of there. I could
apologize later; right now I wasn't in the mood for conversation.
I
went back to the library, but that was really a waste of time. I couldn't even
begin to concentrate. I gave up and went back out to where I'd parked my car.
The
wind that'd cleared away the fog had died down, and the fog was starting to
seep back. It wasn't as thick as over the weekend, but it still made anything
more than a block away look pretty damn fuzzy.
I
drove to
After
Mary left for work, I drove around to the alley behind her house. It was a bit
chancy, but I had a hunch that Twink wouldn't notice me if she went out
hunting.
Her
bedroom light came on at
I
sat tight until she reached the end of the alley, then I drove directly to
Sunnyside. I parked near that alley and waited. I'll admit that I was wound up
pretty tight. After what seemed like a long, long time, Twinkie came out of the
alley on foot. She was wearing that black plastic raincoat again, and I
couldn't for the life of me figure out why she kept stashing her bike behind
that Dumpster.
She
walked down to the corner and got into a tan Honda that was parked there. Boy,
did that explain a lot of things! Of course she stashed her bike every time she
went out. She had an alternate means of transportation. That gave me a sick
feeling in the pit of my stomach. I'd been clinging to the notion that some of
the Ripper murders had been way out of bicycle range. Twink had a car, though-a
car that none of us knew about-and that put everything within a fifty-mile
radius close enough for her to reach while Mary was at work.
The car didn't move for quite a
while, but the smoke coming out of the exhaust pipe told me that the motor was
running. I couldn't quite figure that out, but then it dawned on me that she had to run the motor for a while to get
warm air coming out of the defroster. It was foggy enough and cold enough to
ice up her windshield.
After about five minutes, she
turned on her lights and drove off. I let her get a block or so ahead of me,
and then I turned on my lights and followed her. I was almost positive that I
knew where she was going, but I didn't want to take any chances.
She drove north on Sunnyside, took
a left at Fiftieth, and went on to the south end of
She
drove past Fergusson's apartment house and parked about two blocks away. I took
a quick left onto a side street, parked, and ran back to that main road. I
could see that tan Honda, and it looked to me as if the motor was still
running. I stepped back out of the light and watched.
The dome light in Twink's car came
on when she opened the door and got out. She wasn't wearing that raincoat, but
it looked as if she had it slung over her arm.
I'd brought my binoculars with me,
and I scoped her out. I almost choked when I got her in focus. She was wearing
a very short skirt and a blouse that didn't leave much to the imagination. The
term "bait" pretty much covers what she had on. She was definitely displaying
the merchandise.
She crossed the street and
sauntered along the sidewalk in front of Fergusson's apartment house. She
didn't even look like the Twinkie I knew. After she'd graduated from Fallon's
bughouse, she'd seemed in many ways to be gender neutral. She'd always worn
nice clothes and makeup, but there'd never been any element of sexual
provocation in her behavior. I guess I'd assumed that
I
raised my binoculars up to look at Fergusson's front window. The light in the
front room of his apartment wasn't on, but I could see the outline of somebody
standing there. I'd say that Twinkie was definitely getting Fergusson’s
attention.
She
strolled on down to the end of the block. She was getting pretty close to me,
so I stepped back behind a tree to avoid a "fancy meeting you here"
exchange. I waited a couple of minutes, then poked my head back out. Twink had
turned around and was going back up the block, walking slow and sensual.
The
figure in Fergusson's window was gone.
Twinkie sauntered across the street
again and stood on the sidewalk. Even with my binoculars I couldn't see her
very clearly. The fog was rolling in off the surface of
Then
I caught a flicker of movement on my side of the street. I swung the binoculars
around and saw a dark, almost shadowy figure moving along the side of the
apartment house. I was fairly certain that it was Fergusson, and he wasn't
moving very fast. He obviously didn't want to attract attention.
Twink
turned and strolled into the foggy park. She didn't seem to be in any hurry.
Then that goddam fog swirled in and
blotted out everything. I couldn't see more than ten feet away. Well, if I
couldn't see them, they couldn't see
me, so I crossed the street. I was the third player in this little game, and my
advantage lay in the fact that the other two didn't even know I was there.
I wasn't sure what I was going to
do if I suddenly encountered one-or both-of them in that fog.
City fog isn't much like the fog
you'll run into out in the country. It glows because of all the streetlights
and automobile headlights, where country fog is pale but dark at the same time.
Trees and bushes-and other things-seem to leap out at you in city fog.
It occurred to me that I was taking
some dangerous chances. Fergusson was out there in the fog, and he had some
evil intentions. Twinkie was also out
there, and maybe her intentions were even worse. If Twink happened to mistake
me for Fergusson, I could wind up being Joan the Ripper's next victim. The
concept of actually being afraid of one of the Twinkie Twins had never even
entered my mind. But if Twink was carrying a syringe loaded with curare and she
jumped me, I wouldn't have time enough to identify myself. Even if I could,
there was a distinct possibility that if Twink was going through an episode of
fugue, she wouldn't even recognize my name.
I
started being very cautious along about then.
Suddenly a bright light came
lancing in amongst the trees. Somebody in the street was obviously probing
around with a spotlight. It wasn't hard to figure out who was so curious: the Seattle Police Department had been very
interested in parks for quite some time now.
The playing field was getting a
little crowded. My only advantage was that I knew who all the other players
were.
The spotlight moved on, slowly
sweeping back and forth through the fog, and I stepped out from behind the
bushes where I'd taken cover. Then, from down near the lakeshore, I heard a
peculiar sound that made my blood run cold-the undulating sound of a woman's
voice singing wordlessly in a minor key. There was no specific melody involved,
but I recognized it immediately. God knows that I'd heard it often enough. The
sound coming out of the fog was an almost perfect duplication of the woman's
voice on that unlabeled audiotape that Twinkie could listen to by the hour. And
from off in the distance, another sound joined with the woman's voice in an
eerie counterpoint. My skin crawled as I realized that the wolves in the
Woodland Park Zoo were howling a response to the soulless song of the woman in
the fog near the lakeshore.
Then
the spotlight returned, probing through the fog as
that police car came back down
My
head sort of shut down at that point. Cops usually work in pairs, and it
wouldn't be too long before two cops-with guns-would be searching the foggy
darkness by the shore for the source of that strange sound Renata was making.
If they found her while she was cutting Fergusson to pieces, they'd probably
shoot first and ask questions later. I absolutely had to get to Renata before they did. I wasn't exactly sure what
I'd do when I caught up with her, but I could worry about that later. Right
now, I had to get her out of the line
of fire.
I
didn't exactly run as I moved through the fog, but I was going pretty fast.
Then
the spotlight made another sweep, and I dove for cover. If those cops happened
to get trigger-happy, I could end up being their first target. Renata was still
singing somewhere out there in the fog, and the Wood-land Park wolves were
still singing along, so I was fairly sure she hadn't finished with Fergusson
yet.
The
spotlight from
I
came up running. My original plan had been to cut Renata off before she could
nail Fergusson with her curare, but that'd gone out the window once she'd
disappeared in the fog. The way things stood now, about all I could hope for
was to get her away before those cops caught her in the act. The singing rose
in a crescendo, and then it faded-almost regretfully, it seemed. The wolves
kept singing, though.
Then I heard a faint splash out in
the lake. Renata was going for a swim after she'd finished butchering her
latest victim. At least she wouldn't be standing over Fergusson's bloody corpse
when the cops arrived.
I glanced back over my shoulder.
Sure enough, I could see a couple of flashlights moving around in the fog back
near
Off in the distance, I could hear
sirens wailing, coming this way. Those first two cops had obviously radioed for
backup. Ironically, they'd probably made the call to Mary.
I was still quite a ways ahead of
them, though. If I got lucky, I might be able to catch Renata when she came out
of the water, and get her away from the murder scene before the cops nabbed
her. If I could just get her back to my car, I'd be able to take her to Mary's
place. Then I'd be the one who'd root around in Mary's medicine cabinet looking
for sleeping pills. If I could pull that
off, I could have Twink back in Fallon's bughouse before daylight.
The
only problem was that I could see several blinking red lights back out on the
street. The backup cars were arriving, and it wouldn't be long before that
narrow strip of trees and grass was crawling with cops. Several other
flashlights joined the first pair and they began to fan out.
I reached the
Then
I heard a faint splash. That answered the question: Renata was swimming. I
looked back again and saw why. There were flashlights all over the place back
near
I kept moving along the edge of the
water, following the occasional splashes. I couldn't see anything, but I could hear
enough to stay with her. Then I saw that black plastic raincoat on the
grass at the edge of the water. A few yards back from the raincoat, there was
something huddled motionless near a tree trunk. I was
fairly sure that it was Fergusson's body. I wasn't thinking very clearly at
that point, and it occurred to me that if I dragged Fergusson away from the
shore and shoved him under some bushes, the cops wouldn't find him immediately.
That might give Renata time enough to get clear. I'd have to hurry, though.
Those flashlights were getting closer.
I'd
just reached that huddled figure when one of the spotlights on a police car
came probing through the fog. I dropped to the ground near the body to stay out
of sight.
When
I raised my head, I found myself looking directly at Fergusson's face. That
spotlight was setting the fog aglow, so I could see a lot more than I really
wanted to see. The look of stark terror on the dead man's face will probably
stay etched on my memory for the rest of my life. He'd obviously recognized the
face of a girl he'd murdered almost three years ago.
I
retched and scrambled back, almost like a crab trying to escape. Then I rolled
over and came up running in a low crouch until I got to the water's edge.
Things
were starting to get a little intense. I had to stay ahead of the cops, but
Renata wasn't swimming very fast. She probably wasn't even thinking at this
point. All she seemed to be doing was trying to stay ahead of the flashlights.
I was trying to do the same thing, but it was a little more complicated for me,
because I was trying to keep track of her as well.
Then
I heard a shout from somewhere behind me. I looked back and saw all the
flashlights converging on the place I'd just left. One of the cops had
obviously found Fergusson-or what was left of him. That might give me a little more time. I'd known from the beginning what
was probably going to happen. The cops had just been investigating some strange
sounds. The discovery of Fergusson's body would distract them. It'd take them a
little while to realize that they were almost right on top of Joan the Ripper.
The first two cops had heard Renata singing, but they hadn't realized exactly
what that meant.
The splashing sounds out in the
lake were growing fainter. Renata seemed to be swimming out farther away from
shore. Things weren't going too well. She could drown out there. I was sure
she'd been pretty well hyped-up while she was cutting Fergusson to pieces, and
the water was probably colder than hell. Once that all caught up with her, she
might stop swimming and sink.
The
lakeshore began to curve off toward the left, and the lights from the street
began to recede into the fog. The howling of the wolves in the zoo seemed
closer now, and it suddenly dawned on me that I'd left the strip-park between
Green Lake Way and the water, and moved into Woodland Park itself.
I
looked back again. The flashlights were still clustered together in the same
place. That gave me a little breathing room.
I
hadn't heard any splashing out in the fog for quite some time, and that didn't
make me feel very good.
Then
I saw something that seemed to explain it. As luck had it, there was a narrow
sand beach at the edge of the lake, and a line of footprints came out of the
water and ran up into the grass of
It
had to be Renata. You won't find too many people swimming around in
That freezing fog that I'd been
cursing all week suddenly seemed like a gift from God. Where it had settled on
the grass, it'd frozen, laying a pale white veil on that well-manicured lawn.
And running across that frosty grass was the track Renata had left when she'd
emerged from the lake.
Tracking
her was easy now, but it'd be just as easy for the cops-assuming that they
didn't all stay bunched up around the body. I hurried after her, cutting back
and forth across the trail she had laid down in the frozen grass, zigzagging to
lay down false trails leading off in several different directions. I hoped that
would slow them down, in the event that one of them was sharp enough to realize
that Fergusson's murderer was probably still in the general vicinity. If they
started to fan out for a general search, they'd end up obliterating even more
tracks by accident than I was trying to do on purpose.
I
was positive that Renata was going to have to find shelter, and soon. It was
freezing, and she was soaking wet after her swim. Plus, she hadn't been wearing
very much to begin with. If she didn't find someplace in out of the weather
fairly soon, hypothermia would set in, and that was only about one step away
from pneumonia.
The
trail she'd laid down through the park ran due south. I quit zigzagging and
started to run. I had to get her in sight before she reached
Then
I saw her. Thank God she'd been forced to leave that black rain-coat behind.
She was hiding behind a large tree right at the edge of the park, obviously
waiting for a break in the traffic on
I
hunkered down behind a large bush and watched her tensely. The fog pretty much
obscured the neighborhood on the other side of the street at the edge of the
park, but a sudden eddy pushed the fog aside, and I saw a familiar structure
rising out of the surrounding rooftops-the spire of St. Benedict's Church on
I'd
assumed that Renata had been trying to get back to that alley where she'd
stashed her bike, and cycle from there back to Mary's place. Then she'd wait a
day or so and take a bus to the neighborhood where her car was parked so she
could drive it somewhere closer to home.
The
proximity of St. Benedict's, though, raised an entirely different possibility.
If her head was really turned off, wasn't it possible that the term
"sanctuary" had something to do with that beeline she'd laid down in
the grass? Had she been running to reach the church from the moment she'd come
out of the lake?
More
to the point, though, did the concept of sanctuary still have any legal
validity? Could Father O just slam the church door shut and tell the cops to
buzz off? I didn't think he could,
but a lot of strange things from the Middle Ages are still kicking around in
the legal system.
I tensed up when Renata stepped out
from behind that tree and hurried across
"What the hell?" I
muttered. Then I crossed the street as well. By the time I got to the other
side, Renata was a half block down
I hurried along and reached that
corner in about two minutes. I didn't want to lose her now. She was still in
plain sight, walking directly toward the church.
It was only two blocks, and it
didn't take her long to get there. She started up the front stairs to the
church door, and I gave a vast sigh of relief. Wonder of wonders, I'd guessed
right for a change.
Father O had left the church door
unlocked, as he'd told me he always did, and Renata opened it and went inside.
Now what the hell was I going to
do? I definitely didn't want to go barging into that church right behind her.
Then the church door opened, and
Father O'Donnell stuck his head out. "Hello?" he called, sounding
baffled. I guess the motion sensor in the vestibule had told him that he had a
visitor, but evidently he hadn't spotted Renata.
"It's me, Father
O'Donnell," I called to him. "Mark? Is that you?"
"Right," I replied.
"Renata just went inside your church.”
“I didn't see anybody."
I went up the steps and joined him.
"We've got big trouble, Father," I told him.
"Come
inside," he told me.
"Let's hold off a minute. I'd
better fill you in. Renata definitely went in-side, but she's having one of her
episodes. I've been following her for the last couple of hours, and we don't
want to get too close to her right now. She's dangerous."
"Renata? Be serious, Mark."
"I am, Father O'Donnell-dead
serious. I hate to say this, but Renata's the serial killer who's been
butchering guys all over the
"Renata?" His voice sounded
incredulous.
"I choked on it myself, but
she just took out another one. The cops are probably right behind me, so I'd
better keep this short. Renata might seem
to be recovering, but every so often, she goes psychotic. I don't think she
realizes what's happening, but when she flips out, she goes hunting, like some
avenging angel. I can't prove it, but I
think the guy she just took out was the one she's been after since last
September-the guy who murdered her sister."
"Good
for her!"
"Father O'Donnell," I
said in a pained voice, "she doesn't need a rooting section. We've got to get her off the streets. If her
load shifts just a little bit more, she'll start killing anything wearing
pants-you, me, the postman-anybody!"
"Maybe
I was being a little . . ." He
left it hanging. "What do you think we ought to do?"
"The best thing would probably
be to take her back to Doc Fallon's bughouse. He might have to keep her doped
up, but she'll be safe. If the cops get her, they won't know what's going on,
and she'll probably spend the rest of her life screaming. I'm not about to let that happen."
"Amen,"
he agreed. "Let's go back inside and see if we can find her.”
“Right-but
be careful. As far as I know, she's still got that knife. Maybe you'd better
lock this door behind us. We don't want her slipping out again. The cops are
wound up pretty tight, and they might start shooting if they happen to come
across her."
"Good
idea," he agreed.
We
went into the vestibule, and Father O locked the heavy door behind us.
"Let's go down to the altar," he whispered. "Maybe if we try
talking to her, we can persuade her to come out."
"It's
worth a try, I suppose," I agreed. "Wrestling her to the ground
wouldn't be a very good idea."
The
two of us went quietly through the dimly lighted church. I think we were both
pretty well spooked. I know I was.
"Maybe
you should try to talk to her," Father O suggested.
I was about to agree, when I heard
a lisping sound coining from one of the alcoves off to my right. "Hold
it," I whispered to Father O. "She's right over there."
We both listened intently-not that
it did us any good. I recognized the sibilant hissing of the twins' private
language. If Renata was talking to her-self in twin-speak, she was obviously
completely out of it.
I cautiously moved a little closer,
trying to spot her in that shadowy al-cove where the statue of Saint Benedict
stood with one hand raised in blessing.
Then the headlights from a passing
car briefly flickered through the stained-glass windows on the other side of
the church.
I almost lost it right there. In
that momentary flicker I could swear that I saw two figures in that alcove.
Father O'Donnell drew in a sharp
breath. "Holy Mother of God!" he choked.
We moved slowly closer to the
alcove, and I could see the two figures more clearly now. They were identical
in every detail, except that one figure had wet hair and the other didn't. I
don't think they realized that Father O'Donnell and I were there; they probably
didn't even realize where they were. They were speaking urgently to each other,
the lisping words tumbling out in half whispers. One voice seemed anguished,
but the other was triumphant.
Then
the anguished figure began to weep, and the other one embraced her as if to
comfort her.
And then, even as Father O'Donnell
and I stood staring in stunned disbelief, they merged, and what had been two
became one, and the sibilance of twin-speak died to be
replaced by the song I'd heard earlier on that particular night.
The
lights from another car flickered inside the church, washing the walls with
color from the stained-glass windows, and Father O'Donnell and I could clearly
see Renata for a moment. She'd sunk down onto the floor in that alcove with
vacant eyes and an untroubled face, and she was singing softly to herself under
the watchful eyes of the statue of Saint Benedict.
FOURTH
MOVEMENT
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Father O'Donnell and I stood
staring at Renata in stunned and speech-less disbelief.
"I'd
better get a blanket to wrap her in," the father said quietly after
several minutes. "She's soaking wet, and she just came in out of the
cold." That brought me to my senses. "What do you think, Father
O?" I asked him. "Should we call an ambulance and get her to a
hospital?"
"It
might be best, Mark," he said seriously. "She's suffering from
exposure, and it's dreadful cold out there
tonight."
"Tell
me about it."
"How
did she get all wet like that?"
"She dunked herself in
"I'll
get that blanket, and then I'll call an ambulance." He hurried back toward
the rectory.
The
ambulance arrived about ten minutes later from the University of Washington Medical Center, the closest hospital to St.
Benedict's. The ambulance guys said I could ride along. Somebody was going to
have to fill out all the paperwork, and my car was still over on
"I'll keep you posted,
Father," I promised as I followed the stretcher out to the ambulance.
Father O watched us go from the doorway of the church, his expression grave.
The driver hit the flashing lights
and the siren, even though there wasn't very much traffic,
and it didn't take long to reach the medical center down on campus. Renata was
shaking violently now, and moaning that song she'd picked up from her favorite
tape. I held her hand, but I don't think she was even aware of it.
After we got her inside the
emergency room I was short-stopped by the lady who needed certain information
to fill out a whole stack of papers. I tried to cooperate, but I wasn't in the
mood to answer a lot of questions. I finally cut across them. "She's got
some serious mental problems," I said by way of explanation. "She
seemed to think it was a nice night for a swim."
"In
February?" the lady said
incredulously.
"Like I said, she's disturbed.
Her dad's stinking rich, so don't worry about who's going to pay the
bills."
"Could
you give me his name, address, and phone number."
"I'll go you one better. Hand
me your phone and I'll call him. He can give you all the details himself "
Les
sounded groggy when he answered the phone-it was after two in the morning.
"Renata's flipped out again, boss," I told him. "She fell in the
lake in
I didn't get too many specific
answers, so I sat in the waiting room for about half an hour until the doctor
came out. He was fairly young-probably a second-year intern-but he seemed to
know what he was doing.
"We're
treating Miss Greenleaf for hypothermia, Mr. Austin," he told me. "We
have to be careful, because if we rush things, the patient can go into
shock."
"We
wouldn't want to add that to her other problems," I agreed.
He hesitated for a few seconds, then he came right out with it. "Since it's come up
anyway, is Miss Greenleaf suffering from some sort of mental condition? She's
moaning and babbling incoherently."
"She's a psycho, Doc," I
told him bluntly. "She graduated from an asylum last year, but she still
flips out every so often. We all thought she was on the road to recovery, but
it looks like we were wrong. Patch her up as best you can, and I'll take her
home to that private sanitarium."
"It's
that bad?" He looked startled.
"That only begins to describe how bad it is, Doc.
Watch yourself when you're close to her. She could be dangerous."
"Maybe we should move her to
the psychiatric ward after she gets out of intensive care," he suggested.
"I
didn't realize that there was a
psycho ward here," I said.
"We are a large hospital, Mr. Austin, not just a clinic to patch up
students who get drunk and fall downstairs. We're a teaching hospital, and med
students need to be exposed to just about every medical condition that comes
down the pike."
"I should have realized
that," I admitted. "One of my housemates is a medical student. She
doesn't talk much about what goes on in med school, though-probably because
we've asked her not to. A clinical description of an autopsy doesn't go down
very well at the supper table."
"You're
a student, then?"
I
nodded. "English. We dissect poems, though, not
people."
He smiled faintly. "I'll
caution the staff about Miss Greenleaf," he assured me.
I
called Father O to give him an update-such as it was-and he suggested that I
try getting in touch with Mary. I rooted around in my wallet until I found the
slip of paper with the cop-shop phone number she'd given me. It took me a while
to get connected to her, but I kept waving "family emergency" around
until whoever was on the other end of the line gave up and patched me through
to her.
"You're
not supposed to call me at work, Mark," she scolded.
"We've got a serious problem,
Mary. Twinkie flipped out again. She was wandering around up near
"Did
you get in touch with Les?"
"Yeah, I called him as soon as
we got her here.”
“How did you find out about
it?"
Oops-I realized I'd have to be
careful here. There was a distinct possibility that this call was being
monitored-and recorded. "She homed in on St. Benedict's Church, and Father
O gave me a quick call," I replied. I didn't want to get too much more
specific.
"I'll
come by as soon as I get off work," she promised.
I hung up the phone and went back
to the waiting room. I hadn't really blown anything so far. If I played this
right, I might still be able to keep Twink in the clear. OK, Fergusson was
dead, and it'd been Twink who'd taken him out. Big deal.
The way I saw it, my job was to get Twink safely back to Doc Fallon before the cops caught up with her. It'd
take some fancy footwork and a fair amount of just plain lying, but if I could
keep things low-key, the cops might not make the connection, and I could still
get her out of town. When she'd given me the slip and hacked Fergusson to
pieces, I'd thought that everything had gone out the window, but now I began to
hope that I still might be able to pull this off.
I dozed off in the waiting room
until about seven. Then I called the boardinghouse.
"Yes?"
It was Erika.
"It's me, babe-Mark. I'm at
the emergency room at the
“Hypothermia?"
"That's what they tell me. As
soon as I'm sure that she's going to be OK, I'll come on home."
"You
don't sound very good, Mark."
"I'm running on short sleep,
Erika. It's all I can do to keep my eyes open right now. I could definitely use
a cup or six of your coffee."
"Try the hospital cafeteria.
The coffee's sort of rancid, but it's got a pretty good kick to it."
"I'll give it a shot. Pass the
word, OK?”
“Got it covered."
I hung up the phone and went down
the hall to the men's room. I was washing my hands, and then I suddenly froze,
staring at my reflection in the mirror. There was a blood smear on the front of
my jacket. I'd obviously flopped down a little too close to Fergusson's body
back there in the park, and I'd been parading around in public flaunting
something I really didn't want anybody to see. I tried to wash it off, but I
don't think I got all of it. I finally gave up, and I carried my coat back to
the waiting room in-stead of wearing it.
I should have guessed that the
girls at the boardinghouse wouldn't just let it lie, but I was a little foggy
upstairs by then. It only took Erika and Sylvia about three-quarters of an hour
to join me at the hospital. "You two stay here," Erika told Sylvia
and me. "I'm going to find out what's really
going on."
"You look awful, Mark,"
Sylvia said. "You should see it from in here.”
“What really happened last
night?"
"Damned If I know. Renata
showed up at St. Benedict's dripping water and sprouting icicles. She was
babbling in twin-speak and shivering hard enough to start an earthquake. Father
O got hold of me, and then he called an ambulance."
"I thought you were out on the
town last night. How did he know how to get in touch?"
Don't try to tell lies when you're
groggy. You'll mess up every time. "I was just coming in," I
replied-a little too quickly. "I heard the phone ringing, and it was
Father O. The call was for me, so I didn't wake anybody."
Sylvia gave me a skeptical look. I
don't think anybody would have bought
that one.
Then Erika came back, and she
looked very concerned. "Renata
was apparently coming down with a cold," she told us. "This
hypothermia seems to have kicked it across the line. She's running a high
fever, and my best guess is full-bore pneumonia."
"Oh, dear!" Sylvia exclaimed. "Is
it serious?"
"It's no joke, that's for
certain," Erika told her, "but if you ever decide to come down with
pneumonia, do it in a hospital. The staff here is right on top of it. I'll stay
and keep an eye on things. Sitting around wringing your hands won't accomplish
very much, so you two might as well get out of here. Take Mark back home and
put him to bed, Sylvia. He looks like he's just about ready to fall
apart."
Sylvia drove me back to the
boardinghouse, and I went upstairs to the boys' bathroom. I scrubbed down the
front of that jacket and carefully checked the rest of my clothes for any other
bloodstains. I didn't see any, but I decided not to take any chances. I went to
my room and stuffed all the clothes I'd been wearing into a large plastic bag.
I could take a quick trip to a laundromat after things quieted down. Right now
I was too groggy to think clearly, so I crashed. I doubt I've ever been that
tired in my whole life.
I'd been almost sure that I'd sleep
the clock around, but I woke up at one that afternoon. I was still pretty
tired, but I was too worried about Renata to fall asleep again. I got up, put
on clean clothes, and grabbed a different jacket.
Charlie's
door was open, so I fed him the same story I'd dropped on Sylvia. I must have
been getting better at it, because he didn't look nearly as skeptical as Sylvia had. "Can you run me back to the
hospital?" I asked him. "My car's still where I left it when I rode
down to the hospital in the ambulance."
"Sure,"
he agreed. "No problem."
Mary was in the waiting room when
we got there. "I called Les," she told us. "I thought he ought
to know that Ren's got pneumonia. He and Inga should be here before long."
"Is
she getting any better?" I asked.
"They've got her in intensive
care, Mark. Does that answer your question?"
It was about three-thirty when Bob
West showed up. He glanced around the waiting room to make sure there weren't
any strangers there. "What the hell's going on, Mark?" he demanded in
a quiet voice that seemed pretty strained. "The hospital staff put in a
call. They inventoried that purse the Greenleaf girl had strapped around her
waist, and there was a hypodermic needle in the damn thing. They did a routine
check for heroin or cocaine, but they found traces of curare instead, for
Christ's sake!"
That's when I realized that I'd
blown it. I'd been so stunned by what'd happened in the church that I'd
forgotten that plastic purse. My scheme to keep my mouth shut and hustle Twink
back out to Fallon's sanitarium without letting anybody know what'd really happened fell apart at that
point.
"Curare?" Mary exclaimed.
"That's impossible!"
"They tested it three times,
Mary" Bob told her. "We'd put out an alert that anybody in any
health-care facility who came across curare was sup-posed to call us
immediately because of the connection of curare with the Slasher murders. What
the hell was that girl doing with a hypo filled with curare?"
"What else was in the
purse?" I asked him, hoping against hope that Twink had thrown her
linoleum knife away.
"Lots
of real interesting stuff, Mark," he replied sarcastically. "There
were a couple of strings of rosary beads-one red and one blue. There was a
driver's license that belonged to a girl named
I knew that he'd stay right on top
of me until I gave him what he wanted, but there was something I needed to know
first. "How crazy does somebody have to be to pull off the insanity
defense?" I asked him.
"Pretty
far gone-particularly in a case that's gotten as much publicity as this one
has. With that curare and the knife, the prosecutor's going to
have an open-and-shut case. He'll fight an insanity plea all the way to the
wall.
"What
the hell is this all about?" Charlie demanded.
"Grow up, kid," Bob told
him. "That Greenleaf girl is Joan the Ripper."
"But she's just a baby!"
Charlie protested.
The waiting room door swung open,
and a couple of worried-looking strangers came in. "We'd better find
someplace a little more private," I suggested. "We've got a touchy
situation here."
"Sit
tight," Bob agreed. "I'll be right back."
I'm not sure what strings he
pulled, but he came back after a few minutes with a hospital orderly who led us
over into the main hospital and an empty office.
"All right, Mark," Bob
said after the orderly had left, "let's have it. What happened last
night?"
"Let's go back a little ways
first. Mary can back up most of what I'm going to tell you, so I'm not just
scraping this off the wall. Renata Greenleaf had a twin sister-Regina-up until
the spring of '95. They were about to graduate from high school up in
"What's that got to do with
it?" Bob demanded. "Get to the point, Mark."
"This is the point, Bob,"
I told him. "This is what these Seattle Slasher murders are all
about." And then I told him everything-everything except what I'd seen in
the church last night. I wasn't ready to tell anybody about that.
"Why didn't you come to me
with this, Mark?" Bob demanded. "Because I was hoping that I was wrong. If I was camped right outside her front
door when some other guy got cut to pieces, but she'd stayed home, that'd prove
that she wasn't the Slasher." I
sighed. "That's not the way it turned out though. I guess she finally
worked up enough nerve to ask Mary to run down the name of the guy who owned
that pickup truck. I'm sure she realized that Mary would make the connection
just as soon as Fergusson turned up dead. That's probably why she held off on
asking Mary for the information, until it reached the point that killing
Fergusson was more important than getting away with it."
"You
tell good stories, kid," Mary said dryly.
"That's for sure,"
Charlie said. "I'd say that the next thing on the agenda is coming up with
some way to get Twink off the hook. Does anybody have a problem with
that?"
"It's gonna take some fancy
footwork, kid," Bob told him. "If Fergusson had been the only guy
she'd taken out, a jury might go for ‘justifiable
homicide' or ‘diminished mental capacity.' But there are all those other
carcasses littering various parks around here. This is a high-profile case, so
the media will go into a feeding frenzy. That means that the DA's going to have
to play hardball if he wants to get reelected. If things were a little more
low-key, ‘insanity' might slip by, but this one's gonna be front-page all the
way."
"You
almost sound like you're on our side, Bob," Mary said.
"If
Mark's right about what's been happening around here since last September, just
about anybody with a shred of decency's going to be on the Greenleaf girl's
side. That's off the record, of course. Mary, do you think your brother can
afford a top-notch lawyer?"
"You
bet your bippie he can, Bob," she replied with a broad smile.
I'd deliberately avoided any
mention of the apparition-vision? miracle?-that Father
O and I had seen in the church before we'd called the ambulance. Now that the
hypo with traces of curare and the linoleum knife with Fergusson's blood all
over it had come out into the open, things were obviously headed for serious
legal proceedings, and whether I liked it or not, I'd probably be the star
witness for the defense. If I got up on the witness stand and started telling
ghost stories, things would start to fall apart-real fast.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
I overslept the next morning,
probably because things were unnaturally quiet around the second floor of the
Erdlund house. James and Charlie must have been tiptoeing around, whispering to
each other to avoid rousing me. Tired or not, though, I could only sleep for so
long at a stretch. We get programmed after a while, and most students hit the
deck fairly early. So it was nine or so when I finally woke up, showered,
shaved, and brushed my teeth. I gave some serious consideration to hiding in my
room until the gang had all left. I wasn't ready for another
question-and-answer session.
I really needed some coffee,
though, so I went downstairs. I could hear Charlie in the kitchen when I
reached the foot of the stairs, filling the others in on the story I'd told his
brother just a few hours before. "If Mark hadn't been so rattled, he'd probably
have remembered to get that belt-on purse away from Twinkie. That's what blew
the whole thing."
I
went into the kitchen at that point.
"We
didn't wake you, Mark, did we?" James said. "We were trying to be
quiet."
"It's Erika's fault," I
said with a faint smile. "The smell of her coffee would wake the
dead."
"I'll fix you a cup,
Mark," Erika told me. "I know how to pour coffee, Erika."
"Shush!" she told me. She
pointed at my usual place at the breakfast table. "There," she
commanded. "Sit. Stay."
"Woof-woof,"
I replied and sat down.
"What are we going to do about
this, Mark?" Sylvia asked in a worried tone.
"I don't know, babe," I
answered truthfully. "I think we'll just play it by ear. The next move is
up to Bob West."
"I'll
talk with Mr. Rankin," Trish told me. "If any lawyer in
"I'll
pass that on to Renata's dad, Trish," I promised.
It was about
"No,
I'm free. What's up?"
"I need to pick up the
Greenleaf girl's car. You know where it's parked and what it looks like, so I
thought maybe you could come along."
"No problem, Bob. I need to
pick up my own car anyway-it's still parked over
there. You can save me a bus ride."
"We're big on public
service," he said. "I'll come by in about a half hour."
"I'll be here." This was
peculiar: Theoretically, Bob and I were sup-posed to be on opposite sides of
the Twinkie fence. But over the past several months we'd gotten to know each
other fairly well, and now I found myself hoping that buddyship would step over
the fences between us.
I
went back upstairs to grab my jacket.
"What's
up?" Charlie asked me when I passed his open door.
"Bob wants me to show him
where Renata's car's parked," I replied. "My car's there, too, so
I'll be able to pick it up."
"I'll come along," he
said. "I've got an equation that's fighting me, and maybe some fresh air
would help clear my head."
"And there's that crime scene,
too, huh?”
“I'm big on scenery, Mark," he
said, grinning.
Bob picked us up a little later. It
was misty-moisty out, but at least it'd warmed up a little, so the windshield
wasn't icing over.
"What I can't figure out is
how the Greenleaf girl was able to buy a car without anybody knowing that she'd
done it," Bob said while we were waiting for a traffic light to change.
"Her dad's got lots of bucks,
Bob," I told him. "She had a fairly beefy checkbook." Then I
remembered something. "Oh, hell," I said. "I must still be a
little foggy in the head. Just before Christmas I stopped by Mary's place, and
Renata was having a wrestling match with her checkbook. She couldn't get it to
balance, and it was off by about six hundred bucks! That Honda she had parked
on a side street was a junker-six hundred would probably have been the sticker
price. This is just a guess, but evidently her other personality cropped up now
and then during the daytime-at least long enough on one occasion to go out and
buy that car. Renata obviously didn't know about it, so the alternate identity
was keeping it a secret from her."
"I don't entirely buy this ‘other
personality' business, Mark," Bob said then. "It sounds like a put-up
story to get this girl off the hook."
"Her headshrinker thinks it's
valid, Bob," I told him. "I didn't really understand it myself right
at first. Abnormal Sylvia says the scientific term is ‘fugue,' which suggests
something composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, if you ask me. In music, it
involves counterpoint-two or more parts played at the same time. That's
probably why psychiatrists used the term. Renata doesn't know what the other
side of her is doing-buying cars, sneaking out at night to burglarize
drugstores, cutting assorted guys all to pieces after midnight-the fun part of
life." Bob gave me a stern look. "Sorry. But this split-personality
stuff does happen, though, and it's
not some put-up job. Doc Fallon might not agree with me, but I've got a gut
feel that the alternate Renata is her twin sister-Regina-and
"This
fugue thing's a one-way street, then?" Bob suggested. "The night-time
girl knows everything the daytime girl knows, but the daytime girl doesn't know
the other girl even exists."
"She gets hints once in a
while," I told him, "and those hints are what trigger her crazy
days."
"It's fairly obvious that
Fergusson was number one on her hate parade," Bob said. "She did an
extra special job on that poor
bastard-the coroner looked sick after he finished the autopsy. Fergusson
definitely went out the hard way." He looked sort of apologetically at me.
"I have to take her into custody, Mark," he said. "I'm not going
to yank her out of the hospital or anything, but if I don't do something official before Burpee gets
wind of it, he'll dash on over to the hospital, slap the cuffs on her, and drag
her off to jail. If she's in my custody,
I can lay down the rules. I'll keep her in that hospital for as long as I can.
We might have to wing it, but I think I can keep her out of the slammer."
"Thanks, Bob. That's all that really matters."
Bob
parked near Fergusson's apartment house, and the keys he'd found in Renata's
purse unlocked the tan Honda. My theory about Renata's alternate personality
was pretty much confirmed by the registration slip, which listed the owner of
the car as Regina Greenleaf.
Bob called for a tow truck to haul
the car away, and I went around the corner and got my car. Then Charlie and I
went home.
There was one of those yellow
Post-it notes stuck to the door of my room when I went upstairs. "Father O
wants you to call him," it said. I heaved a tired sigh and went back
downstairs to use the phone in the living room.
"It's
me, Father O'Donnell-Mark," I told him when he answered the phone.
"What's up?"
"I think you'd better come by,
Mark," he said. "Something's come up that we need to talk about in
strict privacy."
"I'll be right over," I
promised him. Lucky I had my wheels again, I mused.
There was actually a brief spell of
sunshine as I drove to the church. It didn't last long, but it was nice to know
that the sun was still out there. I was starting to get a real bellyful of fog.
Father O was puttering around near
the altar when I reached the church. His face had a bleak, apologetic look.
"Come on back to the office, Mark," he suggested. "This is
something we don't want anybody to
overhear."
"You're making me nervous,
Father," I said, following him through the small door off to the side of
the altar and down the hall to his office.
He led the way inside, then firmly closed the door behind him. "How's Renata
doing?" he asked, after we'd sat down.
I brought him up to speed-the
pneumonia, the plastic purse, and the police. "What it all boils down to
is that the cops have an open-and-shut case against Renata. She's definitely
the Seattle Slasher. Our only hope now is the insanity defense. Father, I'm not
sure if what you and I saw the other night-whatever that was-is going to play any part in that."
"You'd better not count on it,
Mark," he told me gravely. "I reported the incident to my bishop, and
there are some rules about things like that. You and I both know we saw
something extraordinary-but my bishop has forbidden me to talk about it."
"You
said what?"
"Church policy, Mark. We're not permitted to
discuss any supernatural incidents that occur in or near a church. In most
cases these apparitions are nothing more than cases of mass hysteria, and the
clergy isn't supposed to get involved in things like that. If you stop and think
about it, I'm sure you'll be able to see why."
"I guess it does make sense,
Father. But dammit, you and I both know
what we saw."
"I
wouldn't make an issue of it in court, Mark, because I won't be permitted to
confirm anything you say about it. Have you mentioned it to anybody?"
"Not
yet. I wasn't sure how to bring it up, to tell you the truth."
"Good. I'd keep it that way,
if I were you. Are the police going to arrest Renata?"
"I
don't think so, Father O'Donnell. She's completely out of it. They'll probably
put her in protective custody, but if we can float mental incompetence past a
judge, this won't ever go to trial. They'll just quietly lock her up in some
insane asylum and throw away the key. It's not a good solution, but it's
probably about the best we can hope for."
He got that shrewd, squinty-eyed
look that every Irishman comes up with now and then. "I think there might
be an alternative to that, Mark. Let me work on it a bit. I'll have to call in
a few favors, but there's nothing new or unusual about that, don't
y'know."
I
went home for supper, then back to the hospital. Les and Inga were in Renata's
room, and they both looked pretty haggard. I took Les off to one side.
"Why don't you let me take the night shift, boss?" I suggested.
"You and Inga ought to get some sleep."
"You
don't look too good yourself, Mark," he replied.
"It's been a couple of pretty
rough weeks, boss," I told him, "but I'm an expert at sleeping in
Renata's hospital rooms, remember?"
He glanced over at Inga.
"Maybe I should get her out of
here for a while," he conceded. "She's taking it hard."
"She's not alone, boss. Lots
of people are upset about it.”
“Will this never end?" he
demanded in a choked-up voice.
"All we can do now is hope,
boss," I said. What a silly thing that
was to say. I wanted to bite my tongue after that absurdity came rolling
out. "Mary's probably awake. Why don't you give her a call, then get Inga out of here until tomorrow?"
"I'll do that. Thanks, Mark.”
“It's no biggie, boss."
After Les and Inga had left, I
pulled a chair over to Renata's bedside, grabbed another one to prop my feet
on, and assumed a very familiar position. Renata had an IV plugged into her arm
and an oxygen mask covering the lower half of her face. I could still hear her
talking, though. The mask muffled the sound, but enough came through to let me
know that she wasn't speaking English.
I'm not sure exactly why I did it,
but I reached out and took her hand. She probably wouldn't even know I was
there, but it made me feel a little better.
About
"I
don't see much change," I told him.
"This is Officer Rauch,"
he introduced the burly policeman. "He'll take the day shift guarding the
door. We need to put together a list of people who'll be allowed into this
room. So far I've got you, her parents, and Mary. Who else should we
include?"
"Hell, Bob, I don't know-the
boardinghouse gang, I suppose-Sylvia and Erika certainly, and probably James
and Trish, too."
"What about Charlie?”
“Yeah, we might as well.”
“Write down their names for me, OK?
Anybody else?"
"I've got to talk with Les-her
dad. Trish thinks he should hire a partner in the law firm where she works. His
name's Rankin. From what she says, he's a heavy hitter."
Bob
nodded. "I've heard of him."
"And we'd better put her
psychiatrist on the list, too. His name's Wallace Fallon-oh, we'd probably
better include Father O'Donnell as well. He's her priest."
Bob
nodded. "Put him on the list."
The doctor had been checking the
progress report hanging from the foot of Renata's bed. "Excuse me,"
he said. "Is she still going on in that peculiar language, Mr.
Austin?"
"I
haven't heard her say anything in English yet."
"That might be the result of
her high fever," he said thoughtfully, "but if she doesn't switch
over into English pretty soon, I'd strongly suggest that she be transferred to
the psychiatric ward here. It's fairly obvious that she isn't ready to deal
with reality yet."
Bob put on a perfectly straight
face. "We can live with that," he replied. "What do you think,
Mark?"
"Sounds OK to me," I
agreed. This would put us one jump ahead of Burpee and all the reporters who
were drooling over the prospect of a lurid criminal trial. If the staff of the
medical center put Renata in the psychiatric ward, it'd add some weight to the
insanity defense and point this whole business in the direction we wanted it to
go.
Les came back to the hospital at
"That's Mary for you. She
likes to keep everybody nice and calm. Listen, boss, I'm supposed to bounce
something off you. One of the girls at the boardinghouse-Trish Erdlund-is in
law school here at the university and she works part-time in a downtown law
firm. One of the senior partners there is John Rankin, and from what she says,
I guess he's the real thing. We've got to get somebody sharp enough to float an
insanity defense past a judge. Renata's obviously totally out of it, but the
prosecuting attorney's likely to fight a sanity hearing tooth and nail. This is
one of those big-time cases that gets lots of attention, and the district
attorney's hoping for a splashy criminal case that'll get him reelected."
"Have
you met this Rankin, Mark?"
"Not personally, no, but I'll
take Trish's word for it. She's almost as smart as her sister is, and Erika's
so smart she scares me-but never mind that. What do
you think about talking to Rankin?"
He shrugged. "Whatever seems
best to you, Mark. My head isn't working too good right now."
"I'll get one of his business
cards from Trish and drop it by so that you can get in touch with him."
"Whatever you say."
That really surprised me. Les
Greenleaf wasn't the kind of guy who shrugged things off this way. This mess
was obviously hitting him very hard.
The TV set in the kitchen was going
full blast when I got back to the boardinghouse, and the gang was camped on it.
"How's
she doing, Mark?" James asked me.
"She still seems pretty much
out of it," I told him. "Her fever's down a
little, but she's still talking to herself in twin. Bob came by this morning
with a uniformed cop who's going to pull the day shift in the chair outside her
door. Her doctor wants to move her to the psychiatric ward once she recovers
from this bout of pneumonia. Bob pretty much went along with him on that one.
He won't come right out and admit it, but I'm fairly sure that Bob's on our
side. Oh, one other thing. I talked with Les Greenleaf, and he says he'll hire
Mr. Rankin as Renata's lawyer."
"That's a big win," Trish
said enthusiastically. "If any lawyer in
"So
will the district attorney square off against Mr. Rankin?" Sylvia asked.
Trish shook her head. "The
DA's too important for that. He'll hand it off to some second-stringer, and Mr.
Rankin will have him for lunch." Then Trish looked at me. "Is Renata
still speaking exclusively in twin?" she asked.
"That's
all I've heard from her so far," I replied.
Trish frowned. "Is she raving?
I mean screaming, or anything like that?"
I shook my head. "The twins
never spoke their private language in anything louder than a whisper," I
replied. "They didn't want anybody eavesdropping."
"Good," Trish said.
"She won't interrupt the proceedings then, and I'm almost positive that
Mr. Rankin will want her to be physically present. One look at her should be
all that it'll take to persuade the judge to rule in our favor."
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
There was obviously no way to keep
what'd happened out of the newspapers or off the evening news on every TV
channel in western
The almost universal yearning for
fifteen minutes of fame produced some bizarre stories, ranging all the way
from, "I think I saw her in the library once," to "I saw right
off that she was very strange."
The media bloodhounds tracked down
several of Renata's sorority-girl chums, and by Saturday of that week the
sidewalk in front of the boarding-house was teeming with reporters and
cameramen. Trish advised us that Mr. Rankin had more or less issued a prime
directive. Our only response was supposed to be "no comment."
I was spending a lot of time running
back and forth between the boardinghouse and the medical center. By Sunday, it
was clear that I wouldn't be able to write any decent seminar papers this
quarter. I didn't care too much for the notion, but my only way out would be to
take "incompletes" on my two seminars, and then try again after the
storm had passed.
Erika was spending more time at the
medical center than I was, but at least she had connections there. She reported
to the gang on Sunday evening that Renata was pretty much out of the woods on
the pneumonia front, and that she'd probably be
released from intensive care and transferred to the psychiatric ward by Tuesday
at the latest. Trish almost danced on the table when she heard that. "That
was the one thing that had me worried," she told us. "Once she's
installed in that psychiatric ward, we're home free. A sanity hearing will be
almost automatic at that point."
"She's such an
enthusiast," Erika murmured. "The least little thing sets her
off."
"Don't pick on me,
Erika," Trish told her sister. "How are you doing with Dr.
Yamada?"
Erika shrugged. "He bought
into it, and he'll keep his mouth shut until he's on the witness stand."
"What
are you girls up to now?" James demanded.
"Oh, nothing much," Erika
replied with a look of exaggerated innocence. "Dr. Yamada's a forensic
pathologist in the coroner's office, and he moonlights teaching pathology in
the med school. I've taken a couple of his courses, so I know him fairly well.
I made a suggestion, and he agreed to follow up on it."
"What
kind of suggestion?" Charlie demanded.
"It's sort of technical,
Charlie," Erika replied. "Let's not get into all the gory details,
OK?"
"I
hate it when she does that," Charlie grumbled.
"Aw," Erika said,
"poor baby."
On
Monday, the fifteenth of February, I went to Padelford Hall and hit Dr.
Conrad's office before he met with his seminar. He'd heard the news, of course,
and he agreed to speak with my professors for me. "It's not un-common, Mr.
Austin," he assured me. "We're fairly flexible in graduate school. An
‘incomplete' doesn't show up on your permanent record. All it means is that
you're on hold until the crisis passes." Then he hesitated slightly.
"How's she doing?" he asked me.
"Not good, Doc," I
replied. "She's pretty much shaken off the pneumonia, but her mind's gone
bye-bye, I'm afraid. She came out of the asylum for just one reason. Now that
she's taken care of it, she'll probably be going back inside again."
He
sighed. "It's a shame. We're losing a great talent there."
"Shit happens, Doc," I
told him bluntly. I definitely didn't
want to start getting emotional at this point. I still had a long way to go. I
could fall apart later. Right now I had to keep my act together.
After supper that evening, Charlie
took James and me aside. "Let's go check in with Bob," he suggested.
"He's our pipeline to the opposition, and we don't want any nasty
surprises cropping up."
"Won't he get in trouble if he
passes things along to us?" James demanded.
"It's not as if we're going to
rat him off, James," Charlie replied. "He knows that he can trust us
to keep our mouths shut. I'm not all that interested in cop-shop secrets when
you get right down to it. But we need to know what Burpee's up to. Bob's cut
him off at the pass on this case, and Burpee's probably eating his own liver by
now. Let's face it, guys. Bob stuck his neck way out with that ‘protective custody' scam, and Burpee's most
likely trying to blindside my big brother. If we want to keep Bob on our side,
we're going to have to help cover his buns."
"He's got a point,
James," I said. "We really need
Bob to be in charge at this stage. If Burpee manages to get Bob kicked off the
case, we're in deep trouble."
"Good
point," James agreed. "Let's go have a chat with Big Brother."
James drove us to the Green Lantern in his station wagon. For some reason, the
term "SUV"-sports utility vehicle-offended the hell out of him.
"It's a station wagon, dammit!" he'd thunder at us any time we
slipped and used the more contemporary term. James had lots of old-fashioned
words in his vocabulary-"station wagon,” “truth,” “ethics"-all those
quaint, out-of-fashion concepts.
Bob was already sitting in that
back booth when we arrived-obviously, he'd been expecting us. That suggested
that this meeting was a put-up job. The brothers West
made a good team.
"Hey,
big guy," Charlie said. "What's happening?"
"Sit down and shut up,
Charlie," Bob growled at him. "We've got problems."
That tightened up my insides just
a notch.
We all slid into the booth, and Bob
leaned forward and spoke very quietly. "Burpee's seriously pissed off
about the way I handled the Greenleaf girl last week, and he's trying
everything he can think of to get me off the case. The chief of detectives
thinks I did the right thing, but Burpee's trying to sneak around behind him.
He's doing his best to buddy up to the lawyers in the District Attorney's
Office, and he's managed to persuade some half-wit over there that he's the
resident expert on serial murders. It's pure, unwashed bullshit, of course, but
if he can float it past some fumble-brain prosecutor, Burpee's gonna wind up on
the witness stand lying his guts out."
"Can't your chief tell him to
keep his goddam mouth shut?" Charlie demanded.
"Not
if the prosecutor's on Burpee's side, he can't. Burpee had that Cheetah
obsession, and the ‘Joan the Ripper' thing scared Cheetah out of town. The way
Burpee looks at it, that torpedoed any chance he'd
ever have for a promotion. He blames the Greenleaf girl, and he's out to get
her-any way he can. He's got enough suck-ups in the department that if we keep
having these little meetings, he'll find out about them and splash the news all
over any TV channel that'll listen to him."
"Damn!"
James rumbled.
"Damn only begins to describe
it," Bob said. "From now on, we stay away from each other. I know
Burpee well enough to figure out what he'll do. He'll push the prosecutor to
take this case into open court-preferably with wall-to-wall TV cameras present.
He's working behind the scenes right now, but if this goes into criminal court,
he won't be able to resist giving a public performance. He pees his pants every
time he sees a cam-era, so his head'll shut down, and he'll make a big splash
on TV That'll blow any chance for a sanity hearing,
and the Greenleaf girl will be tried for first-degree murder. Burpee might get
demoted or even kicked off the force, but that won't do us much good." He
paused. "Now, you did not hear
this from me-have we got that straight? Get to that girl's lawyer and tell him
that you heard this from ‘a reliable source.' If Rankin's as sharp as he's
supposed to be, he'll know how to shortstop Burpee. Our main goal right now is
to keep that son of a bitch off the witness stand."
The girls weren't too happy when we got home and broke the
news to them. Sylvia unlimbered the darker side of her vocabulary, but Trish
went directly to the telephone.
Sylvia
was still bubbling over like a little teapot when Trish came back out to the
kitchen. "Cool it, Sylvia," she told our little housemate. "I
just got off the phone with Mr. Rankin. He wasn't too happy about this, but now
that he knows what's happening, he knows what has to be done."
"You
didn't rat Bob out, did you?" Charlie asked her.
"Of course not," Trish
said promptly. "Your brother's on our side, so I'm not going to get him in
trouble. Mr. Rankin probably knows who our source is, but he didn't make an
issue of it."
"What can he possibly do to
head Burpee off?" James asked her. "Given the
circumstances and Renata's present condition, Mr. Rankin's almost certain to
request a closed hearing-along with a gag order from the presiding judge.
That'll cut the ground out from under Lieutenant Belcher's planned public
performance."
"What a shame," Erika
said. "No Academy Award for poor Burpee this year."
"Mr. Rankin did have some good
news, though," Trish told us. "He's had a couple of off-the-cuff
discussions with the district attorney, and they've more or less agreed that a
preliminary hearing's in order. The DA didn't like the idea, but Mr. Rankin could tie the case up for years if he
re-fuses. The way things stand, just about everything hinges on which judge
presides over that hearing. If we're lucky, we'll get the right judge. There are a couple that we really don't want sitting on the bench."
"It all boils down to luck of
the draw then, doesn't it?" Charlie suggested.
"What a clever way to put it,
Charlie," Trish replied sardonically. "Have they come up with a date
for the preliminary hearing yet?" I asked her.
"That's up to the judge,"
she replied. "The court dockets are pretty full right now. It could all
come down to a plea bargain on some other case that'll free up one of the
judges. Everything's still up in the air."
The next morning I went to
Padelford and arranged to take incompletes on my two seminars. Evidently Dr.
Conrad had put in a good word for me, so I didn't have any problems-at least
not administrative problems. Now that
my academic career was on hold, I didn't have anything to do-except to sit
around and worry.
"Judge Compson's a throwback
to a more leisurely time," Trish said. "She refuses to be hurried,
and she's militantly indifferent to the needs of the news media. A lot of
reporters have wound up in jail for crossing her."
"I
like her already," Charlie said, grinning broadly.
"It gets better," Trish
told him. "Mr. Rankin told me today that the prosecutor in the early
stages will be a Mr. Roger Fielding. He's a new man in the district attorney's
office, and probably still wet behind the ears. I'd even bet he's the one who swallowed Lieutenant
Belcher's cock-and-bull story" She paused then. "By the way,"
she continued, "don't make any plans for Saturday. Mr. Rankin would like
to meet with all of us on Saturday morning. He'll probably be calling most of
us as witnesses during the preliminary hearing, and he'll definitely need our
testimony if this goes into a sanity hearing. Lawyers hate surprises in open
court, so Mr. Rankin wants to get to know us before the hearing."
"Is
there any word yet on when the hearing's going to be?" Sylvia asked.
"Not yet," Trish replied. "That's up to Judge Compson, and she's
not going to let anybody push her."
Trish went to work at the law
office on Thursday of that week. She'd never really explained what was involved
in her part-time job. I guess that a law clerk spends a lot of time wading
through law books looking for precedents and such.
She
was all fired up when she came home, though. "We got a break today,"
she announced at the supper table that evening. "I couldn't swear to it,
but I think Mr. Rankin called in some favors. The presiding judge in Renata's
case is going to be Alice Compson. She's tough but fair, and she absolutely hates having reporters cluttering up her
courtroom. Almost all of her hearings are closed to the public-and to the news media. The reporters scream bloody murder
about that, but she makes them wait until the transcripts are
available-sometime a week or so after the fact."
"That's a leisurely approach
to the 'late-breaking-news' business, isn't it?" James noted with a faint
smile.
It
was raining on Saturday morning, but there was nothing unusual about that. If
rain bothers you, stay away from
Since
James had the largest vehicle at the boardinghouse, he drove us on downtown in
his station wagon. Since Trish worked at the law firm, she had a pass that got
us into the parking garage in the basement of the towering office building in
the business district. Then we took the elevator to the sixteenth floor. The
whole place had an air of subdued luxury about it-deep-pile carpeting, rich
hardwood paneling, and broad windows over-looking
"Classy,"
Charlie observed.
"Just a comfortable little
place we like to call home," Trish replied. She led us through the silent
main office to a large conference room on the west side of the building, where
she tapped lightly on the door.
"Come,"
a rich voice replied, and we all followed Trish into the room. Mr. Rankin rose
to greet us. He was one of those disgustingly handsome older gentlemen with
snowy white hair and a- robust tan. I judged that he spent quite a few hours under
a sunlamp to maintain that. He was casually dressed and seemed fairly relaxed.
"Why don't you introduce me to your friends, Patricia?" he suggested.
"Then we can get down to business."
Trish went down the line, giving
her boss our names and our major fields of study.
"Interesting
combination," Mr. Rankin observed. "Now, then, let's get down to
cases. As Patricia's probably told you, our main goal during the preliminary
hearing will be to steer Judge Compson in the direction of a sanity hearing.
Miss Greenleaf's history lends itself to that outcome, but naturally Mr.
Fielding will attempt to thwart our efforts. The media, and in all probability
the public as well, would prefer a lurid criminal trial that can be simplified
into headlines consisting largely of one-syllable words. We'll want to
complicate it. The way things currently stand, a criminal case would be
open-and-shut, and it wouldn't take much more than a day or two. I'll probably
be calling all of you as witnesses, and I'd like to hear each one of you speak.
Try to relax. Speak in a normal tone of voice, and don't rush, no matter how
much Fielding tries to push you."
Rankin had one of those rich,
oratorical voices that made him sound like a member of the U.S. Senate. He
could probably have made a weather re-port sound like earthshaking news.
"Mr. Forester," he said
then, turning to James, "When did you first meet Miss Greenleaf?"
James pondered that. "If I
remember correctly, she came to dinner at the boardinghouse one evening in late
September or early October last fall. Mark had mentioned her background and her
mental problems, so we didn't really know what to expect. She charmed us all
into a corner, though, and entertained us with stories about the private
sanitarium-she called it the nuthouse-where she'd spent a fair stretch of time
following her sister's murder."
Rankin was staring at James with an
awed look on his face. "You have a magnificent voice, Mr. Forester,"
he said. "I've got to get you on
the witness stand. You sound almost like the voice of God."
James smiled. "That might
depend on your definition of God, Mr. Rankin. We could talk about that if you'd
like, but I'm not sure the witness stand would be the best place for such a
discussion. The limitations of ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth' could interfere with theological speculation, don't you think?"
"I could listen to this man
talk all day," Rankin told the rest of us with a broad smile.
"Keep
him clear of Hegel, though," Charlie suggested. "Kant's OK, but Kierkegaard
and Hegel make my teeth hurt."
"Patricia
tells me that you're a scientist, Mr. West," Rankin said.
"I don't know if I'd go quite that far, Mr. Rankin," Charlie
replied. "I'm an engineer. I make stuff. A scientist works with theories;
engineers work with nuts and bolts. Science guys are usually covered with chalk
dust, but we've got grease and metal filings on our clothes. We get paid better
than they do, though."
"And
when did you first meet Miss Greenleaf?"
"That same evening James did.
Mark brought her to dinner. She was auditing a class he was teaching, and she
did a paper-'How I Spent My Summer Vacation.’ That's what got our gang interested in her. Mark's still got
copies, so he can give you one. Keep a tight grip on something when you read
it, though. Reality starts to slide away about halfway through that puppy.”
"You
have very colorful speech, Mr. West," Rankin observed.
"I'm a working slob,"
Charlie replied with a shrug. "I was perfectly happy with a weekly
paycheck and enough spare time to mess around re-building cars. I do read a
lot, though."
Rankin
nodded. Then he looked at Erika. "Your turn, Miss Erdlund," he told
her. "Patricia tells me you're in medical school."
Erika nodded. "Charlie
rebuilds cars; I rebuild people-at least that's what I'll be doing when I come
out at the far end of med school. I've got a few years to go yet. I met Twinkie
on the same evening when the rest of the gang did."
"What's
this ‘Twinkie' business?" he asked her.
"It's a pet name Mark had for
the twins-both of them. I think Renata actually preferred that name after her
sister was murdered. Sylvia might not agree, but I think that ‘Twinkie' thing
kept
"Now that's something we might want to
pursue," Rankin said. "What do you think, Miss Cardinale?"
"I wish Erika would quit
poaching in my territory" Sylvia replied. "What a thing to say,"
Erika murmured.
"Oh, quit," Sylvia told
her. Then she turned back to Rankin. "As usual, Erika's raised something
troubling. Her notion that Renata was permanently maimed by her sister's murder
suggests that Renata's apparent recovery was a pure sham. She pretended to recover so that she could
chase down
Rankin nodded. "It'll probably
come up during the preliminary hearing," he told her.
"I was almost sure that it
would," Sylvia said. She frowned. "Renata's condition doesn't quite
match any of the textbook terms. At first I looked into the possibility of
multiple personality disorder, but that didn't fit. The twins were so close
that they knew each other completely. Dr. Fallon, her psychiatrist, thinks that
fugue might come closer, but I don't believe that matches either. We may have
to come up with an entirely new term for Renata's condition-'the Twin Disorder'
maybe."
"I can see that I'll be
talking some more with you and Dr. Fallon," Rankin mused.
"I think it's your turn in the
barrel, Mark," Charlie said. "Thanks a bunch," I replied sourly.
"Don't
mention it."
"You seem reluctant, Mr.
Austin," Rankin noted. "I'll grant you that this won't be very
pleasant, but your testimony will probably be the key to our whole case."
"I
know, but I'm not looking forward to it."
"You
were present in the church when Renata came in on the night of
February tenth, weren't you, Mr. Austin? Your previous statement didn't exactly
ring true."
"I
sort of made that up," I admitted. "Actually, I followed her into the
church after she killed Fergusson." Then I explained how I'd spent that
whole night following Twink. "I was one step behind her the whole
way," I said regretfully. And then it dawned on me that Rankin had led me
to the one part of the story that I couldn't
tell. I took a deep breath and pushed on. "Father O'Donnell and I
could hear her raving on in twin-speak. She was soaking wet and delirious, so
we called an ambulance. You know the rest. If I'd had my head on straight, I'd
have grabbed that purse of hers before the ambulance got there. She'd be back
in Doc Fallon's bughouse by now, and we wouldn't have to go through all
this."
"That gets right down to the
nitty-gritty, doesn't it?" Charlie said admiringly. "You're even
sharper than I thought, Mark. Shipping Twinkie back to the nuthouse would have
been a perfect solution."
"Yeah,
but I dropped the ball."
"You had quite a bit on your
mind, Mark," James said.
"It was still a major
screwup," I replied.
"Well,
I'd like to thank all of you," Rankin said then. "You've given me a
lot to work with, and I think the facts in this case are definitely on our
side. That covers everything for now, I guess."
We
all stood up at that point.
"Could you stay for a moment,
Mr. Austin?" Rankin said. "It shouldn't take long."
"We'll
wait downstairs, Mark," James told me as they filed out. "Something
else happened in that church, didn't it?" he asked me shrewdly. "You
glossed over something just a little too quickly, Mr. Austin." Rankin was
sharp, that's for sure.
"This won't go any
further?" I asked him. "Not if you don't want it to."
"All
right. I need to tell somebody about this anyway. When I got to the
church, Renata had already gone in. She was hiding in one of those niches where
there was a statue. Father O'Donnell and I could hear her, but we couldn't see
her. Then a car went past the church, and its headlights lit the inside of the
church. Then we saw her-but she wasn't alone. There were two people in that
alcove. They were identical, Mr. Rankin. Renata was there, but
Mr. Rankin's eyes were wide, and
his face had gone pale under that perfect tan.
"Father O'Donnell says he's
reported the incident to his bishop,
and the bishop ordered him not to talk about it, not even to confirm anything I
might tell anybody else. I guess that's standard church policy. It wouldn't
make any difference in court anyway, so there's no point in making an issue of
it. Renata's gone, Mr. Rankin, and she won't come back. She and
He kept staring at me, and he
didn't say anything, so I quietly left the room and took the elevator to the
lobby.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Trish
had advised us that the preliminary hearing was scheduled for
We all got up early that morning to
get dressed and presentable. James and I had a hell of a time persuading
Charlie to wear a necktie-partly because the only one he owned was that hideous
one Erika had given him for Christmas. I lent him one of mine. Then I had to
tie it for him.
We were all pretty tense about the
whole thing, so breakfast was a bit sketchy. We did drink three pots of Erika's coffee, though.
James had persuaded us that we
should all ride into town in his station wagon. "Let's all stick together,
children. The media folks are likely to be all over us as soon as we walk out
the door."
"He's right," Trish
agreed, "and we'd better stick to the standard ‘no comment'
response."
"Aw,"
Charlie said, "I was gonna be a star. Don't you think the reporters would
be awfully impressed if I answered their questions in German?"
"Just cool it, Charlie,"
Trish told him. "If we ignore the reporters, maybe they'll give up and go
away."
"Fat
chance," Erika murmured.
We went out the front door at about
a
The reporters stepped back to give
us room, but several of them did throw
some shrill questions at us.
Trish
fielded the questions with an icy "no comment."
That didn't make the reporters too
happy, but you can't please everybody, I guess.
Mr. Rankin had given Trish a
parking permit, so James drove straight into the parking garage at the
courthouse, and we took the elevator up to the fourth floor. A bailiff checked
our IDs against a list and passed us on through. That list really upset the
reporters, and the bailiff's announcement-every four or five minutes-that
"This hearing is not open to the public-or the press," raised a lot
of protest.
The bailiff was wearing a gun,
though, so the reporters didn't push him too hard.
Mr. Rankin was waiting for us at
one of the tables down front. "I don't think I'll be calling on any of you
to testify today," he told us, "but judge Compson might step over
some of the more picky procedural details and move directly into a sanity
hearing. Fielding wouldn't like that very much, but I want to be ready-just in
case. Take your seats in that first row, and listen very carefully. This is
basically a hearing where the prosecution's obliged to present its case against
Miss Greenleaf."
"She
won't actually be here, will she?" I asked him.
"Oh, yes," he replied.
"She has to be present to hear the case against her.
"But
she won't understand a damn thing," I protested.
"I
certainly hope not-and I hope it shows. If she's disturbed enough, Judge
Compson could declare her to be incompetent to stand trial before the day's out. That'd put an end to this before it goes any
further. Don't get your hopes up, though."
Les Greenleaf arrived a few minutes
later. Inga wasn't with him, but Mary was. She wasn't wearing her uniform, but
she still had that cop aura hanging over her. The two of them joined us in the
front row. Then, a moment or so later, a tall young man carrying a briefcase
hurriedly entered.
"That's
Fielding," Trish told us quietly.
The prosecuting attorney was
followed into the courtroom by four people: a uniformed cop; Bob West; a
nervous-looking oriental gentleman; and a thick-shouldered fellow with what
appeared to be a permanent case of five o'clock shadow and bushy black
eyebrows.
"That's
Burpee," Mary identified the last man.
"It
wouldn't be the same without him," Charlie said.
Then a side door behind the judge's
bench opened, and a couple of hospital orderlies-one man and one woman-quietly
led Renata into the courtroom.
That really jolted me. Up until
then this had seemed like a mere charade, with assorted people dancing on
strings. With the appearance of Renata, though, it got real serious in a hurry.
"All
rise," the bailiff called from the front of the courtroom.
We
stood, and a woman with iron grey hair wearing a black judicial robe entered
and sat down behind the bench. "You may be seated," she announced.
She waited a moment while we sat down, then she rapped her gavel. "This
hearing is now in session," she said. "Now then," she continued,
"just to be certain that everyone here understands the rules, this is a
closed hearing, and these proceedings are to be kept strictly confidential. The
court will be very unhappy with anybody who violates the confidentiality of
these proceedings." She looked around sternly. "Am I going too fast
for anybody? To put it in the simplest of terms, keep your mouths shut.
If somebody here tries to turn my
courtroom into a three-ring circus, I'll lean on him-hard. The press can go be
free somewhere else, and the public has the right to know only as much as I choose to let it know. This is my court,
and we'll play by my rules. Have we all got that straight?"
"Wow!"
Charlie whispered.
"She's not kidding," Mary
quietly told us. "She's one tough cookie, and you definitely don't want to cross her."
"The prosecution and the
defense will approach the bench," Judge Compson said then.
Mr. Rankin and the nervous young
prosecutor went up to Judge Comp-son's bench, and the three of them held a
brief conference. Then Rankin and Fielding returned to their seats.
"Call
your first witness, Mr. Fielding," the judge instructed.
"The
prosecution calls Officer Paul Murray," Fielding responded.
The uniformed cop rose and went to
the front of the courtroom. One of the bailiffs swore him in and he sat down in
the witness chair beside the judge's bench.
"You were the officer who
discovered the body of a Mr. Walter Fergusson on the night of February
10?" Fielding asked him.
"Yes,
sir. It was after
"Could you describe the
condition of Mr. Fergusson's body for us, Officer Murray?" Fielding asked.
"There were multiple stab
wounds, Mr. Fielding, but they weren't actually stabs. They were more like long
cuts. An ordinary stab wound goes straight in. The wounds on the deceased's
body were long and fairly shallow. I'm no medical expert, but I'd say that Mr.
Fergusson bled to death.”
“Have you been involved in the
investigation of any of the other murders with a similar MO in the past several
months?"
"Yes,
sir, a couple of them. The wounds on this most recent body were consistent
with those on previous ones-except that there were more of them. The killer
even went so far this time as to remove the victim's shoes and slice the soles
of his feet."
Fielding winced. "Ah-no
further questions, Your Honor," he said. "Your witness, Mr.
Rankin," Judge Compson announced.
Rankin
rose to his feet. "Could you describe the noise you heard that prompted
you and your partner to investigate, Officer Murray?"
"It was peculiar, Mr.
Rankin,"
"No
further questions, Your Honor," Rankin said.
"Call
your next witness, Mr. Fielding," Judge Compson said after the uniformed
"The
prosecution calls Sergeant Robert West," Fielding said.
Bob West was wearing a dark suit,
and his face was pretty bleak. It was obvious to those of us who knew him that
he wasn't happy about this. He was sworn in, and he sat down in the witness
chair.
"You are Sergeant Robert West
of the Seattle Police Department?" Fielding asked.
"Yes, sir."
"And you are a detective
currently assigned to the north precinct?”
“Yes,
sir."
"And how long have you been on
the force, Sergeant West?”
“It's going on twelve years now,
Mr. Fielding."
"And
you have been involved in the investigation of the series of murders which have
taken place in various parks in north Seattle-and others as well, but beyond
the immediate jurisdiction of your precinct?”
“Yes, sir."
"Would you characterize these
murders as ordinary, gang-related stabbings?"
"They were anything but ordinary, Mr. Fielding.”
“Would you please elaborate,
Sergeant West?"
"An ordinary stabbing is
usually not very well thought out in advance," Bob told him. "In many
cases, it's a spur-of-the-moment act, and its main intent is to kill the victim
quickly and with a minimum of noise. The Slasher killings were obviously
intended to take much, much longer than a simple stab and run. The weapon was not
really very efficient."
"Pardon me a moment, Sergeant
West," Fielding said. He went to a table just in front of the desk and
picked up a linoleum knife. He held it up so that Bob could see it. "Was
this the murder weapon you just described?”
“If the tag attached to the handle
has my name on it, it is."
"If it please
the court, the prosecution will designate this implement as ‘Exhibit A,"
Fielding said to Judge Compson.
"So
ordered," the judge replied.
"This would not seem to be a
very effective weapon, Sergeant West," Fielding suggested.
"That would depend on the
killer's intent, Mr. Fielding. If the killer wanted quick and quiet, that
wouldn't have served his-or her-purpose. But it would seem that ‘quick' was the
last thing the killer wanted. The
in-tent was quite obviously to make the killing last for a long time. The
killer's primary objective seems to have been to inflict as much pain as
possible on the victim. The killer had come up with an unusual means to ensure
quiet."
"And
could you elaborate on that, Sergeant West?"
"We were at a loss to explain
how the Slasher could slice somebody repeatedly without so
much as a squeak coming from the victim. It wasn't until the December
seventeenth murder that we got the answer. That was the killing that took place
on the military reservation in
"And what was that, Sergeant
West?”
“Curare, Mr. Fielding."
"And
what exactly is curare?"
"I'm no chemist, Mr. Fielding.
As I understand it, though, some Indian tribes in the Amazon smear it on their
arrows to paralyze game animals. It has the same effect on humans, I
understand. That was what kept the
victims quiet-the killer drove a hypodermic needle into their throats for a
quick dose of curare before the cutting started."
"Wouldn't
curare be quite rare in this part of the world?"
"No. Doctors use it when a
patient is having a seizure-or so the coroner tells us. I understand that it's
available in any well-stocked pharmacy." Fielding went back to the exhibit
table and picked up a hypodermic needle with a small yellow tag tied to it.
"The tag on this syringe has your name on it, Sergeant West, and it's
dated February tenth. Would you tell the court who found it, and where, and
what the significance is?"
"That was found in Miss Renata
Greenleaf's purse by the staff of the University of
Washington Medical Center after she'd been brought to the emergency room by
ambulance. The linoleum knife was in there as well, along with a couple of sets
of rosary beads."
"And the syringe was tested
for any chemical residue?”
“Yes,
sir."
"And what chemical, if any,
was found in that residue?”
“Curare, Mr. Fielding."
"If
it pleases the court, the prosecution will designate this syringe as 'Exhibit
B,' " Fielding said to Judge Compson.
"So ordered."
Fielding turned back to Bob.
"Were any further tests performed on Exhibits A and B, Sergeant
West?"
"Yes,
sir. They were tested for blood residue.”
“And what were the findings?"
"The lab confirmed that the
blood on the knife was Mr. Fergusson's. There wasn't enough blood on the
hypodermic to do a DNA test, but the blood type did match Fergusson's."
"Does this evidence confirm
the probability that Miss Renata Greenleaf should be considered the prime
suspect in the murder of Mr. Walter Fergusson, and of a number of other murders
as well?"
"The MO is consistent. Curare
and a linoleum knife appear to have played a part in many recent murders."
"And was there in your opinion
sufficient probable cause to place Miss Greenleaf under arrest?"
"There's no question about
that, Mr. Fielding.”
“And did you arrest her."
"No,
I did not."
Fielding lost it right there. "You didn't? Why not, for God's
sake?" Judge Compson rapped her gavel. "That's enough of that, Mr.
Fielding," she told him firmly.
"I'm sorry, Your
Honor," Fielding apologized, then turned back to the witness. "Would
you please explain to the court why you chose not to place Miss Greenleaf under
arrest, Sergeant West?"
Bob pointed his finger at Renata.
"That's why, Mr. Fielding. Step over a little closer and listen to her. I
had probable cause, right enough, but she was delirious. When we arrest
somebody, we're required to read them their rights-and
we have to be certain that they understand
those rights. I placed her in protective custody instead of arresting her
because she didn't even seem to realize that I was there. If I understand the
law correctly, protective custody is as far as we can go at this point. We
can't arrest her in her present condition. I checked with her doctor, and he
told me that she wouldn't understand anything I said to her."
"What if this is just some
clever ruse, Sergeant West?" Fielding demanded,
sounding desperate.
"We aren't allowed to use
'what-if' when we make an arrest, Mr. Fielding," Bob told him. "We
have to be sure."
"The
witness is correct, Mr. Fielding," Judge Compson told him, "and
Sergeant West stayed within the strict limits of the law in a difficult
situation."
Fielding
got her point. He didn't like it, but
he was smart enough not make an issue of it. "And is Miss Greenleaf
currently being held in custody at any recognized facility?" he asked
lamely.
"Yes,
sir," Bob replied. "She's confined in the psychiatric ward at the
University of Washington Medical Center, and there's a
police officer stationed at her door at all times. She's physically present in
this courtroom right now, but I don't think she's aware of it."
"No further questions, Your
Honor," Fielding said, sounding somewhat deflated.
"Your witness, Mr.
Rankin," the judge said then.
"No questions, Your
Honor," he replied.
"Wise
decision, Mr. Rankin," she said almost absently.
Renata continued to whisper to
herself in twin, and judge Compson looked troubled as she listened to those
sibilant whispers. Finally, she shook her head slightly. "You may step
down, Sergeant West," she said softly.
Charlie
gave his brother a quick, triumphant thumbs-up gesture as Bob re-turned to his
seat. Bob shrugged and sat down. He obviously wasn't very happy.
"Call your next witness, Mr.
Fielding," Judge Compson said quietly. "The prosecution calls Dr.
Hiroshi Yamada," Fielding announced.
The nervous doctor hurried to the
front of the courtroom to be sworn in.
"You
are Dr. Hiroshi Yamada?" Fielding asked. "Yes, Mr. Prosecutor,"
Yamada replied.
"And you have served as a
forensic pathologist on the King County Coroner's staff for the past eight
years?"
"Yes,
Mr. Prosecutor."
"And you performed an autopsy
on the body of a Mr. Walter Fergusson on the twelfth of February of this
year?"
"Yes,
Mr. Prosecutor."
"And
what were your findings?"
"Mr. Fergusson was a male
Caucasian of early middle age. The cause of death was the loss of blood caused
by multiple knife wounds inflicted upon his body-mainly on the upper torso-some
fifty hours prior to the autopsy. Chemical analysis revealed the presence of
curare in his blood-stream, as well as traces of cocaine. His blood alcohol
level was point oh-five."
"Could you tell the court how
many knife wounds had been inflicted upon the body of the deceased?"
Yamada checked some papers on a
clipboard he'd carried to the stand. "Ah-eighty-three,
as closely as we were able to determine, Mr. Prosecutor. Many of the
wounds were in the same general vicinity, and it was difficult to be precise.
The groin area was particularly mutilated."
"Can you confirm that samples
from the knife found in the possession of the defendant were indeed the blood
of the deceased?"
"Yes, Mr. Prosecutor. The DNA
match was well over ninety percent. There was some minor contamination by other
DNA. The implement carried some residue from previous uses."
"Could you estimate how long
it took the deceased to die from blood loss after the initial assault."
"I couldn't be precise, Mr.
Prosecutor. The ambient temperature was well below freezing that night. If the
assault had taken place in the summertime, I'd estimate ten to fifteen minutes.
It was the last wound inflicted that finally proved fatal. That wound was in
the victim's throat, and it severed both carotid arteries."
"Then,
in layman's terms, the initial wounds were located in areas highly sensitive to
pain, but the killer finished the victim off by cutting his throat from ear to
ear."
"Approximately, yes, Mr. Prosecutor."
"No
further questions, Your Honor," Fielding said then.
"The court appreciates that,
Mr. Fielding." Judge Compson had a slightly squeamish look on her face. "Your witness, Mr. Rankin."
Rankin was leaning back in his
chair, listening as Erika whispered to him across the little railing that
separated the defense table from the courtroom.
"Are
we in there, Mr. Rankin?" Judge Compson asked.
"Sorry, Your Honor," he
apologized. Then he rose and approached the witness stand. "Would you
please tell the court if you happened to compare Mr. Fergusson's DNA with
samples taken from other sources, Dr. Yamada?" he asked.
Yamada
threw a quick glance at Erika, and she nodded.
"This goes back just a bit,
Mr. Rankin," Yamada said, "but I think it might have some bearing on
this case."
"We'll take all the help we
can get, Dr. Yamada," Rankin said with a faint smile.
"There's
been an investigation under way for the last six or eight years, Mr. Rankin.
Identification by DNA matching is a fairly new procedure, but it's turned out
to be extremely valuable for pathologists. Over the past several years there
have been a number of rapes followed by the murder of the rape victim in the
“Objection, Your Honor!” Fielding protested. “This is
irrelevant.”
“Overruled, Mr. Fielding,” Judge Compson told him. “The
court finds Dr. Yamada’s testimony highly
relevant. Please go on, Mr. Rankin.”
“And what was the name of the
Yamada checked his clipboard. “Ah-Greenleaf,
Mr. Rankin.
Then she raised her gavel-almost as if it were a club.
“Court is adjourned until Tuesday, March tenth at ten A.M.” And then she banged
her gavel down.
I glanced over at Burpee. He was scowling at the judge
like some kid who’d just been sent to his room without any supper.
Judge Compson called a
recess and asked the lawyers to come to her chambers.
Erika was so jubilant
that I almost thought we’d have to tie her down.
“It worked!” she crowed.
“It actually worked! It slid right past that nincompoop prosecutor! I love it!”
“Calm down, Erika,”
Sylvia told her. “How did you know about all those other rape-murders?”
“Dr. Yamada made a big
thing about it in a class I took from him last fall,” Erika replied. “He’s very
excited about DNA identification. He’s positive that it’s going to replace
fingerprints before very long. He used that series of rape-murders as an
example, and he just now cracked those cases. He’s probably spraining his arm
patting himself on the back right now.’,
Rankin had a triumphant
look on his face when he and Fielding returned to the courtroom. Fielding
looked anything but triumphant.
“All rise,” the bailiff
said, and Judge Compson returned to the bench with a no-nonsense look on her
face. She rapped her gavel and then spoke to the court reporter. “Let the
record show that Miss Greenleaf is to remain in protective custody within the
confines of the University of Washington Medical
Center. She is to be held over for a hearing to determine her competency to
stand trial.” Then she looked sternly at those of us sitting on both sides of
the aisle in her courtroom. “I remind everyone present that there is to be no
discussion of this matter with the news media or anyone else not immediately
involved in this case. And I also remind
you that a violation of this order will be seen as contempt of court.” She
paused. “Do you read me, Lieutenant Belcher?” she demanded in a belligerent
tone. “Zip your mouth shut!”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
The reporters were still clogging
the hallway outside the courtroom, but once again James ran interference for us
James had a gift for nonviolent intimidation. The reporters uneasily gave way
to let us through to the elevator. One enthusiast, however, shouted a question
at Charlie as we waited for the doors to open. Charlie gave him a blank look
and replied, "Nicht verstehen. Haben sie Deutsch?"
The
reporter blinked and backed off.
"Oh, that was clever," Erika said admiringly at Charlie. "If
you got it, flaunt it," Charlie replied.
The elevator door opened, and we
all entered briskly. James stood in the doorway-ominously-to keep any of the
media geeks from joining us. There weren't any reporters in the parking garage.
Either it was a standing rule or Judge Compson had been issuing more orders. We
climbed gratefully into the station wagon, and James drove us back to the
boardinghouse.
There was a mob scene, complete
with TV cameras, waiting for us when we got there, and we treated them to a
linguistic circus when we started for the front door. Trish and Erika
answered-or declined to answer-the reporters' questions in Swedish; Charlie quoted
Schiller's An die Freude extensively; Sylvia
responded in Italian, probably laced with obscure obscenities; and James
delivered an oratorical announcement in Latin.
I
felt obligated to uphold the honor of the English department, so I recited the
opening stanza of Beowulf-in West
Saxon. All right, I was showing off. Everybody else was doing it; why should
they have all the fun?
We
managed to maintain our serious expressions until we got inside and closed the
door behind us. Then we all started laughing. "Did you see their faces?" Charlie howled.
"What a blast!"
"What on earth was that
language you were using, Mark?" Erika asked me.
"English,"
I replied innocently.
"It didn't sound much like
English to me.”
“It's an older variation," I
told her.
"How much older?"
"Oh,
thirteen hundred years-or so.”
“Far out," she murmured.
"Hey," Charlie said then,
"I'd say our side won today, huh? We got that sanity hearing Rankin
wanted."
"Let's
hold off on the victory celebration, Charlie," Trish told him. "I
think we're staring right down the bore of permanent institutionalization for
Renata. About the best we can hope for is a private mental institution.
Fielding will probably try to hold out for a state-operated institution for the
criminally insane-a penitentiary with padded cells."
That
took a lot of the fun out of our day.
The
media geeks were really up in arms
about judge Compson's closed courtroom and her gag order. Channel surfing
through the length and breadth of the assorted TV stations produced whole
bunches of tediously pious recitations of the first amendment.
The
boardinghouse gang continued the foreign language ploy. One station hired translators, but the fellow who converted
Sylvia's remarks into English almost got the station in trouble with the
FCC-Sylvia's choice of terms turned out to be very colorful. After that, they
finally gave up and left us alone.
I was reading Faulkner on Saturday
morning, and about
"Mark?" It was Father
O'Donnell. "If you're not too busy, could you come by the church sometime
today?"
"Sure,"
I said. "What's up?"
"I've got a bit of good news
for you.”
“God knows I could use some,"
I replied.
"Yes, He probably does."
"Sorry,
Father-that slipped out. I'll come over right now."
Father O was waiting for me near
the altar, and he led the way back to his office-as if I couldn't find it on my
own by now. He closed the door and we both sat down. "As I understand it,
the judge who's presiding over Renata's case is conducting a sanity
hearing," he said.
"How
did you find out about that?" I was a little surprised.
"I have me sources, dontcha
know?" he said with a slyly exaggerated brogue. "What's going to be
the probable outcome of this sanity hearing?”
“It's hard to say, Father," I
replied. "Renata isn't really in there anymore, but that happened after
He frowned. "Wouldn't that
just postpone the case indefinitely?”
“Trish tells us that it's happened
a few times before. There's one guy in the funny farm over at
"That wouldn't do at
all," he said. "We need a permanent decision that'll put her beyond
the reach of the courts."
"Sure, except that she could
very well wind up in an institution for the criminally insane, and she doesn't
really deserve something like that.”
“There is an alternative," he
told me. "I was able to persuade the bishop that he owed me a favor. I
promised him that I wouldn't mention what you and I saw in the church that
night, and he was kind enough to have a word with the mother superior of a
cloistered order of nuns that very few people know about."
"Oh?"
"They're called The Sisters of
Hope-though there's not really much hope for the women in their care. For the
most part, the sisters provide shelter and care for elderly nuns who've crossed
the line into senility. They also care for ladies of our faith who aren't nuns, but have a certain social
standing."
"Money,
you mean?"
"That does enter into the
arrangements, I'm told. I'm certain that if Renata's father just happened to
make a sizable contribution to the order, the mother superior would look
favorably upon an application for admittance for Renata."
"Let's see if I've got this
straight," I said. "You blackmailed the bishop; he bullied the mother
superior; and now Les Greenleaf has to pay a bribe. Is that more or less the
way it goes?"
He winced. "That's an awkward
way to put it, Mark." he chided me. "Accurate, perhaps, but a trifle
blunt. The advantage is that Renata will be well cared for in a safe
environment. That will be far, far better for her than being committed to any
secular institution."
"Anything's
probably better than a state-run asylum," I agreed.
"There is one slight problem,
though. The bishop did tell the
mother superior that Renata is a celebrity of sorts."
"Celebrity?"
"You
know what I mean. The mother superior isn't happy about that.
There are some patients at the convent who are members of fairly
prominent families. If some nosey reporter starts snooping around, names might
start appearing in public."
"I
get your point, Father."
"Even the existence of the
order is strictly confidential, but the location of the cloister is what you
might call ‘top secret.' The notoriety of Renata's case truly concerns the
mother superior. She does not want a
horde of re-porters and television cameras on her doorstep."
"I can understand that,
Father, but we'll have to float this past Judge Compson before we get into the
business of sneaking this past the reporters."
"That
might not be as big a problem as all that, Mark. There happen to be some fairly
influential fellows in city government who might be able to persuade the judge
that the cloister's a good idea. Those particular fellows are the ones who say ‘how
high?' when the bishop says, ‘jump.' And the bishop is going to call in some
favors owed to him, because this is a special case. We don't do this sort of
thing very often, but we've been doing it for a long, long time so we're pretty
good at it. Trust me."
"I'll
get hold of Les Greenleaf and see what he has to say, Father."
I didn't want to raise any false
hopes, so I didn't mention my conversation with Father O'Donnell when I got
home.
We were all tense when we got up on
Tuesday morning. Judge Comp-son seemed to be leaning in our direction, but things
could still go wrong. The reporters had obviously given up on us, so there
wasn't anybody around when we left to go back to the courthouse for Renata's
sanity hearing. And when we got off the elevator on the fourth floor, the
hallway was deserted.
"I didn't think she'd go this far," Trish said, frowning
slightly. "Who was that, Mama Trish?" Charlie asked her.
"Judge Compson," Trish
replied. "Evidently, she's declared the fourth floor off-limits to the
media."
"Can
she do that? Legally, I mean?"
"Charlie, a judge can take any
steps necessary to maintain order in the courtroom, but locking off the
corridors is pretty unusual. Mr. Rankin can probably clear it up for us. We'll
see what he has to say."
The
bailiff at the courtroom door checked our names off his list and waved us in.
Mr. Rankin was waiting for us at the defense table, and he had Dr. Fallon and
Les Greenleaf with him. "Ah," Rankin said, "there you are. We've
been waiting for you." Les Greenleaf was sitting off to one side, and he
didn't even seem to be listening.
Doc
Fallon had a slightly amused expression on his face. "Which one of you
came up with the brilliant idea of refusing to speak English to the
reporters?"
"Charlie,
of course," Sylvia told him. "He's our resident clown."
"We don't have too much time,
here," Rankin told us. "Judge Comp-son's gag order is still in force,
so nothing that happens here is going to show up on the evening news. Now that
we've moved into a sanity hearing, the ball's in my court instead of Fielding's. I'm going to call Dr. Fallon here
as my first witness, and I'll be questioning him at some length, so I probably
won't be calling any of the rest of you today. Hopefully, we'll finish with his
testimony today, but I can't predict how long Fielding's cross-examination will
take. Once he's finished, I'll start
calling you-and Renata's aunt, of course. You should pay close attention to the
questions Fielding asks Dr. Fallon, because he'll probably ask each of you
similar questions." Then he gave Charlie a stern look. "I'd advise
you to answer questions in English, Mr. West. Judge Compson doesn't have a very
well developed sense of humor, so I wouldn't clown around in her courtroom, if
I were you-verstehen sie?"
"7awohl,
mein Herr " Charlie replied, snapping to
attention. Rankin sighed, rolling his eyes upward.
Fielding
entered the courtroom then, and he had Bob West and Burpee with him. They took
their seats, and a moment later the two white-coated orderlies brought Renata
into the courtroom. She was obviously still out of it.
Then the bailiff said, "All
rise," and we stood up as Judge Compson entered and took her seat behind
the bench.
"You may be seated," she
told us. We all sat back down.
Judge Compson pursed her lips.
"The purpose of this hearing is to determine Miss Greenleaf's competence
to stand trial. In order to determine this, certain formalities will be
relaxed. I may from time to time question some of the witnesses myself. I'm
sure that neither the prosecutor nor the defense attorney will have any serious
objections if I happen to interrupt them during the proceedings." She
looked at Fielding and Rankin with one raised eyebrow that spoke volumes.
"Mr. Fielding and I will be
guided by Your Honor in these proceedings," Rankin said rather floridly.
"Nicely put, Mr. Rankin,"
she said. "You may call your first witness.”
“The defense calls Dr. Wallace
Fallon," Rankin said.
Doc Fallon rose and went to the
witness stand. The bailiff swore him in, and he took his seat.
"If it please
the court, may we dispense with an extended examination of Dr. Fallon's
professional credentials?" Rankin asked.
"The prosecution has no
objection, Your Honor," Fielding stated. "Dr. Fallon's professional
standing is well-known."
"Excellent,"
the judge said. "You may proceed, Mr.
Rankin."
"Dr. Fallon," Rankin said
then, "are you acquainted with Miss Greenleaf?"
"Yes, Mr. Rankin. She was a
patient of mine for quite some time a few years ago. Her parents placed her in
my sanitarium in the early summer of 1995."
"Then
she is, in fact, Miss Renata Greenleaf?"
"We can't be absolutely
certain of that, Mr. Rankin," Fallon replied. "She's either Renata or
"Could
you clarify that, Dr. Fallon?" the judge asked.
"
"Wasn't
she able to identify herself when she entered the sanitarium?" the judge
asked him.
"No, Your
Honor," Fallon replied. "The trauma of her sister's murder had caused
her to regress to early childhood, a fact that was made quite obvious by her
inability to speak or to understand English. She answered any and all questions
in cryptolalia."
"In which?" Judge Compson asked.
"The term means ‘secret
language,' Your Honor," he explained. "Virtually every set of twins
invents a private language before they learn the language of their parents. In
most cases, that private language falls into disuse and fades away by the time
the twins are three or four years old. The Greenleaf twins kept theirs intact,
however. Their family and friends referred to their private language as ‘twin'
or 'twin-speak.' The Greenleaf girls were very close, and the surviving twin
was evidently regressing in order to escape from the trauma of her sister's
murder."
"And how long did that continue,
Dr. Fallon?" Rankin asked him. "About six months," Fallon
replied. "Then one morning for no apparent reason, she started speaking
English. The first thing she said, though, was ‘where is this, and who am I?'
She obviously couldn't face or accept what had happened, so as a means of
escape, she simply erased all memory of her previous life."
"Amnesia?" Rankin suggested.
"Exactly. Her amnesia was a flight from reality, and
made more complicated for those of us trying to treat her by the fact that she
was almost certainly thinking in two different languages, and we could only
understand one of them. It's obvious that when she lapses into that private
language, she's talking with her sister. They appear to have been living in an
entirely different world from the rest of us-and that's the world where the
survivor’s gone."
"But her sister's not in that world anymore, Dr. Fallon,"
the judge objected.
"Miss
Greenleaf seems to believe that she is, Your Honor."
I almost choked on that one. There
was no way that Doc Fallon could know about it, but Father O and I had seen Renata's sister in the church. We'd
heard her speak the language of that separate world to her anguished sister.
And then she'd taken Renata in her arms and merged with her, and together they
had left the rest of us behind and gone their own way.
Judge Compson ordered a short
recess at that point, and when we re-turned, Mr. Rankin picked up where he'd
left off. "Are we to understand then, that Miss Greenleaf had no memory
whatsoever of her life prior to her awakening in your sanitarium, Dr.
Fallon?"
"Almost no memory, Mr.
Rankin," Fallon replied. "There was one exception, though. She didn't
recognize her parents, but she did recognize Mr. Mark Austin, a longtime friend
of the Greenleaf family. Mr. Austin had been a key figure in the twins' early
childhood, and his presence seemed to give her something to cling to. Her
motivation isn't very clear."
"What
is your current diagnosis of her condition, Dr. Fallon? Is she
paranoid-schizophrenic, manic-depressive, or what?"
"My best guess at the moment
is the fugue state, Mr. Rankin," Fallon replied.
"Would
you clarify that for us, please?"
"The ‘fugue' is an episode of
altered consciousness during which the patient wanders off and may do or say
things that are very uncharacteristic. When the episode concludes, the patient
is frequently agitated and confused. I was not aware of these episodes during
Miss Greenleaf's stay at the sanitarium. They were probably taking place, but
they were so brief that we didn't realize that they were happening. In her
present condition, there's no way that I could verify this, but as I suggested
before the recess, I'm convinced that Miss Greenleaf's alternate persona is her
twin sister,
"Objection, Your Honor,"
Fielding stepped in. "That's pure speculation.”
“Overruled, Mr. Fielding,"
Judge Compson said. "This is not a trial, so we can be more flexible.
Please continue, Dr. Fallon."
"Yes, Your
Honor. After her recognition of Mr. Austin, Miss Greenleaf's recovery seemed quite
rapid, so I began to grant her furloughs to her parents' home. By the late
spring of '97, she appeared to have progressed far enough that I decided to
upgrade her to outpatient status, and she soon expressed an interest in
attending the
Judge
Compson glanced up at the clock. "Would this be a good place to break, Mr.
Rankin?" she asked. "We're getting close to lunchtime."
"I was about to suggest that
myself, Your Honor," Rankin replied. "Dr. Fallon and I can pick up
after lunch."
"How much longer do you
estimate that Dr. Fallon's testimony will take?"
"Not much longer, Your Honor. Mr. Fielding should have most of the afternoon
for cross-examination."
"Good,"
the judge said. "Court's adjourned until one-thirty, then."
We
grabbed a quick lunch in the cafeteria. Trish assured us that reporters weren't
permitted to pester people while they were eating, so we waited in the
cafeteria after we'd finished. Les Greenleaf ate with us, but he didn't say
very much.
"How are we doing,
Trish?" Charlie asked with uncharacteristic seriousness.
"Not
bad," she replied. "Mr. Rankin's managed to slip several things in
that wouldn't be admissible during a criminal trial. Judge Compson's cutting
him a lot of slack."
"We're
winning, then?"
"Let's wait until we hear
Fielding's cross-examination before we start celebrating, Charlie," she
said.
Judge Compson reconvened the
hearing at one-thirty on the dot, and Rankin picked up where he'd left off.
"You mentioned Miss Cardinale's case history, Dr. Fallon. Did I understand
you to say that she was tape-recording her interviews with Miss Greenleaf?"
"Yes, Mr. Rankin. Renata knew
the tape recorder was running, but it didn't bother her."
"And all during this period,
murders were taking place all over the
"So I understand. Mr. Austin
made certain connections that the rest of us missed, and I'm sure that he'll go
into much greater detail than I can.”
“Then to sum up, it's your opinion
that Miss Greenleaf has crossed the line into a perpetual fugue state?"
"We can always hope that she
might recover someday, but given the circumstances, I'd say that the chances of
that are very slight."
"Then her alternate
persona-her sister-simulated recovery for one purpose only-to track down Mr.
Fergusson and take her vengeance upon him.
"So
it would seem."
"And the earlier killings were
little more than practice murders to hone up her skills?"
"I don't know if I'd go that
far, Mr. Rankin. It's more probable that she was trying to lure potential
rapists into attacking her in the hope that sooner or later, the man she was
really looking for might turn up. The alternate persona was functioning at a
very primitive level, especially at first.
It was only after several killings
that she realized that the license plate number she'd happened to see at the
time of
"Thank you, Dr. Fallon,"
Rankin said. Then he turned to Judge Comp-son. "No further questions, Your
Honor," he said.
"Your
witness, Mr. Fielding," the judge said then.
Fielding was staring at Renata with
a troubled expression on his face. "No questions, Your Honor," he
replied quietly.
"Very
well," the judge said. "Court's adjourned. We'll reconvene tomorrow
morning at ten A.M." And she rapped her gavel down.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
I didn't sleep very well on Tuesday
night, and I don't think anybody else at the boardinghouse did either. Doc
Fallon's testimony had definitely gotten Judge Compson's attention, but whether
it'd been enough to persuade her that Renata didn't belong in some state-run
asylum was still up in the air.
Then
too, Mr. Rankin had told us that we'd each be called to testify on Wednesday.
The anticipatory stage fright that followed that announcement certainly helped
keep us awake. I think we were all grateful when the smell of Erika's coffee
came wafting out of the kitchen.
"Mr.
Rankin wants us in early this morning," Trish told us at breakfast.
"He's made arrangements to use one of the conference rooms in the
court-house. He doesn't like surprises coming up in open court, so he'll go
over our testimony with us."
After
breakfast we caught a couple of TV news programs and the reporters were still
pretty miffed about the news blackout. We got some more sermons on the first
amendment and the "public's right to know." For some reason, no
reporter ever gets around to mentioning "the right of privacy."
Isn't
that odd?
We took off at a quarter after
eight, and when we reached the court-house, Trish led us to the conference
room. Mary was already there, and she was still wearing her uniform-probably at
Rankin's suggestion. I guess he thought it might not hurt to let Judge Compson
know that the whole Seattle Police
Department wasn't in the same camp with Burpee.
Les
Greenleaf was also there, but I think the boss was still pretty much out of it.
This whole thing seemed to be almost more than he could handle.
"Now, then," Rankin told
us after we'd all filed in, "this is the way we'll proceed: I'll put Mary
on the witness stand first. I'll want to establish Miss Greenleaf's periodic
breakdowns fairly early. Judge Compson's probably been going over Dr. Fallon's
testimony in her mind since yester-day afternoon. Mary's testimony should help
to confirm most of what Dr. Fallon said, and to keep the word ‘psychosis' out in plain sight. Then I'll call each of you in
turn. We'll start with James. Let's use that magnificent voice to our
advantage. I'll want you to give Judge Compson an overall background of your
housemates, James. Let's establish the fact that this is no ordinary student
group-you aren't any run-of-the-mill collection of party animals."
"I
can deal with that," James rumbled.
"Good. Then I'll move on to
Patricia and establish her connection
to our law firm. From Patricia, we'll go to Erika and her medical school
status-just the term ‘med school' makes people sit up and take notice. After
Erika, I'll call Charlie. We'll briefly touch on the periodic meetings with
Sergeant West. We don't want to get Sergeant West in trouble, but I'll need to
show some connection between him and the boardinghouse group. You've had
certain information that wasn't available to the general public, and I need to
be able to show Judge Compson how you came by it. All
right?"
"Just as long as you don't get
my big brother all steamed up," Charlie said. "He'll kick my butt if
we push it too far."
"I'll
be careful," Rankin promised him. "From Charlie, we'll move on to
Sylvia
and her case history" He looked at Sylvia then. "You did bring those
tapes as I asked, didn't you?"
She patted her oversize purse.
"They're right here, Mr. Rankin," she replied.
"Good.
We may not need them today, but let's have them handy, just in case. I'll
probably be asking you questions in greater detail than your friends, since
your case history's fairly crucial."
She
smiled faintly. "Thank you," she said.
He inclined his head in an almost
courtly bow. This guy had a lot of class.
"Now, then," he
continued, "I can't be sure how far Mr. Fielding will go with his
cross-examinations, but I'm hoping that we finish up with Sylvia's testimony by
the noon recess. That should give me the entire afternoon for Mark's testimony.
We want Judge Compson to have the whole thing before she adjourns this
afternoon. Loose ends are distracting, so let's give her all she needs today so
she can get on with her job." He glanced at his watch. "We'd better
get upstairs," he said. "Judge Compson's big on punctuality, so let's
not offend her."
When
we trooped into the courtroom, Fielding was already there. Bob West wasn't with
him, but Burpee was still camped in his back pocket, obviously not the least
bit happy about this sanity hearing-and Judge Compson's gag order was driving
him right up the wall.
We
went through the "all rise" routine, and the
judge came in and took her place at the bench. She looked fairly tired. I'm
just guessing, but I'd say that Fallon's testimony had bothered her almost as
much as it'd bothered me.
"You may call your next
witness, Mr. Rankin," she said.
"The defense calls Officer
Mary Greenleaf," Rankin said. Judge Compson's head came up sharply at
that.
Mary
came forward and took the oath, then she took her seat
on the witness stand.
"You are a member of the
Seattle Police Department, is that correct, Officer Greenleaf?"
"Yes,
sir," Mary replied.
"And you are related to Miss
Renata Greenleaf, is that correct?”
“Yes, sir. She's my
niece. Her father's my brother."
"After Miss Greenleaf had been
released from Dr. Fallon's sanitarium, she came to live with you, is that also
correct?"
"Yes,
sir. She wanted to attend classes at the university, and I live
in the
"Now then, previous testimony
has established the fact that Miss Greenleaf periodically exhibited some
peculiar behavior, is that also correct?"
"Definitely,
Mr. Rankin. Whenever I mentioned those incidents, I glossed over them by
calling them ‘bad days,' but they usually went way past ‘bad.' I didn't want to
start using terms like ‘whacko' or ‘honkers' or ‘screwball,' so I just said ‘bad
days' and let it go at that."
"Could
you describe these incidents for the court?"
"She'd do a lot of moaning and
screaming, and she'd say things that didn't make much sense-things
about wolves howling, blood, and cold water. Then she'd stop speaking English
and switch over to a language that nobody else could understand."
"And
what was your usual response to these incidents?"
"I'd knock her out with a
sleeping pill," Mary replied bluntly. "I've been a police officer for
quite a few years, Mr. Rankin, and I've had a lot of experience with people who
suddenly go into hysterics. We don't let that go on for too long. We don't want
the subject to hurt himself-or anybody else-so we just tap him out with a
pill."
"Excuse me," Judge
Compson interrupted. "Is that strictly legal, Officer Greenleaf?"
"Probably not, Your
Honor," Mary admitted, "but when a subject-or a
prisoner-goes into hysterics, those of us who are on the scene have to
take immediate steps. We don't have time to wait for court orders or any of the
other niceties of the legal system. The alternative would be to club the
subject into submission, and that seems a little extreme, wouldn't you say?”
“You get right to the point,
Officer," Judge Compson observed.
"It
saves time, Your Honor, and in these situations we don't usually have much time. A pill's a lot kinder
than a rap on the head with a club."
"I
see your point," the judge conceded. "How long did your niece usually
remain comatose after you'd sedated her?"
"Usually until the following
morning, Your Honor," Mary replied, "and when she woke up the next
day, she'd seem perfectly normal. I'm fairly certain that she'd sleep the clock
around after I'd sedated her, but I work the graveyard shift, so I wasn't
always around to keep an eye on her."
"You
may proceed, Mr. Rankin," the judge said then.
"I believe you ladies have
already covered everything, Your Honor. I guess I'm just taking up space
here."
"It
wouldn't be the same without you, Mr. Rankin," Judge Compson told him
sweetly.
"No further questions, Your
Honor," he said with a smile. "Splendid. Your
witness, Mr. Fielding."
"No questions, Your
Honor," Fielding said. He may have been a bit green, but he knew when to
keep his mouth shut.
"The
defense calls Mr. James Forester," Rankin said.
James
was sworn in and took the seat in the witness stand.
"Are you acquainted with Miss
Greenleaf, Mr. Forester?" Rankin asked him.
"We've met, Mr. Rankin. One of
the residents at the boardinghouse where I'm staying is Mr. Mark Austin, who
probably knows her better than anyone in
"Our housemates are all
graduate students in a wide range of disciplines: law school, medical school,
advanced psychology, and engineering, as well as Mr. Austin's major
field-English-and my home base in philosophy. We're a bit more mature than the
underclassmen whose primary interest lies in parties. Miss Greenleaf's paper
struck sparks in our minds, and we all agreed that we'd like to meet this
strange and gifted child. We asked Mark to invite her to dinner one evening.
She agreed, and we found her to be thoroughly engaging. After that, we all
followed her progress-particularly when Miss Cardinale, who majors in abnormal
psychology, undertook a case history of Miss Greenleaf. We followed that
unfortunate young woman's ups and downs, and her recent mental disintegration
struck us all as something akin to a death in the family." James paused
then. "These proceedings and the evidence that prompted them have elevated
our sense of loss to the level of Greek tragedy," he added. "The
Renata we knew would not have been
capable of these murders, but evidently there's another Renata, and she was
obviously driven by an overpowering lust for vengeance." He made a wry
face then. "That sounds pompous, doesn't it? True,
perhaps, but pompous all the same."
"It doesn't bother me all that
much, Mr. Forester," Rankin said. "No further questions, Your
Honor."
"Your witness, Mr.
Fielding," Judge Compson said. "No questions, Your Honor,"
Fielding replied.
Burpee glared at him, and he
appeared to be right on the verge of an explosion.
"Call your next witness, Mr.
Rankin," Judge Compson said, after James had left the stand.
"The
defense calls Miss Patricia Erdlund," Rankin said.
Trish
took the stand, and Rankin explained her connection to his law firm to the judge.
"In point of fact, Your Honor," he said, "it was largely at Miss
Erdlund's urging that I became involved in this case. As Mr. Forester has so
eloquently testified, the students who live in the Erdlund boarding-house are a
tight-knit group, and they have an abiding interest in Miss Greenleaf
"
"The
court recognizes that, Mr. Rankin. Proceed."
Trish verified Renata's impact on
our little family, and then she began citing precedents. Lawyers are big on
precedents, I guess. I noticed that judge Compson was taking lots of notes
while Trish was testifying.
Fielding had a few questions for
Trish, mostly involving her citations. Trish spoke fluent legalese, and she
impressed the heck out of both the judge and the prosecutor. She made a lot of
points for our side.
Judge Compson ordered a short
recess after Trish had stepped down, and when court reconvened, Mr. Rankin
called Erika to the stand. Then he pulled a quick shrewdie on her. "Would
you please tell the court how many classes you've taken from Dr. Yamada, Miss
Erdlund?" he asked her.
"Oops,"
Erika said mildly.
"Would you like to clarify ‘oops,'
Miss Erdlund?" he said with a faint smile.
"You caught me with my finger
in the cookie jar," she replied. "I do know Dr. Yamada quite well,
and I did suggest that he might want
to contact the Snohomish County Coroner's Office for a DNA sample taken from
the body of Renata's sister. It was only a suggestion, Mr. Rankin. It wasn't as
if I'd planted any false evidence or anything."
"It wasn't an accusation, Miss
Erdlund. It was just a loose end that I thought we should tie up. What prompted
you to make that suggestion?”
“It seemed logical, Mr. Rankin. The
business with that license plate suggested that there was additional evidence
available that could prove that Fergusson was indeed the murderer of
"I don't believe I'd care to
comment on that, Miss Erdlund," he replied blandly. "No further
questions."
"Your witness, Mr.
Fielding," the judge said.
"No questions, Your
Honor," he replied.
"The defense calls Mr. Charles
West," Rankin said after Erika had left the stand.
Charlie
was sworn in and took the stand.
"Would you please tell the
court of your relationship to the prosecution witness, Sergeant Robert
West?" Rankin asked.
Charlie shrugged. "He's my big
brother," he replied. "And would you describe your relationship as
very close?"
"We stay in touch," Charlie
said. "He yells at me when I forget to call our mother every so often. He
and I get together more often now than we did when I was still living in
Enumclaw."
"And
why did you move to
"I work for Boeing, and they
bullied me into going to graduate school.”
“And what is your specialty, Mr.
West?"
"I'm
not permitted to talk about that. It's classified."
"Where
did you and your brother customarily meet, Mr. West?"
"At
the Green Lantern Tavern in
"And did he reveal any other
information about the killings, Mr. West-things that weren't appearing in the
newspapers or on television?"
"I'm
not going to rat my brother out, Mr. Rankin. Let's say he gave us a couple of
warnings and let it go at that, OK?" Charlie's tone was almost
belligerent.
"I'll
withdraw the question, Mr. West," Rankin said.
I saw Burpee grab Fielding by the
arm, and the two of them appeared to be arguing about something. Burpee seemed
agitated, and Fielding was having trouble keeping him calmed down. It was
fairly obvious that Burpee was ready to go off the deep end, and Fielding's
frequent "no questions" response was driving him wild.
It was about eleven-thirty when
Charlie left the stand, and Judge Compson, Rankin, and Fielding had a brief
conference at the bench-probably about when we should recess for lunch. Rankin
really wanted to get Sylvia's testimony in before the noon break, and it
appeared that he'd persuaded judge Compson that he'd cover everything before
noon. I thought he might be rushing things, but he appeared to know what he was
doing, so I kept my mouth shut.
He
returned to the table, and then he said, "The defense calls Miss Sylvia
Cardinale," he announced.
Sylvia was sworn in and took the
stand, and Rankin established her identity and residence.
"You are a graduate student in
psychology at the
"Yes.
"And your field of interest is
abnormal psychology?"
"That's right.
"And you are acquainted with
Miss Renata Greenleaf and have under-taken a case history of her mental
problems as a possible subject for your master's thesis?"
"Yes."
"Would you please tell the
court what prompted you to undertake this project?"
"It was the paper she wrote
for Mr. Austin's class," Sylvia told him. "Mr. Forester described
that paper during his testimony. It was of particular interest to me, since it
gave me a glimpse into the perceptions of a patient at a mental institution.
Miss Greenleaf struck me as a highly intelligent and articulate young woman who
could provide insights that could be useful for those of us in the field. Many
patients have a severely limited ability to communicate with a therapist, which
makes it difficult to help them. It occurred to me that Renata could open doors
in ways an ordinary patient could not begin to do. Moreover, her disturbed
state originated in a trauma rather than a preexistent psychosis. It occurred to
me that a case history growing out of an extensive personal relationship might
suggest alternatives to standard therapy." Sylvia threw a quick, sly
glance in my direction. "I had a little trouble persuading Mr. Austin-he
tends to be protective when it comes to Renata. Our discussions were quite
lively, as I recall. Eventually, though, he came to realize that my case
history was not some experiment on a laboratory animal, so he introduced me to
Dr. Fallon. The doctor had some reservations until I advised him that my case
history would be based on tape recordings."
"You recorded every
conversation you had with Miss Greenleaf?" Rankin asked her.
"I
missed a few of the earlier ones," Sylvia admitted. "At first I was
simply taking notes, but as soon as Renata saw my notebook, she'd launch into
wild stories that had no connection to the truth. Once I switched to
recordings, though, Renata relaxed and talked freely."
"And you were able to record
her periodic lapses into raw psychosis?" Rankin asked her.
"Oh, yes," Sylvia
replied, "and those tapes still give me nightmares. Dr. Fallon has
explained the fugue state in clinical terms, but those tapes are raw fugue, and
they're terrifying. At first, we had no idea of what was causing them, but we
do now. Mark will explain what was happening, since he was the one who
ultimately tracked it down."
"Do
you have any of those fugue tapes with you, Miss Cardinale?" Rankin asked
then.
"Yes,
Mr. Rankin, I do."
"Is it your intention to play
the tapes in open court, Mr. Rankin?" Judge Compson asked.
"There
are two dozen tapes, Your Honor," he replied, "and they cover
something in excess of sixty hours. We can play them for Your Honor if you
wish, but. . ." He left it hanging.
"I see your point, Mr.
Rankin," she agreed. "I do want copies, but it wouldn't serve any
purpose to use this courtroom as an auditorium. Have you any further questions
for Miss Cardinale?"
Rankin glanced at his yellow legal
pad. "Ah-no, Your Honor," he replied.
"I think we've just about covered everything."
"Good.
Court stands adjourned until one-thirty this afternoon."
When we hit the cafeteria for
lunch, I was more than a little edgy, since it was obvious that Mr. Rankin
planned to hang most of his case on my testimony. As Charlie put it, "The
bases are loaded, Mark, and it's your turn at bat. Knock it out of the
park."
"I
don't suppose he'd settle for a foul tip?" I said sourly.
"That wouldn't hardly cut it,
partner. We need a home run to win the series."
"Quit, Charlie," Trish
scolded. "Mark, just relax and answer Mr. Rankin's questions. He knows the
story, so let him guide you. That's what he's getting paid for."
Somehow
that didn't make me feel much better.
We went back to the courtroom at
about one-fifteen, and Judge Compson resumed her seat on the bench at
one-thirty on the dot. Sylvia returned to the witness chair, but Fielding
didn't have any questions for her. His continual "No questions, Your Honor,"
had me worried-a prosecutor who just gives up on a case like this wouldn't keep
his job for very long. I was fairly certain that he had something up his sleeve.
"Call your next witness, Mr.
Rankin," the judge said. "The defense calls Mr. Mark Austin,"
Rankin announced.
"Here we go," I muttered.
I went up to the front of the courtroom, and the bailiff swore me in. Then I
sat down in the witness chair.
"You are Mr. Mark Austin, is
that correct?”
“Yes,
sir."
"And how long have you known
Miss Renata Greenleaf?”
“Since she
was born. Our families were very close."
"And
how old were you when the Greenleaf twins were born?"
"I was seven when they came
along. My folks and I spent quite a bit of our free time with the Greenleaf
family, and I became a sort of surrogate big brother to the twins. They used to
amuse themselves by switching personalities."
"Would
you clarify that for us, Mr. Austin?"
"When
people use the term ‘identical twins,' they usually mean ‘pretty close'-one
twin may be a quarter of an inch taller than the other, or have slightly larger
ears. Those minor variations make it possible to tell them apart.
"And
did you find that offensive, Mr. Austin?"
"No. They were the baby
sisters, and I was the big brother. Fixing things was part of my job, I
guess."
"And
what happened in the spring of 1995, Mr. Austin?"
"The
twins had grown up to be moderately gorgeous, and the boys at their high school
became very interested in them. Nobody could ever pry them apart, though, so
they managed to avoid the usual improprieties. In the spring of '95, the twins
were seniors in high school, and their class had a kegger party on a beach near
Mukilteo. By
Nobody was ever able to prove which
twin was which-we still don't know for certain."
"And
what happened to the surviving twin?" Rankin pressed.
"She was completely out of it,
so her parents put her in Dr. Fallon's private sanitarium at
"Let's go back a bit, Mr.
Austin," Rankin said. "Where were you living and how were you
occupied at that time?"
"I was in the graduate school
at the
"Then you were living in
"I was there when she started
speaking English again, if that's what you mean." I looked over at Renata,
who was still whispering to herself. "That was in November of '95. Up
until then, she'd been talking to herself in ‘twin,' the same as she's doing
now. When she finally came out of it, she didn't know who she was. Dr. Fallon
covered all that yesterday."
"She
remembered you, though, didn't she, Mr. Austin?"
"Yes, and nobody could be sure
why. This is just a hunch, but I think she recognized me because she still
thought of me as ‘Mr. Fix-it.' She knew she needed help, and I got elected.
Whatever the reason, Dr. Fallon latched on to it-and me-and I spent a lot of
time with Renata after that. When I got off work I'd go spend the evenings with
her. That went on all through 1996, and she wasn't officially released until
the late spring of '97. That's when
the notion of attending the
"Objection, Your
Honor," Fielding protested. "That's pure speculation.”
“Overruled." Judge
Compson replied. "This is a sanity hearing, Mr. Fielding, not a trial. We
can relax a few rules if it'll help us get to the truth. Go
on, Mr. Austin."
"Yes, Your
Honor," I replied. "I moved into the boardinghouse last fall, so I
was close enough to keep a close eye on Renata. Our goal was to ease her back
into the world of normies, and since I was teaching a section of freshman
English, I suggested that she should audit my class. That'd minimize stress,
put a familiar face in front of her, and let me watch her for any peculiar
behavior. Since she was only auditing, all she had to do was sit there and
listen, but she wrote papers when my assignments caught her interest. She could
write circles around just about anybody who came along. If I'd had my head on
straight, I'd have known that something was seriously wrong with her when I
read her first paper-the one James described. After the boardinghouse gang
heard that one, they really wanted to
meet her. She came to dinner and charmed everybody's socks off. That's what
eventually led to Sylvia's case history and all those tapes."
"Approximately
when was it that you introduced Miss Greenleaf to your friends, Mr.
Austin?" Rankin asked.
I looked over at Trish. "About
the end of September, wasn't it?" I asked her.
She
nodded.
"Please
don't do that, Mr. Austin," Judge Compson scolded me.
"Sorry, Your
Honor. I just wanted to be sure I had it straight, is all. Any-way, it was after the second Seattle Slasher
killing. The killings were crop-ping up every couple of weeks, and whenever
some guy got cut to pieces, Renata would have one of those ‘bad days' Mary
mentioned this morning. None of us at the boardinghouse made the connection
because the whole town was convinced that the Slasher was a guy. It wasn't
until after Christmas that the police realized that the Slasher was female.
That's when a lot of things clicked into place for me. I started watching
Mary's house after she left for work, and sure enough, Renata went out on the
town fairly often. She'd finally asked Mary about that license plate she'd
engraved in her memory since the night when
"I
realize that, Mr. Austin," she said. "Please continue."
"I'm just guessing, but I
think Renata had finally decided to zero in on Fergusson himself-at least her
other personality did. If I correctly under-stand what ‘fugue' means, the
daytime Renata didn't have the faintest idea of what the nighttime Renata was
doing. To cut it short, I followed her several times, but she kept giving me
the slip. It wasn't until the night when she killed Fergusson that I finally
found out that she'd bought herself a car-using
"Anyway," I went on,
"I wasn't able to catch up to her, so she killed Fergusson, then waded out into the lake to wash off the blood. I wasn't
far behind, and I stopped briefly to take a look at Fergusson. He was obviously
dead, but his face seemed to be frozen into a look of absolute terror. I
obviously couldn't prove this, but at the time I got the strong impression that
when he saw Renata's face, he believed that his attacker was a girl he'd raped
and murdered in the spring of '95. That terror of his was the thing that made
the twins' revenge complete. Fergusson knew exactly why he was being butchered.
"Anyway, that's when the cops
showed up, and there were a lot of flash-lights sweeping around in the fog.
Renata saw them, so she kept on swimming until she got to
I realized that I was going to have
to be very careful here, so I paused to take a deep breath.
"Father
O'Donnell and I were near the altar," I continued, "and we could hear
her whispering to herself. I think she was talking with
"I'll
pretend I didn't hear that, Mr. Austin," Judge Compson said
disapprovingly. "Do you have any other witnesses, Mr. Rankin?"
"No, Your
Honor. I think I'll close my case right there. Mr. Austin's covered just about
everything."
"Your
witness, Mr. Fielding," Judge Compson said.
Fielding was staring at Renata, and
he looked almost as if he was ready to break down and cry-either out of
sympathy or because he knew for certain that he'd just lost the case. "No
questions, Your Honor," he said in a barely audible voice.
"I'll need copies of Miss
Greenleaf's freshman English papers and Miss Cardinale's case history-along
with those tapes."
"They'll
be in your hands by
"There's another tape you
might want to hear, Your Honor," I suggested. "Renata used to listen
to it for hours on end, and that moaning sound Officer Murray and the other
policemen heard on the night when Mr. Fergusson was killed was pretty much an
imitation of that tape. It involves a woman singing with a pack of
wolves."
"I believe I would like to
hear that tape. Thank you for mentioning it, Mr. Austin. Oh, you may step down,
by the way."
I
nodded and returned to my regular seat.
Judge Compson looked troubled.
"I'd like to remind everyone here that this matter is still strictly
confidential. If anyone here starts talking about what has transpired here,
I'll find him in contempt of court. I'll advise counsel when I reach my
decision. Court's adjourned."
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
I felt drained as we followed Mr.
Rankin out of the courtroom. I tried not to rehash my testimony in my mind. I
knew that would lead to end-less "wouldas, couldas, and shouldas"
that wouldn't accomplish much of anything-except to make me feel even worse
than I already did.
"Excellent job, Mark,"
Rankin told me. "You definitely gave judge Compson a lot to
consider."
"I hope so," I said.
"Do you think Renata's papers and Sylvia's tapes will be enough to
persuade the judge that we weren't trying to pull off some elaborate scam?
People don't like it when some rich kid gets off easy because the parents can
buy off whole bunches of witnesses."
"I don't believe Judge
Compson's very interested in public opinion, Mark," Rankin said. "She
bases her judgments on the facts, not on the evening news."
"At least we cut the ground
out from under Burpee," Mary said with a certain satisfaction.
"We
did that, all right," Charlie said with a wicked smirk. "There were a
couple of times there when I thought he was going to strangle Fielding.
Every time Fielding said ‘no
questions,' Burpee's blood pressure seemed to ratchet up a little higher."
"That was something I didn't
understand," Sylvia said then. "After Dr. Fallon's testimony,
Fielding seemed to lie down and play dead."
"The young fellow appears to
have a conscience," Rankin replied. "I think Miss Greenleaf's
behavior in the courtroom persuaded him that he was on the wrong side in this
case. He shows promise. My partners and I might just poach him from the
district attorney when this is over."
"What do you say we get out of
here?" I said then. "This place is starting to give me the
whim-whams."
"I already have copies of Miss
Greenleaf's papers and Sylvia's tapes," Rankin told us. "I will need
that tape you mentioned to the judge, though, Mark."
"I've got copies back at the
boardinghouse," I told him. "When we get home, I'll grab one and
bring it to you."
"Good,"
he said. "Let's not keep the judge waiting."
Word had evidently leaked out that
the sanity hearing was over, and the front yard of the boardinghouse was
swarming with reporters and TV cameras again. I'm not sure what they thought
they were going to get out of us-the gag order was still in force, so we
weren't allowed to say any-thing even if we'd wanted to.
We got out of the station wagon,
and James bulked up his shoulders again as he led the way toward the front
porch. The rest of us said interesting things to the reporters in assorted
languages they didn't understand. Then one shrill female reporter, apparently
acting on the assumption that her gender gave her certain privileges, grabbed
Erika by the arm, demanding answers.
That was a real mistake. Erika had
her key ring in her hand, and there was that cute little attachment in among
the keys. The pushy reporter fell back, choking and trying to cover her face as
Erika gave her a heavy dose of pepper spray at close range. Trish might have
used logic; and Sylvia would probably have fallen back on emotion; but Erika
relied on chemistry.
The rest of us followed her example
and did a quick draw with our key rings.
The reporters got the message
almost immediately, and they backed off. When we reached the porch, Erika took
it one step further. She smiled sweetly at nervous reporters. "This has
been absolutely lovely," she told them, "and we'll have to do it
again one of these days-real soon."
I
went upstairs and grabbed a copy of Renata's favorite tape. Then James,
Charlie, and I went back to the station wagon to ferry it downtown to Mr.
Rankin's office.
The
reporters had all left, for some reason.
At about
The incident out front had
brightened our day a bit, but at the supper table things got gloomy again.
"I'm almost certain that judge Compson will rule in our favor," Trish
told us. "Mr. Rankin presented a very good case, and Renata's behavior in
the courtroom demonstrated that she wasn't even aware of what was happening. I'm
positive that the prosecution will try to hold out for incarceration in an
institution for the criminally insane, but it'd make more sense if the judge
just returned Renata to Dr. Fallon's sanitarium. It's not a great solution, but
it's probably the best we can hope for.
"Maybe not, Trish," I
disagreed. I looked around at the rest of the gang. "This doesn't go any
further, right?" I said.
"What
are you up to now, Mark?" Sylvia demanded.
"It's not me, babe," I
said. "Father O'Donnell's got an alternative, and he's already put it in
motion. His bishop owes him a favor, and Father O called it in. He says there's
an obscure order of cloistered nuns who are dedicated to caring for older
sisters who've slid over the line into senility-or Alzheimer's, or whatever
else you want to call it. They'll also accept rich, usually elderly Catholic
ladies with the same problem. The nuns are gentle, and they spend a lot of time
tending to their charges-and their cloister's somewhere out in the boonies here
in western
"It would be better than Dr.
Fallon's place," Sylvia agreed.
" ‘Get thee to a
nunnery'?" Charlie asked.
"It beats hell out of the
alternatives," I said. "Anyway, Father O's bishop pulls a lot of
weight with some higher-ups in city government, and he's got them slipping
around making suggestions. I'm pretty sure that word of this has reached Judge
Compson by now."
"What's
the name of the order?" Sylvia asked me.
"Father
O would rather that I didn't mention it," I told her.
By the end of the week, it was
fairly clear that Judge Compson was taking her time. The delay was making me
very edgy-I really wanted to put an end to this.
"Calm down, Mark," Trish
told me at the supper table on Friday. "Judge Compson has to get all her
ducks in a row on this one. If she rules that Renata's mentally incompetent to
stand trial, the district attorney could very well appeal that ruling. She's
never had one of her rulings overturned, and she's probably digging precedents
out of every law book she can get her hands on and consulting with whole
platoons of psychiatrists to make sure that Renata won't suddenly ‘recover'
after a year or so. There were a number of cases several years back where the
defendant put on a good show and got off with a brief stay in a mental
institution and then walked away after a ‘miraculous' recovery. That's what
clouded up the insanity defense. A lot of people were getting away with murder,
and the appeals courts go over insanity rulings with a fine-toothed comb to
make sure that the presiding judge hasn't been hoodwinked."
"Come on, Trish," Charlie
protested. "Twinkie's at least as
crazy as the Son of Sam killer or that guy who used President Reagan for target
practice."
"I'm
sure judge Compson realizes that, Charlie," she said patiently, "but
she doesn't want some hard-line appeals court to overturn her decision. We
wouldn't want that either, would we?"
"Maybe you're right," he
conceded. "If she does rule in our favor, I'd be a whole lot happier if
her decision's cast in cement. Let's get Twinkie inside that convent and keep
her there."
"Doesn't that raise another
possibility?" James suggested. "If there's an appeal pending,
wouldn't Renata have to be available? They could keep her under guard in the
psych ward at the university medical center almost in-definitely while this
meanders its way through the court system, couldn't they? "
.
"In theory, I suppose they
could," Trish admitted. "Or they could transfer her to some other
facility." She frowned. "That might
have been Fielding's strategy right from the start. If they move her from
the
"I'm
glad I'm not a lawyer," Charlie said. "There's way too much
ifsy-andsy in the legal system for my taste. I like things to be simpler. When
I push the button on a rocket, it either takes off or explodes on the launching
pad. I know immediately if I've done everything right."
"'The mills of the gods grind slow, but exceeding
fine'," James quoted. "It appears that the mills of the legal system
grind even slower."
"Why
are you two picking on me?" Trish complained.
"We're
only teasing, Mama Trish," Charlie said with an impudent grin.
Now I had something else to worry about in addition to all
the roadblocks the prosecutor could throw in our way. It wasn't a very
enjoyable weekend. Then on Monday morning Trish got a phone call from Mr.
Rankin. She talked with him for a few minutes, then
came into the kitchen. "Today's the day," she told us. "Judge
Compson's made her decision, and she'll issue her ruling at
"Did
the judge give him any hints at all?" Sylvia asked. She sounded tense.
"Not Judge Compson,"
Trish replied. "She never tips
her hand." Then she grinned at us. "This afternoon's session will be
closed, the same as all the others have been, and the court record will be
sealed."
"Can
she get away with that?" Charlie asked.
"She can get away with almost
anything," Trish assured him. "Unless an appeals
court overrules her."
"Absolute dictatorship? Wow!"
"It comes close. The legal
system goes all the way back to the Dark Ages. Didn't you know that?"
"I
make a point of not getting tangled up in the legal system, Mama Trish,"
he replied.
"I
wonder why," Erika murmured.
We
went to the courthouse before
Mr. Rankin and Les Greenleaf joined
us at a quarter to one. "We're getting some help from city hall,"
Rankin told us. "It's pretty low-key, but there's been a fairly attractive
offer floating around for the past several days."
"The convent?" I suggested.
He blinked. "How did you find
out about that, Mark?" he demanded.
"I have me sources, dontcha
know," I replied with a fake Irish brogue.
"I should have guessed,"
he said ruefully. "Did you tell the others?”
“Not in any great detail," I
replied. "I was told to keep my mouth shut about the ins and outs. Do you
think Fielding will hold still for it?”
“Fielding will do what he's told to
do," Rankin said, "and I wouldn't be surprised if the district
attorney's been receiving phone calls from some high-ranking officials in city
and county government. Frankly, I'm a little baffled by all this
behind-the-scenes maneuvering. I'd give a lot to know what's set this all in
motion."
"You already know," I
told him. "I told you about it quite some time ago."
Rankin
was sharp-I could practically see his mind whirring back to the scene I'd
described-Regina and Renata together in the darkened church that night.
"You mean-?" He broke off.
"Exactly. Why don't we keep it to ourselves, though?
This is messy enough already. Let's not clutter it up with that."
"What
are you keeping tucked up under your armpit, Mark?" Charlie demanded.
"I've
been told-firmly-not to talk about it, old buddy. And I don't think you really
want to know. You won't sleep very well if you find out.”
“That bad?"
"It's
even worse, Charlie. It's making everybody who knows about it real
nervous."
"He's probably right,"
Rankin sided with me. "We don't want any word of this leaking out. One
hint of it will trigger news stories all over the known world. Why don't we
just leave it at that?"
Judge Compson entered the courtroom
at
The judge rapped her gavel more
firmly than usual. "It is the decision of this court that Miss Renata
Greenleaf is mentally incompetent to stand trial at this time," she
announced. "Moreover, the court record shall remain sealed until further
notice."
Fielding came to his feet.
"Exception, Your Honor," he protested.
"Exception noted," she
replied.
"May
the prosecution inquire as to what arrangements have been made for the
defendant's confinement?" Fielding pressed.
"No, Mr. Fielding, the
prosecution may not. The arrangements are still pending, and this court will not interfere-and neither will the
prosecution. Sit down, Mr. Fielding."
"You
can't just turn her loose!" Burpee exploded, coming to his feet.
"Remove
that person from this courtroom!" Judge Compson sharply instructed the
bailiffs. "And hold him until we adjourn."
"Yes,
Your Honor," the head bailiff replied.
There were three bailiffs in the
courtroom, and they homed in on Burpee with grim determination.
Judge
Compson's sealing of the court record caused a near explosion in the ranks of
the
The
Tuesday morning newspaper had two full pages of letters to the editor, most of
them bitching and complaining about this "unlawful violation" of
their right to drool and slobber about something that was really none of their
damned business in the first place.
Then,
along about
The
reporter seemed to be fairly excited, and then the camera panned to-guess
who?-dear old Lieutenant Burpee.
The
reporter briefly introduced him, and then Burpee started to read a prepared
statement in a wooden voice. He didn't read out loud very well, and after a
minute or so, he crumpled the pages he was reading, threw them to the ground,
and launched into a diatribe of shrill-voiced denunciation.
"This
has been one of the grossest miscarriages of justice in living memory!" he
declared. "Judge Compson is obviously one of those bleeding heart liberals
who turn cold-blooded murderers loose on society with absolutely no regard
whatsoever about public safety. Worse yet, the prosecuting attorney was obviously in on the scam. He didn't even bother to
question the witnesses, for Chrissake!"
A
brief shot of the reporter who was conducting the interview showed us a young
fellow on the verge of collapse. His look of stunned chagrin was almost
comical. Burpee had obviously caught him completely off guard.
Burpee
ignored him and plowed on. "This so-called sanity hearing was nothing more
than a cheap excuse to let some spoiled rich brat get off scot-free without
ever taking the case to trial. That Greenleaf chippy butchered nine law-abiding
citizens just for kicks. These were obviously thrill killings, and now the
murderer's going to get off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Well,
I'm not going to let them get away with it. I'm blowing the whistle on them
right here and now. There's been a lot of secret manipulation by a bunch of
crooked politicians to hush something up that's so rotten that it makes me want
to puke. They're trying to sneak this thrill killer off to some country-club nunnery
operated by a bunch of nuns who are on the take. If somebody offers those
so-called Sisters of Hope a big enough bribe, they'll set a female murderer up
in luxurious surroundings and wait on her hand and foot for the rest of her
life. That woman belongs in a prison-or at the very least in an institution for
the criminally insane. She should be locked up behind bars permanently, for
God's sake, but no, she'll get coddled and pampered instead. The criminal
justice system just fell apart!"
Burpee's
eyes were bulging, and he was obviously totally out of it. An-other quick shot
of the reporter showed him making desperate gestures at the camera, but
evidently the cameraman was either asleep, amused, or Burpee's diatribe had
caught him completely off guard and he'd frozen up.
Finally, somebody in the control
room woke up and switched to a commercial.
"I
wonder if Judge Compson's schedule's all filled up," Charlie said. "I
think it might be time for another sanity hearing."
"Maybe
after he gets out of jail," Trish amended. "When judge Compson hears
about this, she'll cite him for contempt of court."
"Aw,
gee," Charlie said. "What a shame."
"Meanwhile, you do realize
that he just told the whole world about the Sisters of Hope, don't you?"
James asked. "The mother superior's not going to be happy at all. She
could very well tell the bishop to forget the whole thing."
"Can
she do that?" Charlie demanded. "I thought the bishop was the
headman, and everybody's supposed to take orders from him."
"It
doesn't work that way, Charlie," Sylvia told him. "The various
religious orders have their own hierarchies. The bishop can't just issue orders
to the mother superior. He'd have to go through channels, and it could take
years to get a ruling. I'm not sure, but this might even have to be settled by
the
"I
think we might be in trouble," Erika said.
There was some late-breaking news
that afternoon that brightened up our day: As soon as Judge Compson heard about
Burpee's little performance, she'd cited him for contempt of court, and now he
was cooling his heels in jail. That made us all feel a
little bit better.
Charlie was grinning broadly at
breakfast on Saturday morning. "Well," he said, "old Burpee's
history. I called Bob last night, and he told me that old blabbermouth has been
suspended, and if Judge Compson ever lets him out of jail, he'll get booted off
the force. That fit of his yesterday really
up-set the higher-ups in the police department, and they're going to dump
him before he embarrasses the department any more."
“Aw,"
Erika said, "poor baby."
"Let's not start gloating
yet," Trish told us. "All of Burpee's blathering on camera might have
closed the door of the convent for Renata. If it turns out that way, Doctor
Fallon's sanitarium might be the best we can hope for.
"You always look on the dark
side of things, Trish," Erika complained. "You should really try to
lighten up."
Charlie had a meeting at Boeing
that evening. I was more or less marking time until the Twinkie matter was
settled once and for all, but life went on for the others.
It was about eight-thirty when
James rapped on my door. "Are you busy, Mark?" he asked.
I set the book I'd been reading
aside. "Not really," I said. "What's up?"
He came in and sat down.
"Something's been bothering me, and I thought maybe we could talk it
out."
"Sure,"
I replied. "What's the problem?"
"As I understood your
testimony, the decision to call the surviving twin ‘Renata' after the murder up
in Everett in '95 was pretty arbitrary, wasn't it?"
I
shrugged. "It sort of fit, that's all. Nobody
could tell the twins apart, so all we had to go on was the dominance of
"It all comes down to ‘usually,'
then, doesn't it?”
“Where are we going with
this?" I asked him.
"It
seems to me that ‘usually' is pretty shaky ground to base a decision like that
on. We've been operating on the notion that Renata's undergoing a personality
change before she goes hunting. She somehow turns herself into
I
nodded. "Okay, but it doesn't fit their personalities, James," I
protested. "
"Aren't
you assuming that the twins weren't switching dominance back and forth the same
way they switched hair ribbons? Were they ever really separate enough actually
to have individual identities? You told us that they almost never used the
words ‘you' and ‘me.' All they said was ‘we.' Was there ever a real
"Why are you doing this to me,
James?" I demanded. "What set you off on this?"
"Complication,
Mark. In my field, we're supposed to look for the simplest answer. All of this ‘fugue' or ‘multiple personality' business steps around
the possibility of a much simpler answer. If the twins didn't have
separate identities, it doesn't matter which
one was killed, does it? Stay with me here. The surviving Twinkie was
shocked into a psychotic state by her sister's murder, right?"
"That
much is pretty certain," I admitted.
"Then she spent six months in
Fallon's sanitarium talking to herself, right?"
"You're
being obvious, James."
"Simple answers usually are obvious. She wasn't in solitary
confinement during that period, was she? That first paper she wrote for your
class suggests that she was aware of her surroundings and of her fellow
inmates, right?"
"Well,
probably, yes."
"Wouldn't that have given the
twins six months to develop their game plan?"
"There's
just one of her now, James," I protested.
"I'm not so sure," he
disagreed, "and if you think about it a little, I don't think you will be,
either."
"Are you saying that this has
all been a put-up job? You seem to think that Twinkie-whichever one she is-has
been faking insanity right from the start."
"I didn't say faking, Mark. The surviving Twinkie is
profoundly disturbed-incurably disturbed, probably. ‘Insane'
doesn't mean ‘stupid,' though. Twinkie-whoever she is-has been cleverly
manipulating all of us in order to get what she wants-revenge." He made a
sour face. "I don't really think ‘revenge' is the right word. I think ‘self-defense'
would come a lot closer. Fergusson attacked her, and then she struck
back."
"After
three years?" I demanded
incredulously.
"Would elapsed time have any
meaning for her? I think she might be living in the perpetual ‘now.' "
"That's
crazy," I objected.
"Interesting choice of words,
Mark," he said slyly. "We've all been assuming that sometimes
Twinkie's a normie, and other times she's a loon. It's simpler and more logical
to believe that she's insane all the time, isn't it? Just because she's faked
us all out doesn't put her into the normie column, does it? I'm almost positive
that we'll never really know for sure which twin was murdered or which twin
survived, because as far as they're concerned, there isn't any difference. In a
certain sense, they were both murdered,
but they both survived. Life's
simpler for them now, though. They don't have twenty fingers any more-just
ten."
"Why did she keep having those
‘bad days' after she carved out some guy's tripes, then?" I demanded.
"Just
how bad were they, Mark?"
"Pretty
damn bad. Haven't you heard Sylvia's tapes?"
"They were dramatic,
certainly," he agreed, "but didn't they seem a trifle
overdramatic?"
"You mean that she was laying
a foundation for this insanity defense right from the start?"
"I didn't say that. Isn't it
possible that she was bent on establishing her helplessness, her vulnerability?
In a certain sense those episodes were analogous to the pose she'd assume when
she was out hunting. She tricked us as much as she tricked her assorted
victims. She tricked us with imitation psychosis, and she tricked them with curare. The result was the
same-paralysis. Her victims couldn't do anything, and neither could we."
He paused. "I'm obviously playing devil's advocate here, Mark," he
said apologetically, "but I think it's a possibility that we shouldn't
overlook. The 'twin-game' the girls played all through their childhood would
have given them lots of practice. I'm not going to mention this to anybody
else, but I thought that you, of all people, should be aware that this is a
distinct possibility. No matter which twin survived, she's been damaged beyond
repair, and the cloister's ultimately the best solution."
"It's the best one for
Twinkie, that's for sure. But after what you just unloaded on me, I might need
some place to get my head on straight too, and I'm fairly sure the nuns
wouldn't accept my application."
"You're a nice guy,
Mark," he said, grinning. "Maybe they'll bend a few rules for
you."
"Thanks a bunch," I said
sourly. "Aw, forget it, good buddy."
Mr.
Rankin called Trish on Monday morning, and she came back into the kitchen with
a troubled expression on her face. "Judge Compson's going to announce her
final decision this afternoon," she told us. "I don't think we're
going to like it very much, but we'd probably better be there."
Maybe it was just me, but that
morning seemed to drag on forever. It was raining and blustery outside and that
seemed to make things worse. We didn't talk much on our way downtown to the
courthouse. What was there to say?
I was surprised to see Father
O'Donnell in the courtroom with Les Greenleaf when we entered. He gave me a
quick grin, and then he winked at me.
What
was that all about?
Then the two attendants brought
Renata-assuming that she really was Renata-into the courtroom. She was still
murmuring to herself and wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention to
anybody else in the room.
At
"You may be seated," she
told us. "This won't take us very long." Then she paused. "This
case has troubled me greatly from the very beginning," she told us all.
"I can only hope that I've made the right decision. It's been obvious that
the defendant is not even aware of her surroundings and that she's profoundly
disturbed. This being the case, my judgment of her in-competence was obviously
the correct one. The final disposition, however, was not quite so simple. Miss
Greenleaf is beyond punishment, obviously. She must be placed somewhere where
she can receive custodial care and attention of a sort that goes somewhat
beyond the capabilities of an ordinary mental institution. It is, therefore,
the judgment of this court that Miss Renata Greenleaf shall be placed in the
care of a religious order of her faith for the balance of her life." Then
judge Compson rapped down her gavel. "This court stands adjourned,"
she declared.
That really jolted me. How was she going to force the sisters to take
Renata in if they didn't want to?
Something strange was going on here, and I was fairly certain that I knew who
might be able to explain it.
As soon as the judge left the
courtroom I zeroed in on Father O'Donnell. "You've been pulling some
strings again, haven't you, Father?" I demanded.
"Oh, I wouldn't go quite that far, Mark,' he said. "The mother superior of the Sisters of Hope needed
just a wee bit of information, that's all, so I gave it to her."
"You told her?" I
exclaimed. "I thought your bishop ordered you to keep your mouth shut
about it."
"He
was talking about outside the family, Mark. The mother superior and I are old
friends, so I was almost obliged to let her know about something that
significant. It helped her to make the right decision."
"You guys play by a
complicated set of rules, don't you, Father?" I accused him.
"It's
OK as long as it gets the job done, Mark," he said smugly. "I have it
on the very highest authority that everything's fine and dandy now, dontcha
know."
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
The
press release Judge Compson issued that afternoon was very terse, and it made
no mention of a religious order. That left the news media high and dry. There
wasn't going to be a trial or much of anything else for them to babble about.
Burpee was still in jail for contempt of court, and nobody else involved would
answer any questions.
The
reporters didn't think that was very nice at all.
To make things even worse for them,
Renata was transferred from the university medical center to Doc Fallon's
sanitarium that same evening, before the reporters even knew what was going on.
She was still technically being held in custody, but Fallon was now her
custodian. The idea was to give the impression that Fallon's institution was
going to be her final home. Then things would have time to cool off before she
was quietly transferred to the cloister.
It looked good on paper, but we
started running into snags almost immediately. Some blabbermouth at the medical
center told a reporter about the transfer the following morning, and a dozen or
so reporters showed up at Doc Fallon's gate. The guard wouldn't let them into
the courtyard, of course, but they camped outside and didn't show any signs
that they planned to leave at any time in the near future.
Fallon conferred with Les Greenleaf
by phone, and on Wednesday morning several burly and unfriendly security guards
showed up. They informed the reporters in no uncertain terms that they were
trespassing on private property, and that they'd better get the hell off the
grounds. The reporters sullenly retreated back down the driveway and
reestablished their camp at the side of the public road beyond the sanitarium
grounds-where they tried to stop every car that was entering or leaving.
Fallon
told his entire staff that he'd fire anybody who talked to a reporter about anything-even
the weather.
The reporters were still clustered
around the entrance to the driveway, though, so Doc Fallon took the next
logical step. One of his golf buddies was a
There was a lot of screaming about
that, and several reporters, claiming "freedom of the press,"
deliberately ignored the order. They ended up in jail for contempt of court.
The
whole thing was starting to turn into a comedy-or even a farce.
I didn't laugh very much, though.
By Friday of that week, it was obvious that waiting the reporters out was going
to take longer than any of us had anticipated. Father O'Donnell advised us that
the mother superior of the Sisters of Hope was having second thoughts about the
whole thing.
We'd hit the quarter break at the
university, and I probably should have enrolled in a couple of seminars, but as
long as this other thing was still hanging fire, I knew that there'd be no way
that I could concentrate, so I took a pass for now. That gave me all kinds of
time to worry about the possibility James had raised. "Either/Or" suddenly became very significant for me. It
probably wouldn't have made much difference in the final outcome.
Twinkie-whichever one she was-would be quietly transferred to the cloister, and
that'd be the end of it. Still-
Spring
quarter classes were scheduled to begin on the sixth of April, and the rest of
the gang was busy with registering, buying textbooks, and all the other
minutiae that clutter up registration week. Oddly enough, though, we didn't see
much of Charlie. Knowing him as well as we did, we were all fairly sure that he
was "up to something." Charlie had almost made a career out of being "up
to something."
He showed up on the Sunday before
classes began, and Trish immediately climbed all over him. "Where have you
been, Charlie?" she demanded, "and what have you been doing?"
"Just working, Mama
Trish," he replied, faking wide-eyed innocence.
"Here we go again," Erika
said. "Give up, Charlie. We're not going to let up on you until you come
clean. You should know that by now."
"You guys are taking the fun
out of this," he complained.
"Fun-schmun, Charlie,"
Erika said bluntly. "Talk.”
“Well-" he said, "we seem
to have this little problem with Twinkie.”
“No kidding," I said dryly.
"What a brilliant observation."
"All right," Charlie gave
up. "Our problem has to do with logistics. Twinkie's at point A-Fallon's
nuthouse-and we've got to move her to point B-the cloister."
"All
right," James agreed. "That's fairly specific."
"The main problem is the pack
of newshounds camped on Fallon's front door, right?"
"You're going to round them
all up and put them in the dog pound?" Erika suggested.
"That's a slick idea," he
said, "if we could get away with it. The pound would hold them for seven
days, then put them to sleep."
"I
could live with that," I said darkly.
"So could I, but we'd probably
get yelled at if we tried it. I've been working on something that might just pull
it off without too many fatalities." Charlie frowned slightly. "I'm
not too clear on a couple of technicalities, though." He looked at Trish.
"Maybe Rankin could give us an OK, but I've got a hunch that maybe we
ought to clear it with Judge Compson before we jump in with both feet. My game
plan has a couple things involved that might be technically illegal, so let's
not rock the boat if we don't have to."
"I'll
speak with Mr. Rankin," Trish told him.
"That's it? You're not going
to give us anything more specific?" Sylvia objected.
"I'm
still working on a couple things, sweet cakes," he said. "Give me
some time to get it all down pat before I spread it out for you guys.”
“Sweet
cakes?" she said archly.
"It's an expression," he
replied defensively. "I'm not breaking any rules-yet."
"Don't
even think about it," Trish told him flatly.
It
took Mr. Rankin a couple of days to set up an appointment with Judge Compson,
and he finally passed the word that she wanted to see us in her office at the
courthouse at seven-thirty on the evening of Tuesday, the seventh of April.
I
went to the phone in the living room to check in with Les Greenleaf.
"Charlie isn't talking, boss," I told him, "but he's got
something cooking that might get those damned reporters off our tails. If I
know Charlie, it's probably fairly complicated, and we might have trouble
sneaking it past judge Compson. Is the mother superior still willing to go
along with this?"
"Only
if we can guarantee the security of the cloister, Mark," he told me.
"That's her major concern. If you and your friends show up at the gate
with a dozen reporters hot on your trail, she won't open the gates."
"That's
what Charlie's working on, I think. I'm sure he's got some sort of scam cooked
up that'll confuse hell out of those reporters."
"I certainly hope so.”
“How's Inga doing?"
"Not
good, Mark," he told me sadly. "Her doctor's got her on some
heavy-duty tranquilizers. I think it's going to take her a long time to come
out of this."
"She's
not alone there, boss. I doubt I'll ever get
over it."
"We've lost both of my girls,
haven't we?" he said then, and there were tears in his voice.
What the hell could I say? I
stepped around it. "Do you want to sit in, boss?" I asked him.
"Judge Compson might want to ask you a few questions."
"You're
right, Mark," he agreed. "I guess I'd better be there."
I tried to work on my Hemingway
paper, to clear one of my incompletes from winter quarter, but I couldn't
concentrate, so I put it aside so that I could worry full-time. Every time I
turned around, "Either/Or" kept hitting me
in the face.
Charlie still wasn't talking, and
that irritated the hell out of me. I wasn't in the mood for fun and games.
Tuesday rolled
around-eventually-and by then we were all wired up pretty tight. Even now,
Twinkie was at the center of our attention. The girls were waspish with Charlie
at supper, but he still refused to give us any details.
"Let's take the station wagon
again," James suggested after supper. "It's sort of the official
vehicle by now, and after Erika's little demonstration with pepper spray, every
reporter in King County knows that we're loaded for bear."
"Thou shalt not look, neither
shall ye touch-lest ye die," Erika announced.
"That'd make a great bumper
sticker, wouldn't it?" Charlie said with a certain enthusiasm.
Erika
shrugged. "It gets right to the point," she said.
The walls of Judge Compson's office
were lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves and law books. Lawyers and
judges don't have to spend much money on wallpaper, that's for sure.
Mr. Rankin, Les Greenleaf, and Mary
were already there when we arrived, and Bob West showed up before we even got
seated. "What are you up to now, kid?" he asked Charlie.
"Sit tight, Bob," Charlie
replied. "I want to dump it on everybody at the same time, so I won't have
to keep repeating myself."
"It better be good," Bob
told him. "Trust me."
"Oh, sure." Bob's voice dripped with
sarcasm.
"Is everyone here now?"
Judge Compson asked us. She wasn't wearing her black robe, and she looked
almost motherly in her print dress.
Mr.
Rankin looked around. "I think that's everybody, Alice," he said
familiarly, "unless you think Mr. Fielding should sit in?"
"I
think we can get along without him for now, John," she replied. "If
there's anything you think he ought to know about, you can pass it on to him
later." She looked around at the rest of us. "This is an unofficial
meeting," she said. "I'm here to listen-and possibly to pass along
some advice. Go ahead, John."
"Bob
West's younger brother wanted to bounce an idea off you, Alice," Rankin
said. "He hasn't given any of us the details, so we're as much in the dark
as you are."
"It's
in your court, then, Mr. West," the judge told Charlie. "Fire away.”
“Yes,
ma'am," he said, grinning at her colloquialism. "I've been kicking
this idea around since you handed down your decision. I think I've plugged up all the holes, but if anybody spots something
I've missed, let me know. What this all boils down to is a security problem. We
need to transfer Twinkie from Doc Fallon's loony bin to that cloister, without
picking up a convoy of reporters along the way. Is that pretty much the
problem?"
"Yes,"
the judge said. "If by ‘Twinkie,' you're referring to Miss Green-leaf. So
what's your solution, Mr. West?"
"Right
at first, I thought that maybe a helicopter might be the best way to go,"
Charlie replied, "but then I remembered that a couple of the TV stations
have helicopters of their own. They might not be right there on the scene, but
I didn't want to take any chances. We're probably going to have to stay on the
ground, and that means that we'll need decoys. An un-marked delivery truck might work, but that's still a little
risky. We'll only have one shot at this, so we've got to get it right the first
time."
"I
think we all get your point, Mr. West," Rankin said.
"OK," Charlie said,
"let's say that along toward evening on some
rainy afternoon, five identical black limousines wheel into the courtyard of
Doc Fallon's place and stop there."
"Wouldn't
it be better if they came in after dark?" Bob asked.
Charlie shook his head. "No.
We want those reporters to see those
limos. That's part of the scam. A duck has to see the decoy before he'll land
on the pond where you and your shotgun are waiting. OK, we've got five
identical limos in the courtyard. Next we'll need five more or less identical
tall blond girls to be led out through the front door of the nuthouse. They can
all wear sweatshirts with the hoods pulled up but with a lock or two of blonde
hair showing, so that the long-range TV cameras can pick it up. Then each girl
gets into the backseat of a different limo. Are we OK so far?" He looked
around.
"I still think you should wait
until it gets dark," Bob told him. "The reporters will just split up
and follow every one of the limousines, won't they:”
.
"I sure hope so," Charlie
said. "OK, now we've got five limos with those tinted windows that make
sure that nobody can see inside. They drive out and scatter to the winds-one
goes toward Snohomish, one to
"I don't see where that's
going to make any difference, Charlie," James said.
"I'm coming to that,"
Charlie replied. "OK, now we've got five limos scattered all over the
place, with a gang of reporters trailing each one. The idea here is to get
those reporters away from any side roads or driveways. That way, they've got to stay on the road we want them to
be on."
"Right behind the limo that we
don't want them to be
following," Bob said. "Brilliant, kid.
You've got a mind as sharp as a pile of limp spaghetti.”
“I ain't done yet, big
brother," Charlie told him. "OK, we're in
"Maybe,"
Bob admitted. "What difference will that make?"
"This is where it gets
interesting," Charlie said with a smug grin. "We tell the cops
exactly which road each limo's going to follow-like before
"Would
that actually work, Sergeant West?" Judge Compson asked Bob.
"I
hate to admit it, Your Honor, but my kid brother's probably come up with the
best solution to the problem. That sobriety checkpoint idea of his is
brilliant. Nobody goes through one of those without stopping, and if he even
tries, he goes straight to jail."
"I
like it," the judge said with a sudden smile.
"I've
got another little gimmick in mind that'll add to the confusion, Your
Honor," Charlie added. "It's not some major violation, but it does
bend certain rules just a teensy-weensy little bit. It'll definitely confuse
hell out of the reporters, I can flat-out guarantee that."
"Maybe we'll leave the
logistical details to you, Mr.West," the judge said.
"It might be best," he
agreed. "Now, we'll need five official-looking nut-keepers."
"The term is ‘attendants,' Mr.
West," Doc Fallon said with a pained expression.
"Sorry, Doc," Charlie
apologized. "Anyway, I think that Miss Mary should suit up in those white
clothes so that she'll be the one in
the real Twinkle-mobile. Mark's going to be the driver, and Father O will have
to go along to give directions. Nobody, and I really mean nobody, will get any information out of those three. We'll keep Father O out of sight, because we don't
want anybody making any church connection. The decoy limos will each need a
fake Twinkle, a driver, and somebody wearing attendant clothes. Trish can be
one of our Twinkle decoys, and if we put a blond wig on Erika, she can be another.
We'll dress Sylvia in a white uniform to play attendant, and James and I can
drive two of the decoy limos. All we need now are two more drivers, another two
fake Twinkles, and three more attendants."
"You'll also need somebody to
foot the bill," James added. "This might be expensive."
"That's
my department, James," Les Greenleaf told him.
"I was hoping you'd see it
that way, Mr. Greenleaf," Charlie said. "Now, I've spent quite a bit
of this past week cruising around on all the roads that'll be involved, and
I've pretty well pinpointed the locations for those sobriety checks. Mark's
going to have to get in touch with Father O, and they'll decide where to set up
checkpoint number five-the important one. I talked with the guy who owns a
fleet of limos up in
"You have a gift for this sort
of thing, Mr. West," Judge Compson said. "Your scheme's
fairly elaborate, but if it works the way you've laid it out, I don't think any
reporter's going to be able to evade you."
"That was the whole idea, Your
Honor," Charlie replied. "We'll need a few practice runs to make sure
everybody knows what's going on, but one of us is going to be in each of those
limos, and we'll be calling the shots on the radio."
Judge
Compson looked at Rankin, then at Les Greenleaf. "What do you gentlemen
think?" she asked them.
"Let's
go for it," Les replied shortly.
"All
right, Charlie," Erika said when we got back down to the parking garage,
"What's this gimmick you didn't want to talk about?"
"Somehow I knew you'd be the
one who'd ask, Erika," Charlie said. "OK, I spent a few hours in one
of the shops at Boeing last Saturday evening, and I managed to counterfeit five
sets of license plates."
"What
on earth for?" she demanded.
"All five sets have the same
number, babe," he said with his trademark smirk. "Those five limos
are really going to be identical, and the reporters are going to discover that
there's this magical limousine out there that can be in five different places
all at the same time."
"It's
a miracle!" she said with feigned awe. "Let's run and tell the bishop
so that he can pass it on to the
"You're
an evil, evil person, Charlie," James said. And then we all began to
laugh.
CODA
Pavane
We spent the rest of that week and
the early part of the next one getting to know the back roads in
I
drove to Saint Benedict's Church about
"Are
you certain this is going to work, Mark?" Father O'Donnell asked me as we
went north on the interstate.
“It sure should, Father,” I said. “We’ve been
rehearsing for long enough to get all the details down pat. Everything ought
to come oft rigtit on schedule.”
“Well, we can always hope.”
He still sounded a bit dubious.
It was about a
"Check
out my phony license plates, Mark," Charlie said, pointing at the line of
limos with a certain pride.
The
counterfeit plates he'd cobbled together were neatly in place on each limo, and
they covered the real plates. As nearly as I could tell, they were
indistinguishable from genuine plates, and they all showed the same number.
"Nice
job, Charlie," I congratulated him. "Did you get your training in the
official license plate factory, maybe?"
"Not hardly," he replied.
"That one's in the state prison over at
"It's
only a matter of time, Charlie," James said in that deep voice. "Just
keep on bending rules, kid. You'll make it eventually."
"Very funny," Charlie
replied sarcastically. "When are we going to take off?" I asked him.
"Bob
says we should hit Fallon's bughouse at about six thirty-three," Charlie
said. "We've got a little time to play with when
we get there. The rush-hour traffic might delay us, but I built in a pad to
cover it. We can either move right along or stall-whichever it takes for us to
leave at
"Will
there still be light enough for Mark and me to find the turnoff to the
cloister?" Father O'Donnell asked him. "It isn't really marked.”
“That
part's OK," Charlie assured him, "but you might have to wait a while
after you turn Twinkie over to the nuns. We don't want you coming out of that
side road until after dark. Those back roads don't have very much traffic, so
you'll be able to see the headlights on the reporters' car if they're that
close behind you. That's the main reason for this Mickey Mouse time schedule.
We don't want any reporter to see you go in or come out. Once you guys are back
on the pavement, we're home free." Charlie looked at his watch. "I'd
better check in with Bob and let him know that we're all in place here,"
he said, slipping into the front seat of one of the limos. He picked up the
microphone.
"Are we sure that none of the
reporters will be listening in while we're radioing back and forth?"
Father O'Donnell asked me.
"There's not much chance of
that, Father," I replied. "We're using an oddball frequency, and even
if some reporter who's roaming up and down the dial happens to pick us up, he
won't realize what's going on. We're going to use chess moves as a code. My
official designation is ‘king's pawn,' and when I say, ‘king's pawn to king
four,' it'll mean that I've made my first turnoff. Later, when we come to the
roadblock at Verlot, I'll broadcast, ‘king's pawn to king six-check." If
the cops manage to stop the reporters, it's ‘checkmate,' and we've won the
game. Trish is queen, James is castle, Erika's bishop,
and Charlie's rook. If some reporter stumbles across our frequency, he'll think
he's listening to a couple of people playing a long-range game of chess."
"Oh,
that's clever," he said admiringly.
"Naturally. James and
Charlie play chess quite a bit, and they worked it out between them. The
boardinghouse gang's going to be manning all five radios, and we've got all the
moves memorized."
"What if something goes wrong
and a reporter evades that roadblock at Verlot?" the priest asked me.
I
shrugged. "We all turn around and go back to Doc Fallon's sanitarium. Then
we'll wait six months or so and try again-maybe with delivery trucks or
ambulances. You and I'll be calling the shots, and we won't take the cloister turnoff unless we're absolutely sure that
nobody's behind us."
We hauled out of the limousine
service garage at
We made the turnoff to Fallon's
place, and Bob's voice came crackling over the radio.
"Black king to castle three," he announced. Bob was monitoring the
reporters' frequency.
"The reporters have spotted
us," I translated for Father O'Donnell. "It was bound to happen, I
guess."
We all followed Charlie into the
courtyard and parked the limousines in a neat row, being careful to make sure
that none of the license plates were visible.
"Stay out of sight,
Father," I cautioned. "We don't want any reporter to find out that
you're here."
"Right,"
he agreed. "This is sort of exciting, isn't it?"
"Only if it works the way it's
supposed to." I slid out of the limo, and the five of us who were driving
went inside to Fallon's office.
Trish and Erika were both wearing
hooded sweatshirts, and Erika sported a blond wig that didn't look very good on
her. Two other tall blond girls were there as well; I recognized one as a nurse
who worked for Doc Fallon.
Mary and Sylvia were wearing those
standard white pants and shirts that sanitarium employees always seem to wear,
and the three other attendants weren't acting-they really were sanitarium
employees. When you get right down to it, Sylvia was sort of redundant: We only
needed five people to man the limo radios. We'd been smart enough not to
mention it to Sylvia, though. She had a real short fuse, and we sure didn't
want to light it. She'd be riding with James, who was probably best qualified
to keep her calm.
"Where's
Twinkie?" Charlie asked, looking around.
"She'll
be along in just a few moments," Dr. Fallon replied. "Have there been
any foul-ups so far? If we're going to have to scratch this, there's not much
point in getting her all dressed-up and ready to go. I don't think she'll get agitated, but let's not
take any chances if we don't have to. Is everything going the way it's supposed
to so far?"
"Yup," Charlie said.
"There's probably four or five long-range TV
cam-eras zeroed in on the courtyard right now. We made sure that they won't be
able to pick up the license plates, so everything's going just the way we want
it to." He checked his watch. "We've got nine minutes before we have
to take off."
"Did you get longer cords for
the microphones, Charlie?" Trish asked him. "Erika and I will be in
the backseats, you know."
"Got it covered," he
replied. "And everybody remember to step right along when we go out the
front door to the limos. We don't want to give those cameras more than thirty
seconds to home in on us. We'll let Mark, Mary, and Twinkie lead off. Let's get
them out of sight as quickly as we
can. Each of the other limos will have a driver, an attendant, and a Twinkie
look-alike inside. Let's keep those chess-move code sheets handy. You'll
confuse the hell out of Bob if you happen to call in a wrong move. If you're
talking about Snohomish and you use the chess move for
"Charlie," James said in
a pained tone, "we've already been through this several dozen times.
You're beating a dead horse."
"Well-"
Charlie said defensively.
I looked at my watch. "It's
getting close," I said tersely. "Let's crank it up.
Doc
Fallon nodded and pressed the buzzer on his intercom.
A couple
moments later one of the orderlies led Renata into the office. She was
still rambling on in twin-speak, and she didn't seem to even see any of us.
That's assuming that she really was Renata, of course. If, as James had
suggested, she just happened to be
Mary took her gently by the arm, then pulled up the hood of her grey sweatshirt to cover her
face, leaving only a bit of blond hair showing. The decoy girls all rearranged
their hoods to duplicate Renata as closely as they could.
"What
do you think, Mark?" Charlie asked me.
"It should be close
enough," I replied. "It's only about fifteen or twenty feet from the
front door to my limo. I should have Renata out of sight be-fore the cameras
can zoom in, and the rest of you won't be far behind. I don't think those
cameras will get much detail."
"Let's
hit the bricks, then," he said.
Mary and I hustled Renata out the
front door, and we had her stashed in the backseat with Mary beside her in under
fifteen seconds. You'd be surprised how fast you can move if you have to. I
kept my chauffeur's cap pulled down to hide my face and slid into the driver's
seat while the decoys all got into their limos and closed the doors.
Father O'Donnell was scrunched over
on the passenger's side of the front seat.
"You don't actually have to
crouch, Father," I told him. "These are one-way windows. We can see
out, but they can't see in."
"Oh," he said. "That
takes a bit of getting used to, doesn't it?”
“Rook to queen three,"
Charlie's voice came over the radio. "Knight's gambit acknowledged,"
Bob replied.
"That's our go-ahead," I
told Mary and Father O'Donnell. I checked the dashboard clock. "
Charlie's limo led the way out of
the courtyard, naturally, and the rest of us fell in behind him down the long
driveway to the public road.
"Rook to bishop five,"
Charlie reported to Bob, advising him that we'd left the grounds of the
sanitarium.
"Where
do we go from here?" Father O'Donnell asked me.
"Back to Cavalero's
Corner," I replied. "There's a half dozen highways that fan out from
there. That's where we scatter."
"Black
king to castle," Bob told us tersely.
"What's
that supposed to mean?" Farther O'Donnell asked.
"Bob's monitoring the
conversations of the reporters," I explained. "Evidently, they're
calling for backup. We've probably got reporters and TV camera crews homing in
on us. This is where we start juggling our positions. James is going to drop
back, and I'll pass him. Then Erika's car will pass both of us, and so on. One
or two of those reporters out there might have been hanging around the
courthouse during those hearings, so they might have recognized a couple of us
when we were out in plain sight back at the sanitarium. We'll keep changing
places in the line, so that they won't know which one of us is in which
car."
"Shrewd," Father
O'Donnell said. "That's Charlie for you," I replied.
"Black
queen to king's rook four," Trish announced from the rear of our convoy.
"We've got cars following
us," I translated. "Anytime one of us identifies the color of the
chess piece as black, it means that we're talking about the reporters. We're
starting to get down to the nitty-gritty."
"Have
there been any black knight gambits on the board yet?" Charlie called in.
"Not
so far," Bob answered. "I'll keep you advised."
"We must have caught them off
base," I told Mary and Father O’Donnell. "They haven't got any
helicopters up yet. Once we split up and scatter at Cavalero's Corner, I think
we're home free."
When we got down to the bottom of
the hill, we fanned out. I was in the middle of the pack, and I held back to
let Charlie and Erika get ahead of me. Then I turned right onto
"King's pawn to king
four," I called in to let Bob know that I'd made the turnoff. Then I
leaned back in my seat. "Check the road behind us, Mary,"
I said without taking my eyes off
the road. "See if we've got any company coming along."
She looked out the back window.
"It looks like we've still got three cars on our tail," she reported.
"No, wait a minute. One of them's a beat-up old pickup truck. Reporters
wouldn't be driving something like that, would they?"
"Probably not," I replied.
"Keep an eye on him, though. If he's a local, he might turn off onto a
side road."
"Will this road take us to
"The pickup just turned off,
Mark," Mary reported. "There are only two cars on us."
"Good. As long as we don't get
a chopper on our backs, we ought to be able to get clear."
"You worry too much," she
said. "This is old news by now, and it costs a lot of money to run a
chopper. No station manager in his right mind would cough up that much on the
off chance that he might get a thirty-second sound bite."
"I
hope you're right," I said.
"Queen
to bishop three," Trish reported.
"She's right on time," I
said, checking the dashboard clock. "She just took the Snohomish
cutoff"
The
chess moves came in rapid sequence for a while as everybody re-ported the
various turnoffs. If somebody out there was trying to follow the game on a
standard chessboard, he was probably pretty confused by now. We had a
six-player chess game, and we were making moves that were way off the board.
You almost never see "rook to queen nineteen" in a regular chess
game.
We were about a minute and a half
behind schedule when we reached
"After you pass Verlot, you'll
want to take the Darrington cutoff at Silverton, Mark," Father O'Donnell
told me. "Then you'd better slow down. We have to be absolutely certain
that nobody's following us."
"Right," I agreed.
"That's pretty rough country up there.”
“You're familiar with it?"
"My dad and I used to fish in
the south fork of the
"No," he replied.
"It looks just like any other Forest Service road. There's a gate about a
quarter of a mile in. It's kept locked, but I've got the key.
"Good. After we pass the
roadblock at Verlot, I'll stay off the radio. I don't think anybody's going to crack our code, but let's not take any
chances."
Just before we reached Verlot, I
saw three Highway Patrol cars parked at the side of the road. One of the
patrolmen waved me on through, and then I watched in the rearview mirror as two
of the patrol cars pulled out to block the road while the third one went down
the road to swing in behind the reporters.
"King's pawn to king
six," I reported. "Check." Behind us I saw the two press cars
screech to a halt as the Highway Patrolmen flagged them down.
"Checkmate!" I announced gleefully.
Four other checkmates followed in
rapid succession. I'm sure that there were unhappy reporters scattered all over
"Where are we supposed to go
after we drop Ren off at the cloister?" Mary asked from the backseat.
"We'll go on into Darrington
and then hook on back toward
"That's
a long night," she said.
"The
pay's pretty good, though," I replied.
I
drove up to Silverton, turned left, and crossed the bridge that spanned the
"About
three more miles," he replied. "You'd better slow down a bit. It's
not marked, and it's a little hard to see if you're going fast."
"Right,"
I said, backing off to about thirty miles an hour.
We crept along the narrow, two-lane
road as the sunset painted the western sky bright red.
Father
O'Donnell was peering intently through the windshield. "There it is,"
he told me, pointing on ahead.
It
was a narrow, badly rutted dirt road on the right-hand side, and it looked very
much like any one of a thousand or more Forest Service roads that run off among
the trees on the western slope of the
"Checkmates
cleared," Bob's voice came over the radio.
"Perfect," I said,
slowing down and turning onto the dirt road. "The Highway Patrol just now
turned the reporters loose. They're fifteen miles behind us, and it'll be dark
before long. Charlie's going to be impossible to live with for a while, but his
scam worked exactly the way it was sup-posed to."
"That's
what really matters, Mark," Mary said from the backseat. "Let him
brag about it if he wants to."
"How's
Renata doing?" I asked her.
"She
seems calm enough. I think she might have sensed something-not consciously,
maybe, but the fact that we're all very happy about the way this has turned out
might have seeped through to her."
If James had been anywhere close to
being right, the surviving twin was probably much more aware of what was
happening around her than she appeared to be. I devoutly wished that James had
kept his theory to himself. Every time I turned around, it seemed, I kept
coming face-to-face with the very disturbing possibility that it was
"There's the gate, Mark,"
Father O'Donnell told me. "Stop here and I'll go open it for you."
"Right," I said. I eased
to a stop, and he got out of the limo. He un-locked the gate and swung it open.
I drove through and stopped to wait while he closed and locked the gate, then
got back into the front seat. "How much farther?"
I asked him.
"About a half mile. Take it slow-the road's a
little rough."
I crept on through the woods at no
more than five miles an hour, and we finally came to what appeared to be a
turnaround-one of those end-of-the-road wide places.
"Stop here, Mark," the
father told me. "I'll go tell the mother superior that we're here."
"Right." I stopped the limo and
turned off the key.
Father O'Donnell got out and
crossed the muddy clearing to an opening in the woods that appeared to be one
of those hiking trails that wander around all over the
I glanced back. Mary was holding
Twinkie in her arms and rocking gently back and forth, with tears running down
her cheeks. This had been the best solution we'd been able to come up with, but
it still hit us all pretty hard. I tried my best to push the possibility James
had suggested out of my mind. It didn't really matter now which twin it was
that Mary was holding. Renata or
Twilight was beginning to seep out
of the woods, but it was still light enough that we could see.
Father
O'Donnell came back along the trail and motioned to us.
"Could you take her,
Mark?" Mary asked me. "I don't think I'm up to it." Her voice
was thick and sort of choked up.
"I'll
take care of it, Mary" I said. I got out and opened the back door.
"It's only me, Twinkie," I said gently. "We're almost there
now."
Twinkie
reached her arms out to me, and there seemed to be a faint flicker of
recognition in her eyes-almost a question.
I
probably could have led her along the trail that obviously led to the cloister.
But that didn't quite seem appropriate, so I picked her up and carried her
instead. She wrapped her arms around my neck as I crossed the muddy clearing,
and she murmured to me in twin, her face very close to mine. The soft, lisping
sibilance of the secret language brushed my cheek as I carried her toward
Father O'Donnell.
Together
we walked slowly along that trail. It was pretty dark back in under the trees,
but after about a hundred yards we came to another clearing, and there was the
cloister.
It
was a low grey building nestled in among the trees and surrounded by a wall. It
probably wasn't even visible from the air.
"Wait
here," Father O'Donnell told me. Then he crossed the clearing, following a
kind of gravel walkway toward a narrow gate in the wall. He pulled on a slender
brass chain at one side of the gate, and I heard the faint tinkling of a small
bell inside. After a moment, the gate opened, and there was a nun wearing the
traditional habit standing there.
There
was that peculiar twilight clarity in the clearing-that moment that comes just
before sunrise and just after sunset when everything seems to be sharply etched
on the surroundings, and there aren't any shadows.
I
set Renata down on the graveled walk, and then I wrapped my arms around her in
a brief embrace. "It's the best we can do, Twinkie," I told her
sadly. "At least you won't be alone anymore. Good-bye, then."
She
touched my face with her fingertips, and then she briefly kissed my cheek. Then
she said something to me in twin, and "Markie" came through very clearly.
She obviously recognized me, and that meant that she was to some degree aware
of what was happening.
Then
she turned and followed the walk in that steel grey, shadowless twilight toward
the gate and the waiting Father O'Donnell and the mother superior.
I could see very clearly, because
it wasn't dark yet, so I know with absolute certainty that I did see what
happened next. There was a kind of brief blur, and then Twinkie wasn't alone
anymore. There were two of them walking toward their sanctuary. They half
turned briefly to look back at me, and they were both smiling.
Father
O'Donnell crossed himself and stepped out of their way.
The mother superior held her arms
out to the twins and led them on inside.
And
then the gate closed.
Father O'Donnell had tears in his
eyes as he came back across the clearing to join me. Then he started back along
the trail toward the limousine. I was just about to join him, but something
lying on the walk caught my eye. There were two ribbons, one blue and one red,
lying there on the stones.
I
bent over and picked them up. They felt sort of warm, and they looked almost
brand-new, with no wrinkles or smudges. I wasn't really surprised.
I
tucked the ribbons into my pocket where they'd be safe. Then I turned back to
join Father O'Donnell and Mary in the limousine. Night was gently falling, and
we still had a long way to go before we could sleep.
ABOUT
THE AUTHORS
David Eddings published his first
novel, High Hunt, in 1973, before
turning to the field of fantasy and the series The Belgariad and The Malloreon.
Born in
Leigh Eddings has collaborated with
her husband for more than a dozen years.
David
and Leigh Eddings live in the Southwest.