“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 Everett, and I backed the truck up to the front porch. Then we hauled out my furniture and box after box of my books. Books aren’t quite as heavy as salt, but they come close. James and I were both sweating heavily by the time we finished up. “Now I see why you needed so much shelf space,” he observed.
“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 Regina and Renata and started being Twink and Twink.”
“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 footprints 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 upstairs 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 five o’clock rush.”
“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 nine o’clock, I went back to the motel and fell into bed. Moving really takes a lot out of you.
By noon on Sunday, I had my bed and desk set up and most of my clothes hung in the closet. Then I started putting books on the shelves. After an hour or so of unloading boxes and randomly shelving, I stopped and stood in the center of the room, glowering at my bookshelves. They were an absolute masterpiece of confusion. Hemi
ngway and Faulkner were jammed in cheek by jowl with Chaucer and Spenser, and Shakespeare was surrounded by Mark Twain, Longfellow, and Walt Whitman. “Bummer,” I muttered. I knew that if I didn’t organize the silly thing right from the start, it’d probably stay confused in perpetuity. Owning a book is very nice, but you have to be able to put your hands on it.
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 Austin was now complete and ready to hold off the forces of ignorance, absurd clothing, and bad music. With my help, God could defend the right—or the left, depending on His current political position.
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 Wallingford, and then I had to relocate myself as well: I got a place not far from her aunt’s. It’s a boardinghouse with a few grad students from departments scattered all across campus—but don’t worry, I’ll try to hold up our reputation.”
“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.
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.”
“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-bopper 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.
CHAPTER FOUR
James woke me at quarter after seven on Tuesday morning. “Breakfast,” he announced. “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 ticky-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 bedside 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 beli
eve 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 Seattle, so there are a lot of drunks out there in the brush. We had a powder-monkey who showed up in camp the summer I worked there who had the shakes so bad that he’d set the bunkhouse to trembling as soon as he came through the door—and this was a guy who worked with dynamite, for God’s sake! He drank up all the shaving lotion and hair tonic in camp by Wednesday, and then he caught the train back to Seattle. The camp was way back in the woods, so the train only came by three times a week—Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday—and that was the only way to get there.”
“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 Forest Service tells the loggers they have to be out of the woods by ten o’clock in the morning. Working in the dark with an eight-foot chain saw can get sort of exciting.”
“I imagine so,” James said. “Oh, by the way, Trish, Mark has a legal question he’d like to ask you.”
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