Regina's Song

by David Eddings

  “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 ten o’clock is an emergency in some people’s minds. The neighborhood around a park is a quiet one, and screaming isn’t the sort of thing people are going to shrug off. There has to be some explanation, but I’m damned if I can pin it down.” He laughed then. “Old Burpee’s trying to sell the notion of ‘a vast, unsuspected dope cartel’ engaged in open warfare with Cheetah’s gang, but that won’t float. An operation like that would involve some very sophisticated professionals, and with the possible exception of Muñoz, these guys were third-rate street punks who probably weren’t smart enough to tie their own shoes.”

  “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 ‘Nam. She sort of agrees that Burpee’s a joke. She told me that he blew a chance to nail Cheetah by running his mouth at the wrong time.”

  “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 Seattle, but by then, Cheetah was long gone. Big-mouth Burpee damn near got himself kicked off the force for that—or at the very least, demoted back to wearing a uniform and driving around in a patrol car. He managed to wiggle out of it, but he got transferred to the north end, so now we have to listen to him and all his screwball ideas.”

  “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 midnight, and you don’t see too many girls strolling in the park at that time of night. For all we know, this guy will kill anything that moves when he’s out hunting. I’d suggest that you travel in packs until we nail him.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve gotta run,” he told us.

  “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 ‘Kubla 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 protégée’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 supposed 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—witho
ut 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 midnight before they decided to call it a day. I was camped out in the living room with Milton when they came down the hall.

  “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. “Hollywood doesn’t get too many things right, but that one hit the nail right on the head. There are a few people out there who aren’t single individuals. They’re two—or three—or even a dozen—totally separate and different people, and sometimes they aren’t even aware of the others. Jane doesn’t know that Suzy exists, and Mabel’s never heard of Barbara. They have different sets of friends, different interests, and sometimes even different apartments.”

  “I think you’re pushing that one just a bit, babe. Twink’s problem goes back to Regina’s murder, and there’s a good chance that she’ll never really face it. I say, if she can function, let’s leave her alone. As the saying goes, ‘if it ain’t busted, don’t fix it.’ ”

  “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.