Regina's Song

by David Eddings

  “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 three o’clock that afternoon when Sylvia came home and read the note I’d Scotch-taped to her door. “Hey, up there,” she called up the stairs.

  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 Forest Park, it made a lot more sense than it had back in November. The “I’ve got blood all over me,” business might have been a reference to something that hadn’t shown up in the police reports, or in the local newspaper. When Twink had found Regina’s body, she might very well have tried to take her sister in her arms, and that would have definitely bloodied her up more than just a little. I still couldn’t make any sense out of the whimpers about how cold it was. If these bad days were in fact the result of the recurrent nightmare during which she relived the night of her sister’s murder, “cold” was way out of place. Regina had been murdered in late May, and it’s not cold in May. I stopped the tape.

  “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 Regina copied. The first time I ever heard it was last fall—right after Twink moved in with Mary. I gave her a call one evening, and I could hear this playing in the background. Her voice was kind of dreamy, and she told me not to pester her while her wolves were singing to her. Then she hung up on me. I’d almost forgotten about it until Twink started moaning about wolves howling. Doesn’t it seem a little odd that she listens to this over and over when she’s a normie, but starts carrying on about wolves howling when she’s all torqued out?”

  “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 Lake Stevens. Sylvia was trying to put the best face possible on the situation, but she was obviously very worried.

  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 Auburn, and it’s been there for quite a while—long enough, anyway, that the Pierce County coroner can’t come up with a precise date. The TV guys are all excited about it, but I don’t think the cops are going to get anything useful out of it. It’s a pretty stale body.”

  “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. Auburn’s quite a ways from here. We’ll see what he has to say this evening.”

  I fixed myself some sandwiches while Charlie ridiculed the assorted reporters 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 Chicago.”

  “I gather that curare showed up during the autopsy of the fellow they found in Auburn?” James said.

  “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 curare 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 Auburn yet?” I asked.

  “Larson,” Bob replied. “Samuel Larson. He was another small-timer—like a lot of the other ones the Slasher’s taken out. Most of his arrests were for shoplifting or illegal possession of drug paraphernalia. He was a suspect in a rape case in Tacoma a few years back, but that was before the public realized the DNA is even better than fingerprints when it comes to identifying people. The victim took a long hot bath before she reported the rape, and she couldn’t positively point the finger at Larson in the lineup, so the Tacoma cops didn’t have enough on him to take it to court.”

  “Rape or attempted rape shows up in the record of quite a few of these victims, doesn’t it?” James suggested.

  “It’s not particularly unusual, James,” Bob told him. “We’re dealing with a subculture here. Girls who hang out with petty criminals aren’t too bright to begin with, and the line between rape and consensual sex can be pretty blurred among those people. If the girl doesn’t scream or pull a knife, the guy—who’s usually about half-drunk or doped up—thinks she’s just being coy, so he doesn’t wait for anything like formal permission. Just about all of these small-timers have at least one rape or attempted rape on their police records.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve
got to run now,” he said, standing up. “Don’t forget what I told you guys. Keep the curare thing strictly to yourselves. It’s the only solid thing we’ve got to work with, so don’t screw it up for us.”

  I spent that weekend holed up with Hemingway. The writers of that period between the two world wars had some peculiar work habits. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story at a racetrack once, they say. And when Papa Hemingway lived in Paris during the 1920s, he’d go to a little bistro on a cobblestone street about six o’clock every morning and do his writing on a small table with a checkered tablecloth and wire-backed chairs. He’d keep at it for as long as the writing was going well, and he’d stop at a place in the story when he knew exactly what was coming next. He wrote several of the classics of twentieth-century short fiction there, using a small notebook that’d fit in his coat pocket and a stubby little pencil, quite probably sharpened with his knife. So much for the notion that you absolutely must have a computer if you want to write good fiction.

  I was still coming down from the quarter I’d spent with Milton, and I had to shift gears just a bit to move into Hemingway territory. The guys who’d been through the First World War were a somber bunch. The mind shudders from the horrors they’d faced in the trenches, and it seems that they all had to keep a tight grip on their emotions to avoid flying apart. Their writing was very visual—almost clinical—and emotions were understated. You can’t just skim the surface when you take on Hemingway. You have to get in there with him. I think that maybe the sixties seriously damaged American literature. That “spill your guts” approach doesn’t produce very good fiction.

  Since I wasn’t teaching during that quarter, I couldn’t keep a close eye on Twinkie the way I had during the fall quarter, so I had to rely on James and Sylvia to keep track of her for me. She was still “in the family,” so to speak, but she was about one step removed from where she’d been before, and that made me a little edgy. Both Sylvia and James were sharp, that goes without saying. But no matter how hard they tried, they’d never know her as well as I did. I could spot things they’d probably miss, and Twink would tell me things she’d never mention to either of them.

  “She keeps asking questions that I can’t answer,” James told us at the supper table on Tuesday. “Every so often we have arguments about the ethics of the criminal justice system and whether it really serves any purpose.”

  “Oh?” Trish asked.

  “She takes the position that X number of years in jail isn’t really a deterrent—if the criminal feels that he has a moral or ethical duty to commit the crime. Sometimes she almost sounds like a Mafioso—’if Luciano beats up on my buddy, I’ve got a moral obligation to blow his brains out,’ for example. The rule of law flies out the window at that point, and moral justification takes over.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Trish exclaimed.

  “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 Seattle hospital for observation. Sylvia told us that he probably belonged in a bughouse, but since he wasn’t really dangerous, he’d probably end up back out on the street again before very long.

  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 Montlake Park last night, and that’s only about two miles from here.”

  “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 Montlake Park?” I asked Charlie.

  “In the Montlake district, naturally. It’s just across Portage Bay from the campus—right in our own backyard.”

  “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 Seattle, and a couple of them came pretty damn close to catching our boy right in the act.”

  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 noon when I got back to the boardinghouse, and there was one of those yellow stick-up notes pasted to the door of my room. “I need to see you—James.” I set my briefcase inside my room and went down the hall to tap on James’s door. He opened it almost immediately.

  “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.
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br />   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.