Regina’s Song. David Eddings

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

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

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

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

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

      “Audit?” Les sounded startled.

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

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

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

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

      “She’s a cop.”

      “A police officer? Really?”

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

      “How does she get along with Renata?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Mary sort of approved of that.

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

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

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

      I liked her: She was one heck of СКАЧАТЬ