Regina's Song

by David Eddings

  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 designed 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 P.E. 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 California. The coaches of those teams have a list of names they hand out to their tame dummies. It’s the ‘Don’t take no classes from these guys’ list. It’s an honor to have your name on that document.”

  “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 already 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 Forty-fifth Street to get us back to Wallingford.

  “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 five o’clock and actually got home in time for dinner.

  “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 pretending 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, yo
u do everything you possibly can to make her life easier, and you get all nervous if she does anything 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 housemates 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 Muñoz killing. They found the carcass along the shore of Green Lake in Woodland Park, only about a mile from here.”

  “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 Green River killer, and this region was Ted Bundy’s starting place. The Seattle Slasher, however, appears to be seeking male victims—at least so far.”

  “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 Olympia or Bellingham.”

  “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 smoo
th 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 Fort Knox the way we used 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 nobody’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 Milton all morning, concentrating on his “Areopagitica.” Milton was a Puritan down to his toenails, and censorship lies at the soul of the Puritan ethic. So why does Johnny Milton tell us to print any damn thing we want to, and let it stand or fall all by itself?

  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 Mount Sinai. I dove into my variation of “It ain’t necessarily so,” which might have gone over a little better if anybody in the class had ever heard of Porgy and Bess. Then I opened the door to formal logic. They got a bit wild-eyed when I mentioned the “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc” fallacy. There were a couple in the class who showed a few faint glimmers of grasping my point, and that’s always encouraging. Trying to teach a classroom of wall-to-wall dum-dums can be terribly depressing.