Regina's Song

by David Eddings

  “Come on, Trish,” Charlie protested. “Twinkie’s at least as crazy as the Son of Sam killer or that guy who used President Reagan for target practice.”

  “I’m sure Judge Compson realizes that, Charlie,” she said patiently, “but she doesn’t want some hard-line appeals court to overturn her decision. We wouldn’t want that either, would we?”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he conceded. “If she does rule in our favor, I’d be a whole lot happier if her decision’s cast in cement. Let’s get Twinkie inside that convent and keep her there.”

  “Doesn’t that raise another possibility?” James suggested. “If there’s an appeal pending, wouldn’t Renata have to be available? They could keep her under guard in the psych ward at the university medical center almost indefinitely while this meanders its way through the court system, couldn’t they?”

  “In theory, I suppose they could,” Trish admitted. “Or they could transfer her to some other facility.” She frowned. “That might have been Fielding’s strategy right from the start. If they move her from the U.W. Medical Center to a state institution for the criminally insane, the prosecution could stall their appeal for years. That would be a de facto win for the prosecution.”

  “I’m glad I’m not a lawyer,” Charlie said. “There’s way too much ifsy-andsy in the legal system for my taste. I like things to be simpler. When I push the button on a rocket, it either takes off or explodes on the launching pad. I know immediately if I’ve done everything right.”

  “ ‘The mills of the gods grind slow, but exceeding fine’,” James quoted. “It appears that the mills of the legal system grind even slower.”

  “Why are you two picking on me?” Trish complained.

  “We’re only teasing, Mama Trish,” Charlie said with an impudent grin.

  Now I had something else to worry about in addition to all the roadblocks the prosecutor could throw in our way. It wasn’t a very enjoyable weekend.

  Then on Monday morning Trish got a phone call from Mr. Rankin. She talked with him for a few minutes, then came into the kitchen. “Today’s the day,” she told us. “Judge Compson’s made her decision, and she’ll issue her ruling at one o’clock this afternoon.”

  “Did the judge give him any hints at all?” Sylvia asked. She sounded tense.

  “Not Judge Compson,” Trish replied. “She never tips her hand.” Then she grinned at us. “This afternoon’s session will be closed, the same as all the others have been, and the court record will be sealed.”

  “Can she get away with that?” Charlie asked.

  “She can get away with almost anything,” Trish assured him. “Unless an appeals court overrules her.”

  “Absolute dictatorship? Wow!”

  “It comes close. The legal system goes all the way back to the Dark Ages. Didn’t you know that?”

  “I make a point of not getting tangled up in the legal system, Mama Trish,” he replied.

  “I wonder why,” Erika murmured.

  We went to the courthouse before noon that day—by eleven-thirty we were all wound pretty tight.

  Mr. Rankin and Les Greenleaf joined us at a quarter to one. “We’re getting some help from city hall,” Rankin told us. “It’s pretty low-key, but there’s been a fairly attractive offer floating around for the past several days.”

  “The convent?” I suggested.

  He blinked. “How did you find out about that, Mark?” he demanded.

  “I have me sources, dontcha know,” I replied with a fake Irish brogue.

  “I should have guessed,” he said ruefully. “Did you tell the others?”

  “Not in any great detail,” I replied. “I was told to keep my mouth shut about the ins and outs. Do you think Fielding will hold still for it?”

  “Fielding will do what he’s told to do,” Rankin said, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if the district attorney’s been receiving phone calls from some high-ranking officials in city and county government. Frankly, I’m a little baffled by all this behind-the-scenes maneuvering. I’d give a lot to know what’s set this all in motion.”

  “You already know,” I told him. “I told you about it quite some time ago.”

  Rankin was sharp—I could practically see his mind whirring back to the scene I’d described—Regina and Renata together in the darkened church that night. “You mean—?” He broke off.

  “Exactly. Why don’t we keep it to ourselves, though? This is messy enough already. Let’s not clutter it up with that.”

  “What are you keeping tucked up under your armpit, Mark?” Charlie demanded.

  “I’ve been told—firmly—not to talk about it, old buddy. And I don’t think you really want to know. You won’t sleep very well if you find out.”

  “That bad?”

  “It’s even worse, Charlie. It’s making everybody who knows about it real nervous.”

  “He’s probably right,” Rankin sided with me. “We don’t want any word of this leaking out. One hint of it will trigger news stories all over the known world. Why don’t we just leave it at that?”

  Judge Compson entered the courtroom at one o’clock on the dot. She looked haggard, and I was fairly sure I knew why. Evidently, Father O’Donnell’s bishop had a long reach, and he could put a lot of pressure on various officials to get what he wanted.

  The judge rapped her gavel more firmly than usual. “It is the decision of this court that Miss Renata Greenleaf is mentally incompetent to stand trial at this time,” she announced. “Moreover, the court record shall remain sealed until further notice.”

  Fielding came to his feet. “Exception, Your Honor,” he protested.

  “Exception noted,” she replied.

  “May the prosecution inquire as to what arrangements have been made for the defendant’s confinement?” Fielding pressed.

  “No, Mr. Fielding, the prosecution may not. The arrangements are still pending, and this court will not interfere—and neither will the prosecution. Sit down, Mr. Fielding.”

  “You can’t just turn her loose!” Burpee exploded, coming to his feet.

  “Remove that person from this courtroom!” Judge Compson sharply instructed the bailiffs. “And hold him until we adjourn.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” the head bailiff replied.

  There were three bailiffs in the courtroom, and they homed in on Burpee with grim determination.

  Judge Compson’s sealing of the court record caused a near explosion in the ranks of the Seattle media, and the screams of protest were probably heard in San Francisco and British Colombia.

  The Tuesday morning newspaper had two full pages of letters to the editor, most of them bitching and complaining about this “unlawful violation” of their right to drool and slobber about something that was really none of their damned business in the first place.

  Then, along about noon, the regular programming on one of the major network TV channels was interrupted. We were just sitting down to lunch in the breakfast nook, and the kitchen television set happened to be tuned to that channel.

  The reporter seemed to be fairly excited, and then the camera panned to—guess who?—dear old Lieutenant Burpee.

  The reporter briefly introduced him, and then Burpee started to read a prepared statement in a wooden voice. He didn’t read out loud very well, and after a minute or so, he crumpled the pages he was reading, threw them to the ground, and launched into a diatribe of shrill-voiced denunciation.

  “This has been one of the grossest miscarriages of justice in living memory!” he declared. “Judge Compson is obviously one of those bleeding heart liberals who turn cold-blooded murderers loose on society with absolutely no regard whatsoever about public safety. Worse yet, the prosecuting attorney was obviously in on the scam. He didn’t even bother to question the witnesses, for Chrissake!”

  A brief shot of the reporter who was conducting the interview showed us a young fellow on the verge of collapse. His look of stunned chagrin was almost comical. Burpee had obvi
ously caught him completely off guard.

  Burpee ignored him and plowed on. “This so-called sanity hearing was nothing more than a cheap excuse to let some spoiled rich brat get off scot-free without ever taking the case to trial. That Greenleaf chippy butchered nine law-abiding citizens just for kicks. These were obviously thrill killings, and now the murderer’s going to get off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Well, I’m not going to let them get away with it. I’m blowing the whistle on them right here and now. There’s been a lot of secret manipulation by a bunch of crooked politicians to hush something up that’s so rotten that it makes me want to puke. They’re trying to sneak this thrill killer off to some country-club nunnery operated by a bunch of nuns who are on the take. If somebody offers those so-called Sisters of Hope a big enough bribe, they’ll set a female murderer up in luxurious surroundings and wait on her hand and foot for the rest of her life. That woman belongs in a prison—or at the very least in an institution for the criminally insane. She should be locked up behind bars permanently, for God’s sake, but no, she’ll get coddled and pampered instead. The criminal justice system just fell apart!”

  Burpee’s eyes were bulging, and he was obviously totally out of it. Another quick shot of the reporter showed him making desperate gestures at the camera, but evidently the cameraman was either asleep, amused, or Burpee’s diatribe had caught him completely off guard and he’d frozen up.

  Finally, somebody in the control room woke up and switched to a commercial.

  “I wonder if Judge Compson’s schedule’s all filled up,” Charlie said. “I think it might be time for another sanity hearing.”

  “Maybe after he gets out of jail,” Trish amended. “When Judge Compson hears about this, she’ll cite him for contempt of court.”

  “Aw, gee,” Charlie said. “What a shame.”

  “Meanwhile, you do realize that he just told the whole world about the Sisters of Hope, don’t you?” James asked. “The mother superior’s not going to be happy at all. She could very well tell the bishop to forget the whole thing.”

  “Can she do that?” Charlie demanded. “I thought the bishop was the headman, and everybody’s supposed to take orders from him.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Charlie,” Sylvia told him. “The various religious orders have their own hierarchies. The bishop can’t just issue orders to the mother superior. He’d have to go through channels, and it could take years to get a ruling. I’m not sure, but this might even have to be settled by the Vatican.”

  “I think we might be in trouble,” Erika said.

  There was some late-breaking news that afternoon that brightened up our day: As soon as Judge Compson heard about Burpee’s little performance, she’d cited him for contempt of court, and now he was cooling his heels in jail. That made us all feel a little bit better.

  Charlie was grinning broadly at breakfast on Saturday morning. “Well,” he said, “old Burpee’s history. I called Bob last night, and he told me that old blabbermouth has been suspended, and if Judge Compson ever lets him out of jail, he’ll get booted off the force. That fit of his yesterday really upset the higher-ups in the police department, and they’re going to dump him before he embarrasses the department any more.”

  Aw,” Erika said, “poor baby.”

  “Let’s not start gloating yet,” Trish told us. “All of Burpee’s blathering on camera might have closed the door of the convent for Renata. If it turns out that way, Doctor Fallon’s sanitarium might be the best we can hope for.”

  “You always look on the dark side of things, Trish,” Erika complained. “You should really try to lighten up.”

  Charlie had a meeting at Boeing that evening. I was more or less marking time until the Twinkie matter was settled once and for all, but life went on for the others.

  It was about eight-thirty when James rapped on my door. “Are you busy, Mark?” he asked.

  I set the book I’d been reading aside. “Not really,” I said. “What’s up?”

  He came in and sat down. “Something’s been bothering me, and I thought maybe we could talk it out.”

  “Sure,” I replied. “What’s the problem?”

  “As I understood your testimony, the decision to call the surviving twin ‘Renata’ after the murder up in Everett in ’95 was pretty arbitrary, wasn’t it?”

  I shrugged. “It sort of fit, that’s all. Nobody could tell the twins apart, so all we had to go on was the dominance of Regina. She was usually the one who made the decisions for the twins. Renata usually hung back.”

  “It all comes down to ‘usually,’ then, doesn’t it?”

  “Where are we going with this?” I asked him.

  “It seems to me that ‘usually’ is pretty shaky ground to base a decision like that on. We’ve been operating on the notion that Renata’s undergoing a personality change before she goes hunting. She somehow turns herself into Regina. But just for the sake of argument, let’s look at an alternative. What if Renata was the victim, and Regina was the survivor?”

  I nodded. “Okay, but it doesn’t fit their personalities, James,” I protested. “Regina was dominant. She would have been the one who’d have gone looking for a telephone.”

  “Aren’t you assuming that the twins weren’t switching dominance back and forth the same way they switched hair ribbons? Were they ever really separate enough actually to have individual identities? You told us that they almost never used the words ‘you’ and ‘me.’ All they said was ‘we.’ Was there ever a real Regina or a real Renata?”

  “Why are you doing this to me, James?” I demanded. “What set you off on this?”

  “Complication, Mark. In my field, we’re supposed to look for the simplest answer. All of this ‘fugue’ or ‘multiple personality’ business steps around the possibility of a much simpler answer. If the twins didn’t have separate identities, it doesn’t matter which one was killed, does it? Stay with me here. The surviving Twinkie was shocked into a psychotic state by her sister’s murder, right?”

  “That much is pretty certain,” I admitted.

  “Then she spent six months in Fallon’s sanitarium talking to herself, right?”

  “You’re being obvious, James.”

  “Simple answers usually are obvious. She wasn’t in solitary confinement during that period, was she? That first paper she wrote for your class suggests that she was aware of her surroundings and of her fellow inmates, right?”

  “Well, probably, yes.”

  “Wouldn’t that have given the twins six months to develop their game plan?”

  “There’s just one of her now, James,” I protested.

  “I’m not so sure,” he disagreed, “and if you think about it a little, I don’t think you will be, either.”

  “Are you saying that this has all been a put-up job? You seem to think that Twinkie—whichever one she is—has been faking insanity right from the start.”

  “I didn’t say faking, Mark. The surviving Twinkie is profoundly disturbed—incurably disturbed, probably. ‘Insane’ doesn’t mean ‘stupid,’ though. Twinkie—whoever she is—has been cleverly manipulating all of us in order to get what she wants—revenge.” He made a sour face. “I don’t really think ‘revenge’ is the right word. I think ‘self-defense’ would come a lot closer. Fergusson attacked her, and then she struck back.”

  “After three years?” I demanded incredulously.

  “Would elapsed time have any meaning for her? I think she might be living in the perpetual ‘now.’ ”

  “That’s crazy,” I objected.

  “Interesting choice of words, Mark,” he said slyly. “We’ve all been assuming that sometimes Twinkie’s a normie, and other times she’s a loon. It’s simpler and more logical to believe that she’s insane all the time, isn’t it? Just because she’s faked us all out doesn’t put her into the normie column, does it? I’m almost positive that we’ll never really know for sure which twin was murdered or which twin survived, because as
far as they’re concerned, there isn’t any difference. In a certain sense, they were both murdered, but they both survived. Life’s simpler for them now, though. They don’t have twenty fingers any more—just ten.”

  “Why did she keep having those ‘bad days’ after she carved out some guy’s tripes, then?” I demanded.

  “Just how bad were they, Mark?”

  “Pretty damn bad. Haven’t you heard Sylvia’s tapes?”

  “They were dramatic, certainly,” he agreed, “but didn’t they seem a trifle overdramatic?”

  “You mean that she was laying a foundation for this insanity defense right from the start?”

  “I didn’t say that. Isn’t it possible that she was bent on establishing her helplessness, her vulnerability? In a certain sense those episodes were analogous to the pose she’d assume when she was out hunting. She tricked us as much as she tricked her assorted victims. She tricked us with imitation psychosis, and she tricked them with curare. The result was the same—paralysis. Her victims couldn’t do anything, and neither could we.” He paused. “I’m obviously playing devil’s advocate here, Mark,” he said apologetically, “but I think it’s a possibility that we shouldn’t overlook. The ‘twin-game’ the girls played all through their childhood would have given them lots of practice. I’m not going to mention this to anybody else, but I thought that you, of all people, should be aware that this is a distinct possibility. No matter which twin survived, she’s been damaged beyond repair, and the cloister’s ultimately the best solution.”