Regina's Song (5 page)

“You’re not serious!”

“Oh, yes. Sylvia has absolutely no idea at all about what’s going on under the hood of her car. She seems to think that warming the car up to get the heater running has no connection at all with putting it in gear and driving it down the block. Every time I tried to explain it, I ran into a solid wall of invincible ignorance.” He shook his head sadly. “Now that you’re aware of some of our peculiarities, are you at all interested in our arrangement?”

“I wasn’t really thinking about a room and board kind of situation,” I replied dubiously. “I keep irregular hours, and I’ve been living on Big Macs for the past few years.”

“Erika’s likely to tell you that a steady diet of Big Macs is the highway to heart surgery, Mark. The girls tend to overmother everybody in the vicinity. And they scold—a lot. You get used to that after a while. Nobody here is really rolling in money, so the room and board’s quite reasonable. The food’s good, and the girls take care of the laundry. To get the benefits, though, you lose your Saturdays. Saturday is national fix-up day around here. If you’re interested, I can show you around the place.”

“Aren’t the ladies here?”

“No. They’re all off visiting before classes begin.”

“I might as well have a look,” I agreed.

“Come along, then,” he said, starting toward the antique front door with its small, ornate glass inserts.

“Are there any other house rules I should know about?” I asked when we reached the porch.

“They aren’t too restrictive. No dope sort of fits in with the no booze policy, and the no loud music stipulation doesn’t really bother me.”

“I can definitely agree with
that
one. Any others?”

“No in-house hanky-panky is the only other restriction. The girls aren’t particularly prudish, but they’ve encountered problems in that area in the past.”

“That’s been going around lately,” I agreed, as we went on into the entryway.

“The rule runs both ways,” he continued. “The girls are off-limits, but the boys are, too. We’re not supposed to make passes at them, and they’re not supposed to make passes at us. No physical stuff on the premises.”

“It makes sense,” I agreed. “Emotional involvement can get noisy.” I looked around. The entryway had a pre–World War II feel about it. A wide staircase of dark wood led up to the second floor, and an archway opened into a living room that was quite a bit larger than the ones in more contemporary houses.

“The downstairs is girl territory,” James told me. “Boy country’s upstairs.” He led me on into the living room. The ceilings were high, the windows all seemed tall and narrow, and the woodwork was dark. “Elegant,” I noted.

“Shabbily elegant,” James corrected. “It’s a bit run-down, but it’s got a homey feel. The dining room’s through those sliding doors, and the kitchen’s at the back. It’s got a breakfast nook, where the girls and I’ve been taking most of our meals. Let’s go upstairs, and I’ll show you the bedrooms.”

We went up the wide staircase to the second floor. “My place is at the end of the hall,” he told me, “and the bathroom’s right next to it. The two at this end are vacant.” He opened the door on the right.

The room had the sloped ceiling you encounter on the second floor of older houses, and it’d obviously seen some hard use over the years. It was quite a bit larger than I’d expected, and the contemporary furniture looked dwarfed by the generous size of the room.

“The fellow who lived here before prohibition came into effect was a drunken slob,” James told me, “and he was hard on furniture. He wanted to get physical when Trish kicked him out after the third time she caught him sneaking whiskey in here, but I reasoned with him and persuaded him not to.”

“Persuaded?”

“I threw him down the stairs, then tossed all his stuff out the window.”

“That gets right to the point, doesn’t it?”

“I’ve had a fair amount of success with it—one of the advantages of being bigger than a freight truck. The rest of the party boys who lived here got the point, and they were all very polite to Trish after that. What do you think about the place, Mark? Would you like to take a stab at it?”

“I think I might give it a try. A quiet place to study sort of lights my fire. When are the girls likely to come home?”

“Tomorrow—or so they told me. I’ll give you the phone number, and you can check before you come by. I’ll put in a good word for you with the ladies. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble getting admitted.”

“Thanks, James. I’ll keep in touch.” We shook hands, and then I went out to my car. James had a “Big Daddy” quality that I liked. I was sure he and I could get along. The girls, of course, might sour the deal, but I decided to keep an open mind until I met them. The overall arrangement seemed almost too good to be true, but I wasn’t about to buy into some kind of absolute dictatorship where I’d be low man on the totem pole. I was going to have to wait until tomorrow to find out exactly which way the wind blew.

CHAPTER TWO

Mary Greenleaf met me at the front door when I got there, touching a finger to her lips. “She’s sleeping,” she said softly. “All this scampering around has her worn down to a frazzle.” She stepped out onto the porch, quietly closing the door behind her.

“She
is
all right, isn’t she?”

“Sure, it’s just the moving and settling in.”

“I’ve got some things to take care of here tomorrow,” I told her, “so I’ll grab a motel room for a couple of nights. If Twink’s feeling unsettled, I’d better stay close.”

She nodded. “I wonder why it is that you were the only one she could recognize when she finally came to her senses.”

“I got this here dazzlin’ personality,” I kidded her. “Hadn’t you noticed that?”

“Sure, kid,” she said dryly. “You want a beer?”

“Not right now, thanks all the same.”

“Did you find a room?”

“I think so. The landladies are away today, but I’ll talk with them tomorrow. I think it’s going to work out. The house rules should keep things quiet.”

“Sounds good, Mark,” she noted.

“The place is sort of shabby,” I told her, “but quiet’s a rare commodity in student housing.”

“We’ve noticed that at the cop shop. The riot squad’s on permanent standby alert at the north precinct. When the parties start spilling out into the street, we get
lots
of nine-one-one calls.”

“I can imagine. Oh, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you—you’re a dispatcher, right?”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“Do you have to wear a gun to work?” I already knew the answer, of course, but I wanted to pinpoint the location of that gun. Twink
was
a recent graduate of Fallon’s sanitarium, after all, and you don’t really want a gun lying around unattended in a situation like that.

Mary smiled faintly and pushed up the bottom of her sweater to show me the neat little holster on her left side. “She has to be with me all the time,” she told me. “I thought everybody knew that. If you’re a cop, you wear a gun—whether you’re on duty or off.”

“That could be a pain in the neck sometimes.”

“You bet it is.” Then she frowned slightly. “Do you happen to know if Ren ever took driving lessons?” she asked.

“Of course she did. Why?”

“It must be one of the things she blotted out, then. I suggested to her that maybe her dad should buy her a car—it’s a good two miles to the campus from here. But she told me that she doesn’t drive.”

“She didn’t, not very often. Regina usually took the wheel when the twins wanted to go someplace.”

“Maybe that explains it. Anyway, she told me that she’s got a ten-speed bicycle at home. Next time you go up to Everett, she’d like to have you pick it up for her.”

“Hell, Mary, if she wants to go anyplace, I’ll pick her up and drive her there. This is rain country, and I’ve never seen a bike with windshield wipers.”

“You’re missing the point, Mark. Ren
doesn’t
want a chauffeur; she wants independence. If you volunteer to become her own private taxi driver, it’ll just be an extension of that cotton batting my idiot brother wants to wrap her in. She may not actually
use
the bike very often, but just knowing that it’s here should give her a sense of self-reliance. That’s really what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“You’re one shrewd cookie, Mary. It would have taken me months to work my way through
that
one.”

“Oh, there’s something else, too. Ren forgot a box of tapes and CDs. She brought the player, but she left all her music at home.”

“Count your blessings,” I told her. “Kid music hasn’t got much going for it but loud.”

“I think Ren might surprise you, Mark. She’s into Bach fugues and Mozart string quartets.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I think it might have been Regina’s idea in the first place. Maybe Renata’s picking up a few echoes from the past. Stranger things have happened, I guess.”

“You’ve got that right. The human mind is the native home of strange. I’d better go rent a motel room before everything gets filled up. Tell Twink that I’ll stop back later—or give her a call.”

“I’ll let her know.”

I found a vacancy in a motel just off Forty-fifth Street and spent the rest of that gloomy Sunday reading Faulkner. Southern writers can take some getting used to.

I called Twink along about suppertime. She seemed OK, so I kept it short.

Monday was drizzly. What else is new? It’s almost always drizzly in Seattle. I called James about ten o’clock, and he told me that the ladies were home. “Tell them I’ll be right over,” I said, pulling on my coat as I grabbed my keys.

James met me at the front door. “I put in a good word for you, Mark,” he told me. “I think you’re in.”

“You’re a buddy,” I told him.

“You can hold off on those thanks until
after
you’ve met the ladies,” he cautioned. “Trish takes ‘serious’ out to the far end, Erika takes it in the other direction, and you never know
where
Sylvia’s coming from. They’re in the kitchen.”

“Let’s go see if I can pass muster,” I said.

Like all the other rooms in the house, the kitchen was fairly large, and it had the breakfast nook James had mentioned to the right of the arched doorway.

The three ladies in the kitchen were obviously waiting for me, and it occurred to me that James might have overstated my qualifications. There was a certain deferential quality hanging in the air as I entered.

One of the Erdlund sisters was a classic Swede, tall, blond, and busty. The other one was more svelte, and she had dark auburn hair. The third girl was, as James had told me, cute as a button, tiny, olive-skinned, and with huge, liquid eyes and short brunette hair.

“Here’s our recruit, Trish,” James told the blond girl. “His name’s Mark Austin. He’s a graduate student in English and a member of the carpenter’s union. Mark, this is Trish, our glorious leader.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do that, James,” she scolded, standing up and looking at me speculatively. Trish was nearly as tall as I am, but that’s not unusual in Seattle, where six-foot-tall blond girls roam the sidewalks in platoons.

“Sorry, Trish,” James apologized. “Not
too
sorry. More like medium sorry.”

“He teases us all the time,” she told me, smiling. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Austin.” She held her hand out and when we shook, I noticed that she had a fairly firm grip.

“Did James fill you in on our house rules?” she asked.

“No booze, no dope, no loud music, and no hanky-panky,” I recited. “I understand that you’ve got some renovations in mind as well.”

“They’re part of the arrangement, Mr. Austin. I think you’ll find our room and board rate very reasonable, but that’s because Erika and I expect a certain amount of physical labor as well. Our aunt’s going to be in a nursing home from here on out, and my sister and I want to fix the house up so that we can put it on the market and sell it. We’ll try to confine the work to Saturdays so that the rest of the week’s quiet. James deals with electricity and plumbing, and you’d be our resident carpenter. Would that cause you any problems?”

I shrugged. “Probably not. I’m a fairly good knock-around carpenter. As long as we stay clear of the building code, I can probably handle things. I gather you want to avoid building permits and inspections, right?”

“Definitely. If we get into building permits, we come face-to-face with union-scale carpenters, and we don’t have that kind of money.”

“We could always take up begging, Trish,” the auburn-haired girl suggested. “Sell pencils on street corners with a little tin cup.”

“My sister Erika,” Trish said sourly. “She’s the smart-mouth in the family.”

“How can you say that, Trish?” Erika asked with wide-eyed innocence.

“As long as we’re introducing ourselves,” the small, cute brunette at the table said, “I’m Sylvia Cardinale.”

“We refer to her as the Godmother, Donna Sylvia,” James told me, grinning at her.

“Would you like to have me make you one of those offers which you can’t refuse, James?” she asked in an ominous tone.

“Oops,” he replied casually.

“We’re obviously clowning around, Mr. Austin,” Trish apologized. “We’ll get around to being serious after classes start—at least I
hope
so. Would you like to look at the vacant rooms?”

“James showed them to me yesterday,” I replied. “I’d like to have another look at the one on the right side of the stairs, though. I’ve got an idea that we might want to talk about.”

“Of course,” she said, and led us all upstairs. A battered bed stood against the wall I was interested in, so I pushed it out of the way and pulled out the tape measure I’d brought. “I think this might actually work,” I muttered, half to myself.

“What have you got in mind, Mr. Austin?” Trish asked.

“Permanent bookshelves,” I told her, thumping the heel of my hand against the wall in search of the studs. “Fourteen inches,” I mused. “This baby’s well built.” Then I turned. “Here’s the idea,” I told the group. “Most students use the standard brick-and-board arrangement for bookshelves, but that’s wobbly, and occasionally the whole makeshift thing collapses. It occurred to me that permanent bookshelves wouldn’t wobble, and they’d provide a lot more shelf space. I need
lots
of shelf space, because I’ve got books by the yard.”

“Won’t that be sort of expensive?” Trish asked me.

“Not really,” I told her. “Unless you start getting into exotic woods, lumber’s fairly cheap around here. Oh, one other thing. James tells me that there are some empty rooms in the basement. If it’s okay, I’d like to put this furniture downstairs and bring in my own.”

“You have your own furniture?” Erika asked. “That’s unusual. Most students travel light.”

“I’ve got a house up in Everett,” I told her briefly, not really wanting to go into too much detail. “I’ll be renting it out, I guess, so I’ll have to put most of the furniture in storage.”

Trish looked around at the room. “If we’re going to empty the room out anyway, we might as well paint it before you move in.”

“I gather that we’ve all sort of agreed that I’ll be living here?” I said, looking at the others.

“I think we’ll be able to get along with you, Mark,” Erika said, “and the house rules should protect you from any predatory instincts that crop up in the downstairs part of the house.”

“Erika!” Trish said in a shocked tone.

“Just kidding, Trish. Don’t get worked up.”

“There
is
something you might want to consider, Trish,” James said. “This place will probably always be student housing, and permanent bookshelves in every room would definitely up the market value, don’t you think?”

“It would, wouldn’t it?” she agreed. “How long do you think it’ll take to build
your
bookshelves, Mark?”

I shrugged. “Two or three days is about all, and once I get the process down pat, the shelves in the other rooms won’t take nearly that long.”

“All that sawing and pounding is likely to disrupt things,” Sylvia protested.

“Not if I take good measurements,” I disagreed. “The guys at the lumberyard can cut the boards to my numbers, so there won’t be very much sawing, and I’m not going to use nails. Books are heavy, and nails tend to work loose. I’ll use wood screws instead. I want this puppy bolted to the wall.”

“You
are
going to paint it, aren’t you?” Trish asked me.

“No, a couple coats of dark stain would be cheaper, and stain dries faster.”

“We
want
you,” Erika said with ominous intensity.

“Steady, toots,” Sylvia told her.

“When would you like to move in, Mark?” Trish asked.

“Today’s what—the eighth?”

She nodded.

“Classes start on the twenty-ninth, but I’d like to get settled in a couple of weeks before that. Moving my furniture and building the bookshelves won’t take too long, so why don’t we zero in on the fourteenth for move-in day?”

“Sounds good to me,” she agreed.

I checked out of the motel and drove to Everett with my windshield wipers slapping back and forth in a sort of counterpoint to Ravel’s
Bolero
coming from the car’s cassette player.

When I got to my house in north Everett, I turned up the thermostat and started sorting through my stuff, moving nonessential items to another room. All I was going to need in the boardinghouse would be my bed, desk, dresser, and books.

I called Twink that evening. She seemed to be pretty much OK, so I kept it short. Then I went back to sorting and boxing.

By midafternoon on Tuesday, I had things fairly well organized, so I went by the office of the rental agency that was going to take care of the house for me and gave them a spare set of keys. “I’m a little pushed for time right now,” I told the agent. “Could you make arrangements with a moving and storage company for me and have them pick up the furniture?”

“We’ll take care of it for you, Mark,” the agent told me. “That’s one of the things you’re paying us for.”

“I guess,” I said. “Oh, another thing. The place needs a good cleaning. Could you get hold of some professional housecleaners to go in and make things presentable?”

“We’d do that anyway. We’ve had a lot of experience with this sort of thing.”

“Good. I’m a bit out of my depth. I’ve chalked a big red ‘X’ on the door of my room. My books, clothes, and the furniture I’ll be taking are in there. Tell the movers and cleaners to leave that room alone. I’ll pick that stuff up this coming weekend.”

“Right,” he agreed. “Don’t worry about a thing, Mark. We’ll take care of everything for you.”

Yeah, he would—for a hefty chunk of the monthly rent.

Then I went over to the door factory to check in with Les Greenleaf.

“How’s Renata doing, Mark?” he asked me with a worried look.

“She seems to be settling in, boss. It took her a few days to get used to your sister’s work schedule, but she seems pretty much OK now.”

“I still think we’re rushing into this.” Then he sighed. “Did you find a place to live?”

“Yeah. It’s only a few blocks from Mary’s house, so if Twink starts coming unglued, I can be there in a flat minute.”