Читать книгу Regina’s Song - David Eddings - Страница 7

“What’s happening here?” Les Greenleaf demanded, after Renata had been sedated into a peaceful slumber and we’d returned to Fallon’s office. “I thought you told us that she has total amnesia.”

“Evidently, it’s not quite as total as we thought,” Fallon replied, grinning broadly. “I think this might be a major breakthrough.”

“Why does she recognize Mark and not us?” Inga sounded offended.

“I haven’t got the faintest idea,” Fallon confessed, “but the fact that she recognizes somebody is very significant. It means that her past isn’t a total blank.”

“Then she’ll get her memory back?” Inga asked.

“Some of it, at least. It’s too early to tell how much.” Fallon looked at me then. “Would it be possible for you to stay here for the next few days, Mark?” he asked. “For some reason, you seem to be the key to Renata’s memory, so I’d like to have you available.”

“No problem, Doc,” I replied. “If the boss can drop me off at my place, I’ll grab a few things and come right back up the hill.”

“Good. I’ll want you right there when Renata wakes up. We’ve made a connection, and we don’t want to lose it.”

Les and Inga took me back to my place when we left the sanitarium. I tossed some clothes and stuff into a suitcase, grabbed some books, and drove my old Dodge back to Lake Stevens. I was as baffled as everybody else had been by Renata’s recognition of me, and it’d caught me completely off guard. There’d been a kind of desperation about the way she’d clung to me—almost like somebody hanging on to a life raft.

“We don’t necessarily have to mention this to her parents, Mark,” Fallon told me when I reported in, “but I think you’d better be right there in the room when Renata wakes up. Let’s not take any chances and lose this. All the rooms here have surveillance cameras, so I’ll be watching and listening. Don’t push her or say anything about why she’s here. Just be there.”

“I think I see where you’re going, Doc,” I told him.

The shot Dr. Fallon had given her kept Twink totally out of it until the next morning, and that gave me time to think my way through the situation. I was still working through my grief at losing my parents, but it was time to put my problems aside and concentrate, here and now, on Twink. If she needed me, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her down.

I pushed the reclining chair over beside her bed, pulled the blanket up around my ears, and tapped out.

When I woke the next morning, Renata was still sound asleep, but she was holding my hand. Either she’d come about halfway out of her drug-induced slumber and found something to hold on to, or she’d just groped around for it in her sleep. Then again, it might have been me who’d been looking. It was sort of hard to say.

One of the orderlies brought our breakfast about seven, and I tugged on Twink’s hand a couple of times. “Hey, sack-rat,” I said, “rise and shine. It’s daylight in the swamp.”

She woke up smiling, for God’s sake! That’s sick! Nobody smiles that early in the morning!

“I need a hug,” she said.

“Not ‘til you get up.”

“Grouch,” she accused me, her face still radiant.

That first day was a little strange. Twink watched me all the time, and she had a vapid look on her face every minute. I tried to read, but it’s awfully hard to concentrate when you can feel somebody watching you.

There was also a fair amount of spontaneous hugging.

I checked in with Dr. Fallon late that afternoon, and he suggested that I should probably let Twink know that I wasn’t going to be a permanent fixture. “Tell her that you’ll have to go back to work before too much longer. Let her know that you’ll visit her often, but you have to earn a living.”

“That’s not entirely true, Doc,” I told him. “I’ve got a few bucks stashed away.”

“You don’t need to mention that, Mark. We don’t want her to become totally dependent on your presence here. I think the best course might be to gradually wean her away. Stay here for a few more days, and then find some reason to run back to Everett for an afternoon. We’ll play it by ear and see how she reacts. Sooner or later, she’s going to have to learn how to stand alone.”

“You’re the expert, Doc. I won’t do anything to hurt her, though.”

“I think she might surprise you, Mark.”

There was another bout of hugging when I got back to Twink’s room. That seemed just a bit odd. There hadn’t been much physical contact between the twins and me in the past, but now it seemed that every time I turned around, she had her arms wrapped around me. “Renata,” I said finally, “you do know that we aren’t alone, don’t you?” I pointed at the surveillance camera.

“These aren’t those kinds of hugs, Markie.” She shrugged it off. “There are hugs and then there are hugs. We don’t do the other kinds of hugs, do we? And I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘Renata.’ I don’t like that name.”

“Oh?”

“I’m Twinkie, remember? Only people who don’t know me call me ‘Renata.’ I knew that I was Twinkie the moment I saw you. It was such a relief to find out who I really am. All the ‘Ren-blah-blah’ stuff made me want to throw up.”

“We don’t get to pick our names, kid. That’s in the mommy and daddy department.”

“Tough cookies. I’m Twinkie, and I’m so cute and sweet that nobody can stand me.”

“Steady on, Twink,” I told her.

“Don’t you think I’m cute and sweet, Markie?” she said with obviously put-on childishness, fluttering her eyelashes at me.

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.

“Gotcba!” she crowed with delight. Then she threw a sly glance at the surveillance camera. “And I got you too, didn’t I, Dockie-poo?” she said, obviously addressing Dr. Fallon, who was almost certainly watching.

“Dockie-poo?” I asked mildly.

“All of us cute and sweet nutcases make up pet names for the people and things around us. I have long conversations with Moppie and Broomie all the time. They aren’t too interesting, but a girl needs somebody to talk to, doesn’t she?”

“I think your load’s shifting, Twink.”

“I know. That’s why I’m in the nuthouse. This is the walnut ward. They keep the filberts and pecans in the other wing. We aren’t supposed to talk with them, because their shells are awfully brittle, and they crack up if you look at them too hard. I was kind of brittle when I first got here, but now that I know who I really am, everything’s all right again.”

She was sharp; she was clever; and she could be absolutely adorable when she wanted to be. I definitely hoped that Doc Fallon was watching. I was certain that her distaste for her name was very significant. Now she had “Twinkie” to hold on to, so she could push “Renata”—and “Regina”—into the background. Maybe “Twinkie” was going to be her passport back to the world of people who call themselves “normal.”

I stayed for a couple more days, and then I used the “gotta go to work” ploy Fallon had suggested to ease my way out—well, sort of. I didn’t really stay away very much. As soon as I got off work at the door factory, I’d bag it on up to Lake Stevens to spend the evening with Twink.

Once she’d made the name-change and put “Renata” on the back burner, Twink’s recovery to at least partial sanity seemed to surprise even Dr. Fallon. Evidently, her switchover to “Twink” was something on the order of an escape hatch. She left “Regina” behind, along with “Renata,” and she seemed to grow more stable with each passing day.

Dr. Fallon decided that she was doing well enough that it’d probably be all right if she took a short furlough for Christmas.

It was a subdued sort of holiday—1995 hadn’t been a very good year for any of us. Twink’s aunt Mary, her dad’s sister, was about the only bright spot during the whole long holiday weekend, which might seem a bit strange, in view of the fact that Mary was a Seattle police officer. But she’d always been fond of the twins, and now she refused to treat Twink as if she were damaged merchandise—the way Les and Inga did. She smoothly stepped over the blank spots in Twink’s memory and more or less ignored her niece’s status as a mental patient on furlough. That seemed to help Twink, and the two of them grew very close during that long weekend. That in turn helped me raise a subject that had worried me more than a little.

It was on Christmas Day that I braced myself and finally broke the news to Twink that our schedule was about to change. “I’ll still be living at home, Twink,” I reassured her, “but I’ll be going to classes at the university instead of working at the door factory. I’ll have to study quite a bit, though, so my visits might be a little shorter.”

“I’ll be fine, Markie,” she said. Then she gave me one of those wide-eyed, vapid looks. “Have you heard the news? Some terribly clever fellow named Bell came up with the niftiest idea you ever heard of. He calls it the telephone. Isn’t that neat? You can visit me without even driving up the hill to the bughouse.”

Mary suddenly exploded with laughter.

“All right, Twink.” I felt a little foolish. “Would it bother you if I gave you a phone call instead of coming up there?”

“As long as I know that you care, I’ll be fine. I’m a tough little cookie—or hadn’t you noticed?”

“Maybe you two should clear that with Dr. Fallon,” Inga suggested, sounding worried.

“I’ll be fine, Inga,” Renata assured her. For some reason, Twink had trouble with “Mom” and “Dad,” so she called her parents by their names instead. I decided to have a talk with Fallon about that.

After the holidays, I returned to the university and started taking seminars, beginning with Graduate English Studies. That’s when I discovered just how far down into the bowels of the earth the main library building extended. I think there was more of it underground than above the surface. Graduate English Studies concentrated on “how to find stuff in the Lye-berry.” That deliberate mispronunciation used to make Dr. Conrad crazy, so I’d drop it on him every now and then just for laughs.

I was still commuting to Everett, even though the two hours of driving back and forth cut into my study time quite a bit. I had a long talk with Twink, and we sort of worked out a schedule. I’d visit her on weekends, but our weekday conversations were held on the phone. Dr. Fallon wasn’t too happy about that, but headshrinkers sometimes lose contact with the real world—occupational hazard, I suppose.

Renata’s amnesia remained more or less total—except for occasional flashes that didn’t really make much sense to her. Her furloughs from the hospital grew more frequent and lasted for longer periods of time. Dr. Fallon didn’t come right out and say it, but it seemed to me that he’d finally concluded that Twinkie would never regain her memory.

Inga Greenleaf, with characteristic German efficiency, went through Castle Greenleaf and removed everything even remotely connected to Regina.

When the fall quarter of 1996 rolled around, Dr. Conrad decided that it was time for me to get my feet wet on the front side of the classroom, so he bullied me into applying for a graduate teaching assistantship, the academic equivalent of slavery. We didn’t pick cotton; we taught freshman English instead. It was called Expository Writing, and it definitely exposed the nearly universal incompetence of college freshmen. I soon reached the point where I was absolutely certain that if I saw, “…in my opinion, I think that…” one more time, I’d be joining Twinkie in the bughouse.

I endured two quarters of Expository Writing. But when the spring quarter of 1997 rolled around, I tackled my thesis and I demonstrated—to my own satisfaction, at least—that Billy Budd was a seagoing variation of Paradise Regained, with Billy and the evil master-at-arms, Mr. Claggart, contending with each other for the soul of Captain Vere. Since Billy was the hands-down winner, Melville’s little parable was not the tragedy it’s commonly believed to be. My thesis ruffled a few feathers in the department, and that was enough to get my doctoral candidacy approved and my MA signed, sealed, and delivered.

When Twink heard that I was now a Master of Arts, she launched into an overdone imitation of Renfield in the original Dracula movie. I got a little tired of that “Yes, Master! Yes, Master!” business, but Twinkie had a lot of fun with it, so what the hell?

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 a gal.

Les Greenleaf wasn’t happy about Twink’s decision to move to Seattle. I think he hoped his sister would reject the idea of having her niece move in with her. But Mary shot him right out of the saddle on that one when he and I drove to Seattle in August of ‘97 to talk it over with her.

“No problem,” Mary said. “I’ve got plenty of room here, and Ren and I get along just fine.”

“You do understand that she’s just a little—” Les groped for a suitable word.

“Screwball, you mean?” Mary asked bluntly. “Yes, I know all about it. I’m used to screwballs, Les. Half the people I work with aren’t playing with a full deck. Renata’s going to be fine here with me.”

“Well,” he said dubiously, “I guess we can try it for one quarter to see how she does. But if it starts giving her problems…” He left it hanging.

“I’ll be here, too, boss,” I told him. “I’ll get a room nearby and, between us, Mary and I can keep Twink on an even keel.”

“You’re going to have to let go, Les,” Mary told him. “If you try to protect her for the rest of her life, you’ll turn her into a basket case. I love her, too, and I won’t let you do that to her. She comes here; and that’s that.” Mary wasn’t the sort for shilly-shallying around when it came to making decisions.

The chore of moving Twink to Seattle fell into my lap. Her father had a business to run, and I wasn’t doing anything important anyway. There was a lot of driving back and forth between Everett and Seattle involved in easing Twink into her new situation, and the whole procedure took the better part of two weeks. There are people who can move halfway across the country in less time, but we all wanted to take it a little slow with this move. Stress was the last thing Renata needed.

“Why’s everybody so uptight about this?” she asked me while I was driving her back to Everett to pick up some more of her clothes. “I’m a big girl now.”

“We just want to make sure you’re not going to come unraveled again, Twink,” I told her.

“My seams are all still pretty tight,” she said. “Actually, I’m looking forward to this. Les and Inga keep tiptoeing around me like I was made out of eggshells. I wish they’d learn how to relax. Mary’s a lot easier to be around.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.” I hesitated slightly, but then I sort of blurted it out. “Your dad’s got a real bad case of protective-itis, Twink. He’s not happy about this whole project, but Doc Fallon overruled him. Fallon believes it’ll be good for you—as long as we can keep the pressure off. Your dad would much rather wrap you in cotton batting and keep you in a little jewel box.”

“I know,” she agreed. “That was my main reason for suggesting the university instead of the community college. I’ve got to get out from under his thumb, Markie. That house in Everett is almost as bad as Fallon’s bughouse. I need to have you somewhere nearby, but Les and Inga are starting to give me the heebie-jeebies. Whether they like it or not, Twinkie is going to grow up.”

That caught me a little off guard. Twink had been kind of passive since she’d come out of Fallon’s sanitarium, but now she sounded anything but passive. This was a new Twinkie, and I wasn’t sure where she was going.

It was a dreary Sunday in early September when I went cruising around the Wallingford district to find a place for me to live. I stuck mostly to the back streets, where older houses that had seen better days. Almost all displayed that discreet ROOMS TO LET sign in a front window. Generations of university students had fanned out from the campus in search of cheap lodgings, and property owners all over north Seattle obligingly offered rooms, many of which took “cheap” all the way down to the flophouse level.

The thing that attracted me to one particular house was an addition to the standard ROOMS TO LET placard. It read FOR SERIOUS STUDENTS ONLY with “SERIOUS” underlined in bright red ink.

I pulled to the curb and sat looking at the self-proclaimed home for the elite. On the plus side, it was no more than five blocks from Mary’s house, and that was fairly important. It wasn’t in very good condition, but that didn’t bother me all that much. I was looking for a place where I could sleep and study, not some showplace to impress visitors.

Then a bulky-shouldered black man came around the side of the house carrying a large cardboard box filled with what appeared to be scraps from some sort of building project. The black man had arms as thick as fence posts, silvery hair, and a distinguished-looking beard.

I got out of my car when he reached the curb. “Excuse me, neighbor,” I said politely. “Do you happen to know why the owner of this house is making such an issue of ‘serious’?”

A faint smile touched his lips. “Trish has some fairly strong antiparty prejudices,” he replied in a voice so deep that it seemed to be coming up out of his shoes.

“Trish?”

“Patricia Erdlund,” he explained. “Swedish girl, obviously. The house belongs to her aunt, but Auntie Grace had a stroke last year. Trish’s sister, Erika, was living here at the time, and she put in an emergency call to her big sister. Trish is in law school, and Erika just finished premed, so they weren’t too happy to be living in the middle of a twelve-week-long beer bust. I’ve lived here for six years, so I’ve more or less learned to turn my ears off, but the Erdlund girls aren’t that adaptable. They announced a no-drinking policy, and that emptied the place out almost immediately. Now they’re looking for suitable recruits to fill the place back up.”

“I don’t want to be offensive,” I said carefully, “but aren’t you a bit old to be a student? You are a student, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “I’m a late bloomer—I was thirty-five before I got started. My name’s James Forester,” he introduced himself, holding out his hand.

“Mark Austin,” I responded, shaking hands with him.

“What’s your field, Mark?”

“English.”

“Grad student?”

I nodded. “Ph.D. candidate. What’s your area?”

“Philosophy and comparative religion.”

“How many people do the Erdlund girls plan to cram into the house?”

“We’ve got two empty rooms on the second floor. There are a couple of cubicles in the attic and several more in the basement, but they’re hardly fit for human habitation. Auntie Grace used to rent them out—el cheapo—to assorted indigents who always had trouble paying the rent, maybe because they routinely spent the rent money on booze or dope. That’s where most of the noise was coming from, so Trish and Erika decided to leave them empty and concentrate on finding quiet, useful people to live in the regular rooms.”

“Useful?”

“There are some domestic chores involved in the arrangement. I’ve got a fair degree of familiarity with plumbing, and I can usually hook wires together without blowing too many fuses. The house has been seriously neglected for the past dozen or so years, so it falls into the ‘fixer-upper’ category. Have you had any experience in any of the building trades?”

“I know a little bit about carpentry,” I replied. “I’ve spent a few years working in a door factory up in Everett. Let’s say I know enough to back off when I’m out of my depth.”

“That should be enough, really. The girls aren’t planning any major remodeling. Replacing wallboard that’s had holes kicked in it is probably about as far as it’ll go.”

“No problem, then.”

“I think you and I could get along, Mark, and I’m definitely outnumbered right now. It’s very trying to be the only man in the house with three ladies.”

“Who’s the third girl?”

“Our Sylvia. She’s in abnormal psych—which is either her field of study or a clinical description of Sylvia herself. She’s an Italian girl, cute as a button, but very excitable.”

“You’re all alone here with two Swedes and an Italian? You definitely need help, brother.”

“Amen to that.” He paused. “Do you happen to know anything about auto mechanics?” he asked me then.

“Not so’s you’d notice it. I can change a flat or replace spark plugs if I have to, but that’s about as far as it goes. My solution to any other mechanical problem is to reach for a bigger hammer. Does somebody have a sick car?”

“All three girls do—or think they do. Auto mechanics seem to turn into rip-off artists when a girl drives into their shop. That’s why these three want to have an in-house mechanic. Last winter, Sylvia was ready to sue General Motors because her car wasn’t getting the kind of mileage GM promised. I tried to explain that warming the car up for an hour every morning might have had something to do with it, but she kept insisting that as long as the car wasn’t moving, it shouldn’t make any difference.”

“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.