LITMIR.BIZ

       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.”

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