LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER FOUR

      James woke me at quarter after seven on Tuesday morning. “Breakfast,” he announced.

      “Oh, right,” I said, coming up a little bleary-eyed. It was obviously going to take me a while to get used to regular hours. For the past couple of years, I’d eaten whenever it’d been convenient, but now I was living in a place where the meals came at specific times and were served in specific places—breakfast in the kitchen and dinner in the dining room. Lunch was sort of “grab it and growl,” largely because our schedules wouldn’t match once classes started.

      I got dressed and staggered to the bathroom to shave and brush my teeth. Then I followed my nose to the kitchen. I really needed some coffee to get my engine started.

      The girls, still in their bathrobes, were bustling around preparing breakfast, and they looked terribly efficient. Evidently, when the Erdlund aunt had been running the house, it’d been one of those “kitchen privileges” places where the boarders were permitted to cook their own meals, since there were still two refrigerators and a pantry. You almost never see pantries in contemporary housing. Like sitting rooms and parlors, they seem to have fallen by the wayside in the twentieth century’s rush toward minimal housing made of ticky-tacky.

      The cupboard doors, I noticed, were a little beat-up, and the linoleum on the floor was so ancient that the pattern had been worn off in places where there’d been heavy traffic. The worn places looked almost like game trails out in the woods.

      “Mark!” Trish snapped at me, “Will you please get out from underfoot?”

      “Sorry,” I apologized. “I think that after the bookshelves, we might want to take a look at this kitchen. It’s seen a lot of hard use.”

      “Later, Mark,” Erika told me, grabbing me by the arm and hustling me out of the work zone. She pointed at a chair off in one corner. “There!” she told me, snapping her fingers. “Sit! Stay!”

      “Yes, ma’am,” I replied obediently.

      Then she brought me a cup of coffee and patted me on the head. “Good boy,” she said. Erika tended to be more abrupt than her sister. If she was going to practice medicine, she’d probably have to work on her bedside manner. She was going to take some getting used to, that much was certain.

      So was her coffee. Erika obviously believed that the only substitute for strong coffee was stronger coffee. It was good, mind you, but it was strong enough to peel paint.

      Sylvia set the table, and Trish was flipping pancakes with a certain flair. It was all sort of homey and pleasant, and things smelled good. I was sure I could learn to like this.

      Then James and Charlie came down and we all took our places at the table and attacked Trish’s pancakes.

      “These are great, Trish,” Charlie said. “I haven’t had pancakes like these since the summer when I worked in a logging camp.”

      “I thought you were a Boeing boy, Charlie,” James said.

      “That came later on,” Charlie replied. “I’ve worked lots of jobs—some good, some bad.”

      “You ever pull chain?” I asked him.

      “Oh, gosh yes,” he replied. “That one goes in the bad column.”

      “Amen to that,” I agreed. “All the way down at the bottom.”

      “Anyway,” Charlie continued, “you wouldn’t believe the breakfasts they used to feed us in that logging camp—and an ordinary, run-of-the-mill dinner in a logging camp is pretty much like Thanksgiving. A logger can put away a lot of food. You aren’t going to swing an eight-foot chain saw very long on a steady diet of Rice Krispies. That’s why the kitchen’s the most important building in a logging camp. If the boss is dumb enough to hire a bad cook, the whole crew’s likely to quit after about a week—and the word gets around fast. By the end of May, that boss won’t be able to find anybody who’ll work for him.” Charlie leaned back in his chair. “You get some strange people in logging camps. The hiring hall’s a tavern on Skid Road here in Seattle, so there are a lot of drunks out there in the brush. We had a powder-monkey who showed up in camp the summer I worked there who had the shakes so bad that he’d set the bunkhouse to trembling as soon as he came through the door—and this was a guy who worked with dynamite, for God’s sake! He drank up all the shaving lotion and hair tonic in camp by Wednesday, and then he caught the train back to Seattle. The camp was way back in the woods, so the train only came by three times a week—Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday—and that was the only way to get there.”

      “No roads?” James asked.

      “Hell, no. We were forty miles back in the timber. The train hauled our logs out, so we didn’t really need a road. The bull-cook was a dried-up old boy, and it was part of his job to build fires in the bunkhouse stoves in the morning. That was our alarm clock when we were moonlighting. He used gasoline to start the fire in the stove, and that can be noisy.”

      “Moonlighting?” Sylvia asked curiously.

      “That’s when you have to get up at three in the morning,” Charlie explained. “When the fire danger gets up to a certain point, the Forest Service tells the loggers they have to be out of the woods by ten o’clock in the morning. Working in the dark with an eight-foot chain saw can get sort of exciting.”

      “I imagine so,” James said. “Oh, by the way, Trish, Mark has a legal question he’d like to ask you.”

      “Are you in trouble with the law, Mark?” Trish asked me.

      “Not that I know of,” I assured her. Then I told them all about the twins, and about Regina’s rape and murder, much as I had told James. “Assuming they ever do catch the guy,” I asked, “would they have to prove the identity of the victim before they could get a conviction”

      “Haven’t they ever heard of DNA?” Sylvia asked.

      “No good,” Erika told her. “Identical twins

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