LITMIR.BIZ

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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,

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