Regina's Song by David Eddings Read Free Book Online Page B

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