Regina’s Song. David Eddings

just auditing the course, Twink, remember? Why write a paper if you don’t have to?”

      “I want to write one, Markie. I’m going to blow your socks off.”

      “Why? You won’t get a grade out of it.”

      “I’m going to prove something, big brother. Don’t start throwing challenges around unless you’re ready to back them up. I can whup you any day in the week.” She paused briefly. “It’s your own fault, Markie. Sometimes I get competitive—particularly when somebody challenges me. You said you wanted a good paper. Well, you’re going to get one, and you won’t even have to grade it. Isn’t that neat?”

      That took me completely by surprise. Renata hadn’t been quite that aggressive before—neither of the twins had. I’d known that they were clever, certainly, but they’d never flaunted it. Of course, Renata was older now, and the time she’d spent in Dr. Fallon’s institution had probably matured her quite a ways past her contemporaries. The average college freshman comes to us carrying a lot of baggage from high school. High-schoolies are herd animals for the most part, and they’re usually deathly afraid of standing out from the crowd. Once they move up to college, the brighter ones tend to separate themselves from the herd and strike out on their own. It usually takes them a year or so, though. Renata, it appeared, had jumped over that transition, and she’d come down running.

      I definitely approved of this new Renata, and I was fairly sure Dr. Fallon would as well. This was turning out better than either of us had expected.

      After I’d dropped Twink at Mary’s place, I went back to campus to continue my examination of the connection between Whitman and the Brits. I hung it up just before five o’clock and actually got home in time for dinner.

      “I’m supposed to tell you that Charlie’s going to be late, Trish,” James rumbled, as we gathered in the dining room. “I guess that something came up at Boeing, and the head of the program Charlie’s involved with called an emergency meeting.”

      “That sounds ominous,” Erika said. “When Boeing starts calling emergency meetings, it suggests that we might all need to go find bomb shelters.”

      “He wasn’t too specific,” James added, “but I got the impression that something fell apart because some resident genius at Boeing neglected to convert inches to centimeters on a set of fairly significant specifications. Charlie was using some very colorful language when he left.”

      “That might just make it difficult to hit what you’re shooting at,” I noted. “A millimeter here and a millimeter there would add up after a while.”

      “Particularly if you’re taking potshots at something in the asteroid belt,” James agreed.

      “Have you got anything serious on the fire this evening, Sylvia?” I asked our resident psychologist.

      “Is your head starting to come unraveled, Mark?”

      “I hope not. I’d like to get your reading on something that happened today, is all.”

      “Whip it on me,” she replied.

      I let that pass. “The Twinkie twin I was talking about did something a little out of character today. Evidently, she’s not quite as fragile as we all thought she was. She seems to be breaking out in a rash of independence. She even gets offended if I offer to drive her anyplace because she’s got that ten-speed bicycle. Rain or shine, she wants to bike it.”

      “That’s probably a reaction to the time she spent in the sanitarium, Mark. People in institutions usually aren’t allowed to make many decisions.”

      “Rebellion, then?”

      “Self-assertion might come a little closer,” Sylvia replied. “In a general way, we approve of that—as long as it doesn’t go too far. Could you be more specific? Exactly what did she do today that seemed unusual?”

      “Well, she’s auditing a course I teach—freshman English—basically pretending to be a student to get the feel of the place.”

      “Interesting notion,” Erika said. “All you’re really doing is moving her from one institution to a different one.”

      “Approximately, yes,” I agreed. “Well, I assigned a paper today. She knows she doesn’t have to write one, but she says she’s going to do one anyway, and then she promised me that it’d be so good that it’ll blow me away.”

      “You assign a paper on the first day of class?” Trish demanded incredulously. “You’re a monster!”

      “Just weeding out the garden, Trish,” I told her. “It’s the best way I know of to scare off the party people. Evidently, Renata took the assignment as a challenge, and now she’s going to jump on it with both feet.”

      “She’s making a pass at you, Mark,” Erika said bluntly. “She wants to write her way into your heart.”

      “Get real,” I said. “There’s none of that going on.”

      “I wouldn’t be so sure, Mark,” Sylvia said thoughtfully. “It’s not uncommon for a psychiatric patient to have those kinds of feelings for the therapist.”

      “I’m not Twink’s therapist, Sylvia,” I objected.

      “Oh, really? You worry about her all the time, you do everything you possibly can to make her life easier, and you get all nervous if she does anything the least bit out of the ordinary. You’re trying everything you can think of to make her get well. In my book, that makes you her therapist.”

      “I think you might be missing something, Sylvia,” James said thoughtfully.

      “Oh?”

      “Mark’s been a brother figure for Renata since she was a baby, and he’s the only person she recognized when her mind woke up. Isn’t it possible that this ‘I’ll write a paper that’ll blow you away’ announcement is an effort to gain Mark’s approval?”

      “He’s a father figure, you mean?”

      “Something along those lines, I suppose,” he rumbled.

      “Thanks a bunch, gang,” I said sarcastically. “Now we’ve got a toss-up. Is she aggressively showing off, or is she just yearning for approval?”

      “It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?” Erika suggested.

      “I’ve got to meet this girl, Mark,” Sylvia said. “For right now, though, maybe you’d better talk with Dr. Fallon about it. He knows her, so he’ll probably have some idea of what’s really going on. It might not be anything very significant, but on the other hand…” She left it hanging.

      I began to wish I’d kept my mouth shut. Twink was my problem, but now I’d opened a door that maybe I should have left closed. My housemates all seemed very interested in Renata’s behavior, and I wasn’t sure I wanted them to start muddying things up.

      On the other hand, I didn’t really have any idea of what was going on in Twink’s mind, and maybe one of the inmates here could come up with a clue. At this point, I’d take all the help I could get.

       CHAPTER SIX

      I didn’t sleep very well that night, and when I finally drifted off, I had some peculiar dreams involving Milton, Whitman, and Twinkie. For some reason, they were all ganging up on me, and the green chain kept turning up to complicate things all the more.

      Anyway, I was a little foggy when I stumbled downstairs the next morning. James, Charlie, and the bathrobe brigade were clustered around the small television set on the kitchen counter, watching and listening intently.

      “What’s up?” I asked,