Regina's Song: A Novel

Regina's Song: A Novel

Regina's Song: A Novel

Regina's Song: A Novel

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Overview

“A story of murder and revenge . . . Outstandingly well paced and tightly plotted, the novel also stands out in its handling of various psychological themes.”—Booklist

Eerily attuned to one another, twins Regina and Renata are so identical that even their mother can’t tell them apart. Then tragedy strikes: a vicious attack leaves one twin dead and the other so traumatized that she turns totally inward, incapable of telling anyone what happened or even who she is. She remains lost to the world, until the day Mark, a family friend, comes to visit—and the young woman utters her first intelligible word.

As she recovers, still with no memory of the past, her nightmares grow steadily more frightful, followed by wild fits of hysteria and dark mood swings. Her strange outbursts seem to coincide with the grisly serial murders that have begun plaguing Seattle. Could she be the killer? Determined to dispel his suspicion, Mark stakes out her home. The unholy sight he witnesses one night will haunt his soul for the rest of his life. . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780345454799
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Publication date: 06/25/2002
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 432
File size: 511 KB

About the Author

About The Author
David Eddings published his first novel, High Hunt, in 1973, before turning to the field of fantasy and The Belgariad, soon followed by The Malloreon. Born in Spokane, Washington, in 1931, and raised in the Puget Sound area north of Seattle, he received his bachelor of arts degree from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in 1954, and a master of arts degree from the University of Washington in 1961. He has served in the United States Army, has worked as a buyer for the Boeing Company, and has also been a grocery clerk and a college English teacher.

Leigh Eddings has collaborated with her husband for more than a dozen years.

David and Leigh Eddings live in the Southwest.

Read an Excerpt

PRELUDE
 
Andante
 
Les Greenleaf and my dad, Ben Austin, had served in the same outfit during the Vietnam War, and twenty-five years later they could spend whole afternoons swapping war stories. They both grew up in Everett, a town thirty miles north of Seattle. And they both worked at the same place, since my dad was a sawyer at Greenleaf Sash and Door, Inc.
 
Aside from that, they couldn’t have been much more opposite. Les Greenleaf was a Catholic, a Republican, and a member of the National Association of Manufacturers. My dad was a Methodist, a Democrat, and a member of the AFL-CIO. Les Greenleaf had investments, and Ben Austin lived from paycheck to paycheck. They were on opposite sides of just about any fence you could think of.
 
“Buddyship,” though, tends to jump over all kinds of fences. I guess that when people are shooting at you, you get attached to the guy who’s covering your butt.
 
Back during the late sixties, staying out of the army and the war in ‘Nam had been every young man’s major goal in life. Rich kids could get a student deferment if they were smart enough to get into college, but working-class kids had to take their chances.
 
Les and my dad both graduated from high school in 1967. My dad promptly married pretty Pauline Baker, his high-school sweetheart and went to work at Greenleaf Sash and Door.
 
Les Greenleaf enrolled in the University of Washington, joined a fraternity, and majored in parties. He flunked out at the end of his sophomore year.
 
My dad had evidently had a little spat with mom, and just to show her how independent he was, he enlisted in the army—something he might not have done if he’d been completely sober. He was, however, sober enough to sign on for only two years rather than the customary six.
 
As it turned out, Les Greenleaf was inducted on the same day, so they started out together. My mom had been pregnant—with me—during her little argument with dad, which might have explained why she’d been so grouchy.
 
Anyway, Ben and Les went off to war, and mom stayed home and sulked.
 
I was about a year and a half old when they got out of the army, and I was among the guests at the wedding of Mr. Lester Greenleaf and Miss Inga Wurzberger. I was the one who slept through the whole ceremony. Inga was obviously of German extraction—Bavarian, I think—and she’d been a sorority girl at U.W. while Les was concentrating on cutting classes. The wedding had taken place in a Catholic church, and I guess my dad had been a little uncomfortable about that—but buddyship prevailed.
 
Inga and my mom got along well together, and starting back when I was still a toddler, we often visited the Greenleafs in their fancy home in a posh district of Everett. Since I was absolutely adorable in those days, I was always the center of attention during those visits, and I thought that was sort of nice.
 
My time in the limelight came to an abrupt halt in 1977 when Inga blossomed and bore fruit—a pair of twin girls, Regina and Renata, who definitely outclassed me on the adorability front. As I remember, I was fairly sullen about the whole thing.
 
Regina and Renata were identical twins—so identical that not even Inga could tell them apart—and when they first started talking, it wasn’t English they were speaking. I’m told it’s not uncommon for twins to have a private language, but “twin-speak” is supposed to fade out before the pair get into kindergarten. Regina and Renata kept their private dialect fully operational all the way into high school.
 
There was a whacko social theory at that time to the effect that twins would grow up psychotic if they were dressed alike. Inga blithely ignored it and followed the ancient custom of putting the girls in identical dresses every morning, the sole difference being a red hair ribbon for Regina and a blue one for Renata. She carefully checked their little gold name bracelets every morning to be certain she wasn’t getting them mixed up. I think it was those hair ribbons that set the girls off on what the Greenleafs called the twin-game. Regina and Renata swapped ribbons three or four times a day, and as soon as they learned how to undo the clasps on their name bracelets, all hope of certainty went out the window.
 
Those two had all sorts of fun with that twin-game, but now when I think back, maybe they were trying to tell us something. The pretty little blond girls had no real sense of individual identity. I don’t think either one ever used the word “I.” It was always “we” with Regina and Renata. They’d even answer to either name.
 
That bugged their parents, but it didn’t particularly bother me. My solution to the “identification crisis” was to simply address them indiscriminately as Twinkie and to refer to them collectively as the Twinkie Twins. That made the girls a little grumpy right at first, but after a while it seemed to fit into their conception of themselves, and they stopped using their given names and began to address each other as either Twinkie or Twink—even when they were using their private language.
 
In a peculiar way, that got me included in their private group. Our families were close to begin with, and because I was seven years older than they were, the chubby, golden-haired twins looked upon me as a big brother. I had to tie their shoes, wipe their noses, and put the wheels back on their tricycles when they came off. Every time they broke something they’d assure each other that “Markie can fix it.” Every now and then, one of them would slip and say something to me in twin-speak, and they always seemed a little disappointed and even sad when I didn’t understand what they were saying.
 
As their official surrogate brother, I spent a lot of my childhood and early adolescence in the company of the Twinkie Twins, and I learned to ignore their cutesy-poo habit of whispering to each other, casting sly looks at me, and giggling. By the time I moved up into high-school—an event most adolescents view as something akin to a religious experience—I was more or less immune to their antics.
 
In May of my sophomore year, I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license. My dad firmly advised me that the family car was not available, but he promised to check at the union hall for job opportunities for young fellows in need of a summer job. I wasn’t too hopeful, but he came home with an evil sort of grin on his face. “You’ve got a job at a sawmill, Mark,” he told me.
 
“No kidding?” I was a little startled.
 
“Nope. You go to work on the Monday after school lets out.”
 
“What am I going to be doing?”
 
“Pulling chain.”
 
“What’s ‘pulling chain’?”
 
“You don’t really want to know.”
 
I found out why I wouldn’t after I’d joined the union and reported to work. I also found out why there were always job openings in sawmills when the job involves the green chain. Sawmills convert logs from the woods into planks. After a green hemlock log has spent six or eight weeks in the millpond soaking up salt water, it gets very heavy, and it’s so waterlogged that it sends out a spray when it goes through the saw. The planks come slithering out of the mill on a wide bed of rollers called the green chain. They’re rough, covered with splinters, and almost as heavy as iron. “Pulling chain” involves hauling those rough-sawed planks off the rollers and stacking them in piles. It’s a moderately un-fun job. More-modern sawmills have machines that do the sorting, pulling, and stacking, but the sawmill where I worked that summer hadn’t changed very much since the 1920s, so we did things the old-fashioned way. I didn’t like the job very much, but I really, really wanted my own car, so I stuck it out.
 
I’d been an indifferent student at best up until then, but after the summer of ’86, my attitude changed. There might just be a doctoral dissertation in psychology there—The Motivational Impact of the Green Chain maybe. I became a much more serious student after that summer, let me tell you.
 
Pulling chain did earn me enough money to buy my own car, of course, and that’s very important to red-blooded sixteen-year-olds, since it’s widely known in that group that “You ain’t nothin’ if you ain’t got wheels.” The Twinkie Twins weren’t very impressed by my not-very-shiny black ’74 Dodge, but I didn’t buy it to impress them. They were only third graders and by definition unworthy of my attention. They were blond, still chubby with the remnants of baby fat, and they were at the tomboy stage of development.
 

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