"Eddings, David - Regina's Song V2.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

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 there were 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
Сserious'?"
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, and Erika just
finished premed, so they weren't too happy to be living
in the middle of a twelve-week-long beer bust. I've lived
here for six years, so I've more or less learned to turn