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

all they were worth. Along toward midnight, things
started to get physical. There were a few drunken fights,
and a fair number of boys and girls were slipping off into
the darkness for assorted boy-girl entertainments. At
that point Regina and Renata decided that it was time to
leave. They slipped away from the party, hopped into
their new Pontiac-a graduation present from their folks-
and started back to Everett.
Regina, the dominant twin, probably drove. Renata
had her driver's license, but she almost never took the
wheel. They took the usual shortcut that winds up
through Forest Park. It was in the vicinity of the petting
zoo where they had a flat tire.
As best the authorities were able to reconstruct what
happened, Regina left the car and walked to the zoo to
find a phone. Renata stayed with the Pontiac for a while,
then went looking for her sister.
The next morning the twins were discovered near the
zoo. One was dead, raped and then hacked to death
with something that wasn't very sharp. The other twin
was sitting beside the body with a look of total
incomprehension on her face. When the authorities tried
to question her, she replied in a language that nobody
could understand.
The authorities-assorted cops, detectives, the coroner,
and so un-questioned Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf
extensively, but they didn't learn much: the boss and the
missus were shattered and even in the best of times,
they couldn't translate the girls' private language-they
couldn't even tell the girls apart. So after the cops
discovered that Regina was the dominant twin, they
assumed that it'd been Regina who'd been murdered
and Renata who'd gone bonkers.
But nobody could prove it. The footprints routinely
taken of all newborns turned out to be missing from the
records at Everett General Hospital, and identical twins
have identical DNA. Logic said that the dead girl was
most likely Regina, but logic wasn't good enough for
filling out forms.
Les Greenleaf nearly flipped when he saw his daughter
listed as an "unidentified female" in official reports.
The surviving twin continued to answer all questions in
twin-speak, and so the Greenleafs had no choice but to
put her in a private sanitarium in the hope that the
headshrinkers could wake up her mind. They had to fill
out papers, of course, and they arbitrarily listed their
surviving daughter as Renata-but they couldn't prove it
either.
The murder remained unsolved.
My folks and I attended the funeral, of course, but