Come Unto These Yellow Sands (3 page)

He knew the basics, of course. He knew Max was forty-five, in excellent health, had never been married, and voted Independent. He was easy to talk to and a good listener. He sang in the shower in a pleasant baritone and rarely got the words right. He couldn’t cook to save his life but he enjoyed eating, and to compensate for it put in time at the gym and went running on the mornings he didn’t wake up in Swift’s bed. He followed sports—baseball and football in particular. He liked soul music. Most important, he had never heard of SSS and the last time he’d read a poem was probably in
Mother Goose.

“I’ll have to get mine to go,” Max said, jogging down the staircase.

“Ready and waiting.” Swift took a mouthful of coffee, watching—appreciating—as Max strode into the kitchen area. An ex-jock, Max moved well, with a careless, athletic ease.

Picking up his yellow mug, Max downed his coffee in three giant swallows. He scooped up the paper towel wrapping his toast, pausing in front of Swift long enough to give him a coffee-tasting peck.

“No cinnamon on mine?”

“Nope. Have a good day,” Swift said.

“I’ll see you.”

Swift nodded. Max usually left it like that. Sometimes they made plans but just as often it was left to chance. The fact that chance usually led them to each other’s bed might mean something—or it might not.

Today Max would be busy with his murder case.

And so would Swift.

Chapter Three

You are an underwater explorer. You’ve just accepted your most challenging assignment. To find the ancient vanished city of Atlantis lost far beneath the waves.

Or maybe you’re just a sleep-deprived, under-caffeinated college professor with rain trickling down the back of your neck as you swim—er, sprint—from your car to your classroom clear on the other side of campus.

Normally Swift didn’t mind the rain. He liked water. He’d been born underwater. His parents—literary icons Norris Swift and Marion Gilbert Swift—had wanted their only offspring to experience a childhood rich in sensory and cultural stimulation. They had documented, both in film and poetry, nearly every moment of Swift’s childhood journey. From tadpole to poet in his own right, it was all there for anyone who wanted to know—and was a regular subscriber to PBS.

It was a peculiar thing to grow up in the public eye. It was a still-weirder thing to serve as the living, breathing form of inspiration for two of the greatest poets in North America. Sometimes, when Swift had been much younger, it had been hard to separate who he was from who everyone else thought he was. He’d seen home movies of himself at eighteen months sitting inside a giant watermelon and trying to eat his way out, of being dipped in watercolor and crawling over canvasses. He’d swum with dolphins at age eight and drank wine at his parents’ dinner parties at ten. His godfather had been the Poet Laureate William Stafford, and according to family legend, Anne Sexton had once babysat him while Marion Swift was accepting a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

No wonder Swift had been doing drugs by the time he was seventeen.

That was the year he’d also scored the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for
Black Solstice,
his first book of poems.
BS
, as he’d come to think of it, had gone on to win the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He’d followed that success a year later with
Cuckoo Shells
, which had pretty much summed up his state of mind.
CS
had been critically lauded but had failed to score any major awards. Swift had been certain his career was over. Maybe it would have been better for everyone if it had been.

He’d sought comfort in more chemical relief. A lot of chemical relief. By the time he was nineteen he had learned to deal with the crushing expectations of his nearest and dearest by means of his serious and less and less easily concealed cocaine habit.

But that was all a long time ago. Now days Swift was healthy, whole and mostly happy. And even if he never wrote another poem as long as he lived, he would be okay.

The only reason he was even thinking about this, dredging up painful history as he jogged across the green and glistening campus, was Tad. Swift didn’t need to hear the particulars of the case—although it had been all over the local radio during his morning drive—to know it was possible Tad
had
killed his old man. Especially if the kid was using again. Personal experience. Swift always figured it was a miracle he hadn’t killed someone—let alone himself—back in the bad old days.

Not that Tad had appeared high when Swift spoke to him the previous afternoon. In fact, Swift had never once picked up a hint that Tad suffered chemical addiction. But if Mario Corelli had delivered the beating Tad received? Yeah, Swift could see Tad hitting back.

Tad was a big kid. Not just tall but broad, heavyset. He reminded Swift of an overgrown puppy who still hadn’t grown into his size. He’d played football in high school despite his current literary aspirations. Swift could imagine him striking out in anger and doing serious damage. Except Mario Corelli hadn’t died in a fight. He’d been shot to death. Shot to death on a state park beach according to Max, which sort of eliminated the striking-out-in-blind-rage defense.

Swift wished now he had shut up and let Max talk about the case. No one else really had much information beyond the most basic, but rumors were already circulating that Tad was wanted by the police for questioning.

He reached Chamberlain Hall, which was busy and bustling at a quarter to eight in the morning, and picked up his messages and mail from Dottie Dodge, the department secretary. Dottie was a fierce munchkin of a woman, and she had never made a secret of the fact that she thought Swift did not belong at a fine old institution like Casco Bay College. The first week Swift had started teaching at CBC she had informed him that her nephew had died in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. It was Dottie’s opinion that all addicts were the same animal and that that animal ought to be put down. He tried not to take it personally, although after six years of that same unbending attitude it wasn’t easy.

That morning Dottie greeted him more cordially than usual, her yellow-green eyes alight with malicious pleasure as she handed over the usual assortment of junk-mail catalogs and brochures. Dottie religiously kept Swift’s junk mail safe for him. The important stuff she tended to misplace for a day or two.

Swift shuffled quickly through the envelopes. There was yet another letter from Shannon Cokely. Probably once again listing her imaginary grievances against the Lighthouse Program in general and Swift in particular.

“The police were here when we unlocked the doors this morning.”

“Oh?”

“They made copies of Corelli’s cumulative records.” Dottie sniffed. “Looks like teacher’s pet is in hot water again.”

There was no point pretending he didn’t know what she was talking about. The whole campus was abuzz. “I thought the cops were looking at a waiter Corelli fired.”

“Oh, you’re way behind the times. The waiter, Tony Lascola, has an alibi. And the Corelli boy has disappeared.” She smiled tightly. Dottie had always been deeply offended by the fact that Swift had bent the rules to get Tad into the Lighthouse program.

“Innocent until proven guilty,” Swift reminded her, he hoped affably.

Dottie gave another of those sniffs that conveyed so much disapproval with so little oxygen.

Nodding farewell, Swift headed for his office. He was running late and had just enough time to dump his coat and grab his roll book before getting over to the seminar room where his students milled restlessly in the hallway.

“Hey, Professor!”

“Morning, Professor Swift.”

“Professor Swift? About Tuesday’s assignment…”

He unlocked the door and let them crowd inside the room, absently responding to greetings and questions.

The first class of the day was Foundations of Literary Analysis. It was a class Swift enjoyed not least because it spared him teaching Introduction to Creative Writing. As sponsor of the college literary magazine he had all the exposure to newly hatched scribes he could handle. The course emphasized a subject dear to his heart: critical reading and writing. It never failed to dismay him how many kids confused liking something with literary merit. If there was one thing he intended his students to take away at the end of the semester, it was an ability to separate personal likes and dislikes from objective analysis.

It would probably be easier to teach them to write book reports in iambic pentameter, but he was going to do it or die trying. If there was one life skill everyone on the planet needed, it was the ability to think with critical objectivity.

As always, once Swift began his lecture, the passion for words and writing swept him away, and he forgot all about Tad and the murder of Mario Corelli, and the fact that Max was going to be very unhappy with him.

“The discovery that you like William Carlos Williams? That’s great. We’ll keep it in mind for Christmas. But to get an A on a paper in this class, you’re going to have to convince me that you’ve got a good reason for liking William Carlos Williams.”

He could see the faces of those most fond of their own opinions wrinkling up in protest.

“I want to see those opinions supported by evidence. I want you to prove to me that you’ve considered elements like theme, setting, characterization—”

“How can there be characterization in a poem?” objected Denny Jensen.

Jensen was a smart kid even if he had taken Foundations of Literary Analysis in the hope of avoiding having to write anything himself. Swift remembered what Max had said about Jensen the evening before. He wouldn’t have guessed Jensen was the bright hope of the football team given the fact that he exhibited none of that attitude of entitlement of so many jocks, so he forgave him the dumb question and was off and running, explaining
exactly
how characterization worked in poetry.

The next seventy minutes passed quickly—for Swift anyway. Back in his cubbyhole of an office he graded papers, absently listening to the drum of rain against the windows, and calculated how soon he could get out to Orson Island to talk to Tad. Not before his afternoon seminar. Not without bringing attention to himself.

That worried him—the realization that he was automatically thinking like a criminal. He wasn’t a criminal. It wasn’t even for sure that he was helping a criminal. He just wanted to make sure Tad wasn’t sandbagged. What was wrong with that?

A little before lunchtime Dottie buzzed him.

“Bernard Frost,” she announced.

It took Swift a few strange seconds to place the name. Recognition brought a little jolt with it. Bernie was Swift’s agent. Former agent.

“You’re kidding.” That was a rhetorical comment. Of course Dottie wasn’t kidding. Dottie had no sense of humor. She didn’t bother to reply, and a split second later the phone rang in Swift’s office.

Swift picked up. “Bernard.”

No one called Bernard “Bernie”. No one ever had but Swift who, back when he was a punk kid, thought it funny to irritate Bernard at every opportunity. What did it say about him that he’d set out to antagonize his own agent? His agent and his friend. He remembered once, after he’d been beaten up by a less-than-amused drug dealer, calling Bernard in the middle of the night—and Bernard had unhesitatingly answered that cry for help, driving to the rescue, cashmere coat thrown over his silk pajamas, hair sticking up on end like a cockatoo. Bernard had sat with Swift in the emergency room while they stitched the cut in his scalp and taped his broken nose.

So there was a lot of warmth in Swift’s voice. There was warmth in Bernard’s tone too, though he sounded tentative even after six years, always prepared to find that Swift had once more descended into self-destruction. “My dear. How are you?”

“Good. Very good. How are you?”

It was odd to be making polite chitchat with someone who knew him as well as Bernard did. Had. Sometimes you had to go through the ping-pong preliminaries. It had been nearly two years since they’d last spoken. They still exchanged cards at Christmas.

“I’m in fine fettle, Swift. As a matter of fact, I’m just back from a fabulous holiday in Barbados.” Bernard forever sounded like someone who’d escaped from a Noel Coward play, like one of those suave congenital bachelors—and he
was
a congenital bachelor, but he was also as straight as a baseball bat.

“That must have been nice.”

“Oh it was, my dear.” Bernard launched into a wry and witty account of his island vacation. He followed that with a catty description of a literary luncheon he’d recently attended—Capote couldn’t have done it better—complete with updates and the latest gossip about people Swift no longer gave a damn about.

Swift appreciated that this was all warm-up for the main event and waited patiently, if a little nervously. Bernard would not call just to chat. Not these days.

“But how did we get sidetracked on me when I rang to hear about you? I don’t suppose you’re…working?” The last word was cautious. Bernard didn’t mean
working
as in teaching or being otherwise gainfully employed. He meant writing. He meant poetry.

“No.”

“Not a word?”

“Not a word worth showing anyone.”

“I only ask because Fountainhead has been in touch about the
Blue Knife
collection.”

Swift sank back in the leather chair that had once belonged to his father. He felt…gut-punched. Fountainhead Press was a small, independent literary press. Best known for the prestigious Fountainhead Prize, it was one of the most influential publishers in the United States. Fountainhead had published all but Swift’s first collection of poems.

After ten years Swift had nearly forgotten the plans for his last ill-fated collection. He’d sort of assumed Fountainhead had forgotten too.

When he found his voice, he said, “There was no
Blue Knife
collection, Bernard. You know that. We all know that. I lied to get an advance because I needed money for coke.”