Come Unto These Yellow Sands by Josh Lanyon Read Free Book Online Page A

better.
    Was there a way to fix this? Beyond apologizing again to Max when he had cooled down, Swift couldn’t think of one. If he knew where Tad was, he could do what he’d planned on this afternoon, but he had no idea where the boy might hole up—and any ideas he came up with were bound to be things the police had already thought of.
    Swift left the police station, drove home on automatic pilot and headed straight for the kitchen. After some aimless opening and closing of cupboards, he decided to prepare a bacon quiche. Not because he was hungry—the smell of the browning bacon had him gagging over the trash bin—but because the dish was complicated and required his full attention. He needed distraction from his worries and he needed routine, so he rolled out the pâte brisée, eased the dough into a 9-inch fluted tart pan, whisked the eggs with the cream, milk, salt, pepper and nutmeg. And when it was all done, when the quiche came out of the oven golden brown and flaky and smelling of warmth and earth and light, he made himself sit and eat.
    Beyond the importance of routine, it was vital to stay healthy in times of stress. Swift had badly abused his body for most of his life. His current state of health required consciousness and commitment. He allowed himself two glasses of wine with his meal. The second glass of wine was a compromise. For the first time in a long time he wanted something else—wanted it badly.
    That was a natural reaction to emotional strain. The best thing was to ignore it and stay busy, so after dinner he built a fire in the fireplace, put on a Barber CD and settled on the sofa with the latest stack of submissions to the Pentagoet Review, the college’s quarterly poetry magazine.
    Since Swift had taken over sponsorship, the magazine had doubled both in size and circulation. Granted, that wasn’t saying a whole hell of a lot. It was still a mostly obscure college publication. The people who had hoped they might discover a new poem or two from SSS had long given up, but the magazine continued to thrive and Swift was proud of it.
    He flipped through the first couple of submissions—calligraphy on colored paper, no less.
    He was never very popular around submission time, but whether anyone noticed or not, he’d considerably eased his critical standards over the years— had to in order to fill the pages with something other than artwork. Even so there were limits.
    That aching hollowness is filled when you are near. When you are far away my soul pores forth…
    Soul pores. He sighed and turned to the next submission. The trouble was most of these kids—and more than a few of his colleagues—were used to the generally uncritical praise from a circle of writing friends.
    Blame is the flame of a candle made of stone. I love you thrown in vein…
    He glanced at the byline. Tess Allison had been the magazine’s faculty advisor before Swift had come along, so that “vein” was probably deliberate. Either way this one would have to be published. Swift had learned a few things through the years—generally the hard way.
    He turned to the next submission—all lowercase. This one was a clever take-off on E.E. Cummings’s “since feeling is first…” which happened to be a favorite of Swift’s.
    since feeling is first
    who pays any attention
    to the syntax of things
    will never wholly kiss you;
    Wonderful. And this little parody was wonderful too. He read it over twice. Smiling, he set the submission in the pile with the others marked for acceptance. Nothing made him happier than when he found a jewel like this.
    Mostly what he got was the inevitable adolescent and post-adolescent angst usually written in anticipation of coitus and punctuated with “I, I, me, me, I.” Sunset, suicide and long walks on the beach figured largely in the variations on the theme of nobody loves me, nobody understands me, we’re all gonna die.
    No wonder his thoughts kept circling back to Max’s office. Each time