Free Come Unto These Yellow Sands by Josh Lanyon

this evening, but not surprisingly it was the main topic of dinner conversation.
    “I always thought it was a mistake to include an undergrad student in the program.” Shannon Cokely tapped a finger on the rim of her wineglass to get the waitress’s attention.
    Shannon was tall and pale and intense. She taught at the University of Maine, and she wrote poetry as sharp and painful as broken razors.
    “I know,” Swift said. “You’ve never failed to mention it.” That was the alcohol loosening his tongue, but he did resent the fact that Shannon had taken her objections over his head to the administration. Swift had triumphed, but it had adversely affected his feelings for Shannon, and he had declined to be her faculty advisor when she’d requested him. She had tried to go over his head that time too, and had again been overruled. Now she restrained herself to regular letters of complaint to Swift about the program, about the other instructors and students, and about Swift himself.
    Shannon flushed at his comment, but the others laughed, so maybe Swift hadn’t sounded as acidic as he felt. Or maybe he did. Shannon wasn’t terribly well-liked for all her talent.
    “It looks like he’s given Nerine the boost she needed,” George Steinberg observed. George worked on the Stone Coast Signal . “She’s ahead of Bill McNeill in the polls now. They were neck and neck just a few days ago.”
    “I thought she was pulling out of the race.” Swift didn’t follow local politics any more than he followed local sports, but he did remember the various conversations he’d overheard that day.
    “She’d be a fool to pull out now,” Shannon said.
    George replied, “She’s not pulling out.”
    “Does Tad have a girlfriend?” Swift asked suddenly.
    The others looked surprised at the change of topic, and then doubtful. That was part of the problem including someone Tad’s age in the program. That he was as gifted as anyone else in the program was never in dispute, but despite the maturity of his work, he didn’t have much else in common with his Lighthouse peers.
    “Probably,” George said. “The police ought to know.” His dark gaze met Swift’s, and Swift realized that his relationship with Max was not the secret he generally assumed it was.
    “For some reason the police aren’t communicating with me.”
    Everyone laughed as though he’d made a joke, but if so, the joke was on Swift.
    “ Is the kid the only suspect?” George asked, and Swift remembered belatedly that George was first and foremost a reporter.
    “I don’t know. I thought one of the waiters was a suspect.”
    “Antonio Lascola,” George concurred. “He threatened Mario after Mario fired him, but it turned out he had an alibi.”
    “What was his alibi?”
    “He was with his girlfriend.”
    “You’re kidding. Even I know that’s a lame alibi.”
    George shrugged. “Maybe. Lascola’s green-card status depends on being employed, so he did have motive, but unfortunately it sounds like Tad had more. A number of people confirmed that he threatened to kill Corelli.”
    Cory Kolodinsky drawled, “My kids threaten to kill me once a week,” and everyone laughed again.
    Swift said, “But that’s just it. He’s a kid. Kids say things like that.”
    “And sometimes they mean them.” Shannon looked up as the waitress arrived with the tray of drinks. “I didn’t want this,” she objected as the waitress set a fresh drink before her.
    “What would you like?”
    “Something else.”
    The waitress failed to conceal her flash of irritation. “What something else?”
    “Just forget it.” Shannon’s lip trembled before she hid it behind her drink.
    The waitress shrugged and moved on to the next person.
    “Order anything you like,” Swift told Shannon.
    She glared at him over the rim of her glass.
    Never, if he lived to be a hundred, would Swift understand women. Starting with his own mother and moving right down the line to