Chapter I
I got the letter from Dai Llewellyn in June, when the locals were still coming to my bookstore out of curiosity and the tourists had not yet found it.
Ginger Gates tossed the bundled mail at me, and I fielded it left-handed. I was waiting on a customer. He bought Joseph Wambaugh's Lines and Shadows, then fresh in paperback, and a field guide to the High Sierras.
I chatted with the man for a while, handed him a flyer that described my book-ordering service and map inventory, and smiled at the twelfth reference to the heat wave since 9:00 a.m. It was four in the afternoon. Only three of the twelve customers had bought books, but all of them had given me a free weather report.
"Hot out," Ginger shouted from the back room.
I contemplated homicide.
"Tam starts work today."
"Good." Tam was Ginger's daughter, second string guard on the junior college basketball team I coached in the winter. Tammy was spending the summer guiding white-water rafters. I hoped she wouldn't break her long legs.
I picked up the mail--two sweepstakes brochures, a coupon offering a free soft drink for every two cheeseburgers purchased, the electric bill, and a letter in a heavy bond envelope with my name, Lark Dailey, and the store name, Larkspur Books, in black ink and a rather crabbed hand. Below that, another hand had written in the rest of the address.
I turned the envelope over. The initials EDL were embossed on the back flap, but there was no return address. One of my players, I reflected, had decided to get married and chuck basketball, and her granny had addressed the wedding announcements. It was that kind of envelope.
Ginger stuck her head around the partition that separated the storeroom-office from the shop itself. "How's business?"
"At this rate I'll file for bankruptcy before Christmas."
Ginger chortled as if I'd said something witty, gave her mouse-blonde perm a pat, and picked up the feather duster. Books accumulate a lot of dust. She began whisking her duster over the revolving science fiction rack.
I tossed the junk mail in the waste basket and took the bill and the heavy envelope to the back room. My brand-new PC gleamed. When I had entered the amount of the bill, written a check, and stuffed it into the return envelope, I opened my mystery letter. "My dear Miss Dailey," it said,
I have just learned from my friend, Lydia Huff, that you have opened a bookstore, a real bookstore for the selling of real books--in Monte, California. Forgive an old man's impertinent curiosity, but why? how? are you in earnest? If so, I hope you will join the house party I'm assembling at my little fishing lodge for the Fourth of July weekend, so we can talk it all over.
Lydia and Bill, Win D'Angelo, la belle Denise, and a handful of other congenial souls have agreed to keep me company. Because I always spend July at the lodge, I find I need a literary weekend at the beginning of the month to sustain me through the sheer earthiness of the rest. Do come, and bring a guest, if you like. Your mother and I are old friends, as you probably know, but even if we weren't I'd still look forward to meeting another Literary Pioneer.
Yours faithfully,
Dai Llewellyn
P.S. Four days--Thursday through Sunday, if you can spare the time. We have swimming, canoeing, fishing, and lucullan food in addition to the stellar company.
I ransacked my memory. Ma had a lot of old friends. I had met Bill and Lydia Huff. Bill published the local weekly and a great deal else, being sole proprietor of a rather famous small press, the kind that prints high-quality chapbooks and regional histories.
Old Bill was a bit folksy for my taste, but I liked Lydia, and I'd cultivated the connection in a desultory way. The only real bookstore and the only real press in the county ought to co-exist in harmony.
I wasn't sure I could put up with four days of literary chit-chat, however. I had better plans for the Fourth. I brooded. The annoying little bell that rang when a customer entered bonged, and I went back into the shop. Ginger peered at me around the science fiction.
I shook my head, 'I'll get it,' and moved forward to greet the woman who had come in. Lydia Huff's large, light gray eyes lit when she saw me. We embraced after the fashion of people who have drunk cocktails together, and I mentioned the invitation.
The hundred kilowatt eyes beamed. "Oh, do come, Lark darling. We're apt to get reminiscent and inky when there aren't any fresh faces. You'll like Dai. He's a dear."
I was about to say, "That's nice but who is he?" when memory kicked in. Of course. A major minor poet. A distinguished teacher. My mother's mentor, or one of them. E. David Llewellyn, poet. My heart sank.
"Uh, Jay and I..."
"Is that your lover?"
When older people use the word lover they make me uncomfortable, as if they were popping me into a mental gilded cage. "We're friends."
"Bring him!" Lydia made an expansive gesture emphasized by the flowing sleeve of her heavily embroidered lilac tunic. Lydia supported all the local arts and had once been a weaver herself, so she was apt to look expensively homespun. "Bill's daughter will be there and Dai's grandniece, Angharad. Do you know her?"
I nodded, and she went on with the guest list. I knew Angharad Peltz. She taught English part time at the junior college and considered women's basketball an appropriate activity for non-verbal ectomorphs and lesbians. She didn't say that, but that's what she meant.
I'm a little paranoid about basketball, because my family is hyper-intellectual, and they did not look upon my selection to the varsity basketball team as they would have, say, regarded precocious publication in Poetry Magazine or The Journal of the American Historical Society. My mother is a poet, my father a history professor.
By the time I made the Olympic team--via Ohio State--they were almost reconciled to having produced a sport in both senses of the word. Unfortunately that Olympic team was sacrificed to the gods of politics. If I had come home with a gold medal, or more likely a bronze, I think they would have understood my enthusiasm, but my basketball career fizzled like a damp firecracker. So there I was, five years later, coaching part-time, and running a bookstore on the wrong side of the Rockies.
Lydia had paused.
"It sounds nice." I hoped that was a suitable but non-committal response.
"Oh, it is. The lodge is pure 1930's rustic--lots of peeled logs and paneling--but Dai has transformed it into a kind of high-class hotel. Not that he rents it out." She laughed, ho-ho-ho. I deduced that Llewellyn was a fat cat. If he owned a lake he had to be.
Lydia was enthusing about the amenities, which included a Filipino chef. There was a private dock, canoes only--no motor boats or speedboats, my dear, he doesn't like noise--and so on. Eventually she wound down, and I said I'd think about it. She had come to check out our display of Huff Press books, naturally, not to buy anything. She rearranged a couple of titles, said she was satisfied, and left.
"He's an old goat."
I jumped. I'd forgotten Ginger. "Llewellyn?"
Ginger waved the feather duster almost fiercely. "Dennis took me out there last year. It's a fancy place, okay, but who wants to be sneered at by eighty year old faggots?"
I wondered whether 'faggot' was local parlance for anyone from San Francisco who didn't crumple beer cans with his bare hands or a more precise metaphor. "He must've been pretty hard to take."
"He was." She whacked the dust from a row of Penguin mysteries so hard the rack revolved. We had mysteries and science fiction on specially constructed wooden racks. The real books reposed on real bookshelves. "He looked at me as if I wore polyester pantsuits."
"Patronizing," I guessed.
"Yeah." Ginger brooded. I suspected she had a polyester pantsuit in her past, but she was now strictly natural fiber. She was also, belatedly, going to college, having married at eighteen, divorced at twenty-two, and hand-raised a pair of kids while waiting tables. College was very disturbing to Ginger's assumptions. I was fond of her, maybe because her assumptions were disturbable.
"Does Dennis like the old man? He's a distinguished poet, you know."
"Maybe he is, but he treats Dennis like the chauffeur." Dennis Fromm, Ginger's whatchacallum, was a forest ranger. She snorted. "Worse than the chauffeur. The old guy has this pretty boy Mexican kid to drive for him, and they flirt."
"Oh."
"Well, they do. Dennis had to take his mom out to stay at the lodge, so I went along. I was glad when we left."
"I suppose Denise likes the old man."
"Oh, you know Denise. She fluttered all over him." Dennis's mother, oddly enough, was a dancer. That is, she had been a dancer in the Isadora Duncan-Martha Graham mold. She was now in her sixties, still graceful, still dramatic. How such a haunting, romantic type had produced a son like Dennis was more than I could figure out, but, hey, my mother produced a female basketball player. Dennis was dumb but sweet. I had reservations about Denise.
The longer I thought about it--and I brooded for several hours--the less I liked the coincidence, Lydia Huff just dropping by in time to abet Llewellyn's invitation. I began to smell conspiracy.
Whenever I succumb to paranoia I go to the source. My mother was home--between writers' conferences--and she sounded innocent.
"You're sure you didn't set me up?" I took a bite of taco salad, tipping the mouthpiece of the phone up around my forehead so I could chew corn chips and listen.
"Set you up? What do you mean, darling? I've known Dai forever, of course, but I haven't talked to him in, oh, it must be months, now." The line crackled. Thunderstorm. I missed New York thunderstorms.
"And you didn't just happen to mention my bookstore to him..."
"I probably did," Mother said cheerfully. "It's not a secret, is it?"
I ground my teeth on another chip.
"What is that noise?"
"I'm eating dinner."
"I always forget the time difference. We had brook trout."
"Dad's been fishing again. Canada?"
She described my father's end-of-semester escape to the wilds of Quebec. Nice but beside the point.
I said, "Give him a kiss for me. Now, about this invitation..."
"The lodge is supposed to be fabulous. Dai wrote 'Siskiyou Summit' there. You ought to go."
Clearly I was supposed to recognize the import of 'Siskiyou Summit.' I didn't. I speared a chunk of cheddar. "The weekend of July Fourth will be my first big tourist rush. I should stay with the store."
"That's probably true..." A burst of static intruded. "...say you'd found a reliable clerk?"
"Ginger." I craned around the door of the office for a view of the shop. Ginger was waiting on an elderly couple who looked as if they might actually buy a hardback. "She's pretty good." But not literary.
"Why don't you have, er, Ginger hold the fort? You could drive into town from the lodge a couple of times to check up."
"Expensive."
"I'll underwrite it, darling."
I chewed vigorously.
"Really, Lark, you're in business now. You shouldn't overlook the advantage of having connections."
She was right. When it came to books I had connections in a big way. The idea of using her name to sell things didn't sit well with the taco salad, but there were a lot of things about my bookstore set-up that bothered me. It was financed by a loan on the family trust fund--one kind of "connection." And now this.
My mother will probably never win a Pulitzer for poetry, but she may take the National Book Award one of these years, and she already has an impressive list of secondary honors. Why pretend I don't have literary connections?
I sighed. "Tell me about Llewellyn. Is it true he's gay?"
"Yes, and a great blow it was to us at Bennington when we first found out." Mother chuckled. "There we were, the entire senior lit contingent, ripe for Meaningful Liaisons, and he wasn't interested."
"All-women's schools are a perversion." I had attended Ohio State over mother's protests.
"Really, Lark."
"So you were all in love with the old guy."
"He was a dashing and well-seasoned fifty at the time, darling. Hardly an 'old guy,' and he read poetry like an angel."
I tried to imagine a bunch of early fifties' college girls in pleated skirts and bobby sox mooning over the visiting poet. Not my style. "Is he good?"
"A good poet, you mean?" She was still amused. "He was a pioneer." That word again. "He made an impact on the young writers of the thirties and forties--liberating them from the tyranny of the iamb and so on. He particularly hated rhyme, as I recall, and, yes, he was good."
"Not 'is good.' 'Was.'"
Mother's turn to sigh. "Did I say that? I always thought Dai's wealth was a handicap. He didn't have to scramble after prizes and fellowships, so there's a whiff of the dilettante in most of his work, but he has a surprisingly good ear for an imagist and, of course, his visual observations are exquisite. He's important."
"But his importance is historical?" I finished the thought for her.
"That makes me uncomfortable." She paused. I could hear her thinking. "But it's true, unless he's been writing and not publishing. For all practical purposes he was literary history twenty years ago. That was when he retired from Muir."
Muir College was an excellent, private liberal arts college in the heart of the wine country. If Llewellyn had taught at Muir he was good more ways than one. Muir was famous for the quality of its teaching.
Another thought clicked in, something she had said. "You talked to him a couple of months ago. Why?"
"He's an old friend." Mother paused again. "He asked me to be one of his literary executors, Lark. I had to think it over."
"An honor?" I ventured.
"Of course, but one that could entail a lot of work. He always meant Hal Brauer to act for him--Hal was his lover--but Hal died in a car wreck several years ago. Dai went into seclusion for months. The fact that he's ready to think about his work again is a good sign. I didn't like to refuse him."
"But you did?"
"No," she said calmly. "When he told me the other executor was willing to do the shit work, I agreed."
"Who's the lucky man--or woman?"
"Somebody named D'Angelo. One of Dai's students."
I groaned.
"I believe he teaches at your little junior college."
Monte J.C., a state community college, had seven thousand students. It was not little, except in Mother's mind. I declined to argue the question. "D'Angelo's head of the English Department."
"Is he? He sounded pleasant enough when I spoke with him. All of this is in confidence, Lark."
I assured her I would be as soundless as a dot on a disk of snow, an excursion into Emily Dickinson that tickled Mother so much she was still chortling when we hung up. I finished my salad.
Out front I could hear Ginger murmuring something to a customer who rumbled back. I decided to let her deal with him. When the door bonged on his departure I strolled out to see what was happening. A hairy person in shorts and a tee-shirt was still drooping over the map file.
"What's happening?"
"I sold one of those Ansel Adams books and a guide to the lake." 'The lake' was Lake Shasta, a hundred odd miles south, though there were thousands of natural lakes nearer.
I commended Ginger's enterprising spirit. The Adams book was expensive. In fact I laid on the soft soap.
Ginger preened.
"Uh, I probably ought to go to this place of Llewellyn's over the Fourth. Do you think you could handle the store yourself?"
Her eyes went wide and her mouth formed an O.
"Don't panic," I said hastily. "I haven't accepted yet. Maybe Jay won't be able to get away. Probably not. It's a holiday." Jay was a cop--acting head of the Monte County C.I.D., in fact. Cops tend to do heavy business on holidays.
"You could go alone," Ginger ventured.
"Yes, but I don't want to. Could you handle it, Ginger? I'll drive in and spell you for a couple of hours Friday and Saturday."
"Well, maybe. If it gets real busy, though..." Her face brightened. "There's Annie. She could come in during the peak time and help me."
Annie was Ginger's best friend and a part-time clerk in the liquor store. Annie needed money even more than Ginger did. I protested. "She doesn't know the stock."
"No, but she could ring up, and I could answer questions and so on. That might work."
Two clerks would also cost an arm and a leg. Chalk it up to PR? "I'll think about it," I said decisively. "Here's Dennis."
The door did its bonging thing, and Ginger's love interest barged in, beaming. I was fond of Dennis, but if ever there was a bull-in-a-china-shop he was it. He brushed against the SF rack and gave Ginger a hug, smiling shyly at me over the top of her perm as William Gibson's latest slipped to the floor. "Hi, Lark. How's business?"
"We may have to have a fire sale. How's business with you? If the heat keeps up you'll be having a fire sale." I picked up the paperback. Fortunately books aren't fragile.
Dennis looked blank then frowned. Forest fires were Serious. "They wanted to do a controlled burn at Castle Crags. Lots of underbrush. But it got hot too soon. There's already a big fire up across the border. We may have a bad fire season."
"Again?" I had only been in Monte a year, but both summers had been dry. Drier than normal, everyone said. I had the sneaking suspicion dry was normal, and they just didn't like to admit it.
As Ginger and Dennis made for the door I said, "Think about the Fourth, Ginge," and she nodded.
I closed at nine. I had sold a climber's map of Black Butte and a guide to local flora. Not much for two hours' work.
My bookstore is in a mall near the Interstate which also contains a dry cleaner/Laundromat, a liquor store, two small bad restaurants and a supermarket. Off by itself in weedy isolation lies the health club I belong to. I ran half a dozen half-hearted laps of the gym, swam, showered and drove home.
Jay's Blazer was parked two slots down from the entry stair by the Calfirst Bank's big door. So he was home from Los Angeles. He might have given me a ring. I drove around back and parked in my specially reserved tenant slot next to the bank vice-president's BMW, grumbling to myself. My pulse quickened--naturally it did, who can suppress hormonal surges?--but Jay's presence in my apartment sans ceremony suggested he was taking his welcome for granted, and we had been bickering when he left. He'd been gone a week.
I took my time on the back stairs.
Jay was on my sofa, blinking himself awake, when I entered. I gave him a quick kiss and moved out of range.
"Hey!" He levered himself up to a sitting position.
"Time for a talk."
"Uh-oh."
I slid a disk in the CD and turned the volume low. Instrumental jazz. Jay thinks to jazz and makes love to classical--at least sometimes. "How was LA?"
"Peachy keen."
"I suppose you watched a lot of old movies on the motel cable."
"I stayed with Ma in Beverly Hills and watched a lot of old movies on cable."
"A week's worth?"
"Freddy's on a 1940's kick." Freddy was his fifteen-year-old half-brother. "He says hi."
I had met Freddy the previous summer, a nice shy kid. "How's your step-father?"
Jay made a face. "Alf won't last a year, according to the doctors."
"Heart?"
"Yeah. Ma's pretty depressed."
I commiserated. Jay had escorted a prisoner to Los Angeles and testified at the arraignment. It was unusual for him to stay with his family.
He stood and stretched enormously, yawning, "On top of everything else, the flight from LAX to San Francisco was delayed half an hour and bounced around like a Ping-Pong ball on a geyser when it did take off. I missed dinner."
"No foil-wrapped packets of delicious dry-roasted almonds on the turbo-prop?" Monte is served by a commuter line through the tiny airport at Weed.
"I eschewed the cheese-flavored peanuts," he said gravely.
"Ugh. Eschewed?"
"Must be the opposite of chewed."
"I'd better feed you." I made for the kitchen, nuked a frozen dinner, and poured two beers.
He ate with exasperating slowness. I sipped my beer and stood at the front window which overlooks Main Street.
The street lights were just coming on. They turned the geraniums in front of City Hall punk purple. A police car slid to a stop in the loading zone, and two uniformed cops got out and walked down the stairs that led to the police station. One of them was gesticulating, and the other was shaking his head. A Winnebago with bicycles on the roof made its sluggish way past City Hall and turned down a by-street. A kid on a skateboard whooshed by on the sidewalk below me. I like a cityscape, even if the city tops out at 17,347 counting dogs and bicycles.
"You wanted to talk?" Jay joined me at the window.
I wanted a Meaningful Discussion of our Relationship. I groped for an opening.
Jay gave me his best negotiating-with-terrorists smile and smoothed his mustache.
I chickened out. "I want us to spend the Fourth of July at Dai Llewellyn's lodge."
"Die?" The mustache whiffled. Jay's eyebrows shot up.
I spelled it, adding, "E. David Llewellyn. He has a lodge up past Murietta."
Jay frowned. "Llewellyn...hey, 'Siskiyou Summit'! I'm damned. I didn't know the old guy was still alive."
"My mother assures me he's history," I said when I overcame my chagrin. What was I, illiterate, that I'd never heard of the damned poem? I told Jay what I knew about the weekend festivities and watched his face as he processed the data. I expected him to cite a backlog of work and plead off, as he usually did when I suggested some kind of sustained social interaction. Jay was inclined to be reclusive, and he had a snug house out in the wilds for us to be reclusive in. I was half-hoping he'd refuse to come. When I described the guest-list, however, he just looked thoughtful and sipped at his beer.
I finished outlining the horrors of four days of literary small-talk. "And the head of the English department will be there. He knows my mother, too." The culminating horror.
Jay missed the point--or ignored it. "Four days, huh? Okay. I'll see if Kevin can hold the fort. He owes me."
I must have been gaping.
Jay gave me another grin and finished his beer, looking bland.
I rallied. "I'll say Kevin owes you. Memorial Day, Easter, Christmas..."
"Thanksgiving, Veterans' Day, Yom Kippur. I don't like holidays."
"So I gathered when you refused to fly back home with me at Christmas." That was a sore point. However, it was not a new sore point, and I refused to let myself be distracted. "Why change your habits now? Think of all the DWI arrests you'll miss out on."
"And the Domestic Assaults," he said nostalgically, "and the Reckless Endangerments and the Vehicular Manslaughters."
"How can you give all that up?"
He kissed me on the mouth, breaking my concentration. I slopped beer on the rug.
We mopped together and sat on the carpet for a while, smelling like hops and roses. We made it to the bedroom eventually.
However, the night was but young. Somewhere around midnight we drifted back out to the kitchen. I made tea, and we sat at my nice gate-legged table, sipping, and flirting with our eyes. A week without Jay was a long time.
"Tell me the truth." I took a swallow of herb tea. "Why did you agree to go with me over the Fourth? I mean really," I added, rather cross, when he leered over his cup.
"I was overcome by the irresistible attraction of the biggest pot-farm north of Fort Bragg."
I set my cup down and gaped. "What?"
"This guy Peltz..."
I was completely at sea. "Angharad's husband?"
"Name of Ted. A poet and a naturalist, so he says. They live in a cabin at the lake, and there's no visible means of support except the woman's job as a part-time English instructor. Her family's wealthy, of course, so that could explain the fancy van and the TV dish and the general air of laid-back post-hippy prosperity. Their movements in and out are suspicious, and we know he's a user."
"Wow." I was revising my mental image of Ms. Peltz.
"Of course, we leave the big pot-busts to the feds these days. But it's interesting. The place is interesting. Half the developers in northern California are lusting after that lake. I thought the title was in dispute or something, but if Llewellyn is still alive he may be the snag."
"He doesn't like power boats, according to Lydia Huff."
"He's not the only one." Jay's house overlooked a tiny lake that was technically on Forest Service territory, but he was apt to feel proprietary about it. Motorbikes and snowmobiles infuriated him, too. "Some outfit from Sacramento was nosing around the county commissioners' offices last winter, talking about putting in condos. The Sierra Club called out its troops."
I was feeling a lot more cheerful. Ecological protests. Pot busts. "Should be a great weekend."
"Yeah. There's Denise, too. I'd like to meet her." He was eyeing me. "Are you sure Dennis Fromm is her son?"
"Incongruous but true."
He rose and carried his cup to the sink. "I saw her dance once. She must have been fifty, but she was graceful as all get out. She came out of retirement for a benefit."
"Pardon me," I said politely, joining him at the sink, "if I have trouble imagining you at a modern dance concert."
"My wife dragged me to it."
"Your what?"
He edged out of the kitchen. "My wife. I was married for about eight months to a psych major who was determined to improve my taste and my sanity."
This was news to me. I followed him out of the kitchen like a basset on the scent. "You were married?"
"About ten or, Jesus, twelve years ago. I was a senior at Northridge, and Linda was working on her masters. She thought I needed a shrink, and I thought she needed a husband. We were both wrong."
"Why have you never mentioned this interesting fact?"
"It never came up," he said mildly. "Don't you have skeletons in your closet, Lark? I seem to remember a pro football player."
"Yeah, but I told you about him. And anyway I didn't marry the jerk. You're so damned secretive." I grumbled at him, but I was more dumbfounded than angry. We had some communications gap.
The next morning I sent Llewellyn a note, accepting the invitation for myself and Jay, and then my bookstore started drawing a respectable number of customers, and I got too busy to brood. Lydia Huff came by again just to make sure we were coming. That set my teeth on edge, but the Huffs didn't know Mother so it wasn't collusion. I also ordered a copy of The Collected Poems of E. David Llewellyn. I figured I'd better read "Siskiyou Summit."
