RETURN TO SWAN LAKE

a novel by Gary Canup

Prologue

The modern university had been built on a landscape of rolling hills whose gentle slopes, picturesque groves, and well-kept lawns betrayed the property's previous use as a golf course. The course, in its day, had been touted as one of the most beautiful and idyllic settings in the city, and golfers from all over the area had been attracted to its lovely fairways and greens. Nothing now remained of the old golf course, except for the colonial-style clubhouse that now served as the university's administration building. Where greens surrounded by sand traps had once lured the errant drives of swearing golfers, university buildings now stood enthroned atop misty slopes like fortresses of concrete and steel and glass.

It was a commuter campus, so parking lots and parking garages stood where dormitories might have been. On any weekday at this hour, the campus would have been teeming with students bustling along the walkways, standing about talking, lounging on the lawns studying or chatting or debating, with automobiles coming and going.

But today was Sunday and the campus was deserted. All the parking lots and parking garages stood empty. The grounds were barren of life except for the flocks of pigeons and crows that haunted the campus when no students were around. On this gloomy autumn morning they foraged on the spacious lawns, winged their way from tree to tree and from building to building, the vacant buildings echoing the mournful cawing of the crows.

The police cruiser pulled up in one of the parking lots. Its emergency lights were not flashing. The front doors swung open, and out of the driver side emerged a young uniformed cop and out of the passenger side climbed a stocky middle-aged detective wearing a dark-brown hat and a pale-brown overcoat over a brown suit and black tie, and they closed the doors after them.

The two groundskeepers sat on the lawn at the edge of the parking lot. One was fat and the other was skinny. They rose to their feet as the two police officers approached. The detective displayed his badge and identified both himself and his uniformed colleague.

"You the gentlemen who discovered the body?" he asked, putting away his badge and pulling out his notepad and pen.

"Yes, sir," the skinny groundskeeper replied.

"What're your names?"

The groundskeepers told him and the detective jotted down the names.

"And where is the body?"

"Up there in those bushes," the skinny groundskeeper told him, indicating a large clump of bushes that stood where a footpath crested the slope.

"Show us where," the detective said.

The four men proceeded single-file up the narrow earthen footpath, first the skinny groundskeeper, then the fat groundskeeper, then the detective, and finally the young uniformed cop. They passed through a domesticated grove of trees. The morning was overcast and gray, a brief shower had settled the dust of the footpath, and the four men trampled no shadows as they went up the slope towards the wilderness. When he caught a whiff of human decomposition the overworked detective removed his hat and mopped his balding head with a handkerchief and put his hat back on.

At the top of the slope the footpath swerved around the large clump of wild bushes growing out from a high brick wall and then paralleled the wall into the dense and dark wilderness. Half denuded by autumn and still dripping from the morning shower, the wilderness was dank and untamed and echoed with the cries of unseen birds. The detective was glad that he did not have to go in there. A person could very easily lose his way in there.

"It's in these bushes here," the skinny groundskeeper said.

"How exactly did you discover it?" the detective asked, readying his notepad.

"Well, me and my partner here, we was coming up the footpath with our equipment. I was pushing that wheelbarrow full of tools, and Ollie was lugging that stepladder there," he indicated the aluminum stepladder that stood beside the bushes. "Our foreman wanted us to do some work up here at the edge of the woods, trimming bushes, raking leaves, that sort of thing. Just piddling stuff. The man's a slave driver. He was chief groundskeeper here way back when the place was a golf course and he still thinks every blade of grass has to be just so. The man's a dictator, I ain't kidding."

"So you were coming up the footpath?" the detective prompted.

"Yeah, we was just coming up the footpath here, talking about, oh, I don't know, what was we talking about, Ollie, sports or something like that, when I smelt this horrible odor. Like a skunk. Worse than a skunk. Like something that crawled out of the ass of a skunk. Ain't never smelt nothin like it. I'm surprised no student never reported it."

"Did you smell it, too?" the detective asked the fat groundskeeper.

"Naw, I can'd smell nuddin. I godda code."

"That's why I had him do the trimming on these bushes here, the odor seemed to be coming from them. I kept well away upwind, rakin leaves."

"Go on," the detective said, scribbling in his pad.

"Well, I was just rakin leaves, like I said, and jabbering away, about sports or something like that, while my partner was up there on the ladder, hacking away at the tops of the bushes with a hedge clippers. When he trims the tops of the bushes down to where he can see behind them he says, 'My Lord!' or 'My Heavens!' or something like that. And I says, 'What's the matter?' But he just stands there on the ladder, holding the hedge clippers in front of him and staring down behind the bushes like he can't believe his eyes. So I put down my rake and he climbs down the ladder and I climb up with a handkerchief over my nose." The skinny groundskeeper paused dramatically, looking from cop to detective. "And that's how we found it."

"What time was this?"

"Oh, about eight forty-five, somewhere in there."

"There's a clearing behind these bushes?"

"Yeah, I'd say about, oh, fifty square feet or so."

"I trust neither one of you has entered the clearing?"

"No sir, the cop — I mean the police officer — on the phone told us not to."

"How come you gentlemen are working on a Sunday?"

"Aw, we screwed something up on Friday and had to put in some overtime. Like I told you, our foreman's a slave driver. What we don't finish during the week he makes us do on the weekend. The man's a dictator, I mean it."

"What's your foreman's name?"

The skinny groundskeeper told him and the detective jotted it down then flipped his notebook shut.

"Thank you, gentlemen. Stick around awhile, if you can. I may have more questions for you later."

The detective took aside his uniformed colleague and conferred with him. The uniformed cop nodded and headed off down the footpath. The detective surveyed the bushes, which stood as a kind of sentinel before the wilderness, so thick and tangled they appeared impenetrable; but obviously they had been penetrated. He wondered who would come along this footpath at night or even during the day but clearly enough students had done so to have worn a path, and he surmised the existence of an apartment building at the other end of the footpath. The detective hoisted his bulk up the stepladder one step at a time until he was high enough to peer down over the bushes into the clearing.

The odor was foul but not intolerable for one inured to the stench of human decomposition. Using the top of the stepladder as a desk for his notepad, he recorded his primary observations of the scene. The clearing behind the bushes was a roughly semicircular area, bounded by the high brick wall and by the tall growth of ragged bushes. The ground was covered with dirt which, in spite of the rainshower, had vaguely preserved a number of footprints. The experienced eye of the detective was able to discern three separate sets of prints, two male and shod, the other female and bare.

The body of a young male lay on its back near the center of the clearing.

The body was fully clothed, and judging by the degree of decomposition that had darkened the skin of the face and hands, the individual had been dead for maybe thirty hours. Flies crawled on the face and on the glazed eyes that stared off to one side of the detective. Flies crawled out of the slightly open mouth.

His scrutiny of the scene was interrupted by the arrival of a second vehicle down in the parking lot, and the detective peered down through the domesticated grove of trees. It was a van from the department's Crime Scene Unit. Field technicians would photograph the body and the clearing from every angle. They would search for fingerprints and samples of hair and blood and semen. They would bag and label the evidence for analysis back at the lab. Finally they would bag and label the body itself and transport it to the city morgue.

Before climbing down to greet the boys from the CSU, the detective took one more look at the body. The youthful face arrested him. The parted lips seemed to want to whisper a secret to him, but all that came out was a fly that had just laid eggs in the mouth. Even after thirty-one years on the force the detective still could not look into the face of a corpse without wondering who the person was and how he had met with such an unfortunate end.