I dropped my tote and whipped out a blanket, candles, a bottle of tequila, and three plastic glasses.

Chico shuffled in place. “I’m not drinking that stuff. Did you bring any beer?”

“No beer. And you don’t have to drink the tequila.” I borrowed Fang’s lighter and set out a dozen tealights in a wide circle. In the centre I spread the blanket. “Sit.”

“You better not be summoning up any demons,” Fang chortled nervously. “I have to be home by eleven or Leanne will hang my balls on the Christmas tree.”

“Charming image.” I lit a large pillar candle and placed it in the middle of the blanket, then poured an inch of tequila into three glasses. “Everyone knows that the sense of smell is directly connected to the memory synapses of the brain. Pick up a glass. We’ll close our eyes and inhale. Remember we’re in the gym on the night of our high school graduation …”

“I think she’s bat-shit nuts,” Chico whispered to Fang, accepting a drag of the joint. But he sounded more relaxed than in the locker room, so maybe the weed was a good idea.

“Shhttt.” I closed my eyes and inhaled. Nothing magical happened. I waited. Still nothing. I opened them again, disappointed that my experiment wasn’t working. Backlit by the surrounding candles and illuminated from the front by the larger central candle, my companions looked far different than the seventeen-year-olds who were so eager to leave their childhoods behind.

I had sat like this, yoga-style, under a table, with two bottles — or was it three — of tequila, tipping the liquid into proffered pop cans and punch glasses. The music thumped, the other eleven grads — since Lionel Petty refused to come home from Victoria — milled around, their feet and legs passing back and forth …

Shitballs on a cracker. No wonder I couldn’t recall any details from that night. It wasn’t that I was plowed on tequila — okay, I was — but I couldn’t see anything from under the table. Crap. I could sniff all the tequila I wanted. It wouldn’t help. And maybe I didn’t even go to the bathroom.

“Anything?” I asked my companions. By candlelight, they looked more relaxed, considering we were sitting on a frigid wooden floor in the dark, in an abandoned building. Chico aimed his flashlight at the ceiling. “Didn’t we have a glitter ball?”

“Bliss has it. She stole it from me.” Fang took a long drag and stuck his nose back into his tequila. He must have forgotten his aversion, and downed the entire glassful, which was a smidge more than a shot.

The sounds of his choking and spitting resounded from the empty spaces around us. “God damn, that’s awful.” He spat some more.

“I told you to smell it, not drink it, idiot.” I poured a drop more into his glass.

“I don’t need to smell any more. I don’t remember anything out of the ordinary.”

I jumped on that. “So, memories of that night are coming back to you?”

“Yeah, I guess. The music, the fucking disco ball flashing and spiralling. It turned my stomach. I thought I was going to puke and went to the bathroom in the locker room.”

“Did you see anyone coming or going?”

“Everybody was in and out of the locker room. Even some of the girls came in with us. Big joke, girls in the boys’ locker room. There were probably boys in the girls’ locker room. At one point, Mrs. Czerneski came in and made us all go back to the gym.”

I thought about that. “Not Mr. Archman?”

“Not that I know of. I think he was trashed, too. He spent the whole night watching the clocks over the basketball hoops and taking nips from his flask. Hope it was something better than tequila.” He spat again.

“Stop spitting! Do you remember Mr. Archman talking to anyone in particular?”

“How should I know? I wouldn’t have noticed him at all except I was watching the clock, too. God, what an endless night. Too bad I can’t remember if I enjoyed myself after that.”

This was a waste of time.

“What about Kelly Quantz?”

“What about him? He never took his eyes off Sophie, as usual. He was so pathetic. In love with a girl who dated everyone except him. He finally got her, though.” Fang re-lit the joint, then passed it to Chico. “For a while, at least. This whole thing sucks.”

Chico played his flashlight aimlessly across the ceiling. “So, where’s the disco ball now?” He spoke quite proficiently around the joint hanging from his lip. I sensed he was no stranger to the demon weed.

“It’s in the greenhouse. You’ll see it on the fourteenth of this month. Don’t forget that date. Now, can we focus, gentlemen?”

“My ass is frozen numb,” Chico complained. “I can’t remember anything except something to do with the disco ball. Let’s get out of here.”

“Not yet,” I snapped. “Keep sniffing, both of you. Chico, you keep mentioning the disco ball. What about it?”

“Hey.” Fang sat up straight. “Chico was on a step- ladder. Mr. Archman made him get down. I remember him yelling. The ladder was over against the wall, and me and Larry salvaged it. It’s a twelve-footer, good quality …”

The double doors at the far end of the gym swung wide, sending a current of cold air across the floor. The garbage fluttered and scattered into the shadows. Footsteps hit the floor with a heavy cadence. Beyond the pale flickering of the candles, the darkness shrouded the intruder’s approach. The deliberate footfalls were familiar, and awareness of his identity touched me seconds before he reached the light.

In those few seconds, I snatched the joint from Chico’s mouth, squeezed the end to extinguish it, and tossed it over my shoulder, where, I hoped, a drug-savvy cop wouldn’t bother to look for it to test for DNA.

The candlelight framed blond spikes, like the crest on Beelzebub’s head. Hands resting on his gun holster, he asked, so mildly the blood froze in my veins, “What the fucking hell are you three up to now?”

CHAPTER

twenty-eight

As morgues go, this one wouldn’t make Neil’s nightmare list. No dissecting tables, no layered drawers held bodies, no trays of bone saws or other sinister instruments. It was just a room in the basement of the hospital where a body waited until the family arranged for the funeral home to pick it up.

Neil looked around. There was no sheet-covered corpse tonight. Ed had asked him and Tony to meet him here at 10:00 p.m. He’d had to rush off to deliver a baby and didn’t have time to explain why.

Yawning so hard his jaw cracked, Neil leaned his head back and listened to Tony crunch potato chips and gulp from a litre bottle of orange juice.

It had been his misfortune to drive by the abandoned high school earlier and see three vehicles parked haphazardly in the parking lot — Cornwall’s Matrix, Davidson’s old Ford pickup, and a van which turned out to belong to Chico Leeds.

He had smelled the weed as soon as he opened the door. For one dizzying moment, he thought they were holding a drug-fuelled séance. Candles set out in a circle, with one big one in the centre, and the trio sitting cross-legged on the floor — it never occurred to him they were conducting an odour-to-memory test.

Cornwall had a hypersensitive sense of smell and couldn’t understand that other people didn’t. He smiled to himself, picturing the three of them holding tequila up to their noses and trying to summon fifteen-year-old memories. It was a harmless stunt, as long as the killer didn’t turn out to be Davidson or Leeds.

The men were half-stoned, but Neil didn’t see any pot on them — and he wasn’t interested in body searches. First of all, he’d have had to peel Cornwall off his back, literally, and secondly, he’d have to listen to her complain about draconian marijuana laws regarding consenting adults for, well, the rest of his life. He knew Cornwall never touched the stuff herself, but that wouldn’t stop her from defending her friends. It wasn’t worth it.