Free The Dead Past by Tom Piccirilli

drank my beer and scanned the room for Tons, but couldn't make out enough faces with the vapid lighting. I moved through the crush.
    It took a while, but I soon began recognizing the faces of my high school peers in the crowd: Virgil Ballard and Ralph Dawes still blocking for each other and sticking tight as they had on the football field; Luke and Shauna Chester, who'd had two sons before marrying at eighteen, then had the marriage annulled six months later only to continue dating all these years; Hazel Marris with pink, full lips that made men drop on their faces, light of my life in the eighth grade, and who would forever give my heart twinges; and Darryl Watkins, Trish Packard, Ellery Ellin , and Bill Farum and the rest of them. I spoke briefly to a few and nodded to others, grinned at Hazel when she grinned at me, but kept looking for Tons.
    A hand landed on my shoulder, with a flash of glittering turquoise fingernails. "Johnny boy!"
    She hugged me so ecstatically, rubbing my back, face buried against my chest so closely that I couldn't make out who she was; when she drew back I saw that Karen Bolan still had the widest say-cheese smile of any human being I've ever met. "Hey, Karen."
    "Come sit, come sit! We've got a table in the back where you can hear yourself think."
    "I'm meeting someone."
    "Let them wait a few minutes. Come on! The gang hasn't seen you in ages!"
    Nearly ten-thirty now and Tons hadn't shown.
    She pulled me to a table. Karen had been loud and obnoxious in a nice sort of way trying so damn hard to get noticed; it meant she flirted with everyone in an unabashedly obvious manner, some of which carried over and earned her a rep. When she walked across a room she made sure men watched the sweet slink of her long sexy legs moving; when she laughed everybody heard the throaty squeals. She was an actress of the saddest order, one who didn't play the part so much as she let it play her.
    "Willie, look who's here! Johnny Kendrick!"
    Her husband, Willie Bolan, didn't mind his wife's nonstop exhibition; just to look at him you got the impression he enjoyed the rambunctious show she put on. Maybe it made him feel like other men envied him. Although he was equally outgoing and as loud as Karen, at the moment he lay sprawled as if ready for a nap. He'd been trying since he was fourteen to grow a mustache and could do little more than raise a few Fu Manchu wisps.
    Karen slung herself into her seat and he rose to shake my hand. In school Willie had been a solid C student with a flair for computers, and I remembered how he'd worked with tutors to pull together for college entrance exams. The work had paid off enough for him to become one of the youngest vice presidents at Syntech . In an odd fashion, I remained moderately jealous of him.
    Across from them sat Lisa and Doug Hobbes, who were the exact opposite in character to their friends; they remained glued at the hip, virtually in each other's laps, quiet, and on occasion, timid. So far as I knew, they'd been together since they were children, having grown up next door to one another: a classic example of made-for-each-other. I'd heard that Lisa had had three or four miscarriages in the last couple of years, and that they were thinking of adoption.
    Willie cut through the chit-chat and went straight to the heart. "I heard a man was found, dead on your property.”
    "Who told you that?"
    He shrugged. "Everybody. You know how it works around here. What did you expect?"
    "My God, it's awful," said Lisa. She was no more than four-eleven, with a voice as tiny as Tinkerbell's . I could understand how it would be difficult for her pregnancy to go full term. "Did you know the person, Jon? Anyone we would know? The police haven't released that many details."
    Doug said, "And the rumor mill fills in the rest, so no one is sure exactly what happened. You've got everything from some guy with a meat cleaver in his forehead to a naked hoochie girl with a black book that can put all