A Shroud for Aquarius by Max Allan Collins

heated argument with an attractive woman whom I hadn’t placed. Ginnie was pointing a finger at the woman, and the woman was pointing a finger back; they weren’t shouting, but it was intense.
    Their arguing had caught my attention, but it was the woman who maintained that attention. She was about five-six, had black punky hair and cute features and a sweet little shape; she was not wearing a prom gown, but a wide-shouldereddesigner number, Zebra stripes above, black skirt below, really striking. She had red lipstick so dark it was damn near black, and green glittery eyeshadow.
    “Who
is
that?” I asked Michael.
    In a tone that sought to be pompous, but had dos Dos Equis ago turned just plain silly, Michael said, “How should I know? Am I her keeper?”
    “Could that be Jill Forest?”
    “I’m afraid I can’t see Jill Forest for the trees.”
    “Right, Michael. Have another beer.”
    It
was
Jill Forest, but she was gone now, and so was Ginnie, back in the ballroom.
    I’d dated Jill a few times in high school days, but she’d been a quiet girl, and her parents had been strict, and, for reasons that now escaped me, we’d never clicked. She’d been too cute to be mousy, but, even so, this was a shock: Jill Forest a trendy stand-out in a crowd where it wasn’t unusual to see a woman wearing the same hairstyle she’d worn to the senior prom. On the other hand, I was wearing the same tie I’d worn to the prom, so who was I to condescend? I was just a cheap bastard, trying to pass for trendy.
    I spent the rest of the evening looking for Jill out of the corner of either eye, and not seeing her.
    I did see Ginnie, though we didn’t speak again that evening. She was spending a lot of time at a table for two in the ballroom, huddling with a dark, not particularly handsome man who I took to be Brad Faulkner. A little drunk, she seemed to be flirting outrageously—and he seemed to be liking it, giving her a shy smile while she did almost all the talking. They were dancing slow, to “Easy to Be Hard,” a song from
Hair,
when I left around midnight. Walking home, leaving my car in the Elksparking lot. I was damn near sober by the time I got home, and lay awake till two wondering why Ginnie had spent so much time with Faulkner, a guy I didn’t remember being anybody she had dated or run around with or anything way back when. It seemed strange.
    A month later, with Ginnie dead, I was again awake at two in the morning, and it seemed even stranger.

Port City Cablevision lurked behind the massive modern community college library, across an access road; behind Cablevision was sprawling Weed Park (named after a guy named “Weed,” so help me), making quite the impressive back yard for so undistinguished a structure, a one-story white frame building with satellite dishes growing around it, like strange mushrooms.
    I was not here to complain about the service, even though ever since they added the Disney Channel and scrambled it, the channels on either side were constantly visited by a rolling tweed pattern. One of those disrupted channels was the all-Spanish network, and the other was twenty-four-hour stock quotations; since I was not a wealthy Mexican investor, I could live without either.
    I was here to see Jill Forest. This morning, at the inappropriately sunny graveside services at Greenwood Cemetery, she had been there, wearing a black suit and dark glasses, the only other person there besides me remotely Ginnie’s age; none of the Iowa City friends had made it, Flater and Sturms included. Oddly absent too were John “J.T.” O’Hara, the hippie poet Ginnie married, and their daughter Malinda; Mrs. Mullens had told me at the funeral home she expected them, but I didn’t see them. Sheriff Brennan was on hand, though, and I asked him if heknew Jill, saying, “I used to go to school with her, but had no idea she was still in town.”
    “She isn’t still in town,” he said. “She’s
back
in town.”
    Turned out