“I go by Mojo,” I said. I’m not sure why I wanted to get that straight, up front, but I did. Mary Josephine Mayhugh was a stranger to me. Mojo Sheepshanks might have been a fraud, but I could recall every day of her existence.

The woman rose halfway out of her chair and promptly sank into it again. Her hand trembled as she handed back my license. “I’m sorry,” she said, with a flustered attempt at a smile. “It’s something of a shock.”

I leaned on the counter. A bell rang shrilly in the background, and I was vaguely aware of kids stampeding through the halls behind me. Geoff had probably attended this school, I thought, with a jolt, at least until he was sent up for murder. I would have been a student there, too, most likely, if it hadn’t been for the events of August 18, 1983.

I drew a deep breath and released it slowly. Tried to remember what I’d learned from The Damn Fool’s Guide to Zen.

Not much, apparently.

My nerves were jumping, and the present moment sucked.

“It was awful, what happened,” the woman said. I glanced belatedly at the little sign on the countertop; it was a day for afterthoughts. Her name was Mavis Rogers, unless she was filling in for somebody. “Geoff seemed like such a nice boy.”

I didn’t comment. Anything I said would have been ironic, if not scathing, and Mavis didn’t deserve that. It wasn’t her fault I came from a family that made the Mansons look like the cast of a holiday mayonnaise commercial.

“I was hoping I could look at some yearbooks,” I said. I hadn’t been aware, until the words came out of my mouth, that I was hoping any such thing, but there you are. My subconscious mind seemed to be elbowing its way to the foreground lately. “From when my parents were in school.”

Mavis swallowed. “Well, dear,” she said, “I can certainly show you the ones with Evie’s pictures in them, but Ron Mayhugh—” she lowered her voice, looked from side-to-side “—dropped out.”

I wasn’t surprised that dear old Dad never got a diploma. Clearly, he hadn’t been big on focused effort toward a goal. Some of my thoughts splintered off from the main bunch and hot-trotted it for the nearest employment agency.

Give me a real job. Any real job.

“We were all just sick when Evie married him,” Mavis confided. She got out of her chair again, but this time, she followed through and actually stayed on her feet. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “Wait here.”

I leaned against the counter and studied a schedule of PTA meetings.

Then it came to me that leaning was something an undisciplined person without a real job would do, somebody with Ron Mayhugh’s blood flowing through their veins, for instance, and I stood up straight.