“No.” I smile politely, trying to ignore the good-natured twinkles of earthen orange and leafy green Highland flinging around Roger Leblanc’s noggin.

“What’s your father’s name?” he says with a musical lilt. Yep, here we go.

“Alec Spenser.”

And that’s when poor ol’ Roger damn near puts us in the ditch when he reefs on the brake and lets out a belt of knee-slapping glee.

“Well, didn’t I know your father, then!” he whoops. “Poor bugger woulda flunked grade ten without me lettin’ him skiff off my sheets. Poor Smart Alec, God rest his soul.”

“So which Fortune do you belong to then?” he starts up again after a short, awkward silence, his fingertips doing a delicate drum on the steering wheel.

“Effie,” I say absently, retreating from the scenery and back into my cellphone screen, anxiously awaiting confirmation that Allie will come get my underdressed ass.

“Yes, yes. Crow, is it?”

“Yeah.” My voice does not waiver from the curt side of friendly.

“Quite the rigs, them Spensers. Smart Alec was a good head, though. What brought you back?”

“Illness in the family.”

“Sorry to hear that,” he says solemnly, and stays quiet for the rest of the ride, like he somehow gathered that the illness in the family is mine.

Roger Leblanc wheels right up to the front doors of the Bay Flower Mall. As in, up over the curb. All the way under the awning at the main entrance, the trees on the roof scratching against snow-laden canvas as we get within spitting distance of the automatic sliding doors of the Island’s grandest shopping mecca, currently a blizzardy ghost town.

“You got time for a little shopping while I get the tree set up. Hop out here, dear. Save you a trek through that snow,” he says. “Meet you right in this same spot in ’alf an ’our.”

The last time I set foot in this mall was when Char, Allie, and I went to Le Drapeau hunting for skin-tight shirts, platform espadrilles, and giant earrings to complement our grad caps and gowns. When a pock-faced rent-a-cop with a big gut and a tiny walkie-talkie started following us, Char got a little riled up. She asked him if he was following us because we looked like shoplifters or because he liked high school–girl asses. She pulled a wad of cash out of her purse and waved it in his face, before she marched over to the counter, where she demanded to speak to the manager. Char railed about her ample disposable income, her right to be respected as a customer, and her trend-setting influence among the sophisticatedly slutty high school set. Minutes later, Char strutted out with a smug grin, a heartfelt apology, and a twenty per cent off coupon. And in our grad pictures, all three of us are wearing shiny new Le Drapeau earrings that Char lifted from the store when the rent-a-cop wasn’t looking.

There’s no rent-a-cop in sight now. There’s no “I Heart CB” souvenir T-shirt shop that sells loose cigs and hash pipes. No dark, dodgy arcade for the burnouts and the drug dealers. No old guys picking butts out of the ashtrays beside the benches down past the food court. No kids skateboarding inside. No big-haired mall rats. The mall isn’t the glorious teenage wasteland of my memory. Now, it’s just a place to shop. Le Drapeau is still there but no longer the bastion of cheap, tight, teenybopper crap it once was. Now it is “European-style” designer collections and two hundred dollar dresses. I make a beeline for it, thinking about Char the entire time.