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Later, as it darkened and the wind came up, we made Elsbeth comfortable on a bed we had moved into a small room downstairs. Then we sat together on the same wicker sofa Elsbeth and I had courted on when we were young. The sensation for me was not so much of déjà vu as of temporal collapse, as though time had contracted and vanished, as though back then and right now were one and the same.

“Do you miss Sixy?” I asked as Diantha sipped an iced Pernod and I toyed with a dry sherry.

She laughed and shook her head, pleased, I think, that I was that interested in her personal life. “Naw. I was outgrowing him, anyway. I can’t believe I ever took that stuff he calls music seriously, never mind listened to it.”

I nodded. “And there are lots of other young men in the world.”

“I’m not sure I want another young man.”

“Really?”

“Really. It’s like breaking in a new puppy.” She turned to me, pulling closer, her face animated in the firelight. “They’re very cute and they wag their tails at you and bark and yip and lick your face and other places …” She giggled at her boldness. “But they leave messes all over the place. I think I’m one of those girls that likes older men.”

“Lots of those around, too,” I said, sighing. “Lots of other loose people around these days. I often wonder what they do for Thanksgiving.”

She pulled closer, her hip touching mine. She took my hand. “Let’s promise, right now, Norman, no matter what happens, that we’ll always have Thanksgiving together.”

“Done,” I said, deeply touched.

“You know. I keep thinking about that video clip. You know, of the three people.”

“Yes, it’s strangely moving.”

She gave a giggle. “You mean it makes you horny.”

“Well … yes.”

She tittered. “I love your reticence, Norman. It’s so sexy.”

“Oh, dear,” I said, which made her laugh and give me an affectionate kiss on the side of the lips.

Perhaps to break the spell, to keep my heart and my lips from wandering, I brought up the Ossmann-Woodley case directly. “What I don’t understand,” I said as we both stared into the flames, “is why anyone would go to the trouble of trying to get their hands on a powerful aphrodisiac.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for starters it’s not possible for someone, even if they got the dosage right, to simply sell it to some company and make lots of money.”

“Okay.”

“The whole research file has to be available, and those files are usually several feet thick.”

“Okay.”

“It’s all very cumbersome, involved, and expensive.”

“But it wouldn’t have to be legal to make money as a drug.”

“What do you mean?” Lights were starting to go on in my dim brain.

“Good God, Norman, there’s like a huge, multibazillion-dollar illegal drug business out there.”

“Even for a drug, if there is one, that induced Ossmann and Woodley to kill each other with sex?”

“That’s why people do Ecstasy.”

“Ecstasy?”

“It’s a drug that makes you feel good about everything. It opens you up, especially if you do it with something else. I still have a little stash …”

“Oh, right,” I said, remembering the autopsies. I wondered for a bewildering moment of she were proposing we try it. “Is that what you and Sixy …?”

“Yeah, sometimes.” Then she put her put her hand to her mouth and gave an embarrassed laugh. “God, the things we used to do.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. One afternoon me and Shelly, she was going with Danko, the drummer, we popped some meth and did a little blow and the guys swallowed some Viagra and I don’t know what else … Anyway, we ended up doing the whole band.”

“Had sex with them?”

“You don’t think the less of me for that?”

I sighed. “The things I’ve missed.”

The ensuing heavy silence I broke by saying, “So, Di, you think there would be a market?”

“Are you kidding? I mean once they get it right, if that’s what they’re trying to do. Think of all those Chinese who can’t get it up unless they’re eating parts of endangered animals. You whip up a concoction, call it Tiger Balls or something like that. I mean