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course—eat hamburgers charred to carbon on the Weber kettle, and have a marvelous time.”
    “Right,” Michael laughed dryly. “There was business you wanted to discuss?”
    “A trifling matter,” Vern said, “but it seems our suspicions regarding Herb Cantlon have sadly proven correct. That’s the basic gist of the report Eddie Markell’s provided me. Herb is utterly unethical, a viper at the bosom of Superior Chemical.”
    “He’s ripping us off,” Michael said.
    “Indeed,” Vern agreed. “We’ll have to terminate him.”
    “Yes.” Michael’s grin was wide.
    “We’ll arrange the details with Eddie in the near future. I’m afraid we’ll have to punish Herb Cantlon rather severely.”
    Michael laughed. “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”
    Vern Engelking chuckled, too. “Well, now you have two festive occasions to look forward to, our party and Herb Cantlon. I hope this brightens your evening. Goodnight, Michael, and see you tomorrow.”
    “Goodnight,” Michael said, and hung up the phone.
    Not the call, he reflected, but a call, promising a new chance to again know the exquisite pleasure, the thrill of near-omnipotence that came from killing.
    In the living room, Beth sat at the end of the sofa encircled by the light of the end table lamp. While Michael had been with Zeller, she’d put on her pastel green baby-doll pajamas.
    “Nothing urgent?” she asked, as Michael sat down. Her small foot spanned the distance between them to press against the side of his thigh.
    “Vern? No, no big deal. A price change on paper towels, that’s all.”
    “Oh,” Beth said.
    “You said your mom called,” Michael said.
    “How’s she doing?”
    Mom was all right, Beth told him, but her pressure was still too high. The doctor had her on new medication and wanted her to take it easier. At age sixty-eight, Claire Wynkoop still put in a forty plus hour week as the librarian in Belford, the small town sixty miles to the south where Beth had been raised. “Mom refuses to slow down,” Beth said, “or even to sit down long enough to consider slowing down.”
    Michael patted Beth’s calf. “Don’t worry, honey,” he assured her, “your mom’s one tough lady. She’ll outlive us all.” Then with an amused smile, he asked, “Mom have any earthshaking predictions?”
    Beth laughed, but she did not really find the question funny. Unlike Michael, she did not think ridiculous her mother’s modest claims to have occasional psychic intuitions of the future. No, Mom had never foretold a Political assassination, air disaster, or erupting volcano, but… Two years ago, Kim, then a first-grader, had broken her wrist in a schoolyard tumble and the call from Mom came only seconds after the one from the school nurse: “Kim is hurt. I know that. How bad is it?”
    Or what about the story, the one told frequently enough over the years to have the feel of truth? Hank Wynkoop, Beth’s father, had died of a sudden heart attack when Beth was a high school freshman, and Claire related: “I watched him get in the car that morning. He waved to me. I thought: ‘This is the last time I’ll see him alive’—and it was.”
    Beth felt a cold tingle at the nape of her neck. So people had hunches. Okay, she could accept that; it was normal. But she didn’t like the disquieting feeling that stemmed from thinking about the “not quite normal,” the “cannot happen” that does happen.
    “I asked if your mom gave us any revealing glimpses of the future,” Michael said, drawing Beth out of her uneasy contemplation.
    “No,” Beth said. She chided herself for worrying about nothing that required worry. Mom was good old normal Mom, the same way she herself was normal Beth or Michael was Mr. Normal Louden.
    And that is that, she decided, and, in order to maintain her certainty, she told Michael she wanted to watch “Trapper John, MD,” when they went down to the rec room instead of going along with his TV