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Catherine felt a pleasant little jolt of lust. She had seen and thought too much of death to deny that positive celebration of life.
    â€œBetter?” Randall asked, with a fair assumption of gravity.
    â€œYes, thank you,” she answered with dignity.
    He handed her the beer can. Catherine took a sizeable swallow. Her eyes were on his face—a Slavic peasant face, she thought darkly—as he looked around the room, zeroed in on her arrangement in the bay window. The soft chair with the dent her body had left, the paperback with a bookmark thrust inside, the lamp pulled over close to her chair surrounded by a litter of books: it looked like what it was, the habitual den of a solitary person. From where she was sitting now, Catherine thought, it looked pitiful.
    â€œIf you heard so fast,” she said hastily, “then…”
    An impatient knock on the back door finished her sentence.
    â€œTom,” Catherine said simply.
    She was regretting the end of a promising moment as she went through the den at the rear of the house to answer the knock.
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    As she had predicted, it was Tom, her only full-time fellow reporter. His long lean frame bisected the doorway.
    â€œAre you all right” he asked perfunctorily. His mouth had already opened to begin firing questions when Catherine cut him short.
    â€œYou might as well come on in the living room, Randall’s in there,” she said.
    Tom looked almost comically taken aback.
    Catherine, bowled over by giddiness, nearly laughed as she preceded Tom into the living room.
    â€œHey, Randall,” he said casually, folding his length into an uncomfortable Victorian rosewood chair. Then he forgot to be offhand. “The coroner’s jury said murder, of course. And a Gazette reporter found the body! Jesus, what a story!” He yanked his fearsome Fu Manchu mustache so fiercely that Catherine thought he might pull the hair out.
    â€œCalm down, Tom, it’s not like there was another paper to scoop,” Randall said. He took his pipe from his pocket.
    â€œHey Catherine, is there any of that beer left?” Tom asked, sidetracked into showing Randall that he, Tom, had been there first.
    â€œThree or four,” Catherine said. “Randall, would you care for a beer?”
    Randall accepted.
    It seemed to Catherine that she took forever pulling out the tabs on three cans, pouring them, and putting the glasses on a tray.
    Pouring them out seemed an unnecessary refinement, but she was determined to do everything right.
    When Catherine came in with the beer, Randall and Tom were discussing rearrangement of the front page to handle the murder story. The paper only came out on Wednesdays, so there was plenty of time to think about it.
    After she had handed the glasses around and resumed her seat, she realized the men were eyeing her with longing—for her story. Randall Gerrard and Tom Mascalco had print in their blood—the only thing they had in common, Catherine thought.
    Randall had inherited the Gazette when his elder brother, for whom it had been intended, had shaken that dust of Lowfield off his shoes and headed for the fertile fields of Atlanta. In fact, Randall had abandoned a promising career doing something in Washington (Catherine couldn’t remember exactly what), to come home when his father died.
    However deep Randall’s regret over that lost career might be, his raising had implanted in him enough of the newsman’s passion for a story, and enough love for the Delta, to bend his will toward building up the Gazette .
    Tom had worked for Randall for three months. He was younger than Catherine. The recent glut of journalism majors had made him glad to accept a job, even at the Gazette .
    Tom was possessed, Catherine had observed, by a Woodward-and-Bernstein complex, which had led to some interesting clashes with Randall. Tom was restless with hunger for big stories, scandals. Catherine sometimes felt she had a