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to it? Bribe our employees to lose a few records...to jam the pulper? Hell, no, if they had a score to settle with us, they'd just burn down the building right here on Whidbey Island. It'd be a whole lot easier. That shack would go up like kindling."
    Rudy, who had been minding his own business, sat up with a jerk. “Oh, thank you very much. That'll help me sleep nights."
    "Or blow it up, or something,” Maggie suggested. “That's what I'd do."
    "Wonderful, even better,” said Rudy.
    "Weil, how do all of you explain it then?” Nelson said hotly. “How do—"
    "Hey!" Nick sat up in the front seat and twisted around as the ferry settled squishily against the Mukilteo pilings and John turned on the car's ignition. “Can I just say something? Enough, already Now, we're going to be at John's place in forty minutes. I haven't seen Marti in a long time, and it'd be nice to talk about something else besides all this warmed-over crap. Okay?"
    "Suits me,” said Maggie.
    Rudy held up his hands, palms forward. “Hallelujah and amen to that."
    Nelson stared out the window and grumped an inaudible response.
    Nick eyed John. “You too? Can we talk about something else for a while?"
    John threw in the towel. “Okay. As long as it's not coffee."
    "Fair enough.” Nick settled comfortably back. “Ah, I always look forward to seeing that lovely bride of yours. You really lucked out there, old son."
    "I'm not gonna argue with that,” John said.
    Nick laughed fondly. “It's always a treat seeing what she comes up with for dinner. What's it going to be this time, do you think—boiled tofu, maybe?"
    "Don't laugh,” John said grimly.
    "Oh, come on, you guys,” Maggie said generously, “it's not going to be as bad as all that."
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    Chapter 6
    * * * *
    That depended on who was asked. Dinner was rice cakes topped with pecan-garbanzo paste, grilled-eggplant-and-feta-cheese salad, and spicy squash-and-orzo stew, all of it perfectly cooked and beautifully served, but still, from John's point of view, rice cakes, eggplant, and squash.
    Rudy uncomplainingly if inattentively consumed whatever was put before him, as he usually did. John sometimes wondered if all that coffee-tasting had burned out his taste buds and immunized them against anything else. Excepting wine, of course. Nelson, whose French-born wife had taught him to like creamed dishes and elegant sauces, picked at his food and filled up on mango-pumpkin bread and apple-fig chutney. Only Maggie ate with any enthusiasm, but then John had once, with his own ears, heard her say that the happiest she got when it came to food was when she sat down to a steaming plate of organic brown rice and poached carrots.
    Nick, like John, ate moderately and with an occasional polite murmur of appreciation, but John knew his secret. Whenever Nick knew he was coming to dinner at the Lam’ he first fortified himself with a four-course restaurant lunch, usually of prime rib and butter-drenched baked potato. (On company-dinner nights, John did exactly the same, except that he usually made it T-bone steak and butter-drenched baked potato.)
    One of Marti's missions in life was to stamp out what she thought of as junk food (which included nearly everything John loved), and most of her menus, John swore, came from TV cooking shows hosted by onetime gourmet chefs who had suffered heart attacks, seen the light, and were now fanatical preachers of low-fat, sodium-free living. Fortunately for the happy state of their marriage, Marti's job as a nutritionist kept her at the Virginia Mason Clinic until late in the afternoon, zestfully dishing up fatless, saltless recipes to hapless patients unable to defend themselves, and Marti and John themselves had to eat out most evenings.
    But once a week or so, there was an unavoidable meal like this, which John, grateful for Marti's many other virtues, considered a small price to pay. The fact that wine, not on her list of forbidden matter,