It was an idyllic summer evening in Pemkowet the night the Vanderhei kid died. No one could have guessed that the town was hovering on the brink of tragedy. Well, I suppose that’s not technically true. The Sphinx might have known, and the Norns, too, come to think of it. But if they did, they kept it to themselves.

There’s some sort of Soothsayers’ Code that prevents soothsayers from soothsaying on a day-to-day basis, when it might, you know, avert this kind of ordinary, everyday tragedy. Something about the laws of causality being broken and the order of creation overturned, resulting in a world run amok, rivers running backward, the sun rising in the west, cats and dogs getting married. . . .

I don’t know; don’t ask me.

I don’t pretend to understand, especially since it wasn’t an ordinary, everyday tragedy after all. But I guess it didn’t rise to the standard required to break the Soothsayers’ Code, since no sooth was said.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, it was an idyllic evening in Pemkowet, the little resort town I call home. A mid-July Michigan evening, soft and warm, not too muggy, one of those evenings when the sunlight promises to linger forever.

It was a Sunday, and I had plans to meet my best friend, Jen Cassopolis, for Music in the Gazebo. Los Gatos del Sol, a Tex-Mex band, was playing. They say music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, and in my experience, it’s true. Also, I’d seen the promo poster, and the guys in the band were pretty cute.

Hey, it doesn’t hurt.

Mogwai didn’t come when I called him, but he was a cat of independent means and he’d been pissed at me since I’d given in to pleas from my friends in animal rescue and had him neutered. I’d hated to do it, since he wasn’t really my cat so much as a streetwise buddy who dropped by on a regular basis, but there were an awful lot of feral Moglets running around town. I filled his bowl on the back porch and made sure the torn screen that served as a cat door was ajar.

It wasn’t the most secure arrangement, but I didn’t worry too much. For one thing, my apartment was on the second story above Mrs. Browne’s Olde World Bakery. Mogwai’s route to the screened porch involved a series of feline acrobatics, Dumpster to fence to porch, that I doubted many humans could duplicate.

As for nonhumans . . . well. Those who were my friends, I trusted. As far as I knew, those who weren’t didn’t want much of anything to do with me.