“Not for lack of trying. When I got home I found this young woman with white hair waiting in my backyard. She was sitting with her back to me, holding her hands up to her face, and in an instant I knew who she was. I grabbed the revolver I keep in the top of our bedroom closet and went out to her. I was going to shoot her, so help me, I was, but as soon as I raised the pistol I was attacked by a swarm of bees and—”

“Killer bees?”

Weldon nodded. “Only they didn’t sting me enough to kill me. They concentrated on my face and my gun hand and didn’t let up until I’d dropped it. Then she turned and I saw her face for the first time. I was surprised that she was so young. From her white hair I’d assumed she’d be some old witch, but she was young and—”

“Not bad looking. I know.”

“You’ve met her then. How did you—?”

“Let’s stick to you. What did you do then?”

“What could I do? She told me I already had two strikes against me. I still remember her words: ‘Strike three and your wife is out.’ What else could I do? Tell me you would have done any different.”

“My approach to settling problems differs a bit from the average.”

“I don’t know how, but this woman somehow controls snakes, insects, birds, and who knows what else? Don’t you see the position I was in?”

Jack stared at Weldon. No question, the guy had been thrust into an appalling situation: Finger a relative stranger for death or lose a family member. A no-brainer, but also a no-win.

“I see that a man has to put his family before strangers, which is regrettably acceptable. But when one of those strangers is my father, we have a problem.” Jack jabbed the knife blade at Weldon’s face, stopping the point an inch from his nose. “We have even more of a problem when it becomes clear that you took an awful predicament and used it to turn a quick buck.”

“I did no such thing!”

Weldon cowered back, pressing himself against the door as the knife point touched the tip of his nose.

“Now’s not the time for lies, bozo.” Jack was doing his best to check his flaring rage. “I could go along with you doing what you had to if you’d picked out the sickest Gateways folks, the ones with the shortest life expectancy. But you didn’t do that. Instead you picked ones who were not only the healthiest, but were unattached, guaranteeing that their homes would go back on the market years, maybe even a decade or two before their natural time.”

“No!”