office: either behind the dark wood paneling that flanked the fireplace, the faux-Oriental papered walls, or within one of the many unique items of furniture so tastefully taking up floor space. Let others more insecure than she flaunt their desktops, laptops, and palmtops: Edwina Godz's office looked like nothing more than the plush, snug, and inviting parlor of a Victorian mansion.

Which it was.

None of which self-congratulatory knowledge did a thing to help her in the matter of deciding which herbal tea to take right now.

If she brewed herself a cup of comfort incorporating every last one of the herbal essences she needed to cure everything that ailed her, there wouldn't be any room left in the teapot for the boiling water. She shrugged and closed the tea-closet door, and instead ambled over to the other side of the fireplace where the liquor cabinet reposed. Gingko biloba was all very well and good when you were confronting the ordinary headaches of day-to-day life, but when it came to dealing with one's children there was no substitute for single malt scotch.

Grain was an herb, when you got down to it, and so was malt, she told herself. As for the peat that was involved somewhere in the manufacturing process of a decent single malt, well, you couldn't get any more back-to-Mother-Earth than that unless you got down on all fours and sucked topsoil. Edwina was still rationalizing in top form as she downed the first shot and poured the second, all while standing in front of the liquor cabinet with a grim expression on her face that would have stopped a charging wildebeest.

Not that there were many wildebeest running loose in the greater Poughkeepsie area (unless you went by appearances alone, in which case some of the individuals to be found roaming the vast bureaucratic savannahs of nearby Vassar College might be considered as—ah, but that was strictly a matter of personal opinion). Edwina Godz's palatial home