The eerily balmy wind grabbed his rain slicker and shook hard. He closed two buckles of the coat and happened to be gazing toward the house when he saw a downstairs light go out.

So Megan had arrived. It had to be the girl; Bett didn’t have keys to the house. No hope of cancellation now. Well, if you live three miles from a Civil War battlefield, you have to appreciate the persistence of the past.

He glanced once more at the fractured pipe and started toward the house, heavy boots slogging through the untilled fields.

Like the Dead Reb. No, he reflected, nothing so dramatic. More like the introspective man of forty-four years that he’d become.

An enthymeme is an important rhetorical device used in formal debate.

It’s a type of syllogism (“All cats see in the dark. Midnight is a cat. Therefore Midnight sees in the dark.”), though the enthymeme is abbreviated. It leaves out one line of logic (“All cats see in the dark. Therefore Midnight sees in the dark.”). Experienced debaters and trial lawyers like Tate Collier rely on this device frequently in their debates and courtroom arguments but it works only when there’s a common understanding between the advocate and his audience. Everybody’s got to understand that the animal in question is a cat; they have to supply the missing information in order for the logic to hold up.

Tate reflected now that he, his ex-wife and Megan had virtually none of this common understanding. The mind of Betty Susan McCall would be as alien to him as his was to her. Except for his ex-wife’s startling reappearance seven weeks ago-with the news about Megan’s drunken climb up the water tower-he hadn’t seen her for nearly two years and their phone conversations were limited to practical issues about the girl and the few residual financial threads between people divorced fifteen years.