House of Past;

It's a natural sort of thing, of course, to be worried. It's entirely regular and completely normal.

And the Eichelns are, after all, an entirely regular and completely normal family. Charles is an entirely normal number of years older than his wife. Lorraine has given him, after all, a completely regular number of sons spaced at appropriate intervals. The boys are growing tall and bright and beyond the pale exactly the sort of children any Clubs family would be proud to smooth down the hair of and call their own.

So being worried as her eldest's twelfth birthday draws near is just an extension of that normalcy. It would have been far more odd if Lorraine wasn't worried that Edgar wouldn't throw himself with absolute immediacy--still so much a child in her eyes, still so much the little boy she felt she'd held swaddled in her arms just a heartbeat ago--into the sort of Challenges which had been known, on occasion, to take good Club boys away from their mothers and fathers and brothers.

If anyone, therefore, happened to be looking for her on the first chilly day toward the end of August, they would find Lorraine Eicheln baking rather purposefully in the Clubs kitchen.