ABSTRACT
Ugly rumors have been circulating in Schaeferville. Bluehaired matrons at the drugstore whisper behind Paula Maven’s back and shake their heads in dismay as she pays for her ibuprofen (Dr. Maven now has chronic headaches and excruciating neck pain, the direct results of long hours of work at her computer screen performing online literature searches). Usually chatty, the clerk at the market now grabs Paula’s money without a word. Her acquaintances and neighbors outside the university, including Ernestine Feasor, shun her. To all of these slights Dr. Maven is oblivious because she is so preoccupied with the complexities of experiments with wicked witches. Blanche St. James, however, has noticed the difference both in the number of phone calls to their lab asking for advice about pests of tomatoes and when they go out to lunch at the local taco stand: no one even bothers to say hello to Dr. Maven. Blanche calls Paula’s mother-in-law Hilda to ask what is going on, and Hilda Maven promises to do some detective work; she discovers the source of the problem when her daughter-in-law becomes the subject of the Sunday pastoral prayer at the senior Maven’s church. “They’re accusing you of being a recruiter for a strange cult that practices polygamy. The preacher called it the Cult of Polygamous Logits. Not only that, people are afraid that you’re raising those giant wicked witches so that some day you can set them loose on the streets of Schaeferville. What
are
you and my son up to?” Dr. Maven is stunned. Then she remembers that a few weeks earlier she
had done a literature search on polytomous logits and multinomial logits and accidentally left the printout on Ernestine’s front porch along with printed instructions on management of hazardous materials. She suspects that Ernestine misunderstood what she should have not been reading in the first place. And sure enough, all that Ernestine gleaned from Dr. Maven’s output was “polygamous logit.” Well, that must have been quite enough to start the juicy gossip. That and Dr. Maven’s preoccupation with what Miss Feasor calls “those disgusting giant varmints.”
