Scepticism Inc. [antikvár]

PROLOGUE Florida was the largest producer of tangerines in the world. Production in the late 1990s reached twenty miUion boxes annually. Orange City, a town in the south of Florida, had a population in 1998 of just 2,795. One person who lived in Orange City at that time and had occasional involvement with the tangerine business was Daphne Stephenson. Daphne Stephenson was a check-out girl in one of Orange City's two supermarkets that had been ovraed by the Davies family for nearly forty years. Daphne Stephenson had gone to school with Bob Davies. Bob Davies inherited the two supermarkets in Orange City in 1997. They had necked once behind the gym, Daphne Stephenson and Bob Davies, in their youth. Daphne's jaw would dislocate. Pop. Three times she had to break away from Bob Davies' amorous embrace and push her jaw back into place Avith two fingers. Daphne Stephenson sometimes had epileptic fits too. So did St Antony, the patron saint of skin rashes. So did Jesus Christ. So did Mohammed the prophet. On the 16th of June 1998 she had a fit while at work. Bob Davies didn't phone for an ambulance. He called over his priest who, as providence would have it, was shopping in the frozen meats section. The priest, a man by the name of Stephen L. Jones, had a