Mortal Danger

self-esteem.”
    John was horrified once when a neighbor brought Kate a cat that had been run over by a car. She cradled it in her arms, trying to find a pulse—but there was none. When John saw the dead cat in her arms, he yelled at her to get away from it. Didn’t she know that bacteria and germs jump off animals when they die?
    Their futon had to be made a certain way, the bedding folded just so and put away, and their towels had to be folded to John’s precise specifications. He drove her crazy when she cooked because he hovered over her, cleaning up and putting away measuring cups before she was finished with them.
    But these were irritating and annoying peccadilloes, and not nearly as troubling as his jealousy.
    To keep them afloat financially, Kate occasionally returned to American Airlines, flying out of San Francisco. She had so much seniority that she could stay on the American roster, even if she didn’t fly as many trips as she once did. It left her free to help John with his plans for a new enterprise. He forbade her to fly very often.
    At first, that didn’t bother Kate. John wanted her with him, and not in some city at the other end of the country. And they did have plans to make.
    John had been seeking an “overnight success” business, although that didn’t matter much to Kate. She would have liked to buy their home instead of renting it, and to have a stronger financial base, but she wasn’t looking for great wealth and fame. Not at all. She loved to walk the beach, and she enjoyed the muted woods that surrounded their house, making the rest of the world and its problems seem far away.
    John wanted more. He began to research companies that sold nutritional supplements, and he read about a Texas corporation that was a rising star in the stock market: Emprise, which soon became Mannatech, Incorporated. Although he read the financial reports on the company, which showed constant growth and millions of dollars in sales, he wasn’t particularly interested in Mannatech’s checkered background.
    Mannatech was founded in the midnineties by an entrepreneur named Sam Caster, a man who had run afoul of the Texas attorney general with some of his earlier ventures. First came an insulation product, which, he said, used“NASA technology” to dramatically reduce heating and air-conditioning bills. The AG questioned just how much and failed to validate Caster’s claims. Next, it was a pest-control device that emitted vibrations that scared varmints and bugs, snakes and scorpions, out of infested households. The AG checked Caster’s claims and found no vibrations whatsoever. He went so far as to say, “The device is a hoax and stands on the same scientific footing as a perpetual motion machine.”
    Undeterred, Sam Caster started Mannatech in 1994, concurrent with the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act’s passage by the U.S. Congress. The new statute made wide marketing of nutritional products much more profitable than it had been.
    Mannatech was a multilevel marketing corporation, with a structure much like that of any number of businesses, with constant recruiting of sales representatives by supervisors and officers on a higher level. Makeup, cooking products, spices, erotic underwear, and sex toys are all sold this way. Of course, only those supervisors and officers in the upper echelons of multilevel companies make the munificent salaries.
    Mannatech was one of the fastest-growing small companies in America, as its enthusiastic sales force spread to extol the success of its nutritional supplements, skin-care products, and weight-management system. The one aspect of their program that demanded intense delicacy was the fact that salespeople were told to avoid claiming that Mannatech’s elixirs, pills, and creams could cure illness. It was all right to say that customers could benefit from “good nutrition,” but they were not to promise cures for cancer,Down syndrome, Alzheimer’s, infertility, hemochromatosis, or any other specific disease.
    Detractors called Mannatech’s supplements “sugar pills” and viewed Sam Caster as a filmflam man. Supporters raved about the benefits of Mannatech and were outraged by doubters. Health care is perhaps more important to the consumer than any other “business,” and return customers were anxious to relate their success stories to their friends.
    John sold the idea to Kate, leaving out any of the criticism of Mannatech. It was, he said, a