After 30 years in the business, I assumed that I had answered all the universal questions that have plagued humankind for centuries. As often happens, just when you think you know it all, something unusual occurs to sabotage your intellectual confidence. It happened to me. Last week, after a substantial rainfall, I noticed dozens of earthworms flocking on my driveway. I don’t like earthworms and I won’t touch one unless I have gloves on. If I have to pick one up, I use needle-nose pliers. I tiptoed through the herd of earthworms as I left the house for work. I didn’t give them a second thought until I came home for lunch and all the worms had dried up on the driveway. That, in itself, is a universal complexity to me. They desperately seek high ground during a rain shower to avoid drowning, but then they forget to go back in the ground when it’s over. That, however, is not my concern today. I went to the mailbox to retrieve my daily stack of bills and credit card solicitations. I have a rural-type mailbox that sits on a post and the front opens down with a hinge at the bottom. I pulled my mail out and there rested three fat wet earthworms. I screamed. They were partially squished because the new Cabela’s spring sale catalog was delivered that day (that was unfortunate.) Since they were mutilated or dead, I scraped them out of the mailbox with a Bank One credit card solicitation. Now I’m getting to that universal question that is plaguing us all. Can an earthworm climb up a four-foot wood post, crawl upside-down under a metal surface, and find its way into a mailbox? Some would say I’m naïve because I believe that is what happened. I have faith in earthworms. Some would say that the neighbor kids may have deposited them in the mailbox as a harmless prank, harmless, except for my near heart attack. Another person suspected, the mailman, (possibly trying to perk up my day because I never get any personal correspondence.) I know you expect an answer. But some uncertainties are so intricate that years of personal investigation and deliberation are required. So, over the next few weeks (or months) I will observe earthworm behavior and draw my own conclusions, which I will pass on to you. Then, maybe, we’ll be able to sleep at night. New on the nonfiction shelf is "A Random Act," by Cindi Broaddus. She didn't realize that her life was about to be forever altered as she sat in the passenger seat of a car on a lonely highway, speeding toward the airport in the early morning hours of June 5, 2001. The sister-in-law of Dr. Phil McGraw, a single mother of three, and a new grandmother, Cindi Broaddus was thinking only of her upcoming vacation, when a gallon glass jar filled with sulfuric acid, tossed from an overpass by an unknown assailant, came crashing through the windshield. In a heartbeat, Cindi was showered with glass and flesh-eating liquid, leaving her blinded, screaming in agony, and burned almost beyond recognition. When she reached the hospital, the attending doctors gave her little better than a 30 percent chance of survival. But Cindi Broaddus did survive — and after excruciating years of recuperation and seemingly endless sessions of skin grafts and reconstructive surgery, she emerged from her ordeal in many ways stronger than she had ever been before. Also new on the shelf is "Superstition," by Karen Robards. Pawleys Island, S.C. is sunny, idyllic, and picture perfect, until a tabloid news program airs a segment about the community's only unsolved murder — the grisly stabbing of teenager Tara Mitchell and the disappearance of her two best friends, both thought to be dead. Since the murders, several families have moved into the mansion where the crime occurred, each claiming that the dead girls still haunt the house. Beautiful redheaded reporter Nicole Sullivan, sensing the story that could be her big break, arranges for her mother, a renowned psychic, to contact the three victims via a live séance on the show Twenty-four Hours Investigates. But something goes terribly wrong during the segment, and a young woman is murdered in the exact same manner as Tara Mitchell was 15 years earlier. Pressured by her producers to get the inside story, Nicole is ordered to continue to investigate. As an attraction grows between Nicole and police chief Joe Franconi, another identical murder occurs, along with a menacing note warning that the original killer is back to claim three more lives. The body count rises, and so does the danger to Nicole.