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the chair, he smiled briefly. “Glad to have you with us, Carley,” he said, then added, “Plan to drive to wherever in Connecticut Spencer came from. I liked the job you did on your sample profiles, getting hometown people to talk about your subject.”
    â€œIt’s Caspien,” I said, “a little town near Bridgeport.” I thought of the stories I’d read about Nick Spencer working side by side with his doctor father in the lab in their home. I hoped that when I got to Caspien I’d at least be able to confirm that that wastrue. And then I wondered why I simply couldn’t believe that he was dead.
    The answer wasn’t hard to figure out. Lynn had seemed more concerned about her own image than about Nicholas Spencer because she was not a grieving widow. Either she knew he wasn’t dead, or she didn’t give a damn that he was. I intended to find out which was true.

F IVE

    I could tell that I would enjoy working with Ken Page and Don Carter. Ken is a big dark-haired guy with a bulldog chin. I met him first and was beginning to wonder if the men at Wall Street Weekly had to satisfy a minimum height and weight requirement. But then Don Carter arrived; he’s a small, neat package of a man with light brown hair and intense hazel eyes. I judged both of them to be around forty.
    I had barely said hello to Ken when he excused himself and ran out to catch Carter whom he spotted passing in the hallway. I took the moment to get a good look at the degrees on the wall and was impressed. Ken is a medical doctor and also has a doctorate in molecular biology.
    He came back with Don behind him. They had confirmed appointments at Gen-stone for eleven o’clock the next day. The meeting would be in Pleasantville,which was the main headquarters for the company.
    â€œThey have plush offices in the Chrysler Building,” Don told me, “but the real work gets done in Pleasantville.”
    We would be seeing Charles Wallingford, the chairman of the board of directors, and Dr. Milo Celtavini, the research scientist in charge of the Gen-stone laboratory. Since both Ken and Don lived in Westchester County, we decided that I’d drive up and meet them there.
    Bless Sam Michaelson. Obviously he had talked me up. There’s no question that when you work on a top-priority team project, you want to be sure you can function smoothly as a unit. Thanks to Sam I had the feeling that there wouldn’t be much of a “wait and see” for me with these guys. In essence I was getting another “welcome aboard.”
    *   *   *
    As soon as I left the building, I called Sam on my cell phone and invited him and his wife to a celebratory dinner at Il Mulino in the Village. Then I hurried home, planning to make a sandwich and a cup of tea and have lunch at the computer. I’d received a new stack of questions from readers of the column and needed to sort them out. When you get mail for a column like mine, questions tend to be repetitious. That means, of course, that a lot of people are interested in the same thing, which is an indication of which questions I should try to answer.
    Occasionally I’ll make up my own inquiries when Iwant my readers to have specific information. It’s important that people who are financially inexperienced be kept up to date on such subjects as refinancing mortgages when the rates are rock-bottom low, or avoiding the snare of some “interest-free” loans.
    When I do that, I use the initials of my friends in the query letters and make the city one where they have a connection. My best friend is Gwen Harkins. Her father was raised in Idaho. Last week the lead question in my column was about what to consider before applying for a reverse mortgage. I signed the inquiry from G.H. of Boise, Idaho.
    Arriving home, I realized I’d have to put aside plans to work on the column for a while. There was a message on the answering