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at the meeting, but he wasn’t through with me. “You do have the names of the people who spoke to you, Ms. DeCarlo?”
    I hesitated.
    â€œMs. DeCarlo, I saw your interview at the hospital. You very properly condemned as evil or psychotic anyone who would set fire to a home.”
    He was right. I agreed to give him the names and phone numbers I had jotted down at the meeting.
    Again he seemed to read my mind. “Ms. DeCarlo, when we call these people, we intend to simply tell them that we are speaking to everyone who attended the stockholders’ meeting, which I assure you is true. Many of those present had returned the postcard sent by the company indicating that they planned to be there. Anyone who returned that card will be visited. The problem is that not everyone who attended bothered to return the card.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œHow did you find your stepsister, Ms. DeCarlo?”
    I hoped my moment of hesitation did not register on this quietly observant man. “You saw the interview,” I said. “I found Lynn in pain and bewildered by all that has happened. She told me she had no idea that her husband was doing anything illegal. She swears that to the best of her knowledge, he was absolutelycommitted to the belief that Gen-stone’s vaccine was a miracle drug.”
    â€œDoes she think the plane crash was staged?” Jason Knowles shot the question at me.
    â€œAbsolutely not.” And now, as I echoed Lynn, I wondered if I sounded either convinced or convincing. “She insists she wants and needs to learn the absolute truth.”

S IX

    A t eleven o’clock the next morning I drove into the visitors’ parking lot of Gen-stone in Pleasantville, New York. Pleasantville is a lovely Westchester town that was put on the map years ago when Reader’s Digest opened its international headquarters there.
    Gen-stone is about half a mile from the Digest property. It was another beautiful April day. As I walked along the path to the building, a line from a poem I loved as a child ran through my head: “Oh, to be in England now that April’s there.” The name of the famous poet simply wouldn’t jump into my mind. I figured I’d probably wake up at three in the morning and there it would be.
    There was a security guard standing outside the main entrance. Even so, I had to press a button and announce myself before the receptionist admitted me.
    I was a good fifteen minutes early, which pleased me.It’s so much better to be able to settle down and get your breath before a meeting rather than go in late, flustered and apologizing. I told the receptionist I was waiting for my associates and took a seat.
    Last night after dinner I did some Internet homework on the two men we’d be seeing, Charles Wallingford and Dr. Milo Celtavini. I learned that Charles Wallingford had been the sixth member of his family to head the Wallingford chain of upscale furniture stores. Started by his great-great-great grandfather, the original hole-inthe-wall store on Delancey Street had grown, moved to Fifth Avenue, and expanded until Wallingford’s became a household name.
    The onslaught of discount furniture chains and a downturn in the economy weren’t handled well by Charles when he took over the reins of the company. He’d added a much cheaper line of furniture to their stock, thereby changing the image of Wallingford’s, closed a number of stores, reconfigured the remaining ones, and finally accepted a buyout from a British company. That was about ten years ago.
    Two years later Wallingford met Nicholas Spencer who at the time was struggling to open a new company, Gen-stone. Wallingford invested a considerable sum in Gen-stone and accepted the job as chairman of the board.
    I wondered if he wished he had stuck with furniture.
    Dr. Milo Celtavini went to college and graduate school in Italy, did research work in immunobiology most of his life there,