Pellam was wearing black jeans and a gray shirt, buttoned at the neck, without a tie, and a black sports jacket.

He was smiling steadily, looking around the house and talking to Keith. She heard her husband say, "You look like you're recovering pretty well from your little run-in with my wife, excuse the expression. Ought to be a town ordinance. Everybody else's got to wear crash helmets when Meg drives…"

"All right, buddy boy," she said, offering a wry smile, "you want to talk fenders? You want to talk body work."

Keith rolled his eyes. Said, "Okay, sometimes I run into things, true."

"You found the place okay?" she asked Pellam.

"Perfect directions."

Keith was looking out the door. "Oh, a Winnebago?" He stepped out on the porch.

"Home sweet home." To Meg, Pellam said, "Brought you a present." He handed her a small, flat bag. "Oh, yeah," he said. He added to it a paper-wrapped bottle, which turned out to be one of her favorite merlots.

Meg looked at the small bag. "What's this?"

Pellam shrugged.

She opened it and began to laugh. "Honey!" she called to Keith. Pellam cracked a grin. She held up a bumper sticker: So many pedestrians. So little time.

Keith laughed hard. "That's a good one, sir. That's very good." He said, "Come on. I'll show you around."

Meg glanced up the stairs. A small face was looking through the newel posts at the landing.

"Sam, come on down here."

Her son jumped down the stairs.

He walked right up to Pellam and stuck out his hand. "How do you do?"

Megan felt a burst of pride.

Pellam smiled-maybe at the formality and at the firm shake. Meg knew that childless men and women tended to think of kids as, more or less, pets. Meg had worked hard with her son. He was polite and direct. Meg said, "Meet my son, Sam. Sam, this is Mr Pellam."

Keith said, "Come on upstairs. Sam, we'll postpone your homework long enough so you can show Mr Pellam your room."

"Yeah!" the boy said in a high voice.

The male contingent of the dinner party vanished upstairs.

Meg walked into the kitchen and poured glasses of Pellam's wine for the three of them. She sipped hers and stared at the Winnebago. Should she join them or not?

No, something told her to stay here.

Ten minutes later the creak of footsteps had worked their way back to the top of the stairs. Pellam's camper was next on the tour itinerary. Sam started to burst out the door but Keith made sure he was wearing his jacket. Meg offered wine to the men. Pellam took his, nodded at her with a smile. Keith glanced at the glass but shook his head. "I'll have some later." He was a hard liquor drinker mostly. Scotch.

"Mom, I showed Mr Pellam the computer, then my burglar alarm and my metal detector…"

Pellam said, "He made it himself. I can't believe it."

Sam said, "Dad helped."

"But not much," Keith said.

They all moved toward the door. Keith said to Meg, "We're getting a Winnebago tour."

She said, "Dinner's ready."

"Honey," he said patiently, "it's a Winnebago." And a glance at Sam's face told her a cold dinner was worth it.

As they walked onto the porch Sam asked, "Hey, Mr Pellam, do you like bombs?"

"I've worked on a few."

"Huh?"

"Movies."

Meg laughed.

Sam continued, breathlessly enthusiastic. "Sometime maybe I could show you these practice bombs. They're at this junkyard. They're really neat. Mom won't let me buy one but… wow, that's so neat. Can I sit in the driver's seat?"

"You can even honk the horn," Pellam told him.

"Cool."

At the dinner table, Pellam looked out over the spread of osso bucco, mashed sweet potatoes, green bean salad, broccoli. How'd she made all this in the two hours since she'd intercepted him downtown?

Sam was in bed, Keith was serving and Pellam kept looking around him. He felt as if he'd never seen a house before.

Keith adjusted his tie and lifted his wine glass. "To my wonderful wife and her superb dinner."

The conversation meandered. Washington politics, Los Angeles smog. Pellam asked Keith what he did.

"I own a little company that makes over-the-counter products. Cough syrup, aspirin, things like that."

"He's too modest," Meg said. "Keith keeps tap dancing on Bristol-Meyer's face. It's an uphill battle but he's getting there slowly."

"It's tough for us small boys. But I like the challenge. That's what's great about growing a business. The competition."

"You a corporation?"

"Uh-huh. You have to be, with all the personal injury suits now. My single biggest overhead expense after salaries is insurance."

"You have a partner?"

Silence. Meg stirred. Pellam had asked something awkward. Keith said, "Dale Meyerhoff. We worked together at a pharmaceutical company near Poughkeepsie. He died not long ago."

"Died? Oh, I'm sorry."

"Car accident," Meg offered.

Keith said, "Last year. It was quite a shock."

Pellam realized that they'd dealt with the loss a long time ago but they were uneasy now for him-probably worried that the reference would remind him of Marty. He said, "So you do everything, hm?"

Keith said, "I had a lot of learning to do. Dale-my partner-was sales and finance. Me, I'm just a chemist basically. A scientist. A nerd, you know."

"Studio I used to work for did a film about a chemist one time."

"Really?" Keith smiled. "Usually you just see movies about cops and monsters and private eyes."

"I guess it wasn't really a chemist. It was called The Surrey Alchemist. We made it in England. It had very limited distribution over here."

"Witches and sorcerers."

"Alchemists were considered scientists at the time," Pellam said. "We did a lot of research. Turning lead into gold is called base alchemy. True alchemists practice sparygia."

He noticed Meg checking out the plates, pushing bowls toward Pellam when the helpings got too close to empty. Keith seemed fascinated with the story and wasn't eating.

"Sparygia?" Meg asked.

Pellam said, "It means extracting basic properties from things, usually plants. What an alchemist does is try to find the essence of something and that essence supposedly had powers beyond just the chemical composition of the material."

Keith said, "I remember from a scientific history course I took at MIT. What's the movie about?"

"It was based on a real story. In the late 1700s, in England, there was a rich man named James Price. He was like a lot of the wealthy then. You know, dabbling at science. Maybe he was a little more than a dabbler since he got named a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also kind of a crank. A little bizarre. He set up a lab in his home-in Surrey, out in the country. He does all this secret work then calls a meeting of his friends and fellow scientists. He brought them into his lab, where he'd set up a display-the three basic ingredients of alchemy: mercury, nitrate and sulfur-"

Keith laughed. "Hey, you know what those are?"

Meg said, "Let him finish."

Pellam said to Keith, "What?"

"A formula for a bullet. Nitrate and sulfur are in gun-powder and fulminate of mercury's in the firing cap."

Pellam laughed. "Wish I'd known that. It would've been a nice metaphor for the flick. Anyway, Price also had some other ingredients-something secret-in covered boxes. He got this crowd together and made a grand entrance. He looked awful, though. Sick and pasty, exhausted. Then he mixed a white powder with the three basic ingredients and turned them into an ingot of silver. He did the same thing with a red powder and produced gold. The metals were tested by a metalsmith and were supposedly genuine."

"Then he sold the ingredients on late-night cable TV and made a fortune," Meg said.

Keith hushed her.

Pellam continued, "But here's the interesting part. Price kept up the alchemy and made a huge amount of gold but after a few months his health began to fail. Finally, when the Society insisted he do another experiment under observation, he agreed. Three members of the Society rode to his laboratory one morning. He invited them in, set up his chemicals and drank a cup of poison. He died right in front of them-without revealing what the powders were."