She opened her mouth to say something else, but the expression on my face silenced her. Wordlessly, she gathered up her long hooded overcoat and scarf and left the room.

I made it up to my room without any more unpleasant run-ins with manic aspiring bankers, closing the door safely behind me and giving thanks that I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the afternoon interviewing more hypercompetitive stress cases. My conversation with Gabrielle had planted the seed of an idea in my head that I wasn’t happy about. I wanted to believe that Sara had fallen prey to a random attack. But if that weren’t the case, I’d just identified a person in Sara’s immediate circle who seemed to wish her ill. It was hard to imagine that Gabrielle’s jealousy and resentment could cause her to lash out violently, and I was hardly a mental health professional, but the woman I’d just met seemed less than sane. If the police determined that the prostitute killer wasn’t responsible for the attack on Sara, they would do well to add the Psycho Roommate to the Creepy Violent Stalker on the list of suspects.

The room was clean and quiet, and I slipped off my shoes, curling and uncurling my cramped toes in the plush pile of the carpet. I was grateful for the downtime; while the police tried to track down Sara’s attacker, the least I could do was track down what, if anything, might be happening to Sara’s company. My laptop was in my briefcase, and I took it out and set it on the desk. While it was booting up, I checked my Blackberry for messages. I hadn’t heard the phone ring, but there was a voice mail from Edie Michaels. Sara was awake and doing well, but the doctors intended to keep her at UHS for a day or two more. I left a message back, letting her know that Professor Beasley had promised to share the letters with the police.

There were a bunch of work-related calls I had to return, but as soon as I finished I plugged the hotel’s Ethernet cord into the computer and opened up my Web browser. I wanted to see what was going on with Grenthaler Media’s stock.

I logged on to Bloomberg.com and typed in the Grenthaler stock symbol. Its price was up since I’d checked it a few days before. Then it had been at $250. It was now trading at $262, a five-percent bump while the market overall was flat, and it was up a full ten percent from a few weeks ago. I then turned my attention to the volume of trading. Of the two million shares held by the public, approximately one percent-or twenty thousand shares-traded hands on the average day. However, the average daily trading volume during the past two weeks was significantly higher-closer to fifty thousand a day.

Of course, some of that could be explained by Tom’s death. Undoubtedly, investors were speculating as to who would be appointed as the new CEO and what it would mean for the company’s future. But usually that sort of speculation wasn’t good for a stock price. Tom had been well respected, and now the company’s leadership was uncertain-if anything, that should send the stock down, not up. And it was odd that the increase in both the stock price and the trading volume had begun prior to Tom’s death.

Perhaps Tom had been right to be concerned. It did look as if there was a player-or several-in the market steadily buying up shares. I checked out the list of headlines from the Associated Press and Reuters. There were reports from the previous week of Tom’s death, and even an item about this morning’s memorial service. I was glad to see that the wire services hadn’t seemed to pick up the news about the attack on Sara. That was the last thing she-or the company-needed right now.

I closed out of Bloomberg and headed over to Yahoo!’s finance portal, typing in the Grenthaler stock symbol again and then clicking on the link to the message board. As a general rule, the message board was not the place for financial wisdom or disciplined technical analysis of a stock’s performance. It was frequented by day traders, many of whom were lunatics and more likely to use a Ouija board to dictate their investment strategies than careful study of a company and its prospects. Still, I was curious as to what rumors might be flying about. The message board would be rumor central.

Here, too, there had been an unusual amount of activity. I scrolled through the postings. While in December there had been only a dozen or so posts each day, in the last couple of weeks it looked like there had been several each hour. I opened up some of the more recent ones at random, mostly incoherent rantings from people with screen names like VivaLasVegas and KermitLuvsGonzo about their esoteric investment philosophies, rife with misspellings and puerile insults for others on the board.

Then a message posted by one CuriousGeorge caught my eye: “Takeover in the works?” read the headline. I clicked it open.

Has anyone else noticed that there seems to be a lot of activity in this stock for no apparent reason? Is a buyout on the horizon? Hard to imagine since Grenthaler’s privately controlled but maybe Barnett’s shares will be up for sale? Anybody know anything on this?

Of course, this set of reasonable questions had been completely ignored by the likes of ExcaliburNYC and XBox-Roolz. I checked out CuriousGeorge’s profile. Apparently he was a one-hundred-and-sixty-eight-year-old male living in Area 51 in Nevada. Needless to say, he hadn’t included a photo in his profile.

While his profile may not have lent his posting much credibility, he raised a good point. Everything I’d seen made me wonder if he was right. Was a takeover in the works? It seemed unlikely, at best, given that only forty-nine percent of the company was publicly traded. Unless, of course, Barbara Barnett made her shares available.

I heard Sara’s anxious voice in my head, her determination not to let control of the company get away from her. “I won’t let that happen,” I had promised her. And I had meant it.

With Sara laid up at UHS, it looked like it was up to me to figure out what was going on.

I called Jessica and asked her to dig up Grenthaler’s company charter and e-mail it to me. Given that Grenthaler was privately controlled, Tom and I had never worried too much about setting up antitakeover clauses for the company. Of course, if a takeover was being launched against the company, it was too late to do anything about that now. But I at least needed to understand what we had to work with. I also asked her to run a Carson Group check for the names of institutions and individuals who had been major purchasers of the stock over the last few weeks. I then left a message for Brian Mulcahey at Grenthaler’s Kendall Square headquarters, asking if he could meet me for breakfast the next day. Brian was Grenthaler’s chief operating officer, and he was temporarily in charge until the board of directors appointed a new CEO.

Most importantly, however, I had to find out what Barbara Barnett planned to do with her ten percent of Grenthaler’s stock. Without Barbara’s shares, nobody could gain majority control of the company. I checked my watch. It was past three. Surely the reception after the memorial service would be long over by now. I needed to talk to Barbara and get a sense of her intentions.

I found the Barnetts’ home phone number on Beacon Hill in my Blackberry, took a deep breath and dialed. A maid answered.

“May I speak to Mrs. Barnett, please?” I inquired.

“Mrs. Barnett is unavailable. Can I take a message?”

I thought for a moment. I wanted to make an appointment to see Barbara in person, but I could only begin to imagine how many people must have left messages of various sorts during the past few days. I doubted that she’d remember who I was in the sea of names and numbers. And I was sure that a good many of those names were from various investment houses, eager to help a new widow manage her wealth. Saying I was from Winslow, Brown wouldn’t get her attention.