Hard Freeze

"Goddamn it to hell," said Kurtz.

Arlene looked up. Joe rarely cursed. "What?"

"Nothing."

Kurtz's e-mail a

Joseph: Received your e-mail and I do indeed have some information on the surviving Ms. Farino and the three gentlemen in question. I would prefer to discuss this in private since I have a request to make of you in return. Could you stop by my winter residence at your earliest convenience? Cordially—P.

"Goddamn it," Kurtz said again.

Arlene squinted at him through a haze of smoke. Her own computer monitor was filled with the day's requests for searches for former high-school boyfriends and girlfriends. She batted ashes into her ashtray but said nothing.

Kurtz sighed. It was inconvenient to go see the old man for this information, but Pruno rarely asked Kurtz for anything. Come to think of it, Pruno had never asked for anything.

The Rafferty thing, though…

"Goddamn it," whispered Kurtz.

"Anything I can help with?" asked Arlene.

"No."

"All right, Joe. But since you're here today, there are a few things you can help me with."

Kurtz turned off his computer.

"We need to find new office space," said Arlene. "This place gets demolished in a month and we get thrown out in two weeks, no matter what."

Kurtz nodded.

Arlene batted cigarette ashes again. "So are you going to have time to help me look for a new office today or tomorrow?"

"Probably not," said Kurtz.

"Then are you going to let me choose a place on my own?"

"No."

Arlene nodded. "Shall I scout some places? Let you look at them later?"

"Okay," said Kurtz.

"And you don't mind me looking during office hours?"

Kurtz just stared at his once and present secretary. She had come back to work for him the day be had gotten out of prison the previous autumn. After twelve years of hiatus. "Have I ever said anything to you about office hours or how you should spend your day?" he said at last. "You can come in and handle the on-line Sweetheart Search stuff in ten minutes for all I care. Take the rest of the day off."

"Uh-huh," said Arlene. Her look finished the sentence. Recently, the Sweetheart Search business had run to ten- and twelve-hour weekdays, most Saturdays, and the occasional Sunday. She stubbed out the cigarette and pulled out another but did not light it.

"What else do we need?" asked Kurtz.

"Thirty-five thousand dollars," said Arlene.

Kurtz reacted as he always did to surprise—with a poker face.

"It's for another server and some data-mining service," added Arlene.

"I thought this server and the data-mining we've already done would handle Sweetheart Search for the next couple of years," said Kurtz.

"They will," said Arlene. "This is for Wedding Bells."

"Wedding Bells?"

Arlene lit the next cigarette and took a long, slow drag. After exhaling, she said, "This high-school-sweetheart search was a great idea of yours, Joe, and it's making money, but we're reaching the point of diminishing returns with it."

"After four months?" said Kurtz.

Arlene moved her lacquered fingernails in a complex gesture. "What separates it from the other on-line school-sweetheart services is you tracking some of these people down on foot, delivering some of the love letters in person."

"Yeah?" said Kurtz. "So?" But he understood then. "You mean that there's only so much market share in this part of Western New York and Northern Pe

Arlene smiled. "Don't worry, Joe. I didn't mean that we're going to run out of yearbook sources or clients for the next couple of years. I just mean we're reaching the point of diminishing returns—or at least for your door-to-door part of it."

"So… Wedding Bells," said Kurtz.

"Wedding Bells," agreed Arlene.

"I assume that's some sort of on-line wedding-pla

"Oh, we can do that," said Arlene, "but I see it as a full-service on-line wedding-pla

"So I won't be delivering corsages to Erie, Pe

Arlene flicked ashes. "You don't have to be involved at all if you don't want to be, Joe. Besides putting up the seed money and owning the company… and finding us an office."

Kurtz ignored this last part. "Why thirty-five thousand? That's a lot of data-mining."

Arlene carried over a folder of spreadsheet pages and notes. She stood by Kurtz's desk as he looked through it. "See, Joe, I was just grabbing bits and pieces of data from the Internet and tossing it all into an Excel spreadsheet—more or less what the present on-line wedding services do—but then I used some of our income to build a new data warehouse on Oracle81 and paid Ergos Business Intelligence to begin mining the database of all these weddings that other individuals or services had pla

She pointed to some columns on the spreadsheet "And voila!"

Kurtz looked for patterns in the charts and columns. Finally he saw one. "Pla

Arlene shook her head. "Some individual wedding pla

"So how does your… our… Wedding Bells dot com cash in on this?" asked Kurtz.

Arlene pulled out other pages. "We continue using the Ergos tool to analyze this two-hundred-seventy- to three-hundred-day period and nail down exactly when each step of the operation takes place."

"What operation?" asked Kurtz. Arlene was begi

Arlene rolled her eyes. Exhaling smoke, she brought her ashtray over to Kurtz's desk and flicked ashes into it. "See, here, at this point early on? Here's the bride's search for a dress. Every bride has to search for a dress. We offer links to designers, seamstresses, even knock-off designer dress suppliers."

"But Wedding Bells wouldn't be just a bunch of hyperlinks, would it?" asked Kurtz, frowning slightly.

Arlene shook her head and stubbed out her cigarette. "Not at all. The clients give us a profile at the begi

Arlene lit another cigarette and ruffled through the stack of papers. She pointed to a highlighted line on a 285-day chart. "See this point, Joe? Within the first month, they have to decide on locations for the wedding and the reception. We have the biggest database anywhere and provide links to restaurants, i