The Second Time Around Read online

  The living room was a cluttered mess. He’d cut out all the articles about the plane crash and the no-good vaccine, and scattered them on the coffee table. The rest of the papers he’d tossed on the floor. When he arrived home, he read the articles again, every one of them.

  When it grew dark, he didn’t bother about supper. He wasn’t hungry much anymore. At ten o’clock he got out a blanket and pillow and lay down on the couch. He no longer went into the bedroom. It made him miss Annie too much.

  After the funeral the minister had given him a Bible. “I’ve marked some passages for you to read, Ned,” he’d said. “They may help.”

  He wasn’t interested in the Psalms, but just thumbing through he’d found something in the Book of Ezekiel. “You have disheartened the upright man with lies when I did not wish him grieved.” It felt as if the prophet was talking about Spencer and him. It showed that God was mad at people who hurt other people, and he wanted them punished.

  Ned had fallen asleep, but woke up a little after midnight with a vivid image of the Bedford mansion filling his mind. On Sunday afternoons he had driven Annie past it several times after he bought the stock. She’d been very upset because he had sold the house in Greenwood Lake that his mother left him and used the money to buy Gen-stone stock. She wasn’t as convinced as he was that the stock would make them rich.

  “That was our retirement home,” she would yell at him. Sometimes she would cry. “I don’t want a mansion. I loved that house. I worked so hard on it and made it so pretty, and you never even talked to me about selling it. Ned, how could you do that to me?”

  “Mr. Spencer told me I wasn’t only helping people by buying his stock, but someday I’d have a house like this.”

  Even that hadn’t convinced Annie. Then two weeks ago, when Spencer’s plane crashed and word got out that the vaccine had problems, she went crazy. “I’m on my feet eight hours a day at the hospital. You let that crook talk you into buying that phony stock, and now I guess I’m supposed to keep working for the rest of my life.” She was crying so hard she could hardly talk. “You just can’t get it right, Ned. You keep losing jobs because of that lousy temper of yours. And then when you finally do have something, you let yourself be talked out of it.” She had grabbed the car keys and rushed out. The tires had screeched as she shot the car back into the street.

  The next instant kept replaying in Ned’s mind. The image of the garbage truck that was backing up. The squeal of brakes. The sight of the car flipping up and slamming over. The gas tank exploding and the flames engulfing the car.

  Annie. Gone.

  * * *

  They had met at this hospital over twenty years ago, when he was a patient here. He’d gotten into a fight with another guy at a bar and ended up with a concussion. Annie had brought his trays in and scolded him about giving in to his temper. She was spunky, small, and bossy in a cute way. They were the same age, thirty-eight. They had started going out together; then she moved in with him.

  He came here this morning because it made him feel closer to Annie. He could imagine that at any minute she’d come trotting down the hall and say she was sorry to be late, that one of the other girls hadn’t shown up and she’d stayed through the dinner hour.

  But he knew that was a fantasy. She’d never be here again.

  With an abrupt snapping motion, Ned crumpled the newspaper, stood up, walked to a nearby trash receptacle, and shoved the paper inside. He started toward the door, but one of the doctors who was crossing the lobby called to him. “Ned, I haven’t seen you since the accident. I’m so sorry about Annie. She was a wonderful person.”

  “Thank you.” Then he remembered the doctor’s name. “Thank you, Dr. Ryan.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “No.” He had to say something. Dr. Ryan’s eyes were curious, looking him over. Dr. Ryan might know that at Annie’s insistence he used to come here to Dr. Greene for psychiatric counseling. But Dr. Greene had ticked him off when he said, “Don’t you think you should have discussed selling the house with Annie before you sold it?”

  The burn on his hand really hurt. When he tossed the match into the gasoline, the fire had flashed back and caught his hand. That was his excuse to be here. He held up his hand for Dr. Ryan to see. “I got burned last night when I was cooking dinner. I’m not much of a cook. But the emergency room’s crowded. I gotta get to work. Anyhow, it’s not that bad.”

  Dr. Ryan looked at it. “It’s serious enough, Ned. That could get infected.” He pulled a prescription pad out of his pocket and scrawled on the top sheet. “Get this ointment and keep putting it on. Have your hand checked in a day or two.”

  Ned thanked him and turned away. He didn’t want to run into anyone else. He started toward the door again, but stopped. Cameras were being set up around the main exit.

  He put on his dark glasses before he got into the revolving door behind a young woman. Then he realized that the cameras were there for her.

  He stepped aside quickly and slipped behind the people who had been about to enter the hospital but waited when they saw the cameras. The idle ones. The curious.

  The woman being interviewed was dark-haired, in her late twenties, attractive. She looked familiar. Then he remembered where he’d seen her. She’d been at the shareholders’ meeting yesterday. She’d been asking questions of people as they left the auditorium.

  She had tried to talk to him, but he’d brushed past her. He didn’t like people asking him questions.

  One of the reporters held a mike up to her. “Ms. DeCarlo, Lynn Spencer is your sister—is that right?”

  “My stepsister.”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s obviously in pain. She had a terrible experience. She nearly lost her life in that fire.”

  “Does she have any idea who might have set the fire? Has she received any threats?”

  “We didn’t talk about that.”

  “Do you think it was someone who lost money by investing in Gen-stone, Ms. DeCarlo?”

  “I can’t speculate on that. I can say that anyone who would deliberately incinerate a home, taking the chance that someone may be inside sleeping, is either psychotic or evil.”

  Ned’s eyes narrowed as rage filled him. Annie had died trapped in a burning car. If he hadn’t sold the house in Greenwood Lake, they would have been there on that day two weeks ago when she was killed. She’d have been on her knees planting her flowers instead of rushing out of the Yonkers house, crying so hard that she hadn’t paid attention to the traffic when she backed out the car.

  For a brief moment he locked eyes with the woman being interviewed. DeCarlo was her name, and she was Lynn Spencer’s sister. I’ll show you who’s crazy, he thought. Too bad your sister wasn’t trapped in the fire the way my wife was trapped in the car. Too bad you weren’t in the house with her. I’ll get them, Annie, he promised. I’ll get back at them for you.

  FOUR

  I drove home not even remotely pleased with my performance during that unexpected news conference. I liked it much better when I was asking the questions. However, I realized that like it or not, I was now going to be perceived as Lynn’s spokesperson and defender. It was not a role I wanted, nor was it an honest one. I was still not at all convinced that she was a naive and trusting wife who never sensed that her husband was a conman.

  But was he? When his plane crashed, he supposedly had been on his way to a business meeting. When he got in that plane, did he still believe in Gen-stone? Did he go to his death believing in it?

  This time the Cross Bronx Expressway ran true to form. An accident had it backed up for two miles, giving plenty of quiet time to think. Maybe too much time, because I realized that despite everything that had been disclosed about Nick Spencer and his company in the past few weeks, there was still something missing, something wrong. It was too pat. Nick’s plane crashes. The vaccine is declared faulty if not worthless. And millions of dollars are missing.

 
; Was the accident rigged, and was Nick now sunning himself in Brazil as Sam suggested? Or did his plane crash in that storm with him in the cockpit? And if so, where was all that money, $25,000 of which was mine?

  “He liked you, Carley,” Lynn had said.

  Well, I liked him, too. That’s why I would like to believe that there was another explanation.

  I drove past the accident that had reduced the Cross-Bronx to a one-lane road. A trailer truck had overturned. Broken crates of oranges and grapefruits had been shoved to the side to open the single lane. The cabin of the truck seemed intact. I hoped the driver was all right.

  I turned onto the Harlem River Drive. I was anxious to get home. I wanted to go over next Sunday’s column before I e-mailed it to the office. I wanted to call Lynn’s father and reassure him that she was going to be all right. I wanted to see if there were any messages on the answering machine, specifically from the editor of Wall Street Weekly. God, how I’d love to get a job writing for that magazine, I thought.

  The rest of the drive went quickly enough. The trouble was that in my mind I kept seeing the sincerity in Nick Spencer’s eyes when he talked about the vaccine. I kept remembering my reaction to him: What a terrific guy.

  Was I dead wrong, stupid, and naive, everything a reporter should not be? Or was there perhaps another answer? As I pulled into the garage, I realized what else was bothering me. My gut was talking to me again. It was telling me that Lynn was much more interested in clearing her own name than she was in learning the truth about whether or not her husband was still alive.

  There was a message on my answering machine, and it was the one I wanted. Would I please call Will Kirby at Wall Street Weekly.

  Will Kirby is editor in chief there. My fingers raced as they pushed the numbers. I’d met Kirby a few times at big gatherings, but we’d never really talked. When his secretary put me through and he got on the phone, my first thought was that his voice matched his body. He’s a large-framed man in his mid-fifties, and his voice is deep and hearty. It has a nice, warm tone to it, even though he is known as a no-nonsense guy.

  He didn’t waste time chatting with me. “Carley, can you come in and see me tomorrow morning?”

  You bet I can, I thought. “That would be fine, Mr. Kirby.”

  “Ten o’clock okay with you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Fine. See you then.”

  Click.

  I had been screened by two people at the magazine already, so this was definitely going to be a make-or-break interview. My mind flew to my closet. A pantsuit was probably a better choice for the interview than a skirt. The gray stripe that I’d bought during a sale in Escada at the end of last summer would be great. But if it turned cold, the way it was yesterday, that would be too light. In which case, the dark blue would be a better choice.

  I hadn’t felt this combination of being both apprehensive and eager for a long time. I knew that even though I loved writing the column, it just wasn’t enough to keep me busy. If it was a daily column, it might have been different, but a weekly supplement that has a lot of lead time isn’t much of a challenge once you learn the ropes. Even though I was getting occasional freelance assignments writing profiles of people in the financial world for various magazines, it still wasn’t enough.

  I called down to Boca. Mom had moved into Robert’s apartment after they were married because it had a great view of the ocean and was larger than hers. What I didn’t like about it was that now when I visited, I slept in “Lynn’s room.”

  Not that she ever really stayed there. She and Nick took a suite at the Boca Raton Resort when they visited. But Mom’s changing apartments meant that when I flew down for a weekend, I was acutely aware that Lynn had furnished that room for herself before she married Nick. It was her bed I was sleeping in, her pale pink sheets and lace-edged pillowcases I was using, her expensive monogrammed towel I wrapped around me after I showered.

  I had liked it a lot better when I slept on the convertible couch in Mom’s old apartment. The plus factor, of course, was that Mom was happy and I sincerely liked Robert Hamilton. He is a quiet, pleasant man with none of the arrogance Lynn displayed at that first meeting. Mom told me that Lynn had been trying to set him up with one of the wealthy widows in nearby Palm Beach, but he wasn’t interested.

  I picked up the receiver, touched number one, and the automatic dial did its job. Robert answered. Of course he was terribly worried about Lynn, and I was happy to be able to reassure him that she really would be fine and out of the hospital in a few days.

  Allowing for the fact that he’d been concerned about his daughter, I still felt that something else was wrong. Then he came out with it. “Carley, you met Nick. I can’t believe he was a fraud. My God, he talked me into putting almost all my savings in Gen-stone. He wouldn’t have done that to his wife’s father if he knew it was a scam, would he?”

  * * *

  At the interview the next morning, I sat across the desk from Will Kirby, my heart sinking when he said, “I understand you’re Lynn Spencer’s stepsister.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I saw you on the news last night outside the hospital. Frankly, I was worried that it might be impossible for you to do the assignment I had in mind, but Sam tells me you’re not very close to her.”

  “No, I’m not. Frankly, I was surprised that she wanted me to go up to see her yesterday. But she did have a reason. She wants people to understand that whatever Nick Spencer did, she had no part in it.”

  I told him that Nick had persuaded Lynn’s father to put most of his savings in Gen-stone.

  “He’d have to be a real skunk to deliberately cheat his own father-in-law,” Kirby agreed.

  Then he told me that the job was mine and my first assignment was to do an in-depth profile on Nicholas Spencer. I had submitted samples of the profiles I’d done previously, and he liked them. “You’ll be part of a team. Don Carter will handle the business angle. Ken Page is our medical expert. You’ll do the personal background. Then the three of you will put the story together,” he told me. “Don is setting up appointments at Gen-stone with the chairman and a couple of the directors. You should go along on them.”

  There were a couple of copies of my column on Kirby’s desk. He pointed to them. “By the way, I don’t see any conflict if you want to keep writing the column. Now go introduce yourself to Carter and Dr. Page, and then stop by Personnel to fill out the usual forms.”

  Interview over, he reached for the phone, but as I got up from 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.”

  “It’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 was true. 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.

  FIVE

  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 doctora
te 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.

  “They 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 I want 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.