He pressed the button and looked impatient that there wasn’t a door opening magically at his touch. Then an elevator arrived. “Good-bye, Miss DeCarlo.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Drexel.”
It was an express elevator, and I plunged down to the lobby, waited five minutes, then took the same elevator back again.
This time I was in and out of the executive offices of Garner Pharmaceuticals in a matter of seconds. “I’m so sorry,” I murmured to the receptionist. “Mr. Garner asked me to be sure to pick up some of your literature on my way out.” I winked at her, girl to girl. “Don’t tell the great man I forgot.”
She was young. “Promise,” she said solemnly as I scooped up the giveaways.
I wanted to study the picture of the assembled Garner honchos, but I heard Charles Wallingford’s voice in the corridor and quickly moved away. This time, however, I didn’t go directly to the elevator but instead scurried around the corner and waited.
A minute later I peeked around cautiously to see Wallingford impatiently pressing the button for an elevator. So much for the big meeting in the conference room, Charles, I thought. If there is one going on, you’re not invited to it.
It had been, to say the least, an interesting morning.
* * *
It was to be an even more interesting evening. In the taxi on the way back to the office, I checked the messages on my cell phone. There was one from Casey. Last night when he came to my apartment, he had felt it was too late to phone Nick Spencer’s former in-laws, the Barlowes, in Greenwich. He had already spoken to them this morning, though. They would be home by five o’clock today and he asked if it would be convenient for me to come at that time. “I’m off this afternoon,” Casey finished. “If you want, I’ll drive you up there. I can have a drink with Vince next door while you’re with the Barlowes. Then we’ll find a place to have dinner.”
I liked that idea a lot. Some things don’t need to be put into words, but I had the feeling the minute I opened the door for Casey last night that everything had changed between us. We both knew where we were heading, and we were both glad to be going there.
I called Casey briefly, confirmed that he’d pick me up at four o’clock, and went back to the office to start to put together a preliminary draft of a profile of Nicholas Spencer. I had a great idea for a caption: Victim or Crook?
I looked at one of the most recent pictures taken of Nick before the plane crash and liked what I saw. It was a close-up and showed a serious and thoughtful expression in his eyes, and a firm, unsmiling mouth. It was the picture of a man who looked deeply concerned but trustworthy.
That was the word: trustworthy. I could not see the man who had so impressed me that night at dinner, or who was now looking steadily back into my eyes as I stared at his photograph, lying, cheating, and faking his own death in a plane crash.
That thought opened another avenue of thought that I had accepted without question. The plane crash. I knew that Nick Spencer gave his position to the air controller in Puerto Rico only minutes before communications ceased. Because of the heavy storm, the people who believed he was dead assumed that the plane had been struck by lightning or had been caught in a wind shear. The people who believed he was alive thought he had somehow managed to get out of the plane before the crash, which he had somehow engineered.
Was there another explanation? How well had the plane been maintained? Had Spencer shown any signs of illness before he left? People under stress, even men in their early forties, can have a sudden heart attack.
I picked up the phone. It was time to have a quiet visit with my stepsister, Lynn. I called her and told her I’d like to come by for a talk. “Just the two of us, Lynn.”
She was on her way out and sounded impatient. “Carley, I’m spending the weekend in the guest house in Bedford. Would you like to come up on Sunday afternoon? It’s quiet there, and we’ll have plenty of time to talk.”
FORTY-ONE
On the way back to Bedford, Ned stopped and filled up on gas; then he picked up sodas and pretzels, and bread and peanut butter, in a hole-in-the wall convenience store next to the service station. That was the kind of food he liked to eat when he watched television and while Annie puttered around the apartment or the Greenwood Lake house. She wasn’t much of a television watcher, except for a couple of shows like Wheel of Fortune. She was usually good at figuring out the answers before the contestants did.
“You should write to them. You should go on the program,” he used to tell her. “You’d win all the prizes.”
“I’d be a big dummy standing there. If I knew all those people were looking at me, I wouldn’t be able to say a word.”
“Sure you would.”
“Sure I wouldn’t.”
Sometimes lately he would just think about her, and it was as if she was speaking to him—for instance, when he was about to put the soda and stuff on the counter, he could hear Annie telling him to get milk and cereal for the morning. “You need to eat right, Ned,” she said.
He liked it when she scolded him.
She’d been with him when he stopped for gas and food, but the rest of the way back to Bedford, he couldn’t see or feel her in the car. He couldn’t even see her shadow anymore, but maybe that was because it was dark.
Arriving at the Spencer property, he was careful to make sure that there was no one else on the road before he pulled up to the service gate and pressed in the code. When he had torched the house, he had gloves on so he wouldn’t leave fingerprints on the panel. Now it didn’t matter. By the time he left here for good, everybody would know who he was and just what he had done.
He parked his car in the service garage, the way he’d planned it. The room had an overhead light, but even though he knew it couldn’t be seen from the road, he didn’t take a risk turning it on. He’d found a flashlight in the glove compartment of Mrs. Morgan’s car he could use, but when he turned off the car’s headlights, he found he didn’t need it. There was enough moonlight coming in the window to see the piles of furniture. He went to the stack of lounge chairs, lifted the top one off, and put it between the car and the wall with the shelves.
There was a name for this kind of furniture, but it wasn’t chair and it wasn’t couch. “What do you call those things, Annie?” he asked.
“Divan.”
In his head he could hear her saying it.
The long cushions were on the top shelf, and it was a struggle to flip one of them down. It was heavy and thick, but when it was in place on the divan, he tested it. It felt as good as his chair in the apartment. He wasn’t ready to go to bed yet, however, so he opened the bottle of scotch.
When he finally got sleepy, it was chilly, so he opened the trunk, unwrapped the blanket from the rifle, picked up the rifle, and laid it down again. It made him feel good to have the rifle next to him, and he shared the blanket with it.
He knew he was safe there, so he could let himself fall asleep. “You need to sleep, Ned,” Annie was whispering.
When he woke up, he could tell from the shadows that it was late afternoon; he’d slept all day. He got up and walked to the right side of the garage and opened the door to the closetlike space that held a sink and toilet.
There was a mirror over the sink. Ned looked at himself and saw his red-rimmed eyes and the stubble on his face. He’d shaved not even a day ago, and already his beard was growing in. He had loosened his tie and the top button of his shirt before he lay down last night, but he probably should have taken them off. They looked kind of wrinkled and messy now.
But what difference did it make? he asked himself.
He splashed cold water on his face and looked at the mirror again. The image was blurry. Instead of his face he was seeing Peg’s eyes and Mrs. Morgan’s eyes, wide and staring and scared; like when they had realized what was going to happen to them.
Then images of Mrs. Schafley and the Harniks started to slither around inside the mirror as well. Their eyes were scared, too. They
knew something was going to happen to them. They could tell he was coming after them.
It was too early to drive to Greenwood Lake. In fact, he decided he shouldn’t leave the garage until ten o’clock—that would mean he’d get there about quarter past eleven. Last night it wasn’t smart when he kept driving around the same mile or two, waiting for the Harnicks to get home. The cops might have noticed.
* * *
The soda wasn’t cold anymore, but he didn’t care. The pretzels were filling enough. He didn’t even need the bread and peanut butter, or the cereal. He turned on the car radio and found the news. On both the nine o’clock and the nine-thirty editions, there was nothing about a nosy landlady in Yonkers being found shot dead. The cops had probably rung her bell, saw her car was missing, and thought she was out visiting, Ned decided.
Tomorrow they might get more nosy, though. Also, tomorrow her son might start wondering why he hadn’t heard from her. But that would be tomorrow.
At a quarter of ten Ned raised the garage door. It was cool outside, but it was the nice kind of cool that comes after a day that had a lot of sunshine. He decided to stretch his legs for a few minutes.
He walked along the path through the woods until he emerged into the English garden. The pool was beyond it.
Suddenly he stopped. What was that? he wondered.
The shades were pulled down in the guest house, but light was coming from underneath them. There was somebody in the house.
It couldn’t be the people who worked here, he thought. They would have tried to put their car in the garage. Keeping in the shadows, he passed the pool, went around the row of evergreens, and inched his way toward the guest house. He could see that one of the shades on a side window was raised a little bit. Keeping as silent as he had when he used to wait in the woods for the squirrels, he edged up to that window and bent down.
Inside he could see Lynn Spencer sitting on the couch, a drink in her hand. The same guy he had seen running down the driveway that night was sitting opposite her. He couldn’t hear what they were saying; but from the expressions on their faces, Ned could see that they were worried about something.
If they had looked happy, he would have gone right back for his rifle and finished them off right there, tonight. But he liked the fact that they looked worried. He wished he could hear what they were saying to each other.
Lynn looked as if she was planning to stay there awhile. She was wearing slacks and a sweater, the kind of country clothes that rich people wore. “Casually dressed”—that was the expression. Annie used to read about “casual” clothes and laugh: “My clothes are real casual, Ned. I have casual uniforms to carry trays. I have casual jeans and T-shirts for when I clean. And when I dig in the garden, I have nothing but casual clothes.”
That thought made him sad again. After the house in Greenwood Lake was gone, Annie threw her gardening gloves and tools into the garbage. She wouldn’t listen when he kept promising that he’d get her a new house. She had just kept on crying.
Ned turned from the window. It was late. Lynn Spencer wasn’t going home. She would be here tomorrow. He was sure of it. It was time to go to Greenwood Lake and take care of tonight’s business.
The garage door didn’t make a sound when he opened it, and the gate at the service entrance opened noiselessly. The people in the guest house had no idea he had been there.
* * *
When he returned three hours later, he put the car away, locked the garage, and lay down on the divan, his rifle next to him. The rifle carried the smell of burned powder, a nice smell almost like smoke from a fireplace when there is a fire blazing. He put his arm around the rifle, pulled the blanket up, and tucked it around him and the rifle, cuddling until he felt safe and warm.
FORTY-TWO
Reid and Susan Barlowe lived in a Federal-style white brick house, situated on a lovely piece of property that borders Long Island Sound. Casey drove up the circular driveway and dropped me off in front of the house at exactly five o’clock. He was going next door to visit his friend, Vince Alcott, while I was talking to the Barlowes. I was to walk over there when I was finished.
Reid Barlowe opened the door for me and greeted me courteously, then said that his wife was in the sunroom. “It’s a pleasant view looking over the water,” he explained as I followed him down the center hallway.
As we walked in, Susan Barlowe was setting a tray on the coffee table with a pitcher of ice tea and three tall glasses. We introduced ourselves, and I asked them to call me Carley. I was surprised that they were so young—surely not more than their late fifties. His hair was salt and pepper, hers still a dark blond sprinkled with gray. They were a handsome tallish couple, both on the thin side, with attractive features dominated by their eyes. His were brown, hers, a bluish gray, but both held a kind of lingering sadness. I wondered if the remnants of grief I saw there were for their daughter who died eight years ago, or for their former son-in-law, Nicholas Spencer.
The sunroom was well named. The afternoon sun was filtering in, brightening even more the yellow flower pattern on the upholstery of the wicker couch and chairs. White oak walls and floors, and a low planter that ran along the floor-to-ceiling windows, completed the sense of having brought the outdoors inside.
They insisted I sit on the couch that offered a panoramic view of Long Island Sound. The two nearest armchairs formed a conversational group, and they settled in them. I was happy to accept a glass of ice tea, and for a moment we sat quietly, taking each other’s measure.
I thanked them for letting me come and apologized in advance for asking any questions that might seem either prying or insensitive.
For a moment I thought I was going to have a problem. They exchanged glances, after which Reid Barlowe got up and closed the door to the foyer.
“Just in case Jack comes in and we don’t hear him, I’d prefer that he not pick up scraps of our conversation,” he said when he sat down again.
“It’s not that Jack would deliberately eavesdrop,” Susan Barlowe said hastily, “it’s that he’s so bewildered, poor kid. He adored Nick. He was grieving for him and handling it pretty well, and then all those stories broke. Now he wants to believe he’s alive, but that’s a doubleedged sword because that brings up the question of why Nick hasn’t contacted him.”
I decided to start from square one. “You know that Lynn Spencer and I are stepsisters,” I said.
They both nodded. I could swear that a look of disdain came over their faces at the sound of her name, but then maybe I thought I saw it because I was anticipating it.
“In truth, I have met Lynn only a few times. I am neither her advocate nor her detractor,” I said. “I’m here as a journalist to learn everything I can of your perception of Nick Spencer.” I eased my way into discussing how I first met Nick, and I described my own impression.
We talked for well over an hour. It was obvious that they loved Nicholas Spencer. The six years he’d been married to their daughter Janet had been ideal. The diagnosis that she had cancer had come at the very time he planned to fold his medical supply company into a research pharmaceutical firm.
“When Nick knew that Janet was sick and her chances weren’t good, he became almost obsessed,” Susan Barlowe said, her voice almost a whisper.
She reached in her pocket for her sunglasses, saying something about the sun getting quite strong. I think she didn’t want me to see the tears that she was struggling to hold back. “Nick’s father had been trying to develop a cancer vaccine,” she continued. “I’m sure you know that. Nick had taken his father’s later notes and had begun to study them. By then his own great interest in microbiology had made him very knowledgeable. He felt that his father had been on the verge of a cure and decided to raise the money to fund Genstone.”
“You invested in Gen-stone?”
“Yes, we did.” It was Reid Barlowe who answered. “And I would do it again. Whatever went wrong, it was not because Nick set out to cheat us or anyone else.�
��
“After your daughter died, did you stay close to Nick?”
“Absolutely. If there was any strain, it began to appear after he and Lynn were married.” Reid Barlowe’s lips tensed into a narrow line. “I swear to you that Lynn’s physical resemblance to Janet was the compelling factor in his attraction to her. The first time he brought her up here was like a body blow for my wife and me. And it wasn’t good for Jack, either.”
“Jack was six then?”
“Yes, and he had a very clear memory of his mother. After Lynn and Nick were married, and Jack would come up here to visit, he became more and more reluctant to go home. Finally Nick suggested that we enroll him in school here.”
“Why didn’t Nick just split with Lynn?” I asked.
“I think eventually it would have come to that,” Susan Barlowe said, “but Nick was so involved with developing the vaccine that concerns about his marriage—or lack of one—were put on hold. For a while he became terribly worried about Jack, but once Jack started living with us and was obviously happier, Nick concentrated only on Gen-stone.”
“Did you ever meet Vivian Powers?”
“No, we did not,” Reid Barlowe said. “Of course, we’ve read about her, but Nick never mentioned her to us.”
“Did Nick ever indicate that he felt there was a problem at Gen-stone that went beyond the fact that many promising drugs fail in the final stages of testing?”
“For the last year there is no doubt that Nick was seriously troubled.” Reid Barlowe looked at his wife, and she nodded. “He confided to me that he had been borrowing against his shares of Gen-stone because he felt further research was needed.”
“Borrowing against his shares, not against company funds?” I asked quickly.
“Yes. We are financially secure, Miss DeCarlo, and the month before his plane crashed, Nick asked if he could arrange a personal loan for further necessary research.”
The Second Time Around Page 22