The Second Time Around

by Mary Higgins Clark

  Ken looked at me, then back at Holden. “Carley has been interviewing Spencer’s family. Why don’t I let her answer that?”

  I told Holden about visiting the Barlowes and about meeting Jack, and I finished by saying, “From everything I’ve heard about Nick Spencer, he would never abandon his son. He was a good man and absolutely dedicated to finding a cure for cancer.”

  “Yes, he was.” Holden leaned forward and linked his fingers together. “Nick was not a man who would fake his own disappearance. Having said that, I feel his death releases me from a promise I made to him. I had hoped his body would be found before I broke the promise, but it has been nearly a month since the plane crash, and it may never surface.”

  “What was that promise, Mr. Holden?” Ken asked quietly.

  “That I would not reveal to anyone that he had injected me with his cancer vaccine while I was in the hospice.”

  Ken and I were both hoping that Dennis Holden had received the vaccine and would admit it to us. To actually hear it from his lips felt like going down the last deep drop on a roller coaster. We both stared at him. This man was thin, but he did not appear at all frail. His skin was pink and healthy. I realized now why his hair was so short—it was growing back in.

  Holden got up, walked across the room, and picked up a framed picture that had been lying facedown on the mantel. He brought it over and handed it to Ken, who held it between us. “This is the picture my wife took at what was supposed to be my last dinner at home.”

  Gaunt. Emaciated. Bald. In the picture Dennis Holden was sitting at the table, a weak smile on his face. The open-necked shirt he was wearing hung on his body. His cheeks were sunken, his hands looked skeletal. “I was down to eighty pounds,” he said. I’m one hundred and forty now. I had colon cancer that was operated on successfully, but the cancer had spread. It was all through my body. My doctors call it a miracle that I’m still alive. It is a miracle, but it came from God through his messenger Nick Spencer.”

  Ken could not take his eyes off the picture. “Do your doctors know you received the vaccine?”

  “No. They had no reason to suspect it, of course. They’re just astonished that I’m not dead. My first reaction to the vaccine was not to die. Then I started feeling a little hungry and began to eat again. Nick visited me here every few days and kept a chart on my progress. I have a copy, and he had a copy. But he swore me to secrecy. He said that I was never to call him at his office or leave a message for him there. Dr. Clintworth at the hospice suspected that Nick had given me the vaccine, but I denied it. I don’t think she believed me.”

  “Have your doctors been doing X rays or MRIs, Mr. Holden?” Ken asked.

  “Yes. They call it a one-in-a-trillion spontaneous remission. A couple of them are writing medical briefs on me. When you called today, my first inclination was to refuse to see you. But I read every issue of Wall Street Weekly. I’m so sick of seeing Nick’s name dragged through the mud that I thought it was time to speak out. The vaccine may not work for everybody, but it gave me back my life.”

  “Will you let me see the notes Nick made on your progress?”

  “I already made a copy in case I decided to give them to you. They show that the vaccine attacked the cancer cells by coating them and then smothering them. Healthy cells immediately started to grow in those areas. I went into the hospice on February 10. Nick was a volunteer there. I’d done all the research available on the treatment and potential treatment of cancer. I knew who Nick was and I’d read about his research. I begged him to try the vaccine on me. He injected me on February 12, and I came home on the twentieth. Two and a half months later, I’m cancer free.”

  As we were about to leave an hour later, the front door opened. A very pretty woman and two girls in their early teens came in. All three had beautiful red hair. They obviously were Holden’s wife and daughters, and they all went straight to his side.

  “Hi,” he said, smiling. “You guys are early. Did you run out of money?”

  “No, we didn’t run out of money,” his wife said, linking her arm with his. “We just wanted to make sure that you were still here.”

  * * *

  We talked as Ken walked with me to my car. “It could be a one-in-a-trillion spontaneous remission,” he said.

  “You know it’s not.”

  “Carley, drugs and vaccines act differently on different people.”

  “He’s cured, that’s all I know.”

  “Then why did the lab tests go wrong?”

  “You’re not asking me, Ken, you’re asking yourself. And you’ve come up with the same answer: Somebody wanted the vaccine to appear to have failed.”

  “Yes, I have considered that possibility, and what I think is that Nicholas Spencer suspected the tests on the vaccine were being deliberately manipulated. That would explain the blind tests he was funding in Europe. You heard Holden say that he was sworn to secrecy, and under no circumstances was he to phone Nick or leave a message for him at the office. He didn’t trust anyone.”

  “He trusted Vivian Powers,” I said. “He had fallen in love with her. I believe he didn’t tell her about Holden or his suspicions because he felt that it might be dangerous for her to have that knowledge, and it turns out he was right. Ken, I want you to come with me and look at Vivian Powers for yourself. That girl isn’t faking, and I have an idea as to what may have happened to her.”

  * * *

  Vivian’s father, Allan Desmond, was in the waiting room next to the intensive care section of the hospital. “Jane and I are taking turns being here,” he said. “We don’t want Vivian to be alone when she’s awake. She’s confused and frightened, but she is going to make it.”

  “Has her memory improved?” I asked.

  “No. She still thinks she’s sixteen. The doctors tell us that she may never recover the last twelve years. She will have to accept that fact when she’s well enough to understand. But the important thing is she’s alive, and we’ll be able to take her home soon. That’s all we care about.”

  I explained that Ken was working with me on the Spencer story and that he was a doctor. “It’s important that he have a chance to see Vivian,” I said. “We’re trying to piece together what happened to her.”

  “On that basis, yes, you can see her, Dr. Page.”

  It was only a few minutes later that a nurse came into the waiting room. “She’s waking up, Mr. Desmond,” she said.

  Vivian’s father was at her side when her eyes opened. “Daddy,” she said softly.

  “I’m here, dear.” He took her hands in his.

  “Something happened to me, didn’t it? I had an accident.”

  “Yes, dear, you did, but you’re going to be fine.”

  “Is Mark all right?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “He was driving too fast. I told him that.”

  Her eyes were closing again. Allan Desmond looked at Ken and me and whispered, “Vivian was in an automobile accident when she was sixteen. She woke up in the emergency room.”

  * * *

  Ken and I left the hospital and walked to the parking lot. “Do you have anybody you could consult about mind-altering drugs?” I asked.

  “I know where you’re going with that question, and, yes, I do. Carley, there’s a battle among the pharmaceutical companies to find drugs to cure Alzheimer’s and restore memory. The other side of that research is that in the process, the laboratories are learning a lot more about destroying memory. It’s not a very well kept secret that for sixty years mind-altering drugs have been used to get information from captured spies. Today those kinds of drugs are infinitely more sophisticated. Think of the so-called date rape pills. They’re tasteless and odorless.”

  Then I voiced the suspicion that had been forming in my mind for some time. “Ken, let me try this out on you. I believe that Vivian ran to her neighbor’s house in a panic and was afraid to call for help even on that phone. She took the car and was followed. I believe she may have
been given mind-altering drugs to try to learn whether it was possible that Nick Spencer somehow survived the crash. In the office I learned that a number of people suspected she and Nick were emotionally involved. Whoever kidnapped her might have hoped that if Nick was alive, he would respond to her phone call. When that didn’t happen, they gave her a drug that would erase her short-term memory and left her in the car.”

  * * *

  I arrived home an hour later and turned on the television first thing. Ned Cooper was still missing. If he had gone to the Boston area, as was speculated, he might have managed to find a place to hide. It sounded as though every lawman in the state of Massachusetts was out looking for him.

  My mother phoned. She sounded worried. “Carley, I’ve hardly spoken to you in the last two weeks, and that isn’t like you at all. Poor Robert almost never hears from Lynn, but you and I are always close. Is anything wrong?”

  There’s a lot wrong, Mom, I thought, but not between us. Of course I couldn’t tell her what was really troubling me. Instead I calmed her down with the excuse that the cover story was practically a 24/7 commitment, but almost choked at her suggestion that it would be so nice if some weekend Lynn and I came down together and the four of us spent some quality time together.

  When I hung up, I made myself a peanut butter sandwich and a pot of tea, put it on a tray, and settled down at my desk for a couple of hours of work. The Spencer files were piled on it, and the newspaper clippings I had been studying for references to the air crash were scattered around as well. I gathered them up, put them back in the proper file and then picked up the house organs and other literature that I’d grabbed at Garner Pharmaceuticals.

  I decided they were worth skimming through to see if there were any references to Gen-stone. When I got to the one that was in the middle of the pack, my blood went cold. It was what I had seen in the reception office that had registered in my subconscious.

  For long minutes, maybe even as long as a half hour, I sat there sipping at the second cup of tea and barely noticing that it was already chilled.

  The key to everything that had happened was in my hand. It was like opening a safe and finding inside everything I’d been searching for.

  Or it was like having a deck of cards and arranging them all in sequence by suit. Maybe that’s a better example because in cards the joker is wild and in some games it can belong anywhere. In the deck we were playing with, Lynn was the wild card, and where she belonged was going to affect both her life and mine.

  FORTY-NINE

  When he got back to the garage from the guest house, Ned sat in the car drinking scotch and occasionally listening to the car radio. He enjoyed hearing the news reports about himself, but on the other hand, he didn’t want to drain the car’s battery. After a while he felt himself dozing, and gradually he drifted off to sleep. The sound of a car coming up the service road and driving past the garage woke him abruptly and made him reach for his rifle. If it was the cops and they tried to come after him, he’d at least blow some of them away before he died.

  One window of the garage faced the road, but he couldn’t see out of it. There were too many chairs stacked in the way. That was good, though, because it means they couldn’t look in from the road and see the car, either.

  He waited nearly half an hour, but no one drove out again. Then he thought of something—he bet he could guess who had shown up: the boyfriend, the guy she’d had with her the night he set the fire.

  Ned decided to take a look and see if he was right. With his rifle tucked under his arm, he noiselessly opened the side door and made his now familiar way to the guest house. The dark sedan was parked where the housekeepers used to leave their car. The shades in the house had all been pulled down except for the one in the study that he had looked through the other night. That one was raised an inch or so from the sill again. It must be stuck, he decided. The window was still open, so when he squatted down, he was able to peek in and see through to the living room where Lynn Spencer and that guy had been sitting last night.

  They were there again, only this time they had someone else with them. He could hear another voice, a man’s voice, but couldn’t see the face. If Spencer’s boyfriend and the other guy were here tomorrow when the DeCarlo woman came to visit, they’d be out of luck, too. Fine with him. None of them deserved to live.

  As he strained to listen to their conversation, he could hear Annie telling him to go back to the garage and get some sleep. “And don’t drink anymore, Ned,” she said.

  “But . . .”

  Ned clamped his lips shut. He had started to talk out loud to Annie, the way he’d gotten in the habit of doing. The man who was talking, the boyfriend, didn’t hear, but Lynn Spencer raised her hand and told him to be quiet.

  He could tell that she was saying she thought she had heard something outside. Ned slipped away and was back behind the tall evergreens before the front door opened. He couldn’t see the face of the guy who walked out and looked at the side of the house, but he was taller than the boyfriend. He only glanced around quickly, then went back inside. Before he closed the door, Ned could hear him say, “You’re crazy, Lynn.”

  She’s not crazy, Ned thought, but this time he kept his mouth shut until he was safely back inside the garage. Then, as he opened the bottle of scotch, he began to laugh. What he had started to tell Annie was that it was okay to drink the scotch as long as he didn’t take the medicine as well. “You keep forgetting, Annie,” he said. “You always keep forgetting.”

  FIFTY

  On Sunday morning I got up early. I simply couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t just that I was dreading having to face Lynn; I also had an odd sense that something terrible was going to happen. I had a quick cup of coffee, dressed in comfortable slacks and a light sweater, and walked uptown to the cathedral. The eight o’clock Mass was about to start, and I slipped into a pew.

  I prayed for those people who had lost their lives because Ned Cooper had invested in Gen-stone. I prayed for all the people who were going to die because Nick Spencer’s cancer vaccine had been sabotaged. I prayed for Jack Spencer, whose father had loved him so much, and I prayed to my little guy, Patrick. He’s an angel now.

  It wasn’t even nine o’clock when the congregation streamed out. Still feeling restless, I walked up to Central Park. It was a perfect April morning, promising a day filled with sunshine and freshly blossomed trees. People were already walking and roller-blading and bicycling through the park. Others were stretched out on blankets on the grass, preparing for picnics or for sunbathing.

  I thought of the people like the ones in Greenwood Lake who had been alive last week and now were dead. Did they have any premonition that their time was running out? My Dad did. He went back and kissed my mother before he set out for his usual morning walk. He’d never done that before.

  Why was I thinking like that? I wondered.

  I wanted to wish the day away, making the time disappear until the evening, when I’d be with Casey. We were good together. We both knew it. Then why did I have this overwhelming sadness when I thought of him, as though we were going in different directions, as though our paths were dividing again?

  I started back home and on the way stopped for coffee and a bagel. That perked me up a bit, and when I saw that Casey had already called twice, that perked me up even more. He’d gone to a Yankee game last night with one of his friends who has a box there, so we hadn’t talked.

  I called him back. “I was getting worried,” he said. “Carley, this Cooper guy is still out there somewhere, and he’s dangerous. Don’t forget that he has contacted you three times.”

  “Well, don’t worry. I’m keeping a lookout,” I said. “He certainly won’t be in Bedford, and I doubt if he’s in Greenwich.”

  “I agree. I don’t think he’d be in Bedford. He’s more likely looking for Lynn Spencer in New York. The Greenwich police are watching the Barlowes’ house. If he blames Nick Spencer for the failure of the vaccine, he might be crazy
enough to go after Nick’s son.”

  The cancer vaccine is not a failure, I wanted so much to tell Casey, but I couldn’t, not over the phone, not now.

  “Carley, I’ve been thinking. I could drive you to Bedford this afternoon and wait for you.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “I don’t know how long I’ll be with Lynn, and you should get to the party on time. I’ll join you there. Casey, I won’t go into it now, but I learned some things yesterday that mean there’ll be criminal charges coming out of all this, and I only pray that Lynn is not involved. If she does know anything or suspect anything, now is the time for her to come forward. I’ve got to convince her of that.”

  “Just be careful.” Then he repeated the words that I had heard from his lips for the first time the other night: “I love you, Carley.”

  “I love you, too,” I whispered.

  I showered and washed my hair and paid more attention than usual to my makeup. I’d plucked a pale green silk slack suit out of the closet. It was one of those outfits that I always felt good in, and people told me I looked good in, too. I decided to carry the necklace and earrings I usually wear with that suit in my purse. They seemed too festive for the conversation I was going to have with my stepsister. Instead, I put on plain gold earrings.

  At one forty-five I got in my car and started the drive to Bedford. At ten of three I rang the bell and Lynn released the gate. As I had done last week when I interviewed the housekeepers, I drove around the remains of the mansion and parked in front of the guest house.

  I got out of the car, walked to the door, and rang the bell. Lynn opened it for me. “Come in, Carley,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  At two o’clock Ned was positioned behind the trees near the guest house. At quarter after two a man he’d never seen before came walking up the driveway that ran to the service gate. He didn’t look like a cop—his clothes were too expensive. He had on a dark blue jacket and tan pants, and wore an open-necked shirt. He had a look and attitude about him, reflected in the way he walked, that said he felt as if he owned the world.