The Second Time Around (15 page)

It isn't a threat, I told myself. It's probably from
some religious nut, a doomsday kind of message. I shrugged it off, perhaps because the other message really took my breath away:
“Who was the man in Lynn Spencer's mansion a minute before it caught fire?”

Who could have seen someone leave the house before the fire started? Wouldn't it have to be the person who actually set it? And if so, why would he write to
me?
Then a thought came to me: The housekeeping couple hadn't expected Lynn to be there that night, but had they seen someone else leaving the house? If so, why hadn't they come forward? I could think of one reason: They might be in this country illegally and don't want to be deported.

I now had three stops to make in Westchester County.

I elected to make the first one to the home of Vivian and Joel Powers in Briarcliff Manor, one of the towns that borders Pleasantville. Using my road map I found their house, a charming two-story stone dwelling that must have been over one hundred years old. A realtor's sign was on the front lawn. The house was for sale.

Mentally keeping my fingers crossed as I had when I arrived unannounced on Dr. Broderick's doorstep, I rang the bell and waited. There was a peephole in the heavy old door, and I sensed that I was being observed. Then the door was opened, the safety chain clearly in sight.

The woman who answered the door was a darkhaired beauty in her late twenties. She was wearing no makeup and needed none. Her brown eyes were enhanced by long lashes. Her high cheekbones and perfectly
shaped nose and mouth made me wonder if she had ever been a model. She certainly had the looks it took to be one.

“I'm Carley DeCarlo,” I said. “Are you Vivian Powers?”

“Yes, I am, and I already told you that I would not be interviewed,” she responded.

I was sure she was on the verge of closing the door, so I said hurriedly, “I'm trying to write a fair and balanced story about Nicholas Spencer. I don't accept the fact that there isn't a lot more to his disappearance than what is being reported in the media. When we spoke on Saturday, I got the sense that you're very defensive of him.”

“I am. Good-bye, Ms. DeCarlo. Please don't come back.”

I was taking a chance, but I plunged ahead. “Ms. Powers, on Friday I went up to Caspien, the town where Nick Spencer grew up. I spoke to a Dr. Broderick who bought the Spencer home and who was holding some of Dr. Spencer's early records. He's in the hospital right now, a hit-and-run victim, and probably won't make it. I believe that his talking to me about Dr. Spencer's research may have had something to do with his so-called accident.”

I held my breath, but then I saw a startled look come into her eyes. A moment later her hand moved to unfasten the safety latch. “Come in,” she said.

The interior of the house was in the process of being dismantled. Rolled-up carpets, stacks of boxes clearly marked to show their contents, empty table tops, and
bare walls and windows attested to the fact that Vivian Powers was on the verge of moving. I noticed she was wearing a wedding ring, and I wondered where her husband was.

She led me to a small enclosed sun porch that was still intact, with lamps on the tables and a small rug on the wide plank floor. The furniture was wicker with brightly colored chintz seat cushions and backrests. She sat on the loveseat, which left the matching chair for me. I was thankful that I'd persevered and had driven up and forced my way in today. Real estate wisdom is that a house shows much better when there are people living in it. Which made me ask, what was her rush to get out? I intended to make it my business to see how long this place had been on the market. I bet myself that it had not been listed before the plane crash.

“This has been my retreat since the packers started.”

“When are you leaving?” I asked.

“Friday.”

“Are you staying local?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“No. My parents live in Boston. I'll live with them until I find my own place. I'll put the furniture in storage for the present.”

I was beginning to believe that Joel Powers was not part of his wife's future plans. “Could I ask you just a few questions?”

“I wouldn't have let you in if I hadn't decided to let you ask me a few questions,” she said. “But first I have a few of my own.”

“I'll answer them if I can.”

“What made you go to see Dr. Broderick?”

“I went solely to get background on the home where Nicholas Spencer was raised and anything Dr. Broderick might know about Dr. Spencer's laboratory which had been in that house.”

“Were you aware that he had been holding Dr. Spencer's early records?”

“No. Dr. Broderick volunteered that information. He obviously was troubled when he realized that Nicholas Spencer had not sent for the records. Did Spencer tell you they were missing?”

“Yes, he did.” She hesitated. “Something happened at that award dinner in February, and it related to a letter Nick received around Thanksgiving. In it the writer said she wanted to tell him about a secret she had shared with his father, and she stated that his father had cured her daughter of multiple sclerosis. She even put in her phone number. At the time Nick tossed the letter over to me to give the standard reply. He said, “This is as nutty as they get. That's totally impossible.”

“But the letter was answered?”

“All his mail was answered. People wrote in all the time, begging to be used in an experiment, willing to sign anything for a chance to get the cancer vaccine he was working on. Sometimes people wrote that they'd been cured of some ailment and wanted him to test their homespun remedies and distribute them. We had a couple of form letter responses.”

“Did you keep copies of these letters?”

“No, just a list of names of people who got them. Neither of us remembered that woman's name. There
are two employees who deal with that kind of mail. But then something happened at the award dinner. Nick was very excited the next morning and said he had to go right back to Caspien. He said he'd learned something terribly important. He said that his gut had told him to take seriously that letter from the woman who wrote about his father curing her daughter.”

“Then he rushed back to Caspien to collect his father's early records and found that they had disappeared. This happened around Thanksgiving, at about the same time the letter came into the office,” I said.

“That's right.”

“Let me get this straight, Vivian. You think there was a connection between that letter and the fact that his father's early records were taken from Dr. Broderick a few days later?”

“I'm sure there was, and Nick was different after that day.”

“Did he ever say who he went to see after he left Dr. Broderick?”

“No, he didn't.”

“Can you check his calendar for that day. The award dinner was on February 15, so it would be February 16. Maybe he jotted down a name or number.”

She shook her head. “He didn't write it down that morning, and he never put anything on his calendar after that day—I mean, anything about appointments outside the office.”

“Suppose you had to reach him, how would you do it?”

“I called his cell phone. Let me correct that. There
were some events already scheduled, like medical seminars, dinners, board meetings—those kinds of things. But Nick was out of the office a lot those last four or five weeks. When the U.S. attorney's people came to the office, they told us that they'd learned he'd been to Europe twice. But he didn't use the company plane, and no one at the office knew his plans, not even me.”

“The authorities seem to think he was either making arrangements for face-changing plastic surgery, or he was setting up his future residence. What do you think, Vivian?”

“I think there was something terribly wrong, and he knew it. I think he was afraid that his phone was tapped. I was there when he called Dr. Broderick, and looking back at it, I wonder why he didn't just say that he wanted his father's records. All he did was ask if he could stop in.”

It was obvious to me that Vivian Powers wanted desperately to believe that Nick Spencer had been the victim of a conspiracy.

“Vivian,” I asked, “do you think he seriously expected the vaccine to work? Or did he always know it was flawed?”

“No. He was driven by his need to find a cure for cancer. He lost both his wife and his mother to that terrible disease. In fact, I met him in a hospice two years ago when my husband was a patient there. Nick was a volunteer.”

“You met Nick Spencer at the hospice?”

“Yes. St. Ann's. It was just a few days before Joel died. I had given up my job to take care of him. I'd been
assistant to the president of a brokerage firm. Nick stopped in Joel's room and talked with us. Then a few weeks after Joel died I got a phone call from him. He told me that if I ever wanted to work for Gen-stone, to come see him. He'd find a place for me. Six months later I took him up on that. I never expected to be hired to work for him personally, but my timing was good. His assistant was pregnant and planning to stay home for a couple of years, so I got the job. It was a godsend for me.”

“How did he get along with other people in the office?”

She smiled. “Fine. He really liked Charles Wallingford. He joked about him to me sometimes. Said if he hears once more about his family tree, he'll have it cut down. I don't think he liked Adrian Garner, though. He said he was overbearing, but it was worth putting up with that because of all the money Garner could bring to the table.”

Then I heard again the passionate tone I first noticed when I called her on Saturday. “Nick Spencer was a dedicated man. He'd have carried Garner's boots if that was necessary to get his company to market the vaccine and make it available all over the world.”

“But if he realized that the vaccine didn't work, and if he'd been taking out money that he couldn't replace, then what?”

“Then I admit that he could have snapped. He was nervous, and he was worried. He also told me about something that happened only a week before the plane crash, something that could have led to a fatal accident.
He was driving home from New York to Bedford late at night, and the accelerator froze in his car.”

“Did you ever tell anyone else about that?”

“No. He made light of it. He said that he was lucky because there was very little traffic and he was able to maneuver the car until he turned off the engine and it stopped on its own. It was an old car, one that he loved, but he said it was clearly time to get rid of it.” She hesitated. “Carley, now I wonder if it's at all possible that somebody did something to jam the accelerator. The incident with the car was only a week before his plane went down.”

I tried to keep my expression neutral and merely nodded thoughtfully. I didn't want her to see that I absolutely agreed with her. There was something else I needed to find out. “What do you know about his relationship with Lynn?”

“Nothing. Gregarious as he seemed to be, Nick was a very private person.”

I saw the genuine grief in her eyes. “You were very fond of him, weren't you?”

She nodded. “Anyone who had the chance to be with Nick Spencer regularly would have been very fond of him. He was so special. He was the heart and soul of that company. It's going to go bankrupt. People there are either being fired or are leaving, and all of them blame him and hate him. Well, I believe that he may be a victim, too.”

I left a few minutes later, having made Vivian promise to stay in touch with me. She waited while I walked down the path and waved to me as I got in my car.

My mind was churning. I was certain there was a connection between Dr. Broderick being hit by the car and Nicholas Spencer's jammed accelerator and the plane crash. Three accidents? No way. Then I allowed the question that had always been in the back of my mind to come front and center: Had Nicholas Spencer been murdered?

But when I was talking to the housekeeping couple at the Bedford property, another scenario cropped up, and this one changed my thinking entirely.

“L
ast night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” I couldn't help thinking of the haunting opening lines of Daphne du Maurier's novel
Rebecca,
as I turned off the road in Bedford, stopped at the gate of the Spencer estate, and announced myself.

For the second time today I was making an uninvited visit. When a Hispanic-accented voice politely asked who I was, I replied that I was Mrs. Spencer's stepsister. There was a moment's pause, and then I was directed to drive around the site of the fire and to stay to the right.

I drove in slowly, giving myself a chance to admire the beautiful well-tended grounds that surrounded the ruined building. There was a pool in the back and a pool house on a terrace above it. To the left I could see what looked like an English garden. Somehow, though, I couldn't visualize Lynn on her knees, digging in the
soil. I wondered if Nick and his first wife had been the ones to oversee the landscaping, or perhaps a previous owner had undertaken the task.