The Second Time Around (25 page)

N
ow that his rifle was safe in Annie's grave, Ned felt secure. He knew the cops would be back, and he wasn't even surprised when they rang his doorbell again. This time he opened up right away. He knew he looked better than he had on Tuesday. After he had buried the rifle Tuesday afternoon, his clothes and hands were muddy, but he didn't care. When he got home, he opened the new bottle of scotch, settled into his chair, and drank until he fell asleep. All he could think of when he buried the rifle was that if he kept digging, he could get to Annie's coffin and pry it open and touch her.

He had to force himself to smooth down the dirt and leave her grave alone; he just missed her too much.

The next day he woke up at about five o'clock in the morning, and even though the window was streaked and dirty, he could see the sun as it came up. The room
got so bright that he noticed his hands and saw how dirty they were. His clothes were caked with dried mud, too.

If the cops had walked in on him then, they'd have said, “You been digging somewhere, Ned?” Maybe they'd have thought to check Annie's grave and find his rifle.

That was why he'd gotten in the shower yesterday and stood under it for a long time, scrubbing himself with the long-handled brush that Annie had bought for him. Then he even washed his hair, shaved, and cut his fingernails. Annie was always telling him that it was important to look clean and respectable.

“Ned, who's going to hire you if you don't shave or change your clothes or brush your hair so that it doesn't look wild,” she had cautioned. “Ned, sometimes you look so terrible that people don't want to be near you.”

On Monday, when he'd driven over to the library in Hastings to send the first two e-mails to Carley DeCarlo, he noticed that the librarian looked at him strangely, as if he didn't belong there.

Then Wednesday, yesterday, he'd gone to Croton to send the new e-mails, and he'd worn clean clothes. Nobody paid any attention to him at all.

And so, even though he'd slept in his clothes last night, he knew that he looked better today than he had on Tuesday.

When they came, it was the same two cops, Pierce and Carson. Right away he could see that they noticed
he looked better. Then he saw them look at the chair where all his dirty clothes had been lying. After they'd left on Tuesday, he'd thrown them all in the washing machine. He had known the cops would be back and didn't want them to see the clothes all caked with mud.

Ned followed Carson's eyes and saw that he was looking at the muddy boots by his chair. Damn! He had missed putting them away.

“Ned, can we talk to you for a couple of minutes?” Carson asked.

Ned knew he was trying to sound like an old friend who just happened to drop in. He wasn't fooled, though. He knew how cops worked. The time he'd been arrested about five years ago because he got into a fight with that jerk in the bar, the landscaper who worked for the Spencers in Bedford and who said he'd never hire him again, the cops had acted nicey-nicey at first. But then they'd said the fight was his fault.

“Sure, come in,” he told them. They pulled out the same chairs they had in the previous visit. The pillow and blanket were where he had left them on the couch the other day. He'd been sleeping in the chair the past two nights.

“Ned,” Detective Carson said, “you were right about the fellow who was behind you in Brown's drugstore the other night. His name is Garret.”

So what? Ned wanted to say. Instead he just listened.

“Garret says he thought he saw you parked outside the drugstore when he left. Is he right?”

Should I admit that I saw him? You had to have seen him, Ned told himself. Peg was trying to make her bus. She'd finished with him fast. “Sure, I was still there,” he said. “That guy was about a minute behind me coming out of the store. I got in my car, turned the key, changed the radio station to get the ten o'clock news, and then took off.”

“Where did Garret go, Ned?”

“I don't know. Why should I care where he went anyhow? I pulled out of the lot, made a U-turn, and came home. Maybe you want to arrest me because I made a U-turn, huh?”

“When the traffic is light, I've been known to do one myself,” Carson said.

Now we get the buddy-buddy act, Ned thought. They're trying to trap me. He looked at Carson and said nothing.

“Ned, do you have any guns?”

“No.”

“Have you ever fired a gun?”

Be careful, Ned warned himself. “As a kid, a BB gun.” He bet they already knew that.

“Have you ever been arrested, Ned?”

Admit it, he told himself. “Once. It was all a misunderstanding.”

“And did you spend time in jail?”

He'd been in the county jail until Annie scraped together the bail. That was where he'd learned how to send e-mails that couldn't be traced. The guy in the next cell said that all you had to do was go to a library, use one of their computers, go on the Internet, and
punch in “Hotmail.” “It's a free service, Ned,” the guy had explained. “You can put in a fake name, and they don't know the difference. If anybody gets sore, they can trace that it came from that library, but they can't trace it to you.”

“I was only in overnight,” he said sullenly.

“Ned, I see your boots over there are pretty muddy. Did you happen to be in the county park the other night, after going to the drugstore?”

“I told you, I came straight home.” The county park was where he had dumped Peg.

Carson was studying the boots again.

I didn't get out of the car at the park, Ned told himself. I told Peg to get out and walk home, and then when she started to run, I shot her. They don't have any reason to talk about my boots. I didn't leave footprints in the park.

“Ned, would you mind if we took a look at your van?” Pierce, the tall detective, asked.

They had nothing on him. “Yeah, I mind,” Ned snapped. “I mind a lot. I go to the drugstore and buy something. Something happens to a very nice lady who had the hard luck to miss her bus, and you try to tell me I did something to her. Get out of here.”

He saw the way their eyes went dead. He had said too much. How did he know she had missed the bus? That's what they were thinking.

He took a chance. Had he heard it or had he dreamt it? “They said on the radio that she missed her bus. That's right, isn't it? Someone saw her running for it. And, yes, I do mind you looking at my van, and I mind
you coming here and asking me all these questions. Get out of here. You hear me? Get out of here and stay out of here!”

He hadn't meant to shake his fist at them, but that's what he did. The bandage on his hand shook loose, and they could see the blistering and the swelling.

“What was the name of the doctor who treated your hand, Ned?” Carson asked quietly.

A
good night's sleep means that all parts of my brain come awake at the same time. It doesn't happen all that often, but I was blessed enough that when I woke up on May 1, I felt bright and alert, which as the day evolved turned out to be a lucky thing.

I showered, then dressed in a lightweight gray pinstriped suit that I bought at the end of last season and had been dying to wear. I opened the window to get some fresh air, and also to find out the temperature outside. It was a perfect spring day, warm with a little breeze. I could see flowers pushing through the soil in the pots on my neighbor's windowsill, and above there were blue skies with puffs of fluffy clouds drifting by.

Every May 1 when I was growing up, we had a ceremony at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Ridgewood in which we crowned the Blessed Mother. The words of the hymn we used to sing then drifted through
my head as I applied a touch of eye shadow and lip blush.

O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today,

Queen of the angels, Queen of the May . . .

I knew why that tune was coming back to me now. When I was ten, I was chosen to crown the statue of the Blessed Mother with a wreath of flowers. Each year the honor alternated between a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl.

Patrick would have been ten next week.

It's funny how, even long after you've accepted the grief of losing someone you love and truly have gotten on with your life, every once in a while something comes up that plays “gotcha,” and for a moment or two the scar tissue separates and the wound is raw again.

Enough, I told myself, firmly closing my mind to that kind of thinking.

I walked to work and got to my desk at twenty of nine, filled a cup with coffee, and went into Ken's office where Don Carter was already seated. I wasn't there long enough to have my first sip of coffee before things started to heat up.

Detective Clifford of the Bedford Police called, and what he had to say was a real shocker. Ken, Don, and I listened on the speaker phone as Clifford informed us that they had traced the e-mails, including the one I hadn't kept but had told them about—the one telling me to prepare myself for judgment day.

All three had been sent from Westchester County.
The first two had come from a library in Hastings, the other from a library in Croton. The sender had used “Hotmail,” a free Internet service, but had entered what they believe must have been false information on his ID.

“What does that mean?” Ken asked.

“The sender gave his name as Nicholas Spencer and used the address of the Spencer home in Bedford that burned down last week.”

Nicholas Spencer! We all gasped and looked at each other. Could it be possible?

“Wait a minute,” Ken said. “They have tons of recent pictures of Nicholas Spencer in the newspaper files. Did you show some of them to the librarians?”

“Yes, we did. Neither one of them recognized Spencer as someone who used one of their computers.”

“Even on Hotmail you have to give a password,” Don said. “What kind of password did this guy use?”

“He used a woman's name. Annie.”

I ran out to get the original e-mails from my desk and read the last one:

When my wife wrote to you last year, you never bothered to answer her question and now she's dead. You're not that smart. Have you figured out who was in Lynn Spencer's house before it was torched?

“I'll bet anything that guy's wife's name was Annie,” I said.

“There's just one more thing that we think may be interesting,” Detective Clifford said. “The librarian from
Hastings distinctly remembers that a disheveled guy who used the computer had a serious burn on his right hand. She can't be sure he sent these e-mails, but she couldn't help noticing him.”

Before he hung up, Clifford assured us that he was widening the net and alerting libraries in other Westchester towns to be on the lookout for a guy using the computer who was in his fifties, around six feet tall, may be disheveled and has a burn on his right hand.

He had a burn on his hand! I was sure that the man who had been sending me e-mails in which he claimed to have seen someone run down the driveway of the Spencer home was the one with the burn on his right hand. It was an exciting piece of news.

Marty and Rhoda Bikorsky deserved a nugget of hope. I phoned them. God, if we could only realize what's really important in our lives, I thought as I heard their stunned reaction to the fact that the sender of the e-mails was possibly using Nick Spencer's name and had a burned hand. “They'll get him, won't they, Carley?” Marty asked.

“He may just turn out to be a lunatic,” I cautioned, “but, yes, I'm sure they'll get him. They're sure he lives around there somewhere.”

“We've had another piece of good news,” Marty said, “and this has really knocked our socks off. The growth of Maggie's tumor slowed up last month. It's still there, and it's still going to take her, but if it doesn't accelerate again, we'll have one more Christmas with her almost for sure. Rhoda's already starting to plan the gifts.”

“I'm so glad.” I swallowed over the lump in my throat. “I'll stay in touch.”

I wanted to sit for a few minutes and savor the joy I'd heard in Marty Bikorsky's voice, but instead it was necessary to make a call that I knew would quickly dissipate it. Vivian Powers's father, Allan Desmond, was listed in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, directory. I called him.

Like Marty Bikorsky, the Desmonds let the answering machine filter their messages. Like Marty, they picked up before I could disconnect. I began by saying, “Mr. Desmond, I'm Carley DeCarlo from
Wall Street Weekly.
I interviewed Vivian the afternoon of the day she disappeared. I'd very much like to meet you, or at least
talk
to you. If you're willing—”

I heard the receiver being picked up. “This is Vivian's sister Jane,” a strained but well-bred voice said. “I know my father would like very much to talk with you. He's staying at the Hilton Hotel in White Plains. You can reach him there now. I just spoke with him.”