The Second Time Around (36 page)

“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.

W
hen 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.”

O
n 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.”