The Second Time Around (38 page)

“It wasn't her problem, Carley,” a deep male voice said.

The voice came from behind me. I gasped and jumped up. Lowell Drexel was standing in the doorway. He was holding a pistol.

“Sit down, Carley.” His voice was quiet, unemotional.

My knees were suddenly weak as I sank back into the chair and looked at Lynn for an explanation.

“I was hoping it wouldn't go this far, Carley,” she said. “I'm really sorry, but . . .” Suddenly she was looking past me, toward the back of the room, and the contemptuous expression she'd worn an instant ago had transformed into a look of sheer horror.

I jerked my head around. Ned Cooper was standing in the dining area, his hair matted, his face covered with stubble, his clothes stained and wrinkled, his eyes wide, his pupils dilated. He was holding a rifle, and as
I watched, he shifted it a hairbreadth and pulled the trigger.

The sharp cracking sound, the smell of acrid smoke, Lynn's terrified scream, and the thud of Drexel's body as it hit the hardwood floor assaulted my senses.
Three!
That was all I could think.
Three
in Greenwood Lake;
three
in this room. I'm going to die!

“Please,” Lynn was moaning, “please.”

“No. Why should you live?” he asked. “I've been listening. You're dirt.”

He was aiming the rifle again. I buried my face in my hands.

“Plea—”

I heard the explosive sound again and smelled the smoke and knew that Lynn was dead. Now it was my turn. Now he's going to kill me, I told myself, and waited for the impact of the bullet.

“Get up.” He was shaking my shoulder. “Come on. We're taking your car. You're a lucky girl. You get to live another half hour or so.”

I stumbled to my feet. I couldn't look at the couch. I didn't want to see Lynn's body.

“Don't forget your pocketbook,” he said with eerie calm.

It was on the floor next to the chair where I'd been sitting. I bent down and scooped it up. Then Cooper grabbed my arm and propelled me back through the dining area and into the kitchen. “Open the door, Carley,” he commanded.

He pulled it shut behind us and shoved me to the driver's side of the car.

“Get in.
You
drive.”

He seemed to know I hadn't locked the car. Had he been watching for me? I wondered. Oh, God, why did I come here? Why didn't I take his threat seriously?

He walked around the front of the car, never taking his eyes off me and keeping his rifle at the ready. He got in the passenger seat. “Open your pocketbook and get out the keys.”

I fumbled with the catch. My fingers were numb. My whole body was trembling so much that when I did get the catch open and pulled out the keys, it was hard to fit the key into the ignition.

“Drive down this road. The number for the gate is 2808. Punch it in when we get there. When the gate opens, turn right. If there are any cops around, don't try anything.”

“I won't,” I whispered. I could barely form the words.

He leaned down so that his head wasn't visible to anyone on the street. But when the gate opened and I drove out, there were no other cars on the road.

“Turn left up at the corner.”

When we passed the charred remains of the mansion, I saw a police car drive slowly by. I kept looking straight ahead. I knew Ned Cooper meant what he said: If they came near us, he'd kill them and me.

*   *   *

Cooper remained slumped in the seat, the rifle between his legs, speaking only to give directions. “Turn right here. Turn left here.” Then he said in a markedly different
tone of voice, “It's over, Annie. I'm on the way. Guess you're glad, honey.”

Annie.
His dead wife, I thought. He was talking to her as if she was in the car. Maybe if I tried to talk to him about her, if he saw I felt sorry for both of them, then I might have a chance. Maybe then he wouldn't kill me. I wanted to live. I wanted to have a life with Casey. I wanted another child.

“Turn left here, then drive straight for a while.”

He was avoiding main roads, anyplace there was likely to be police looking for him.

“All right, Ned,” I responded. My voice was trembling so much that I bit my lip to try to get control of it. “I heard people talking about Annie on the television yesterday. Everybody said they loved her.”

“You didn't answer her letter.”

“Ned, sometimes, if I get the same question from a lot of people, I do answer the letter, but I don't use one particular name because that wouldn't be fair to all the others. I bet I answered Annie's question even though I didn't use her name.”

“I don't know.”

“Ned, I bought stock in Gen-stone, too, and I lost money, just like you. That's why I'm writing a story for the magazine, to let everybody know about people like us who got cheated. I know how much you wanted to give Annie a nice big home. The money I used to buy the stock was money I had been saving for an apartment. I live in a rented place that's really small, just like the one you lived in.”

Was he listening? I wondered. I couldn't tell.

My cell phone rang. It was in my purse which was still lying in my lap.

“Someone supposed to call you?”

“That's probably my boyfriend. I'm supposed to meet him.”

“Pick it up. Tell him you'll be late.”

It
was
Casey. “Everything okay, Carley?”

“Yes. I'll tell you about it.”

“How long before you get here?”

“Oh, about twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes?”

“I just started.” How could I let him know I needed help? “Tell everybody that I'm on my way,” I said. “It's good to know I'll be seeing Patrick soon.”

Cooper took the phone out of my hand. He pushed the end button and dropped it on the seat. “You'll be seeing Annie soon, not Patrick.”

“Ned, where are we going?”

“To the cemetery. To be with Annie.”

“Where is the cemetery, Ned?”

“Yonkers.”

Yonkers was less than a ten-minute drive from where we were.

Did Casey understand that I needed him? I wondered. Would he call the police and tell them to be on the lookout for my car? But even if they saw it and followed us, it would only mean that some of them would be killed, too.

I was now sure that Ned Cooper was planning to kill himself in the cemetery, after he killed me. The only way I could hope to survive was if he decided to let me
live. To do that I had to get his sympathy. “Ned, I think that it's a shame all the terrible things they said about you on the television yesterday. It wasn't fair.”

“Annie, hear that? She doesn't think it's fair, either. They don't know what it was like for you to lose your house, all because I believed their lies. They don't know how it felt for me to see you die when that garbage truck hit your car. They don't know that those people you were so nice to all the time didn't want you to know that I was going to sell the house to them. They didn't like me, so they wanted us both to go away.”

“I'd like to write about all that, Ned,” I said. I tried to keep from sounding as if I was pleading. It wasn't easy.

We drove through Yonkers. There was a lot of traffic, and Cooper slumped lower in the seat.

“I'd like to write about Annie's beautiful gardens, how she planted a new one every year,” I continued.

“Keep driving straight. We're almost there.”

“And I'll let everyone know that the patients loved her at the hospital. I'll write about how much she loved
you.
”

The traffic had thinned out. On the right, down the block, I saw a cemetery. “I'll call it ‘Annie's Story,' Ned.”

“Turn into that dirt road. It goes through the cemetery. I'll tell you when to stop.” There was no discernible emotion in his voice.

“Annie,” I said, “I know you can hear me. Why don't you tell Ned that it's better if you two are alone together, and that I should go home and write about
you and tell everyone how much you and Ned loved each other. You don't want me to be in the way when you finally get your arms around Ned, do you?”

He didn't seem to be listening. “Stop here and get out of the car,” he commanded.

Ned made me walk ahead of him to a grave that was still freshly dug and covered with mud. The ground had begun to settle, and there was a depression in the middle.

“I think Annie's grave should have a beautiful tombstone with flowers carved around her name,” I said. “I'll do that for her, Ned.”

“Sit down. Over there,” he said, pointing to a space about six feet from the foot of the grave.

He sat down on the grave, the rifle pointing at me. With his left hand he pulled off his right shoe and sock.

“Turn around,” he said.

“Ned, I promise you, Annie wants to be alone with you.”

“I said turn around.”

He was going to kill me. I tried to pray, but I could only whisper the word that Lynn had died trying to say, “Please—”

“What do you think, Annie?” Ned said. “What should I do? You tell me.”

“Please.” I was too numb with terror to even move my lips. In the distance I heard the scream of sirens racing down the road. Too late, I thought. Too late.

“All right, Annie. We'll do it your way.”

I heard the crack of the rifle and everything went black.

*   *   *

I kind of remember a cop saying, “She's in shock,” and seeing Ned's body lying on Annie's grave. Then I guess I passed out again.

*   *   *

When I woke up, I was in a hospital. I had not been shot. I knew I was alive, that Annie had told Ned not to kill me.

I guess I was heavily sedated, because I fell asleep again. When I woke up, I heard someone say, “She's in here, Doctor.” Two seconds later I was wrapped in Casey's arms, and that was when I knew I was safe at last.

W
hen confronted with the admissions Lynn had made to me before she died, Charles Wallingford rushed to cooperate with the investigators. He admitted that he had stolen all the money that was missing, except for what Nick had borrowed against his own stock. The theft was to be his payoff for cooperating in the scheme to send Gen-stone into bankruptcy. Charles's most stunning statement was that Adrian Garner, the billionaire head of Garner Pharmaceuticals, had masterminded the entire plan and directed every step of what had happened.

It was Garner who had recommended Dr. Kendall as Dr. Celtavini's assistant and sent her there deliberately to sabotage the experiments.

Garner was also Lynn's lover and the man Ned Cooper saw in the driveway the night he set the fire. After the mansion burned, Lynn dismissed the housekeepers
in order to continue seeing Garner without being observed.

When Garner learned that the cancer vaccine did indeed work, he was not satisfied just to distribute it—he wanted to
own
it as well. When the vaccine seemed to be a failure and Gen-stone went bankrupt, he planned to pick up the patent on the vaccine for a comparative pittance. Then Garner Pharmaceuticals would own a vaccine that did in fact show great promise, and would in all likelihood prove to be very lucrative.

The mistake had been to have Lowell Drexel pick up Dr. Spencer's records personally. Vivian Powers's phone had been tapped. When she left a message for me saying that she knew who had taken the records, she was kidnapped and drugged to keep her from connecting the now gray-haired Drexel to the man Dr. Broderick had described as coming to his office.

Garner gave Lynn the tablet she put in the iced tea Nick drank in the airport coffee shop. It was a new drug, one that did not take effect for a few hours, and when it did, would knock the victim out without warning. Nick Spencer never had a chance.

Since then, Garner has been indicted for murder. Another major pharmaceutical company stepped in and worked out a deal to absorb Gen-stone in a stock exchange. The investors who initially thought they were defrauded now have stock that is worth most of what they invested, but it will be worth a great deal more someday if the vaccine continues to succeed without serious complications.

As I suspected, Dr. Kendall's niece was the one who passed the letter from Caroline Summers about her daughter having been cured of multiple sclerosis. When it reached Adrian Garner's desk, he told Drexel to get Dr. Spencer's records from Dr. Broderick. Now the new pharmaceutical company is bringing in top microbiologists from all over the world to study those records and to try to discover what combination of drugs may have produced that astonishing cure.

It is still hard for me to believe that Lynn not only helped to kill her husband, but also would have allowed Lowell Drexel to kill me that terrible day in the guest house. Lynn's father has had to endure not only her death, but also the heartbreak and humiliation of the media stories. My mother has done her best to help him, but it has not been easy. As she sympathizes with him, she has to struggle with her own awareness of what Lynn would have done to me to keep me from telling the true story.