“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.
TWENTY-ONE
“Last 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.
The house where Manuel and Rosa Gomez lived was a quaint limestone cottage with a sloping tile roof. A screen of evergreens shielded the cottage from the view of the mansion, giving privacy to both places. It was easy to see why the housekeepers had not been aware of Lynn’s return last week. Late at night she could have punched in the code to unlock the gate and driven into the garage without their knowledge. It did seem odd to me that there were no security cameras on the premises, but I knew the house had been alarmed.
I parked, went up to the porch, and rang the bell. Manuel Gomez answered the door and invited me in. He was a wiry man, about five feet eight inches in height, with dark hair and a lean, intelligent face. I stepped into the vestibule and thanked him for seeing me without notice.
“You almost missed us, Miss DeCarlo,” he said stiffly. “As your sister requested, we will be gone by one o’clock. We have already removed our personal belongings. My wife has purchased the groceries Mrs. Spencer ordered and is presently checking upstairs one last time. Would you care to inspect the house now?”
“You’re leaving! But why?” I think he realized that my astonishment was genuine.
“Mrs. Spencer says she has no need of full-time help, and she intends to use this cottage for herself until she decides whether or not to rebuild.”
“But the fire was only a week ago,” I protested. “Do you have a new situation to go to so quickly?”
“No, we do not. We will take a short vacation in Puerto Rico and visit with our relatives. Then we will stay with our daughter until we find another position.”
I could understand that Lynn might want to be able to stay in Bedford—I was sure she must have friends here—but to put these people out with so little notice seemed almost inhumane to me.
He realized I was still standing in the vestibule. “I am sorry, Miss DeCarlo,” he said. “Please come into the living room.”
As I followed him, I quickly glanced around. There was a rather steep staircase leading to the upstairs from the foyer. To the left there was what seemed to be a study with bookcases and a television set. The living room was a generous size, with creamy rough plaster walls, a fireplace, and leaded pane windows. It was comfortably furnished with a tapestry-patterned fabric covering the roomy couch and chairs. The ambience was that of an English country home.
It was spotlessly clean, and there were fresh flowers in a bowl on the coffee table.
“Please sit down,” Gomez said. He remained standing.
“Mr. Gomez, how long have you worked here?” I asked.
“Since Mr. and Mrs. Spencer—I mean the first Mrs. Spencer—were married twelve years ago.”
Twelve years, and less than a week’s notice! Good God, I thought. I was dying to ask how much severance pay Lynn had given them, but I didn’t have the nerve—at least not yet.
“Mr. Gomez,” I said, “I haven’t come here to inspect the house. I came because I wanted to talk to you and your wife. I’m a journalist, and I’m helping to write a story for my magazine, Wall Street Weekly, about Nicholas Spencer. Mrs. Spencer is aware I’m doing the story. I know people are saying some pretty vicious things about Nicholas, but I intend to be scrupulously fair. May I ask some questions of you about him?”
“Let me get my wife,” he said quietly. “She is upstairs.”
While I waited, I took a quick look through the archway at the back of the room. It led to a dining area, and beyond that was the kitchen. I wondered if this originally was intended to
be a guest house rather than housing for employees. It had an expensive feel to it.
I heard footsteps on the stairs and settled back in the seat where Gomez had left me. Then I got up to meet Rosa Gomez, a pretty, slightly plump woman whose swollen eyes were a dead giveaway that she had been crying.
“Let’s all sit down,” I suggested, and immediately felt like a fool. After all, this had been their home.
It wasn’t hard to get them talking about Nicholas and Janet Spencer. “They were so happy together,” Rosa Gomez said, her face lighting as she spoke. “And when Jack was born, you would think he was the only child in the world. It is so impossible to think that both his parents are gone. They were such wonderful people.”
The tears that were glistening in her eyes began to overflow. Impatiently she brushed them away with the back of her hand.
They told me that the Spencers had bought the house a few months after they were married, and they had been hired shortly after. “We lived in the house at that time,” Rosa said. “There was a very nice apartment on the other side of the kitchen. But when Mr. Spencer remarried, your sister—”
“Stepsister,” I wanted to shout. Instead I said, “I must interrupt you, Mrs. Gomez, and explain that Mrs. Spencer’s father and my mother were married two years ago in Florida. We are technically stepsisters, but we are not close. I’m here as a journalist, not as a relative.”
So much for being Lynn’s advocate, but I needed to hear the truth from these people, not polite, carefully phrased answers.
Manuel Gomez looked at his wife, then at me. “Mrs. Lynn Spencer did not want us living in the house. She preferred, as many people do, that the help have separate quarters. She suggested to Mr. Spencer that there were five guest bedrooms in the house, and they were more than sufficient for any guests they might wish to accommodate. He was quite agreeable to the idea of our moving into the cottage, and we were delighted to have this wonderful home to ourselves. Jack, of course, was living with his grandparents.”
“Did Nicholas Spencer stay close to his son?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” Manuel said promptly. “But he did travel a great deal and did not want to leave Jack with a nanny.”
“And after his father’s second marriage, Jack did not want to live with Mrs. Lynn Spencer,” Rosa said firmly. “He told me once that he didn’t think she liked him.”
“He told you that!”
“Yes, he did. Don’t forget we were here when he was born. He was comfortable with us. To him, we were family. But he and his dad . . .” She smiled reminiscently and shook her head. “They were pals. This is such a tragedy for that little boy. First his mother, then his father. I have spoken to Jack’s grandmother. She tells me that he is sure his father is alive.”
“What makes him think that?” I asked quickly.
“Mr. Nicholas did some stunt flying when he was in college. Jack clings to the hope that somehow he was able to escape from the plane before it crashed.”
From the mouths of babes? I wondered. I listened while Manuel and Rosa vied with each other to tell anecdotes about the early years they had spent with Nick and Janet and Jack, and then I moved on to the questions I needed to ask. “Rosa, Manuel, I received an e-mail from someone who claimed that a man had left the mansion only a minute before it caught fire. Do either of you know anything about that?”
They both looked startled. “We don’t have e-mail, and if we had seen someone leave the mansion before the fire, we would have told the police,” Manuel said emphatically. “Do you think the person who started the fire sent it?”
“It could be,” I said. “There are sick people who do that sort of thing all the time. Why it would have been sent to me instead of the police, though, I don’t know.”
“I feel guilty that we did not think to check the garage for Mrs. Spencer’s car,” Manuel said. “She doesn’t usually come home so very late, but it does happen.”
“How often did they use the house?” I asked. “I mean, every weekend, during the week, or infrequently?”
“The first Mrs. Spencer loved the house. At that time they came up every weekend, and before Jack was in school, she would often stay for a week or two if Mr. Spencer was traveling. Mrs. Lynn Spencer wanted to sell this house and their apartment. She told Mr. Spencer that she wanted to start out fresh and not live with another’s woman’s taste. They used to argue about that.”
“Rosa, I don’t think you should discuss Mrs. Spencer,” Manuel warned.
She shrugged. “I am saying what is true. This house did not satisfy her. Mr. Spencer asked her to wait until the vaccine was approved before becoming involved with a building project. I understand in the last months there were problems with the vaccine, and he was terribly worried. He traveled a lot. When he was home, he would often go up to Greenwich and be with Jack.”
“I know Jack lives with his grandparents, but when Mr. Spencer was home, did Jack stay here on weekends?”
Rosa shrugged. “Not so much. Jack was always very quiet around Mrs. Spencer. She is not one who naturally understands children. Jack was five when his mother died. Mrs. Lynn Spencer looks somewhat like her, but, of course, she isn’t her. That makes it harder, and I think it upset him.”
“Would you say that Lynn and Mr. Spencer were very close?” I knew I was pushing the envelope with my questions, but I had to get a handle on their relationship.
“When they were first married four years ago, I would say yes,” Rosa said slowly, “at least for a little while. But unless I am wrong, that feeling did not last. Frequently she would come up with her guests, and he would be away or in Greenwich with Jack.”
“You said that Mrs. Spencer didn’t make it a habit to come up here late at night, but that it did happen occasionally. Did she usually call you first?”
“Sometimes she would phone ahead and say she wanted to have a snack or cold supper waiting for her. Other times we would get a call from the mansion in the morning to say that she was here and she would say what time she wanted breakfast. Otherwise we would always go over at nine o’clock and begin to work. It was a big house and needed to be kept up constantly, whether or not it was being occupied.”
I knew it was time to go. I could sense that Manuel and Rosa Gomez did not want to prolong the painful moment of leaving this house. And yet I felt that I hadn’t scratched the surface of the lives of the people who had lived here.
“I was surprised to see that there are no security cameras on the property,” I said.
“The Spencers always had a Labrador, and he was a good watchdog. But he went with Jack to Greenwich, and Mrs. Lynn Spencer did not want another dog,” Manuel told me. “She said she was allergic to animals.”
That doesn’t make sense, I thought. In the Boca Raton apartment, her father has pictures of her growing up with dogs and horses.
“Where was the dog kept?” I asked.
“It was outside at night unless the weather was very cold.”
“Would it bark at an intruder?”
They both smiled. “Oh, yes,” Manuel said. “Mrs. Spencer said besides her allergies, Shep was too noisy.”
Too noisy because he announced her nocturnal arrivals or because he alerted everyone to the nocturnal arrivals of other visitors? I wondered.
I stood up. “You’ve been very kind to give me this time now. I only wish that everything had worked out better for everyone.”
“I pray,” Rosa told me. “I pray that Jack is right and that Mr. Spencer is still alive. I pray that his vaccine will work in the end and that the trouble about the money will go away.” Tears welled in her eyes again and began to flow down her cheeks. “And then I ask for a miracle. Jack’s mother can’t come back, but I pray that Mr. Spencer and that beautiful girl who works with him will get together.”
“Rosa, be quiet,” Manuel commanded.
“No, I won’t,” she said defiantly. “What harm can it do to say it now?” She looked at me. “Just a few days before his plan
e crashed, Mr. Spencer came home one afternoon from work to pick up a briefcase he’d forgotten. The girl was with him. Her name is Vivian Powers. It was so clear that they were in love, and I was so glad for him. So much has gone wrong in his life. Mrs. Lynn Spencer is not a kind person. If Mr. Spencer is dead, I’m glad that at the end he knew someone loved him very much.”
I gave them my card and left, trying to absorb the ramifications of what I had just heard.
Vivian had quit her job, sold her home, and put her furniture in storage. She had talked about starting a new chapter in her life. But as I drove home, I would have bet dollars to doughnuts that that chapter wouldn’t open in Boston. And what about her account of the discarded letter from someone who claimed that Dr. Spencer had miraculously cured her daughter? Were the letter, the missing records, and the story about the jammed accelerator all part of an elaborate plot to create the illusion that Nick Spencer was the victim of a sinister plot?
I thought of the Post headline: WIFE SOBS, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO THINK.”
I could offer a new headline: STEPSISTER-IN-LAW DOESN’T KNOW WHAT TO THINK, EITHER.
TWENTY-TWO
The halls of the hospice wing of St. Ann’s Hospital were softly carpeted, and the reception area was comfortable, with a windowed wall that looked out over a pond. There was an air of serenity and peace about the place, totally unlike the hospital’s center building and the other wing where I’d visited Lynn.
The patients here arrived with the knowledge that they would not leave. They came to be relieved of their suffering, as much as was humanly possible, and to have a peaceful death surrounded by their loved ones and by dedicated people who would also be there to comfort those they were leaving behind.
The receptionist was surprised that I asked to see the director without an appointment, but she agreed, and there’s no question that mentioning Wall Street Weekly will open doors. I was promptly escorted to the office of Dr. Katherine Clintworth, an attractive woman in her early fifties who wore her sandy hair long and straight. Her eyes were her dominant feature—they were winter blue, the color of water on a sunny January day. She was dressed in a casual knit jacket and matching slacks.