The Second Time Around by Mary Higgins Clark Page A

believe Nick was gone. He was larger than life. You met him, and I think you sensed that. I believed in him. I thought of him as a man with a mission. He’d say things like, ‘Lynn, I’m going to beat the cancer cell, but that’s just the beginning. When I see kids who were born deaf or blind or retarded or with spina bifida, and know how close we are to preventingsuch birth defects, I go crazy that we’re not out there with this vaccine yet.’ “
    I had met Nicholas Spencer only once, but I had seen him interviewed on television any number of times. Consciously or unconsciously, Lynn had caught something of the tenor of his voice, of that forceful passion that had made such an impression on me.
    She shrugged. “Now I can only wonder if everything about my life with him was a lie. Did he seek me out and then marry me because I gave him access to people he might not have known otherwise?”
    â€œHow did you meet him?” I asked.
    â€œHe came to the public relations firm where I work, about seven years ago. We handle only top-drawer clients. He wanted to start getting publicity for his firm and get the word out about the vaccine they were developing. Then he started asking me out. I knew I resembled his first wife. I don’t know what it was. My own father lost his retirement money because he trusted Nick. If he deliberately cheated Dad as well as all those other people, the man I loved never even existed.”
    She hesitated, then went on. “Two members of the board came to see me yesterday. The more I learn, the more I believe that from beginning to end Nick was a fraud.”
    I decided it was necessary to tell her that I would be writing an in-depth article on him for Wall Street Weekly. “It will be a chips-fall-where-they-may article,” I said.
    â€œThe chips have already fallen.”
    The phone at the bedside rang. I picked it up and handed it to her. She listened, sighed, and said, “Yes, they can come up.” She handed the receiver back to me and said, “Two people from the police department in Bedford want to talk to me about the fire. Don’t let me keep you, Carley.”
    I would love to have sat in on that meeting, but I had been dismissed. I replaced the phone on the receiver, picked up my purse, and then thought of something. “Lynn, I’m going to Caspien tomorrow.”
    â€œCaspien?”
    â€œThe town where Nick was raised. Would you know anyone you’d suggest I see there? I mean, did Nick ever mention any close friends?”
    She considered my question for a moment, then shook her head. “None that I can recall.” Suddenly she looked past me and gasped. I turned to see what had startled her.
    There was a man standing in the doorway, one hand inside his jacket, the other in his pocket. He was balding and had a sallow complexion and sunken cheekbones. I wondered if he was ill. He stared at the two of us, then glanced down the corridor. “Sorry. I guess I’m on the wrong floor,” and with that murmured apology, he was gone.
    A moment later two uniformed police officers replaced him at the entrance to the room, and I left.

N INE

    O n the way home I heard on the radio that the police were questioning a suspect in the torching of the Bedford home of Nicholas Spencer, described, as always, as the missing or deceased chief executive of Gen-stone.
    To my dismay I heard that the suspect was the man who had the emotional outburst at the shareholders’ meeting on Monday afternoon at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan. He was thirty-six-year-old Marty Bikorsky, a resident of White Plains, New York, who worked at a gasoline station in Mount Kisco, the neighboring town to Bedford. He had been treated at St. Ann’s Hospital on Tuesday afternoon for a burn on his right hand.
    Bikorsky claimed that the night of the fire he had worked until eleven o’clock, met with some friends for a couple of beers,