The Second Time Around Read Free Page B

four days, Greg didn’t have to tell me that he was relieved. I could see it. It meant that he wouldn’t be saddled with a child who needed constant care.
    We didn’t really talk about it. There wasn’t much to say. He told me that the job he was offered in California was too good to pass up.
    I said, “Don’t let me keep you.”
    And that was that.
    All these thoughts did nothing but depress me further, so I went to bed early, determined to clear my head and make a fresh start the next day.
    I was awakened at seven in the morning by a phone call from Sam. “Carley, turn on the television. There’s a news bulletin. Lynn Spencer went up to her house in Bedford last night. Somebody torched it. The fire department managed to get her out, but she inhaled a lot of smoke. She’s in St. Ann’s Hospital in serious condition.”
    As Sam hung up, I grabbed the remote from the bedside table. The phone rang just as I clicked the TV on. Itwas the office of St. Ann’s Hospital. “Ms. DeCarlo, your stepsister, Lynn Spencer, is a patient here. She very much wants to see you. Will you be able to visit her today?” The woman’s voice became urgent. “She’s terribly upset and in quite a bit of pain. It’s very important to her that you come.”

T WO

    O n the forty-minute drive to St. Ann’s Hospital I kept tuned to the CBS station to catch anything new that was being said about the fire. According to the reports, Lynn Spencer had driven to her home in Bedford around eleven o’clock last night. The housekeepers, a couple, Manuel and Rosa Gomez, live in a separate residence on the estate. They apparently were not expecting her to be there that evening and were not aware that she was in the main house.
    What made Lynn decide to go to Bedford last night? I wondered as I decided to risk the Cross Bronx Expressway, the fastest way to get from the east side of Manhattan to Westchester County if there isn’t an accident to snarl traffic. The problem is there usually is an accident, causing the Cross Bronx to be called the worst roadway in the country.
    The Spencers’ New York apartment is on FifthAvenue, near the building in which Jackie Kennedy had lived. I thought of my nine hundred square feet of domain and the $25,000 I’d lost, the money that was to be a deposit on a co-op. I thought of the guy at the meeting yesterday whose child was dying and who was going to lose his home because he’d invested in Gen-stone. I wondered if Lynn felt a shred of guilt going back to that opulent apartment after the meeting. I wondered if she was planning to talk about that to me.
    April had returned to being April. When I walked the three blocks to the garage where I park my car, I sniffed the air and appreciated being alive. The sun was shining and the sky was intensely blue. The few clouds overhead were like puffs of white cushions, drifting around up there almost as an afterthought. That’s the way my interior designer friend, Eve, tells me she uses throw pillows when she decorates a room. The pillows should look casual, an afterthought when everything else is in place.
    The thermometer on the dashboard registered 62 degrees. It would be a terrific day for a drive to the country if the reason for the drive wasn’t the one I had. Still, I was curious. I was on my way to visit a stepsister who was virtually a stranger and who, for some unknown reason, had sent for me instead of one of her celebrity friends when she was rushed to the hospital.
    I actually got across the Cross Bronx in about fifteen minutes, a near record, and turned north toward the Hutchinson River Parkway. The newscaster began updating the story about Lynn. At 3:15 A.M . the fire alarmin the Bedford mansion had gone off. When the firefighters got there a few minutes later, the entire downstairs of the house was engulfed in flames. Rosa Gomez assured them there was no one inside.