The Second Time Around: A Novel

Chapter One

The stockholders' meeting, or maybe the stockholders' uprising is a better way to describe the event, took place on April 21 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan. It was an unseasonably cold and wintry day, but suitably bleak considering the circumstances. The headline two weeks earlier that Nicholas Spencer, president and chief operating officer of Gen-stone had been killed in the crash of his private plane while flying to San Juan had been greeted with genuine and heartfelt grief. His company expected to receive the blessing of the Food and Drug Administration for a vaccine that would both eliminate the possibility of the growth of cancer cells and bring to a halt the progression of the disease in those already afflicted -- a preventive and a cure that he alone was responsible for bringing to the world. He named the company "Gen-stone," a reference to the Rosetta stone that had unveiled the language of ancient Egypt and allowed the appreciation of its remarkable culture.

The headline proclaiming Spencer's disappearance was followed in short order by the announcement from the chairman of the board of Gen-stone that there had been numerous setbacks in the experiments with the vaccine and that it could not be submitted to the FDA for approval in the foreseeable future. The announcement further said that tens of millions of dollars had been looted from the company, apparently by Nicholas Spencer.

I'm Marcia DeCarlo, better known as Carley, and even as I sat in the roped-off media section at the stockholders' meeting, observing the furious or stunned or tearful faces around me, I still had a sense of disbelief in what I was hearing. Apparently Nicholas Spencer, Nick, was a thief and a fraud. The miracle vaccine was nothing more than the offspring of his greedy imagination and consummate salesmanship. He had cheated all these people who had invested so much money in his company, often their life savings or total assets. Of course they hoped to make money, but many believed as well that their investment would help make the vaccine a reality. And not only had investors been hurt, but the theft had made worthless the retirement funds of Gen-stone's employees, over a thousand people. It simply didn't seem possible.

Since Nicholas Spencer's body had not washed ashore along with charred pieces of his doomed plane, half the people in the auditorium didn't believe he was dead. The other half would willingly have driven a stake through his heart if his remains had been discovered.

Charles Wallingford, the chairman of the board of Gen-stone, ashen-faced but with the natural elegance that is achieved by generations of breeding and privilege, struggled to bring the meeting to order. Other members of the board, their expressions somber, sat on the dais with him. To a man they were prominent figures in business and society. In the second row were people I recognized as executives from Gen-stone's accounting firm. Some of them had been interviewed from time to time in Weekly Browser, the syndicated Sunday supplement for which I write a financial column.

Sitting to the right of Wallingford, her face alabaster pale, her blond hair twisted into a French knot, and dressed in a black suit that I'm sure cost a fortune, was Lynn Hamilton Spencer. She is Nick's wife -- or widow -- and, coincidentally my stepsister whom I've met exactly three times and whom I confess I dislike. Let me explain. Two years ago my widowed mother married Lynn's widowed father, having met him in Boca Raton where they lived in neighboring condominiums.