Every Precious Thing

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

“Diana and Richard had it harder than me,” Sara said.

Diana shook her head. “That’s not true.”

“It is. We all had the same mother, but Diana and Richard had a different father than me. Didn’t really matter, though. Their dad, my dad, neither of them stuck around. Mom was…not picky, you know what I mean? There were different men all the time.”

“Until Jerry,” Diana said.

“Yeah,” Sara agreed.

When neither of them said anything more, Logan asked, “What happened?”

“Richard and I came home from school one day,” Diana said, picking up the story. “Sara was four at the time, and was sitting in the living room watching TV. That usually meant Mom was busy with one of her boyfriends in back, but when I went to my room, I noticed her door was open, and she was stretched across the bed. There was something odd on her pillow, so I tiptoed in to see it, thinking she was asleep.” Diana paused. “It was blood, and there was more on the sheets. Her face was bruised and swollen. Turned out Jerry beat her into a coma at some point during the day, then gave Sara a sandwich, put her in front of the TV, and left. They caught him a week later. Mom never came out of the coma. She lasted three months before she died, and six weeks after that Jerry went to prison.”

Sara said, “We were sent to live with our aunt and uncle in Iowa. Unfortunately, they weren’t particularly big fans of our mom. They tolerated us at best. Diana and Aunt Jill didn’t see eye to eye at all, so Diana left when she was a junior in high school. Richard and I both made it through our senior years before we got out.”

“I knew they weren’t going to help me out when I left,” Diana said, “but I thought they’d give Richard or at least Sara a hand. But no, once they were out of high school, it was out the door, have a good life. Which meant the only thing we had was the only thing we’d always had-each other.

“I was bartending before I could even legally drink. My bosses didn’t know that, but a job’s a job. When Richard moved out, I’d get him work bussing tables, sometimes security, that kind of thing. I did the same for Sara-waitress, hostess, whatever. It always killed me, though. Sara’s the smartest of us. She should have gone to college. Of the three of us, she’s the one who could make something of her life.”

“She’s giving me too much credit,” Sara said. “Diana’s the smart one. I always wanted to be like her.”

Diana reached out and squeezed her sister’s hand. “Shut up,” she said, smiling.

“It’s true.”

“Anyway,” Diana said. “I kept looking for ways for Sara to get a better life. I was constantly checking online for something that might get her on the right track. My dream was finding her a job that might even pay for her education at some point. Anything better than where she was would have been great, you know?”

Logan nodded, sympathizing with Diana’s desire to help her sister.

“Three years ago I spotted something that I thought would be perfect. It wasn’t a job, per se, but the money she could have gotten would have paid for college. The ad said accepted applicants could earn up to fifty thousand dollars and continue working at their current job. All Sara had to do was…”

“Get pregnant,” Logan said, already knowing the answer.

Diana nodded.

“I didn’t want to do it at first,” Sara told him. “A child growing in my body? How was I supposed to give that up? I was told the baby wouldn’t be related to me, that I’d just be a surrogate, but it just seemed wrong.”

“I talked her into applying anyway,” Diana jumped in. “I told her she could back out whenever she wanted, but to at least hear what they had to say, and find out how much she could make. I even took her to the interview.”

“From the moment we walked in,” Sara explained, “the nurses and the staff were so nice, so concerned about…me. Even when Dr. Paskota came in, she seemed-”

“Hold on,” Logan said. “Dr. Paskota?”

Sara looked at him. “It’s her, isn’t it? In the other car? The woman?”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes and looked like she was fighting off a wave of pain.

“Are you sure?” Diana asked him.

“It’s what the others called her. When I did, too, she didn’t correct me.”

“I knew it,” Sara said, her eyes still closed.

“Maybe…maybe this isn’t a good idea,” Diana said.

“No,” Sara said, looking at her sister now. “It was going to happen at some point.”

“We could still run.”

“But Emily…”

“We get her, then disappear. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.”

“I can’t keep running.”

For several seconds, there was only the sound of the tires on the road.

Sara turned back to Logan. “We ended up spending four hours at the clinic that first day. When we were done, the doctor had answered most of my concerns, and had actually made me feel good about the process. I mean, I was possibly going to help a couple who couldn’t have kids on their own become parents. That was actually pretty cool. While I was there, they ran a few tests, and told me they’d call me later to let me know how much I would be paid if I chose to sign up.”

“I assume they called,” Logan said.

She nodded. “That evening. They said I was in particularly good health, and that I fit a specific profile one of their clients had been looking for. The offer was for sixty-five thousand dollars. A month or two prep before the pregnancy, the pregnancy itself, and the birth. That was it. Sixty-five thousand dollars for maybe eleven months total, and I could still work.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” Diana said in a low voice, as if she were caught in the memory. “It was more than we could have hoped for. Sara could use that money to go to school and get a degree. She was going to do something better. Exactly what I’d wanted.”

“Something obviously wasn’t right, or we wouldn’t be here,” Logan said.

“Everything went fine until the fifth month,” Sara explained. “I was visiting Dr. Paskota. She told me an irregularity had popped up on one of the tests. Nothing to be worried about, but she wanted to do an amniocentesis as a precaution.”

Diana said, “Sara was worried about the baby, but I was worried about the money. She’d only get a small portion if something happened with the pregnancy. I don’t mean that to sound cold-blooded, but Sara was my concern.”

“It was several days before I got the call,” Sara said. “I was a wreck by then, worried that the baby was having problems I could do nothing about. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t mine. I cared about her. So much. The caller wasn’t Dr. Paskota, but a woman who said she was one of her nurses. She told me the doctor wanted her to call as soon as they got the results back. She said that everything was fine. I’ve never felt so relieved in my life. But then she told me something else. ‘I didn’t realize you were also the egg donor.’ I thought I misheard her so I asked her to repeat what she said. That’s when I found out that I wasn’t just a surrogate. I was the actual mother. When it became clear to her that I had no idea, she said, ‘That’s what I thought. We need to talk.’ I was confused and scared, but I agreed to meet a few hours later, and took Diana with me.”

“The woman told us to call her Brenda. When I said I didn’t remember seeing her at the doctor’s office, she said that was because she didn’t really work there. We almost left right then, thinking she was just some crazy person trying to scare us. But Brenda said enough for us to hear her out.” Sara paused. “She said she worked in the lab that handled the tests, and took it on herself to run a DNA match between the baby and myself. I was definitely the mother.”

“She didn’t just happen to work at that lab, though,” Diana clarified. “She said she’d purposefully gotten herself hired there.”

“Right.”

“Why would she do that?” Logan asked.

“Because they handled all of Dr. Paskota’s tests,” Diana said.

Sara nodded. “Brenda told us she had a cousin who’d been recruited by Dr. Paskota. After a while, Ruby-that’s what Brenda called her-began to get suspicious that something wasn’t right. She talked to Brenda, who was actually a lab tech at a hospital across town, and said she was going to start asking some questions she should have asked a long time ago. Two days later, her car was broadsided by a truck that had lost its brakes. Brenda didn’t like it, not at all, so she started digging.”

A baby mill, Logan thought. There were no barren families, at least not those who were looking for surrogates. The doctor was creating the product, and undoubtedly selling them to the highest bidder. Though he was sure that had to be it, he said, “So what did she find?”

Sara looked too distressed to continue, so Diana took up the story. “Dr. Paskota had set up a program that has one purpose-to insure the health of its clients.”

“Insure? Like insurance?” he asked.

Diana shook her head. “Not in the way you’re thinking of. Something a bit more tangible.”

How does selling babies insure health? “I’m not following.”

“It’s a long-term plan,” she said. “People. Genetically matched people.”

He stared at her, still not getting it.

“If you’re rich enough and still relatively young,” she said, “why not hedge your bets against the future? Thanks to Dr. Paskota, somewhere there’s a person, your offspring, just waiting in case you need…anything.”

Logan’s lips parted in horror. “I hope I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying.”

“I doubt it,” Sara said. “Heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, whatever-perfectly matched to you, just hanging around in case you ever needed them.”

He hadn’t misunderstood. It was…inhuman.

“Do you have proof?” he asked.

“The fact that they have your father isn’t proof enough?” Richard said.

Again, Sara put a hand on her brother to calm him down, then said, “That’s what Brenda had been collecting. We made plans to take what she had to the FBI. I was going to be the final piece of evidence, an actual person still in the process. Only she didn’t show up when she was supposed to, and on the news that night, there was a report about a woman who had been murdered while getting money from an ATM, a lab technician named Monique Pond. The picture they showed was Brenda’s. I immediately called Diana.”

“If Dr. Paskota knew about Brenda, she probably also knew that Sara had been talking to her,” Diana said. “Hell, I was concerned someone was waiting outside Sara’s apartment to mug her, too. I told her to pack only what she really needed, then sent Richard to pick her up. I was right. Someone was waiting. The doctor and one of her men.”

“They tried to grab me when I came down,” Sara said. “Dr. Paskota said I was going with them someplace where they could keep an eye on me until the baby was born. Whatever kindness I’d seen in her was gone.”

Her brother grinned. “They weren’t expecting me, though. Dislocated the guy’s shoulder and broke his leg. The doctor I only knocked to the ground so she’d get out of our way.”

Quite a family, Logan thought.

“We’ve been hiding Sara ever since,” Diana said.

“Hold on,” he said. “What if you’d never found out and had Emily there? Then what?”

“They would have paid me and I would have gone on my way,” Sara answered.

“And Emily? What would Dr. Paskota have done about her? She can’t just stick all these babies in a room until they’re needed.”

“She doesn’t have to. This isn’t the only thing Dr. Paskota does, though there’s no doubt it makes her a ton more money than anything else. See, the other thing she does is help match newborns with families wanting to adopt. It’s the perfect cover. When one of her special cases comes up, she can just add the baby to the mix, and carefully track them as they grow up. Once a special child reaches sixteen, he or she becomes viable. If the client associated with that child ever needs a kidney or, say, a heart, the child is simply snatched and…harvested. The doctor makes money on both ends-the clients who are buying the insurance in case they have a need someday, and the parents who think they’ve just adopted their dream child.”

“Has that happened?”

Sara shook her head. “From what Brenda could learn, Dr. Paskota had only been doing this special service for about twelve years, which means about fifteen now. Those first kids will soon become viable, and then it becomes a waiting game.”

“They may never be used, though. Not everyone’s going to need a transplant.”

“True, but remember, to the ones who’ve paid for these kids’ existence, the cost is minimal so it’s worth the risk. Most of the children will probably live full lives, but not all. No way was I going to risk Emily’s life like that.”

So horrifying, yet so simple. Logan wondered if there were others doing something similar.

“Why didn’t you go to the FBI on your own?”

“We didn’t have Brenda’s proof,” Diana said. “Why would they believe us? The three of us with our less-than-stellar family history versus the good Dr. Paskota? A woman who’s helped hundreds of deserving families get matched with ‘needy’ children? Not only would all the adoptive parents come to her defense, but her wealthy special clients wouldn’t want their involvement in her program exposed. They would do anything to help her keep things quiet. The FBI would never listen to us.”

“There’s another reason,” Sara said. “One of those clients is Emily’s father. What if he got custody of her? What would I do then?”

Though unsure what he would have done in similar circumstances, he understood their reasoning.

“Why did you marry Alan? Wasn’t that taking a chance?” he asked, wanting to fill in the holes so he could have the full picture.

“I didn’t set out to meet him, and I certainly didn’t mean to fall in love,” Sara said defensively. “After we started seeing each other, I can’t tell you how many times I almost disappeared. And when he asked me to marry him? Oh, God. I wanted to so bad, but how could I?”

“I’m the one who encouraged her to say yes,” Diana said. “I’m the one who came up with the plan that if something happened, she could leave Emily with him. That way she would be safe.”

“So what triggered you to run again?”

“I have people I talk to,” Diana said. “Friends who think I’m on the run from a bad relationship. They keep their eyes open and let me know if anyone’s asking around about me or Richard or Sara. About three months ago I started getting calls, and knew it wasn’t going to be long before they figured out my new last name and tracked me down. Once they did that, they’d try to use me to get to Sara. So I knew it was time for her to disappear.”

“But you didn’t,” Logan said. “You stayed in Braden.”

“I wanted to be sure. If they didn’t show up, then perhaps we were in the clear, and if they did, I’d just sneak away. I thought your friend the other night was one of them. Hell, I thought you were, too.” She paused. “Sorry about your friend. That was…a mistake.”

Logan looked at Richard for a second, then back at Diana. He’d already figured Richard was the one who’d attacked Pep.

“Don’t blame him,” she said. “I was the one in charge. It was my mistake.”

Logan glanced out the window. They were in the desert again, the vast brown landscape seeming to go on forever.

There was so much to think about, to process. He’d seen enough of the bad in the world to know that people like Dr. Paskota existed. He just didn’t want to believe it. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a choice.

“Now you know why we had to run,” Diana said, breaking the silence. “And why we’ll need to continue running once we have Emily. What other choice do we have?”

Logan couldn’t think of one.