Hush

19

SHE’D BOUGHT CATNIP once for Smokey ages ago-but she certainly hadn’t stuffed it in her purse. No, someone else had placed the bag there. It was obviously supposed to remind her of Smokey and what had been done to him. Was it a message? I was in your backyard. This time I got even closer to you.

A word shot like a bullet through her mind: Jack. She’d left her purse with him when she had to dash back up to the apartment because Jack had told her the wrong books on the phone. His whole visit may have been a ruse just so that he could slip the catnip in her purse. If that was true, it meant he’d also shaved Smokey.

Maybe Jack was trying to unhinge her, to make it appear that she was an unfit mother. But was Jack really capable of such sick behavior?

Another thought barged through her brain: If Jack was her stalker, then there was no reason to believe that Keaton’s killer was watching her after all. In fact, Keaton’s death might have no relation to the clinic at all. All the stuff she’d been doing to save herself-going through files, talking to patients-may have been pointless, and the real threat was the man she used to love.

But, she realized with a start, her purse had also been out of her sight at the clinic. She’d left it on the conference room table while she’d searched for the files. Anyone at the clinic could have dropped in the little sack of catnip. Which would mean that the killer did work at the clinic, knew of Lake’s involvement with Keaton, and was sending her another warning. But a warning to do what? she wondered. To shut up or else?

Lake searched in her purse for a tissue and wiped the perspiration from her face. There was something else to consider: She’d left her purse in the living room at Steve and Hilary’s when she’d gone to the kitchen to see Matthew, and Hilary had scurried off alone for a minute or two when Lake was in the playroom. What if Hilary had been having an affair with Keaton? Lake remembered how flirtatious Hilary had been with him at the restaurant. And then there was the fight in the car Steve had alluded to. Perhaps Hilary had gone to Keaton’s apartment later and discovered he’d been in bed with another woman that night. In a rage she’d killed him. Now Hilary suspected Lake was the other woman but wasn’t sure and was trying to flush her out.

And yet that idea seemed as farfetched as Jack hurting Smokey.

“Is this it?” a voice said.

Startled, Lake looked up to see that the cabdriver was speaking to her through the Plexiglas divider. She hadn’t even realized that they had stopped in front of her building.

After climbing out of the cab, she glanced furtively up and down the street. The block was empty except for a woman pushing a stroller. As soon as Lake was in her apartment, she dropped the catnip into a plastic bag and shoved it in the back of a kitchen drawer. She couldn’t stand the sight of it, but she knew it wouldn’t be smart to throw it away.

As she slammed the drawer shut, her eye caught the calendar on the door of the fridge. The kids were due back in the apartment in just a few weeks. She couldn’t imagine how she could allow them to live here with the killer possibly closing in on her and the police breathing down her neck. Perhaps she could ask Jack to keep them longer in the Hamptons than planned. She could say she was swamped with a project and needed to work on it 24/7. But if Jack was the stalker, wasn’t this exactly what he was trying to do: create the impression of a mommy who was coming unglued?

I have to get a grip, she told herself as she stripped off her top. It was essential to keep her wits about her so she could watch her back at all times. That also held true with the police. She needed to keep a cool head if they showed up sweating at her door again. And if Jack was behind all the cat madness, she had to outsmart him, too. It all seemed overwhelming, but she had to do everything she could to save herself. If she didn’t, she would lose Will and Amy-and perhaps much more.

She showered and then forced herself to microwave and eat another frozen mac and cheese. After stabbing at the dregs of it in the plastic container, she paced the hall of the apartment. The one sure way to save herself, it still seemed, was to figure out what was going on at the clinic. The discrepancy about Sydney Kastner’s embryos bugged her. It could very well point to attempts by the clinic to jack up profits. And she couldn’t ignore the odd Keaton connection. He’d consulted on Sydney’s case and encouraged her to do what was right for her. Perhaps right before the celebratory dinner, Keaton had figured it all out and confronted Levin.

But how do I figure it out? Lake wondered. She thought again of the odd letters on Sydney’s information sheet. Even if she summoned the nerve to look through files again, she didn’t know what she was really looking for. Her thoughts rushed back to Alexis. There was clearly something she hadn’t told Lake, something she’d been close to revealing. It seemed Lake’s only hope was to convince Alexis to share what she knew. Lake glanced at her watch. It was almost ten. She would phone Alexis in the morning. And she would try to learn what she’d meant by cherchez la femme.

She slept with the table once again propped against the door. All through the night, Smokey paced up and down the bed as if he sensed how tense she was. The last time she remembered looking at her clock it read 2:27.

The late summer sun nudged her awake just after six. For a moment she luxuriated in the soft feel of it on her face until, with a jolt, she remembered everything. She sat up against the headboard and ran her hands through her hair. She didn’t want to wake Alexis-she sensed she’d have the phone slammed down in her ear if she did-but she didn’t want to miss her if she went to work someplace. She decided to call just before eight. Until then she would rehearse her presentation.

After dressing and making coffee, she opened her laptop. Client presentations were the part of her work she’d always liked the least, and in the early years she had positively dreaded them. She’d felt so exposed, at times even wondering if the shadow of her birthmark was actually darkening and pulsing as she spoke. But she had worked with a speech coach and learned to feel more at ease.

As she went through her presentation out loud, she seemed to stumble over every other word. It would be even worse at the clinic, she knew. Levin had been so cool to her the other day, and Brie may have since gone running to him about finding Lake poking through the files-hardly the makings of a receptive audience. To say nothing of the fact that the killer might very well be one of the people sitting at the conference table during the presentation. She couldn’t imagine how she’d ever manage to appear confident and professional.

At twenty of eight, unable to wait any longer, she phoned Alexis. The same blunt, unhappy voice said hello. A male voice-from the TV or radio-yammered in the background.

“Alexis, this is Lake Warren. I came by to see you-”

“I remember.”

“Of course. I-”

“What do you want?”

“You said the other night that you were reluctant to share more with me because you weren’t sure of my agenda. It’s true that I wasn’t very clear. You see, I’m actually working at the clinic-as a consultant. I was afraid to tell you that because I was going behind their back.”

“And your point is? I’m not sure why you’re confessing this now.”

“Because I want the chance to speak to you again,” Lake said. “I’m really concerned that something wrong might be going on there. If you tell me what to look for, I may be able to find evidence.”

There was a very long pause. If Lake hadn’t still heard the background voices, she might have thought Alexis had disconnected the call.

“You actually work there. At the Advanced Fertility Center?” Alexis said finally.

“Yes. I’m sorry I was reluctant to tell you before.”

“All right. I’ll speak to you again. When?”

“As soon as possible. I’m finishing up my work there, so if I’m going to try to get any proof, I have to act immediately.”

“All right-come now, then.”

Lake was in a cab in ten minutes. The whole way to the East Side, she warned herself to handle Alexis delicately, to resist pouncing. She couldn’t come away empty-handed this time.

Alexis was wearing another wrap dress, this one in pinks and browns. Her apartment looked exactly the way it had two days before, like unchanging scenery for a play.

“So you work at the clinic,” Alexis said coldly as they took the same seats in the living room they had on Tuesday. “What an interesting detail to have left out of our previous conversation.”

“I’m sorry. Like I said, I was afraid of making trouble…until I knew it might be justified.”

“Is business booming these days?” Alexis asked sarcastically. “I read the other day that the average age of marriage is increasing for women. That kind of news must make Levin and Sherman positively gleeful.”

“I know they want to build their business-that’s why they hired me. I’m a marketing consultant.”

“Marketing? So you’re not in the lab or anything like that? Do you have any medical expertise at all?”

“No. I’ve had other clients in the health-care field, but-”

“Damn.” Alexis shook her head hard to the left, as if she were flicking water from her hair. “I need someone in the lab.”

“Why?” Lake asked, surprised. “Is that where you think the problem is?”

“Look, I really don’t see how you can help me,” Alexis snapped.

Lake could feel her own anxiety starting to balloon. She couldn’t walk out of there without the truth.

“Please let me try,” she urged. “You can tell me exactly what to look for. If there’s something less than kosher going on, I want to help you expose it.”

“Less than kosher?” Alexis said. The testy tone was back, like a tiger that had suddenly slunk out of the bush. “Excuse my eyes from bulging out of my head, but considering what they did to me, that has to be the understatement of the year.”

“What do you mean?” Lake asked. “What did they do?”

“They stole my baby.”

Lake played the words back in her mind, trying to decipher them.

“Your baby?” she said. “But I thought you weren’t able to conceive?”

“I did conceive-in a petri dish. And when I was denied future access to my embryos, they gave them to someone else.”

Involuntarily Lake’s hand flew to her mouth.

“My God,” she said. “How-how did you find out?”

“I saw the baby with my own eyes.”

“At the clinic?” Lake asked.

“No. At a store on Madison Avenue. I’d been running errands and had gone into this little gourmet food store to grab a sandwich. They have a few tables in the back there where you can eat lunch. And then this woman-Melanie’s her name-came in with a toddler in a stroller. And the baby was the spitting image of Charlotte.”

Okay, Lake thought, so this is the nut-job part that Archer had mentioned.

Alexis smiled wickedly with her tiny pink lips.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” she said.

“No, it’s not that,” Lake said. “I’m just digesting what you said.”

At that, Alexis shot up and for a brief second Lake wondered if she was going to walk over to the couch and slap her. But she hurried out of the room, leaving Lake alone. When she returned a moment later, she was carrying a small piece of paper in her incongruously slim fingers. On her way back across the room, she picked up the silver-framed photograph of Charlotte.

“Here,” she said, thrusting both things toward Lake. Lake saw that the piece of paper was actually a slightly blurry photo of a toddler in a stroller, perhaps taken with a cell phone. The two toddlers looked almost identical.

“Are they…twins?” Lake asked, her voice catching.

“Interesting thought, isn’t it?” Alexis said, smirking. “But, no, you can’t produce identical twins with an IVF procedure. Brian and I look alike, though, and a sibling of Charlotte’s would look very much like her. Think of those Olson twins. They’re fraternal twins and yet people can barely tell them apart.”

“You took this photo of the child?”

“Yes. When I saw the baby, I changed tables to get closer and took some pictures when the woman was busy blabbing to someone on her cell phone.”

“Did you say something to her about it?”

“Good God, no,” Alexis said. “I may be crazed but I’m not stupid. If this woman had known what I’d just put together, she would have left skid marks on her way out the door.”

“How did you figure out her name, then?”

“She used a credit card to pay. After she left, I asked one of the clerks for her name-I said I thought I might have known her in college and wanted to double-check. I’m a regular there and the clerk didn’t think anything of it. I’m not sure what this woman was doing on the Upper East Side that day. She lives in Brooklyn. In that area they call Dumbo.”

She’d said the word disdainfully, as if it was synonymous with dung heap. But it was a hip, trendy part of Brooklyn-Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass-that Lake had visited several times with friends.

“How…?”

“How do I know where she lives?” Alexis asked, her voice edgy again. “She and her husband are listed… Oh wait, how do I know she’d been a patient at the Advanced Fertility Center? That was as easy to find out as her address. I called the girl at the front desk, pretending to be Melanie, saying I needed to review some of my dates for insurance reasons. She’d had two rounds of IVF, starting two months after I’d been told Brian wouldn’t release my embryos to me. I didn’t want the embryos destroyed, in case Brian changed his mind. But they knew I’d never be back. So they gave them to her.”

Lake let out a long breath. The story was horrific-and almost too crazy to believe.

“But why would Sherman have to resort to this?” Lake asked. “If this woman couldn’t conceive with her own eggs, why not use eggs from an actual donor? The clinic has even started its own donor program.”

“She probably didn’t want a donor,” Alexis said. “She looked like she was in her early forties and she was probably hoping she could still have her own child. And I’m sure Sherman encouraged her just like he did me. He and Levin like to tell women, ‘You will get pregnant,’ as if they’re the Baby Makers. When Sherman found her eggs were useless, he was stuck. So he just used my embryos-without ever telling her.”

Over the past few weeks Lake had read enough about in vitro fertilization to understand the challenges faced by patients over forty. As part of IVF, a woman underwent hormone therapy to encourage the ovaries to release multiple eggs. Those eggs were then collected and placed in a petri dish with sperm from the woman’s partner-or, for an additional fee, even injected with sperm to facilitate fertilization. But if the woman was close to forty, or older, like Melanie, the chances for successful fertilization were slim. By that point in a woman’s life, her eggs had not only declined rapidly in number but also in quality-in fact, by the time a woman was forty-three, only about ten percent of her eggs were viable. The older the woman, the poorer the chances of harvesting enough viable eggs to fertilize and transfer back to her body. That’s why some clinics didn’t even take women over forty.

“And you never signed any kind of permission allowing them to share your eggs?”

“Never.”

“Have you confronted Sherman about this?” Lake asked.

“Of course. I called him after I’d figured out Melanie was a patient. He was totally patronizing. He told me I should talk to a psychologist who specializes in-quote-‘women like you.’”

“Did he suggest you talk to Harry Kline?”

“The psychologist they have on staff? No. I guess they only use him for the women they feel haven’t gone completely off the deep end yet and they can still milk for procedures.”

“Is there any way of getting a DNA test?”

“Not that I’ve found so far. Believe it or not, in these cases, the law protects the custodial parent-which is despicable. That’s my baby and she’s supposed to be with me.”

Lake glanced down at the photos again. It was uncanny how alike the two little girls looked. If Alexis was right and the clinic had done this to improve Melanie’s chances of conceiving, it likely wasn’t the first time-or the last.

“Do you think this woman, Melanie, has any suspicions that the child may not be hers?”

“I doubt it,” Alexis said. “If you’ve been desperate for a baby, you don’t allow yourself to question these things. And whether it was intentional or not, Sherman did a brilliant job of matching the coloring. This Melanie woman has light coloring like mine. And her husband’s probably fair as well. His name is Turnbull, a snooty English name.”

Lake felt her skin turn cold. Melanie Turnbull. She’d heard that name before-and recently.

And then she remembered. It was the name written on the scrap of paper she’d seen in the black bowl in Keaton’s loft.