Kate White - Hush

“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.

“DO YOU KNOW her?” Alexis asked. She was studying Lake intensely and had seen the flicker of discomposure.

“No-of course not. I’m just trying to absorb everything.”

“So what are you going to do to help me?”

“What?” Lake asked distractedly. She could barely concentrate. In her mind she kept seeing the slip of paper in the bowl. Why did Keaton have Melanie Turnbull’s name? Had he stumbled onto something suspicious about her pregnancy? Maybe this was the reason he’d decided not to join the clinic. And maybe this was the reason he’d been murdered.

“You wanted the truth and I told you,” Alexis said fiercely. “Are-?”

“Let me ask you one more question,” Lake said, trying to find her footing again. “The day you spoke to Sherman-you didn’t talk to another doctor there, did you? Mark Keaton?”

“No,” Alexis said, annoyed, it seemed, at having been driven off topic. “I’ve never even heard of him. So are you going to be able to get into the lab or not?”

“I definitely want to help, but what would getting into the lab do? I’m not sure what I’d be able to discover.”

“You could see what the people there are up to,” Alexis said. “You might overhear something important.”

“I seriously doubt they’d say anything incriminating in front of me, even if I did manage to spend any time in there. But look, I do have access to the charts-I actually looked at yours before. Now that I know about the Turnbulls, I can see if there’s anything in their chart linking the two of you.”

“Like what?”

“Well, they must have made some kind of notation in Melanie’s file indicating who they got the embryos from. With both files in front of me, I may be able to spot it.”

Alexis eyed her skeptically. “Maybe,” she said. She glanced away, thinking.

“There’s something you should be aware of,” Lake said. “Your chart indicated that you had only two embryos left. You told me there was a good amount.”