Square in the Face (Claire Montrose Series) (10 page)

“Hi, this is Ginny. Leave me a message after the beep.” Even Ginny’s voice was tentative.

Claire took a breath, ready to ask the young woman to call her. She wanted to ask Ginny if she’d ever noticed any sign of an alarm during her visits to the Bradford Clinic. She still wasn’t sure which plan would be best at the clinic - the one Jimmy had suggested, or her original idea of using a pick kit. Although she had practiced for several hours each day, Claire hadn’t gotten to the point where she could open a door in five minutes, like Jimmy. Still, she was fairly certain that she could do it in fifteen.

Instead of a beep, a mechanized voice followed Ginny’s, saying, “This voice mail box is full and not accepting any new messages.” With that, there was an abrupt click and then the hum of a dial tone.

Lonely Ginny, seemingly friendless - how could she end up with a full voicemail box? She had told Claire that since dropping out of school the only people she regularly spoke to were the clinic’s staff. Claire felt a spurt of uneasiness.

Slowly, she put the phone down. She found Charlie in the kitchen and explained the situation to her. “I’m worried something’s wrong. She doesn’t seem to have any friends. How did she get a full voice-mail box unless she’s been gone for a while?”

“Is she near her time? Perhaps she has just gone to the clinic to have her babies.” With a wooden spoon, Charlie stirred the chopped onion she was slowly sautéing for Zwiebelkuchen. The onion-topped yeasted flat bread was Southern Germany’s answer to focaccia.

Claire shook her head. “She’s not due for another month. When I talked to her four days ago, she had an appointment at the clinic later in the day. What if she started asking questions about Lori’s daughter?”

Charlie wiped her hands on her white apron, then took it off and hung it on the back of a chair. “Let’s go, then.”

“Go?”

“I have watched you practice with those picks on every lock in this house all week. If that girl doesn’t answer the door, you can get us inside to see if she is okay.”

In the half-empty parking lot in front of Ginny’s building, they parked next to a Pizzicato Pizza delivery van with a vanity plate that read U8MYPY. They walked up the worn, rain-puddled stairs to Ginny’s apartment, which was on the second floor of the three-story building. Light leaked through the cheap yellow fiberglass curtains, but no one answered the door when Claire knocked. Thinking of the man who had recently been convicted of murder on the basis of a telltale ear print, Claire pressed her ear against the door, but heard nothing.

Ginny’s apartment complex was laid out like a budget motel, with the doors of two mirroring apartments grouped together, then a gap, then another pair of matching doors. There was no one in sight. Probably most of the tenants were in class, and the drizzling gray day offered nothing to entice those who weren’t. “I will keep watch,” Charlie whispered, so Claire slid the pick kit out of her pocket, knelt down, and began to work.

Compared to the locks at Claire’s own house, the lock on Ginny’s apartment door was so simple it could have been opened by someone with a butter knife and a little patience. Claire had just felt the last tumbler click home when Charlie hissed a warning. “Hier kommt jemand!”
Someone’s coming
. Charlie had taught her a few phrases in German, but Claire had already heard the footsteps coming down the staircase. Quickly, she turned the handle and nudged the door a fraction so that it was barely ajar.

“Jetzt!” Charlie hissed.
Now.

Looking up, Claire could see a pair of Nikes coming to the bottom of the stairs, ten feet from where she was. There was no time to get to her feet.
 
Suddenly, Charlie dropped to her knees next to her. She tilted her head as if she were looking for something. “There it is,” she said.

Claire stared at her blankly.

Charlie stabbed her finger near a tiny pebble that had worked its way loose from the concrete. “There is your contact.”

The footsteps had stopped. Claire looked up and into the eyes of a pizza delivery guy, a white guy with long blond fuzzy dreadlocks. In his hands was a square red insulated bag. His nose, eyebrow and lower lip were pierced with silver rings, but that wasn’t what bothered her. It was the way he was staring, or not at her, but past her, in the direction of the door that now sat slightly ajar in its frame. And then she saw what had attracted his attention. Not the door itself, but the pick kit, resting on the doorsill and flipped open so that all the tiny tools were visible.

Charlie had given Claire an idea. Making a show of it, Claire used her index finger to pick up the imaginary contact, and then popped it in her mouth. She got to her feet, blocking the pizza delivery guy’s view of the door. Then she opened her mouth and ran her right index finger across the tip of her tongue, at the same time pulling the red inside of her eyelid down with her left hand. In went the imaginary contact.

“Ooh!” She squealed. “It’s not in right.” Blinking and grimacing, she swept her finger against her open eye, mimicking other contact wearers she had occasionally watched with fascinated disgust.

The pizza guy grimaced. Averting his gaze, he started down the second flight of steps, a murmured “Gross!” trailing back over his shoulder.

As soon as he was out of sight, they stepped into the apartment. Claire scooped up the pick kit and quickly closed the door behind them. “Ginny?” Claire called out, already knowing there would be no answer. As she walked through the small apartment, Charlie’s gaze went from photograph to photograph, not realizing the Ginny in the pictures was different from the Ginny who lived in this place.

A half-eaten burrito sat on a paper plate in the middle of Ginny’s makeshift table. Bending closer, Claire smiled as she recognized the sweet spicy smell of Macheezmo Mouse’s famous boss sauce. Only then did she see that the chair had been overturned. A cold pulse of fear went through her.

“Come look at this,” Charlie called. In the bathroom, a pale gray towel lay on the yellow linoleum floor. The center was blotched with a dark brown stain. Claire pressed a finger against the matted loops. The blood was slightly tacky, nearly dry.
 

Without speaking, they opened the only other door. In the tiny bedroom, the narrow bed was neatly made. There was nothing in this room to help them unravel the mystery of what had happened in the rest of the apartment.

They went back out into the main room, and Claire pressed the blinking light on the black answering machine. “Ginny, honey, it’s Mom. It’s about three in the afternoon on Monday - could you call me tonight? I was hoping I could talk to you about your dad’s birthday this Sunday. I was hoping maybe you could take the Greyhound home and surprise him. I’ve got some tip money saved up, so I could pay you back. You don’t even need to bring a present. Just bring yourself, that would be all the present he would ever wish for. Anyway, give me a call and tell me if you can swing it.” After the beep, a mechanized voice gave the time and day. Ginny’s mother had called only a few hours after Claire’s visit.

The next five calls were also from Ginny’s mother, her voice increasingly plaintive and the time between calls increasingly shorter. “Ginny, please call me!” she pleased in the last call. “Are you all right, honey? It’s okay if you call me collect. Please call and let me know you’re” - and then the machine mercifully cut the call short.

“She’s got Caller ID,” Claire said as she looked down at the machine. “Maybe she saw it was her mother calling and decided not to answer.” Had Ginny stood and looked at the pictures of her old life as she listened to her mother’s voice and tried to formulate the lie she would use when she returned the call? “Do you think maybe she couldn’t figure out how to avoid going home and got freaked out enough to run away from her own life?”

Charlie shook her head. “Perhaps that could explain the chair being on its side, but not the blood. Maybe got a nosebleed while she was eating. She stood up fast so that it would not stain her clothes, then went in the bathroom and cleaned up with a towel.”

“I wish I knew what time she’d been eating. If this was her lunch, then it was before she went to the clinic, and this can’t have anything to do with my having come here, asking questions. If it was her dinner, then it was after.”

“Let us consider the possibilities,” Charlie said calmly. “These things could be signs of a struggle or a bloody nose. But they could also mean that she went into labor.”

“But she wasn’t due for another month,” Claire protested.

“Twins often come early.” Charlie gestured to the overturned chair. “Didn’t you tell me the father of this child was unpleasantly surprised by her announcement?”

Claire nodded. “Ginny said he wanted her to have an abortion. She said he seemed afraid that she would sue him for child support.”

“Then he would have a motive for being angry with her. Perhaps he came here and argued with her.”

“I don’t remember hearing a lock turn when she answered the door,” Claire said. “I don’t she was the kind of person to look her door. She still thought she was living out in the tulles, the kind of place where you keep your keys in the ignition.” She thought of something that made her feel better. “Even if she did go to the Bradford Clinic and start asking a bunch of questions, who would attack a pregnant woman over something that happened ten years ago? Besides, if they were going to have that strong a reaction, strong enough that they would want to harm her, wouldn’t they do it then and there?”

Charlie looked at Claire with faded blue eyes that had seen everything. “And draw suspicions to themselves? Better to wait until she got home.”

TYMZUP

“Name, please,” said the guy in the yellow-and-black striped booth that sat at the top of the long, twisty private road that led from Highway 26 to the Bradford Clinic’s parking lot.

Claire’s brain was still in shock, but her mouth took over. “Lucy Bertrand.” Damn! Damn! Damn! Why hadn’t Lori or Ginny mentioned that there was a guard at the entrance to the parking lot? Maybe there hadn’t been an attendant when Lori was pregnant years ago. Maybe Ginny hadn’t thought he was important enough to mention, although surely she would have brought him up if Claire had managed to see her again.

While her thoughts chased themselves, Claire gathered herself together enough to offer a smile. This guy seemed really more of a parking lot attendant than a security guard. He certainly didn’t look like a wannabe cop. Instead of a shiny white shirt and black polyester uniform, he wore a blue parka zipped to his neck. A dark wool cap pushed his long brown hair into his eyes, and his untrimmed beard and mustache covered most of what was left. Claire guessed the guy was about her own age - or at least the age she really was, not what it said on her new I.D. His little booth must get very cold, Claire thought, noticing he kept his free hand in his coat pocket.

 
“Bertrand’s a real pretty name,” he said and checked it off on a list. “Is it French?”

Claire thought it probably was, although she had picked the name out of the air when she had gotten her fake I.D. “Yeah, I guess. We’re Heinz 57.”
 
She broadened her smile and hoped it didn’t look forced. “How about you? Are you anything?”

He looked away. “Don’t really know what I am, either. Guess I should let you get into your appointment.”

“Don’t worry. I’m early. I was afraid I might get lost.” Maybe she was looking at the guy all wrong. It must get lonely, sitting out in the booth day after day. Maybe there was some way he could prove useful.
 
Sticking to the story she had memorized, Claire continued on with the lie she had begun when she gave him a name other than her own. “I just moved up here from California last term and I still don’t know my way around.” Inspiration struck. “I’ve been hoping maybe I’d met someone who could show me around, give me a little tour. Have you lived in Portland long?” She gave him a frankly inviting look, figuring that a woman who was daring or foolish enough to get herself knocked up in the age of AIDS might also try to hit on a parking lot attendant.

He stared at her for a long moment before understanding broke. “I was born here, so I guess I know my way around town pretty good.” He left the words lying there, and she could tell he wasn’t brave enough for the follow through.

Claire cocked her head flirtatiously and acted as though he had asked her what he only wished he had. “So you could show me around some time?”

His dark eyes widened, and Claire felt mean for the hope she was raising in him. He ducked his head and mumbled, “If you want.”

 
“Sure. Give me your phone number.”

Something shifted in his face, and Claire could see that with a haircut and the application of a razor, he might be good-looking. Then his mouth drew down again. “Except for I should tell you, I don’t have a car.” The tops of his cheeks, about the only part of his face that wasn’t obscured by hair, reddened.

“That’s okay. You could ride shotgun and tell me which way to turn.”

He nodded eagerly. “Okay. Let me give you my number.” He hunted for a scrap of paper, then scribbled his number down. When he leaned out of his booth again, his breath washed across Claire’s face, a mix of spearmint and garlic. She looked down at what he had written. Doug Renfro.
 
“Nice to meet you, Doug Renfro.”

“You, too, Lucy Bertrand.” Retreating into shyness, he was already pressing the button to raise the yellow-and-black striped arm.

Claire kept her foot on the brake. “Say, what time do you get off?” She had asked for the last appointment of the day, and gotten a 4:30. It was 4:25 now. If Doug left at five, Jimmy’s plan might still work.

 
“I live here on the property, so I’m here until the last scheduled patient leaves.” Doug’s flush deepened. “Which I guess in this case would be you.”

Claire realized he thought she was asking him to go out that night. She faked a sigh. “Since it’s mid-terms, I guess tonight I really need to concentrate on studying. But I’ll definitely keep your number handy.” Claire waved the paper as she drove forward, then tucked it into the backpack that sat on the Firebird’s passenger seat. She figured college-student Lucy would also carry a backpack, although this morning Claire had stripped it of anything that might identify her as Claire Montrose.

Scanning the grounds, Claire pulled forward into the tiny kingdom Doug oversaw, a parking lot with spaces for ten cars. Four of them were already taken. The new silver Mercedes she tagged as the doctor’s car, especially since it was parked closest to the door. Next to it stood a late model purple Toyota and a few spaces over sat an aqua Geo. Claire parked next to the only other car, a blue Subaru station wagon.

For a minute, she sat lost in thought. Doug posed a real problem. Jimmy’s idea for gaining access to the clinic had been simple. All she had to do, he had said, was find a place to hide during business hours, then just wait until after the building emptied out. “In other words, break out instead of break in. All you need to find is a restroom or utility closet. Maybe just the kneehole of an empty desk. And then you wait until everyone goes home. Even if you do set off an alarm, you’ll have a good start because you’re already inside,” he had said before adding, “Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

The only problem with Jimmy’s plan was that it hadn’t counted on there being someone paid to watch over the building’s comings and goings. The only way in, Claire realized, was going to have to be with her pick kit in the dead of night. Good thing picking a lock relied on touch rather than sight.

Sighing, she shouldered her backpack and got out of the car. For a moment, she rested her hand on her abdomen, just in case Doug was watching. Dr. Gregory had told her that pregnant women touched their bellies a lot. But when she half-turned, Doug’s head was bent over a magazine.

Claire looked over the clinic and grounds. Aside from forgetting to mention the parking guy, Lori’s and Ginny’s descriptions had been good enough that everything looked somewhat familiar. The clinic must have built sometime in the early seventies, with odd angles and tall, narrow windows that reminded Claire of arrow slits on a castle. To the left, a stand of huge cedar trees with reddish bark and gray-green branches completely cut off any glimpse of the highway below.
 
On the right, the drive skirted a rising sweep of green lawn as long as a football field. It ended at an oversized three-car garage next to a remodeled farmhouse. A white sailboat sat between the garage and the farmhouse. The house was painted a traditional white with green trim, but over time skylights, solar panels and a glassed-in sun porch had been added.
 
Next to the garage sat a tiny, doll-sized outbuilding that looked as if might have begun life as the original garage. She guessed it might be where Doug lived.

Claire walked toward the clinic’s front door. There were no little signs stuck into the grounds advertising Brinks or another security firm. No keypad in the alcove to disable or arm a security device. Finally, she looked for foil-covered wires leading from the door or window frames, but didn’t see any. Maybe there wasn’t an alarm. After all, why would the clinic need one, what with Doug in his booth? And it wasn’t like an Ob/Gyn was a good place to go looking for drugs.

When she opened the door, the young woman behind the counter tucked away the magazine she was reading. Underneath an old-fashioned white nurse’s cap, she had a heart-shaped face with a mole by her mouth. It had been so long since Claire had seen a nurse’s cap that she wondered if the clinic had had to order it from a costume shop rather than a uniform supplier. Claire’s gaze swept over the empty waiting area. It was furnished with blue armchairs arranged in two groups: one circled a coffee table bearing a perfect fan of magazines and the other faced a fireplace that was clearly never used.

The nurse arched one of her perfectly shaped black brows. “Your name?”

For a second, Claire drew a blank. “Oh, um. Lucy. Lucy Bertrand. My appointment’s for four-thirty, but I’m a little early.”

The nurse handed over a clipboard with an attached pen. “I’ll need you to fill out these forms.” Leaning down, she pressed a button on an intercom that sat on the counter. “Lucy Bertrand is here.”

Claire chose a seat by the empty fireplace. The questionnaire wanted to know everything about her as well as the father of the child she was supposed to be carrying. Where did she go to school, and what were her GPA and majors? What about high school GPAs and SAT scores? Had she ever had an IQ test? What were her natural hair and eye colors, as well as her weight? Then there were pages and pages asking about what diseases might run in the family: Was there autism? epilepsy? near-sightedness? migraine headaches? heart disease? breast cancer?

Following the principle that a good lie always contained as much truth as possible, Claire’s only complete falsehood was her age. It helped that there weren’t many relatives to think about. She’d never known her father, so that left only Jean and Susie for near relatives, plus a couple of uncles and aunts and a half-dozen or so cousins. Under the column labeled “child’s father” she marked NA and penned a series of ditto marks under it.

Claire handed in her completed questionnaire, again interrupting the nurse’s pursuit of
People
magazine. In the bored tones of someone who uttered the same sentences day after day, the nurse said, “Next we’ll need a urine sample. The bathroom’s right over there and the instructions are on the wall. When you’re done, go into the exam room next door, get completely undressed, and put on the gown that’s on top of the table. Put the opening in the front. I’ll let the doctor know you’re nearly ready.”

In the bathroom, Claire carefully pulled off her loose sweater and raised her left arm. With the edge of her fingernail, she loosened the edge of the white first-aid tape that held a sealed plastic bag under her arm. At the bottom of the bag was a half-inch of yellow liquid, an unknowing donation from one of Dr. Gregory’s other patients. She had been worried that the bag might leak, but it had proved as good as its own commercials that endlessly touted its superiority to other bags with fasteners that clicked, zipped, locked, or changed color when properly sealed. Opening the bag, she carefully poured the contents into a plastic cup that sat waiting on the edge of the sink. She rinsed the bag, wrapped it in a paper towel, and tucked it and the discarded tape in her backpack. The page of framed instructions told her to leave her sample on the stainless steel shelf above the toilet, so she did. Claire was careful to flush the toilet and wash her hands before she left.

As she opened the door, she heard a low moan from the end of the hall, then the soft murmur of a woman’s reassuring voice. Claire realized that behind one of the closed doors a woman was in labor, ready to trade a child for fifteen-thousand dollars. She wondered if Ginny had made it this far.
 
She hoped she had.

After Claire got undressed, she sat on the edge of the exam table and tried to hold the edges of the gown closed over her breasts. There were two soft raps on the door, then the doctor pushed it open without waiting for an answer. He wore an open white lab coat over a blue oxford shirt, red striped tie and dark blue wool pants, and in his hand he carried the clipboard that held Claire’s - or rather, Lucy’s - questionnaire. A little above average height and thin, the doctor appeared to be in his mid-fifties. Frost-colored hair swept back over his ears to curl just above his collar. His narrow, ruddy-skinned face was dominated by a long nose, hooked at the end. His eyes were his most striking feature, a pale ice blue. Wolf’s eyes, Claire thought when she saw them.

“Lucy? I’m Dr. Bradford.” He set the clipboard down on the counter, then reached out his hand, shaking hers with the lightest of grips. “Let’s get your exam out of the way with and then I’ll asked you a few questions. Have you ever had a pelvic exam?” She nodded. “Good. I’ll go ask my nurse to step in. While I’m doing that, I need you to put this drape over your lap, put your feet in the stirrups, and then slide your bottom down to the end of the table.”

The doctor returned a few seconds later with another nurse, a scrawny woman in her late forties. Her dyed red hair contrasted with her oddly sallow skin. She had the same cap and uniform as the younger nurse, but completed her outfit with white high heels rather than sensible flats.