Square in the Face (Claire Montrose Series) (6 page)

He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Don’t you have a key hidden under the welcome mat or anything?”

She shook her head. And then remembered the backpack that was still looped over the bedpost. “Wait - I forgot. I do have a key up here.”

He fumbled the ring when she tossed it down, then recovered. “I’ll be up in just a second.”

When she heard Dr. Gregory’s footsteps on the stairs, Claire called out, “I’m in here.” He opened the door, and she saw that his hair was still a little damp in back from his shower. Claire ran into Dr. Gregory outside his office all the time - lifting weights next to her at the MJCC, getting a latte from Village Coffee, petting the resident black cat at Annie Bloom’s Books - but still, it felt oddly intimate to have him in her bedroom. He was dressed in an expensive outdoorsy way that would never actually work in the real outdoors. His Hilfiger jeans were too snug, and his moss-green long-sleeved polo shirt was made of pima cotton too light to keep out even a faint breeze.

“Let’s have a look, then.” He knelt at her feet, and Claire was glad she had remembered to put on panties. His cool fingers stroked her ankle and calf as he talked to her, reinforcing the oddly personal nature of his profession. On Claire’s last birthday, Charlie had given her a gift certificate for a massage. It had been the same sort of thing, professional hands paid to touch in places and ways that you would normally slap a stranger for.

“I thought of the best heteronym yet,” she said, as he flexed her foot.

His eyes were on her ankle, evaluating its range of motion. “Does this hurt?” He pushed until her toes pointed back at her. His nails were perfect, capped in white new moons and buffed to a discreet shine. It probably didn’t pay to be a doctor with dirty fingernails.

“No more than anything else.”

“How about this?”

Claire shook her head. From this angle she could see that Dr. Gregory must have grown up poor. His top teeth were white, even and shining - and certainly capped, Claire realized, as she glimpsed the jumble of gray and yellow lower teeth, normally hidden by their spiffed-up brethren and his lower lip.

“What was the word you thought of?”

“Slough as in slough of despond, and slough, as in this loofah will slough off dead skin cells.” She pronounced the first word
slau
and the second one
sluff
.

The skin around his green eyes crinkled as he smiled. “That’s great. And I don’t have it on my list.” Dr. Gregory sat back on his heels and cradled her foot in his hands. “Well, what we have here is pretty simple. You’ve sprained your ankle. You’ve torn and twisted a lot of ligaments right here,” he trailed a finger across the puffiest part, “but nothing is broken. You won’t need a cast, but you will need to take it easy for a while.” He picked up his black bag, unzipped it and pulled out an Ace bandage. “Now watch how I wrap this.”

“What about running? I’ve been running five miles nearly every day.”

“This is going to put a crimp in it, I’m afraid.”

Running was the only reason Claire was still able to eat Doritos and not have the thighs to show for it.
 
“For how long?”

“Take it easy for a week, and then after that you can gradually start running again.” He saw the frown cross her face. “The better you take care of your ankle now, the sooner you’ll be lacing up your Nikes. You can speed the healing by keeping your foot elevated for the rest of the day. In fact, let’s get that foot elevated right now.” He stood up and helped Claire to her feet - or foot. Before she knew what he was doing, he had bent down, hooked one arm under her knees and hoisted her in his arms.

“Hey!” Claire protested. “You don’t need to do this.” Underneath the cotton of his polo shirt she could feel the hard muscles in his chest. Was that the reason he had picked her up, to sneak in a little physical contact?

A little huff of exertion brushed past her ear as Dr. Gregory settled her down on the bed. Claire pulled her dress back over her knees as he sat down at the foot of the bed. “I want you to take it easy, not be hopping all over your bedroom. I’m going to put an ice pack on you, and I want you to promise you won’t stir for the rest of the day. If I know Charlie, she will want to wait on you hand and foot. And if I know you, you won’t want to let her. You’re hereby under doctor’s orders to let her. Here,” he said as he bent down to retrieve the mystery novel from the floor and then handed it to her, “this should help you stay entertained until she gets back. Why don’t you spend the next couple of hours seeing if you can figure out the solution before the main character does?”

The mystery novel gave Claire just the in she was looking for. “Speaking of solving mysteries, have you ever heard of the Bradford Clinic?”

Dr. Gregory didn’t answer her right away. Instead, he took an instant ice pack from his pack, broke it open and then draped it over ankle. When he looked over at her, his green eyes were thoughtful. “Why do you want to know? Are you pregnant, Claire?”

Claire was surprised to feel herself flush. “No, no, I’m not asking for me. So you have heard of it?”

“In my line of work, everyone knows the good doctor Bradford. Do you know someone who wants to adopt? I’ll warn you, he’s not cheap. But he can come through for parents who may not otherwise qualify.”

“ Look, I ‘m not pregnant and I don’t know anyone who wants to adopt. It’s kind of an unusual problem. About ten years ago, my friend had a baby at that clinic. You know how it works, right? You give up all rights to contact the child.” He nodded. “But see, now she has another child, Zach, and he’s got leukemia. He may need a bone marrow transplant, but there’s no match in the national registry.”

Dr. Gregory’s reply was carefully phrased. “Does she know that even if she does find the child, the chances of a half-sibling matching aren’t much better than an unrelated donor?”

“That’s the thing. The baby she gave up and Zach - the child she has now - both have the same father. Lori and Havi broke up around the time she got pregnant and then got back together a few years later. They have another child, too, a little older than Zach, but he doesn’t match. They’ve thought about trying to conceive another child as a possible match, but the doctor says there’s no time.”

“Who’s the pediatric oncologist?”

“Dr. Preston.”

“I’ve heard he’s a good man. I’m sure he’s doing everything he can. But as for Dr. Bradford, that’s a tricky one.” Dr. Gregory seemed to be thinking something over. His voice dropped. “This is all off the record, right?”

“Record, what record? This is just me, Claire Montrose, talking in my” - she was about to say bedroom, but switched it to -”house.”

“I’ve heard that he’s been up before the board several times, but ultimately nothing ever came of it.”

“The board?”

“Of medical examiners. There’s been a few complaints about his clinic over the years. Not as many as you might think, even though he runs a fairly unorthodox set-up. But there’s so much money involved that all the parties have some incentive to look the other way.”

“If there’s a lot of money involved, isn’t that getting pretty close to buying a baby? And isn’t that illegal?”
“Tell that to the person who pays fifteen thousand dollars for an adoption.”

“Fifteen thousand?” Claire echoed.

“That’s how much one of my patients just paid for a one-year-old girl in an open adoption. The child’s mother was a stripper with a taste for meth, so my patient is paying a lot of money for a baby that may or may not have been born drug-addicted, and quite probably spent her first formative months in a less than ideal environment. And my patient got that baby through a strictly legitimate agency. Now just imagine how much someone would be willing to pay for a brand spanking new - excuse the pun - white baby, certified drug-free, whose birth parents are guaranteed to be college students with above average IQs. And on top of that, the baby comes with absolutely no strings attached, no birth mother who’s going to want to stay in the picture. How much would that be worth to someone?” He answered his own question. “I think Dr. Bradford’s prices
start
at one-hundred thousand dollars.”

Claire realized there was something wrong with his scenario. “But my friend’s husband wasn’t in college. Havi’s smart, but he never went past high school. When the baby was born, he was in the Army.”

“And maybe the good doctor told the adoptive parents that. And maybe he didn’t. There have been rumors around for years that Dr. Bradford might play a little fast and loose with the truth, especially when it’s to his benefit. One thing nobody doubts, though, is that he cuts all ties between the biological parents and the adoptive parents. Nobody knows except Dr. Bradford, and he’s not telling.”

“Is that legal?”

“I think in this state that women have three months after the birth to change their minds about giving up a baby, but I don’t know how well he explains that to them. And with the kind of money he has to hand out, a lot of these girls probably don’t care. Whatever goes on at Dr. Bradford’s clinic might be what libertarians like to call victimless crimes. The parents get the baby they always wanted. The girl gets a free education and the knowledge that her child is getting a better life than she could ever give it. And Dr. Bradford gets some money. So everyone’s happy.”

“How come you know so much?”

Dr. Gregory looked away from Claire. He pinched the end of his nose. “I may have referred a girl or two to him. Say a good Catholic girl comes in, wondering how come she hasn’t had her period in three months. A little girl from Burns, Oregon, never been in the big city before, now she’s a wide-eyed freshman at Portland State who forgot to say her Hail Marys and keep her legs crossed.”

“And a girl like that probably wouldn’t believe in abortion,” Claire continued for him, although it went against her personal beliefs to call anyone over the age of sixteen a girl.

“Exactly. Dr. Bradford offers her a way out besides choosing between an abortion or quitting school to raise her kid.” Dr. Gregory leaned over to pick up his bag, then stood up. “Let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.”

“There is one more thing, Doctor.”

He shook his head in mock irritation. “Michael, Michael, I’ve told you to call me Michael.”

“This is something I wanted to ask you in your official capacity as a doctor.”

“You name it.”

“Can you tell me how to fake a pregnancy?”

There was a long pause while he considered her question. He finally cocked his head to one side. “Although I probably shouldn’t be, I am willing to discuss this mater with you.” Claire opened her mouth to thank him, but he raised a cautioning hand. “On one condition. You must allow me take you out to dinner.”

D8NNE1

Chapter Five

“I feel like a magazine ad for tampons,” Claire complained, and was gratified when Lori’s smile met hers in the tall mirror that hung on the door of Lori’s walk-in closet. Claire had called Lori the day before, while she reluctantly rested in bed. When she heard that Claire hoped to persuade Dr. Gregory to help her pose as a pregnant woman, Lori had insisted that Claire come over to plan what to wear. She was convinced that Claire lacked the appropriate outfit that would both guarantee Dr. Gregory’s help and that wouldn’t look out of place in Sinq, Northwest Portland’s hottest restaurant. Claire, who mostly dressed in jeans and T-shirts, had to admit she was right.

“You don’t like all-white?” Looking in the mirror next to Claire’s shoulder, Lori twitched the lapel of an antique white silk jacquard vest into place. The vest was layered over a lightweight ivory wool turtleneck and paired with matching wool pants.

Discarded clothes were heaped on the bed and scattered on the floor. Even though she was three inches shorter and currently fifteen pounds heavier, many of Lori’s clothes from thinner phases in her life fit Claire.

“You know what will happen if I wear this within a ten-foot radius of any food or beverage? “ Claire stepped back from the mirror, unbuttoned the pants and let them drop to her knees. She sat down on a dark-green velvet overstuffed chair to finish taking them off. After a day draped with an icepack, her ankle had begun to heal, but it was still unable to solely support her weight. In the shower this morning, her foot had looked bloated and shapeless, green near the ankle and purple along the bottom edge where the skin gathered to smooth out into the sole.
 
“If I wear this, I’ll guarantee you that I’m doomed to spill something on it that even
my
drycleaner can’t get out. She scolds me enough already. You know what she told me last time I brought something in?” Wagging her finger, Claire did her best approximation of the drycleaner’s Korean accent. “‘You messy eater! Many spot!’” She slipped off the vest, pulled the sweater over her head and handed everything back to Lori.

“I wore that outfit to a New Year’s Eve party with Havi,” Lori said, her eyes unfocused. “We had a wonderful time. We didn’t get home until three.” She sighed and shook her head. “Let me see what else I have back here.” She disappeared again into the walk-in closet. The yellow halter dress she emerged with was splashed with bright orange sunflowers.

“Have you told him yet?” Claire asked.

Without looking at Claire, Lori shook her head. “How can I? You know how they say people either see the glass as half-full or half-empty? In Havi’s case, he wants to know who in the hell drank his water.” Claire smiled but Lori didn’t. “He’s so angry right now, but there’s no one to be angry at. If I tell him, then I’ll just be giving him a place to put his anger, and I can’t deal with that right now.” Her tone hardened, as if Claire were arguing with her. “If you find her, then I’ll tell.” She let her breath out in a sigh, then amended it to, “When you find her.” She sat on the bed and looked at Claire. There were shadows under her dark blue eyes. “Do you really think you need to go to the Bradford Clinic posing as a pregnant woman?”

Claire was still figuring out the answer to that question herself. “The only place I can find out who adopted your daughter is at the clinic. We already know they won’t talk to you, so they wouldn’t talk to me, at least not as Claire Montrose. The minute I showed up asking questions they would show me the door. But if I go as a pregnant woman who is considering adoption, I might have the opportunity to beg, borrow or steal the information we need.” Claire hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. “Do you think I can get away with saying I’m a college student?”

Leaning forward, Lori put a finger under Claire’s chin and examined her face with narrowed eyes. “Maybe. If you said you were twenty-five you could probably get away with it. A lot of students at PSU are in their mid-twenties. It’s a good thing you don’t have many lines.”

“Redheads don’t tan, especially in Oregon. I gave up and started wearing sunscreen a long time ago.”

Lori held the sunflower dress against herself. “Well, what do you think? This always looks good on me when I’m a red-head.”
 

“It might be a little ...” loud didn’t seem like a polite term. “Colorful?”

“Okay. I can take a hint. No big flower prints.” Lori disappeared again into the closet. Claire could hear hangers sliding back and forth as she sought another selection. “How about this?” She came out with a red cocktail dress, cut low in the bosom and high on the legs, the kind of thing that would show off Lori’s curves and would make Claire look as shapely as a clothespin.

“I don’t think it’s really me,” Claire said. “You have to be you to carry off that dress.”

“I guess it’s just another dress I have good memories of. Let’s see, let’s see. Wait a minute, I might just have something in the back. I bought it at Nordstrom’s Rack, but it’s a little too long for me. I’ve only worn it once.”
 

The dress Lori emerged with was still swathed in clear plastic from the drycleaner, but right away Claire could see how striking it was - and how unlike anything she regularly wore. A floor length black knit, it had a cut-away back crossed by two curving bands of satin. “Could I wear a bra in that?” she asked.

Lori snorted. “What are you, a B-cup? Honey, you don’t need to worry. Go on, try it on. And if you absolutely decide you have to have a bra, just go down to Nordstrom and get yourself some of those glue-on cups. They’ll give you a little bit of support and prevent that ‘headlight’ phenomenon.” For a moment, Lori seemed nearly her old self, dispensing fashion advice with a smile and a wink. It was almost possible to forget about the desperately ill child sleeping downstairs.

“At Minor High, guys would say your highbeams were on. Or they’d yell down the hall that they wanted to ‘taste your chocolate chips.’ High school is a much blunter place than the rest of the world.”

“Yeah, that kind of talk would be grounds for a class action suit nowadays,” Lori said. “Go on, try it on.”

Claire stood up and Lori helped lift the dress over her head, the fabric cool as it slid across her skin. She looked in the mirror. The dress fit her like a dream, the knit hugging her, but not too tightly. Turning to the side, she smoothed the dress over her abdomen. Was it her imagination, or did it already look poochy after two days without exercise?

Lori read her mind. “Just go buy some of those Perfect Silhouette pantyhose. They’ve got a lot more than a control top - they also stop your thighs from jiggling and contour your butt.”

Claire was curious. “Where does all that extra flab end up? Can I move it up to my chest and give myself cleavage for the night? I’ve always wanted cleavage.”

Lori snorted. “It’s overrated. I got to be a double-D when I was nursing, and I quickly found out that it’s no fun when your breasts are bigger than your head.”

At the thought of nursing, Lori started to look sad again, so Claire switched subjects. “This dress doesn’t make me look too pale, does it?” Her skin seemed as ghostly white as the vanilla ice-milk Jean used to buy by the half-gallon box when she was dieting (and then polish off in a single night).
 

“There are yellow-based blacks and blue-based blacks,” Lori said with the air of a connoisseur. Claire had never noticed any such thing herself. “And while a yellow-based black would make you look sallow, a blue-based black actually compliments the slightly rosy undertones in your skin and also sets off that apricot-colored hair of yours.”
 
She gathered up Claire’s hair loosely and pulled it to the top of her head. Their eyes met in the mirror. “Wear it up like this. Not too tight. And not too many hairpins, either. You want some of these curls to spring up.”

“I’m not trying to seduce the guy. This is a fact-finding mission.” Claire regretted the words as soon as she said them, because they brought her friend back to reality. Lori’s shoulders curled over and her lips pressed together in a thin white line. “There is something else you could do to help me. I need to know everything you remember about the layout and the staffing of the clinic.”

 
“It’s been nearly ten years, but I’ll tell you what I remember.” Lori took a notepad and pencil from the drawer of a bedside table. “It’s near Sylvan.” She drew a thick line, then a narrower line that snaked up at a right degree angle to the first line. “Here’s the highway, and up here there’s a private drive. It’s not really marked - you have to know what to look for. I remember that by the time you get to the top you don’t even believe you’re near a city any more. The cedar and fir trees up there must be a couple of hundred of years old.”

 
“And what’s the clinic like inside? Does the doctor have an office - and where is that in relationship to the exam rooms? Is everything visible from the nurses’ station, or are there walls in between?”

“I was afraid you were going to ask me about stuff like that.” Her teeth sank into her lower lip. “That’s one part I just don’t remember a lot about. There’s a waiting area, and a nurses’ station in the front, but I don’t really remember where things were exactly.”

Claire was beginning to feel frustrated, although she knew it wasn’t Lori’s fault. “How about the records? Do you remember where they kept the records?”

“All I remember is that they always had a big fat manila file in the room.
 
But now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure it had a number on it, not a name.”

A number. That meant even if Claire could find the records, they might not do her much good. Maybe a better bet were the people. “Okay, so there’s the head nurse, Vi. Are there other staff?”

Lori sighed. “Another nurse or maybe two. I only really dealt with Vi. And Dr. Bradford.”
“What’s he like?”

Lori looked up at the ceiling as she searched her memory. “Tall. Thin. He seemed old to me then, but he was probably only in his mid-forties. And he has these pale eyes, like blue ice.”

“He doesn’t sound like the warm, fatherly type.”

Lori nodded. “He was all business.” Her smile was bitter. “I guess that’s what it was, a business.
 
He probably sold my daughter to the highest bidder.”

“Mommy!” The wail was faint, but Lori was already halfway down the stairs by the time it was repeated. “Mommy!”

Claire followed her down more slowly, her ankle protesting at every step.
 
Zach was in the hallway on his hands and knees, his small body seeming to convulse as he vomited on the oak floor. It was still a shock to see his completely bald head. Kneeling by him, Lori massaged his shoulders, tears running down her face.

Panic hummed in Claire as she looked at the bright red spattered on the floor. “Is that blood?” Was Zach beginning to hemorrhage inside?

Without looking up, Lori shook her head. “He had Spaghetti Ohs for lunch. Could you start filling a tub for me?” She continued to pat and soothe him until his stomach was empty. While Lori gave Zach a bath, Claire found rubber gloves, a bucket and a sponge under the kitchen sink. She scrubbed the floor clean as she listened to Lori hum as the water splashed. How hard it must be to be strong for him, not to scream or cry or curse God, but instead to hum Zach a lullaby.

After he was tucked back in bed, Claire asked, “Do you need to call the doctor’s office? He seemed so sick.”

Lori shrugged. “I know what they will say. ‘It’s normal.’ ‘It’s to be expected.’ ‘Bring it up with the doctor next visit.’ Vomiting is normal. He’s so tired he can’t hold his head up sometimes, but if I call they say that’s okay. From the oncology nurses’ point of view, it’s all normal. Constipation, stomach cramps, headaches, headaches, pains in his jaw. These drugs they have him on, they can permanently screw up his liver, give him heart failure or diabetes, even make his bones so brittle I could break his arm if I’m not careful. I guess they figure that all those are in the future, and the cancer is killing Zach now.” Lori’s voice broke.

A hundred years from now they will pity us
, Claire thought,
for how we tried to fight cancer by burning, poisoning and cutting the patient
. And what if these remedies, as awful as they were, didn’t work? She had to find Zach’s sister.

###

Dante’s phone rang for the third time, which meant the answering machine was about to click on. Claire decided she didn’t feel like talking to a machine, not when what she wanted was the real Dante. Part of her felt guilty about going out to dinner with Michael Gregory, even though she knew in her heart that it meant nothing. She was about to disconnect when the phone was picked up.