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