forty-three

It was past six thirty, and Frank and I sat in the Gremlin outside the white house with the blue shutters. Corey, not surprisingly, hadn’t returned to work after Frank chased her down the street. Nor had she returned to her own home. With no leads on Corey’s whereabouts, our only option was to speak to the residents of the house.

“Am I the only one who thinks the skinny jeans woman will turn out to be this woman the neighbor with the dog told us about?”

Frank scrolled through his iPad. “Kelly Goff. According to my notes, the neighbor said her first name was Kelly.” He looked from the trail to the house and back again. “I’m wondering if this Kelly woman is the surrogate,” he said, and then turned to me. “There’s got to be a reason Corey was in this house.”

“Maybe Kelly is the adopted mother,” I reasoned. “Maybe Corey is concerned that since the transfer wasn’t legitimate, the adoption could be overturned. Maybe she’s kept in touch with Kelly and tried to warn her.”

“On the other hand, if Kelly is the surrogate,” Frank said, “then there’s no guarantee she knows the family that received the baby. That would mean we’ve still got a ways to go until we find the child, and in this race, our competition is your father.”

I stiffened at Frank’s observation. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but if that’s the case, then I’d advocate backing off from this search. Clearly, my father doesn’t want me to find my child. If we step back, maybe he’ll stop and she’ll be safe.”

Frank shook his head. “At this point, we can’t assume your father ever does the right thing.”

I looked at the house. It was perfect. If my child had grown up in this home, I can’t say I’d be disappointed. As much as I wanted to meet her, I’d rather she be safe than at the mercy of my father. I forced myself to believe Frank. Regardless of my actions, my father would continue to search for the sole purpose of eliminating the evidence of his twisted plan.

“I’m thinking about the picture of Corey with her arm around Liz,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she had befriended some of the women involved in the fertility exchanges. What I don’t get is how any of these people are related to Bob’s murder. Outside of this home’s proximity to the recycling center, I don’t see the connection.”

“The connection to the murder is the location. Being in the vicinity at the time a crime occurs is a core requirement for a witness and murderer.”

“So you think maybe the skinny jeans woman, or Kelly, as I’m going to call her now, was a witness?”

“Like the neighbor with the dog, she probably walks the trails and fell upon something that made her run home,” Frank said as he opened the car door.

I thought about Kelly Goff. Did she have any idea that in addition to being an inadvertent witness to a murder, she was about to be questioned about a fertility scam?

“Since Corey is currently at large,” Frank said as he headed for the house, “this is all we’ve got. Let’s see where it goes.”

Frank rang the bell, and the door opened immediately. A hefty man in his early fifties greeted us. He still held his briefcase, and his suit jacket hung halfway off his shoulder. Frank identified himself as a detective and asked for Kelly.

“I’m Kelly,” he said, placing his bag on the foyer floor.

Frank shook his head in disbelief. “You’re Kelly?”

So much for our theory about the skinny jeans woman with short black hair living in the blue-shuttered house. I turned to Frank and shrugged. Then I looked back at the trail leading from the woods to the cul-de-sac. Where had this woman run to? I counted the houses on the street—there were seven. The skinny jeans woman could be living in any one of these homes or maybe, as we had first theorized, she had left her car in the neighborhood and then made her getaway.

“That’s right. Kelly Goff. I’ve lived here for twenty years.” He led us into a cozy den with a stone fireplace. Frank and I sat down in a pair of soft leather chairs while Kelly remained standing. I glanced quickly around the room, hoping to spot a photo of the skinny jeans woman, but there were no pictures of a female with short black hair. The neighbor had mentioned that someone in the house had passed away. Maybe the skinny jeans woman was Kelly’s new girlfriend and it was too early in their relationship to warrant a photo.

“What’s this about?” Kelly asked.

“Do you know Dr. Carolyn Corey?” Frank asked.

“Carolyn is my sister-in-law.”

My ears lit up, and my nails dug into the chair’s leather arms. Carolyn Corey and Kelly Goff were related. I wondered if Corey had been afraid to return to her own home after Frank’s visit. Her brother-in-law’s house may have seemed a safer haven.

“Is there something wrong with her?”

Frank ignored the question. “And your wife passed away?”

Kelly frowned. “My husband passed away. It’s been two years, and I don’t know what I’d do without my sister-in-law’s support. Has something happened to Carolyn?” He swiped at his mouth a few times, and I could see he was agitated.

Before Frank responded, Kelly Goff took a giant step toward me and stared directly into my eyes. “Excuse me. What did you say your name was?”

“CeCe,” I said. “CeCe Prentice.”

He nodded and then walked quickly to the stairs. For a large man, he moved swiftly, taking two steps at a time. We felt his heavy vibrations overhead as he moved from room to room.

Frank looked at me. “We can’t afford another runner,” he said, and then he directed his voice toward the stairs. “Mr. Goff,” he called. “We’re coming up.”

We found Kelly seated on an antique iron bed made up with a vintage quilt in a patchwork of purples and pinks. Kelly Goff’s weight caused the ancient bed to sag, and a pile of stuffed animals had rolled to the lowest point around his thighs.

“She’s not here,” he said, and then he lowered his head and wept.

“Do you mean Dr. Corey?” I probed while Frank ran to find tissues. I took a shot in the dark. “Is this where she stays when she visits?”

“No,” he said. “My daughter is gone. She should have been home by now. I assumed she was upstairs studying.”

Frank returned with a box of tissues. My voice was thin, but I repeated what Kelly had told me. “He says his daughter is gone.”

Frank walked over to Kelly and knelt by the bed. “How do you know she’s gone and not at a friend’s house?”

Kelly shook his head. “It’s Thai Tuesday, our father/daughter night. We’d normally be heading out the door for Thai now.”

“How old is your daughter?” Frank asked.

Kelly inhaled swiftly, as if woken from a trance, and looked at Frank. “She’s sixteen.”

At that moment, my legs gave way like my hamstrings had been sliced with a knife. I lunged for the desk and crumpled into a chair. Two gay men, one sister-in-law with a medical background, a free egg, and a container of Teddy’s sperm: the exact ingredients required for a test-tube baby. In a billion years, I would never have guessed the outcome unfolding in front of me, yet it was entirely plausible.

I stared at the man. “You asked me my name. Why?”

Kelly Goff wiped his tears and looked at me. “Because I know two men can’t produce a baby.” He blew his nose and continued. “Since the first day I held my daughter, I’ve worried that someone, a woman, would surface and lay claim to her. Carolyn told me I was crazy. But then, about six months ago, she came to me. She said she had read something in the paper that made her nervous.”

I turned to Frank and mouthed, The trial. He nodded.

Kelly stared at me. “I’m assuming you’re her.”

“Maybe,” I said, leaving the door open to speculation. “Only a blood test can confirm.” But deep down I knew Kelly was on to something. I didn’t need my blood drawn to know that Kelly Goff’s child was my child, Teddy’s daughter, and Frank’s niece.

“Carolyn had always been vague about the baby’s biological origins,” Kelly continued, “but we assumed that since she worked with the labs, it was legitimate.”

“Did you use Lifely’s fertility services?”

He seemed surprised that I knew about Lifely.

“Initially, yes,” he stammered. “Carolyn introduced us to the center. It wasn’t easy for two gay men to adopt a white baby twenty years ago. We also weren’t on the fertility clinics’ radars at the time. In New York State, paid surrogacy was and still is illegal, which severely limited our choices. At that point, we’d already wasted years getting rejected by mainstream options. We were thrilled to find Lifely. They were progressive. We went pretty far through the process and paid ten grand for preliminary paperwork. And then one day, Carolyn showed up with another solution.”

“She had found a surrogate for you?” I said as my mind immediately raced to Lizzy James. I wondered if my father and Corey had been competing for Lizzy’s uterus. “Had your sister-in-law found you a surrogate?” I repeated.

“No,” Kelly said. “She was pregnant. Carolyn was our surrogate.”

My face fell into my hands. Carolyn Corey had carried my child? Why me? Why my child? Why had she stolen my baby and given it to her brother and his husband?

Frank handed us both a tissue. “Tell us again why CeCe’s name interested you.”

“After years of downplaying my concerns, Carolyn recently told me someone by the name of Prentice might come around asking questions. By Carolyn’s description though, I thought it would be an older man.”

So Carolyn Corey knew my father was on to her and that after sixteen years, he’d come back to erase the evidence of his unethical plan to manipulate my family’s genetic tree in the name of science. That’s why Corey had run. She, too, could be implicated. And now she probably also feared my father, afraid of what he might try to do to the child she had carried to term and then given to her brother and Kelly. Surely Dr. Corey, as a former employee of the Sound View labs, had read about Teddy’s death in the papers and the subsequent coverage of the trial. Frank’s unannounced visit to her office and his questions about Lifely must have set off a red flag. When Frank left her office, I guessed Dr. Corey had put a simple plan into action—intercept her niece before the girl returned from school and move her to a safe place.

“Dr. Corey might think you’re working with my father,” I said to Frank.

“I realize that,” Frank replied as he paced the small bedroom. “She might think your father has a cop in his pocket, and she certainly won’t come forward if she believes that to be so.”

“I’m not so sure she’d go to the cops, anyway,” I countered. “It doesn’t help her credibility that she stole my egg,” I said, and then I turned to Kelly. “I’m sorry, there’s more here than you realize.”

“What about the school buses?” Frank asked. “When we were here before, the bus was still making stops. Corey was in her BMW and heading toward the bus. She might have met her niece at a bus stop farther up the road while we were still talking to the neighbor.”

“That’s what I was thinking. If that’s so, then at the least we know the two are together,” I said.

Kelly Goff breathed a sigh of relief. “But where are they now?”

“We don’t know,” Frank said. “But we’re going to find out.”

I moved gingerly from my chair to the bed and placed my hand on Kelly’s. “What’s your daughter’s name?”

“Gayle.”

“Gayle,” I said as if trying the name on for size. “Like a storm.”

Kelly smiled and squeezed my hand. “We had no idea when we named her, but as it turned out, she’s a bit of a hurricane.” He paused, and then as if to apologize to me, he said, “She’s difficult, but in a good way.”

No apology required, I cheered to myself. My most notable quality, a challenging personality, had just been assigned to my daughter. Little did Kelly know it was the greatest compliment I had ever received. Having spent years lamenting the differences between myself and my brother Teddy, finally I had proof that at least one other person on the planet shared my traits.

Kelly opened his wallet and produced a school photo of his daughter. I gulped a pound of air. The girl in the picture had long, straight blond hair, just as I’d had at that age.

“She’s got my hair,” I said proudly.

Kelly frowned. “Well, the hair has proved to be a bit of drama. A whopper of a fight,” he said. “Her hair was as smooth as silk and the color of fresh wheat. Now it’s dyed black, and she’s got it cut in this severe-looking bob.”

“What?” Frank yelled.

Kelly seemed surprised at Frank’s outburst. For all he knew, it was just hair.

I yanked my sketchbook out of my bag and flipped to the faceless woman with the short-bobbed hair, whom I had seen outside of Bob’s house. “Hair like this?”

Kelly nodded yes.

I turned the pages again to the sketch of the calves. “How about pants like this?”

“Always,” Kelly said. “That’s what teen girls wear.”

I reached for Gayle’s picture and stared directly into the eyes of my own daughter. Upon closer inspection, I could see that Gayle bore a familiar resemblance to my own mother. Elizabeth Prentice had a regal, almost handsome appeal, and I recognized the similarity in Gayle’s face. Unlike a giggly teenager, my daughter’s image had an air of maturity. With her jaw raised and her shoulder’s square in the frame, this girl could easily pass for a woman in her early twenties.

“Shit, Frank,” I said. “Gayle is the skinny jeans woman. I must have seen her in family photos at Corey’s house and not recognized her with her natural blond hair. I think she looks a bit like my mother in this photo.”

Frank was silent for a moment and then said, “Your father has been in Corey’s house and has seen photos of her as blond too. He doesn’t know to look for the new black hair.” Frank turned to Kelly. “When did she color her hair?”

“About two months ago.”

“My God,” I said. “Her rebellion might have saved her from my father.”

Frank asked Kelly to come to the window. He drew up the shade and pointed in the direction of the recycling center. “Do you know what’s over there?”

“The recycling center,” Kelly said.

“Does your daughter ever hike on the trails?”

“Not that I know of,” Kelly said, “and I would be furious if I found out she had been in those woods. That’s where the high school deadbeats hang out to smoke. In fact, that’s why I thought you were here at first. We’ve had issues with kids starting fires in the woods.”

Frank regarded Kelly for a moment. I couldn’t decide if Frank was confused by Kelly’s answer or annoyed that the man was unable to own up to his daughter’s questionable actions. “You’ve got a daughter who by your own admission had disobeyed your rules, and you still think she hasn’t been in those woods for the drug scene?”

Frank was back on the drugs theory and at this point, I couldn’t blame him. We knew how Gayle was connected to Corey, my father, and myself, but we had no clue how or if she was connected to Bob. The only definitive fact was that a female matching Gayle’s description had been seen leaving the recycling center in the direction of the trails on the day Bob died, and conveniently, she lived where the trail ended.

Kelly Goff had a good two inches and fifty pounds on Frank, not to mention the wrath of a father whose daughter was missing. He turned to me and said, “What would you say if I described a preschooler who refused to eat meat when she found out how it was processed, a sixth grader who refused to attend school on the day women received the right to vote, and a young woman who sent a video with a personal plea for gay marriage to the goddamn Pope?”

I swallowed hard. “I’d say she sounds an awful lot like me.”

“If she was in the woods,” Kelly said in a firm voice, “it wasn’t because she was up to no good.” And then he turned to Frank. “Don’t misinterpret my daughter. You need to get a handle on who this kid is, because although she doesn’t walk the straight and narrow, she always has a purpose.”

Before Frank could apologize, Kelly’s phone buzzed. He fumbled in his pocket for his cell and read a text. “It’s Carolyn. She wants to know if Gayle is with me.”

Frank grumbled, and then turned to Kelly. “Can you come with us?”