The inn. It was Friday night. Her mother should be there now, in her element, greeting guests, keeping a watchful eye on the waiters and busboys, the table settings, sampling the dishes in the kitchen. Every detail automatically checked and rechecked.
“Dad didn’t do this to you,” Meg said flatly. “I just know that.”
Catherine Collins broke into harsh, dry sobs. “Maybe Dad used the bridge accident as a chance to get away from me. But why, Meg? I loved him so much.”
Meghan put her arms around her mother. “Listen,” she said firmly, “you were right the first time. Dad would never do this to you, and one way or the other, we’re going to prove it.”
8
The Collins and Carter Executive Search office was located in Danbury, Connecticut. Edwin Collins had started the firm when he was twenty-eight, after having worked five years for a Fortune 500 company based in New York. By then he’d realized that working within the corporate structure was not for him.
Following his marriage to Catherine Kelly, he’d relocated his office to Danbury. They wanted to live in Connecticut, and the location of Edwin’s office was not important since he spent much of his time traveling throughout the country, visiting clients.
Some twelve years before his disappearance, Collins had brought Phillip Carter into the business.
Carter, a Wharton graduate with the added attraction of a law degree, had previously been a client of Edwin’s, having been placed by him in jobs several times. The last one before they joined forces was with a multinational firm in Maryland.
When Collins was visiting that client, he and Carter would have lunch or a drink together. Over the years they had developed a business-oriented friendship. In the early eighties, after a difficult midlife divorce, Phillip Carter finally left his job in Maryland to become Collins’ partner and associate.
They were opposites in many ways. Collins was tall, classically handsome, an impeccable dresser and quietly witty, while Carter was bluff and hearty, with attractively irregular features and a thick head of graying hair. His clothes were expensive, but never looked quite put together. His tie was often pulled loose from the knot. He was a man’s man, whose stories over a drink brought forth bursts of laughter, a man with an eye for the ladies, too.
The partnership had worked. For a long time Phillip Carter lived in Manhattan and did reverse commuting to Danbury, when he was not traveling for the company. His name often appeared in the columns of the New York newspapers as having attended dinner parties and benefits with various women. Eventually he bought a small house in Brookfield, ten minutes from the office, and stayed there with increasing frequency.
Now fifty-three years old, Phillip Carter was a familiar figure in the Danbury area.
He regularly worked at his desk for several hours after everyone else had left for the day because, since a number of clients and candidates were located in the Midwest and on the West Coast, early evening in the East was a good time to contact them. Since the night of the bridge tragedy, Phillip rarely left the office before eight o’clock.
When Meghan called at five of eight this evening, he was reaching for his coat. “I was afraid it was coming to this,” he said after she’d told him about the visit from the insurers. “Can you come in tomorrow around noon?”
After he hung up he sat for a long time at his desk. Then he picked up the phone and called his accountant. “I think we’d better audit the books right now,” he said quietly.
9
When Meghan arrived at the Collins and Carter Executive Search offices at two o’clock on Saturday, she found three men working with calculators at the long table that usually held magazines and plants. She did not need Phillip Carter’s explanation to confirm that they were auditors. At his suggestion, they went into her father’s private office.
She had spent a sleepless night, her mind a battleground of questions, doubts and denial. Phillip closed the door and indicated one of the two chairs in front of the desk. He took the other one, a subtlety she appreciated. It would have hurt to see him behind her father’s desk.
She knew Phillip would be honest with her. She asked, “Phillip, do you think it’s remotely possible that my father is still alive and chose to disappear?”
The momentary pause before he spoke was answer enough. “You do think that?” she prodded.
“Meg, I’ve lived long enough to know that anything is possible. Frankly, the Thruway investigators and the insurers have been around here for quite a while asking some pretty direct questions. A couple of times I’ve wanted to toss them out bodily. Like everyone else, I expected Ed’s car, or wreckage from it, would be recovered. It’s possible that a lot of it would have been carried downstream by the tide or become lodged in the riverbed, but it doesn’t help that not a trace of the car has been found. So to answer you, yes, it’s possible. And no, I can’t believe your father capable of a stunt like that.”
It was what she expected to hear, but that didn’t make it easier. Once when she was very little, Meghan had tried to take a burning piece of bread out of the toaster with a fork. She felt as though she was experiencing again the vivid pain of electrical current shooting through her body.
“And of course it doesn’t help that Dad took the cash value out of his policies a few weeks before he disappeared.”
“No, it doesn’t. I want you to know that I’m doing the audit for your mother’s sake. When this becomes public knowledge, and be sure it will, I want to be able to have a certified statement that our books are in perfect order. This sort of thing starts rumors flying, as you can understand.”
Meghan looked down. She had dressed in jeans and a matching jacket. It occurred to her that this was the kind of outfit the dead woman was wearing when she was brought into Roosevelt Hospital. She pushed the thought away. “Was my father a gambler? Would that explain his need for a cash loan?”
Carter shook his head. “Your father wasn’t a gambler, and I’ve seen enough of them, Meg.” He grimaced. “Meg, I wish I could find an answer, but I can’t. Nothing in Ed’s business or personal life suggested to me that he would choose to disappear. On the other hand, the lack of physical evidence from the crash is necessarily suspicious, at least to outsiders.”
Meghan looked at the desk, the executive swivel chair behind it. She could picture her father sitting there, leaning back, his eyes twinkling, his hands clasped, fingers pointing up in what her mother called “Ed’s saint-and-martyr pose.”
She could see herself running into this office as a child. Her father always had candy for her, gooey chocolate bars, marshmallows, peanut brittle. Her mother had tried to keep that kind of candy from her. “Ed,” she’d protest, “don’t give her that junk. You’ll ruin her teeth.”
“Sweets to the sweet, Catherine.”
Daddy’s girl. Always. He was the fun parent. Mother was the one who made Meghan practice the piano and make her bed. Mother was the one who’d protested when she quit the law firm. “For heaven’s sake, Meg,” she had pleaded, “give it more than six months; don’t waste your education.”
Daddy had understood. “Leave her alone, love,” he’d said firmly. “Meg has a good head on her shoulders.”
Once when she was little Meghan had asked her father why he traveled so much.
“Ah, Meg,” he’d sighed. “How I wish it wasn’t necessary. Maybe I was born to be a wandering minstrel.”
Because he was away so much, when he came home he always tried to make it up. He’d suggest that instead of going to the inn he’d whip up dinner for the two of them at home. “Meghan Anne,” he’d tell her, “you’re my date.”
This office has his aura, Meg thought. The handsome cherrywood desk he’d found in a Salvation Army store and stripped and refinished himself. The table behind it with pictures of her and her mother. The lion’s-head bookends holding leather-bound books.
For nine months she had been mourning him as dead. She wondered if at this moment she was mourning him more. If
the insurers were right, he had become a stranger. Meghan looked into Phillip Carter’s eyes. “They’re not right,” she said aloud. “I believe my father is dead. I believe that some wreckage of his car will still be found.” She looked around. “But in fairness to you, we have no right to tie up this office. I’ll come in next week and pack his personal effects.”
“We’ll take care of that, Meg.”
“No. Please. I can sort things out better here. Mother’s in rough enough shape without watching me do it at home.”
Phillip Carter nodded. “You’re right, Meg. I’m worried about Catherine too.”
“That’s why I don’t dare tell her about what happened the other night.” She saw the deepening concern on his face as she told him about the stabbing victim who resembled her and the fax that came in the middle of the night.
“Meg, that’s bizarre,” he said. “I hope your boss follows it up with the police. We can’t let anything happen to you.”
As Victor Orsini turned his key in the door of the Collins and Carter offices, he was surprised to realize it was unlocked. Saturday afternoon usually meant he had the place to himself. He had returned from a series of meetings in Colorado and wanted to go over mail and messages.
Thirty-one years old with a permanent tan, muscular arms and shoulders and a lean disciplined body, he had the look of an outdoorsman. His jet black hair and strong features were indicative of his Italian heritage. His intensely blue eyes were a throwback to his British grandmother.
Orsini had been working for Collins and Carter for nearly seven years. He hadn’t expected to stay so long, in fact he’d always planned to use this job as a steppingstone to a bigger firm.
His eyebrows raised when he pushed open the door and saw the auditors. In a deliberately impersonal tone, the head man told Orsini that Phillip Carter and Meghan Collins were in Edwin Collins’ private office. He then hesitantly acquainted Victor with the insurers’ theory that Collins had chosen to disappear.
“That’s crazy.” Victor strode across the reception area and knocked on the closed door.
Carter opened it. “Oh, Victor, good to see you. We didn’t expect you today.”
Meghan turned to greet him. Orsini realized she was fighting back tears. He groped for something reassuring to say but could come up with nothing. He had been questioned by the investigators about the call Ed Collins made to him just before the accident. “Yes,” he’d said at the time, “Edwin said he was getting on the bridge. Yes, I’m sure he didn’t say he was getting off it. Do you think I can’t hear? Yes, he wanted to see me the next morning. There wasn’t anything unusual about that. Ed used his car phone all the time.”
Victor suddenly wondered how long it would be before anyone questioned that it was his word alone that placed Ed Collins on the ramp to the Tappan Zee that night. It was not difficult for him to mirror the concern on Meghan’s face when he shook the hand she extended to him.
10
At three o’clock on Sunday afternoon, Meg met Steve Boyle, the PCD cameraman, in the parking lot of the Manning Clinic.
The clinic was on a hillside two miles from Route 7 in rural Kent, a forty-minute drive north from her home. It had been built in 1890 as the residence of a shrewd businessman whose wife had had the good sense to restrain her ambitious husband from creating an ostentatious display on his meteoric rise to the status of merchant prince. She convinced him that, instead of the pseudopalazzo he had planned, an English manor house was better suited to the beauty of the countryside.
“Prepared for children’s hour?” Meghan asked the cameraman as they trudged up the walk.
“The Giants are on and we’re stuck with the Munchkins,” Steve groused.
Inside the mansion, the spacious foyer functioned as a reception area. Oak-paneled walls held framed pictures of the children who owed their existence to the genius of modern science. Beyond, the great hall had the ambiance of a comfortable family room, with groupings of furniture that invited intimate conversations or could be angled for informal lectures.
Booklets with testimonials from grateful parents were scattered on tables. “We wanted a child so badly. Our lives were incomplete. And then we made an appointment at the Manning Clinic . . .” “I’d go to a friend’s baby shower and try not to cry. Someone suggested I look into in vitro fertilization, and Jamie was born fifteen months later . . .” “My fortieth birthday was coming, and I knew it would soon be too late . . .”
Every year, on the third Sunday in October, the children who had been born as a result of IVF at the Manning Clinic were invited to return with their parents for the annual reunion. Meghan learned that this year three hundred invitations were sent and over two hundred small alumni accepted. It was a large, noisy and festive party.
In one of the smaller sitting rooms, Meghan interviewed Dr. George Manning, the silver-haired seventy-year-old director of the clinic, and asked him to explain in vitro fertilization.
“In the simplest possible terms,” he explained, “IVF is a method by which a woman who has great difficulty conceiving is sometimes able to have the baby or babies she wants so desperately. After her menstrual cycle has been monitored, she begins treatment. Fertility drugs are administered so that her ovaries are stimulated to release an abundance of follicles, which are then retrieved.
“The woman’s partner is asked to provide a semen sample to inseminate the eggs contained in the follicles in the laboratory. The next day an embryologist checks to see which, if any, eggs have been fertilized. If success was achieved, a physician will transfer one or more of the fertilized eggs, which are now referred to as embryos, to the woman’s uterus. If requested, the rest of the embryos will be cryopreserved for later implantation.
“After fifteen days, blood is drawn for the first pregnancy test.” The doctor pointed to the great hall. “And as you can see from the crowd we have here today, many of those tests prove positive.”
“I certainly can,” Meg agreed. “Doctor, what is the ratio of success to failure?”
“Still not as high as we’d prefer, but improving constantly,” he said solemnly.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Trailed by Steve, Meghan interviewed several of the mothers, asking them to share their personal experiences with in vitro fertilization.
One of them, posing with her three handsome off-spring, explained, “They fertilized fourteen eggs and implanted three. One of them resulted in a pregnancy, and here he is.” She smiled down at her elder son. “Chris is seven now. The other embryos were cryopreserved, or, in simpler terms, frozen. I came back five years ago, and Todd is the result. Then I tried again last year, and Jill is three months old. Some of the embryos didn’t survive thawing, but I still have two cryopreserved embryos in the lab. In case I ever find time on my hands for another kid,” she said laughing as the four-year-old darted away.
“Have we got enough, Meghan?” Steve asked. “I’d like to catch the last quarter of the Giants game.”
“Let me talk to one more staff member. I’ve been watching that woman. She seems to know everybody’s name.”
Meg went over to the woman and glanced at her name tag. “May I have a word with you, Dr. Petrovic?”
“Of course.” Petrovic’s voice was well modulated, with a hint of an accent. She was of average height, with hazel eyes and refined features. She seemed courteous rather than friendly. Still, Meg noticed that she had a cluster of children around her.
“How long have you been at the clinic, Doctor?”
“It will be seven years in March. I’m the embryologist in charge of the laboratory.”
“Would you care to comment on what you feel about these children?”
“I feel that each one of them is a miracle.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“We’ve got enough footage inside,” Meg told Steve when they left Petrovic. “I do want a shot of the group picture, though. They’ll be gathering for it in a minute.”
The annu
al photo was taken on the front lawn outside the mansion. There was the usual confusion that attended lining up children from toddler age to nine-year-olds, with mothers holding infants standing in the last row and flanked by staff members.
The Indian summer day was bright, and as Steve focused the camera on the group, Meghan had the fleeting thought that every one of the children looked well dressed and happy. Why not? she thought. They were all desperately wanted.
A three-year-old ran from the front row to his pregnant mother, who was standing near Meghan. Blue eyed and golden haired, with a sweet, shy smile, he threw his arms around his mother’s knees.
“Get a shot of that,” Meghan told Steve. “He’s adorable.” Steve held the camera on the little boy as his mother cajoled him to rejoin the other children.
“I’m right here, Jonathan,” she assured him as she placed him back in line. “You can see me. I promise I’m not going away.” She returned to where she had been standing.
Meghan walked over to the woman. “Would you mind answering a few questions?” she asked, holding out the mike.
“I’d be glad to.”
“Will you give us your name and tell us how old your little boy is?”
“I’m Dina Anderson, and Jonathan is almost three.”
“Is your expected baby also the result of in vitro fertilization?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, he’s Jonathan’s identical twin.”
“Identical twin!” Meghan knew she sounded astonished.
“I know it sounds impossible,” Dina Anderson said happily, “but that’s the way it is. It’s extremely rare, but an embryo can split in the laboratory just the way it would in the womb. When we were told that one of the fertilized eggs had divided, my husband and I decided that I would try to give birth to each twin separately. We felt that individually they might each have a better chance for survival in my womb, and actually it’s practical. I’ve got a responsible job, and I’d hate to have left two infants with a nanny.”