A Woman with a Mystery

by B. J Daniels

  “I figured as much,” Slade said. “You remember Holly?” Norma nodded and smiled, holding out her hand. “We met last year.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Holly said.

  Norma ushered them into the living room. “Can I get you something to drink? I still have a few of those sugar cookies left, Slade.”

  “No. We don’t have time for that. There’s something I need to tell you.”

  She offered them a seat and Slade poured out everything they knew, from Holly’s mind control to the monsters stealing her baby to Dr. Allan Wellington’s superbabies and Dr. Delaney’s and Lorraine’s involvement and subsequent deaths.

  Norma stared at him. “It’s all so…unbelievable.”

  “What is the Genesis Project that you and my mother and Lorraine Vogel were involved in at Evergreen Institute?” he asked. “I know you were a patient there.”

  “I told you that. L.T. and I were trying to have children.”

  “But Dr. Allan Wellington couldn’t help you?” he asked.

  “You know that, too. But I don’t know anything about a Genesis Project. Nor did I know about Dr. Wellington’s…superbabies.”

  “So you were infertile?” Slade asked, remembering what Lorraine had said about his mother.

  “No.” She seemed to hesitate, looking at him as if trying to gauge how much he knew. “I came close once, but the babies were stillborn.”

  Babies? “Twins?”

  She must have realized her slip. While she must have known that it would have been common knowledge she had been pregnant, not everyone knew it had been twins.

  He stared at her, hearing the echo of Lorraine’s words about history repeating itself, hearing the chief say he was sterile, hearing his own heart banging against his rib cage. “Do you have a photo of my mother when she was pregnant?”

  Norma turned white, all the color bleaching from her face in an instant, and he knew. Should have always known. It had been right there in front of him the whole time.

  “Who was the father of your babies?” he asked, his tone as cold and hard as the look he gave her. “I know it wasn’t L.T. because he told me he was sterile.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it. Tears filled her eyes. He watched her fight the inevitable. “Your father.”

  Slade squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to put his fist through the wall. “And I was afraid my mother was having an affair,” he ground out. He opened his eyes, fighting hard not to lose his temper. Lose his sanity. He felt Holly behind him, felt her hand squeeze his shoulder as she moved to stand behind his chair.

  “You don’t understand,” Norma pleaded. “I did it for your mother. It was her idea.”

  “For you to have children by my father?” Slade glared at her. “He was the man you were in love with, wasn’t he? Did my mother know that?”

  Norma said nothing, dropping her gaze in answer.

  He shook his head, trying hard to make sense of all of it. So many lies. So many deceptions. But what did it have to do with his and Holly’s baby? “What do you know about Holly’s and my baby?”

  “Slade, I swear to you on your father’s grave that I didn’t even know the two of you had a child together,” Norma cried.

  “Where were Shelley and I born?” he asked.

  “In the hospital. The old underground part.”

  He felt Holly’s hand tense on his shoulder.

  “Dr. Wellington and Lorraine delivered you,” Norma was saying. “Your mother was there. She pretended to be pregnant during the nine months. It wasn’t that unusual back then for a woman to fake a pregnancy. There was a stigma to adoption. And infertility.”

  “That’s why there weren’t any photos of my mother pregnant, because everyone close to her knew it was a lie,” he said, more to himself than to her. Was that the secret his mother had begged Aunt Ethel not to tell? Not about an affair. Not about Evergreen. But about the biggest lie of all. Except Joe Rawlins was in on this, he realized. It had to be another lie, this one his mother’s own.

  He felt Holly’s hand, warm and reassuring. “My father agreed to this?”

  “Not at first. But yes. He would have given your mother anything.”

  “Shelley doesn’t know, does she?”

  “No. How could she?”

  “What about the chief?” Slade asked.

  Norma seemed to hesitate again. “He knew.”

  “He was against it?” Slade guessed. “But you did it anyway, and we both know why. Obviously, the chief did, too. How does my mother’s murder fit into all this?”

  “It doesn’t,” she looked shocked.

  He couldn’t help thinking about what Lorraine had said about his mother being too smart for her own good.

  “I loved your mother,” Norma said angrily. “I would have done anything for her.”

  “Even sleep with my father.” He got up. “Why did you tell me my mother was having an affair?”

  “I thought she was.” Norma’s gaze dropped. “Maybe I just wanted to believe it. It would have made things more…even.”

  “L.T. keeps an extra service revolver in the house,” he said. “I need it and a box of cartridges.”

  Norma got to her feet, looking old and tired.

  “We’re going out to Evergreen,” he said when she handed him the weapon and cartridges. “Carolyn Gray is still at large,” he said, loading the weapon, then dumping a handful of extra cartridges into his coat pocket before slipping the gun in the other pocket. Without looking at Norma, he turned, taking Holly’s hand, and headed for the door. “Give us twenty minutes to get out there, then call the chief. Tell him everything we’ve told you.”

  “Slade?”

  He kept his back to her but stopped, knowing she wasn’t going to ask him not to go to Evergreen. She knew him better than that. After all, she’d been like a mother to him.

  “I’m sorry. But if I hadn’t done what I did, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “No,” he said. “And, right now, that would be a blessing.”

  Holly didn’t say a word as they climbed into the pickup and started toward Evergreen. She laid her hand on his thigh and seemed to watch the road ahead.

  “Thanks,” he said after a few miles, thankful that she hadn’t asked a lot of questions or tried to offer him sympathy or even comfort right now.

  “Rawlins, when this is all over I want us to take the baby to someplace warm,” she said. “Have you ever been to Arizona?”

  He glanced over at her, wondering if she felt as cold as he did inside. “No, but I’d go there with you.”

  She smiled. “Good.” After a few minutes, she said, “Did I tell you I remembered the first time I met Dr. Allan Wellington? It was at a party right before Thanksgiving. I hate parties, but I went because Dr. Wellington supposedly wanted to buy some of my art. I had a splitting headache. He offered me a little something for it.”

  Slade glanced at her in the glow of the dash lights. She was staring out the window.

  “Once he had control of my mind, he didn’t need the pills anymore. I guess I should feel lucky that at least I wasn’t taking the Halcion when I met you, when I got pregnant with our baby and during my pregnancy. Inez insisted I start taking the pills again right after I came home from the hospital because of the weird dreams I started having. Memories.”

  He drove for a few miles in the falling snow, silence between them.

  “I guess he wanted a legitimate heir,” Holly continued as if there hadn’t been a break. “That’s why he married me. I was lucky he died when he did. I guess he planned to impregnate me the way he had all his other ‘mothers.”’ She paused for a moment. “You thought I might have killed him for his money.”

  The pickup’s lights cut through the snow and darkness. Ahead, Slade spotted the turnoff for Evergreen. He slowed the truck. He glanced over at her and frowned. “You think someone killed Dr. Wellington and made it look like a heart attack?”

  “It’s possible. Especially now that we know
that Dr. Delaney was a friend of Allan’s and part of all this.”

  “Sweet heaven.” He couldn’t help thinking of his father’s heart attack.

  He brought the pickup to a stop at the entrance to Evergreen Institute, the headlights shining through the snow to illuminate the gate. Only this time, he wasn’t going to buzz in and let them know he was coming. He took the key ring Holly had found at Lorraine’s and climbed out of the truck, leaving the pickup running, the headlights on, and, walked over to the lock.

  It took him a few minutes. The snow fell around him silent as death. No wind up here. No sound but the hum of the pickup’s engine behind him and the glow of the headlights.

  He finally found the key that activated the gate. It swung open. Holly drove the pickup through, the gate closing soundlessly behind the truck.

  She slid over as he got back in. He turned off the headlights and waited for his eyes to adjust. He could make out the pines along the edge of the road.

  Slowly, he drove through the falling snow toward Evergreen. He’d noticed an employees’ entrance road yesterday. It wound behind the Institute. Slade took it now. Through the snow, he saw a light glowing in the employees’ parking lot. He followed it, stopping at the edge of the late afternoon darkness.

  “We’ll have to walk from here,” he told Holly as he cut the engine. He wanted to tell her how he felt, all the emotions roiling inside him, one clear. He loved her. He loved their baby. “If something happens—”

  She laughed softly. “What could possibly happen?” Then she touched his face, leaning toward him to kiss his lips. A soft, tender kiss.

  Then he heard the click of her door opening as she slipped out. He followed her.

  One of the keys on Lorraine’s ring opened the employees’ entrance. He’d half expected an alarm to go off. Or a dozen guys in white coats to appear the moment they stepped inside.

  But no alarm sounded. No team of white coats. The door closed behind them. Slade stood with Holly in the silence, tense as a spring. Holly pointed down the dimly lit hallway, away from the section of Evergreen that resembled a country club to the part without the pool or tennis courts, without the spa and the gym. Toward the part that she said was closed to “clients.”

  The gun he’d taken from Norma’s felt cold and heavy as a rock in his coat pocket. In his other pocket was the key ring and the extra cartridges.

  He was counting on Dr. Allan Wellington’s ego. The man couldn’t have helped himself; he would have kept track of his babies just to feed that incredible ego. Slade was also counting on the person who’d taken over for Wellington to have the same type of egocentric character. So there would be a record of what had happened to their baby.

  The problem was, Slade wasn’t sure how much access Lorraine would have had. He didn’t think she’d have had a key to the files. He’d probably have to break in. And Carolyn Gray was still at large. And, as far as Slade knew, armed and dangerous.

  They reached a caged door with a sign announcing it Off Limits. Only authorized personnel. As quietly as he could, he tried one key, then another until almost the last one. The lock opened. Again, no alarm sounded. At least not one he and Holly could hear.

  He glanced over at her. She looked scared but not about to stop now. That was his Holly.

  They moved quickly, stepping through the door, closing it firmly behind them. This section looked like a hospital. Smelled like one, too. It was the smell that worried Slade. He pulled the weapon from his pocket and edged down the hallway. There were only four doors, the second one on the right standing open. He moved cautiously, motioning for Holly to stay behind him. The first two were examining rooms, the third, on the left, appeared to be an operating room.

  He stopped just before the open doorway, took a breath, gripped the weapon in both hands, then started to step around it, ready to fire.

  “Adding another breaking and entering charge to your record?” Chief L. T. Curtis asked as he stepped from what was obviously the lab. “I figured you’d show up here.” He wagged his head at him. “Have you lost your mind, Slade?”

  “Not yet. But the night is young.” He assumed Curtis had spoken with Norma or he wouldn’t already be here. Obviously Norma hadn’t waited twenty minutes to call him.

  “I thought you had more sense than to jeopardize your client’s life as well as your own,” the chief said.

  “It’s my baby who’s missing,” Holly snapped.

  “I understand that,” Curtis said, sounding almost compassionate, a stretch for him even on one of his good days. “But you have no business here. Neither of you do.”

  Slade looked past him. The lab had been vandalized, just as Delaney had told them. Slade felt his heart drop. “I think whoever took our baby kept records. I need to look in those files.” He motioned to a huge set of file cabinets against the right-hand wall of the lab.

  “You aren’t searching anything,” Curtis snapped. “I can have you both thrown in jail, and it appears that’s what it’s going to take.”

  “You should be out looking for Carolyn Gray, not busting my chops,” Slade snapped back.

  “We are looking for her. She was last seen inside the Institute. We’ve searched the entire place. We haven’t found her, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t here. Now you listen to me,” the chief continued. “I have a couple of police officers in the main office upstairs. I can either call them down here to remove you bodily. Or you can do this my way.”

  Slade glanced toward the file cabinets. They didn’t look as if they’d been broken into. Yet. “You’d better go ahead and call your officers down here.” He started to step past the cop.

  The chief swore at he grabbed Slade’s arm. “You want to add resisting arrest to all the other charges against you?”

  They glared at each other for a long moment. Slade wondered if Norma had told the chief everything? It didn’t seem the time to bring up her confession. Slade suspected her liaison with his father was one of the reasons the chief had never let himself get too close to Slade and Shelley. Or maybe it was just the cop’s nature.

  Curtis let out a sigh. “Well, at least don’t jeopardize Holly’s life with your damned foolishness. Until Carolyn Gray is found, I want Holly with those two policemen upstairs—no argument,” he snapped when Holly started to protest. “I’ll take her up myself. When I get back down, I’ll let you be present while I search the lab. That’s the deal and believe me, it’s a better deal than you deserve.”

  Slade saw his chance to be left alone here to search on his own. “He’s right, Hol,” he said quickly. “I’ll feel much better knowing you’re safe.” Hurriedly, he pulled her to him and whispered, “I have a better chance of finding something without the chief here.”

  She kissed him and nodded, obviously not liking it but realizing if she didn’t go along with it, the cop would force them both to go with him. “Be careful.”

  “Always.”

  “Come on,” the chief said. “Wait right here,” he ordered Slade. “You touch anything and it will be inadmissible as evidence.”

  He was no longer looking for evidence. He just wanted his baby. “Got it.”

  Curtis shot him a look. “I mean it, Slade. I’ll put your ass behind bars so fast your head will swim.”

  Slade waited until Curtis and Holly disappeared through the locked doors and around the corner before he hurried into the lab.

  The room was large with ceiling-high cabinets along the left wall, what looked like a huge walk-in cooler at the rear and a lab setup and office off to the right. Someone had broken a lot of the glassware and smashed some of the equipment. Strange, it looked more like vandalism than anything else. Certainly not the kind of thing he thought Carolyn Gray would do to cover her trail.

  Slade moved to the desk and quickly checked the drawers. Nothing of interest. But on the wall over the desk was a plaque that read:

  The question of genetic quality of the coming generations is a hundred times more important than t
he conflict between capitalism and socialism and a thousand times more important than the struggle between Germany and other countries.

  Fritz Lenz, leading German eugenicist.

  Next to it was another:

  Eugenics: the movement devoted to improving the human species through the control of hereditary factors in mating.

  Sweet heaven.

  He turned to the row of steel file cabinets. This time, he doubted he’d find a key on Lorraine’s ring. He was right. No key.

  He glanced around for something to try to pry open the cabinets with. He found a metal letter opener in the top desk drawer, broke each of the locks and drew out one drawer after another.

  They were all empty.

  Whoever had cleaned them out had a key. So why bother to make it look like the place had been vandalized? Unless whoever had done it was in a hurry and didn’t have the time or patience to break the locks on the files.

  Had Carolyn had the key all along? Slade doubted it. She must have taken it from Dr. Delaney. No wonder they hadn’t been able to find the keys to his Suburban.

  He glanced over at the cabinets lining the wall across the room, doubting Carolyn had left anything. She’d known exactly what she was looking for, it seemed.

  And yet, his only hope was that she might have missed something. He started toward the cabinets, slowing as he spotted something dark pooling beneath one of the far cabinets.

  He pulled the weapon from his pocket and moved cautiously toward the cabinet.

  HOLLY BARELY HEARD what Chief L. T. Curtis said as she walked beside him down the hall. All she could think about was Slade back there alone in the lab. She hadn’t wanted to leave him, but she knew that if she hadn’t, Curtis would have forced them both to go. Selfishly, all she could hope was that Slade would find what they needed. A lead to their daughter.

  Let Curtis bring down Carolyn Gray and see that she got her proper punishment. Holly just wanted her daughter—and Slade.