by Jance, J. A.
Ali felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. She knew that smell. She had encountered it before—at the hospital when Dean was dying. “Kidney failure,” Ali murmured. “Acute kidney failure.”
Nodding, Jolene dabbed tears from her eyes. “Robert went to talk to the park ranger and was told the nearest ER was forty miles away in West Yellowstone. The ranger offered to call for a helicopter, but Robert figured if we left right then, we’d be able to get her to help faster than waiting around for them to send in an air ambulance. Even so, by the time we got her to the ER, it was too late. Cindy was gone.”
“And your husband?” Ali asked, fearing the worst.
“Robert never got over it,” Jolene answered. “He blamed himself for not calling for the helicopter. He committed suicide two years later. That’s what his death certificate says, but as far as I’m concerned, he died of a broken heart.”
Ali was stunned to silence. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say. The word “sorry” simply didn’t cover a heartbreak of this magnitude.
“I heard your talk at the luncheon,” Jolene went on after a bit. “Thank you for doing that, by the way. As you can well imagine, I’m involved in the Kidney Foundation. I run the local chapter in the Village. I raise money. I donate. One of my friends mentioned the upcoming piece on L.A. Evening, and of course I watched. I also watched the follow-up two nights later. As soon as I saw those two red-haired young men standing together, I was almost sick to my stomach. Robert had red hair, and so when we were shopping through the donor book, we specifically looked for a red-haired donor. That’s the one we picked, but do you know who else had red hair back then?”
“Who?” Ali asked.
“Dr. Edward Gilchrist.”
Again the hair rose on the back of Ali’s neck. “What are you saying?” she asked. “Do you think he was substituting his sperm for his donors’ sperm?”
“Don’t you?” Jolene replied.
Ali was appalled at the very idea. “Is he still in business?”
Jolene nodded. “That’s what I wanted to know, so I checked first thing this morning, before I got ready to come here. I called the office and asked if Dr. Gilchrist was accepting new patients. The person who answered the phone said, ‘Yes, he is.’ ”
Ali glanced at her watch. She had spent more time than she should have and was already late. “I’ve got to go get ready now,” she said. “But if you wouldn’t mind waiting until after I finish up with the evening news, there’s someone I want you to meet.”
“Alexandra Munsey?”
“Yes, I’ll call her and see if she could meet us for a bite of dinner.”
“I’d like that,” Jolene said. “I’d like that very much.”
8
Burbank, California, May 2003
Alex was at the station by the time Ali’s stint on the evening news was over. That night it was just the three of them—Ali, Alex, and Jolene. The next day, when they added Cassie Davis to the mix, the three moms made as unlikely a set of Three Musketeers as you can imagine. There was the prim and proper widow from Westlake Village, the concerned mother still fighting the good fight to see her son’s organ transplant through to completion, and the tough-as-nails lesbian lady who looked as though she’d just stepped out of a dusty horse corral—which happened to be true. Cassie worked for a man who trained Thoroughbred racehorses on a swath of land in Orange County that had once been covered with citrus groves.
The three women soon became fast friends. When it came time for Evan’s kidney transplant in early June, all three of them gathered at the hospital together. Since Ali was an integral part of the story, she was invited to come along, too. When the dual operations were over and both Evan and Rory were in the recovery room, Ali watched as Alex and Jake Munsey went in to see him. A few minutes later, a pale-faced Jake emerged from the recovery room, walking through the waiting room without exchanging a word with anyone. Not long after that, Alex came out as well. As soon as Ali saw the stricken expression on Alex’s face, her heart fell.
“What’s happened?” Ali asked, hurrying up to her.
“He’s gone,” Alex choked, bursting into tears. “Gone.”
“But I thought the surgeon said Evan was okay,” Ali objected, “that he’d come through the operation in good shape.”
“Not Evan,” Alex managed. “Jake. He’s leaving me. He wants a divorce.”
A few minutes later, while the other women were still trying to comfort Alex, Rory’s mother, Emma, came out of the recovery room as well. During the course of the operation, Emma and her former partner, Cassie, had stayed on opposite sides of the room, like boxers stuck to their respective corners. This time, rather than avoiding Cassie, Emma walked straight to her. “Rory says he’d like to see you now. You can go in.”
After leaving the hospital that night, Ali drove back to the station to give the viewers who’d been avidly following the Rory and Evan story an update on the successful transplant operations. Later that night, driving home to Robert Lane, she was struck by the stark contrasts the day had presented for that whole cast of participants.
According to the doctors involved, it looked as though the surgeries themselves had been entirely successful. Ali hoped that the few words of reconciliation exchanged between Cassie and Emma and between Cassie and her son were signs of better things to come for that set of fractured relationships. And yet, on a day that had finally seen the happy conclusion of Alex’s long fight to save her son’s life, she had also had to come face-to-face with the end of her marriage. But isn’t that the way life works? Ali wondered. Good news and bad news always seemed to be rolled up into one complex, multicolored ball of yarn.
For the next several months after the transplants, Ali Reynolds had watched the activity from afar as Alex, Jolene, and Cassie embarked on their next battle—a concerted effort to bring down Dr. Edward Gilchrist.
That was about the time Ali’s own life plunged off track.
The following January, one night after the eleven o’clock news, the station’s new news director, a hotshot young guy named Cliff Baker—the guy considered to be the network’s next golden boy—came looking for her. He caught up with her out in the hallway for a late-night ambush in which he let her know that she was yesterday’s news and that her days as an anchor were over. Baker blamed Ali’s dismissal on falling ratings, of course, and the fact that it was “time to take the station in a new direction.” But Ali knew as well as Cliff did that the ratings—hers especially—hadn’t changed all that much. She suspected that her dismissal had far more to do with the advent of high-def television broadcasting—a hypervisual venue in which the slightest blemish was there for all to see. In those kinds of circumstances, it was common for female newscasters to reach their pull-by dates far earlier than their male counterparts.
At the end of his late-night tirade, Baker had her summarily escorted from the building. With the rest of the newsroom staff looking on in stone-cold silence, Ali had been required to hand over her key to the building, her elevator pass, her name badge. Finally she’d loaded her personal effects from her office into a banker’s box. The man designated to escort her out of the building was Eddie Duarte, the station’s nighttime security guard. For years he had been the person who’d watched over her as she made her way out to her vehicle in the parking lot at the conclusion of her newscasts. That night he saw her out of the building and safely to her car in the parking lot, but this time she was going into exile rather than just going home from work, and Eddie was lugging her banker’s box. He was also the only person at the station who ever expressed a word of regret over the way she was being treated.
Ali had gone home that night, expecting some show of sympathy from her husband, but none was forthcoming. Paul Grayson worked for the network. For all Ali knew, Cliff Baker was one of Paul’s personal hires. In the course of their conversation that evening, it became painfully obvious that Paul had known well in advance that Ali was about to be handed he
r walking papers, and he hadn’t had the simple decency or the courage to offer her a word of warning.
For Ali that was the last straw. Her marriage to Paul had been in a downward spiral for a long time. Her work on the Rory/Evan story had rekindled her love for her job, but it had done nothing for her relationship with her husband. She’d known it would come to a head eventually, but with Chris still in school, inertia had taken over and it had been easier to stay put and do nothing.
But that night when Paul had walked away from her, leaving her alone in her misery, his slamming the door behind him had been the final catalyst, one that prodded her into overcoming her reluctance to make some necessary changes. The very next day, she started emptying her closets of all the clothes she had accumulated over time, packing them into bags and delivering them to a charity she had done work with over the years, My Sister’s Closets. Out of curiosity’s sake, she tuned in to the noon news to see what, if anything, would be said about her sudden departure. Instead she saw a promo touting the arrival of the pert young thing who had clearly already been vetted and was due to be Ali’s on-air replacement.
Weeks later, offended by the idea that someone in her late forties would be sacked from the station, Ali met with an attorney and launched the process of filing a wrongful-dismissal suit based on age and sexual discrimination. She had arrived at the house that evening in time to learn that her best friend from high school back home in Cottonwood, Arizona, Irene Holzer Bernard, who’d been reported missing several days earlier, had been found dead in the wreckage of her vehicle on a snowy mountain road north of Sedona. That very evening Ali and Chris had set off for Ali’s hometown so she could be there to support Reenie’s widower and their two kids.
Two critical pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place on that momentous drive home. Along the way Paul had called, demanding that she drop the lawsuit against the station for fear it might adversely affect his career. A few miles later, Chris had unleashed the real bombshell—the shocking news that Paul had been carrying on simultaneous affairs with both his personal assistant, April Gaddis, and Ali’s PA as well.
Those illicit relationships might have been apparent to everyone else, but they had been invisible to Ali, and for her, learning about them was also the last straw. Driving east through the barren desert landscape, Ali understood firsthand exactly how Alex Munsey must have felt that night in Evan’s recovery room when Jake had told Alex that their marriage was over and he wanted a divorce.
In this case Christopher had been the one who’d delivered the bad news—Paul had been too much of a gutless wonder. Ali had left L.A. thinking she was going home to deal with Reenie’s funeral. Now, she decided, she was going there for good. A year or so before, she had inherited her Aunt Evie’s double-wide mobile home on Sedona’s Andante Drive. When the mobile had come her way, Ali’s intention had been to go home long enough to help her mother sort through Aunt Evie’s belongings in advance of selling the place. Fortunately, she had never quite gotten around to carrying through on that.
For the past seven years, she’d led what had seemed on the outside to be a charmed life of apparent luxury. Instead, she realized now, she’d been trapped in a reality that had been little more than a gilded cage. Some people might have considered the prospect of abandoning a literal mansion on Robert Lane in favor of a double-wide in a mobile-home development called Sky View Terrace as a huge step down, but Ali didn’t see it that way. In fact, from where she was right then, living alone in humbler surroundings sounded more like heaven. Aunt Evie, bless her heart, had provided her niece with a priceless gift—a place to go—a haven where Ali could regroup, regain her strength, and figure out what the hell she was going to do with the rest of her life.
Yes, on that day in March Ali left both Paul Grayson and her life in California in her rearview mirror. She turned her back on them and slammed the door shut without giving either one of them so much as a second thought.
9
Santa Clarita, California, June 2003
As Alex Munsey, Jolene Browder, and Cassie Davis went to war with their former fertility physician, the first battles were little more than minor skirmishes. They had approached Dr. Gilchrist’s office en masse, with the three of them carpooling to Santa Clarita together, riding in Jolene’s Buick. Jolene and Cassie gave the young blond receptionist their names and requested access to their records. She disappeared into a back room and was gone for what seemed like a very long time. When she finally returned, they were given the news that the files for the other two women were, like Alex’s, also among the missing.
“It must be some kind of clerical error,” she told them. “According to Dr. Gilchrist, when the office converted from paper records to electronic ones in the nineties, some of the files dating from the eighties inexplicably disappeared and couldn’t be retrieved.”
“You expect us to believe they just went missing?” Cassie demanded. “We’d like to hear that from Dr. Gilchrist himself.”
“Sorry,” was the answer. “He’s currently out of the office and unable to meet with you. If you’d like to schedule an appointment . . .”
Had Edward Gilchrist bothered to speak to them—if he had acknowledged their concerns—things might have been different—but the three women left his office in a state of outrage.
“Clerical error my ass!” Cassie exclaimed once they were back in the car and headed south. “What a bunch of hogwash!”
“And delivered with a totally straight face,” Jolene added. “The man downright lied to us back when we were his patients, and that woman in there is lying to us now. What Edward Gilchrist did wasn’t just medical malpractice, it was out-and-out fraud, and yet here he is, still in business when he ought to be in jail.”
“Right,” Cassie said. “Remember that so-called catalog they showed us? I’ll bet all those photos and profiles were phony as three-dollar bills.”
“And I can already predict what’s going to happen if we go after Gilchrist,” Jolene continued. “He’ll claim the only reason our kids are related is due to the fact he used the same sperm donor on each of us. Never in a million years will he admit that he was the clinic’s primary sperm donor, and without access to our records and with no DNA evidence to back up our claim, he knows we’ve got no proof, so what do we do now?”
They were heading south on Interstate 5, inching along in rush-hour traffic toward Alex’s apartment complex in Sherman Oaks. With the Munseys’ divorce still pending, she had moved out of the house and into a nearby studio. She and Jake had agreed that Evan would stay on in the house, but for the time being a tiny apartment nearby was all she needed. And that was where they were heading now—back to the apartment where they’d met up earlier in the morning.
For several minutes after Jolene asked that question, no one spoke. “I’ll bet we can find more DNA,” Alex said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think we’re the only ones Gilchrist tricked?”
“Not on your life,” Cassie muttered. “There are bound to be others. I’m betting we’re just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Think about our three kids,” Alex continued. “Evan, Rory, and Cindy. They’re all still relatively young, or they would be, and yet two out of three of them have already had serious issues—fatal in one case—with kidney disease, and we all know that a propensity for kidney disease can be passed from parent to child.”
“If I remember correctly, all the catalog profiles included health overviews,” Jolene said thoughtfully. “It seems to me that the donors were described as being in excellent health.”
“But those were all the pretend donors,” Alex said. “What about the real donor? We never saw a catalog listing for Edward Gilchrist. What if there’s a history of kidney disease lurking on his family tree? And what if any other children he might have fathered are also unknowingly susceptible to the same thing?”
A moment of silence followed before Cassie murmured sadly, “And poor Rory
’s already down to one.”
That quiet comment from the backseat crystallized the whole issue for all of them, framing it in another light entirely. This was no longer just about the three of them—about Edward Gilchrist lying to them and withholding their medical records. Suddenly the situation was much bigger and much more significant. Now other lives were involved, along with other families potentially facing the same kind of heartbreaks and hurdles that Jolene Browder’s and Alex Munsey’s families had endured.
“If people know they’re prone to kidney disease,” Jolene said, “there are preventive measures they can take, and if they’re warned in advance, they can be on the lookout for the onset of symptoms before they become deadly. So what do we do?”
“We find those other people,” Alex said simply, “Edward Gilchrist’s other patients. We find them and their children and warn them.”
“How?” Cassie asked.
Alex responded to the question by asking one of her own. “How did the three of us meet?”
“We met because of your interview with Ali Reynolds, of course,” Jolene replied. “Without you and Evan showing up on L.A. Evening, none of us would have had a clue.”
“Exactly,” Alex agreed. “And that’s what we need now—more publicity.”
“Should we call Ali Reynolds?” Cassie asked. “I’ll bet she’d help us in a heartbeat.”
“We need to fight our own battles. We should hit the bricks on our own and find other media outlets so we can let people know,” Alex told them. “We have to get out and see the people.”
When they arrived at Alex’s place in Sherman Oaks that evening, a fire had been lit under all three of them, and Cassie and Jolene weren’t nearly ready to head home. Instead they all went inside and gathered around Alex’s tiny kitchen table to brainstorm.
