Hush

about. Do not call here again. Do you understand?”

A hard click followed. Damn, Lake thought. She’d blown her chance. She should have talked to Archer first and plotted out a clear strategy. Now everything rested again on what she could find in the files.

Feeling drained, she wandered into the living room and sank onto the couch. The drapes were pulled and the room was dim. She swung her legs up on the seat and closed her eyes. The last thing she remembered was Smokey hopping up next to her and nuzzling her face.

When she woke, she felt sticky, and her mind was fuzzy. She glanced nervously at her watch, worried about how long she’d slept. It was just after four. She had the odd sensation that a noise had woken her, though Smokey was nowhere in sight. She listened carefully. Then she heard the sound of her BlackBerry, ringing softly from the kitchen, where she’d left it. She shot up awkwardly from the couch and hurried to answer it. Maybe it’s Archer, she thought. But the screen said “caller unknown.”

“Lake,” a woman said.

“Yes,” Lake said quietly. She didn’t recognize the voice.

“This is Melanie Turnbull.”

Lake nearly gasped in surprise.

“Hello,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about your call,” Melanie said. “And actually I do think we should talk.”

“Thank you,” Lake said, still taken aback. “As I said before, Dr. Keaton-”

“In person, though. I don’t want to do this over the phone. And as soon as possible.”

“Of course,” Lake said. “You tell me when and where.”

“Tonight. I want to get this over with.”

Lake winced. She wouldn’t be done with the presentation until at least seven.

“I have a little hitch tonight. I have to work until around seven.”

“That’s not a problem. I don’t want to do it until I’ve put my daughter to bed, anyway. At around nine?”

“Okay. Where should we meet?”

“I can’t come all the way into Manhattan so it’s going to have to be in Dumbo.” She gave the name of a restaurant on Front Street and said she’d meet her at the bar.

“Uh, that’s fine,” Lake said, jotting down the information. Melanie told her that she was tall with shoulder- length blond hair. Then she brusquely ended the call.

Lake felt like sobbing with relief. The fact that Melanie had called her had to mean something.

There were some logistics to work out. As long as she left the clinic at around seven-thirty she would reach the restaurant in time. Taking the subway there would be a hassle, though, involving at least one transfer, and it would be tough to find a taxi at that hour, and then again when heading back home. The smartest approach, she realized, would be to take her car. That meant driving to the clinic. She needed to get moving.

By the time she parked her car in a garage on the East Side, Lake felt fried. Traffic had been awful and the trip had taken longer than expected. She was wearing a black skirt and a pink jacket, and they both already looked rumpled, as if she’d picked them from a pile of worn clothes on the floor. But as she hurried down the street she knew she had bigger concerns tonight.

There were a few patients bunched at the reception desk and she skirted around them, heading directly toward the back. No one was at the nurses’ station, indicating that the staff was involved with patients. As she turned one corner she saw the backs of two people in scrubs emerging from the OR-Sherman and Perkins, it looked like.

As soon as she entered the large conference room, her stomach began to roil. The last time she had been in this room was when Levin had announced Keaton’s murder and Hull and McCarty sat there like predators anxious to pick up a scent.

After unpacking her tote bag, she hooked up her laptop so that it fed into the flat-screen TV on the wall. Next she distributed pads and pencils around the table, a touch that a former boss had always insisted on. When she was done, she ran through the PowerPoint presentation.

“You’re early.”

Lake spun around and saw that the comment had come from Brie, who was standing in the doorway. Great, she thought. Brie had probably been sent to watch her like a hawk.

“I just wanted to run through my slides on the big screen,” Lake said, hearing the defensiveness in her voice and hating it.

“No problem,” Brie said, weirdly chipper for her. She was wearing a slim black dress and her lips were painted a nude color that made them almost recede into her face. “Everyone’s still finishing up with patients, so six-thirty is the earliest we can start.”

“Perfect,” Lake said, trying to smile. “Excuse me, you said everyone-who do you mean? Isn’t it just Dr. Levin and Dr. Sherman?”

“Dr. Levin asked a few others to join them. He thought it would be great to get their feedback.” Still that unnatural cheeriness. “Did you figure out how to hook up your laptop okay?”

“Um, yes, thanks,” Lake said.

“Well, just let me know if you need any help. I’m going to be in Dr. Hoss’s office going over a few things.”

As Brie left, closing the door behind her, Lake pressed the tips of her fingers to her lips, thinking. Why was Brie acting so helpful? Was it because Lake’s work was almost done and she’d soon be out of Brie’s hair-or was something more sinister afoot? Maybe the geniality was an offshoot of devilish glee because Brie knew Lake was in trouble. In any case, Lake couldn’t worry about that now. She had to focus on sneaking into the file room, which she had fifteen minutes to do. The good news was that it sounded like Brie would be ensconced in Hoss’s office.

Lake slipped out of the conference room and looked both ways up and down the hall. No one was in sight. Quickly she made her way to the file room. This time she didn’t bother with the stepladder ruse. It hadn’t worked before anyway and she needed to make dead certain no one saw her this time. She shut the door firmly behind her.

She went to the drawers and quickly found the Turnbull chart. It wasn’t as thick as the Hunt chart, and as she thumbed quickly through the pages she saw that Melanie had indeed undergone two IVF procedures, the second resulting in a pregnancy. Though it was difficult to completely decipher the doctors’ notations, it seemed that only six eggs had been harvested the first time and only one embryo had made it to day three, which Lake knew was the first point it was viable to transfer embryos to the uterus for implantation. The low number wasn’t surprising if Melanie was in her forties, as Alexis had suggested, but it also meant that the chances of a pregnancy were very slim. The next IVF, however, produced eight eggs and six viable embryos. What a nice surprise, Lake thought mockingly. If Alexis was right, this was when her embryos had been used because Sherman realized Melanie had little chance on her own.

What Lake didn’t see was any notation that seemed to link this chart to another. She would have to pull Alexis’s chart and compare them side by side. But first she flipped to the front of the file to check Melanie’s age. According to her birth date, she’d been forty-one at the time of her first in vitro. As Lake started to lay the file down on top of the open drawer, she noticed several letters, written in pencil, by Melanie’s name on her information form. BLb. It was similar to what she’d spotted in the Kastners’ file, but with different letters, she thought. Her eyes jerked toward Melanie’s husband’s name. BLg. Was this the code that linked one couple to another?

She glanced at her watch. To her shock, it was 6:28. She needed to look at Alexis’s file again, but she’d run out of time. Suddenly, from behind the door, she heard the muffled sounds of conversation. She froze. But the sound soon receded and she dropped the chart back into place. Lake eased the door open, peeking cautiously into the hall-no one was there-and quickly slipped from the room. Her heart was thumping so hard, she could hear the sound it made. As she hurried back to the conference room she could feel that the inside of her jacket was sticky with sweat.

Steve was the first to arrive for the presentation, only seconds after Lake had returned to the room. Lake felt a momentary rush of relief. Surely she could count on him to be supportive tonight.

“I’m so sorry about yesterday evening,” he said quietly. “There were some complications with a patient.”

“Did everything turn out all right?”

“Yes, thankfully. Hilary said you weren’t feeling well.”

“Oh-it was just a very bad headache. I’m better now.”