“The Obstetrics and Gynecology Department,” I said aloud, and rechecked the name at the top of the page.
Kells, Deborah S.
“ ‘Patient conceived intrauterine pregnancy. Patient experienced miscarriage. Required termination.’ ”
“I counted six miscarriages in there so far,” Jamie said. “Then I skipped ahead. She was diagnosed with idiopathic infertility—they didn’t know what was causing it.”
“So . . .”
Jamie shrugged. “I don’t know what it means exactly. We need more.”
I looked at the dates of the records—1991, 1992, 1993. And that was just in this folder.
“Should we skip ahead?” Jamie asked.
“To when?”
“I want to know how she ended up working at Horizons.”
Jamie was right. Without fully realizing it, we’d been reading her file to find the answer to just one question: Why? Why had she brought us there? Why had she tortured us? If there was a reason, it wouldn’t be in her kindergarten records. We needed to find out how she’d found out about Horizons in the first place. And who had recruited her.
Jamie rifled through some of the other folders and picked up small little envelopes with discs in them. “CDs?” He turned them over. “No. DVDs,” he said. “ ‘DSK Interviews 11-3-1999, 10-2-1999, 09-2-1999 . . . What the . . . ?”
“DSK,” I said. “Deborah Susan Kells.”
Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Right. How far do you think these go back?”
I dipped my hands into the file folder Jamie had found them in. There were dozens. “To ’98, I think.”
Jamie stood and looked in another folder. “There’s ’96 and ’97 in here.”
We kept looking through folder after folder and eventually realized that the earliest DVDs were from 1994, beginning not long after the medical records ended.
“I’m kind of dying to watch these,” I said.
“Me too.”
“They’re set at around the same time every month—some kind of experiment, maybe?” That would fit with what we knew about her. Maybe Dr. Kells’s first test subject had been herself.
“Maybe.”
“We should bring them with us.”
“All of them?”
I gestured to the room. “Well, we can’t watch them here.”
Jamie stood and opened the door, then turned to me. “Should we go look for more?”
We should. “I want to see how many there are. And if there are any from this year.” She might have talked about us. She might have talked about me.
Just as we gathered up some of the files and left the stuffy little room, we ran into Daniel and Stella.
Daniel took a dramatic step back. “What’s up?”
“We found something,” I said, and then Jamie began to talk.
40
WOW,” DANIEL SAID AS HE walked into the brownstone. “What does your aunt do?”
“Teacher,” Jamie said. “She made intelligent real estate decisions.”
“That she did.”
“I’m hungry,” Stella announced. “Anyone else?”
“Starving,” I said, realizing it just then. We hadn’t eaten anything the whole day.
“Should we order in?” she asked.
Daniel shook his head.“The less attention we attract, the better.”
He was right, so we managed to scrounge together a meal out of the junk we’d bought at the bodega down the street. Daniel divvied up the file folders between us and, taskmaster that he was, told us to get reading. But I wanted to watch the videos first.
Daniel dug his heels in. “We’ll get more done if we split up the work.”
“Split it up however you want,” I told him. “But I’m calling the interviews.”
“I want to watch too,” Jamie said.
Daniel looked at Stella, who held up her hands in defeat. “We bought popcorn,” she said. “Should I make popcorn?”
“This isn’t movie night,” Daniel grumbled.
I couldn’t help my smile. “Yes,” I told Stella. And then, to complete the picture, Jamie fetched blankets and tossed them at us. “Where do you want to start?” Jamie asked me as Stella walked in with a bowl of popcorn.
“What’s the first one we’ve got?”
Jamie shuffled the little DVD envelopes and announced, “January eighth, 1994.”
“That one, then.”
Jamie dutifully popped the DVD into his aunt’s Xbox (I very much wanted to meet this aunt), turned out the lights, and plopped down in an armchair.
There was static at first, and then it cleared to reveal a very young-looking Dr. Kells sitting at a small card table in front of a pea-green-and-off-white-striped wall. It looked familiar. After a moment I realized why.
It was the room from the video of her I’d seen in the Horizons Testing Facility, the one she’d used to trick me into searching for her, so she could lure me into the containment room. It had been there since 1994.
“State your name for the record,” a male voice said. I didn’t recognize it.
“Is this a deposition?” Daniel asked. I shushed him.
“Deborah Susan Kells.”
“Have you ever gone by any other name?”
“My maiden name,” Dr. Kells said.
“And what is that?”
“Lowe.”
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
“No fucking way,” Jamie said.
It wasn’t possible. I’d met Jude and Claire’s parents. I’d seen them at the funeral and memorial service. I’d—
“What is your date of birth?”
“Wait, someone pause this, we must discuss,” Jamie said as Dr. Kells started to recite what sounded like addresses.
“Where’s the remote? Fuck!”
“Degrees conferred?”
“I was awarded a PhD in genetics from Harvard, and my first postdoc appointment was at—”
Dr. Kells paused midword. Jamie left his hand extended while pointing at the television. “So okay,” he said. “Deborah Susan Lowe. As in—”
“Jude Lowe,” Daniel said.
“What the fuck, guys,” I said. “What. The. Fuck.”
Jamie looked taken aback. “Who would marry that bitch?”
“I’ve met Jude and Claire’s mother, though,” I said thinly. “I’ve met her and their dad. And I went to their house.” Then I remembered something—something Noah had said. “But . . . it wasn’t their house.”
Daniel cocked his head. “What are you talking about?”
“Noah went there before Horizons,” I said. “Before . . .” I held up my wrists. Daniel flinched as if I’d hit him.
“To Laurelton? Seriously?”
I nodded. “To try to find Jude’s parents, to see if they knew anything, when we thought he was hunting me. But they weren’t there,” I said. “Jude’s parents, I mean. The people who answered the door said they’d owned the house for the past eighteen years. Noah thought I’d given him the wrong address.”
“So okay.” Stella held up a finger. “If the people you thought were his parents weren’t really his parents,” Stella said, “who were they?”
“Jesus, how far does this go back?” Jamie looked nervous.
“Jude and Claire moved to Laurelton a year before they died,” I said. “Claire was in my grade, but Jude—”
“Was in mine,” Daniel said.
“Did you know him?” Stella asked.
“Not well,” my brother said uncomfortably. “I should have. Maybe if I’d known him better, I could’ve—”
“No,” I said quickly. “Even you wouldn’t have guessed this.”
“What, though?” Jamie asked. “I mean, we were just looking at pages of records of miscarried pregnancies. You think she’s his mother?”
I thought back to every interaction I’d had with Dr. Kells, rifling through my memories for a clue, a hint, anything. But every time I’d talked to her, she’d been dispassionate. Clinical.
Except for the last time, anyway.
“Lowe isn’t really an uncommon name,” Jamie said.