On one hand, Zachary was anxious about meeting Pat’s family, but the other part of his brain was occupied with trying to unwind the problem of Forest McLachlan. Where had he gone? Had he been warned of the investigation and fled? Or had he been taken against his will? He was comforted by the fact that there was no blood or sign of violence at the man’s apartment, but the phone and packed bag were out of place. They didn’t fit with the idea that McLachlan had just left of his own accord.
The police would probably reach out to his friends and family, see whether anyone knew where he was or if they had any concerns. But what if no one knew anything and the trail got cold? What if the BOLO on his car never turned anything up?
Was it possible that Gordon had been involved in Forest’s disappearance?
As things stood, Zachary wasn’t about to call Gordon again. His client had still not returned his text message from that morning but, considering what he might have to say about Zachary’s unfortunate call to the house, Zachary figured he could use some time to cool down before they spoke.
There was nothing more Zachary could do for Gordon that evening. The case was, more than likely, closed. Gordon had all of the information that it would be possible to gather for him.
30
I think they’re here,” Lorne called out, peering out the window of the living room. “Yes, that’s them. Pat!”
Pat hurried out of the kitchen, wiping damp hands on the towel over his shoulder. He smoothed his already-perfect hair and raised eyebrows at Zachary.
“This is it!”
Zachary swallowed and nodded.
“You don’t need to look like I’m throwing you to the lions,” Pat said with a grin. “Really, they’re not going to eat you.”
He walked to the door and threw it open to greet his family.
He ushered an older woman into the house. While Zachary knew she must be in at least her seventies, she didn’t look it. She had black hair and pink cheeks and not very many wrinkles. She stood up straight, her full height about even with Zachary’s.
Patrick’s sister was a younger, softer, taller version of her mother. Her hair was a little lighter, but Zachary suspected they probably were both dye jobs. Pat himself was starting to go gray, his appearance at odds with the way Zachary still pictured him when they were apart, as the broad-shouldered, athletic-looking man in his mid-thirties that he had been when they had first met. Not a lot about him had changed in his appearance, aside from the graying temples and some fine lines around his eyes and mouth.
After hugging both women, Pat ushered them over to meet Zachary.
“Zachary, I’d like to introduce Gretta and Suzanne Parker, my mom and sister. Mom, Suzie: Zachary Goldman.”
“A pleasure to meet you,” Gretta said immediately, holding out a hand to shake Zachary’s. He took her firm, dry hand, and hoped that his was not too clammy by comparison. He turned to shake Suzanne’s hand as well, but she put her arms around him and pulled him in for a hug.
“No need for formalities!” she insisted. “You’re family, right?”
Zachary was startled, but submitted to the hug and stepped back slightly when she released him. He smiled at her.
“Yes. Family,” he agreed.
“Let me have a look at my grandson,” Gretta said, giving Suzanne a little nudge to the side. She gazed into Zachary’s face, her eyes sharp, but not critical. “There’s not much of a family resemblance, is there?” she cracked.
Everyone laughed. Zachary shook his head. “Afraid not. It’s very nice to meet you.”
“Well, it probably should not have taken this long,” Gretta admitted. She gave a little sigh and looked up at her son. “We lost a lot of years, and I have no one to blame but myself for that.”
“And Dad,” Suzanne reminded her.
“I should have stood up to him. Should have said that I just wasn’t putting up with that nonsense. But… I thought…” She looked at Pat again, apologetic. “Well, twenty years ago, we had some very different views on homosexuality. There were a lot of proponents for tough love, conversion therapy, keeping gays out of the churches, that kind of thing. We were told that if we made our position clear and refused to associate with Patrick as long as he was ‘acting out,’ that he would come to see the errors of his ways.”
Pat shook his head ruefully. “I did want to see you,” he told her firmly. “But… I had to be who I am.”
“We heard about families that it had worked for,” Gretta said. “They just held out for a few months… or a couple of years… and eventually, their wayward child came back again. Settled down, got married, had babies.”
“And were miserable,” Pat said. “I knew a lot of gay men and women who died, too. They couldn’t bear being cut off from their families, but they couldn’t be what society expected them to be. They couldn’t live with the pain.”
Gretta’s mouth turned downward in a deep frown. Zachary didn’t know if he would have had the courage to say something like that to her. To point out how much pain their decision had caused Pat over the years.
“Let’s sit down,” Mr. Peterson suggested, motioning to the living room.
“Actually, if you want to go straight to the table, everything is ready to go,” Pat announced. He pulled the towel off of his shoulder, smiling. “Lorne, you get everyone settled and I’ll bring out the food.”
The painful moment put behind them, everyone cheered up and moved to the table, excited to dig into the ravioli that smelled so heavenly.
“Did you teach him to cook?” Zachary asked Gretta. “He really has a talent for it.”
“Only the basics. I wanted my kids to be able to look after themselves. The rest he’s taught himself. My mother was an excellent cook. Maybe he got it from her.”
“I remember cooking with Bubba,” Pat said, bringing a covered dish to the table. “She made such good food!”
“She did,” Gretta agreed. Suzanne nodded.
They got settled around the table, Zachary sitting with Mr. Peterson on his right so that he had an anchor among the unfamiliar faces. There was some light chatter as Pat finished bringing the various dishes to the dining room table. They all exclaimed over each dish as it was uncovered and passed around.
“Now, you know you don’t have to cook fancy every time we come,” Gretta said sternly. “We can eat sandwiches or macaroni or a frozen pizza. It’s the company we want; you don’t have to spend hours in the kitchen for us.”
“Not that we don’t like this,” Suzanne inserted.
“Of course, we love this. Who wouldn’t?” Gretta agreed. “But you don’t have to do something special every time. And sometime, you can come home and I will cook for you. Or not cook for you. Depending on how I feel.”
Zachary could see where Pat got his down-to-earth nature. He’d always made Zachary feel comfortable and at home, no matter what Zachary threw at him.
“I enjoy cooking. It relaxes me. And this meal is special, because it’s the first time that you and Zachary have met.”
“Yes,” Gretta agreed. “Just don’t feel like you’ve set a precedent that you have to follow every time. So far, we’ve only had special occasions, but at some point, we’ll want to have just casual visits too.”
Zachary knew he had put too much of the intoxicating food on his plate. He’d never be able to eat it all. But he didn’t want to look like he didn’t appreciate it, either. If everybody else had full plates and he only had a couple of spoonfuls of food, they might think that he didn’t appreciate the work that Pat had done or that he was a picky eater.
Mr. Peterson glanced at his plate and raised an eyebrow, fully aware that Zachary would never eat that much.
“Patrick said that you’re a private detective,” Gretta said, looking across the table at Zachary and taking a bite of pasta.
“Yes,” Zachary agreed. “But don’t think that it’s the romanticized job that you see on TV. It isn’t anything like that.”
“I don’t
imagine so!” Gretta agreed. “I’ve always thought those shows were pretty unbelievable. But they are entertaining. So what kind of a private detective are you? What sorts of files do you get?”
“A variety,” Zachary said with a shrug. He took a small bite of the cheese ravioli, which melted in his mouth. “Mmm,” he looked over at Pat, “this is wonderful.” Then back to Gretta. “I don’t do a lot of high-profile cases. Mostly small stuff. Surveilling spouses or employees. Doing accident scene reconstruction. Skip tracing. Those are the bread and butter, jobs that will always be around.”
“But you have done some murders and others that have made it into the media. I’ve seen some of the coverage. And you helped with that poor boy that Patrick knew.”
“Yes.” Zachary glanced over at Pat, not wanting to make him feel bad about what had happened to Jose. “I have done a few of those cases.”
“What are you working on right now? Anything interesting?”
Zachary thought about his workload. “Mostly the routine stuff. One of my sisters is helping out now with some of the research and skip tracing. I’ve been working on one case—just wrapping it up, really—that involves paternity issues.”
“A cheating spouse?”
“That’s the way that it looked at the start. But it looks like it might have been fraudulently committed by one of the workers at the fertility clinic they used.”
“Really!” Gretta shook her head. “That’s terrible! How could something like that happen? Don’t they have safeguards?”
“Not that will stop men from using their own sperm or mixing their own into a sample. Their security is all against outside parties, and all of their protocols inside are to prevent accidental mix-ups. Not intentional contamination. How would you stop something like that?”
“Well…” Gretta’s forehead creased, “there has to be a way.”
“If someone is really intent on it, I’m not sure there is anything they could do to stop them.”
“They must do the fertilization in a controlled environment. They search people as they come in… keep surveillance cameras on them… film the whole process…”
“Pretty hard to keep eyes on people every second, even with surveillance cameras. What is going on below the tables? What about sleight of hand while fertilizing a sample? You have to assume people are honest and not trying to game the system.”
Gretta wrinkled her nose. “How disgusting. Well. I’m never going to one of those places.”
Suzanne and Pat burst out laughing. Zachary wasn’t sure how to respond to Gretta’s declaration. Of course as a seventy-something she had no need for a fertility clinic.
Gretta gave Zachary a small smile, letting him know that she was only joking.
“Well, I agree,” Zachary agreed. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“Would you? With what you know now?”
Zachary considered the question. “Well… if it was the only way to conceive. I guess I would. Bridget—my ex-wife—she had to have her eggs frozen before she had treatment for her cancer. So there wasn’t really any other option.”
“Then adopt,” Suzanne put in. “There are a lot of kids out there who would give anything for a family.”
Pat looked over at Zachary for his reaction. The angle he held his head at told Zachary that he was ready to step in and shut down the conversation if he thought it was bothering Zachary.
Zachary swallowed and shrugged. “Most of the kids in foster care are not infants, which is what people want. There are fewer and fewer babies available for adoption all the time, because of improved birth control, abortion being available, and people waiting until they are older to start families.”
“How selfish is it to only take an infant when there are so many other kids in care?” Suzanne looked at Mr. Peterson. “You were a foster parent for a while, right? So you saw what it was like. How much love those kids need.”
Mr. Peterson looked at Zachary.
Zachary nodded at him.
“I saw kids with very high needs in foster care,” Mr. Peterson said. “Most of them were not free for adoption and a regular family would not have been able to deal with their needs.”
“But there must still be a lot who could go to forever families. Take the pressure off the system. Give people the children they want but can’t have.”
Mr. Peterson took a few bites of his dinner, not answering.
“Like Zachary,” Gretta said. “You were one of the Petersons’ foster kids, and you kept in touch with him all this time. You would have been adopted if you could have, wouldn’t you?”
Zachary shook his head. “I wanted to go back to my biological family, I wasn’t interested in adoption. I was ten when I went into foster care, too old for adoption. And family groups… you hear about people adopting whole families sometimes on TV, but it’s so rare… that’s why it’s news.”
Zachary toyed with his vegetables, looking for something to do with his hands so that he didn’t have to look at Gretta or Suzanne.
“Even if everything had lined up… I couldn’t have managed in a family. I was in institutional care a lot of the time. Group homes, therapeutic settings, care centers. I was too…” He looked at Lorne, trying to find the words.
“Zachary came to us from a very traumatic background,” Mr. Peterson explained. “He had some very difficult issues to work through. We were not able to keep him, and we had all of the necessary training. A couple who didn’t have experience dealing with high-needs, traumatized kids… the kind of family who is looking to start a new family together… things would not have turned out well.”
Gretta focused on her meal. Suzanne darted glances at Zachary, wondering about him and his background. Zachary didn’t know how much Pat and Mr. Peterson had previously told them about him. Probably not enough for them to understand what he was talking about.
“I still have a lot of issues,” he explained. “I’m on medications and regular therapy. And I still have cycles of severe depression, panic attacks, flashbacks. PTSD.”
“You look so normal,” Suzanne observed.
Zachary rolled his eyes, not sure how to answer that one.
“Having people adopt from the system is not a reasonable replacement for reproductive technology,” Pat said. “Some adoptions from foster care turn out great. But it has a very high failure rate. Zachary did well to be able to carve out his niche and find a way to earn a living and stay on the right side of the law. A lot of foster kids end up homeless, addicts, unqualified or unable to find work, or in prison. It’s not a perfect system.”
“So what is your client going to do now that they know what happened?” Gretta asked, returning to the original topic. “Are they going to sue him? Make him pay child support or something? Is there such as thing as a wrongful birth suit?”
“I suspect they’re going to terminate the pregnancy. That was the original suggestion. My client was hoping to avoid it. Not sure she’ll ever agree to get pregnant again, and he would like to have a child with her.”
“Tough luck for him,” Suzanne said unsympathetically.
Zachary tried to swallow the lump in his throat. He hated to think of Bridget terminating her pregnancy. She had never wanted his children, but he had longed for hers. But biology worked against Zachary. He couldn’t take on pregnancy, labor, and nursing a baby. He could help to care for a child once it was born, but he couldn’t step in and take the rest of the burden away from Bridget. And she hadn’t ever considered adoption either.
And now, it was going to be her choice not to have them with Gordon either.
On the one hand, Zachary felt a little vindicated. At least that was one way that Gordon was not better than he was. He had thought that Gordon would step in and become the father that Zachary had always wanted to be. But Gordon couldn’t. As successful as he was, as competent in everything, he could not control that.
“How did they find out the baby was not his if it hasn’t even been born y
et?” Pat asked, cocking his head slightly. “I was thinking it was something in the baby’s physical features that had tipped them off. Wrong color of skin or eyes.”
Zachary shook his head. “They did prenatal genetic testing to make sure that everything was okay… and found out that the baby had a genetic disease that isn’t in either of their families.”
“Oh.” Pat nodded his understanding. “Yeah, I guess that would do it.”
“I have a friend who has that breast cancer gene,” Suzanne said. “She’s so paranoid about passing it on to her children, she was having IVF and they were testing each embryo for the gene, so that she would only have children without it.”
“She had breast cancer?” Gretta asked.
“No. Just the gene that predicts that she has an eighty percent chance of getting it, or something like that. I don’t even know the percentages.”
“She didn’t have any symptoms? They screen for breast cancer so they can catch it right away.”
“No, Mom,” Suzanne said with exaggerated patience. “She didn’t have cancer. She didn’t have any symptoms. It probably won’t develop until later in life. She won’t have symptoms until then.”
Zachary remembered what Patton had said about the dangers of reproductive technology, the birth defects and other problems it could cause. He wondered whether Suzanne’s friend had been told that. Screen for a known danger like the BRCA1 gene and end up with a child with a hundred times higher chance of getting hepatoblastoma or another fast-growing childhood cancer. Or blindness. Or CP.
If Bridget chose to raise the babies, she would never have to worry about getting Huntington’s herself, but she would have to watch her children growing up, knowing that one day they were going to develop it.
She would see one of her daughters starting to develop more erratic, irrational behavior. Maybe get violent. She would know what was happening because they had done the testing. But they wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop the progression of the disease.
31
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