by Jance, J. A.
“What about the others?” Cassie asked once they were seated.
“Gilchrist’s other kids?” Jolene asked with a puzzled frown.
“No,” Cassie said, “what if there are other Gilchrists out there? He’s probably not the only lying piece-of-crap fertility doctor in the universe. There may be a lot of other mass-produced progeny out there—people whose births came as a result of artificial-insemination procedures and who now have no access to half of their own medical history. There may be unpleasant and undisclosed illnesses lurking in their futures as well. Shouldn’t they be warned, too?”
“They probably should,” Jolene agreed, “but I’m guessing the rules in those other practices would be the same as Gilchrist’s, where the identities of the donors are kept confidential.”
“And weren’t we all required to sign nondisclosure agreements?” Jolene asked.
“I’m pretty sure we did,” Alex agreed.
“Those are NDAs,” Cassie said, “but what about DNA?”
“What about it?”
“I know a guy who’s creating a racehorse DNA database. Maybe he’d be willing to work with us on the side and create a human DNA database as well—DNA from people whose births were the result of artificial insemination. That might not lead folks back to their actual donors, but it could possibly give them access to half siblings who could help fill in the blanks on a few of their medical histories.”
“Tracking down affected people won’t be easy, and DNA testing doesn’t come cheap,” Jolene objected. “We’d have to raise a lot of money to make that happen.”
“What the hell?” Alex Munsey asked. “I don’t have anything better to do at the moment, so I’m in. And if we’re going to do it, what are we going to call this thing?”
Cassie Davis raised her hand. “I move we call it the Progeny Project. All in favor?”
In the end the vote was unanimous.
10
Sedona, Arizona, June 2004
Once Ali went off to college, she’d spent very little time back home in Sedona. She’d come there occasionally for short visits, but until now she hadn’t hung around as an adult for any extended period. It was something of a shock to her system and a come-down, if you will, to be demoted from being an easily identifiable celebrity in Southern California to being “Bob and Edie Larson’s daughter.”
Because Bob and Edie, owners and operators of the Sugarloaf Café, were a known quantity in town and had their own particular brand of celebrity. Edie’s baking prowess—including her infamous Sugarloaf Café sweet rolls, which she made fresh every day—was literally the talk of the town, and Bob was considered to be the best short-order cook in the Verde Valley. Running a restaurant that was open from 6:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. seven days a week required a kind of industry, cheerfulness, and steady perseverance that Ali found both amazing and humbling.
In the beginning the restaurant had belonged to her grandmother, who had passed it along to her twin daughters, Edie and Evie. Ali’s father, Bob, had been a latecomer to the partnership, but the three of them—the two sisters and Bob—had worked together for decades before Aunt Evie’s death—and their hard work along with that scholarship was what had enabled Ali to go off to school, earn her degree, and live what had seemed to be a charmed life. Now that she was back, Ali couldn’t help but feel ashamed that as a kid she’d looked down on her parents because they didn’t have more money. Other families went on family trips. Bob and Edie worked seven days a week, day in and day out, with no time off for vacations. Other kids had fancy houses. The Larsons lived in a tiny place—a two-bedroom cottage—out behind the restaurant. Ali had a room of her own, but it was little more than a closet. And when it came to weekends and school vacations, other kids could hang out together listening to music or swimming in Oak Creek while Ali was drafted into helping out at the restaurant, busing tables or waiting on customers.
“I was such an arrogant twit when I was a teenager,” Ali said. “What kept you from throwing me back?”
She and her mother were sitting in the restaurant drinking coffee. There were still a few customers, but it was near closing time. Having been up baking since 4:00 A.M., Edie was glad to be off her feet.
“You weren’t arrogant,” Edie said with a smile, “you were young and smart. Your father and I both knew that you were destined for better things than working in a restaurant. So did your Aunt Evie. We all wanted you to go off to school and make something of yourself, and you did.”
It was Edie Larson’s sister who had pointed Ali in the direction of that first Askins scholarship.
Ali peered into the depths of her almost empty coffee mug. “That much-vaunted degree isn’t doing me a whole lot of good these days,” she said. “When Cliff Baker gave me my walking papers, he told me I was ‘yesterday’s news,’ and I guess he was right. I’ve put out feelers to stations in the area, but no one’s hiring—at least they’re not hiring women my age. What am I going to do with myself, Mom? What am I going to be when I grow up?”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Edie assured her. “Look what you did about Reenie.”
When Ali had first come home from California, it was because her best friend from grade school, Irene Holzer Bernard, had died in a car wreck on Schnebly Hill Road, a treacherous back-road route that wound its way down the face of the Mogollon Rim, between Flagstaff and Sedona. Schnebly Hill was dangerous under the best of circumstances, and Reenie had chosen to tackle it in the midst of a fierce winter snowstorm. When word came out that Irene had recently been given an ALS diagnosis, it was easy for people to assume that she had chosen that route on that particular night as a way of committing suicide.
Ali knew her friend—and she knew Reenie’s kids, Matt and Julie. Unwilling to accept the idea that Reenie would have left her children behind a moment before she had to, Ali had dug deeper into the case, eventually uncovering the sobering reality that her friend had been murdered.
“Yes, I did,” Ali agreed, “and look what that got me—ownership of a one-eyed, one-eared, fifteen-pound cat named Samantha.”
When Reenie’s kids had gone to live with their grandparents, their grandfather’s severe cat allergy had meant that Sam couldn’t go along. Instead she’d taken up residence at Ali’s double-wide on Andante Drive.
“When you say it that way, it makes me want to hum that old song about the Flying Purple People Eater,” Edie said with a laugh.
“It’s not funny,” Ali objected. “With nothing to do, I’ll probably end up being one of those weird old ladies who live alone with nothing but a cat for company. Sounds pretty bleak to me.”
“I doubt that,” Edie said. “Based on Reenie’s case, maybe you’d make a better cop than you do a reporter.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Ali told her, “never in a million years.”
Still, the seed was planted. Was that why, a few years later, Ali Reynolds found herself enrolled for six weeks of law-enforcement training at the Arizona Police Academy down in Peoria? Probably so, because whether Ali Reynolds meant to or not, she tended to take her mother’s advice.
11
Lake Arrowhead, California, 2008
Over time the Progeny Project became an all-consuming passion for the three women involved. Cassie Davis, despite her rough-hewn looks, was a tiger when it came to strong-arming donations from hapless acquaintances, many of whom were big spenders at the racetracks. Jolene Browder, a retired CPA, set Progeny Project up as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. She handled the IRS filings and did all the necessary accounting. Yes, she was supposed to be retired, but this was a labor of love, something she did in memory of both her cherished daughter, Cindy, and her late husband, Robert.
As for Alex? She took her show on the road, sometimes on her own and sometimes with Evan along, and went out to preach the gospel of the Progeny Project. She spoke to civic-minded groups, such as Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, and did countless radio and television interviews. Without mentionin
g Edward Gilchrist’s clinic by name, she told the story of how she and other families had been bamboozled by an unethical doctor who was suspected of using his own sperm rather than that of his alleged donors to impregnate his patients. Yes, something good had come from her former doctor’s fraudulent behavior, but it also meant that offspring conceived that way risked susceptibility to a potentially life-threatening health risk that had been concealed from the families directly involved. When it came to that part of the story, Alex always had before-and-after photos of Evan and Rory along for show-and-tell.
With practice, Alex morphed into an effective public speaker, bringing more and more people into the fold and uncovering a growing community of families who had been forced to resort to artificial insemination to conceive. Alex’s concerns were their concerns, too. As word got around, more and more people swabbed their cheeks and submitted their DNA samples for testing. For some of the progeny involved, this was the first time they learned that the person they’d always believed to be their biological mother or father wasn’t, so questions were raised about their origins that they might have wondered about but never dared ask.
In the beginning, Rick—Cassie Davis’s racehorse-DNA guy—processed all their DNA samples on a contract basis. By the time Evan Munsey was a senior at UCLA, majoring in microbiology, the load had grown exponentially, and he was the one in charge of doing the profiling. While other databases focused on law-enforcement issues, Evan masterminded the creation of one of the country’s first-ever civilian DNA databases of donor siblings. As Progeny Project’s only paid employee, he managed their Web site as well as their Facebook page, creating a forum where both children and parents could discuss the pros, cons, and sometimes unintended consequences of creating babies and families by nontraditional means.
Over time Progeny Project’s efforts paid off. Along the way, profiling brought to light three more twentysomethings, two girls and another boy, whose DNA designated them as additional Gilchrist half siblings. From Evan’s point of view, the last of those three turned out to be the best. Crystal Lucas happened to be a newly sworn officer with LAPD. She had red hair that matched Evan’s and Rory’s, but her facial features were entirely different. She was estranged from both of her parents for reasons she never quite specified, but she was willing to pitch in and help out with Progeny Project wherever her services were needed. Crystal had grown up loving video games and all things computer. Once she joined the group, she relieved Evan of his Web-site duties and greatly expanded Progeny Project’s social-media presence, turning what had once been a California-centric organization into a national one.
As the library of DNA samples expanded, so did the stories that came to them in heartfelt Facebook comments, in e-mails, and occasionally in handwritten letters. Many of the resulting children had been told up front that the man who was their dad wasn’t necessarily their father. For them none of this was an earth-shattering revelation. More than once, however, those stories about artificial insemination were themselves bogus and had been used to provide cover for long-standing extramarital affairs. In other cases the parents had never mentioned the truth of the matter, but the kids themselves, feeling a mysterious sense of not belonging, had discovered it for themselves from information gleaned from Progeny Project’s growing database. For some, finding out that they had half siblings in the world was a blessing, for others a curse.
In what felt like a real triumph, longtime sperm and egg donors began coming on board as well. While still preserving their anonymity, they voluntarily offered to provide not only DNA samples but also pertinent health and medical information that could then be passed along to their biological offspring. It was as though the Progeny Project had finally come full circle.
By then Alex had grown tired of the constant traveling. With social media bringing in a steady supply of new Progeny participants, Alex Munsey was ready to unpack her suitcase and hang up her microphone. As a result of the divorce settlement, the Munsey family’s summertime cabin on Kuffel Canyon Road near Lake Arrowhead came to her free and clear. She’d hired a contractor to winterize the place so she could live in it year-round. After she’d spent a long stretch out on the road, the cabin provided a welcome retreat. Now, though, it seemed to her that the time had finally come to settle in at home and turn her hand to writing the book she’d always meant to write, one with a telling working title—A Mother’s Tale: A Fertility-Clinic Nightmare.
One at a time, she laid out what she regarded as Edward Gilchrist’s misdeeds and his growing collection of fraudulently conceived offspring. Because Evan’s and Rory’s identities had previously been made public, she was free to use their real names. She shielded the other victims’ privacy with pseudonyms, but she offered no such courtesy to Edward Gilchrist himself. With him she pulled no punches—she named names and laid out the whole story, chapter and verse.
Once the manuscript was in what she thought of as final form, she ran it by an attorney. After reviewing the manuscript, the attorney offered advice that was short and to the point:
“Put this away in a drawer, or else turn it into fiction,” he told her. “If you publish it this way while the man’s still practicing medicine, he’s likely to sue you for slander and/or libel. You’ve written it and gotten it out of your system. Now let it go. There’s no sense in poking a hornet’s nest.”
Having asked for the advice, Alex Munsey was smart enough to take it. She put the completed manuscript for A Mother’s Tale away in a locked filing cabinet and left it sitting there gathering dust.
12
Phoenix, Arizona, January 2008
In early 2008 Alex Munsey was summoned out of her self-imposed retirement and called to assist in the handling of a newly discovered cluster of half siblings that had been located in and around Phoenix, Arizona. The doctor/sperm donor in that case turned out to be a guy named Kenneth Brennan, who had died unexpectedly in a car accident in 1986 and whose widow still lived in the area.
“What do you want me to do?” Alex asked when Evan phoned to apprise her of the situation.
“I’d like you to contact her,” he said. “We don’t have DNA on the doctor, so we don’t have any real confirmation that the doctor himself was responsible for this cluster of sperm donations. Occasionally people have gone public with these kinds of unanticipated results. Since the doctor has been dead for decades, I think we have an obligation to reach out to his widow and let her know that she might be caught up in a storm of bad publicity.”
“You’re right,” Alex agreed. “If I were in her place, I would appreciate having some advance warning. Do you have her contact information?”
“Sure thing,” Evan said. “Her name is Marcella Brennan, and she lives in a place called Paradise Valley. I’ll text you her address and phone number.”
Minutes later, when Alex picked up the phone to dial Marcella’s number, she had no idea what to expect. The phone rang several times. Just when she was expecting a voice-mail announcement, someone picked up. “Hello,” a woman said.
“Is this Marcella Brennan?” Alex asked.
“It is. Who’s this?” Marcella asked.
“My name’s Alexandra Munsey, Alex for short, and I’m with an organization called the Progeny Project.”
“If you’re looking for a donation, I’m not interested in making any of those at this time,” Marcella replied. “Please put me on your do-not-call list.”
“I’m not calling for a donation,” Alex put in quickly. “The Progeny Project is a charitable organization devoted to using DNA profiling to enable people conceived via artificial insemination to access information about their biological parents for health and medical reasons.”
Holding her breath, Alex fully expected to have the phone slammed down in her ear. That didn’t happen.
“Oh,” Marcella murmured after a pause. “What took you so long? I always knew someone would come around asking questions about that sooner or later. That’s why I saved all Kenny’s records. I
thought they might be important later on.”
Alex could barely believe her ears. “You kept his records?” she asked. “You still have them?”
“I sure do. When Kenny died, most people around town, including our friends and acquaintances, expected that I’d sell his practice and bring home a nice hunk of change, and I certainly could have used the money. Without my knowledge he had run up huge gambling debts, but by then I had some idea that things at the office might not be as they should be, and I was afraid that if I tried to sell the practice, the whole thing might blow up in my face. Instead I dispatched a crew of movers to clean out his office to the bare walls. Then I had them haul all the office furniture, file cabinets, and suchlike to Goodwill, but I had them box up all the records and bring them here. They’re still down in the basement, untouched. But all of this happened a long time ago. Why are you calling me now?”
“As I said before, Progeny Project is an organization focused on providing pertinent medical information and occasionally emotional support for people whose lives have been impacted by artificial insemination. Sometimes offspring resulting from those kinds of procedures are the ones who come to us, sometimes it’s the parents, and sometimes it’s both together. By submitting and comparing DNA samples, we’re able to match children with their biological donors, who can—”
“Then provide the necessary medical information,” Marcella said impatiently, finishing Alex’s sentence.
“Exactly,” Alex agreed. “Occasionally our research has revealed unusual clusters of several half siblings located in close geographical proximity. This may indicate that the clinic involved was overusing the sperm from a single donor rather than relying on a variety of donors. My own son, Evan, was part of one of those single-donor clusters. When he was in his early twenties and needed a kidney transplant, we were able to locate a half brother who was willing to be a living organ donor. That’s actually how the Progeny Project got started.”