the Third Twin (1996)

There were four people in the waiting area: a young couple, the woman looking strained and the man nervous, plus two other women of about Jeannie’s age, all sitting in a square of low couches, looking at magazines. A chirpy receptionist asked Jeannie to take a seat, and she picked up a glossy brochure about Genetico Inc. She held it open on her lap without reading it; instead she stared at the soothingly meaningless Abstract art on the lobby walls and tapped her feet impatiently on the carpeted floor.

She hated hospitals. She had only once been a patient. At the age of twenty-three she had had an abortion. The father was an aspiring film director. She stopped taking the contraceptive pill because they split up, but he came back after a few days, there was a loving reconciliation, and they had unprotected sex and she got pregnant. The operation proceeded without complications, but Jeannie cried for days, and she lost all affection for the film director, even though he was supportive throughout.

He had just made his first Hollywood movie, an action picture. Jeannie had gone alone to see it at the Charles Theater in Baltimore. The only touch of humanity in an otherwise mechanical story of men shooting at one another was when the hero’s girlfriend became depressed after an abortion and threw him out. The man, a police detective, had been bewildered and heartbroken. Jeannie had cried.

The memory still hurt. She stood up and paced the floor. A minute later a man emerged from the back of the lobby and said, “Doctor Ferrami!” in a loud voice. He was an anxiously jolly man of about fifty, with a bald pate and a monkish fringe of ginger hair. “Hello, hello, good to meet you,” he said with unwarranted enthusiasm.

Jeannie shook his hand. “Last night I spoke to a Mr. Ringwood.”

“Yes, yes! I’m a colleague of his, my name’s Dick Minsky. How do you do?” Dick had a nervous tic that made him blink violently every few seconds; Jeannie felt sorry for him.

He led her up a staircase. “What’s led to your inquiry, may I ask?”

“A medical mystery,” she explained. “The two women have sons who appear to be identical twins, yet they seem to be unrelated. The only connection I’ve been able to find is that both women were treated here before getting pregnant.”

“Is that so?” he said as if he were not really listening. Jeannie was surprised; she had expected him to be intrigued.

They entered a corner office. “All our records can be accessed by computer, provided you have the right code,” he said. He sat at a screen. “Now, the patients we’re interested in are … ?”

“Charlotte Pinker and Lorraine Logan.”

“This won’t take a minute.” He began to key in the names.

Jeannie contained her impatience. These records might reveal nothing at all. She looked around the room. It was too grand an office for a mere filing clerk. Dick must be more than just a “colleague” of Mr. Ringwood’s, she thought. “What’s your role here at the clinic, Dick?” she said.

“I’m the general manager.”

She raised her eyebrows, but he did not look up from the keyboard. Why was her inquiry being dealt with by such a senior person? she wondered, and a sense of unease crept into her mood like a wisp of smoke.

He frowned. “That’s odd. The computer says we have no record of either name.”

Jeannie’s unease gelled. I’m about to be lied to, she thought. The prospect of a solution to the puzzle receded into the far distance again. A sense of anticlimax washed over her and depressed her.

He spun his screen around so that she could see it. “Do I have the correct spellings?”

“Yes.”

“When do you think these patients attended the clinic?”

“Approximately twenty-three years ago.”

He looked at her. “Oh, dear,” he said, and he blinked hard.

“Then I’m afraid you’ve made a wasted journey.”

“Why?”

“We don’t keep records from that far back. It’s our corporate document management strategy.”

Jeannie narrowed her eyes at him. “You throw away old records?”

“We shred the cards, yes, after twenty years, unless of course the patient has been readmitted, in which case the record is transferred to the computer.”

It was a sickening disappointment and a waste of precious hours that she needed to prepare her defense for tomorrow. She said bitterly: “How strange that Mr. Ringwood didn’t tell me this when I talked to him last night.”

“He really should have. Perhaps you didn’t mention the dates.”

“I’m quite sure I told him the two women were treated here twenty-three years ago.” Jeannie remembered adding a year to Steve’s age to get the right period,

“Then it’s hard to understand.”

Somehow Jeannie was not completely surprised at the way this had turned out. Dick Minsky, with his exaggerated friendliness and nervous blink, was the caricature of a man with a guilty conscience.

He turned his screen back to its original position. Seeming regretful, he said: “I’m afraid there’s no more I can do for you.”

“Could we talk to Mr. Ringwood, and ask him why he didn’t tell me about the cards being shredded?”

“I’m afraid Peter’s off sick today.”