Drawing Conclusions (26 page)

“I was hoping to fertilize the egg with your brother's sperm,” my father responded.

My fists opened and flew to my face in horror. I cried the word
no
over and over until my mouth was dry and caked. The soles of my feet ached as I stamped my legs into the floor. Frank cradled me like a baby, whispering soothing words in my ear until I finally exhausted my rage.

“Where's this baby?” I sobbed.

“I can't say there is a baby,” my father said as he rose to leave. He smoothed down the lapel of his sport coat and shook out the wrinkles in his pants. He reached into his pocket for a linen handkerchief, passing it over his face before continuing. “I realized the futility of the study as Frank matured into a successful young man despite his disadvantages. Eventually, I lost track of your genetic material. I have no idea what happened after that.”

I was dumbfounded. I looked to Frank, but this strange turn of events was beyond his legal knowledge. A part of me might be stored somewhere in a canister of dry ice, but locating what I assumed was my personal property would be nearly impossible. I wanted to react, but to what? In the momentary lapse, my father made his way freely to the door. He started to leave the room, but DeRosa stopped him.

“You
will
be appearing at the trial as a witness for the prosecution,” DeRosa said with his hand on the doorknob. “If your responses are scattered or somehow confusing to the jury, I will make the results of your experiment public. I'd like your word on that.”

“You have my word.”

forty

My father's courtroom cameo
was scripted as tightly as a Shakespearean sonnet. Each word was chosen for purpose, leaving little room for tangents. The board of Sound View Laboratories
forced him into retirement but still maintained complete control over his public discourse. In order to avoid additional negative exposure, the board ensured that his statements were reviewed and approved by a fleet of image-control experts. On the day of his testimony, my father's “team” hustled him into the courtroom amid a sea of blue suits, making it nearly impossible for a reporter or camera to nab a sound bite.

Dr. William Prentice appeared controlled on the witness stand, barely flinching when a professional headshot of Teddy was flashed on the screen. I found DeRosa in the crowd and was not surprised to see him fixated on Teddy's image. He appeared self-conscious, as if everyone knew the two were actually twin brothers. In fact, this point was not revealed in the trial, since it had no bearing on Peter Dacks's motive to kill my brother. Dacks killed Teddy because he was about to pull the plug on his diabolical plot to compile the world's DNA. DeRosa's association with the case was irrelevant.

Throughout the questioning, my father maintained an airtight story. He had no idea that his son, Dr. Theodore Prentice, was averse to the DNA transfer, and he was completely unaware that Teddy had approached Dacks with the intent to reveal his unethical attempt to package and resell personal medical data. I can't say the courtroom believed my father, but he wasn't the one on trial.

In fact, it was in both my father's and Peter Dacks's interest to act as if they didn't know each other. Both men played as if they were passing acquaintances in the medical industry. Dacks just happened to be hired to recruit patients for one of many tests conducted by the Sound View labs. If the jury had been apprised of their previous relationship, Dacks would have looked guiltier and my father's testimony would have been less believable.

I caught the accused man's eye as Teddy's image faded in the background. Dacks's demeanor seemed impenetrable. Despite the accusations, he seemed strangely confident, smiling to witnesses and patting his lawyer on the back periodically. He was a complete phony. I had seen footage of my father and Dacks socializing on the beach in Italy, and there was no question that for many years, these men had worked in professional harmony. Dacks had been my father's right-hand man abroad, providing a myriad of services my father would have never been able to accomplish by himself in a foreign country.

But the jury knew none of this. Nor would they ever.

I busied myself during the long weeks of trial in the dead heat of summer by sketching a child who possibly had yet to be born. Strange as it was to think of a child created by myself and my brother, I needed a way to wrap my head around what my father had done. I compiled years of photographs of me and Teddy, attempting to find a combination of features that balanced our strengths and minimized our physical weaknesses. I played with eye shapes and nose alignment. I worked through ratios of facial spacing, even measuring distances from the major features and extrapolating results with my charcoal pencils. I drew young girls and boys in profile, then full-faced, and I mixed the results with straight, curly, and wavy hair. Every few days, I'd pass one to DeRosa with the caption
your niece
or
your nephew
.

The trial ended in late September, with Dacks convicted of premeditated murder. The courtroom cheered. Charlie cried like a baby. Trina and Jonathan embraced as if they had just married, and I climbed across the rows of wooden benches and straight into DeRosa's arms.

“Happy birthday,” he said as he lifted me so high in the air that I could observe the courtroom from a bird's eye view. I realized, as I stared at the tops of heads, that this was how my father saw the rest of us, a notch beneath him. I slid down DeRosa's body, resting comfortably in his arms, looking up into the eyes of my new future. A lot had happened, much of it terrible, but there was no doubt I had the best seat in the house.

THE END

About the Author

Deirdre Verne (Scarsdale, NY) is a college professor and active blogger. A writer whose target audience is the millennium crowd, Deirdre's interest in green living inspired her to create an off-the-grid character who Dumpster dives her way though a suspense-filled mystery series. A member of Sisters in Crime, Deirdre's short stories have appeared in all three of the New York chapter's anthologies:
Murder New York Style, Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices
, and
Family Matters
.