The Dark Forest: A Collection Of Erotic Fairytales(144)
It felt like a dream as she approached. Part of her was screaming at her to run, to flee out the doors, but when he flipped on a buzzing fluorescent light revealing the overcrowded room, she knew she wasn’t going anywhere. A small cot was pushed against one wall, there was a desk covered in computer parts and a table that seemed to be a makeshift kitchen against another—but the rest of the room was lined with tall, black filing cabinets. “What is all this?”
“Your father’s sins.” He turned away from her to open a drawer, digging through the files.
Leaning against one of the cabinets, she counted them in her head—six, seven, nine, eleven. Eleven filing cabinets? Seriously? “All of these files are about my father?”
“There are a lot of sins to cover.” Dropping a thick folder onto the little table that filled the only space left in the room, he reached back into the cabinet and removed another, setting it next to it. “You want the truth? Go ahead and look, princess. Daniel William Sinclair woke up one day and decided he wanted a child, an heir for his empire, and he had the money to try and make it happen without all the trouble of falling in love and getting married.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” She crossed her arms at the doorway, and he pointed at the folders.
“Look.”
Pulling over a stiff, metal chair, Rebecca sat down with a huff and flipped open the folder in front of her. Pages of patient files from a fertility clinic. The information was dense, medical terminology she didn’t quite understand, but the dollar amounts on the pages with bills were staggering. Tens of thousands of dollars, and her father’s name was listed on all of it.
“Those files are from the year when he was trying to do it legitimately. Through surrogate organizations, actual clinics with IUI and IVF—none of it worked, and he was impatient.” He moved to another cabinet and pulled open the second drawer down, bringing out another dense packet. “Then he met Dr. Bernard Haisch.”
He held out the next folder to her and she took it, flipping it open to find a photo of a rail-thin man, balding, with intense, dark eyes. The contract beneath it was, admittedly, a little extensive for a relationship with a doctor, but she shook her head. “Okay, so he wanted a child. That’s a good thing, he wanted to be a father.”
“Keep listening, then tell me what you think, princess.”
“Asshole,” she muttered under her breath and he glanced at her as he slammed a file drawer shut again.
“Dr. Haisch promised your father an heir, and all he wanted in exchange were subjects to undergo his procedures, and a guarantee that the women would follow his strict regimen for optimal fertility and health throughout the process. It’s in the contract if you want to read all of the bullshit.” Another cabinet. Another folder. “Your mother wasn’t the only woman to fall into the trap. Sinclair enticed them, charmed them with his dreams of a child, and got them to sign a contract agreeing to Haisch’s process.”
“None of this is a crime.” Shutting the folders in front of her, she looked up at him, sensing the seething rage under his skin as he started to pull out narrower folders from a variety of drawers.
“You’re right, it wouldn’t have been a crime. Except your father locked them in The Tower with Dr. Haisch and refused to let them leave. Remember those police reports you read through?” He dropped a tall stack of folders onto the end of the table. “I won’t burden you with the fucked up details of what Haisch did to those women, princess, it’s all in the cabinets if you want to read his notes. But out of the twelve women they used, only the five you read about even tried to get help.”
“They dropped the charges,” she whispered as she opened folder after folder of contracts with women’s names across the top. Mary Herbert. Diana Lincoln. Susan. Heather. Jennifer. Lauren. Jessica. “The files all said the charges were dropped.”
“Of course they were, after Sinclair sent his lawyers after them. Reminding them of the contract that had consented to any and all doctor approved fertility treatments. Oh, and if you look at the last couple of pages, there’s an iron clad confidentiality clause.”
She raised her eyes from yet another contract where her father’s elegant signature was scrawled. Rebecca knew his hand by heart, the strange tip on the ‘S’ when he wrote just his initials, the loop on the ‘D’ in his full signature. It was her father’s handwriting. It was everywhere. On every single document.
How was this possible? Could he have really done this?
“They had years of failures, and then they found Clarissa Warren.” The name stopped her heart cold, and she found her eyes glued to the drawer his hand rested against. “I guess you’re not completely blind, are you, princess? You may not remember your mother, but you know her name.”
“Let me see.” Pushing back from the chair, she moved to the filing cabinet, and he stepped away, giving her room as she ripped the top drawer open and took out a file at random. There were more of Dr. Haisch’s scribbled notes on procedures. Positions Clarissa Warren, her mother, was bound in after attempted insemination. Clinically detached descriptions of her distress, her complaints of pain. When she couldn’t take anymore, she slammed the folder down on top of the cabinet and faced him. “I’m not reading through all of this. What happened?”