Was the Heiress Switched at Birth? novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Swab
At a Saturday clinic Billie swabs her cheek and Annalise smiles through hers, Cordelia refuses until Roland forces a vote, and Billie overhears her order that the result never reach the board.
I got to the clinic at ten to nine with no sleep, a gas station coffee and my mother's cookie tin under my arm.
It was a beige room on the fourth floor of a medical building in Dilworth.
It had a fish tank, a stack of old magazines and a sign that said GENETIC TESTING WELCOMES YOU.
Roland Kenworthy's lawyer sat by the window in a gray suit, holding a folder with both hands.
"Ms. Odom?" he said.
"That's me."
"My client wants the chain of custody observed to the letter."
"I'm a court stenographer," I said.
"I observe chains of custody for a living."
I set the steno machine on the table and woke it up.
The technician, a young man in blue scrubs, looked at it and decided not to ask.
Annalise arrived at nine on the dot.
She wore a camel coat over a cream dress, with the dark bob so smooth it looked lacquered.
She had brought the same two young men with the phones.
"We're all going to be very adult about this," she announced to the room.
"Of course," I said.
"I'm sure you're excellent at being adult."
She blinked at me.
She had probably never heard her own tone thrown back at her.
"It's a cheek swab," the technician said, to anyone.
"Open, rub, seal."
"Nothing to eat or drink for thirty minutes."
I went first.
The swab was gentler than I'd expected, and my hand shook only slightly when I signed the label.
Annalise went second.
She opened her mouth for him, and then she turned the smile on me.
"I want you to know I forgive you," she said.
"I don't need it."
"Everyone needs forgiving."
"My aunt Pris taught me that when I was nine."
My jaw tightened, and I typed that into the machine, word for word.
"What are you doing?" she said.
"Recording a witness statement."
"I'm not a witness."
"You will be."
She laughed in a bright, high way that her phones would love.
"You'll be sued by lunch," she said.
"Then lunch will be on you."
The door opened at nine-twenty.
Cordelia Kenworthy came in alone, without her coat or her staff or her pearls.
She wore a plain gray sweater and a silk scarf tied over her hair.
She looked like a woman who had been awake in the same chair all night.
She did not look at me.
"I won't be tested," she told the lawyer.
The lawyer lifted his folder an inch.
"Ms. Kenworthy, the chairman has asked that all parties be tested."
"I am the founder of this company," she said.
"I do not submit my body to be an alibi for a thief's daughter."
"Then stop calling her a thief's daughter and call her what you are afraid of," I said.
It came out before I'd decided to say it.
The room went quiet except for the fish tank bubbling.
Cordelia turned her head, finally, and looked at my face.
It was the briefest look.
Her eyes went to the streak at my temple, and then very quickly to the floor.
"Ms. Kenworthy," the lawyer said, "if you decline, the chairman will call an emergency board session at noon."
"For what?"
"The first item is your fitness to name an heir."
"He wouldn't."
"He has a draft."
She closed her eyes.
In the fish tank behind her a blue fish turned slowly around a plastic castle.
"Mother," Annalise said sharply, "you don't have to."
"Be quiet, Annalise."
The word mother hit me somewhere under the ribs.
It had never occurred to me that I might have to hear it said to someone else.
Cordelia held out her hand for the swab.
The technician gave it to her, and I saw her fingers tremble as she took it.
She rubbed it against her cheek, sealed the tube and signed the label.
She signed it as Cordelia Anne Kenworthy, in a tidy, slanted, expensive hand.
"Say you don't know me," I said.
She stood very still.
"Say it into the record," I said.
"Say you've never seen my face before last night."
For one long moment the only sound was the tank.
"I don't know you," Cordelia said.
I typed it.
Her voice did not break.
But her hand rose on its own and pressed flat against the scarf over her left temple.
She left without another word.
I walked out into the corridor a minute later to find the elevator.
The corridor turned a corner by the stairwell door, and two people stood in its shadow with their heads close.
I stopped.
"Whatever it says," Cordelia whispered to Piers Stanwyck, "it cannot reach the board."
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