She clicked around the site. There wasn’t much else to it, just that landing page, photos of smiling young women pretending to be patients. Predictably, it had been made to look exactly like Mercy Street’s website. Anyone would have been fooled.
Claudia felt a pulsing behind her left eye, the beginnings of a headache—premenstrual, or possibly not. Her cycles were unpredictable. Thirty years after her teenage flirtation with malnutrition, she still bled grudgingly, on her own mysterious schedule—two periods in a single month, or sometimes none at all. It was a basic, incontrovertible truth of female life: everything that ever happened to you unfolded against this backdrop, the unending play of shifting hormones. Month after month, year after godblessed year, there were logistics to be managed, symptoms to be treated, effluvia to be absorbed.
Mary knocked briefly at the door frame. “How’d it go with Ladan?”
“It went,” Claudia said. “Women’s Wellness was booked solid, but Wellwoman can see her tomorrow.”
“Thank God for Wellwoman! Can she get herself down there?”
“The bus leaves at midnight. I got RCAN to spring for the ticket.”
“RCAN still exists?”
“Apparently.” Claudia felt suddenly exhausted. “Of course, it’s an eight-hour bus ride, and she has a six-year-old at home, and two jobs and no sick days and no family and no childcare. So, you know, what could go wrong?”
“Jesus,” said Mary. “Why’d she wait so long?”
“She didn’t. She’s been trying to get an appointment for months.” Claudia swiveled the monitor around to show her the screen. “She called them.”
Mary frowned. It took her exactly ten seconds.
“Oh God,” she said. “Not again.”
“This one’s on Shawmut Ave. I can’t tell how long they’ve been open.”
“How did she find them?” Mary perched on the edge of the desk. “I mean, why didn’t she come to us first?”
“How does anybody find anything?” At the keyboard Claudia typed “abortion boston.” As Ladan had surely done; as any unhappily pregnant woman in the city would naturally do.
The search took two seconds. The first result was the Mercy Street website. Second was the site Claudia had just visited—the homepage of the dummy clinic, Women’s Choice. The scammers, clearly, were tech savvy. At least, they knew enough about search engine optimization to make their site easy to find.
The other search results were just what she’d expected—links to hospitals, legit private clinics, a slew of reputable gynecology practices in Cambridge, Brookline, Arlington, and Newton. She was about to close the browser when she noticed a link at the bottom of a page:
Abortion: An Insider’s Guide.
She clicked on the link.
The page took a long time to load. When it did, it had a distinctly homemade look. At the center of the screen was an ornate picture frame—clumsy clip art from the 1990s, the awkward early days of web design. At the top of the page was a caption in curlicue script:
Hall of Shame
Click to begin slide show.
Again she clicked.
Slowly, one pixel at a time, a female face appeared in the frame. The girl was young and blond, her hair in a ponytail. She wore a pink ball cap and headphones and looked away from the camera.
“Mary,” said Claudia. “You’ve got to see this.”
They watched, fascinated, as the image fragmented and was replaced. Another photo of a woman—older, a redhead. She too looked away from the camera, seemingly unaware that she was being photographed.