The upper part of Carl’s body was strapped to some kind of a board, and he seemed to be numb from the waist down. He raised his hands and gingerly touched the medieval collar screwed into his neck and head. “What is this thing?” he asked.
“Torture,” the doctor replied with a smile. “You know that old song about the head bone connected to the neck bone? Well, that collar is what’s holding your head to your neck, and your neck to your spine.”
“Well, all I can say is it’s giving me one hell of a headache.”
The doctor nodded. “And it probably will for a while. Savor the pain. It’s a good sign; it means not all the nerves were damaged.”
Carl looked at the doctor. “Tell me straight, doc, will I be okay? Will I walk again? Will I— will I be able to function?”
“All indications so far are that I am a superb surgeon, a bit of a miracle worker, actually,” the doctor replied with a twinkle in his eye, “and that you will in no way damage my reputation.” He saw the uncertainty in his patient’s expression. “The numbness you’re experiencing should wear off in time,” he added. “How much time, I admit we can’t predict with any real consistency. It could be as long as several months before you regain certain capabilities, but everything should come back pretty much the way it was. For now, though, you’ll just have to take my word for that, and be patient.”
The security guard sighed with relief. “Thanks,” he said, a little embarrassed. “I was kind of worried, you know. You see, I’m only forty-six.”
Four days later, there was a visitor, slipping into his room like a vision. For a moment, he couldn’t quite place her, and thought perhaps she had come for the man in the next bed. But then she came close and he smelled her perfume, and then she spoke and he remembered. It was the woman he had met the night before the bombing, the one he had been thinking about the next day, at the very moment he was being tossed off the porch.
“It took me this long to find you,” she told him, half hidden behind an enormous bouquet of flowers, “or I’d have come sooner.”
“I’m really glad,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot, but, well, under the circumstances, I wasn’t really sure, you know, if you’d want to see me again.”
“Whew,” she declared with a sigh of relief, depositing the flowers on the bed stand and herself in a chair. “I was going to feel very foolish, rushing to your side like this, if you’d forgotten all about me.”
A big smile spread across Carl’s face. His headache seemed to vanish, gone in a rush of sensations that he could swear he felt the whole length of his body.
The injuries to Joyce O’Mara were extensive. For days, the doctors at Swedish Hospital were unsure whether she would survive. They removed one kidney and a lung, reconstructed her rib cage, repaired her aorta, made every effort to locate and control all the internal bleeding, and then monitored her around the clock for any signs of infection, liver damage, or failure of her other kidney.
“Barring any unexpected complications, I think she’s going to make it,” the lead doctor finally felt confident to report. “But I don’t mind telling you, she is one very lucky lady.”
Donald O’Mara, Joyce’s husband of eight years, felt the sting of tears in his eyes. “I can’t thank you enough,” he said. “The whole staff. I know how hard you’ve all worked.”
“It’s going to be a long recovery,” the doctor cautioned. “She’ll have to adjust to a body that isn’t going to work quite the same as the old one did. There will probably be some things she won’t be able to do again, and others she’ll have to learn to do differently.”
“Don’t worry,” Joyce’s mother said. “She’s coming home to North Bend with me. Everyone is coming home with me. I’ll take care of her. I’ll take care of everything.”
“We’re going to move her out of Intensive Care in a couple of hours,” the doctor told them. “One of the nurses will let you know what room she’s going to.”
The moment the doctor was gone, Donald slumped into a chair, deserted by every ounce of the energy that had kept him going until this moment. As harrowing as the two weeks prior to the bombing had been, this last week had been ten times worse. “I don’t know what we’d do without you,” he said to his mother-in-law.
“It’s a perfect solution,” she replied. “I have plenty of room and the children will be the better for the distraction. What better place for all of you to be than on the farm?”
Donald sighed. “For the sake of the family, we make an agonizing decision not to have this child, based on overwhelming medical advice, exhaustive religious debate, and endless hours of prayer, and look what happens.”
“God works in mysterious ways,” she suggested.
Her son-in-law looked horrified. “You think all this devastation was the work of God?” he asked.
At two o’clock in the afternoon on the third Tuesday in February, two weeks almost to the minute after the bombing of Hill House, Jeffrey Korba died. His injuries were just too massive for him to survive.
“He’s at peace,” the doctor told his sobbing wife. “I realize how hard it is for you to understand this now, but it was for the best. Had he lived, he would not have been the man you knew. It’s better to remember him the way he was.”
Marilyn nodded, thankful, at least, that she was by his side, holding his hand, when he took his last breath. She had been able to tell him how sorry she was about the damned washing machine.
“Do you think he knew I was there?” she asked.
“We know so little of what the mind processes in a state of unconsciousness,” the doctor replied. “But we constantly hear about people who come out of comas and relate whole conversations that were carried on around them. So yes, I believe he knew.”
Marilyn looked down at her husband. “I guess I have to go on somehow, don’t I?” she murmured.
“Do you have someone to help you?” the doctor inquired solicitously.
“Oh yes,” she said. “My mother—she’s taking care of the children. And of course, my sister is here with me. There are lots of people…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked up at the doctor with an almost childlike need for reassurance. “But Jeffrey was my whole life, you see. I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.”
SEVEN
Joshua Clune took the medicine the doctor had prescribed for him and got over being sick. But he didn’t get over the bombing of Hill House. It was all he could think of, every day, every night. And it didn’t help that for almost a month now it was all anyone seemed to want to talk about.
“We’re not as safe as we used to be,” Big Dug told him, as the two sat huddled on a bench near the ferry terminal in a cold damp rain. “They didn’t just feed us, they looked after us, too.”
“I know,” Joshua mumbled, wishing his friend would go away and let him be. “I’m sorry.”
“Of course you’re sorry. We’re all sorry. Life here won’t ever be the same.”
“I couldn’t help it,” Joshua said, his stomach in knots.
“Of course you couldn’t, none of us could,” Big Dug assured him. “It isn’t like any of us wanted this to happen.”
“I didn’t, really, I didn’t,” Joshua told him, finding it suddenly difficult to breathe.
“It’s just that nobody knows what to do. The churches will feed us, but what about everything else? Like your medicine when you got sick. Who’s going to give that to us now? I have to tell you, everyone’s pretty worried.”
At that, Joshua couldn’t stand it anymore. Tears filled his hazel eyes and rolled down his cheeks, into his reddish stubble. “I’m sorry,” he choked. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Mean to do what?” Big Dug asked.
“I did it,” Joshua gasped, no longer able to hold it in. “I caused the fire.”
The big man blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“The fire,” Joshua repeated. “I caused the fire, and I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to
do it.”
“It was a bomb,” Big Dug told him. “A bomb caused the fire.”
“No, it was me,” Joshua said forlornly. “You told me. You told me not to sleep there, but the doctor said for me to come back first thing in the morning, and I was afraid I’d forget. I forget things, sometimes, and if I forgot the doctor, then he would get mad and tell me to go away, and I wouldn’t get my medicine, and I wouldn’t get well.”
“You slept at Hill House that night? The night before the bomb went off?”
Joshua looked miserable. “You told me not to, you told me if I did, it could start a fire,” he sobbed. “Now I don’t know what to do. I burned down Hill House and nobody will ever want to be my friend again.”
Big Dug might have looked like a lumberjack, but he had once been a schoolteacher. “Listen to me, very carefully,” he said, his voice as gentle as he could make it. “You didn’t burn down Hill House. What I said about sleeping there, I didn’t mean for you to think that just sleeping there was going to cause a fire. It takes a lot more than that.” He stopped and peered down at his younger friend. “You did just sleep there, didn’t you?”
Joshua nodded. “In the back. There’s a little shed next to some bushes. It’s real dry and cozy in between there. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t forget to go to the doctor. Do I have to tell?”
“Well, I guess that depends,” Big Dug replied. While there was little open hostility, there was not much love lost between the police and the homeless in the city of Seattle, and not much sympathy, on either side. “Did you see anything, or hear anything, you know, that looked suspicious?”
“I don’t think I did,” Joshua said, shaking his head. “It was pretty dark, and I was sleeping.”
“Then, if there wasn’t anything, I don’t see any reason for you to have to tell.”
Joshua heaved a huge sigh of relief. “And no one has to know I was there, except you and me?”
“I guess not,” Big Dug said. “We can just keep it between ourselves, if you like.”
A broad smile spread across Joshua’s face. “That’s what I’d like,” he said. “If we could just keep it between ourselves. Do you promise you won’t go and tell any of the others what I did?”
“I promise,” Big Dug assured him with a smile, getting up from the bench and lumbering toward the water fountain.
Joshua rose to follow him. “Besides,” he said with renewed cheer, “if there was anything to see, the delivery man will tell.”
Big Dug stopped in his tracks. “Delivery man?” he asked. “What delivery man was that?”
“The one that brought the packages.”
“Someone brought packages to Hill House? The night you slept there?”
Joshua nodded. “He took them down to the basement.”
When the bombing of Hill House was six weeks old, the mayor of Seattle sat down with his chief of police.
“Are we any further along than we were, say, a week ago?” he asked, a clear note of desperation in his voice.
“I think so,” came the reply.
The two men had known each other since boyhood, and the mayor generally knew better than to push the methodical police commander. But now he was being pushed, and pushed hard, and he didn’t like it. “Can you give me something, anything?” he begged.
“I know the media blackout has been tough on you,” the chief said. “But it’s made all the difference to us. At this point, I can confirm that this was not an act of international terrorism.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway,” the mayor said. “It’ll relieve some of the pressure.”
“I can also tell you that we now have a person of interest.”
“You mean someone you think you can charge?” the mayor exclaimed, almost popping out of his seat.
“I believe so. But we’re not ready to go public with that yet. We want to be sure we’ve got everything in order first.”
“When?”
“A couple more days, maybe.”
The mayor sighed. “Why does that sound like another eternity?”
“It won’t be much longer,” his friend promised.
“All right then, can I say that the investigation is still ongoing, and has been quite productive, and that your office will likely have a statement to make, say, by the end of the week?”
The police chief thought for a moment. The mayor was not alone. He, too, was under the gun, and feeling the pressure. His department was being ridiculed by the media, and after almost thirty years on the job, his competence was being questioned by the city council.
He was almost certain of his culprit, but he had been dragging his heels on an arrest because his case was wholly circumstantial. The thing he needed to lock it up tight was just one piece of direct evidence, and he knew, if it came to that, he’d give his pension for it. However, he also knew he couldn’t wait forever. He sighed. “I think that would be all right,” he said.
The news came late Saturday, with a simple statement from the chief of police that began: “We now have a person of interest in custody,” and ended: “We thank all of you for your patience and understanding.”
According to officials, the arrest was the culmination of the largest investigative effort in city history. Seattle authorities, in cooperation with several federal agencies, had sifted through the wreckage of Hill House with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. They had collected anything that might conceivably be related to the crime, examined and then reexamined each piece of potential evidence, interviewed literally dozens of people, and run down every possible lead.
What was extraordinary was that it had all been done with amazing calm and efficiency, despite incredible public pressure and the white-hot glare of a national media blitz.
EIGHT
Once a year, Dana McAuliffe fixed pancakes for breakfast. The singular occasion was the Sunday closest to March 19, and she made the effort because her husband, Sam, was a sucker for the buttermilk kind with fresh blueberries in them. March 19, which this year just happened to fall on a Sunday, was Sam’s birthday.
For the first two years of their marriage, Dana had lovingly and laboriously prepared the batter from scratch, squinting over the tiny print in her antiquated version of the Joy of Cooking, measuring cups and spoons firmly in hand, hoping to achieve the right blend of flour, buttermilk, eggs, and seasonings. Then one day she happened to come upon a packaged mix at Costco, and never looked back. If he noticed the difference, Sam never let on.
Molly certainly never noticed. The nine-year-old freckle-face with brown pigtails loved pancakes every bit as much as her stepfather did, and the preparation process was still a happy mystery to her. It was a most fortunate circumstance for Dana, whose least favorite activity in life was cooking.
“If I’d wanted to be a cook,” she often grumbled to herself, usually during the frenzy of getting a meal on the table at the last minute, “I’d have gone to cooking school instead of law school.”
Dana was every inch her father’s daughter, from her height and her striking features, to her keen intellect and her single-minded determination to succeed as an attorney. She had cut her teeth on the law in Port Townsend, Washington, watching how it was practiced by the dedicated crusader for individual rights who was both her idol and her mentor.
“The law is the only thing that keeps us civilized,” Jefferson Reid told her from the time she was old enough to understand. “Without it, we would have destroyed ourselves a long time ago.”
The eldest of four daughters, and in many ways the son her father never had, Dana was a double graduate of Stanford University, her father’s alma mater. She began her career by spending two hectic years in the King County prosecutor’s office before joining the small but prestigious Seattle law firm of Cotter Boland and Grace.
“I don’t have to take this job, you know,” she told her father when she called to discuss the offer with him. “I can come back to Port Townsend. We could set up that partnership we talked a
bout when I was a kid. Remember—Reid & Reid?”
“Yes, but you’re not a kid anymore,” he replied wisely. “You wouldn’t be happy practicing small-town law. It might suit me to a tee, but not you, my girl. Not yet, anyway. Right now, there are big-city lights in your eyes and dreams in your head, and you have to follow them wherever they take you. From everything I hear, Cotter Boland is a top-level firm, doing first-class work, and it sounds like an offer that’s probably too good for you to pass up.”
She could always count on him to know her better than anyone, probably better even than she knew herself. Port Townsend was a fine place to have been raised. Dana treasured the years she had spent there, growing and learning, and she would always think of it as home, but it was undeniably provincial, and to be honest, dull. Seattle, on the other hand, was the largest city in the Pacific Northwest, and it offered all the excitement, sophistication, and opportunity she could hope for.
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” she persisted.
Jefferson Reid, who was very good at reading people, especially his daughter, smiled into the telephone. “I’m sure,” he said.
She took the job.
Eight years later, having devoted herself to her work, at the expense of almost everything else in her life, she was invited to join the partnership of Cotter Boland and Grace; the first woman to whom such an offer had ever been tendered. She was thirty-five years old.
“A healthy dose of feminine perspective ought to do this stuffy old place some real good,” Paul Cotter told her. He was then fifty-eight, and the managing partner of the firm that had been started by his great-grandfather more than a century before.
The first time that Dana took her place at the foot of the huge mahogany conference table, she knew she had achieved what she had dreamed about since the days when her father had let her play hooky from school and had taken her to court with him, sat her down in the first row, right behind the defense table, and let her soak it all up.
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