“Hey, Doc—you gonna fix my momma. She gonna be okay, right?”
Jostled off-balance, Ethan looked up into Michael Parker’s amber eyes. Oh, how he wished he could lie. He desperately wanted to; his mind searched for the comforting words. But instead, he only shook his head.
For one endless moment the boy stared back at him with frightened, angry eyes…bravely lifted chin. Then he pushed at Ethan, struck him hard with both doubled-up fists before he turned. Blindly. Then waiting hands reached for him and pulled him away.
Somewhere, someone was sobbing.
Only when he was sure the boy was safely away did Ethan lift his hand and gently close Louise Parker’s unseeing eyes.
Chapter 2
The day after the tragedy in The Gardens, Ethan was in the rectory of St. Jude’s Catholic Church monitoring the progress of a hastily convened meeting of the Citizens’ Alliance for Community Action from his hiding place in the rectory kitchen. Such skulking and hiding seemed cowardly to him but was actually a compromise of sorts. Father Frank had tried his best to dissuade him from coming at all.
“Bad idea,” the priest had insisted that afternoon on the phone. “The news media’s got their teeth in this in a big way. When word gets out—and it will—that the ride-along doctor on the scene was the president’s son…”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” Ethan said heavily. He’d thought about it a lot, during the course of a difficult day and worse night. “Something needs to be done. If we use my name, my dad’s influence—”
“We’ll be sitting in the middle of a three-ring circus. Ethan, my friend—my naive friend—I know you mean well, but do you have any idea what will happen down here—what will happen to these people once the various government agencies and the media get involved in this?”
Ethan’s jaw tightened. “Well, I expect my work at the clinic would be history, but at least something would be done about improving conditions in The Gardens. Those tenements—”
The priest’s snort interrupted him. “The Gardens will become a political football, everybody fighting over what to do and how to pay for it and who gets the credit, and the media will be egging them on, and while the struggle goes back and forth, what do these people who actually live down here do? After an appearance or two on national network television, they go on as before—only with less privacy. No, my friend…” a sigh gusted over the line “…and perhaps it is shortsighted and God forgive me, but I don’t much care about what new legislation gets passed, or what new ordinances, or what new development projects get proposed for sometime in the far-distant future. I care about these people, and what they need is some changes to be made now. Before somebody else dies.”
Before somebody else dies.
Safely out of view of those attending the meeting in the next room, Ethan leaned his forehead against the wall and closed his eyes. In his mind, as in a darkened movie theater, he saw again the body in the rubble, the blood, the blind dead eyes. And another pair of eyes, very much alive. Angry amber eyes. Proud, frightened eyes. He felt again the frustrated blow from a pair of small, clenched fists. He heard poignant echoes of Mrs. Schmidt’s voice: With a mother like that, he has a chance. What will become of Michael Parker, he wondered, now that his mother is dead?
Ethan knew what it was like to be a small boy left suddenly without a mother. Those memories came to him, not as images on a movie screen, but as a cold, sick feeling in his stomach, a yawning emptiness in his heart. Almost a quarter of a century later, oh, how well he remembered it—the fear, the desolation, the terrible sense of abandonment. Back then, part of him had wanted to lash out in anger; part had tried to retreat into the remembered security of babyhood. Every part of him had felt utterly bereft.
But he’d had his sister, Lauren. He didn’t know what he’d have done without Lolly, even though most of the time she’d treated him the way older sisters generally treat younger brothers. Still, she’d been there for him when it counted.
And then…there’d been the miracle. Dixie had come. Dixie, with her gifts of music and laughter and breezy Texas ways. Starved for a mother’s love, six-year-old Ethan had fallen for her immediately, long before his father had made her officially his stepmother. Long before the entire country had fallen in love with her casual, down-home charm and embraced her as its most unconventional First Lady. As his father the president was fond of saying, both in public and in private, God Bless Dixie.
Ethan had been lucky. He’d had Lolly to keep him on his toes and Dixie to love and care for him. Who would Michael Parker have?
Beside him the crack in the kitchen door cautiously widened, and he straightened hurriedly as Ruthie Mendoza slipped through and sidled past him. From the parlor, which also served the church as an informal meeting room, he could hear a rising level of noise and activity. He wondered what he’d missed while his mind had been wandering in his own distant past.
“What’s going on?” he asked Ruthie in a whisper.
“Wrapping up.” Ruthie didn’t bother to lower her voice. Nor did she look at him, but went on making unnecessary adjustments to the platters of oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies that were spread across the kitchen table. From the way she’d been pushing them on him all evening, Ethan suspected she’d made them herself. “I’m just going to take these in…”
She swept toward him with a plate of cookies in each hand and a spot of color in each cheek. All Ethan could do was pull the door open for her and shrink back behind it, well out of the line of sight of anyone in the parlor. As Ruthie sailed out the door, her brother, wearing a short-sleeved black shirt and his clerical collar, for once, sidestepped around her and into the kitchen. Ethan all but pounced on him.
“What happened? What did they decide? Are they going to the mayor? What about—”
“No city, state or federal officials—not yet,” Father Frank said with the contained satisfaction of someone who’s had things go exactly his way. He picked up a cookie and bit into it, glancing down at his rounded shirtfront as he did so; apparently Ruthie had been nagging him again about putting on weight. He shrugged and picked up another cookie. “First thing we have to do is find out who owns that building—or block of buildings. Then we decide where to go from there. Lawsuits, like government agencies, take too long. What we’re hoping is that the threat of bad publicity will be enough to squeeze these slumlords into bringing their buildings up to standard.”
“You want me—”
The priest shook his head. “Mrs. Schmidt’s volunteered to go down to city hall tomorrow morning. She’s got a friend who works in the…I forget what department, the one where they issue permits, fire and safety inspections, things like that. Anyway, she’ll—” He broke off with a muttered, “Oops” as someone bumped the door from the outside. He lunged to block unauthorized entry while Ethan once again flattened himself against the wall.
Through the partly open door he could hear the unmistakeably carrying voice of a television news reporter: “Oh—Father Mendoza—Father, I wonder if you could take just a moment to tell us—” The door closed, cutting off the rest.
After a moment, swearing softly and feeling utterly powerless, Ethan adjusted a Chicago Cubs baseball cap to hide his blond hair and let himself out of the rectory through the side door, where a Secret Service agent waited unobtrusively for him in the shadows.
Mrs. Schmidt arrived at the clinic shortly after noon the next day, four hours late and with Father Frank Mendoza close on her heels. Ethan didn’t have to ask if the trip to city hall had been successful; both looked ready to burst.
Whatever the import of the news they’d brought, it had to wait while Ethan finished suturing a toddler’s badly mangled lip—from falling off the steps, his mother claimed. Ethan devoutly hoped it was true.
He was on his own, since Ruthie wasn’t due in until two o’clock and Clair,