Act of God (4 page)

Inside the hedge of laurel, more than two hundred men, women, and children lay wounded or dying or already dead. It would
later be determined that a dozen had miraculously escaped injury. One of them was three-year-old Chelsea Callahan.

Firefighters and paramedics reached the scene within minutes; police close behind. They were greeted by doctors, nurses, and
staff members from nearby hospitals, already in the throes of a massive rescue effort. The wounded were removed as quickly
as they could be extricated from the burning building and whisked off to various facilities for treatment, determined by the
severity of their injuries. Authorities later verified that the immediacy of medical attention was in all likelihood responsible
for most of the lives that were saved.

Carl Gentry was among the first to be lifted onto a gurney and taken off to a hospital. And fuzzy though his mind was, as
he was being wheeled away, something that had not occurred to him earlier now struck him clearly. This first Tuesday in February
was also the first day in the eight years since he had come to work at Hill House that the sidewalk people had not appeared.

T
he bombing of Hill House shook Seattle to its very core. Not just literally, within the half-mile radius of the mansion itself,
but figuratively as well.

There were few in the city who had not had some sort of association with the center at one time in their lives, if not as
an employee or a patient, then perhaps as a friend or family to an employee or patient, or to a child who had been so carefully
nurtured on the third floor. Or possibly, the link had come through the facility’s extensive outreach efforts: its neonatal
and well-child clinics, its indigent care and clean needle programs, its youth and drug crisis hotlines. Whatever the connection,
it was now being sharply felt.

As word of the disaster spread, people found themselves stopping in their tracks, stunned and incredulous, unable to comprehend.

“What could have happened?” they asked one another.

“Why?”

Reporters from Seattle’s two daily newspapers raced to the scene. Cameramen from the local television stations had their
Minicams rolling when they were still blocks away. What greeted them was total devastation. Lenses, zooming in past the ring
of fire trucks that had answered the call, registered the gruesome sight of body parts, mingled with fragments of furniture
and equipment, smoking and smoldering in the blaze. Microphones caught the awful sounds of dying, the frightened whimpers
of infants, the agonized screams of adults. The smell of burning flesh, fortunately unrecordable, was sickening. The historic
mansion was gone.

“In a matter of minutes,” the fire chief confirmed with a catch in his voice. “There was nothing we could do. This has been
mainly a search and recovery operation.”

“How many?” reporters asked.

The chief sighed as he surveyed the destruction. “We don’t know yet,” he said. “All these… parts… will have to go to the morgue
to be sorted out. It could be days, even weeks, before there’s positive identification, or even an accurate count.”

It was a photographer from the
Seattle Times
who caught what would become the quintessential shot of the event. Thirty-eight-year-old Janet Holman, still wearing her
hospital scrubs, stood in the middle of the grisly wreckage, holding a small, dismembered arm in a blue-striped sleeve. On
her face was an expression of disbelief, dismay, and dawning horror.

“We have a breaking story to report,” newscaster Joyce Taylor was telling her television viewers within minutes of the incident.
“A massive explosion of as yet undetermined origin has just occurred at Hill House. We don’t have many details at this point,
as authorities are just now reaching the scene, but we’re told that the explosion has completely destroyed the mansion and
killed or injured a great many people.”

For Dana McAuliffe, the association with Hill House was personal. Not only had she been going to the clinic for gynecological
services for over a decade, she had been there not more than a month ago for her annual checkup.

“I can’t believe it,” she exclaimed, when she returned to the office after lunch. “I thought it was a train wreck.”

“I heard it on the radio,” Angeline Wilder assured her. “It’s really spooky, you know, what with that doctor having just been
here.”

“Good lord, you’re right,” the attorney gasped. “And he was on his way back there.”

Angeline shook her head. “They shouldn’t have done that story the other night. I bet that’s what did it. I bet someone set
a bomb.”

“I want answers, and I want them now,” Washington’s governor bellowed from his office in Olympia, some sixty miles away.

“Nobody knows anything yet,” his chief of staff replied.

“Don’t tell me nobody knows,” he retorted. “Somebody has to know something—they’re just not talking. Well, I’m the god-dam
governor of this state, and I want answers. So, go get me some. And keep the media out of my face until you do.”

“You’re going to have to make a statement about this fairly soon,” his aide said.

“Of course I am,” the governor replied. “That’s why you’re already on your way out of here, right? I’m running for reelection
this year, and I don’t intend to make an insensitive fool of myself by saying the wrong thing.”

It didn’t take investigators long to determine the cause of the disaster. Once firefighters had the blaze under control, members
of the King County bomb squad were on the scene, bolstered by several teams from the FBI. Entering the area, which had already
been cordoned off by the police and sealed from public access, they went to work, systematically combing the rubble of Hill
House for whatever they could find. And what
they found were fabric remnants, traces of fertilizer and other chemicals, and the remains of a small timing device.

“It was a bomb all right,” the head of the squad declared. “And whoever set it knew exactly what he was doing. The stuff was
positioned for maximum results.”

“Will that help you catch whoever did this?” someone asked.

“It’s a starting point.”

At a quickly arranged press conference, a spokesman from the Seattle mayor’s office did what he could to assure an apprehensive
population that everything possible was being done to protect the community and to resolve the crisis expeditiously and professionally.

“Let there be no mistake,” he said firmly but calmly. “This was not just an attack on one isolated building. It was an attack
on the entire city of Seattle. We do not take it lightly, and we intend to do whatever is necessary to track down the person
or persons responsible.”

“Tell us what you know so far,” entreated a reporter from the
Post-Intelligencer.

“I want to,” came the response, “but unfortunately I can’t. In this case, we must balance the people’s right to know with
the need for an unhampered investigation. I’m sorry, but that means there can be no briefings, no information, no leaks from
the police or any other investigating authority to anyone until we have something of material substance to report. And we
ask you all to understand and respect that.”

“You mean, don’t call us, we’ll call you?” the reporter suggested sardonically.

The spokesman shrugged. “For now, let’s think about the victims and their families, and the grieving that has to take place,”
he said, deftly diverting the crowd. “Let’s all be there to offer our condolences and our prayers to these people, and give
us a few days’ breathing space.”

“In a most heinous act of terrorism,” NBC’s Tom Brokaw reported on the evening news, “more than two hundred people, including
an estimated seventy children under the age of five, were either killed or seriously injured today when a bomb destroyed an
abortion clinic in Seattle, Washington.”

“Whatever your opinions on the subject,’ Kathi Goertzen, KOMO news co-anchor, felt compelled to suggest, “the Seattle Family
Services Center was much more than just an abortion clinic. It was an integral part of our community. Over the years, it was
a helping hand for millions, a refuge for thousands, and a last resort for hundreds. Hill House will be sorely missed.”

“The Coalition for Conservative Causes is a peaceful and law-abiding organization that does not advocate violence of any kind
against anyone,” executive director Roger Roark read from a hastily prepared script. “We deeply regret the loss of life at
the Seattle Family Services Center. While we accept no responsibility for those who have made a holy war out of an unborn
child’s right to life, we cannot help but consider how many times, in such righteous wars, guiltless people have been sacrificed
for the greater good.”

“We are horrified by the destruction of Hill House, and by the deaths of so many innocent people,” Priscilla Wales, president
of FOCUS, the acronym for Freedom of Choice in the United States, declared in an impromptu telephone interview from her San
Francisco headquarters. “However, if you consider the current political climate, and the resulting rhetoric of the CCC and
other organizations like it, who want you to believe that two wrongs do indeed make a right, you can see why we’re not particularly
surprised by this terrorist act. A disaster of this magnitude was totally predictable, really just a matter of time.
The question is—how much longer are we going to continue to put up with it? How many more lives are going to be lost before
we elect officials who will step up to the responsibility for protecting the rights of women in this country?”

“This is what happens when our legislators turn a blind eye to the double standard of killing helpless babies and then protecting
their killers,’ said the soft-spoken, Houston-based Prudence Chaffey, pro-life activist and co-founder of AIM, the acronym
for Abortion Is Murder. “And the worst of it is that such acts of frustration and desperation will likely continue until the
people of this country are willing to rise up as one and repudiate all forms of murder.”

“A special hotline has been established in an effort to help authorities identify the victims of this catastrophe as quickly
as possible,” veteran KING telecaster Jean Enersen announced. “Police are asking people who think they know someone who might
have been at Hill House at the time of the bombing to please call this number.”

“My mother isn’t here,” eight-year-old Justine Pauley told the woman who answered the hotline. “I think maybe she was at Hill
House today.”

“And why do you think that, honey?” the operator asked.

“Because she told me not to worry if she wasn’t here when I came home from school.”

“Can you describe her for me?” the woman inquired gently.

“She’s thin.”

“How old is she?”

“I’m not sure. Pretty old, I guess.”

“What does she look like? What color is her hair, her eyes?”

“Brown,” Justine replied.

“Honey, is your daddy home? Can I talk to him?”

“No, he’s not here,’ the child replied. “But I’m not worried about him, ’cause he doesn’t come home until real late sometimes.”

“Are you alone?”

“Oh no,” Justine assured her. “My brother is here with me.”

“That’s good,” the operator said, relieved. “How old is he?”

“He’s six.”

Joshua Clune would not come out of his box. No matter how hard Big Dug coaxed and cajoled, his friend would not budge.

“I’ve been looking for you,” the bearded behemoth declared. “Did you hear the news?”

“No,” Joshua mumbled.

“Somebody blew up Hill House this afternoon, and it burned right down to the ground.”

There was no response.

“I heard almost everybody’s dead “ There was still no response.

“Are you sicker?” Big Dug asked. For the past week now, Joshua had been suffering from a chest cold. Yesterday, he had coughed
up blood, and Big Dug had taken him to Hill House, where he was examined by a doctor and told to come back today for further
treatment. “Did you go see the doctor again like you were supposed to? Did he give you some medicine?”

“Go away,” Joshua said.