Once a Father. Marie Ferrarella

need help here!” he shouted without looking up.

      The demand was issued to the paramedics who’d accompanied the fire trucks to the country club at the first sound of the alarm. But even before any of them managed to materialize at his elbow, Adam was employing CPR. One hand over the other, he pressed down hard on the boy’s chest while counting to five in his mind.

      The white patches of snow on the ground contrasted sharply with the dark, sooty layer of dirt along every part of the boy’s blistered, burned body. Adam tried not to think about anything except getting the boy’s chest to move, getting him to breathe on his own. The small chest felt so fragile. If he pressed too hard, he was afraid he might crush it.

      He repeated the cycle twice, first pressing down on the boy’s chest, then breathing into his mouth. Finally, the boy stirred, his lids fluttering, then opening. He looked directly into Adam’s eyes.

      Adam felt as if something had hit him smack in his chest with the force of an anvil.

      “We can take over from here, buddy.” K.C., one of the paramedics, firmly but gently nudged Adam aside. Gently, because they all knew that after two years the firefighter was no closer to being over the loss of his wife and son than he’d been the evening the tragedy had occurred.

      Adam felt something take hold of his hand. When he looked down, he saw that the boy had wrapped his small, grimy, burned fingers around it. He knew that the very effort must have hurt terribly. The boy’s grasp was not strong. It would have taken next to nothing to break the hold.

      But the connection was far stronger than any steel wire could have ever managed. Adam couldn’t pull his hand away. The boy’s eyes wouldn’t release him.

      Adam heard the captain coming up behind him, felt a fatherly hand on his shoulder he neither related to nor resented.

      “Anyone know who this boy is?” Captain MacIntire addressed his words to anyone in the immediate vicinity.

      With careful steps, Bonnie moved closer to them. There were fresh tears shimmering in her eyes.

      “That’s Jake Anderson.” She pressed her lips together, her heart going out to the boy. “Those were his parents you just…you just…” She couldn’t make herself finish her statement.

      She didn’t have to.

      Someone at the baseline of the fire called to MacIntire and he hurried away, all under the watchful eye of Chief Stone.

      Adam made up his mind. “I’m going with the boy.”

      Working over Jake, K.C. slanted a look toward Adam. There was understanding in the paramedic’s eyes. But sympathy, they’d learned, was the last thing anyone offered Adam Collins.

      “Suit yourself.” K.C. snapped the legs on the gurney and they popped upright. With Adam walking alongside him, holding the boy’s hand, he guided the gurney to the rear of the ambulance. “But being the good Samaritan won’t keep the captain from getting on your case for playing Superman again.”

      “Yeah, but it’ll postpone it for a while.” Adam stepped back to allow the gurney to be hoisted into the ambulance. Jake’s fingers remained around his. Adam twisted around to maintain the connection, then got into the ambulance himself.

      Dr. Tracy Walker felt beat and ready to call it a day. And it wasn’t even one o’clock.

      She felt as if she’d been running on fast-forward all morning, with no signs of a letup anytime soon. It had started when her alarm had failed to go off at five. Five a.m. was not her idea of an ideal hour to get up, but it would have given her sufficient time to pull herself together for the surgery she had to perform this morning. Five o’clock came and went, as did six and then almost seven.

      Fortunately, Tracy had what she fondly liked to refer to as an alarm pig, a gentle, quick-footed Vietnamese potbellied pig that was still very much a baby and went by the name of Petunia. Petunia, it turned out, was trainable and far more intelligent than some of the people Tracy knew.

      At five to seven, Petunia had snuggled in at her feet and tickled her awake. Any one-sided dialogue Tracy had felt up to rendering was immediately curtailed the instant she’d rolled over in her bed and saw that according to her non-ringing clock, she had exactly twenty minutes to shower, eat and get herself to the hospital for the skin grafting surgery she was scheduled to perform.

      Weighing her options and the somewhat seductive power hot water had over her, Tracy decided to sacrifice the shower and breakfast as she hurried into clothes, put out a bowl of fresh water for Petunia and threw herself behind the wheel of her car in less time than it took for an ordinary citizen to floss their teeth.

      As she ran out the door she promised a disgruntled Petunia to return during her own lunch break to feed her choice leftovers from the refrigerator. Petunia had said nothing.

      With one eye on the rearview mirror, watching for dancing blue and red lights, Tracy had bent a few speeding rules and made it to the operating room with two minutes to spare.

      The three-hour surgery had been as successful as possible, given the circumstances. There were no instant cures, no huge miracles in her line of work. Only many small miracles that were eventually hooked up into one large one. She was a pediatric burn specialist, and there was nothing in the world she would rather have been, even though it meant having her heart torn out of her chest whenever she saw another victim being wheeled into the hospital. Pain went with the territory. But someone had to help these children and she had elected herself to be one of the ones on the front lines. It gave her life a purpose.

      “Out of my way, Myra,” she wearily told a nurse who had somehow materialized in her path. “I’m on my way home to feed a hungry pig.”

      But the dark-skinned woman shook her head. “’Fraid your boyfriend’s going to have to wait, Doctor,” the thrice-divorced woman told her. “We just got a call in on the scanner. There’s been a bombing at the Lone Star Country Club.”

      “A bombing?” Here? In Mission Creek? They were a peaceful little town of some twenty thousand people. Who would want to bomb them? Had the world gone completely crazy? “Does anyone know who did it?”

      “Beats me,” Myra lamented. “But dispatch says they’re bringing in a little boy who’s going to need your gentle touch.”

      Tracy took the new sterile, yellow paper gown Myra held up for her and donned it to cover her regular scrubs. “Do we know how many people were hurt?”

      “About fifteen or so.” The wail of approaching sirens disturbed the tranquil atmosphere, growing louder by the second. “But according to the dispatch, there were only two fatalities.” Myra’s dark eyes met hers. “The kid’s parents.”

      “Oh God,” Tracy groaned just as the emergency room doors parted and the ambulances began arriving.

      First on the scene were the two paramedics with the boy Tracy assumed was her patient. Hurrying alongside of the gurney, holding tightly onto the boy’s hand, was a firefighter, still wearing his heavy yellow slicker. The sight had a dramatic impact.

      A relative? she wondered.

      The next moment, Tracy was looking at the boy and ceased wondering about anything else.

      Chapter 2

      She never got used to it.

      Never got used to seeing the anguish in their eyes, on their faces, could never anesthetize herself not to take note of the pitiful, fearful conditions in which so many of her patients arrived.

      Tracy never bothered wasting time trying to find answers to unanswered questions or an order to the universe. She was just grateful that her training allowed her to make a difference in these children’s lives, however small. To help start these innocent victims, who had unwittingly stood in the path of a cruel and feelingless fate, back on the road to recovery.

      She gave each patient a hundred