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  Police began investigating immediately, and in following days the media reported that the girl claimed to have aborted herself, and that the only contact she had had with any physician or public health organization were two counseling sessions with Jennifer Yalebrough of Northern Buchanan Health Services. Ms. Yalebrough's degree was in counseling only, and she had had no medical training.

  Rumor soon informed Paul that the girl was Heather Heisey, who had been absent from school for several days, and when he learned that she could be the unfortunate girl, he lost no time in making an appointment to see Bill Geyer in his office at the church. He also lost no time in coming to the point.

  "Heather Heisey," he said, after he had exchanged greetings with the pastor.

  From the way Geyer's face darkened, Paul knew the rumor was true. "What about her?" the pastor said.

  "She was the girl in the news, wasn't she? The one who had the abortion?"

  Geyer didn't answer immediately, but finally asked Paul if he had seen the paper that morning, and he said he had. "Was there anything new?" Geyer said.

  "No. Nothing."

  "There will be. I saw her last night. In the hospital. She broke down, told me some things, things she hadn't told the police, the doctors...or her parents."

  "What?"

  "What's your interest, Paul?"

  "She's one of the children of this church. I'm concerned for her welfare. And I want to try and help, if there's any way I can."

  Geyer looked away, then nodded. "You already know who she is, and the rest of it will be in the papers. Besides, you're involved with the youth more than any other layman, and you should know. Just keep it confidential." Paul nodded agreement, and Geyer went on.

  "This counselor -- Yalebrough -- apparently told Heather how to abort herself. Heather was afraid to tell her parents about her pregnancy, and a minor needs parental consent for an abortion in this state. She wasn't very far along, so Yalebrough told her about some non-prescription pills she could take an overdose of that would do the job."

  "How could she do that?" Paul felt his anger rising. "She's not a doctor."

  "She can't do it," Geyer said. "Not legally. Technically, all she can do is present the available options -- the legal ones. The patient has to make the choice on her own. And as for advising self-abortion, well, that's way out of the ball park, from what the police said."

  "You told the police."

  Geyer nodded. "With Heather's permission, and on the condition that the police talk to her only when I was in the room. At any rate, she took the pills when her parents were away, and waited. They made her terribly sick, but they did detach the fetus. That was when the problem started. It wouldn't come down the canal." Geyer looked away from Paul, studying the top of his desk. "The pain increased, awful cramps, and she started to bleed. That's when she panicked and grabbed the first thing she could think of...a wire hanger. Didn't take time to sterilize it, dug around, ripped herself up pretty badly, but got the fetus out. By then she was bleeding so much that she got terrified and dialed 911. You know the rest."

  Paul tasted bitterness as he pictured the scene, the sobbing girl unable to stop the bleeding.

  "I think she told me because I was the first person who was really kind to her, who wasn't after information. It was like she had been waiting for me. It just flowed out of...her." Geyer said the last words slowly, realizing that they bore a darker meaning.

  "This counselor...will they arrest her?"

  "I think so. Steering a girl into something like that, she might have died."

  "A hysterectomy. She'll never have children then."

  "No. No natural children, anyway."

  "So not only," Paul said slowly, "was her baby killed, but the babies she might have had someday -- had and wanted -- will never be born. That's terrible. That's like...murder in advance."

  "The police will take care of it," Geyer said.

  ~ * ~

  The police, however, did not take care of it. Jennifer Yalebrough was arrested that evening on the charges of corrupting the morals of a minor, reckless endangerment, and prescribing medications without a license. She was able to put up the $10,000 bail money immediately, and the next morning two attorneys sent from CHOICE For Women arrived and chivvied the district attorney's office until their confidence of the strength of the case was badly eroded. Within two days they had dropped the charges of corrupting morals and illegal prescription. The endangerment charge still stood.

  Jennifer Yalebrough had made no comments to either confirm or deny that she had advised the unnamed girl to abort her own fetus, and because of the lack of a denial was told by her superiors at Northern Buchanan Health Services that she would not be permitted to return to her job until the case was resolved. The CHOICE attorney's threats made short work of his client's forced layoff, and an order signed by a federal judge put Jennifer Yalebrough back in her office within twenty-four hours.

  It also put over fifty demonstrators in front of Northern Buchanan Health Services for thirteen hours a day.

  ~ * ~

  Among those demonstrators at any one time were over a dozen members of the Conservative Christian Youth Coalition. Peter Hurst spent two hours a day there, and another half hour scheduling other members of his organization. They took turns walking up and down the sidewalk in front of the main doors from seven in the morning to eight at night, when the facility closed. They wrote blogs, sent press releases and wrote angry letters to the Buchanan area newspapers, letters of appeal to local churches, and appeared on the local nightly news shows. Buchanan's mayor stationed uniformed patrolmen outside the building to maintain order, and in the first two weeks of protests, no violence had taken place.

  That was, however, before Jennifer Yalebrough's preliminary hearing. Heather Heisey testified that Ms. Yalebrough had advised her to take a brand-name stimulant in order to abort her fetus, while Ms. Yalebrough finally and flatly denied ever doing such a thing, and remarked that Heather might have learned of the method online, or by hearing several other women talking about it in the waiting room, where such primitive techniques were often discussed.

  Under cross-examination, an insecure and rattled Heather admitted that she had spent long periods of time in the waiting room on her two visits, and that it might have been possible that she had overheard women discussing techniques of self-abortion. She also admitted to reading about various abortion techniques on the Internet. Although the assistant district attorney (who happened to be Norm Feathers) objected seven times that the defense was harassing the witness, the judge overruled.

  With the seeming uncertainty on Heather Heisey's part, along with the character witnesses who swore that they had no knowledge that Ms. Yalebrough had ever advised a consultee to perform an illegal or dangerous act, the judge decided by the end of the hearing that the evidence against Jennifer Yalebrough was not strong enough to warrant bringing the case to trial.

  The dismissal did several things. It maintained pro-life fury toward the district attorney's office, it made certain that Jennifer Yalebrough would continue to work as a counselor, and it spurred both Paul Blair and Peter Hurst to action.

  Chapter 32

  Paul had smoldered for weeks. He remembered smiling at Heather Heisey when she was a baby in her parents' arms, teaching her the stories of Jesus when she was barely old enough to talk, listening to her small, shy voice in the YF discussion groups.

  Then he pictured Heather Heisey in agony, wielding a coat hanger in her own vagina, trying to stop the pain like some dumb animal biting away its foot caught in a trap. The image made him sick with anger, but not toward Heather, who had been cheated and lied to, once by the boy who had fathered her dead child, and again by the woman who had told her of the easy way to kill her baby and end her problems.

  It was the second of these betrayals that made Paul burn with a retributive fire. Up until the time of the dismissal, he had been begrudgingly content to let the police and the law deal with Jennife
r Yalebrough, thinking that loss of position and a several year loss of freedom would effectively prevent the woman from exercising her pernicious influence among other foolish children.

  But now Jennifer Yalebrough was not only free, but reinstated in a place where she could once more counsel blood and death and terror. That, thought Paul, was an unacceptable conclusion to the affair, a false conclusion that promised a repetition and continuity of self-violence, a series of mutilated young women, and babies killed, never born, never conceived in wombs involuntarily left barren.

  Poor Heather. And all the poor girls to come.

  Unless he would make the conclusion final, end it once and for all.

  ~ * ~

  The next day marked Jennifer Yalebrough's return to work, and there was violence for the first time on the sidewalk in front of Northern Buchanan Health Services. Over a hundred demonstrators were outside the building an hour before it opened. Six patrolmen surrounded Jennifer Yalebrough as she walked among the protestors shaking their fists and placards. Still, several of them successfully spat upon the woman. One threw a cup full of water with red food coloring on her brown leather jacket, and was arrested.

  The protestors shouted at and shook placards in the faces of the women patients who went in, intimidating several of them into turning around and leaving, to the sound of loud cheers from the group. Their success and their numbers emboldened them, and by ten o'clock they had linked arms and formed a chain across the entrance. The six patrolmen, uncertain how to respond to this display of civil disobedience by limiting access to a public place, stood by uncomfortably as though waiting for orders.

  They went into action only when the fists began to fly, which occurred when an Hispanic man and his wife attempted to enter. The man spoke to the protestors, then tried to separate two of them, an older man and a young woman. When the pair refused to unlink their arms, the Hispanic man threw a short right jab into the older man's face, breaking his nose. The woman protestor, horrified by the gushing blood, stepped away, and the Hispanic man grabbed his wife's arm and pushed through before the rest of the crowd could react.

  When they did, they went crazy, trying to enter the building after the man, but the facility's security guard locked the door from the inside, and the protestors could only pound on the door and howl with rage, while the leaders berated the police for not arresting the Hispanic man for assault.

  The patrolmen called their superiors at the police department, who called the district attorney's office, who called the mayor, who had already been called by Northern Buchanan Health Services. Another hour of hysteria and siege followed before police reinforcements drove up to disperse the crowd, a large number of whom refused to disperse. Seventeen arrests were made, including the Hispanic man who had broken the nose of the older man, who turned out to be the Reverend Ronald Wilber of the Church of the Holy Word.

  On the local TV news that night, the Reverend Wilber, his nose swathed in white bandages, called the facility's staff murderers and their patients accomplices, a staff spokesman called the protestors thugs, and the Hispanic man, now charged with assault, called the pro-lifers fascists, though he pronounced the word differently every time he said it.

  The mayor vowed that, although she sympathized with the pro-life demonstrators, such behavior would not be tolerated. The district attorney vowed that anyone breaking the law, no matter what the reason, would be prosecuted. And Jennifer Yalebrough, the most calm and self-possessed of all those interviewed, vowed that as long as abortion was legal in the state of Pennsylvania, she would continue to counsel it as a viable tool for women's reproductive rights.

  Yes, Paul Blair thought, watching. You will counsel it in any form possible, legal or not. You will take the young and the ignorant and you will tell them things that can kill them or ruin their futures, and you will not change your behavior of your own accord.

  And that is why you must be stopped.

  ~ * ~

  The same thought had occurred with increasing frequency to Peter Hurst, who was there the day the Reverend Wilber had been struck. But while Paul Blair's intent was to stop someone who had hurt a single person and might hurt more, Peter's goal was broader. He wanted nothing less than to shut down the clinic altogether, just as he would have wanted to close any facility in the world in which abortions were counseled and performed.

  He had devised a plan that would make his point clear, his power known, and his threat unmistakable. However, he needed to wait until the current furor died down, until the security had become less intense, until the murderous status quo had returned to its perverse normality.

  It took several weeks. By mid-January the number of protestors had diminished to less than a dozen each day. They arrived around ten o'clock and left at seven, an hour before the clinic closed. Only one patrolman kept watch now, and there were no linked arms to keep people out. Instead, the protestors handed patients pamphlets with photographs of aborted fetuses, and tried to engage them in conversations. Some stopped and listened, others simply walked past.

  Jennifer Yalebrough no longer had her police escort. The protestors occasionally shouted at her if she went in or out of the building while they were there, but the slander and harassment lawsuits brought against several of them by CHOICE attorneys had diluted the vitriol of the comments. Northern Buchanan Health Services and the butchers who ran it had begun to relax again. The time was right.

  Peter put the device together in his room. There was no difficulty in doing so without his parents' knowledge. They were used to his desire for privacy. After all, most people his age were either on their own now or away at college, and they felt fortunate that Peter had chosen to go to school locally and live with them rather than stay in a dormitory. Besides, his behavior was impeccable, and they had no reason to think that he was doing anything but God's work.

  Miriam Hurst had been delighted with how her son had turned out, particularly after his terrible childhood experience. But now, praise God, that was all forgotten. The Lord had answered her prayers and shone His healing light upon her son. She knew that no mother could have a better boy.

  And in his room, Peter built his bomb.

  Chapter 33

  Jennifer Yalebrough did not like working late, but the hearing and all the publicity surrounding it had backed up her paperwork to the point where she feared she might never catch up. At least it was all over, except for the few protestors who would have been outside the center whether she was there or not, and now all that was left was her and the paper.

  Piles of it, stacks of it, ream after ream of forms to be filled out, reports to be made. The computer helped some, but the information stored within had to be transferred by hand to that multitude of papers. She glanced at her watch, saw that it was already 10:30, and swore to work only another half hour, and then head for home.

  She vowed to herself, as she had vowed over and over again ever since this whole thing started, that she would never again try to help these damn teenagers more than she legally should, never mention shortcuts, other ways to force a miscarriage. In truth, she remembered her two meetings with Heather Heisey only dimly. At the first, Jennifer had indeed recommended abortion as the prime option. It made sense. If you don't want a baby, abort the fetus. And how many girls Heather's age actually wanted to be mothers, for God's sake? Even the supposedly prim, straight-laced ones who said grace before meals and sang their hymns in church.

  Two years earlier Jennifer had had one of those girls who had refused to consider abortion. As it turned out, she had never had to put her baby up for adoption, because her father, a devout churchman who owned a garment factory, had blown the girl's head off with a shotgun one night, did the same to his wife, and ended the whole thing by eating the barrels himself. Jennifer had thought at first that it would have made more sense for him to have gone after the girl's boyfriend, but after a few days’ thought, she figured out that the guilty party probably wasn't a teenage boy. It was ugly, but it was th
e only thing that added up. The father couldn't live with that kind of guilt, so he had ended three lives.

  At least Jennifer hadn't had to get involved with that case the way she had with this Heisey girl. At their second session, the girl had been crazed, crying and saying that she couldn't ask her parents for permission, she just couldn't, and Jennifer had sympathized and held the girl and thought she might have said something about other ways, the old home remedies, but she was sure she didn't recommend them, and if the girl had been stupid enough to go home and swallow a whole bottle of that crap from the drug store and then finish off the job with a wire hanger -- a wire hanger, for crissake! -- was it her fault? There was, after all, a big difference between teaching about Lincoln's assassination and handing someone a gun and telling them to go shoot Barack Obama.

  Sure. Try and explain that to a Jesus-crazed Buchananite. At least the judge had been sane, and thank God for CHOICE. Still, Jennifer had learned her lesson. She'd never mention do-it-yourself again.

  She shuddered at the memory of all the shouting faces, shook her head to drive it from her mind, and turned back to her work, scribbling in names, dates, times on the next form.

  Then her door opened and someone walked in, and she barely had time to look up and see a dark hand holding something inches away from her face, a metal fist, a gun –

  ~ * ~

  When he heard the shot, Peter Hurst froze in place. At first he thought, in a split-second scenario, that it had been fired at him by the night watchman, who had noticed the men's room window he had unlocked earlier that afternoon and had waited for him. But when he felt no pain, and heard no more shots, he jerked his head to the left and looked down the hall just in time to see a door open and a man come through, the light behind him, carrying a gun in his hand, and for a moment Peter was sure he was about to die.