Free Fatal by Michael Palmer Page A

patted Ellen on the shoulder.
    “Whatever you say, Mrs. Kroft,” he said. “You know this kid best.”
    Ellen sat on the newly mowed lawn, staring off at nothing in particular, rocking Lucy gently in her arms, and making no attempt to stem the steady flow of tears from her own eyes. Minutes later, the girl began to come around.

    ELLEN SLID BEHIND  the wheel of the Taurus and headed north. In moments, in spite of herself, she was reliving the horrible sequence of phone calls that had signaled the start of it all.
    “Mom, something’s wrong with Lucy. I took her to the pediatrician this morning. He said she was in terrific shape. Fiftieth percentile in height and weight, way ahead of most three-year-olds in speech and hand-eye coordination. Then he gave her two shots—a DPT and an MMR. That was about eight hours ago. Now she’s screaming. Mom, her temperature is one-oh-three-and-a-half and she won’t stop screaming no matter what. What should I do? . . . ”
    “. . . I called the doctor. He says not to worry. Lots of kids get irritable after their vaccinations. Just give her Tylenol. . . .”
    “. . . Mom, I’m frightened, really frightened. She’s not screaming anymore, but she’s completely out of it. Her eyes keep rolling back into her head and she doesn’t respond to anything I say. Nothing. She’s, like, limp. Dick is getting the car right now. We’re going to bring her to the emergency room. . . .”
    “. . . They’re going to keep Lucy in the hospital. They don’t know what’s wrong with her. Maybe a seizure of some sort, the doctor says. Mommy, it’s bad. I’m so scared. It’s bad. I know it is. Oh, Jesus, what am I going to do? My baby . . .”
    What am I going to do?
    Beth’s panicked words echoed in Ellen’s thoughts as they did almost every school day after drop-off. With effort, she forced them to the background. There were other things to focus on this day, most notably a strategy meeting across the Potomac at the headquarters of PAVE—Parents Advocating Vaccine Education.
    Driving by rote, Ellen headed up the George Washington Parkway toward the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge and D.C. Now a trim, silver-haired sixty-three, she still recalled all too vividly the day just before her fifty-fifth birthday when she went, according to her husband at least, from being “good-looking” to being “a damn fine-looking woman for your age.” A year and a half later, Howard had left their twenty-nine-year marriage and run off to be with a thirty-something cocktail waitress he had met during an engineering convention in Vegas.
    At the time, it was as if her life, on cruising speed, had hit a brick wall. She accepted an early retirement package from the middle school where she was teaching science, and then effectively pulled down the shades of her existence, shutting herself in and her friends out. Ironically, it was the tragedy surrounding Lucy that pulled her back into the world.
    She had always been a positive, upbeat person, but Howard’s hurtful and unexpected departure coupled with the end of Lucy’s life as a vibrant, healthy child had been a one-two punch that threatened to send her spiraling to the bottom of a Valium bottle. With the help of unrelenting friends and a godsend of a therapist, she gradually opened the blinds again and began putting one foot in front of the other. Now, working out at the gym several times a week, intimately involved in her granddaughter’s life, doing volunteer work at PAVE, and functioning as the lone consumer representative on the blue ribbon federal panel evaluating the experimental supervaccine Omnivax, she was running on all cylinders.
    Ellen lucked into a parking space not half a block from PAVE headquarters. For a few years after its inception in the mid-eighties, PAVE had been a true grassroots organization, run from the kitchen tables of its two founders—Cheri Sanderson and Sally Lynch, both of whom were convinced that their children had been