Act of God (11 page)

Dana disagreed wholeheartedly with Paul Cotter. It was unfair, if not inappropriate, for him to ask her to take this case
simply because he wanted a woman up front. And despite his attempt to gloss over it with platitudes about her legal prowess,
there was no mistaking his message—abortion was a woman’s issue, and he intended to dismiss it as such.

She smiled to herself. On that basis alone, she would have no problem dropping this case right back in his lap.

C
orey Dean Latham was born on the tenth of September in Cedar Falls, Iowa, a picturesque little city in the middle of a state
that was, give or take a bit, right in the middle of the country.

He was the only son born to Dean and Barbara Latham, and the youngest of three children by eleven years, his birth having
been unplanned, but certainly not unwelcome. His father was a mathematics professor at the nearby University of Northern Iowa.
His mother worked at a local Christian preschool.

A self-sufficient child, with brown curls, bright blue eyes, and endless curiosity, Corey loved his family, his golden retriever,
and his Red Flyer best in all the world, if not always in that order. He had a gentle disposition, a ready smile, and a disarming
charm.

By the time he reached his teens, he had developed a keen sense of right and wrong which, combined with a personal code of
honor to do no harm, earned him the respect and admiration of both his peers and his elders. As he moved into adulthood, he
was looked upon as one of the brightest lights the community had ever produced.

Growing up, he excelled at sprinting and acting, splitting his time between the track and the theater. His father often joked
that he didn’t know which Corey was better at, running lines or running between the lines. In his junior year, he won the
state championship in the hundred-meter sprint, and also won the lead role in his high school’s production of
Hamlet.

Whether they were aware of it or not, Dean and Barbara Latham raised their two daughters to marry young, have large families,
and stay in Iowa. They raised their son to leave.

“There’s a great big world out there,” Dean suggested when the boy was about to enter his senior year in high school. “Go
take yourself a good hard look at it before you decide what to do with your life.” What he didn’t say aloud, but fervently
hoped, was that his son’s choice would not be the theater.

Perhaps because Iowa was a landlocked state, Corey had always had a deep and abiding fascination for the sea. He took that
fascination, along with a strong middle-American sense of duty and patriotism, excellent grades, and the blessing of a career
congressman, to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.

“This is the finest young man I have come across in many a year,” the congressman wrote in his letter of endorsement. “It
is my privilege to sponsor him, and I have every belief that given the opportunity, he will do his family, himself, and his
country proud.”

Corey had barely turned eighteen. It was the first time in his life that he had been outside his home state, and he was totally
unprepared for what greeted him. The sudden, unfamiliar freedom, the constant carousing, and the easy access to drugs, alcohol,
and women, combined with the rigorous training, rigid class system, and unabated, academy-endorsed hazing, tested his morals,
threatened his determination, and wreaked havoc with his studies. For the gentle, sheltered Iowan, the mental
and physical brutality was shocking. He finished the first quarter in the bottom ten percent of his class, and would likely
have quit a dozen times over had it not been for a very experienced and understanding academy chaplain.

The Lathams were good people who believed in traditional family values. They had raised Corey on an abundance of affection,
tempered with occasional discipline, and the constancy of the Methodist version of Jesus Christ, the Bible, and the Golden
Rule. His religion was as much a part of who he was as were his good looks or his lean body or his quiet sense of humor.

For months, the chaplain met with the plebe on an almost daily basis, helping him to find his footing, and encouraging him
not to give up, but to stick it out. He shared anecdotes about previous plebes, and the ways they had found of coping. Corey
listened and absorbed. By the end of the year, he had regained his balance and added a thick layer of toughness to his Midwest
hide. When he graduated from the academy, he was in the top ten percent of his class.

In return for his education, Ensign Latham owed the Navy the next five years of his life. He spent the first twenty-four weeks
of it at the nuclear power school in Orlando, Florida, after which he was sent to Charleston, South Carolina, for twenty-six
weeks of nuclear prototype training. Then it was thirteen weeks in Groton, Connecticut, for the submarine officer basic course.
And everywhere he went, he worked hard and excelled. Finally, he was rewarded with the prestige assignment to the Bangor Naval
Submarine Base, located near Bremerton, Washington, where he was assigned to the crew of a Trident class submarine, the USS
Henry M. Jackson.

His first patrol, which began in the middle of August, was a disaster. Submerged for sixty-eight straight days, he was subjected
to the endless criticism of a neurotic engineer, packed into a steel fortress without an inch of privacy or a ray of sunshine,
forced to breathe fetid air, unable to sleep, worried every
moment about fire or leakage or worse, and scared to the point of constant nausea about living cheek-to-jowl with a formidable
nuclear arsenal. He returned to Bangor at the end of October with a gastric disorder and a sickly pallor, twelve pounds lighter
and ten years older.

“I think I know what hell is,” he told his roommate, who already had two patrols under his belt.

The roommate laughed. “There’s only one cure,” he replied. “Go out and get laid.”

There were a few girls who had wandered through Corey’s life during the last several years; fine young women from good families
with whom he spent pleasant evenings that never progressed past the preliminary fondling stage. The church in which Corey
had been raised considered intercourse inappropriate outside of marriage. His parents had both been virgins on their wedding
night, at the age of twenty-two, as had their two daughters when they married, one at nineteen, the other at twenty. And their
son was without experience at the age of twenty-four.

His roommate, Zach Miller, took him to Seattle, on a series of bar-hopping excursions through Belltown, a section of the city
frequented by yuppie singles. He met three girls in rapid succession, each of them pretty, each of them available, each of
whom invited him to come in when he escorted her home. In all three cases, he bought them dinner, took them to the movies
or to a concert or to a sporting event, and said good night at the door. A girl who thought so little of herself that she
was willing to go to bed with him on the first date was not what he was looking for.

“What’s the matter?” his roommate asked.

“Nothing, I hope,” he replied.

Zach was usually in bed with at least half a dozen different girls during the months between his patrols. But as far as Corey
was concerned, what his roommate was doing was like drinking
out of a paper cup that was discarded soon after it was used. There was no way he could explain that he was looking for just
one cup—clean, reusable, and made of the finest porcelain.

“I intend to test the product before I buy,” Zach told him. “After all, a lifetime is an awfully long trip to take with someone
incompatible in bed.”

But for Corey, sex without love was much like a church without God. He knew how long a lifetime was, and he was in no hurry.

Three weeks later, he met Elise Ethridge, and his world turned upside down.

“Hi,” she said, sliding up beside him at the bar of a fashionable Belltown watering hole, all tall, and slender, and golden.
“What’s a nice guy like you doing in a dump like this?”

“Gosh,” he said before he could stop himself, “I didn’t think anyone ever said that for real.”

She laughed a deep, husky laugh. “Well, I saw your uniform and I just couldn’t resist. My name’s Elise.”

“I’m Corey,” he replied a little breathlessly, because someone had squeezed in on the other side of her and pushed her against
him, and he could feel her warmth down the length of his body.

Elise reached into her handbag for a cigarette and stood waiting for a light. But Corey didn’t smoke, and had no lighter.
He glanced around in a near panic until he spied a pack of matches lying on the bar and grabbed at them. It then took him
three tries to strike one up. She wrapped her hand around his to cup the flame, or perhaps to prevent his hand from shaking
too much for the match and the Marlboro to meet. Green eyes looked at him through a lazy stream of smoke and he tried his
best not to choke. Her perfume was intoxicating. He invited her back to his table.

Long before the end of the evening, Corey decided that Elise was the most mature and sophisticated woman he had ever
encountered, which may have had something to do with the fact that she was two years his senior. Nevertheless, next to her,
all the other girls he had known suddenly seemed silly and superficial, and he couldn’t believe his good fortune when she
agreed to go out on a date with him.

Zach did not seem particularly impressed with her, but then he was a good deal more experienced than Corey, and had a whole
stable of willing women at his beck and call.

“She’s a bit chilly,” he observed on the way home to Bremerton, as they stood on the top deck of the ferry, leaning over the
rail, letting the wind blow in their faces.

“You mean, not the type to jump into bed with you on the first go-round?” Corey responded with a chuckle. “I think I like
that about her.”

After a couple of double dates, Zach took him aside. “Take it easy,” he cautioned.

“Why?” Corey asked. He was now seeing Elise at every opportunity, sometimes just for a few minutes between round-trip ferry
rides. They would step outside the terminal, weather permitting, and share a few lingering kisses in the dark. Or they would
sit inside the lobby and hold hands, saying little, their eyes locked. When they couldn’t arrange to meet in person, he would
spend hours on the telephone talking with her.

“Because there’s no need to get that serious this soon,” Zach told him. “You’re a country kid, still wet behind the ears.
You’ve never even been in the sack with anyone. And she’s a city girl, with a definite level of expectation. It’s obvious
she’s got all your hormones going crazy, which doesn’t exactly correspond to seeing straight, but you’re from two different
sides of the aisle here.”

“So what?” Corey protested. “That doesn’t mean we can’t be in love with each other.”

Zach groaned. “You’re not in love, you’re just in lust. Love takes time. So, do yourself a favor, slow down. Get to know her.”

“I know her.”

“No, I mean, get to
really
know her, before you do something stupid.”

“You don’t like her very much, do you?” Corey observed.

“She’s all right, I guess,” Zach replied with a shrug. “Just a little too anxious, you know what I mean? Anyone that anxious
always makes me nervous.”

But she didn’t make Corey nervous. And she wasn’t any more anxious than he was. His heart raced out of control at the mere
thought of her. He proposed after six weeks, two days before he shipped out on his second patrol, and he and Elise were married
a month after he returned, a week after he received his promotion to lieutenant, junior grade.

“Did you really think putting a ring on her finger was the only way to get in bed with her?” Zach asked after the ceremony.

“No,” Corey responded with a happy grin. “I thought it was the only way to spend the rest of my life with her.”

The newlyweds honeymooned in Hawaii, and Corey had ten days to discover that Elise was anything but chilly. When they returned,
it was to a cute little house with a detached garage they had rented on West Dravus, on the north side of Queen Anne Hill.
They spent the remaining days of Corey’s leave, in addition to several thousand dollars, furnishing their new home, and then
began the process of settling into married life.

On most Mondays through Fridays, Corey would take the five-twenty car ferry to Bremerton in the morning, driving the short
distance from there to Bangor, and the six-twenty ferry from Bremerton back to Seattle in the evening.

“Why do you have to work such ridiculously long hours?” Elise complained once she realized he would be abandoning their bed
at four o’clock in the morning, when she didn’t need to rise until nearly eight, and returning home too late to participate
in the preparation of dinner, a chore she quickly learned she loathed.

“Someone has to protect the country,” he told her with a gentle smile because he didn’t really want to be away from her so
much. “And for the next two years anyway, that means me.”