him, and the worst of it was that some of what he had said made sense. Too much, in fact. Especially about Charlie. It had to come from her. Gray would never have spoken to him that way on his own. Never. She had turned him inside out and upside down. And Charlie didn't like it one bit.
He stood at the door of the Children's Center for a long time after ringing the bell. Finally a young man with a beard, in jeans and a T-shirt, came to open it for him. He was African American, and had a wide white smile and velvet chocolate-colored eyes. When he spoke, it was with the lilt of the Caribbean in his voice.
“Hello. Can I help you?” He looked at Charlie as though he had been dropped from another planet. They never saw people come to the center dressed as he was. The young man managed to conceal his amusement and led him in.
“I have an appointment with Carole Parker,” Charlie explained. She was the director of the center. All Charlie knew about her was that she was a social worker, and her credentials were excellent. She had gone to Princeton as an undergraduate, got her MSW at Columbia, and was working toward her doctorate. Her specialty and area of expertise was abused kids.
This was a safe house for abused children and their mothers, but unlike other similar establishments, the main focus was on the children, more than their mothers. An abused woman without a child, or one whose children hadn't been abused, could not stay there. Charlie knew that they were doing a research study, in conjunction with NYU, on preventing child abuse, rather than just putting balm on the end result. There were ten full-time staff working there, six part-time employees, who mostly worked nights and were, for the most part, graduate students, two psychiatrists who worked closely with them, and a flock of volunteers, many of whom were inner-city teenagers who had themselves been abused. It was a new concept to use survivors of child abuse to help younger kids who were enduring the same thing. Charlie liked everything he'd read about it. Parker had started it herself three years before, when she got her master's degree. She was planning to become a psychologist, specializing in urban problems, and inner-city kids. She was running the place on a shoestring. She herself had raised over a million dollars to buy the house and start it, and his foundation had matched the funds she'd been able to raise on her own. From what he'd read of her, she was an impressive young woman, and the only other thing he knew about her was that she was thirty-four years old. He had no idea what she looked like, and had only spoken to her on the phone. She had been professional and businesslike, but had sounded kind and warm. She had invited him to come and see the place, and had promised to give him a tour herself. Everything on paper had checked out so far, including the director herself. She was young, but allegedly capable. The references she'd supplied to the foundation board had been extremely impressive. Some of them were from the most important people in New York. No matter how well trained and capable she was, she also had some powerful connections. The mayor himself had written a reference for her. She had met a lot of important people, and impressed them favorably, while putting the center together.
The young man led Charlie to a small, battered waiting room, and offered him a cup of coffee as soon as he sat down, which Charlie declined. He'd had enough to drink with Gray over lunch, and most of what had happened there was still sticking in his throat, but as he waited for her, he forced it from his mind.
He glanced at the people walking by the open door of the waiting room. There were women, young children, teenagers wearing T-shirts that identified them as volunteers. There was an informal basketball game going on in a courtyard outside, and he noticed a sign inviting neighborhood women to come to a group twice a week, to talk about preventing child abuse. He wasn't sure what their impact on the community had been so far, but at least they were doing what they said. As he watched the kids throw basketballs through the hoop, a door opened, and a tall blond woman stood looking