But McCready, Ailard, Lane, Schulz, Vincent, and the rest of them had made that impossible.

He rubbed his eyes as bitter memories rushed in. . . memories of poor Lisa . . .

Lisa Lathram . . . a euphonious name, such an up sound to it. And yet Lisa herself . . .

He remembered her as such a happy child, could still hear her dulcet laugh, see her bright eyes, her effulgent smile, Lord, that smile .

.

.

Lisa was always smiling, accepting everyone and everything, hugs and kisses all around.

When Brad came along, Duncan loved him equally, but as a son. There was a difference there.

Lisa remained the light of his life. At times he was sure Diana was jealous of their relationship. When he arrived home from the hospital or the office, Lisa was the first one he looked for, and she always came running when she heard his voice. How he cosseted her. Whatever she wanted, whatever she needed, a piano to play, a horse to ride, a balance beam for gymnastics practice, was hers for the asking.

But the halcyon days of her childhood evanesced as puberty took hold, and Duncan came to understand firsthand the origin of the changeling myth. As her body changed, so did Lisa's personality. At first he and Diana chalked up the moodiness to the new hormones pulsing through her.

After all, what was there to be grumpy about? With her flowing blond hair and lissom figure, she was only getting prettier.

He and Diana kept hoping their adolescent age would snap out of it, but after a while it became clear that more than hormones were at work here. She lost interest in her friends, her piano playing, her horse.

The downs kept getting deeper and longer, and there never seemed to be any real ups, only not-so-downs.

And then she swallowed half a bottle of her mother's Dalmane and had to have her stomach pumped. She was diagnosed with severe endogenous depression and the endless rounds of antidepressants and outpatient therapy began.

Nothing worked for very long. And then came that terrible night she locked herself in her room and screamed with pain. Duncan kicked the door down and found her sitting in the middle of her bed bleeding from a slit wrist.

They hospitalized her for a month after that, and tried something new called Prozac. Lisa responded beautifully. In her case it was truly a miracle drug.

Duncan still remembered the day he came home from the hospital to find Diana standing in the foyer sobbing. Immediately his heart plummeted, expecting the worst And then he heard it, floating in from the living room, the sound of Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 2I. Lisa was playing again.

He and Diana fell into each other's arms and wept.

Even now his eyes clouded at the memory.

After that, as Lisa brightened, so did their lives. Duncan hadn't realized how his daughter's problems had tainted their entire family life. But now that she was getting back to normal, the days seemed brighter, his own step lighter. Laughter again around the dinner table as Lisa began riding her horse and hanging out with some of her old friends. Her grades turned around and she began dating Kenny O"Boyle.

They dated for months, and Kenny became the sole topic of Lisa's conversation. She and Diana would have long mother-daughter talks about him, and Diana told Duncan she was worried that Lisa might be getting too involved. She'd just turned eighteen, true, but she'd missed a lot of growing up in those black years.

Duncan wasn't crazy about Kenny. He seemed a shifty, inarticulate dolt, but then Duncan was naturally leery about any male sniffing around his daughter. Lisa adored him. And Lisa was happy. Happy for the first time in years. So Duncan decided to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut.

And then the McCready committee reared its ugly head. He remembered the morning five years ago when it all began, in the doctors lounge at Fairfax Hospital, somebody showing him the article on the front page of the Post. He'd just come off two scheduled procedures, an abdominal aneurysm graft and a carotid endarterectomy, all after rushing in at 3:00 A. M. to close a torn femoral artery on a motorcyclist, "donorcyclist, " as the E.R staff called them. He was tired. But not too tired to be furious at Senator Vincent's public condemnation of his million-dollar charge to Medicare the year before.

Every time he turned around some baseball player or basketball dribbler was signing a contract for five or six million dollars a year. How many lives did they save in a year? Barbra Streisand can get twenty million for two nights of warbling, but you, Duncan Lathram, you moneygrubbing bloodsucker, you charge too goddamn much.

He'd wished he had some legal recourse, but how the hell did you sue a congressional committee? And what would he accomplish but call even more unwanted attention to himself?

What did it matter? he remembered thinking. The whole brouhaha would blow over in a couple of days.

But he was wrong.

His auto-da-fe' at the hands of the Guidelines committee continued with unflagging zeal. Apparently the members thought they'd found a particularly tasty bone in Duncan Lathram and wanted to keep gnawing away at him. Then the Alexandria Banner picked up the story, followed by a patient's rights group demanding an investigation, so the State Board of Medical Examiners got involved, and soon Medicare had a team of pettifogging auditors formicating through his office records, pawing through his files, and swarming in the hospital records room, sifting his charts for pecuniary indiscretions. To hell with patient confidentiality. Those weasel-faced bureaucrats would know all the secrets of everyone he'd operated on in the past few years. But what did that matter? Spurred by the Guidelines committee, the government had declared jihad on Duncan Lathram.

Duncan was angry and embarrassed, but not too worried. His medical records were impeccable, and he'd match his morbidity and mortality stats against anyone in the country. Let them investigate. He'd come up smelling like a rose.

He just wished they'd hurry and get the whole mess over and done with.

But it dragged on, and in the ensuing months Duncan began to notice a hint of coolness from some of his colleagues at the hospital. He was getting fewer requests for surgical consults. He understood their predicament, worrying about guilt by association. They were waiting till things cooled down.

Still, he was in for a nasty shock one day as he began one of the surgical consultation requests he did receive. When he entered the patient's hospital room and introduced himself, the patient bolted upright in bed. Duncan still remembered his words.

"Oh, no. Forget it. No way I'm gonna be operated on by some knife-happy, money-grubbing quack! " Duncan was mortified, angry enough to punch a hole in the wall. And dammit, hurt. He consoled himself that most likely he had just experienced the nadir of the whole affair.

It couldn't get any worse.

The only way he could go from there was up.

Again, he was wrong.

Because all the bad press was having a devastating effect at home.

Duncan Lathram, MD, was the talk of the town . . . including the high school.

And so in retrospect it seemed inevitable that he would come home one night to find Lisa sobbing in her mother's arms. She and Kenny had had a fight and broken up. The cause of the fight? What the kids were saying about Lisa's father, saying to Kenny behind Lisa's back.

Kenny's parting shot? "Forget the prom! Forget everything! I ain't going' anywhere with the daughter of no crook! " Devastating for any teenager, but to Lisa it seemed like the end of the world.

Barely able to speak through her sobs, she wanted to know why her father hadn't said anything, why he hadn't come out and defended himself.