Phantom of Riverside Park (25 page)

Nobody had ever called him hostile. He’d
always been considered a mild-mannered man, and he told her so.

“What about your companions, Mr. Jennings? Do
you often associate with the foul-mouthed Mr. Lollar when Nicky is
around?”

She made Fred sound like some kind of
hoodlum.

“Fred Lollar is a decorated war hero, Miss
Parkins. I’m proud for my great grandson to know him.”

“He’s a gambler.”

“He plays gin rummy, and not for money.”

“He drinks. Do you drink, Mr. Jennings?”

He’d got drunk in public the night of his
engagement party to Lola Mae and fell off his horse, but he didn’t
see how she could know that unless she was one those clairvoyants
he saw on television. And then there’d been that time when he came
back from the war, but that was only twice in his whole life, and
long ago, to boot. He wasn’t one to lie, but he didn’t think
something that happened nearly seventy ago ought to count.

“I’m sober as a judge,” he said. He didn’t
know about Fred, though. He’d never seen him drinking, but he
couldn’t say what he did when he went to his lonely house where he
didn’t have a single human being to keep him company. Fred didn’t
even have a dog.

Thomas wasn’t fixing to start lying this late
in his life. All he could think of was to tell her the good things
about Fred and hope she would use some common sense. If she had
any. Which he was beginning to doubt.

“Fred was a deacon in his church for forty
years. He’s a fine, upstandin’ man. A war hero.”

“You’ve already said that, Mr. Jennings.”

Now she was trying to make out that he was
senile. He wondered if she knew about the notebook he kept under
his mattress. He wondered if she knew how hard he had to work at
keeping present events separated from past events.

Why didn’t she ask him about the good things
he did with Nicky?

“I taught Nicky to pray, same as I did his
mother when she was a little girl. Did you know that, Miss Parkins?
And I’m teachin’ him how to cook. I’m a good cook. I’ll put my
biscuits alongside anybody in this country. Even Pillsbury.”

“I’m concerned with the child’s safety and
well-being, Mr. Jennings, not his cooking skills.”

“What about his spiritual and moral
well-bein’? I’ve taught him honesty and respect and kindness.
Manners, too. There’s not enough good manners today. People don’t
say
please
and
thank you
anymore. Not like they
used to. Why, in my day...”

Her stare brought him to a halt. Bringing up
his day
had been a mistake.

“Things have changed, Mr. Jennings. This is
no longer your era.”

That’s what she said.
Your era
, as
if he were a fossil she’d dug up in a sand dune somewhere in the
Sahara.

All the air suddenly went out of Thomas. He
felt like one of those pricked balloons you see circling around the
ceiling making whining noises.

He couldn’t have told what Helen Parkins said
next or what he said to her. He was too sick at heart. Or maybe he
was really sick, weighed down by an accumulation of failure and
years.

All he knew is that he couldn’t go home and
face Elizabeth. Not right away, anyhow.

Helen Parkins didn’t say
goodbye
or
thank you
or anything else remotely resembling good
manners. She just picked up a sheaf of papers and disappeared
behind them while he sat squirming in his chair, not sure whether
to go or to stay.

Finally he figured he was dismissed. But he
wasn’t about to slink out of there like a defeated man. He’d always
prided himself on being a man of principle, and even if he didn’t
have a pot to pee in nor a window to throw it out of, he had his
pride. And his name.

A man should always be proud of his name.

“Miss Parkins.” He didn’t speak her name all
soft and full of deference. He held himself tall and proud and
spoke to her in the way of a true gentleman, in a way she couldn’t
ignore. He could tell she was fixing to say something nasty, and
then she changed her mind. “I don’t know who put you up this, but I
can tell you one thing. There was never a child more loved nor
better cared for than Nicky.”

He could tell he finally had her attention.
Maybe he should have been more aggressive from the very beginning.
But that was all water under the bridge, now.

“I’ll tell you something else, too. Elizabeth
and Nicky are all I’ve got, and I’m not fixin’ to stand by and let
you or anybody else take that boy away from me. Anybody who knows
Thomas Jennings knows I’m a man of my word. I will die before I’ll
let you take that child.”

She was sitting there working her mouth like
a fish, probably trying to think up some suitably scathing comment,
but he stole her thunder. He tipped his hat like a true Southern
gentleman and said, “Good day, Miss Parkins,” then walked out of
there with his head held high.

o0o

Papa’s interview had gone badly. Elizabeth
could tell, not by what he said, but by what he hadn’t said.

And now Nicky was in there with Helen
Parkins, scared to death and probably agreeing with whatever
outrageous things she suggested just so he wouldn’t make her mad
while Elizabeth sat in the waiting room torn between snatching her
child and running or screaming.

In the end she did neither. She waited with a
magazine clutched in her lap until Nicky emerged, pale and scared
and small, so very small. He didn’t even smile when he saw her.
Robot-like, he took her hand, and they didn’t say a word to each
other until they were safely on the street and two blocks away from
the building Fred called the De-fart-ment of Human Misservices.

She took her son straight to the ice cream
shop.

“You can have two of everything you want,”
she said.

Instead of racing around grinning and
pressing his nose against the glass, he said, “Is that lady gonna
take me away, Mommy?”

She longed to say
no
. But Nicky
would see through the lie. Children see truth with their
hearts.

Besides that, he had to be prepared for
whatever lay ahead. Elizabeth was no match for the likes of Helen
Parkins. She knew that. Miss Parkins had the law on her side, and
the entire state of Tennessee, while Elizabeth had only Papa and a
mother’s fierce love.

And so she told her son that she would always
love him, no matter what happened, that she would always be part of
his life, and that she would fight lions and tigers and giants and
monsters and the entire world to keep him at her side.

Nicky giggled at that. “Papa, too?”

“Yes. Papa will fight, too.”

“Can I have two stwabewwy ice cweams?”

“I said you could, and you can. I always keep
my word. Remember that, Nicky.”

Elizabeth watched her son as if every minute
with him would be her last. She stopped going to night classes, she
took a leave of absence from the cleaning service with Quincy’s
blessing, and she scrubbed. She polished the floor of the little
rental house in the mean neighborhood until even Papa
complained.

“It’s not safe to walk in this house,” he
said. “The floor’s always slippery.”

She turned her efforts to the bathroom,
scrubbing it down as if she planned to do surgery in the tub. When
she wasn’t hovering over Nicky, she was cleaning. And praying. And
thinking. And walking the floors at night.

It was on one of late-night ramblings that
she remembered David’s note. Elizabeth burst into tears of relief.
She might not be a match for Helen Parkins, but David Lassiter was
more than her match. He was a corporate giant, a legend, a hero. He
would chew Helen Parkins up and spit her out, and laugh while doing
it.

For the first night since the Department of
Human Services had entered her life, Elizabeth slept like a
baby.

At nine o’clock the next morning, she placed
her call.

“David Lassiter, please,” she said. “This is
Elizabeth Jennings calling.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Jennings, Mr. Lassiter is
not in. Can someone else help you?”

Maybe God
, she thought, but thank
goodness she didn’t say it. She had to keep her wits about her. God
had more important things to do than fixing Elizabeth’s problems.
She had to save her son, herself, even if that meant groveling at
David Lassiter’s feet, though she couldn’t imagine him making her
grovel.

“No. No one except David. Will he be back
later today?”

“No, Miss Jennings. Mr. Lassiter is in
Europe. Peter Forrest is taking his calls. Perhaps he can be of
assistance to you.”

The bottom dropped out of Elizabeth’s world.
She felt as if she were running a race with the Devil and suddenly
there was nowhere to put her feet.

“Miss Jennings...Would you like me to connect
you with Mr. Forrest?”

“No... no, thank you.”

“Would you like to leave a message?”

What would she say?
Help. I’m in trouble
again, and I want you to fly across an ocean to rescue me?

“No,” she whispered. “No message.”

The peace David had hoped to find in Italy
eluded him. Sitting in the nave of S. Damiano, a church
distinguished for it simplicity in the city of elaborate cathedrals
and the famous Basilica of St. Francis, David understood that the
thing he’d been running from was inescapable, for he carried it
within himself.

David had never considered himself a
religious man, had not, in fact, darkened the door of a church
since his return from Iraq, but the simple chapel beyond the
ancient olive groves on the slope of Mt. Subasio called to him in a
voice as old as time. Behind the High Altar was a replica of the
famous wooden crucifix that, according to tradition, cried out to
St. Francis to re-establish the church, and on the right of the
nave, a small group of monks sang the beautiful Canticle of the
Creatures.

In the evening when the bells rang through
Assisi and birds took flight against a darkening sky, even the
cypress trees took up the mystical song. As they swayed and dipped
they seemed not to be moved by breezes but by an inner spirit that
St. Francis had immortalized in his canticle.

David closed his eyes to let the beauty of
the song steal over him, and when he opened them he was looking
straight into the face of the Madonna. Suddenly he was not seeing a
faded fresco from the middle ages but the face of Elizabeth
Jennings, as real to him as if she had walked among the gnarled
trees in the olive grove and sat down beside him with her pink
skirt brushing against his leg.

Her face was beautiful, as always, but filled
with an ineffable sadness. As he looked a tear as bright as crystal
appeared on her cheek, and the Latin inscription in the chapel
leaped out at him: “Neither the voice nor the clamour reach God’s
ear, but the vow and love.”

Though it was hot in the church and even
hotter outside in the unforgiving Italian sun, David shivered.
I must go to her
, he thought.

As soon as the mass was over he drove through
the heart of Umbria to his rented villa tucked in the mountains,
and called his office. It was his first contact with home in
weeks.

“Peter, any messages for me?”

“David! It’s great to hear from you. We were
beginning to think you’d dropped off the face of the earth.”

Peter brought him up-to-date on the merger,
then recapped the calls that had come for David and how he had
handled them.

David listened with only half a mind.
“Nothing more?” he asked after Peter had finished.

Peter laughed. “What more do you want?
Inquiries from the Pope?”

The minute David hung up he saw Elizabeth’s
face superimposed over the Madonna. The crystal tear had turned to
blood.

“I’ve been in this country too long,” he
muttered. “I’m losing my grip on reality.”

If he ever had one. Being cooped up for years
was bound to take its toll. Maybe he had gone crazy and nobody was
willing to tell him so.

And yet, the vision was so compelling he
picked up the phone and called Peter again.

“David, what’s up?”

“I want to know if there have been any
messages from Elizabeth Jennings?”

“None, David. I would have told you.”

David’s instincts were now screaming at him.
He had always trusted them, and they’d never failed him. What was
going on here?

“I realize that, Peter, but I have this
feeling...Check the telephone log and see if she has called since
I’ve been gone.”

“Just a minute ...Aha, here it is. Elizabeth
Jennings. She called on the tenth, David, Tuesday at nine o’clock
in the morning. She left no message.”

Two weeks ago. She would never have called
him just to chat. Nobody did that except McKenzie. Elizabeth needed
him.

“I’ll be on the next plane home. And Peter
... find out what’s happening with Elizabeth Jennings.”

o0o

They were all gathered on Vine
Street--Quincy, Fred, Papa and Elizabeth. Holding a summit meeting,
so they said, but to Elizabeth it felt more like a wake. The
thunderclouds that rolled and rumbled in the darkening sky were
nothing compared to the gloom that pervaded the little house.

No childish laughter rang out. No little boy
called for his scrubby dub dub. No rollicking versions of “Bringing
in the Sheeps” and “Glady, the Cross-eyed Bear” and “I found my
pill on Blueberry Hill” filled the air.

The only sound was the rattle of coffee cups
against chipped china saucers. Nobody looked at each other and
nobody said anything. They didn’t know what to say. Nothing this
bad had ever happened to them.

Finally Quincy leaned over and patted
Elizabeth’s hand.

“How you holdin’ out, hon?”

“I’m not. I think I’m going to die.”

Her eyes were red and her face was puffy from
her all-night crying jag. She thought she’d cried herself out, but
all it took to start the tears flowing again was one small act of
kindness. She leaned against Quincy’s shoulder and cried.