Having reached the train platform, I turned and told him sharply, “That’s none of our business.”
Ryan smirked. “Maybe not mine. But you care about everybody, don’t you? That’s why you’re here.”
My blush was so sudden and hot that the wind on my cheeks felt good. Ryan the Kid had nicked me, and he knew it. I shut my mouth on what would have been too telling a denial.
Content with his victory, the teenager sat patiently at my side until just before the train was due.
I was thinking about how well metal benches conduct cold, musing on the rotten underside of the roof covering the far platform; or perhaps I was zoning out even more completely, because suddenly I became aware that Ryan was no longer beside me. He was twenty yards down the platform leaning over the track. Should the train have come through with him in that position, his entire potential would have been in his past.
“Ryan!” I called as I trotted toward him. “What are you doing?”
“Penny,” he said, holding one up for my inspection. “If you put it on the rail, sometimes the train will flatten it. Looks really cool.”
“Too bad,” I said. “I’m not bringing you back here to find out if it worked.”
“Oh, it works. Unless the vibrations shake it off first or somebody sees the penny and picks it up.”
“That’s swell,” I said. “Forget it.” I hooked his arm again and led him to a safe location behind the yellow line.
The train arrived, and we got on. I chose a seat that rode facing forward, one at the back edge of a wide oval window. When I had commuted to a downtown office job before our children were born, I discovered that only seats to the back of the oval offered you a view. Today I calculated that daydreaming out the window might save me from some of Ryan’s booby-trapped conversation.
I paid the conductor and pocketed the receipts. Villanova station came and went, and the few college students who boarded settled around the mostly empty car. Ryan observed them with bemused interest, then returned to peering at me.
“So do you work, or what?” he asked. The deep timbre of his voice was deceptively adult, even if the question was not.
“Certainly,” I answered. I worked day and night, just not in a defined job.
“No,” Ryan amended, reading my response for what it was. “I mean like in a career.”
“I make hors d’oeuvres,” I said instead, my favorite flip reply to what was essentially a biased line of questioning.
“No, seriously,” Ryan tried again. “What do you do?”
My mother’s words came to mind. “You solve problems,” she once remarked. “All day every day.” She had done the same during my upbringing.
If Rip had had a less impossible job, I might have rejoined the commercial workforce, but running a school has been described as dancing with a bear. “You dance until the bear gets tired.” Since Rip took on the struggling Bryn Derwyn Academy, my goal was to relieve him of anything I possibly could in the hope that it would give him time for a private life.
Rather than be that specific, I asked, “What does your mother do?” instead.
The boy’s eyes narrowed. He was enjoying this. “Shops, I think. And whines.”
And enables you, your father and your sister to do everything you do, I wanted to respond. Even though Krystal Cooperman struck me as a bit of a wimp, she seemed to have the basics of maternal nurturing more than covered. If anything, her son seemed overindulged.
“Humph,” I said. “Sounds like you ought to ask her that question sometime.”
Ryan dismissed that with a grunt, and I finally got to daydream.
The rest of the Main Line back yards rumbled by, giving way to junk piled on scabby earth and desolate-looking buildings trimmed with either frozen laundry or industrial equipment. Welcome to Philadelphia’s ugly edge.
The train wisely burrowed under it. Thirtieth Street Station led to Suburban Station and then Market East, our stop.
Most of the remaining passengers jostled through the doorways and down onto the platform. There they threaded through the waiting crowd and rejoined into two lines at the base of the nearest escalator and stairs. Others strode purposefully toward more distant stairs or even deeper into the building for exits more to their convenience. When I realized Ryan had left me again, my insides sickened, my mouth soured, and my skin became slick with sweat. My initial He wouldn’t! response quickly became He didn’t.
Did he?
“Ryan! Where are you?” I shouted into the crowd, but this time the teenager wasn’t just twenty yards away. This time he was totally gone from sight.
Missing the appointment was no longer my biggest fear. It was the city. Predators of all sorts spent their day hoping to snare strays, misfits like Ryan and me who didn’t know what or who to avoid. Together we had the protection of purpose—a deadline and a destination. A boy wandering loose was another matter altogether.
I went up on tiptoe to scan faces. I scurried around clusters of moving people. I ran toward the next bank of stairs and back again. My purse weighed fifty pounds. My knees were made of pasta. My eyes burned and my head pounded. Where was he?
“Ryan!” I called. “This isn’t funny. Ryan! Come on. Where are you?”
Within two minutes the crowds thinned to half a dozen people. Ryan Cooperman was not one of them.
Last I saw he had been behind me, but I had to accept that he may have passed me without my noticing and taken the stairs.
I needed to check the next level up, but my body balked at leaving the platform. Instinct told me Ryan was still nearby.
A glimpse of bright cloth drew my attention to a wide post—Ryan’s multicolored ski jacket. I wanted to collapse with relief but didn’t dare; the battle was still on.
Hammering my boots loudly toward the bottom of the stairs, I shouted into the cavity, “Ryan Cooperman! Are you up there?” City noise deadened my voice before it reached the middle steps, but that didn’t matter.
Pivoting on tiptoes, I retraced my steps to the far side of the square, three-foot wide post. Ryan was just turning to run when he smacked into me. His gleeful expression switched to shock.
When breath returned to his lungs, he opened his mouth, but I reached out and pinched his earlobe between my fingers before he could speak.
“Don’t bother trying to suck up, you little worm,” I said. “You will never, and I mean never, do that to me again. Do you understand?”
“Oww,” he complained. “Let me go. That hurts.”
“Good,” I said without releasing his ear. “Hold still and listen. I have something you need to hear.”
His eyes narrowed and his tongue wet his lips.
I said, “You are a very intelligent, very spoiled kid, Ryan Cooperman, and you have no idea how lucky you are. Whole armies of adults are trying to stop you from destroying your life, but for some unimaginable reason you refuse to cooperate.
“Look at yourself. Listen to yourself. You’re so angry at who-knows-what that you can’t see what’s really going on. You’re in a nosedive here, and you’re the only one who can pull you out of it.
“It won’t be easy, but your mom, your dad, they’ll get over whatever you do to yourself now. They’ll move on because they’ll have no choice, but at the rate you’re going you won’t.”
He squirmed his shoulder around so he could stand more upright, which was probably even more uncomfortable, but I had his attention, and I had more to say.
“So, you will accompany me to the Federal Courthouse. You will keep your appointment, and you will not step one inch out of my sight until I turn you over to your mother back at Radnor Station, because if you do, I swear I will instruct my husband to find a way to make your school year—wherever you are—pure hell. If it means telling your father just how big a jerk you are, if it means getting a court order grounding you until the beginning of the next decade, I will see that it happens. Do you understand me?
“Do you?”
Ryan tried to nod without
shifting his eyes from mine.
“Say it,” I ordered.
Say what?”
“Say that you won’t leave my sight again.”
“I won’t leave your sight again.” It came out sing-song and whiny, but it was as much reassurance as I was going to get, so I let go of his ear.
“Jeez,” he said. “I probably have a lawsuit.”
“You would lose,” I declared, not at all sure it was true. Still I felt much better. I clapped the kid jovially on the shoulder.
“Let’s go,” I said. “We gotta hustle.”
I steered him toward the exit up to Market Street left, away from City Hall. As we passed the Hard Rock Cafe, he pretended to try to go in, but I shot him a look so nasty he began to circle me whistling Pop Goes the Weasel instead.
The rest of the way he entertained himself by gawping at the odd mixture of pedestrians, who ranged from your typical professionals to the quintessentially atypical professional bums.
When we reached the block of Market Street commanded by the Federal Courthouse, I automatically checked myself the way a driver who just spotted a police car glances at his speedometer. It seemed to me even the buildings stood up straighter, their windows scanning the wide brick sidewalk for strewn gum wrappers or passersby wearing furtive expressions. A row of trees growing out of tight squares of earth displayed NO STOPPING signs, “Temporary Police Regulation, City of Philadelphia.” And yet two white squared-off police vehicles with light bars, blue trim, and door shields reading, “Police/Federal Protective Service” waited at the curb.
Across the street a medium-blue banner pointed tourists toward Betsy Ross’s house, Independence Hall, and Visitor Center Parking. Other “Historic Philadelphia” banners in red, white, and blue trimmed with four stars decorated the light poles. The United States Constitution, which guaranteed the right to a trial by jury, had been written a mere block away; and of the ninety-four federal courts currently in existence I knew Philadelphia’s to be one of the oldest, dating from 1789. Yet its housing was solidly modern—brick for the first floor, something darker and more austere for the second story and above.
Ryan absorbed none of this, because he nearly walked right past.
“Hey,” I alerted him. “We’re here.” And, thanks to all our rushing, we were early.
Entrance to the vast black marble lobby involved an airport-style metal-detecting arch and x-ray conveyor. Serious guards in serious clothing performed the expected duties. Ryan holstered a make-believe gun, and the muscular woman who had just cleared my purse rolled her eyes at me with what I determined to be sympathy.
“We have half an hour before his meeting with Judge Rolfe,” I confided. “Is there an interesting trial we could sit in on until then?”
The woman reexamined Ryan with the detachment of a skilled professional. “We got a fraud just starting in 6-A,” she decided.
“Perfect.” I thanked her with a smile, but it wasn’t returned.
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DONNA HUSTON MURRAY’S cozy mystery series features a woman much like herself, a DIY headmaster's wife with a troubling interest in crime. Both novels in her new mystery/crime series won Honorable Mention in genre fiction from Writer’s Digest, and her eighth cozy FOR BETTER OR WORSE is shortlisted for the Chanticleer International Mystery & Mayhem Book Award. FINAL ARRANGEMENTS, set at Philadelphia’s world famous flower show, achieved #1 on the Kindle-store list for Mysteries and Female Sleuths.
At home, Donna assumes she can fix anything until proven wrong, calls trash-picking recycling, and although she should probably know better by now, adores Irish setters.
Donna and husband, Hench, live in the greater Philadelphia, PA, area.
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A Score to Settle Page 20