Phantom of Riverside Park

by Peggy Webb

“Mommy, can God hear me?”

  “Of course, He can, darling.”

  “Maybe God can’t hear me ‘cause I talk funny.”

  “He hears all his children, and His special ones most of all.” Her hug was fierce and protective. “You’re very, very special, Nicky, and don’t you ever forget it.”

  Nicky pondered that for a minute, his little face screwed up with concentration, then he’d smiled, believing.

  “Okay.” He shut his eyes tight, and then he began to pray with a child’s absolute confidence that God was personally taking care of every detail of his life. “God, it’s me, Nicky, and I don’t want a fire truck ‘cause I already got one. I want Papa to find Houdini so we can play ‘stead of runnin’ ‘cause runnin’ makes Papa say jackass.”

  He opened one eye and squinted up at Elizabeth. “Is it all right if I tell God?”

  “Yes, it’s okay.”

  Satisfied, he squeezed his eyes tight, then pressed his little chin against his folded hands. “Bless Mommy and Papa and Uncle Fred, most of all, ‘cause Papa said he don’t have a little boy to love and that makes him scratchy.”

  Crotchety was the word Papa had used, but she liked Nicky’s version better. Not having someone to love created a itch that wouldn’t go away, no matter how much you scratched.

  Elizabeth was doubly blessed: she had two people to love, and that’s why, all of a sudden, she knew she was planning to embark upon her life as a criminal, that plus the sight of Mae Mae standing with her arms crossed the way she always did when she was mad and fixing to light into you with a speech that would prod you off your pity pot and into action.

  Sliding back into the chair that belonged to the unsuspecting Miss Mullins, Elizabeth tapped her way through the bank’s accounting system. She thought about praying for success or mercy or both, but she already had the boss angel on her side. Mae Mae was probably telling even the Archangel Michael himself what to do.

  Elizabeth followed clues through a maze of corporations that all led back to one man.

  Stunned, she watched the cursor blinking green on his name. An image of the park rose in her mind, and with it the ancient brick structure directly across the street, its wide beveled doors flanked by huge columns.

  She passed the Lassiter building every day on her way to the park entrance. All this time, her benefactor had been right under her nose.

  Or had he? She typed his name into the computer and initiated a search. There were more than a thousand listings on him. She didn’t have time to read them all, but the few she did confirmed her suspicion.

  She’d discovered her benefactor’s identity, but not his motives. The big question was still, why?

  Elizabeth turned off the computer, then picked up her mop and bucket. Her personal problems would have to wait. She had a bank to clean.

  o0o

  Morning sun illuminated the kitchen. Elizabeth had never seen such a sight. Biscuits sat on every available surface--the stove top, the kitchen table, the laminated countertops, even the top of the refrigerator.

  “‘Morning, Elizabeth.”

  Thomas Jennings sat at the table spreading butter and jam on three fat biscuits, a steaming cup of coffee at his elbow.

  “‘Morning, Papa.” She kissed his leathery cheek.

  “How do you like our handiwork?”

  “They look great.” She wasn’t lying. Most of them did. A few, though, showed signs of having been done by an amateur, their uneven shapes and charred edges a dead giveaway. “I guess I know what we’ll be eating for the next few days.”

  “Would’a been longer, but I sent the rest home with Fred. It’ll do him good to eat something besides honey buns.”

  Elizabeth nabbed a biscuit off the stove top then poured herself a cup of coffee. Her news was bursting inside her. Usually Papa would have seen it in her face and asked a dozen questions, but he was still high on his success of the previous evening.

  She joined him at the table. “I’ve found him, Papa.” His knife stopped in midair. “I’ve found the man who gave us a million dollars.”

  “Who is it?”

  “David Lassiter.”

  “The Lassiter Building, that Lassiter?”

  “I hope so, Papa. If it’s not I have some more leg work to do.”

  “Didn’t Time do a big spread on him a couple of years back?”

  “Yes, when he merged with Alpha.”

  The article had dredged up his past and served it in large chunks designed to make the reader gasp and gag and open the windows to let in a fresh breeze. His childhood in Mountain City, Tennessee, was skipped over with little more than mention of his parents’ names, but his war injuries were laid out in excruciating detail.

  Though no one had seen his face in years, at least, no one who was talking, speculation was rampant.

  “Hideous beyond belief,” was the quote taken from a doorman David Lassiter had fired for drinking on the job seven years ago.

  “Grotesque,” was the way a disgruntled bookkeeper who had been caught with his hands in the till described him. “A monster. A beast,” he’d added, in spite of the fact that Lassiter had not prosecuted and he’d been living on a cattle ranch in West Texas for the last eight years instead of in a prison cell.

  Some even speculated that David Lassiter was dead, his corporation run by a well-oiled machine he’d set in motion years ago.

  There was nothing from Lassiter himself except a generic statement of the merger from his press secretary that gave no hint of the man behind the myth.

  Thomas was remembering too, his whole face puckered with concentration and worry. It was the worry that bothered Elizabeth. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

  “It’s going to be all right, Papa. I’m going to find out why he sent that check.”

  “How?”

  She’d thought of little else since she’d discovered her benefactor’s identity. The only thing she could come up with was trying to get into his building via a cleaning service. But not Quincy’s. She’d already taken a huge risk, and she refused to further involve her best friend in her own wild schemes, no matter how pure the motive.

  “I’m going to sew another patch over my cleaning service uniform, and try to get into the Lassiter building under that guise.”

  “Even if you get in, reckon you’ll ever find him?”

  Women do what they have to do, Mae Mae used to tell her, the advice so strong and clear it was almost as if her grandmother were standing in the kitchen over by the stove, still talking.

  Women are born with a reservoir of strength men can’t even guess at.

  Elizabeth understood the truth of her grandmother’s statement in her bones. How else could she explain the fact that she’s sitting in her kitchen making plans to find a man others called monster, and the only fear she has is not that she will fail but that she will somehow wake up in her bed in the middle of the night and start screaming from loneliness?

  She can work two jobs without a blinking an eye. She can pinch pennies till Lincoln squealed, and plan budgets better than any committee Washington ever had. And yet she can’t control the fear that creeps over her when a cloud blocks out the stars and a stray cat sits on her back fence howling. When that happens she wraps her arms around the empty pillow on the other side of her bed and presses her face into its soft folds in case the screams building inside her escape.

  In high school when she’d imagined herself at twenty-four, she thought of a girl with a college diploma, a great job and a good man to share her life.

  Never mind that she loves Papa and Nicky beyond all reason. Never mind that she’s not the kind of person to wish for things she knows she can’t have nor to mourn for things that might have been.

  What she missed most was the surprise of another person related by love and not blood. She missed the small intimacies, someone saying, honey, let me rub your back, or sweetheart, I drew your bath. She missed going to the laundry basket and finding dirty gym so
cks, size large and boxer shorts, size thirty-four, tossed in with her white cotton tee shirts and her seersucker gown.

  “Reckon you’ll find him?” Papa asked once more.

  “I’m certain of it,” she said.

  To a woman gifted with sacred strength, finding David Lassiter was an absolute.

  It was the rest of her life, the part Elizabeth kept to herself, that was the uncertainty.

  Chapter Eight

  David’s office was on the top floor of the twenty-one story Lassiter Building, and when he worked late at night he opened all the curtains. It was a brilliant night and the panoramic view of the sky gave him a feeling of freedom, almost as if he were back on the farm striding across the open meadows under a canopy of stars.

  He’d done a lot of walking the past week, mostly at night, out of habit more than necessity, for on the farm there was no need for hiding. And while he’d walked he’d remembered his parents standing in the same spot where he stood, holding each other around the waist, Della Jean’s head on Clint’s chest and his chin resting in her hair.

  David didn’t even know why he was thinking of them now except that a trip to the farm often made him introspective.

  Or perhaps it was the moon. It was full and especially bright, the kind of moon that made you want to sit on a front porch and hold hands. If you had a front porch. And if you had somebody whose hand you could hold.

  “The night must be made for fools,” he said, then walked to the window and stood with his back to everything except the stars and the moon that would bewitch if you’d let it.

  He didn’t plan to let it.

  He folded his hands behind his back and tried to get his mind back on his business, but the pull of the moon was too great. He thought of the sweet smell of the wild pear tree in spring and the way wisteria spilled out of tall oaks and the way bluebirds returned to the farm year after year to build their nest in the weathered house he’d nailed to a post right outside the kitchen window.

  He thought of McKenzie’s cats who rubbed against his legs and the dogs that tucked their cold noses into his hand and wagged their tails so hard he wondered why they didn’t drop off. He thought of the yearlings following their mothers on spindly legs across pastures so green they looked as if they’d been painted with a child’s crayons.

  And thinking, he yearned. The sad thing was, he didn’t even know what he yearned for.

  A sound ripped into his dreams and brought him back to his corporate office on the twenty-first floor with a heart-stopping thud. Alert, David scanned the room lit only by the glow from his computer’s screen and the full moon that blazed a silver trail across his Oriental rug.

  Slowly his door yawned open, and there in a shining path of moonlight stood Elizabeth Jennings, in the flesh, as if his unspoken longings had conjured her up.

  Later when he would think about it, he would wonder why he hadn’t touched the remote controls that would close the curtains and plunge the room into darkness or why he hadn’t punched the button that would bring security guards swarming, or why he hadn’t simply vanished.

  All he had to do was step into the bathroom and press the panel opening to a secret elevator that would whisk him to the parking garage. He’d designed his escape hatch for just such an occasion--when an unwanted visitor appeared.

  Somehow he couldn’t think of Elizabeth as unwanted.

  She observed him in perfect silence, not blinking, not cringing, not staring, merely watching with a quiet dignity that unnerved.

  How much of his face could she see? The moon backlit him, but no lights burned in the room. His only hope was that the shadows obscured the most monstrous aspects of him.

  “I hope you won’t call the police,” she said.

  “Tell me one good reason why I shouldn’t.”

  “Then you would never know how I found you, how I got in and why I came.”

  “Why would I want to know those things, Elizabeth?”

  “You know me?”

  “I know everything there is to know about you.”

  Except the things that were important. For instance, he didn’t know why she always wore a ribbon in her hair, or why she preferred pink which was the color she wore season after season, year after year in her comings and goings in the park below his window. She even had a pink coat with big patch pockets and a little faux fur collar that, turned up, made her face look like a heart.

  “And I know nothing about you except that you had somebody put my name on a million-dollar check.”

  David didn’t reply. Long ago he’d learned that the best way to gauge an opponent was to remain silent and let them do the talking or the squirming, whichever happened to be the case.

  Elizabeth did neither. She watched him with the exquisite stillness of a deer sensing a harmful presence in the deep green woods. David fell into the silence. It was familiar to him, and comforting.

  If she wanted to play the waiting game, she would lose for she had met the master. He smiled into the darkness, thinking how McKenzie would get a kick out of this unexpected encounter.

  The thing that surprised him most was not that Elizabeth had found him--he’d never doubted her intelligence nor her resourcefulness--but that he wasn’t sorry she had.

  It seemed to him that Elizabeth Jennings was inevitable, that she had been waiting somewhere in the wings for years, poised to enter his life and change it forever.

  David remembered his excitement in the early years of his career when each day had brought a new challenge and the possibility of remarkable discoveries. That’s how he felt now about the woman standing in his doorway.

  Nothing around him had changed, but inside him everything had rearranged itself. His heart was where his throat ought to be, and muscle, bone and sinew had expanded so that his skin felt too tight. Some kind of explosion was going to happen, and he would be the only one who felt it.

  Elizabeth Jennings stepped closer, and he had nowhere to go. His back was to the wall. Literally.

  His heart beat with such a frantic rhythm he felt as if he’d run five miles.

  David never ran unless he was on the farm where there was no one to observe him except the black angus cattle and a broad-winged hawk that McKenzie swore was Solomon who had lived beyond his years in order to watch over her after Paul’s death. The exercise room in his penthouse apartment in Memphis was outfitted with all the latest equipment which mostly gathered dust.

  The fact that he was still trim and toned had nothing whatsoever to do with discipline and everything to do with good genes. Both his parents had been slim people more prone to great vitality and huge reserves of strength rather than vague aches and outright pains.

  As Elizabeth advanced, moonbeams caught in her hair giving her the appearance of an ethereal being who might have dropped into his office out of the night sky.

  Don’t come any closer, he silently begged, and she must have read his mind for she stopped at least six feet short of him which still gave him the advantage of shadow. He hoped.

  “Why?” She asked the question so softly he had to strain to hear. “Why did you send me that check?”

  “Because of the child.”

  She paled, then stepped back as if she’d been slapped. “The Belliveaus are behind it, then. Taylor lied.”

  “No one is behind it except me. I can assure you, Elizabeth, that I have no ulterior motives. There are no strings attached to the check.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “You have to trust yourself, Elizabeth. Follow your instincts. What are they telling you?”

  “That you’re a good man.”

  David almost wept. In all his long years of solitude he’d never realized how much he missed the sound of a soft woman naming him good. Over the years the scars on his face had sunk into his soul so that he thought of himself as more beast than man.

  “Then cash the check. It’s yours.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

&n
bsp; “I don’t take charity.”

  “It’s not charity. It’s a gift.”

  “A gift from a stranger. That’s the same as charity.”

  “I’m no longer a stranger to you, Elizabeth. You know my name. You know where I work.”

  Suddenly she laughed. It was a beautiful sound, full of spirit and light, and it outdid all the Vivaldi concertos he loved so well.

  David wished she would do it again. He wished he were the kind of man who knew how to make a woman laugh.

  “I suppose now that we’re such good pals you’ll be inviting me to sit in on one of your board meetings and I’ll be teaching you to pour Murphy’s Oil Soap into my mop bucket.”

  “You don’t have to teach me, Elizabeth. I know my way around a mop bucket.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. I’m human.” His smile was wry. “I used to be.”

  She made a sound like the breaking heart of a child and began to move toward him, her hand outstretched.

  “Don’t come any closer!”

  She fell back, stricken. David would have been remorseful if he hadn’t been so scared.

  “I don’t want your pity,” he said.

  Her chin came up, and because of her eyes he could see how the term blue blazes came into being.

  “Then what makes you think I want yours?”

  She stalked out, slamming the door behind her. Nobody except McKenzie ever walked out on him, and not even she slammed his door.

  Stunned, David stared at his closed door, and then he started laughing. But it was amusement with a nervous edge, the kind of laughter you might make if you’d gone into the bedroom expecting to settle down into restful sleep and suddenly found a dragon under your bed.

  He’d just confronted his worst fear, being faced by a woman. Not just any woman, but a beautiful woman. And he was still standing, not much worse for wear.

  “We’re all scared about something, David,” his mother had told him after he’d left bits and pieces of himself in Iraq and come home to lick his wounds.

  He wondered what scared Elizabeth Jennings.

  Chapter Nine

  “And there I was, Papa, facing David Lassiter with my knees shaking so hard I could barely stand.”