Phantom of Riverside Park

by Peggy Webb

  “I’m out of answers, McKenzie. All I have are questions.”

  “David, you’re scaring me.”

  “I don’t mean to. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Peter will be in charge while I’m gone.” This was not unusual. David could stay gone indefinitely and his business would be in good hands. “If there’s anything you need, all you have to do is call him.”

  McKenzie sniffed. “I won’t call him. I won’t have to.”

  “Still, he would never betray my trust. That’s why I can vanish at a moment’s notice.”

  “Vanish?” McKenzie was out of her chair. “Where are you going, David?”

  He said the first place that popped into his head. “Italy, for starters. Assisi.”

  “One of my favorite spots in the whole world. I might just go with you.”

  “Sorry, McKenzie. This trip has to be solo... Peter will take care of you while I’m gone.”

  “I don’t need taking care of.”

  McKenzie glared at him, more on general principles, David figured, than any righteous indignation. David kissed her goodnight then slipped out the door.

  He would leave town tomorrow evening, fly out in the cover of night, and with the exception of McKenzie and Peter, nobody would even know he’d gone.

  Why would they? How could anybody miss a shadow? That’s what he was, a man reduced first by circumstances then later by will to nothing more than a featureless outline that cast a sudden darkness on whatever it touched.

  Maybe he would leave and never come back. He could live abroad. He could live in one of those shining white houses with the red-tiled roof in a grape vineyard in the Tuscan countryside. In the mornings he would pick grapes with the dew still glistening on their purple skins, and in the evenings he would sit in the shade of an olive tree older than most countries and drink good wine while the sun painted his house vermillion.

  David stood on the third floor balcony and watched the moon track across an inky sky sprinkled with stars. Some people charted their lives by the stars. They turned to the horoscope first thing every morning seeking direction for their lives, their loves.

  In Italy maybe he’d become one of those people. He would seek celestial guidance for the best time to plant grapes, the best time to drive into Verona to watch an outdoor performance of “Aida” while a full moon rose over the ruins of the theater. The best time to eat. The best time to sleep. The best time for everything except love.

  Love would never be part of his future.

  He went inside and closed the curtains against the pull of the moon, the spell of the stars. A vast bed of hand-turned walnut faced the windows. It had been his Granddaddy Snead’s bed. He’d brought his bride there, conceived his children there, died there.

  All of a sudden it struck David as sad beyond bearing that the old bed had not seen a woman since he’d assumed occupancy. It would never provide comfort for a bride, never witness the conception of a child.

  David jerked a quilt off the bed and spread it on the sofa in the adjoining sitting room. Tomorrow would be soon enough to pack.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Nicky had more paint on himself than the kitchen wall, but that was fine with Elizabeth. He was perfect and happy. That was the main thing.

  She still couldn’t get over the fact of her good fortune. Never mind that she still lived in the same run-down little house. Never mind that the landlord had had a conniption fit about Papa nearly burning down the kitchen. Never mind that Celine had threatened to fire her if she ever brought her child to the bakery again. Elizabeth had life by the tail. She had the world on a string. She was sitting on top of the rainbow, and every other cliche’ she could think of.

  She giggled for no good reason, and Nicky giggled because she did. Papa and Fred, engaged in a lively game of gin rummy, grinned.

  “You two birds are having too much fun over there,” Uncle Fred said. “Painting’s supposed to be work. Didn’t you know that?”

  “The seven dwarves whistled while they worked, didn’t they, Nicky?” She winked at Papa, and his face shone as if it had been scrubbed down with Ajax.

  “Whistle while you work, Mommy,” Nicky said, and she pursed her lips and got out nothing more than a blowing sound.

  “I can’t. You try, Nicky.”

  He got no further than puckering up like a fish before he burst into a fresh fit of giggles.

  “Whistle the drawf song, Papa,” Nicky said.

  “I don’t know that song. How about ‘I’ve Been Working on the Railroad’?”

  Nicky made a face. “We not on a railroad, Papa. We in the kitchen.”

  All of a sudden Fred Lollar puckered up and rendered a perfect version of the work song from the Walt Disney movie “Snow White.”

  “I didn’t know you could do that,” Papa said.

  “There’s lots of things you don’t know about me, Thomas Jennings. I’m a man of mystery.”

  “Shoot, all you are is a man about to be beat.” Papa spread out his cards. “Gin,” he said.

  “Well, I’ll be doggoned.”

  “You ought to been payin’ more attention to your cards and less to your whistlin’.”

  Fred opened his mouth to argue when the doorbell rang.

  Elizabeth couldn’t have been more shocked if an elephant had walked into the kitchen.

  “Are we expecting company, Papa?”

  “Not me. My company’s here. What about you?”

  “Quincy’s in Arkansas visiting her son.” The bell pinged once more. “It’s probably a door-to-door salesman.”

  She looked around for something to wipe her hands on. The kitchen was a mess--newspaper on the floor to catch the drippings, fresh roller pads scattered everywhere, one paint can open, the other blocking the narrow passage between kitchen and den.

  “Sit tight, everybody,” Fred said. “I’ll get rid of him.”

  “This is not your house,” Papa said.

  “Yeah, but I’m meaner than you, Thomas.”

  “Fine, go on, answer the door. Give you a chance to vent your spleen on somebody besides me.”

  When Fred jerked open the front door all Elizabeth could see was the pointy tip of a pair of white shoes.

  “What do you want?” Fred yelled.

  “Is Elizabeth Jennings here?”

  The voice was female and unfamiliar. Somebody from the university, maybe? Elizabeth looked like she’d come from combat in the War of the Blue Paint. She frantically searched for something to wipe her hands on.

  “What’s it to you?”

  Fred’s belligerence was probably scaring the poor woman to death. Elizabeth abandoned her search for a towel in favor of making their unexpected guest feel welcome. She went to the doorway, rumpled clothes, blue paint and all.

  “I’m Elizabeth Jennings.” She smiled to show that she, at least, was harmless. The woman didn’t smile back.

  Later, when Elizabeth agonized over every aspect of the visit, she would recall that tight mouth with a shudder. She should have known, even then, that it was a bad sign.

  “I’m Helen Parkins of the Department of Human Services. A complaint has been filed against you. I’ve come to investigate.”

  She fired from a verbal machine gun that shot Elizabeth straight through the heart. Elizabeth reached out blindly for support, and if Fred hadn’t caught hold of her arm she’d have fallen at the feet of the woman who had surely come to destroy her.

  Fred didn’t suffer the same weakness. He stuck out his chin and shouted, “Who’s complaining?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “What sort of complaints?” Elizabeth asked, though she already knew. The truth had already cracked her heart and bled her bones.

  To make matters worse Nicky suddenly appeared looking like a street urchin or a waif from a nineteenth century orphanage that imposed child labor.

  “It’s about your son. Nicky Jennings.”

  “No. No.” Elizabeth held her hands up in fr
ont of her face like a blind woman, but Fred got straight into the woman’s face.

  “You can just get your sorry self back into that fancy car and tell that de-fart-ment of yours that we ain’t fixing to put up with no government shenanigans.”

  Helen turned red from the roots of her starched yellow hair to the base of her scrawny neck, while Elizabeth bit the inside of her mouth to keep the room from spinning. This woman was going to take her child. Now was not the time to be weak.

  She could hear Mae Mae saying, Always keep your chin up, Elizabeth, and don’t you ever back down from a fight in order to protect what’s yours.

  “Uncle Fred, please.” Elizabeth put a restraining hand on his arm. “Go back to your card game with Papa. And take Nicky with you. I’ll take care of this.”

  She squatted beside her son and cupped his face even though her hands were blue. What did paint streaks matter when your entire future was at stake?

  “Go with Uncle Fred like a good boy, Nicky. Mommy will answer all your questions later.”

  Thankfully he didn’t argue. As Elizabeth held the door open she saw the scene through the eyes of her enemy: the neighborhood a disaster, the house in shambles, one foul-mouthed old man at the door and the other crusty old codger sitting at the kitchen table shuffling a deck of cards, gambling no doubt, and the child exposed to it all. Most of all the child. Though Nicky often had streaks of washable magic markers across his cheeks or mud on his shoes and pant legs, he’d never looked more unkempt.

  Helen What’s Her Name probably even thought Elizabeth had coerced him into painting the kitchen, a modern-day form of child labor.

  “Please excuse the mess, Miss ...” The silence roared like a tornado ripping them all apart, but the social worker stood with her lips clamped and no notion of supplying the name Elizabeth was too scared to remember.

  “I wonder if you could come back another time? We’re in the middle of a painting project, plus, Papa has company, and ... as you can see, this is really not a very good day for a visit.”

  “That’s the point. With advance notice, everybody can be a star. Even a criminal.”

  Helen barged past her and sat down on the sofa right where Elizabeth knew she would, over the bad spring that had a nasty habit of poking through at the worst possible times. And then the woman with the permanent-press frown snapped open her briefcase and began to record random bits and pieces of the worst day of Elizabeth’s life.

  Still, Elizabeth clung to a thin thread of hope and a stubborn sense of justice. She was a good mother. Any fool would see that. Strangers didn’t come up to your house and take your child away if you were a good mother, did they? After all, this was America.

  In the kitchen Papa and Fred had gone quiet. Even Nicky was silent. Elizabeth answered the woman’s wicked questions as softly as possible, hoping her family wouldn’t hear.

  She tried to come across as an intelligent loving mother who more than made up for the fact that Nicky didn’t have a father. From the way Helen’s eyebrows kept disappearing into her starched hair, Elizabeth knew she’d come across another way. An unflattering way. Maybe even a dangerous way. Dangerous to Nicky. Dangerous to Papa. Dangerous to all of them.

  After Helen had left and Fred said goodbye and Nicky was tucked into bed with three goodnight stories instead of two and a prayer so long he made Baptist preachers sound brief, Elizabeth faced Papa’s questions. In spite of the fact that he’d taught her the virtue of honesty, she still tried to put on a good face, more for him than for herself.

  There was no use in two people being scared out of their wits.

  “What’d she want to know about Nicky?” Papa asked.

  He looked every one of his ninety years tonight. The recent illness had taken more of a toll than Elizabeth had noticed. Or perhaps it was that she’d never looked at him before as a stranger might, as Helen Parkins surely did: Thomas Jennings was long past the age of baby sitting. He looked like a man who might drop dead any time, anywhere, and what would a four-year-old do then?

  “She asked about pre-school, day care, that sort of thing.”

  “Who put her up to it, I wonder?”

  Elizabeth was wondering the same thing. With Taylor dead, the chapter in Tunica was closed. Celine, maybe? She’d been fit to be tied about having Nicky at the bakery. Plus, she had a mean streak as wide as a Mack truck.

  “I don’t know, Papa. The thing we have to concentrate on now is making her see what a good family we are. We have to convince her that Nicky couldn’t be in a better place than right here with us.”

  “Any fool can see that. And I still don’t see why we have to convince a woman we’ve never laid eyes on about a doggone thing. I’m with Fred. If she comes nosing around her again she’s going to get more than she bargained for.”

  Elizabeth’s heart sank to her shoes. This was exactly what she’d feared, and exactly what she had to try and prevent.

  “The world has changed, Papa. Bad things do happen in good families. Our government tries to be an advocate for children.”

  “Nicky doesn’t need an advocate. He has us.”

  “I know that, and you know that, Papa, but still, we’re stuck with this investigation whether we like it or not. It’s up to us to convince her that Nicky is well cared for and well loved.”

  “You mean there’s more to this? She’ll be coming back?”

  “You’ll be going to her office, Papa. You and Nicky, both. She’ll conduct separate interviews with both of you.” She leaned forward and squeezed his hands. “We can get through this, Papa. We have to, for Nicky’s sake.”

  For a moment he looked as if he were going to cry, and then Thomas Jennings proved to her one more time that he was the rock of the song she’d sung so many years ago while sitting on his lap in Tunica Baptist Church. The rock of ages. The rock that not only provided shelter from the storm but succor for every need.

  “You’re doggone tootin’, we will, Elizabeth. I don’t want you to worry about a thing. The day I can’t convince a woman what a wonderful man I am is the day I’m laid out in my Sunday best waiting for that bumpy ride to the cemetery. And that’s not a ride I’m planning on taking for a long, long time.”

  o0o

  The Department of Human Services was in on one of those buildings designed to make you think the government didn’t spend a lick of your tax money on their offices, but Thomas was nobody’s fool. That wasn’t cheap carpet on the floor. It was ugly--a sort of dingy gray that looked like the coats of pigs after they’d wallowed around in the sty--but it wasn’t cheap.

  Neither were all those brass name plates. How come folks thought they had to have their names engraved on plaques and sitting on the edge of their fancy desks when all it took was a minute to tell somebody your name. And it was a lot friendlier, too.

  Nobody was friendly here. They didn’t know much, either, if you wanted his opinion. He’d asked six people how to get to Helen Parkins’ office and had been told six different things. Wasn’t that just like a government-run operation? He and Fred had discussed the subject many times in the park, and they were both of the opinion that if you cut out all the government fat, everybody would be better off. It was about the only thing they agreed on.

  That and Helen Parkins.

  “You watch out for her, Thomas,” Fred had warned him. “She’s out to get you.”

  Thomas had known that from the minute Helen Parkins walked into their house. He was the one who had brought this disaster down on their heads. He couldn’t give you a clear reason, but he knew all the same. It had to do with old age and not paying attention to the soup and waking up one morning when he was sixty and looking at his worn-out tractor in the barn and his worn out land and saying to himself, “I’ve worked like a dog all my life, and this is all I have.”

  Still... until that day in the park when a stranger gave him a million dollar check, he’d thought of himself as a man blessed, a modern-day Job, not rich in the traditional way but rich in
all the ways that counted. Now he knew better. Thomas Jennings was a failure. He’d failed Lola Mae and he’d failed Elizabeth and Nicky.

  Wild horses couldn’t have made Lola Mae say she ever wished for more than a hundred acres of land and a subsistence living with a man who never could seem to get the dirt out from under his fingernails. But he used to catch her unawares sometime. She’d have that far-off, dreamy look in her eyes and Thomas would know what she was thinking. Lola Mae had wanted to be a concert pianist. Would have been, too, if it hadn’t been for him.

  “I’m going to get you a baby grand one of these days, Lola Mae,” he used to tell her. “Just you wait and see. We’re going to have a bumper crop of cotton this year.”

  That bumper crop never came along. Just a hot dry spell that sucked all the life out of the land or a plague of boll weevils or so much rain the cotton rotted in the boll.

  Same thing with soy beans. You could fight the elements till you were bone weary and broken, but nature always won.

  All he ever got for Lola Mae was a second-hand upright with the ivories missing and a middle C that wouldn’t play. She hadn’t complained, though. She was never one to complain. Why, to hear her tell it, Thomas had bought her the finest musical instrument in the Delta, and if anybody dared mention the middle C, she’d be on them faster than a duck on a June bug.

  Elizabeth was exactly like her. Fierce and proud and tender.

  She would never let on to him that he was the cause of the complaint, and would fight anybody else who mentioned such a thing, but he could see that haunted look in her eyes. He was going to do his dead-level best today to make the government leave her alone.

  She’d wanted to come with him, but he’d said no. If he showed up with an escort it would prove once and for all to Helen Parkins that he didn’t have sense enough to get in out of the rain by himself, much less take care of a child.

  He stopped by the water fountain to get a drink. He was lost, that much was for sure, and once again he was going to have to ask somebody how to find the office of the woman he didn’t want to see.

  Thomas wandered down a long hallway trying to look like somebody who knew where he was going, but he failed because a big man with a dark shiny face stepped away from a drink machine and said, “Can I help you?”