by Dave Balcom
“I tried; the phone number was disconnected; probably abandoned his landline when Fiske left.” I parked behind one of the vehicles after noticing that its front tires were flat.
We listened to our engine ticking after we shut it off. The quiet seemed to seep into the car. I rolled down the window, and caught a faint sound of country music from an unidentified source. Other than the music and the cooling engine, the only sound was the constant humming buzz of the surrounding woods.
As we sat there that humming buzz came right through our window and circled Jan’s ear. “Jim, if we sit here much longer, the mosquitoes will drain us.”
I opened the door and started to get out as the door to the trailer opened, and a tall, thin African-American man came out. He stood at the top of the wooden stairs wearing only gym shorts.
“Can I help you?”
He didn’t smile, but his tone was neutral.
“Looking for Riley Parker,” I said in the same tone.
“You found him.”
I turned back into the car, “Jan? You wanna come out here?”
I closed my door and started towards the stairs, “My name is Jim Stanton.” I nodded back towards the car, “My wife is Jan. We’re friends of Ed and Rita Sweet, and I heard you lived here in town, and on a whim we decided to come meet you.”
A wide smile broke his face, and he started down the stairs lightly, “That’s great! Momma told me you were visiting. Daddy has talked about you from time to time, so I’m really happy to meet you. Come in.” He finished as he reached my hand to shake and Jan stepped into a wide hug.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Stanton.”
“Jan, please.”
He was heading up the stairs, “Come on. Roxanne and the kids are inside. Roxie will be happy to meet you, too.”
We stepped into the trailer and found ourselves in the kitchen. Riley walked ahead calling out to his wife, “Roxie! We’ve got company.”
I noted that the kitchen was spotless, and the aroma of fresh baked bread was the only smell I could sense. “That smells delicious,” Jan whispered beside me as we followed Riley.
The living room was in total disarray by comparison, but it was obviously just the muss of books, clothes, and games that sent that first impression. I noted that there was a comfortable, lived-in feel, but the room was clean and everything that belonged in the room was neat and tidy.
Roxanne Parker unfolded herself from a recliner where she’d been reading with her little boy. She had a welcoming smile on her face, and as she stood up I could see that she was as tall as Jan, built along the same lines – she was a stunningly beautiful blue-eyed blonde.
“I’m so glad to meet you,” she said as she extended a hand towards Jan. “Rita told me you were beautiful and nice enough that I wouldn’t mind, and she was right.” She had a little giggle that erupted after she spoke, one of those little tics of speech that I seem to be particularly attuned to.
“Please sit down. Can I offer iced tea? Water? Anything?”
“Not for me, thank you,” Jan said as she leaned over the youngster still sitting on the sofa. He looked up at her and she said, “Hi there; you must be Gerald.”
The little boy smiled and looked at his mother.
Roxanne said, “Gerry, you’ll need to go to your room for a while, but tell Marie that company’s here and she should come and meet them.”
Gerald bounced up off the sofa and hurried out of the room. Seconds later a 12-year-old version of Roxanne stepped gracefully into the living room. “Marie, these are Mr. and Mrs. Stanton; please say hello to them.”
“Hi,” she said with a bright smile.
“Hello yourself,” Jan said, walking to her. “I’m very happy to meet you. Your grandmother told me you were the image of your mom, and she wasn’t lying.”
The youngster was clearly pleased and yet uncomfortable with such attention, and I thought for a second she might bolt. Instead she stepped confidently towards Jan and extended her hand, “You’re very kind, thank you.”
Jan shook her hand and beamed at all of us. I was next.
“Mr. Stanton? Thank you for coming to see my mom and dad. Welcome.”
I shook her hand and found it firm, warm and dry. I held it and marveled at her beautiful, coffee-colored skin, her dark-blue eyes taking me in with obvious intelligence. “Thank you, Marie.”
Her duties complete, she looked at her folks with a bright smile.
“Thank you,” Riley said with a chuckle. “You can go back to what you were doing.”
Roxanne stepped around Jan and guided her daughter out of the room. She turned her head back to us, “Please, make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be right back.”
“How are you folks doing?” Jan asked Riley. “I mean, what are you doing after Fiske? Rita told me you were working nights at a diner?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking around the room. “We sold our house about a month before the announcement, bought this trailer and moved in here. I know it doesn’t look like much, but it’s a far sight better than when we bought it. We figured there were some tough times coming...”
“Did your dad, I mean Ed, tip you off as to what was coming?” I asked.
He reacted a little, “No, that’s right, Ed is my dad in every way, and, no he didn’t give me any hint. As far as I know the announcement was just as much a shock to him as it was to everyone else. We all knew they were looking at options for the future, and most of us knew that the wives weren’t all that enamored with rural Missouri ... I think I reacted because of my experience in baseball ...”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’d forgotten, but you played pro ball.”
“Really?” Jan was impressed. She’s the baseball fan in our family; I can take it or leave it along with most team sports. I watched an occasional game on TV, but only if there was nothing I could do outdoors instead.
“Just minor league ball,” he said dismissively.
“He had a chance at the majors,” Roxanne chimed in as she settled onto the sofa next to her husband. “But he hurt his arm, and even with the Tommy John surgery, that ended it.”
“I probably never had a real chance,” Riley quietly insisted. “I was pretty hot stuff here ’bouts, and in A ball my control got me by, but when you stand next to a guy who throws effortlessly at ninety-five and can make a curveball break fifteen inches straight down at eighty-five, you know you’re maybe not going to get by forever on your control...
“I should have listened to Ed and Rita and parlayed my arm into a college degree like Crawford did with football, but I didn’t, and that meant when I sensed that Fiske might be moving away, I knew I had to take steps to protect us before the axe fell...”
“What’s next for you?” Jan asked.
“Oh, I’m taking classes on line. I’m going to get a degree in business and pursue a law degree. I have several friends in sports management who have told me that if I had the degrees, they’d hire me in a heartbeat...”
“How’s that going?” I asked.
“I’ll have my BS this winter, and I’ve already been accepted at Missouri’s Columbia School of Law... in about three years we’ll find out if I have a future in sports management.”
Roxanne smiled at him, “Whatever, nobody can take your degrees away from you.”
“What do you do at the diner?” I asked.
“Cook,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to own and operate a restaurant. I just love food.”
“Me too,” Jan said with a grin; “food loves me, too.”
“You look like you’ve got the word on food, though,” Riley said seriously. “Eating great doesn’t always mean eating a lot or eating unhealthy. We’re eating great right here with a food budget of less than sixty dollars a week.”
Jan’s eyes went wide and Roxanne started that giggle. “He’s not telling you the whole story. Our backyard is all garden and one piece of our furniture that lives at Ed and Rita’s is our freezer which is full
of wild game from last year...”
“Good, healthy wild game,” Riley added.
“You don’t have to convince us,” Jan said. “Jim keeps our freezer filled with birds and I help with fish. We eat wild at least three times a week. And we are into canning now, something neither of us used to do, but it’s fun and rewarding.”
I got the discussion back on track, “So, Riley, how does all this work?”
“Financially?”
“Not to be too nosy, but, yeah. I mean we’re always hearing how expensive college, much less law school can be... and then there’s the family...”
He smiled. “I was young when I signed, but I wasn’t all together stupid, and my dad is, after all, a financial genius, right?”
“I get it. You invested your signing bonus?”
“Dad did. Carefully. I have never touched the principal. And, of course, now, Dad’s assured us that Marie and Gerald’s college educations will be fully financed and there’s plenty of money to fund ventures or college, whatever we want.
“He’s all business with that, you can bet. But if we put together a business plan and he accepts it, we won’t have to go far to find a venture capitalist...”
Roxanne interrupted, “I’m going to get some tea. Can I get some for anyone else?”
Jan bounced up, “I’d like some; I’ll help you get it. I know Jim wants some, don’t you?”
“I do; thanks.”
We watched the two women head for the kitchen, and then Riley turned to me, “But you have to understand that we’re not going that route with Ed and Rita. I pay Ed a fee, minimal fee for sure, but a fee to manage my portfolio; I’ll never be making that proposal to him for a restaurant or my education. I made my decisions thirteen years ago, and I’m going to own them and overcome them on my own – at least only with Roxanne’s help.”
“I can understand that. I know that my son, Jeremy, is the same way and my daughter, Sara, is even more independent. I probably was too, but by the time I was out of high school and thinking about my future my parents were gone, so I didn’t have that choice to make.”
“I understand more than many that your parents are a long time gone,” Riley said, letting his piercing eyes rest on mine. “I’m going to treasure every minute of Ed and Rita’s life standing on my own two feet.”
We left the Parkers a little before three having traded phone numbers and contact information. I felt like I’d come looking for one thing and left having found a friend worth having.
“They’re just terrific, aren’t they?” Jan literally gushed as we turned out of the park and headed into town. “I mean, look at them. They’re beautiful, fit, healthy and resilient. I just could love Roxanne to death – she’s quite a lady. Did you know they were high school sweethearts?” She finally stopped to take a breath. “What did you think, Jim?” She laughed self-consciously.
I took my eyes off the road to laugh at her. “I can’t see either of them worrying about the money, much less terrorizing Ed over it.”
“I agree.” She sat silently until I pulled into the motel lot. “But that doesn’t mean someone in her family or someone else in Riley’s life isn’t interested.”
“That’s true, Jan. But in this kind of deal we need to cross off the people we can cross off; we can’t worry too much about the people we don’t know or even hear of.
“Now, let’s get refreshed before we go to see Ed, Rita and the agents; this might be a trying evening.”
She didn’t answer, just bounced out of the car and headed for the room.
Chapter 15
“What did you think of Riley and Roxanne?” Rita said as way of greeting as we walked up to the screened back porch of their home just after 5 that afternoon.
Jan opened the door, walked in and sat down on the end of a wicker recliner next to the one Rita was sprawled in. “I think they’re terrific. They’re just about the nicest young couple I can imagine.”
I could hear Ed moving around in the kitchen and headed that way.
“Howdy, Jim,” he said without looking up from his task. “Pull up a stool, and I’ll have this beaker of Martinis about frozen in a minute.
“Riley called me a while ago; said you’d been by to visit. What do you think of him?” I looked at the top of Ed’s head as he leaned over the sink where he was stirring a beaker that was inside a bucket containing a crushed ice slurry.
With his sandy hair, it was hard to see much gray in him. He had always been on the soft side for his stature. A little over six feet, he probably weighed something over the hundred and eighty-five the charts would have said was normal for his height, but he wasn’t obese.
“You must be very proud of him, them; is Crawford anything like his younger brother?”
“A lot. Not quite as tall. Riley’s six-four; Crawford’s six-three, heftier, maybe two-ten or so, but they’re definitely brothers. They have their father’s size, but their mother’s eyes and mouth.
“They’re both handsome men; good men, I think. I’m very proud to know them.”
“Ed, I have to ask...”
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking. This is the South and all, but there really wasn’t all that much reaction when we petitioned to adopt the boys after their lives blew up at home.
“There were those, I’m sure, the real rednecks, maybe the white trash, who had something to say, but they never said it to me or around me.
“Our church family never raised an eyebrow; nobody I worked with at Fiske had anything to say that wasn’t positive... And then the way the kids blossomed here, away from the horror they’d been living in, well that cinched it with the community.
“Hell, these kids were both high school heroes on the playing field, in the classroom and in the halls. I don’t know a single student or teacher that didn’t love those guys.”
“How did your own kids accept them? They were, what...?”
“Younger. Cindy was six, Pete was five and Matt was three; Crawford was fourteen and Riley was twelve when they first met. For our kids, Craw and Riley were just always here, always part of the family – even before they came to live with us.”
“That’s all pretty amazing considering where we are now and how this country was back in the eighties.”
“This is a small town, Jim; everybody thinks they know what everybody else is doing... I think there was an element of universal guilt that Dallas Parker was running amok out on that farm and nobody had the slightest inclination... when it all blew up that morning nobody had the slightest warning... I think that went a long ways towards accepting our decision as to how those boys should be cared for.
“There was nobody on the Parker side in a position to care for those boys and they never raised a single objection to our adopting them. We’ve made sure that those two boys knew their kin. They’ve never missed a funeral, a wedding or a family reunion – at least they never missed one when they lived with us.
“I love them like they were flesh and blood, but I never intended to make them “white” or to preserve their “black.” I just insisted they be honest, forthright and true to themselves in everything they did – just like I did with Cindy, Peter and Matt.
“It wasn’t hard, believe me. Those are five great young people living lives to be proud of. That’s why I can’t believe any of them would be party to these threats.”
“I can’t see Riley being part of it.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” he said as he lifted the beaker out of its ice bath. “Grab four glasses out of the freezer there, will you?”
He poured the almost syrupy concoction into the glasses, plopped a giant olive into each one and then slid one to me while he put the other two on a tray. “Wrap a lip around that, and I’ll be right back,” he said with a chuckle.
He came back all smiles. “I love serving a drink to a woman who shows her appreciation. You’ve got a wonder there, man.”
“Oh, don’t I know it. But you better be prepared. Unless I miss m
y guess completely she’ll be in here begging for a refill in minutes.”
“I’ll have to warn her, and you too; these are not intended to be drunk in multiples of one if you have any interest in the rest of the evening’s proceedings.”
I gestured a salute with my glass and tasted the drink: There is something almost magical about the first sip of a perfect gin martini. I’ve always thought if you could just limit it to the first sip, it would be the best drink of all... but the second sip and those that follow lack some of the crisp piney flavor and replace it with a numbing of the rest of your senses as well.
“I’ve always heard that two are not enough but three are too many,” Ed said after smacking his lips. “So I set out to create a mart that would not require a second investment, and this is where the experiment has taken me.”
“You’ve arrived,” I sighed. I knew I wasn’t going to find out if that flavor would last to the bottom of the small glass that night, and not finishing would sorely test my will.
Chapter 16
Richards and Hurst listened to our recap of the day’s work without interruption, and when we were through, I saw Hurst put a check mark next to something in her notes and then close her book.
“Pretty good day,” Richards said quietly, letting his eyes travel across all four of us. “Have you got a plan for meeting the rest of the children?” His eyes had stopped on Jan.
Rita spoke up, “We’ve discussed it, but you have to understand they’re spread from Ithaca, New York, to San Diego, California...”
Richards nodded, “I have agents watching them around the clock right now, looking to see if anyone is paying close attention to them or their family.”
I was pleasantly surprised at that; the Feds were taking this seriously.
Jan spoke up hesitantly, looking at me knowing we hadn’t discussed any of this, “I’ve been thinking we could pose as journalists doing a major magazine piece on how big winners and their families react to the fact... We’ve done that kind of thing before when we were looking for a woman in Portland... It worked after a fashion...”
Richards nodded, encouraging her to say more, but she’d run out of steam. “Got a couple of people killed, if I read the file right,” he said after a minute. “But that was a weird bunch of psychos you were dealing with...” He seemed to lose the thread there, and left me thinking that whoever was torturing the Sweets might not be the run of the mill psycho, either.
