Phantom of Riverside Park

by Peggy Webb

  “I don’t know. I’m looking for Helen Parkins but nobody seems to know where she is. Maybe I’m in the wrong building.”

  The man laughed. “You’ve got the right building. Just the wrong hall. If you’ll turn left you’ll find her two doors down, on the right.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “No need to call me sir. I’m just the janitor.”

  “They ought to promote you to president. You know more than anybody in this whole building.”

  “You tell ‘em for me.”

  Maybe he would. Maybe he’d tell Helen Parkins, along with a few other things.

  “Well, here goes, Lola Mae. I hope you’ve rounded up a host of angels because I can use all the help I can get.”

  Feeling more confident, he stepped into Helen Parkins’ office.

  “Mr. Jennings, you’re late,” was the first thing Helen Parkins said to him, and as it turned out later, the nicest.

  She knew about him setting the house on fire, and it didn’t help one bit that he told her he’d been sick. She said ninety was too old to raise a child. She said he was an endangerment, as if he were some bomb ticking away and set to go off at any minute and blow Nicky to bits.

  “I would never harm a hair on that child’s head,” he told her. “And I’d whip anybody who tried,” he added, for good measure.

  That was the wrong thing to say--one of the many wrong things he said--because then she got on her high horse about violence and what a bad influence it was to raise a child in an atmosphere of hostility.

  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.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  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.

  They had taken her son. Yesterday. Out of the blue. No advance warning. Helen Parkins had driven up in a blue Honda Civic and taken Nicky away from her.

  He didn’t kick and scream and carry on. Not her Nicky.

  “Do I have to go, Mommy?” he’d asked.

  She knelt beside him, folded him close to her still-beating heart, held back her screams and tears for his sake. For the sake of the little boy who was no longer hers.

  “Yes, darling. You have to go. But only for a little while. I promise you that.”

  “Can I take Bear?”

  “Yes, you can take Bear.” Elizabeth glared at Helen Parkins, daring her to contradict. There were a million things she needed to say, but only
one she could think of.

  “I love you, Nicky. I’ll always love you. Remember that.”

  Nicky walked slowly down the hall to his room, Nicky who had always raced and bounced and bounded. And when he came back he was clutching his teddy bear as if the stuffed animal were his last hope on earth.

  “Bear makes me feel all better,” he announced, and then he’d taken Helen Parkins’ hand and walked out the door, a miniature soldier marching to the front lines. He didn’t cry, he didn’t call out to Elizabeth or Papa, but he’d looked back over his shoulder all the way to the car.

  Elizabeth would never forget the way he’d looked. To see heartbreak in a child’s face is the cruelest punishment a mother can endure.

  She could have cried for the rest of her life, but crying wouldn’t solve a thing. She sat up and wiped her face on the cool damp cloth Fred had fetched from the bathroom.

  “Thanks, Uncle Fred.”

  “The cowards,” Fred muttered. “I’d like to strangle them all.”

  “You got my blessin’, Fred,” Quincy said. “But me. I got another plan.”

  “What is it?” Elizabeth asked the question more out of politeness that anything else. She didn’t hold out much hope, especially if Quincy’s plan was of the same caliber as Fred’s.

  “I got me some connections, umhunh. Yessir, I got me a son-in-law sitting right up there in city hall. Right hand man to the mayor.”

  “I didn’t know that, Quincy.”

  “There’s lots of things you don’t know about ole Quincy, missy. Yessir. Lots of things.” Quincy nodded vigorously, pleased with herself. “For instance, you didn’t know my third husband was white as Fred Lollar over there.”

  “That ain’t very white,” Fred said. “I’m parched brown as an old hickory nut.”

  “I’m not talking about a suntan, I’m talking pure dee Caucasian. I used to call him Snow White. And my daughter, she’s married to the vice mayor of Memphis. White as you please, mind you. Unhunh.”

  “What’s that got to do with the price of peaches?” Fred shouted. “We got a little boy missing, here. A little boy settin’ this very minute in a house full of strangers.”