Phantom of Riverside Park (10 page)

Inside the restaurant there would barely be
room to stand while you waited for a table, and by the time you
were seated you’d be so hungry from the delicious smell of Southern
cooking at its best that you’d order twice as much as you wanted,
then leave wishing somebody would come along and roll you out in a
wheelbarrow. At least, that was the way McKenzie told the
Rendezvous dining experience.

David wouldn’t know. He ordered his
Rendezvous ribs take-out style, then called to thank the manager
for a sumptuous meal. He’d have thanked God, too, but he’d lost the
hotline number in Iraq.

Around the corner at the Orpheum “Wicked” was
playing, and people were queued up outside trying to look natural
and important at the same time while they cut their eyes around the
crowd to be sure somebody else didn’t outshine them for the big
evening at the theater.

More of McKenzie’s commentary. She was a born
raconteur, and she was the main reason David could hole up in the
Lassiter Building as if it were a separate planet instead of
plopped right smack in the middle of downtown Memphis.

Across from the Orpheum was a renovated Beale
Street that no matter how hard it tried would never be able to
recapture its heyday when you could walk right off the street and
see the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis kicking his piano stool aside and
setting the keyboard on fire. Almost literally. Jerry Lee, who
might have been King if he hadn’t married his thirteen-year-old
cousin and if that upstart Elvis Presley hadn’t moved to Memphis
with the guitar his mother had bought in his Tupelo, Mississippi
birthplace. Beale Street’s history was so well documented, David
felt as if he had witnessed the icons, himself.

He turned down Riverside where lights along
the Mississippi illuminated the riverboat loading passengers for a
trip down to New Orleans.

Everywhere people were going about their
business, living ordinary lives. It had taken David years to adjust
to the fact that he would never be one of those people.

When his fiancée had first seen him in the
hospital, she’d screamed. And that was after David’s second round
of plastic surgery.

David drove along Riverside, remembering…

“What have you done to your face?” That
was the first thing Kelly Lynn had said to him. Not hello. Not how
are you. Not even, I’m glad you’re alive.

He’d thought the patched- up ear looked
fine. And the rebuilt nose. With Kelly Lynn cringing before him, he
wanted nothing more than to crawl back into a fox hole and have the
grenade finish the job.

“
They’re not finished yet, Kelly Lynn.
The doctor says it will turn out okay.”

“I thought you could go to Betty Jane’s
cotillion with me.”

“I won’t be dancing for a while. I don’t
have my left leg, yet.”

He stuck his stump out from under the
cover just for sheer spite.

“David, stop it! I can’t bear to
look.”

David finally saw a living, breathing
miracle--Kelly Lynn breaking track records as she sprinted from the
room with her eyes shut and her arms outstretched. As if she were
blind. As if she were the one who’d been blown to bits in
Iraq.

“You forgot your flowers.”

David picked up the red roses she’d
brought and flung them at the door. Glass shattered everywhere,
water cascaded across the floor, red petals scattered like blood.
Nurse Jenny Landsdell came running, her rubber soled shoes
beheading the last of the roses that lay on the floor gasping for
breath.

“I hate roses,” David said.

“So do I. Petunias are less fuss. Someday
I’m going to raise them.”

She patted David’s hand. “Accidents
happen, baby,” she said, and then she’d cleaned up the mess herself
lest somebody else made a scene.

And that was why, years later, David had
chosen her as the first recipient of a million dollars. That, and
the cool hands she’d laid on his head when he first came to the
hospital.

When David had finally located her, Jenny had
been living in a retirement home in middle Tennessee. Pleasant
Manor, inappropriately named according to McKenzie who said the
only thing pleasant about it was leaving. Bereft of family and
sidelined from her profession by a series of strokes, she passed
her days watching a black and white TV with reception so bad it
looked as if it were snowing in every old movie she viewed.

“To repay your kindness,” McKenzie told her
when she handed Jenny the check.

“What am I going to do with all that
money?”

“There’s a little house on the Cumberland
River you might like to buy. It comes complete with a gardener and
a housekeeper. The soil is just right for raising petunias, I’m
told.”

The last he’d heard, Jenny was still living
in her house on the Cumberland, and every summer when the petunias
were in full bloom she invited the neighbors over for a garden
party.

Immersed in the past, David was surprised to
find himself already at his destination, the campus of Memphis
State where any minute now Elizabeth Jennings would emerge from her
class and if she remained true to her pattern, walk across campus
with her friend Quincy and get a cherry ice cream float at the
grill before they headed to work.

Elizabeth’s routine never varied, McKenzie
had said, even to the cherry ice cream float.

Tonight was David’s first time to observe her
except through the telescope, and he was not prepared for his
reaction. Seeing her in person was like a blow to his solar plexus.
If ever a woman embodied physical perfection, it was Elizabeth
Jennings. She looked like something David might have dreamed.
Enhanced by the moonlight she took on a luminosity that made her
seem unreal.

Tonight she was alone, and she was heading
straight toward the tree where David hovered. This was a
complication he hadn’t counted on.

In fact, he didn’t know what he had hoped to
gain by coming there. Perhaps he just wanted to see close-up what
kind of woman would refuse his check then have the audacity to try
and track him down.

She moved closer, swinging a yellow book bag
with Save The Trees printed in bold red lettering.

David stepped deeper into the shadows, and
Elizabeth froze.

“Who’s there?” She swiveled her head, a
slight frown creasing her forehead. “Is anybody there?”

David mentally kicked himself. She was
scared, and with good cause. Nowadays not even a college campus was
safe at night for a woman alone.

She glanced back toward the building,
probably trying to decide whether to go back to the safety of the
lights and the crowd. Then her gaze swung to the tree.

She was looking right at him, and all he
could do was pray he blended with the darkness. If Elizabeth
Jennings caught a glimpse of his face, she’d really be scared.

He held his breath, waiting. Suddenly she
changed from a fragile porcelain doll to somebody who wanted to
kick something and was just looking for the nearest target.

Even her voice was different. Strong.
Assertive. Self-confident.

“I’m warning you. I’m a karate expert. My
hands are lethal weapons. If you touch me I’ll make you sorry you
were ever born.”

David had to bite his lower lip to keep from
laughing. McKenzie had told him Elizabeth was full of spit and
vinegar. But her file revealed nothing except the facts.

Having made her speech, she sashayed down the
sidewalk like a woman headed to a Sunday picnic. She passed so
close to him, he could have reached out and touched her.

She didn’t look in his direction. No so much
as a single glance. Which was a good thing, for the dial of his
wristwatch was glowing in the dark. He might was well have been
wearing a theater marquee.

Some sleuth he’d turned out to be. In a
single night he’d almost done the thing he feared most--reveal
himself to a beautiful woman.

In the course of his day there were times
when he had to meet face-to-face with employees and business
associates. Over the years he’d been careful, though, to make
certain the employees in his inner sanctum were male. And on the
occasions when David knew a business deal would involve a woman, he
would send his second-in-command, Peter Forrest, a man so discreet,
so private, that only David knew anything about him.

Still shaken by his close encounter, David
watched until Elizabeth disappeared in the direction of the grill,
then he climbed into his car and headed out of town, south on
Highway 78, south to the only place he could walk freely in the
daylight and feel safe--his farm in northeast Mississippi.

o0o

There are certain places and certain people,
even particular events, that anchor you in time, that tether you so
you that no matter how far you stray from your course you will
never be lost.

For David that place had always been the farm
in New Albany, which wasn’t a farm, really, but a plantation
featuring an antebellum mansion that had been so run-down when his
grandfather bought it he’d said he had to waylay the rats in order
to take possession. David remembered going there as a child, he and
McKenzie piled in the back seat of the car, their parents up front
singing or laughing or talking or sometimes just holding hands
while Clint drove the five hundred miles that separated his farm in
Tennessee from the place where Della Jean grew up, the place she
always loved with a passion that was contagious.

Grandfather Snead would be waiting for them
with stories, and David and McKenzie would stream out of the car
like kites straining to break the thin string that holds them back
from the heavens.

That vaulting sense of freedom was gone now,
but not the sense that he is returning to a safe harbor, for
Grandfather Snead had been one of the people who provided David his
mooring, along with his parents and McKenzie. All dead except
McKenzie.

And she might as well be gone for David has
drifted away from her. Not physically, of course. He’s still
present in the flesh. What he isn’t, is present in the spirit, that
life-spark that had burned so brightly when he was a child.

Like all children, David had been born full
of magic and dreams. He was born knowing the songs of angels and
understanding the conversations of animals. He was born full of
wonder, able to find beauty in a blade of grass or a single
raindrop.

Though his wartime experience had been
horrible beyond imagining, it wasn’t that single catastrophic event
that had snuffed out his life-spark, but rather the slow corrosion
of years and the subtle censure of a society bound by convention
and blind to the magic of children.

Children like Nicky. Children with the good
fortune to have a family like Elizabeth and Thomas who had somehow,
in spite of the crushing weight of poverty, learned to live
unfettered. The flame of magic was still bright in them, and that’s
what drew David to his window day after day to watch them from
afar.

That’s also what propelled him through the
night toward the refuge of his farm, for seeing Elizabeth this
evening had opened up such a sharp sense of loss he had no recourse
but to run.

Briefly, he thought about calling his
sister’s cell phone, but he preferred the element of surprise, the
look on her face when she saw that he was actually out in the
world.

His old Volvo ate up the miles. A long,
winding ribbon of Highway 78 stretched behind him, and before him
lay the small town of New Albany, already shut down for the night.
He and McKenzie used to joke that the city fathers rolled up the
sidewalks at 5:30, and Grandfather Snead would say that was the
best way he knew to keep them out of trouble.

David passed Snead’s Feed and Seed Store
which squatted, wizened and weathered, on the corner by the
Tallahatchie River bridge and hadn’t changed one iota in forty
years. Flats of spring onions and Big Boy tomatoes sat in the bins
on the store’s front porch alongside wheelbarrows and clay pots and
stacks of potting soil. New Albany was one of the few places left
in the world where it wasn’t necessary to carry the merchandise
inside at night.

Up the street was one of many antique stores
that had sprung up in the last few years, and across the railroad
was the church where David had been christened.

Roots. They bound him to this town as surely
as the blood ties that bound him to McKenzie.

He headed the Volvo east where sidewalks and
turn-of-the-century buildings gave way to rolling green hills and
wide open pastures. Soon his lights picked up the entrance to his
farm, and as David drove up the mile-long avenue that snaked among
towering oaks and ancient magnolias, he rolled down his window to
let the sights and sounds of his beloved land sink into his
soul.

The air was thick with the perfume of
honeysuckle, and high in the trees cicadas sang their plaintive
night song. Fireflies danced among the Queen Anne’s Lace that
swayed in the night breeze, their lights like tiny stars that
flickered briefly and then vanished.

Sometimes when David came to the farm he
would take a bedroll to the meadow then lie there in perfect
silence, his eyes and his heart wide open, letting the beauty soak
into his soul while he tried to regain harmony with the universe.
And maybe, if he got very lucky, he might find a bit of the magic
he’d thought was lost forever.

The house was dark but a light still burned
in the barn. David headed in that direction in search of his
sister. She was in the corner of the barn splinting the leg of Bo,
her twelve-year-old border collie who still acted as if he were
three and the best herding dog this side of the Mississippi.

When she looked up and saw him, her
expression went from surprised to ecstatic.