Phantom of Riverside Park (12 page)

One of the things Elizabeth had wanted to
forget was suddenly there, staring her in the face. Pretending to
be somebody she wasn’t lost all its appeal. Elizabeth wanted
nothing more than to gather her family and carry them back to the
safety of their little house on Vine Street, but she wasn’t about
to spoil the fun for everybody else. Quincy hadn’t tried on shoes
yet and Papa hadn’t traipsed up and down the jewelry counter
deciding what he might have bought for Mae Mae. If she’d lived. If
things had been different.

“Look, I’m finished here,” Elizabeth said.
“Why don’t I leave these things for you to try on? I won’t be
needing them.”

“Headed home, huh?”

“Eventually.” Elizabeth was through telling
strangers her business.

“Hey, me too. I’ve got to get home so I can
kick my brother’s backside.”

McKenzie Matthews smiled at her, and even
reached over and touched Elizabeth’s hand. “You take care of
yourself, Elizabeth.”

The strange encounter stayed on Elizabeth’s
mind as the rest of the Good-time Gang frolicked through
Goldsmith’s. She didn’t believe in chance. Like her grandmother
before her, she believed that every encounter was arranged by
cosmic forces.

“If you’re open to possibility, you’ll meet
many an angel, unaware,” Mae Mae used to tell her, but Papa would
always smile and say, “Now, Elizabeth, your Mae Mae meets angels
going and coming, but I’ve met a devil or two, myself, and I want
you to know the difference.”

Elizabeth was trying, but more often than not
she failed. What she needed was the wisdom of Solomon and the
sleuthing expertise of Sherlock Holmes. She had an elusive
millionaire to find.

o0o

Elizabeth liked cleaning other people’s
houses. She enjoyed polishing the silver and imagining what kind of
people would gather around the mahogany table for Christmas dinner.
While she waxed floors she fantasized about the kind of parties
that would be held in the house, the kind of clothes the people
would wear, the kind of shoes that would dance over the shiny
hardwood.

In the midst of her dusting and waxing and
mopping she was privy to the secret lives of others. She would see
the gold sequined shoes lying under the bed, forgotten. She’d find
an ostrich-plume boa trailing from the pocket of a three-piece
Brooks Brothers business suit. Or she might come unexpectedly upon
a worn and well-loved teddy bear hiding in the folds of a child’s
blanket, and she’d snatch it from certain death in the washing
machine.

The people whose houses she cleaned had birds
in fancy Victorian cages, dogs with names like Fifi and Randolph
and Winstead Wilkins, the Third, and cats who slept on satin
pillows and disdained to eat anything except gourmet cat food
served on china plates.

Nicky loved the stories she made up starring
the various pets and their owners. His favorite was of the
suspicious cat Snurly Burly who followed her all over the house
spying while she cleaned. Sometimes he would jump out at her from
closets or pounce at her from behind potted ferns. Other times he
would perch on the highest shelf in the bookcase and twitch his
tail in anger while she dusted the book jackets.

Tonight, though, she wouldn’t come home with
any stories. She would be cleaning the bank on Lamar. And if the
fates were with her, she would be doing some sleuthing.

She buttoned her uniform, then went into the
kitchen to say goodbye to her family. Swathed in an apron as big as
he was, Nicky stood on a straight-backed chair at the kitchen
counter watching Papa measure flour into a wooden mixing bowl his
daddy had carved from a lightening-struck oak on their Delta
farm.

Fred Lollar hovered nearby.

“Thomas is teaching me to make biscuits,” he
boomed when Elizabeth came in. “He thinks he’s Betty Crocker.”

Not to be outdone, Papa shouted, “If old
honey-bun breath here had a lick of sense he’d turn into Mrs.
Pillsbury.”

Nicky clapped his hands. “Can I be the
doughboy?”

Elizabeth liked Fred. Full of courtly manners
and funny stories, he’d won both her and Nicky over on his first
visit to their house.

But more than that, she was delighted that
after all these years in Memphis Papa finally had somebody his own
age to talk to.

“You two behave, now.”

She wrapped her arms around Nicky and lifted
him off the chair for a big hug.

“Give me a bye-bye kiss. That’s my boy. You
be good, and mind your Papa.”

“Uncle Fred, too?”

“Yes, Uncle Fred, too. He’s an adult and it’s
called respect.”

Papa jabbed Fred in the ribs, just in case he
hadn’t been paying attention.

“I taught her everything she knows.” He waved
a floury hand toward the door. “Shoo. Go on. Get out of here before
you’re late. I’ve got biscuits to make.” He jabbed Fred again. “And
so have you.”

“You do the cooking,” Fred said. “I’ll do the
cleaning. We’ll be the odd couple.”

“You’re going to cook or my name’s not Thomas
Jennings.”

“What will your name be, Papa?”

Fred winked at Elizabeth. “Let’s think of
one, Nicky. How about Elmer Fudd?”

“Who’s Elmer Fudge?”

Elizabeth waved goodbye to the lively trio.
The sounds of their good-natured bickering drifted through the
screened door as she climbed into her Valiant and headed to
work.

Quincy was waiting for her at the bank.

“Ready to shake, rattle and roll, girl
friend?” Quincy yelled.

“You bet.”

Five foot nine in her stocking feet, with
hands the size of Virginia hams and a heart the size of Texas,
Quincy never spoke in anything less than a sustained shout. She had
eight grown children and fifteen grandchildren. She’d buried more
husbands than she could keep track of, or so she said, she was
older than the Tennessee hills, also her saying, and she’d given
Elizabeth a job when nobody else in Memphis would.

Not only had Quincy rescued her, she’d
befriended her. Quincy was boss, mother, grandmother and friend to
Elizabeth.

After tonight, all that could end.

Quincy showed the security guard her
identification, as if she needed to. Nobody who had ever seen her
was likely to forget Quincy.

As Elizabeth followed her inside, she felt
like Judas.

“Hmmmunh, it smells like money in here.”
Quincy laughed, flashing her gold teeth. “If I wasn’t as honest as
old Abe himself I’d be on easy street.”

Elizabeth began to gather her supplies. “What
would you do if you were on Easy Street, Quincy?”

“Get me a TV so big you could see it from
here to the Arkansas state line, stock my refrigerator with
Michelob Light and watch the sports network till my eyes bugged
out.”

“You must really love sports.”

“It’s not sports I’m interested in, honey.
It’s all the hunks in their tight-fitting pants.”

Elizabeth thought of the million dollar check
lying in the bottom of her cookie jar. If she cashed it, she could
make Quincy’s modest dream come true.

And Papa’s. Although he would die swearing he
didn’t want a farm, she knew that every day of his life he missed
his land. She could see it in the way he looked at the trees in
other people’s neighborhoods. She could see it in the way he would
stand in the back yard after a rain, sniffing the air as if the
water-soaked earth carried messages that only he could understand.
She could see it in the secret stash of brochures he’d collected
from John Deere, slick color layouts that featured tractors he must
have dreamed about years ago when he was plowing his patch of Delta
earth with a mule.

Then there was Nicky...

It would be so simple to solve all their
problems, give them their dreams. All she had to do was cash the
check. Then she would be on easy street, herself.

But at what cost?

“What’s the matter, hon? You look like
somebody’s walked over your grave.”

“I’m just fidgety, I guess, Quincy. I’ve had
a lot on my mind lately.”

“You want to talk about it?”

Quincy was the balm in Gilead and Elizabeth,
the open, aching wound. Like any woman worth her salt she longed to
bare her soul to this big-hearted woman who would not only listen
without judging but would smother her in a life-affirming hug that
would lift Elizabeth’s spirits for days.

But how could she tell her best friend that
she was planning to do something that might land them all in jail?
She couldn’t, of course, so she did the next best thing. Pretend. A
defense Southern women had elevated to an art.

“I’ll come over to your house sometime and
we’ll have tea, just like the Queen of England,” Elizabeth said.
“Meanwhile, the music is playing and Dancing with the Stars is
calling me on the phone.”

She waltzed around with her mop till Quincy
was laughing so hard she had to lean against the bank vault and
hold her sides.

“Quit that. You’ve made me wet my britches.
I’m gonna have to make a detour by the bathroom before I tackle the
president’s office.”

Quincy left and the door to opportunity swung
wide open. Or was it the door to destruction?

Alone in the cavernous room with a terminal
sitting on every desk, Elizabeth broke out in a nervous sweat.
She’d never in her life done anything illegal, not even drive over
the speed limit or slide through a traffic light that was just
turning red. And here she was in the bank contemplating a life of
crime.

Not merely contemplating. She was going to do
it. She had to do it, for Nicky’s sake.

The million-dollar check had come from this
bank. If she could hack into the computers and discover the
identity of the donor, she could confront him and find out why he
had sent the check to her.

Setting aside her mop and bucket, Elizabeth
slid into the desk that belonged to Marjorie Mullins, according the
nameplate. A graduation picture of a pretty girl in a cheap red
plastic frame stood beside the nameplate. Elizabeth could tell by
her smile that she knew everything there was to know about life’s
possibilities and not the first thing about its
disappointments.

She turned the picture face down, then
powered up the computer. Her fingers flew over the keys. She’d
known her way through cyberspace since she was eight years old and
had been allowed to tinker with the computer at Tunica Baptist
Church while her mother vacuumed the gold carpet that had split the
congregation in two. The old timers held out for wood floors while
the newcomers lobbied for carpet. The newcomers had won. They had
the most money on their side.

Sweat beaded her lips as all the Tunica
Baptists rose up to haunt her. Every Sunday Miss Bethany Cliburn
would herd the six-year-olds into class and pronounce in a voice
that sounded like Doom, “Avoid even the appearance of evil.”

Conscience-stung, Elizabeth jerked her hands
off the keyboard and glanced around to see if anybody was watching.
Not a soul was in sight. A moon the size of a hoop of cheese shone
through the glass double doors. The sidewalk outside the bank was
empty. Not even the stray cat that liked to prowl around when she
and Quincy came to clean was in sight.

What were the laws concerning hackers?
Severe, she was certain, and getting more so every day.

A vision of herself sitting in a prison cell
while Nicky cried himself to sleep at night and Papa hung his head
in shame floated into Elizabeth’s mind. She was going to become a
convict at the age of twenty-four. Nicky would not only be laughed
at in school, he’d carry the extra burden of having a mother who
was a jailbird.

Elizabeth got so dizzy she laid her head on
the desk to keep from fainting. With the computer screen still
glowing, she went to the nearby fountain and splashed her face with
cold water.

“I can’t do this,” she whispered.

She would turn off the computer and get her
mop and do the job she was hired to do, and when she got home she
would tear the check to pieces. With her hand on the power button,
she paused.

All of a sudden one of those memories that
scars the soul and causes the heart to bleed revisited her. She’d
been in the ice cream shop on Poplar with Nicky and Papa. Going
there was a Saturday ritual for them, a small pleasure that lit
Nicky’s face and didn’t do major damage to Elizabeth’s
pocketbook.

Standing on tiptoe he’d pressed his face
against the glass display case in big-eyed wonder. Then he moved
from one end to the other saying
wow
in his little
awe-struck voice that made Elizabeth feel young again, young and so
full of exuberance and anticipation she felt that she might be
air-borne at any minute.

Leaving fingerprints and nose prints on the
glass, he’d turned a shining face their way. “What are you having,
Papa?”

“I can’t decide. Why don’t you help me, then
you can have a bite of mine.”

“And you can have some of mine.” Nicky jumped
up and down, a marionette boy on strings. “We’ll share.”

“Good boy. All right. What will it be?”

“Stwabewwy, Papa. I want stwabewwy.”

Neither of them had heard the shop bell
tinkle. Neither saw the woman in designer sunglasses and the little
girl in blue shorts staring at them. But everybody heard what the
child said.

“That kid with the ugly lip talks funny.
What’s wrong with him, Mama?”

The mother could have said
I’m sorry
then quietly ordered her ice cream. She could have shushed her
child discreetly then gone about her business. She could have
ignored the comment that hung like lightning between them, the
stench of burning still in Elizabeth’s nostrils.

Instead she brayed with laughter that nearly
two weeks later still echoed in Elizabeth’s dreams.

“Kids,” she’d said. “They’re so honest.”

And so very cruel.

With his face pinched white, Nicky ordered
his ice cream while Papa muttered for Elizabeth’s ears only,
“Somebody ought to teach her some manners,” meaning the mother, not
the child.