Phantom of Riverside Park (13 page)

The only mention Nicky ever made of the
incident was that evening after Elizabeth read his bedtime story
and prepared to listen to his prayers.

“Mommy, can God hear me?”

“Of course, He can, darling.”

“Maybe God can’t hear me ‘cause I talk
funny.”

“He hears all his children, and His special
ones most of all.” Her hug was fierce and protective. “You’re very,
very special, Nicky, and don’t you ever forget it.”

Nicky pondered that for a minute, his little
face screwed up with concentration, then he’d smiled,
believing.

“Okay.” He shut his eyes tight, and then he
began to pray with a child’s absolute confidence that God was
personally taking care of every detail of his life. “God, it’s me,
Nicky, and I don’t want a fire truck ‘cause I already got one. I
want Papa to find Houdini so we can play ‘stead of runnin’ ‘cause
runnin’ makes Papa say jackass.”

He opened one eye and squinted up at
Elizabeth. “Is it all right if I tell God?”

“Yes, it’s okay.”

Satisfied, he squeezed his eyes tight, then
pressed his little chin against his folded hands. “Bless Mommy and
Papa and Uncle Fred, most of all, ‘cause Papa said he don’t have a
little boy to love and that makes him scratchy.”

Crotchety
was the word Papa had
used, but she liked Nicky’s version better. Not having someone to
love created a itch that wouldn’t go away, no matter how much you
scratched.

Elizabeth was doubly blessed: she had two
people to love, and that’s why, all of a sudden, she knew she was
planning to embark upon her life as a criminal, that plus the sight
of Mae Mae standing with her arms crossed the way she always did
when she was mad and fixing to light into you with a speech that
would prod you off your pity pot and into action.

Sliding back into the chair that belonged to
the unsuspecting Miss Mullins, Elizabeth tapped her way through the
bank’s accounting system. She thought about praying for success or
mercy or both, but she already had the boss angel on her side. Mae
Mae was probably telling even the Archangel Michael himself what to
do.

Elizabeth followed clues through a maze of
corporations that all led back to one man.

Stunned, she watched the cursor blinking
green on his name. An image of the park rose in her mind, and with
it the ancient brick structure directly across the street, its wide
beveled doors flanked by huge columns.

She passed the Lassiter building every day on
her way to the park entrance. All this time, her benefactor had
been right under her nose.

Or had he? She typed his name into the
computer and initiated a search. There were more than a thousand
listings on him. She didn’t have time to read them all, but the few
she did confirmed her suspicion.

She’d discovered her benefactor’s identity,
but not his motives. The big question was still, why?

Elizabeth turned off the computer, then
picked up her mop and bucket. Her personal problems would have to
wait. She had a bank to clean.

o0o

Morning sun illuminated the kitchen.
Elizabeth had never seen such a sight. Biscuits sat on every
available surface--the stove top, the kitchen table, the laminated
countertops, even the top of the refrigerator.

“‘Morning, Elizabeth.”

Thomas Jennings sat at the table spreading
butter and jam on three fat biscuits, a steaming cup of coffee at
his elbow.

“‘Morning, Papa.” She kissed his leathery
cheek.

“How do you like our handiwork?”

“They look great.” She wasn’t lying. Most of
them did. A few, though, showed signs of having been done by an
amateur, their uneven shapes and charred edges a dead giveaway. “I
guess I know what we’ll be eating for the next few days.”

“Would’a been longer, but I sent the rest
home with Fred. It’ll do him good to eat something besides honey
buns.”

Elizabeth nabbed a biscuit off the stove top
then poured herself a cup of coffee. Her news was bursting inside
her. Usually Papa would have seen it in her face and asked a dozen
questions, but he was still high on his success of the previous
evening.

She joined him at the table. “I’ve found him,
Papa.” His knife stopped in midair. “I’ve found the man who gave us
a million dollars.”

“Who is it?”

“David Lassiter.”

“The Lassiter Building, that Lassiter?”

“I hope so, Papa. If it’s not I have some
more leg work to do.”

“Didn’t
Time
do a big spread on him
a couple of years back?”

“Yes, when he merged with Alpha.”

The article had dredged up his past and
served it in large chunks designed to make the reader gasp and gag
and open the windows to let in a fresh breeze. His childhood in
Mountain City, Tennessee, was skipped over with little more than
mention of his parents’ names, but his war injuries were laid out
in excruciating detail.

Though no one had seen his face in years, at
least, no one who was talking, speculation was rampant.

“Hideous beyond belief,” was the quote taken
from a doorman David Lassiter had fired for drinking on the job
seven years ago.

“Grotesque,” was the way a disgruntled
bookkeeper who had been caught with his hands in the till described
him. “A monster. A beast,” he’d added, in spite of the fact that
Lassiter had not prosecuted and he’d been living on a cattle ranch
in West Texas for the last eight years instead of in a prison
cell.

Some even speculated that David Lassiter was
dead, his corporation run by a well-oiled machine he’d set in
motion years ago.

There was nothing from Lassiter himself
except a generic statement of the merger from his press secretary
that gave no hint of the man behind the myth.

Thomas was remembering too, his whole face
puckered with concentration and worry. It was the worry that
bothered Elizabeth. She reached across the table and squeezed his
hand.

“It’s going to be all right, Papa. I’m going
to find out why he sent that check.”

“How?”

She’d thought of little else since she’d
discovered her benefactor’s identity. The only thing she could come
up with was trying to get into his building via a cleaning service.
But not Quincy’s. She’d already taken a huge risk, and she refused
to further involve her best friend in her own wild schemes, no
matter how pure the motive.

“I’m going to sew another patch over my
cleaning service uniform, and try to get into the Lassiter building
under that guise.”

“Even if you get in, reckon you’ll ever find
him?”

Women do what they have to do,
Mae
Mae used to tell her, the advice so strong and clear it was almost
as if her grandmother were standing in the kitchen over by the
stove, still talking.

Women are born with a reservoir of
strength men can’t even guess at.

Elizabeth understood the truth of her
grandmother’s statement in her bones. How else could she explain
the fact that she’s sitting in her kitchen making plans to find a
man others called monster, and the only fear she has is not that
she will fail but that she will somehow wake up in her bed in the
middle of the night and start screaming from loneliness?

She can work two jobs without a blinking an
eye. She can pinch pennies till Lincoln squealed, and plan budgets
better than any committee Washington ever had. And yet she can’t
control the fear that creeps over her when a cloud blocks out the
stars and a stray cat sits on her back fence howling. When that
happens she wraps her arms around the empty pillow on the other
side of her bed and presses her face into its soft folds in case
the screams building inside her escape.

In high school when she’d imagined herself at
twenty-four, she thought of a girl with a college diploma, a great
job and a good man to share her life.

Never mind that she loves Papa and Nicky
beyond all reason. Never mind that she’s not the kind of person to
wish for things she knows she can’t have nor to mourn for things
that might have been.

What she missed most was the surprise of
another person related by love and not blood. She missed the small
intimacies, someone saying,
honey, let me rub your back
,
or
sweetheart, I drew your bath
. She missed going to the
laundry basket and finding dirty gym socks, size large and boxer
shorts, size thirty-four, tossed in with her white cotton tee
shirts and her seersucker gown.

“Reckon you’ll find him?” Papa asked once
more.

“I’m certain of it,” she said.

To a woman gifted with sacred strength,
finding David Lassiter was an absolute.

It was the rest of her life, the part
Elizabeth kept to herself, that was the uncertainty.

David’s office was on the top floor of the
twenty-one story Lassiter Building, and when he worked late at
night he opened all the curtains. It was a brilliant night and the
panoramic view of the sky gave him a feeling of freedom, almost as
if he were back on the farm striding across the open meadows under
a canopy of stars.

He’d done a lot of walking the past week,
mostly at night, out of habit more than necessity, for on the farm
there was no need for hiding. And while he’d walked he’d remembered
his parents standing in the same spot where he stood, holding each
other around the waist, Della Jean’s head on Clint’s chest and his
chin resting in her hair.

David didn’t even know why he was thinking of
them now except that a trip to the farm often made him
introspective.

Or perhaps it was the moon. It was full and
especially bright, the kind of moon that made you want to sit on a
front porch and hold hands. If you had a front porch. And if you
had somebody whose hand you could hold.

“The night must be made for fools,” he said,
then walked to the window and stood with his back to everything
except the stars and the moon that would bewitch if you’d let
it.

He didn’t plan to let it.

He folded his hands behind his back and tried
to get his mind back on his business, but the pull of the moon was
too great. He thought of the sweet smell of the wild pear tree in
spring and the way wisteria spilled out of tall oaks and the way
bluebirds returned to the farm year after year to build their nest
in the weathered house he’d nailed to a post right outside the
kitchen window.

He thought of McKenzie’s cats who rubbed
against his legs and the dogs that tucked their cold noses into his
hand and wagged their tails so hard he wondered why they didn’t
drop off. He thought of the yearlings following their mothers on
spindly legs across pastures so green they looked as if they’d been
painted with a child’s crayons.

And thinking, he yearned. The sad thing was,
he didn’t even know what he yearned for.

A sound ripped into his dreams and brought
him back to his corporate office on the twenty-first floor with a
heart-stopping thud. Alert, David scanned the room lit only by the
glow from his computer’s screen and the full moon that blazed a
silver trail across his Oriental rug.

Slowly his door yawned open, and there in a
shining path of moonlight stood Elizabeth Jennings, in the flesh,
as if his unspoken longings had conjured her up.

Later when he would think about it, he would
wonder why he hadn’t touched the remote controls that would close
the curtains and plunge the room into darkness or why he hadn’t
punched the button that would bring security guards swarming, or
why he hadn’t simply vanished.

All he had to do was step into the bathroom
and press the panel opening to a secret elevator that would whisk
him to the parking garage. He’d designed his escape hatch for just
such an occasion--when an unwanted visitor appeared.

Somehow he couldn’t think of Elizabeth as
unwanted.

She observed him in perfect silence, not
blinking, not cringing, not staring, merely watching with a quiet
dignity that unnerved.

How much of his face could she see? The moon
backlit him, but no lights burned in the room. His only hope was
that the shadows obscured the most monstrous aspects of him.

“I hope you won’t call the police,” she
said.

“Tell me one good reason why I
shouldn’t.”

“Then you would never know how I found you,
how I got in and why I came.”

“Why would I want to know those things,
Elizabeth?”

“You know me?”

“I know everything there is to know about
you.”

Except the things that were important. For
instance, he didn’t know why she always wore a ribbon in her hair,
or why she preferred pink which was the color she wore season after
season, year after year in her comings and goings in the park below
his window. She even had a pink coat with big patch pockets and a
little faux fur collar that, turned up, made her face look like a
heart.

“And I know nothing about you except that you
had somebody put my name on a million-dollar check.”

David didn’t reply. Long ago he’d learned
that the best way to gauge an opponent was to remain silent and let
them do the talking or the squirming, whichever happened to be the
case.

Elizabeth did neither. She watched him with
the exquisite stillness of a deer sensing a harmful presence in the
deep green woods. David fell into the silence. It was familiar to
him, and comforting.

If she wanted to play the waiting game, she
would lose for she had met the master. He smiled into the darkness,
thinking how McKenzie would get a kick out of this unexpected
encounter.

The thing that surprised him most was not
that Elizabeth had found him--he’d never doubted her intelligence
nor her resourcefulness--but that he wasn’t sorry she had.

It seemed to him that Elizabeth Jennings was
inevitable, that she had been waiting somewhere in the wings for
years, poised to enter his life and change it forever.