Phantom of Riverside Park (14 page)

David remembered his excitement in the early
years of his career when each day had brought a new challenge and
the possibility of remarkable discoveries. That’s how he felt now
about the woman standing in his doorway.

Nothing around him had changed, but inside
him everything had rearranged itself. His heart was where his
throat ought to be, and muscle, bone and sinew had expanded so that
his skin felt too tight. Some kind of explosion was going to
happen, and he would be the only one who felt it.

Elizabeth Jennings stepped closer, and he had
nowhere to go. His back was to the wall. Literally.

His heart beat with such a frantic rhythm he
felt as if he’d run five miles.

David never ran unless he was on the farm
where there was no one to observe him except the black angus cattle
and a broad-winged hawk that McKenzie swore was Solomon who had
lived beyond his years in order to watch over her after Paul’s
death. The exercise room in his penthouse apartment in Memphis was
outfitted with all the latest equipment which mostly gathered
dust.

The fact that he was still trim and toned had
nothing whatsoever to do with discipline and everything to do with
good genes. Both his parents had been slim people more prone to
great vitality and huge reserves of strength rather than vague
aches and outright pains.

As Elizabeth advanced, moonbeams caught in
her hair giving her the appearance of an ethereal being who might
have dropped into his office out of the night sky.

Don’t come any closer
, he silently
begged, and she must have read his mind for she stopped at least
six feet short of him which still gave him the advantage of shadow.
He hoped.

“Why?” She asked the question so softly he
had to strain to hear. “Why did you send me that check?”

“Because of the child.”

She paled, then stepped back as if she’d been
slapped. “The Belliveaus are behind it, then. Taylor lied.”

“No one is behind it except me. I can assure
you, Elizabeth, that I have no ulterior motives. There are no
strings attached to the check.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“You have to trust yourself, Elizabeth.
Follow your instincts. What are they telling you?”

“That you’re a good man.”

David almost wept. In all his long years of
solitude he’d never realized how much he missed the sound of a soft
woman naming him good. Over the years the scars on his face had
sunk into his soul so that he thought of himself as more beast than
man.

“Then cash the check. It’s yours.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t take charity.”

“It’s not charity. It’s a gift.”

“A gift from a stranger. That’s the same as
charity.”

“I’m no longer a stranger to you, Elizabeth.
You know my name. You know where I work.”

Suddenly she laughed. It was a beautiful
sound, full of spirit and light, and it outdid all the Vivaldi
concertos he loved so well.

David wished she would do it again. He wished
he were the kind of man who knew how to make a woman laugh.

“I suppose now that we’re such good pals
you’ll be inviting me to sit in on one of your board meetings and
I’ll be teaching you to pour Murphy’s Oil Soap into my mop
bucket.”

“You don’t have to teach me, Elizabeth. I
know my way around a mop bucket.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I’m human.” His smile was wry. “I used
to be.”

She made a sound like the breaking heart of a
child and began to move toward him, her hand outstretched.

“Don’t come any closer!”

She fell back, stricken. David would have
been remorseful if he hadn’t been so scared.

“I don’t want your pity,” he said.

Her chin came up, and because of her eyes he
could see how the term
blue blazes
came into being.

“Then what makes you think I want yours?”

She stalked out, slamming the door behind
her. Nobody except McKenzie ever walked out on him, and not even
she slammed his door.

Stunned, David stared at his closed door, and
then he started laughing. But it was amusement with a nervous edge,
the kind of laughter you might make if you’d gone into the bedroom
expecting to settle down into restful sleep and suddenly found a
dragon under your bed.

He’d just confronted his worst fear, being
faced by a woman. Not just any woman, but a beautiful woman. And he
was still standing, not much worse for wear.

“We’re all scared about something, David,”
his mother had told him after he’d left bits and pieces of himself
in Iraq and come home to lick his wounds.

He wondered what scared Elizabeth
Jennings.

“And there I was, Papa, facing David Lassiter
with my knees shaking so hard I could barely stand.”

It was Sunday morning, Nicky was in the tub,
and it was the first chance she’d had to talk to her grandfather.
Elizabeth had spent the last five minutes telling him how she got
past the security guard at the Lassiter Building merely by flashing
her cleaning supplies and her smile.

“I’ll bet you a pretty, Lassiter didn’t know
you were shakin’.”

“He didn’t. I was in my General Patton mode.
Instead of storming across Europe I was cornering the phantom in
his own den.”

“What’s he like?”

She couldn’t answer Papa’s question. How
could she explain a man who scared her so badly he made her knees
shake and her mouth go dry and at the same time made her feel as if
she’d known him for years?

“It was dark in his office. I couldn’t see
him.”

“You don’t have to see a man to know him. I
taught you better than that.”

Papa was nobody’s fool. She should have known
better than to try and duck his question.

“It’s hard to say, Papa. He’s a complex man.
Aloof one minute and very approachable the next. He told me he
knows how to use a mop and bucket.”

“He didn’t inherit all that money, you know.
He earned it. You gotta respect a man who knows how to work.”

They fell into silence, both thinking about a
man who not only knew how to work but how to amass a fortune so
great that he gave away checks to complete strangers. It was
incomprehensible to Elizabeth that while she’d searched out David
Lassiter with the express purpose of finding out why he’d sent the
check and what he expected to gain by it, she’d done no more than
pass lightly over the real issues while she’d spent a fair amount
of time dwelling on personalities.

Even crazier was the fact she now dreamed
about him. In her dreams she was always lost in thick fog and the
only thing that could possibly save her was the sound of his voice
calling to her from a distance.

“Trust the gargoyle,” he said over and over.
“Trust the gargoyle.”

His check still lay at the bottom of the
cookie jar, the gargoyle logo in the corner the first thing she saw
every time she took off the lid. She could tell by the way Papa
kept cutting his eyes in the direction of the cookie jar that he
was thinking of the money, too.

“I’m guessin’ he’s a good man,
Elizabeth.”

“Still, Papa, I can’t take his charity.”

“What are you goin’ to do, then?”

“I thought about sending it back.”

Papa watched her, the only sound in the room
the dripping of the kitchen faucet. Then a child’s voice filled the
air with song. Down the hall Nicky was belting out an earnest
version of “You Are My Sunshine.”

“You’ll never know, Bear, how much I luv me
‘n you,” he warbled.

Her son was singing to his favorite teddy
bear who kept a watchful, one-eyed look from the toilet seat while
Nicky splashed around in a tubful of bubbles that smelled like
green apples. Elizabeth listened with her heart, and quite suddenly
she started to cry.

Papa didn’t say a word. He just came around
the kitchen table and put a hand on her shoulder, the strong
gnarled hand that had guided a steady course for the last five
years. She leaned her cheek against his hand, and with the other he
stroked her hair.

When she’d been a child he’d always taken
care of her. No matter what. When Manny and Judith were too busy to
notice that she needed new shoes, Papa quietly carried her to Sears
and Roebuck and bought a pair of cotton canvas tennis shoes, bright
pink because Elizabeth said the fairy princess who lived in the
chinaberry tree in her back yard wore pink shoes. When Judith got
overzealous with the ruler and slapped Elizabeth’s knuckles until
they were bright red, Papa was the one who intervened. Elizabeth
never knew what he said to her mother, but she’d watched from her
bedroom window as he carried the ruler onto the front porch and
smashed it with his hammer. Forever after, Elizabeth’s knuckles
were safe.

And that time she’d had pneumonia, it was
Papa who never left her side.

He had always done whatever it took not only
to make her life bearable but to make it--sometimes--wonderful.

She pressed her cheek into Papa’s hand and
when she smiled up at him, he went to the sink, tore off a paper
towel and wiped her face.

“I have to go back, Papa.”

“I know you do, Elizabeth.”

From down the hall Nicky wound up his musical
number with a plaintive plea.

“Please don’t snaatch my sunnshiine todaaay.
Ta daah! I’m all clean now. Can I get out?”

Elizabeth moved to the doorway. “Even your
ears?” she called.

“Whoops! Sorry ‘bout that.”

“I don’t want to see a speck of dirt. Do you
hear me, young man?”

“I did, but Bear didn’t. Is it all right if
he has dirty ears?”

“Only till next Tuesday, and then he’s going
into the washing machine.”

Papa was already at the sink stacking dirty
dishes.

“Sit down, Papa. I’ll do that.”

“I’m not too old, you know.”

“I know.”

Thinking about what she had to do, she turned
on the faucet and fear rose up from the hot water along with the
steam. What if David Lassiter wouldn’t see her again? And what if
he said
no
?

Elizabeth grabbed the liquid soap and hung
onto the bottle as if it were a life raft. Joy, the label said. She
always bought it because of the name. She liked to see it sitting
on her kitchen cabinet, jaunty and hopeful, as if going by a
certain name could make it so.

Still clutching the bottle, she turned to
Papa.

“He’s my only hope for Nicky.”

o0o

“I want you to find out everything you can
about Taylor Belliveau.”

Peter Forrest sat in David’s office in the
chair McKenzie always used, and nodded as he listened to his boss.
He was twenty-seven and looked eighteen, in spite of the fact that
David required god-awful hours from him and Herculean tasks that
would daunt lesser men.

But Peter Forrest was not the kind of man to
be daunted by anything. A direct descendant of Nathan Bedford
Forrest, the Confederate general and brilliant strategist who led
the Union Army on a merry chase throughout the South and years
later was studied by German tacticians at Brice’s Crossroads, Peter
sometimes seemed to be a reincarnation of his famous ancestor.

Brilliant, charismatic, and a born leader, he
was exactly the kind of man David would want his son to grow up to
be ...if he had a son.

The aching void he’d been plagued with lately
opened up and threatened to swallow him. Maybe he needed some time
off. Maybe he ought to go to Italy and lose himself in the
magnificent art. Though he would never allow himself to be seen at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he traveled abroad with
impunity. Nobody knew him and nobody cared.

Nobody cared.

The thought saddened him beyond imagining.
Except for McKenzie he was a man without a family.

Then why was he interested in Taylor
Belliveau? Elizabeth had turned the money down. Why didn’t he just
let the whole thing go?

“In particular, I want to know as much as you
can find out regarding his relationship with Elizabeth
Jennings.”

Belliveau was only a footnote in the file
he’d already given Peter--Taylor Belliveau, father of Elizabeth’s
baby, not named on the birth certificate, son of a Delta land
baron. By evening Peter would have memorized every word in
Elizabeth’s file. He would find the gaps, then go out and fill in
the missing pieces.

“Take all the time you need. Use the farm as
a base if you like. That’ll put you closer to Tunica.”

As well as to McKenzie. David worried about
her. Since her husband’s death she’d become almost as reclusive as
he. It would do her good to have Peter on the premises.

Besides, it would salve David’s conscience
about not seeing her as often as he should.

Peter stuffed the file into his briefcase.
“Will your sister be there?”

“Yes, she’ll be there. Tell her I said to
make you welcome.”

“Not unless I want to get chewed out.”

“Her bark’s worse than her bite.”

“You can’t prove it by me.”

“She likes you. Otherwise she’d never have
invited you to ride horses with her last Christmas.”

“That was no horse she gave me. It was a
spawn of the devil. And by the way, she didn’t invite me. I invited
myself.”

“Do you play gin rummy, Peter?”

“No.”

“You might want to learn.” He grinned. “By
the way, McKenzie cheats.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

By the time he got to New Albany, Peter
Forrest would be an expert in gin rummy. David knew that for a
fact.

He told his assistant goodbye, then scanned
the messages his secretary had placed on his desk.

All at once they had David’s full attention.
Elizabeth Jennings had called. Four times. Since she wasn’t on the
list of persons who had telephone access to David, she’d been
refused her request to speak directly to him.