Phantom of Riverside Park (26 page)

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.”

Papa got up and left the room. Elizabeth
started after him, but Quincy caught her arm.

“Leave him be. He’s got a load of grief, and
he’s got to carry it all by himself. He’s a proud man, your
Papa.”

“Tell us your plan and quit your yapping,
woman.”

Anybody who didn’t know Fred would have
thought he was a mean old man, but Elizabeth saw through his
bluster. Fred’s heart was as tender as a baby’s.

“I think, Clemson, my son-in-law, can get
that baby moved to his and Sally’s house till you can get him
back.”

“Quincy, do you meant it?” It was the first
tiny shred of hope she’d seen, and Elizabeth clung to it as if it
were a life raft.

“I can’t make any promises, mind you.”

“That would be wonderful. I could see him. I
could go over every night and read him bedtimes stories and tuck
him in.”

Fred slapped his thigh, grinning. “If you
ain’t the beatingest woman I ever saw. I’m liable to take up with
you myself.”

Quincy sniffed. “In your dreams, Fred
Lollar.”

Elizabeth refilled their coffee cups, and
while Fred and Quincy sparred, she began to make plans. She’d need
a lawyer, of course. One she couldn’t afford. She’d have to settle
for pro bono. Still, how hard could it be for a lawyer to prove
that she was a good mother? Anybody with a legal degree ought to be
able to do that.

Papa hadn’t come back. She glanced toward the
kitchen, wondering whether she ought to go after him. And then,
suddenly, the doorbell rang.

“What fresh nightmare is this?” Fred said,
and Quincy shot him a dark look.

“Shut your mouth, you ole fool.”

“It’s probably a traveling salesman.”
Elizabeth got up to answer the door. They had taken her child. What
more could they do to her?

She opened the door and to a man she’d never
seen.

“Elizabeth Jennings?”

“Yes.”

He handed her a bunch of legal documents.”You
are now served,” he said, and then walked out into the rain as if
this were an ordinary day instead of the day the Belliveaus sued
Elizabeth for custody of Taylor’s child.

Elizabeth had hidden the papers, hoping he
wouldn’t find them, but Thomas Jennings was nobody’s fool.
No.
He took that back. He couldn’t say that anymore. He
was everybody’s fool, else why was his great-grandson living with
strangers and why did his granddaughter cry herself to sleep every
night.

Oh, he knew how she tried to muffle her cries
with the pillow. He could picture her in that mean bedroom without
so much a rug on the floor to make it look homey, trying to be
brave even when she was alone so he wouldn’t worry.

He knew another thing, too. He knew that all
this misfortune was his fault. Only his. He was the man of house.
He was responsible for the safety and well-being of his family. And
he had let them down. They’d taken Nicky right out from under his
nose, and he hadn’t done a thing but stand there with tears
streaming down his face.

Thomas felt so old he could barely walk
across the floor. He was careful not to step on the board that
squeaks. It was way past midnight, but he could sleep all day on
the bench in the park.

He had nothing else to do. No little boy to
watch after. No little angel calling out, “Look at me, Papa. Watch.
I flyin’ to the moon.”

The papers were tucked way back in the
cabinet behind the only piece of good china Elizabeth owned, her
grandmother’s teapot. Thomas had sold a pig so he could buy that
pot for Lola Mae, a young shoat who would’ve made a huge old
sow.

“You shouldn’t have, Thomas,” Lola Mae had
said, but he knew she was proud. Lola Mae was a high-born lady,
made to pour tea from a fine china teapot. He used to watch how
she’d lay out a linen cloth and linen napkins she’d sewed late at
night after all the chores were done. Then she’d sit on the porch
rocker and sip her tea with real cream skimmed off the fresh milk
he’d brought from the barn that morning, just as refined as could
be.

She’d been proud of that teapot, all right.
Proud of him, too.

“You’re my knight in shining armor, Thomas
Jennings,” she’d say.

He wondered what she thinks of mess he’s made
of things now?

He unfolded the legal document and there it
was in black and white: Ralph and Anna Lisa Belliveau versus
Elizabeth Jennings. His hands shook as he began to read the
complaint, and his eyes blurred so badly he couldn’t make out all
the words.

But the ones he could tortured him. Nicky was
gone because of him. Elizabeth was in this mess all because of him.
There it was, plain as day. She was accused of endangering her
child by placing him in the care of a ninety-year-old man who was
not only too old to care for a small helpless child and getting
senile, but who also consorted with a foul-mouthed, drunken gambler
in the presence of the child. As if that weren’t enough, Thomas
Jennings had set the house on fire, and it was only by the grace of
God that Nicky hadn’t burned to death.

She was accused of flagrant disregard for
Nicky’s safety by taking him to work and leaving him unsupervised.
She was charged with reckless endangerment by failing to provide a
safe home environment for him, by exposing him to drug dealers and
known felons who lived two doors away from her house. She was
accused of negligence by not providing proper day care and/or
pre-school for Nicky.

The only thing they didn’t accuse her of was
being poor. Thomas guessed it wasn’t yet a crime to be poor in
America. He wondered how long it would take before that was against
the law, too.

Thomas didn’t know what to do anymore. Just
when that had happened, he couldn’t say. The world had somehow
gotten too complicated for him. The simple life was gone. The
simple courtesies, gone. The simple pleasures, vanished.

Maybe it had all happened when Americans
stopped building houses with front porches. Used to be, you could
sit on the front porch in the evening when the chores were done and
wave at your neighbors. Now, half the time you didn’t even know who
your neighbors were. And didn’t want to know.

They were liable to be selling crack cocaine.
And if you knocked on their door, they were just as likely to shoot
you in the face as to say howdy do.

Violence.
The world was a violent
place. A scary place. You didn’t dare walk in this neighborhood
after dark. You didn’t dare speak to strangers, much less strike up
a conversation with one for fear of saying something politically
incorrect, for fear of being hauled into court and getting your
britches sued off.

Why, you could be just going about your
business, trying to live proud and free and upright, and still
you’d get hauled off to court.

And all because the Belliveaus had lost the
only son they had and now they wanted Nicky and there was not a
thing Thomas could do about it. He’d never felt so helpless, so
useless, in all his born days.

Still clutching the complaint, Thomas dropped
to his knees right in the middle of the kitchen floor. He could
pray. That much he could do.

“God,” he said, and then he ran out of steam.
For years he’d been badgering God for this thing or that, and
whether he got what he asked for or not, he’d always known that God
was listening, that he was bending down from that High Place with a
heart full of compassion for his children.

The only time he’d ever doubted was when Lola
Mae died, and now he’s doubting again. Maybe even God had turned
His back on this evil old world. Maybe He’d hidden His face in
shame.

Thomas covered his own face, hiding his
private shame. With the cold tile pressing his cheek, he conjured
up the benevolent Presence who had watched over his comings and
goings for ninety years without a single thought of desertion.
Humbled and contrite, Thomas whispered his entreaties to the
floor.

o0o

When she was five years old and full of the
magic of dreams, Elizabeth coped with the frequent thundershowers
Judith rained down on them and the occasional tornado Manny sent
roaring through their house by pretending she was Alice in
Wonderland and had fallen down the rabbit hole. Nothing was what it
seemed, and she could become small enough to hide from it all or
big enough to rise so far above the storms that nothing got wet
except her feet.

But she was a quarter of a century old now
with the magic long ago whipped out by life, and every inch of her
body felt waterlogged. In the last forty-eight hours she’d learned
two things: some kidnappings were legal and
pro bono
publica
wasn’t necessarily for the good of the public.

She’d met the pro bono attorney who had been
assigned to her case: H. Gerald Crump, Attorney at Law,
specializing in real estate and wills. He was probably an expert in
his field. Most likely, if she wanted to sell a thousand acres of
land, she would go straight to the office of H. Gerald Crump with
full confidence that she was hiring the cream of the crop. But he’d
stumbled around her questions about child custody as if he were in
a maze.

First Elizabeth was heartsick, and then
enraged. This was
her
life, her child’s life they were
messing with. Punishment usually matched the crime. Why couldn’t
the lawyer match the case?

“I wonder what the
H
stands for?”
Papa had asked, and she guessed she should thank God for small
favors. For the past two days he had gone around the house like
somebody dead. Today was the first time Papa had said anything at
all relating directly to the case. He hadn’t asked questions, he
hadn’t offered tea and a strong shoulder, he hadn’t even mentioned
Nicky since that awful day Helen Parkins took him away.

“I’ll tell you what it stands for. It stands
for Hell!” Elizabeth was all but shouting, and she didn’t care.
“Gerald Crump can tell me everything I need to know about mortgages
and closings but he knows diddledy squat about custody cases.”

She half expected Papa to rise out of his
chair...
no,
levitate out of the chair on a giant Bible
and tell her she was going to go to hell a poppin’ if she didn’t
mend her backsliding ways, or at the very least to wash her mouth
out with soap.

Instead he said, “Hallelujah,” then plunked
the tea pot onto the stove and began to drag out bowls and pans and
sugar and flour. Papa was going to make cookies, a sure sign that
he had decided to rejoin the human race.

“You forgot your apron.” She fetched it from
the peg on the half-painted kitchen wall. “Are you making
chocolate? I like chocolate.”

“That’s what I had in mind. Now, what’re you
fixin’ to do about gettin’ our baby back?”

“What was the one thing you always said about
solving a problem, Papa?”

“Get to the source.”

“Exactly. I’m going to the source. I’m going
down to the Delta to see the Belliveaus.”

“I’m going with you.”

At first she was going to protest. She didn’t
plan to call ahead. There was no way in heaven or on earth the
Belliveaus would want to talk to her. They hadn’t come to her when
they’d found out about Nicky, had they? They’d just up and snatched
him away without so much as a fare-you-well.