The Seeing

Chapter Fifteen

Several days later, Miss Elizabeth Scobey sat at her desk facing the view of Philadelphia’s center city. It was a brilliant spring morning, and on such a day, superb with clean, cold winds off the rivers, she could see beyond Ben Franklin’s statue to the green expanses of Fairmount Park and from there all the way to the stone steps of the art museum.

Her phone rang suddenly.

“There’s a man to see you, Miss Scobey.” It was Emily at the front reception desk. “He doesn’t have an appointment but he says it’s personal and urgent.”

“What’s his name, dear?”

“Griffith, Mr. Eric Griffith.”

The name rang a vague bell. Miss Scobey glanced at the clutter of files and forms on her desk and said with mild exasperation, “I honestly don’t have a moment to spare. What does he want to see me about?”

After a minute, Emily was back on the phone saying, “It’s about an adoption you processed through this office about eight years ago. A little girl named Jessica Mallory. Mr. Griffith is her uncle. He wants to talk to you about something that happened back then. He insists it’s terribly important.”

Staring out at the gray-stone, gingerbread mass of City Hall, a vague, uneasy memory of a wintry countryside and Eric Griffith stirred in her. “Well, all right, send him in...”

“—I believe the human spirit is malleable, Miss Scobey. I believe it can be reshaped in the image of our Lord God, Jesus Christ. I believe in the phenomenon of redemption and rebirth—”

“Mr. Griffith, I don’t disagree but I have a deskful of—”

“—and that is why, I entreat you to hear me, Miss Scobey, that is why I’ve presumed on your valuable time. Because you, dear lady, in the mysterious ways of the Lord, may have been His instrument for the therapy of humility that led me to the higher plateaus of grace. Since you helped me once, even unknowingly, to be born again, I pray—”

“Mr. Griffith, I have every sympathy with what you’re trying to say, but would you please tell me what it is you want?”

“May the Lord bless you, Miss Scobey. Eight years ago, you came to my home to see me and my wife, Maud, to discuss our niece, Jessica Mallory...”

As Eric Griffith recreated that scene in the past, talking in a rambling, circuitous fashion, with evangelical sweeps and frequent invocations of the Deity, Miss Scobey remembered in considerably sharper detail her trip to the Griffith place in Chester County so many years earlier. And the memories were far from pleasant — Griffith with his nervous posturings, and his wife, eyes wide and round as the keys of a cash register glinting in her doll-like face, slamming the car door hard.

“Our unchristian selfishness has been a heavy burden, Miss Scobey, but like the cross itself, I have carried it as a sweet penance for my many sins.”

Suddenly, Miss Scobey realized why Eric Griffith was here. Of course. Andrew Dalworth, on the TV news and in the papers this week, still in a coma, near death from his injuries in a riding accident...

“Just what is it you want with this office, Mr. Griffith?”

“My beloved wife, Maud, is close to death, an incurable disease. I want you to help us, to join with me in bringing her into the presence of a forgiving God in this world — before she must account to Him for her sins in the next.”

Miss Scobey looked at him without expression. “Just how would you expect me to do that, Mr. Griffith?”

“You took extensive notes when you talked to Maud and me, Miss Scobey. I want to show those actual notes, that evidence of our callousness, to my wife, Maud. To make her understand how desperately she must seek the Lord’s forgiveness for having closed her arms and — yes — her heart, against our own flesh and blood.”

Miss Scobey’s phone rang. After listening a moment, she replaced the receiver and said, “Would you excuse me, Mr. Griffith? That was my boss. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Eric Griffith relaxed and looked with a musing smile at the views of the city stretching out toward cloudless horizons.

Suffused with a glow of superiority and a confident anticipation of victory, Eric savored the view along with the recollections of his meeting with Tony Saxe the day after the point-to-point at the Cadwalader estate.

Oh, yes, Tony had seen the money in it, that was clear enough, poring over the news items about Dalworth, the pictures of Easter Hill that Maud had brought to his club, holding them up for closer inspection, muttering statistics aloud in an excited voice, his face sharp and cunning as a vole’s, the smokey light in his office catching the glint of his diamond-chip cufflinks and the rings on his fingers. And the greedy glint in his eye had become as bright as those rings when Eric had pointed out that Andrew Dalworth was a widower with no children of his own, no living relatives and no one in the world with stronger emotional and legal claims to his affection and wealth than his adopted child, Eric’s own dear niece, Jessica Mallory.

Tony Saxe’s club, The Rhinestone Quaker, was located near the river on the outskirts of Camden, New Jersey, just across the Walt Whitman Bridge from Philadelphia — in a neighborhood gray with decay and noisy with funky jazz bars, with massage parlors and adult bookshops balanced in a precarious equipoise with the few respectable jewelers and furriers and pawnshops struggling for honest livings in a pocket of urban decline.

Saxe had paced behind his desk, the piano from the lounge sounding faintly around them, only the quick puffs on his slim brown cigar betraying his excitement. He hadn’t aged since Eric had last seen him, but it would have been difficult to tell in any case, because Saxe’s deeply tanned face was not only without lines or wrinkles but almost totally without expression. His eyes were dark, so dark the whites seemed strangely vivid in the frame of his hard features and cropped black hair. And he still favored the characteristic decorative and sartorial embellishments — jewelry, rings and tie-pins (this one a gold eagle with a small ruby in its claw) — and neat, dark suits, mohairs, Italian silks and gabardines.

Eric remembered that an incautious female companion of Tony’s had once told him that he looked like a Lebanese rug merchant who had struck oil. Tony Saxe had shown his appreciation for her humor by smiling and putting out his cigar on the back of her hand.

“But, Eric, you haven’t been in touch with this kid, not even a postcard, for eight years,” he had said. “With that kind of money, there’ll be vultures flocking down from everywhere. Who do you think you’ll fool?”

“I expect that. I’m prepared for it.”

“And so far, I’ve only got your word on what the stuff’s worth, the jades and antiques and all.”

“Check it out. Check with your friendly neighborhood shylocks — just show them those pictures of Easter Hill.”

“Then how do we pull the handle on the slot machine? How do we cash in our chips?”

“We’ll need a crooked cop or two in Belfast and an international fence. You should be able to set that up, Tony.”

“So all you’re asking is that I finance the deal to ease your way into that kid’s life?”

“You’d be a fool if you didn’t, Tony. And Maudie insists you’re no fool.”

Tony Saxe had stared hard at the photographs of Jessica and Dalworth taken at the race course of the Curragh, and then at the entrance to Easter Hill where a gray-haired butler held open the door of a Daimler.

He said then, “What I’m staking my loot on is whether you’ll keep your mind on the job, Eric. You gotta play a role, no slip-ups, stay nice and sober for as long as it takes. What it comes down to, pal, is whether you want it bad enough.”

And it was at that moment that Maud burst into the room, like some howling Cassandra — Eric recalled with amusement — accompanied by Benny Stiff, Saxe’s professional muscle. She had just remembered Miss Scobey, the way they’d treated her, the things they’d said eight years ago, with Miss Scobey’s busy little fountain pen taking down every word of it.

Studying the skyline of Philadelphia, Eric savored the memory of their faces, Tony Saxe’s and Maudie’s and Benny Stiffs, when he had said blandly and casually, “You needn’t worry yourselves about that. I’ll take care of Miss Scobey. I’ve already set up an appointment with the good lady.”

And yet, as he sat beside the social worker’s desk, fingering the cross in his lapel and watching the pigeons flying their strafing runs above City Hall, and yet — his thoughts drifting without direction — there was something unappealing, in fact, downright distasteful, about these sordid details. To be forced to include such brazen thugs as Tony Saxe and Benny Stiff, to con a pious gullible fool, to soil himself with talk of theft and crooked art dealers and alibis. What the devil did he need alibis for? How could he, in fact, “steal” what practically belonged to him as the child’s only blood relative?

Still, Eric thought, there was a catch to that, a brutal, frustrating flaw to his claim. While he had certain “rights” to Easter Hill, it came down to that — they could only be exercised at the whim of distant fates, far far down the long roads of chance, when Jessica — perhaps an old, old woman by then — might die and leave her estate to the next of kin. But, and God, what a bleak thought this was, where would he and Maud be then? Long past any hope of enjoying the monies, the luxuries of Easter Hill, of savoring that life with its privileges.

And even if Jessica wanted to throw them a bone out of charity’s sake, she wouldn’t be in a legal position to do so until she was twenty-one, years and years from now. And Tony was right. With lawyers and administrators watching her estate, shrewdly eyeing those millions, there was no way they’d appoint him her executor or legal guardian, no way that could ever happen. But as a favored uncle, a needed and trusted companion, a beloved mentor, he might be a guest at Easter Hill... At least until he had won her confidence and set up the scheme he had let Tony Saxe in on, the deal that would give them all a load of loot from Easter Hill.

But still it was enraging, thought Eric, to have to settle for a pittance of what he felt was rightfully his... His middle name was hardly a coincidence; Boniface, the Irish saint, the confidant of kings and popes; Boniface, the legendary patron of inns and hostels, a name that symbolized a spirit of grandness in style, lavishness in hospitality, connoisseur of all gracious material pleasures.

That was his birthright, what was owed him by the covenant of primogeniture, not the role of petty thief snatching up a crust of bread with the silverware and fleeing from his own estates with the dogs after him...

He smiled at these reflections but when he heard Miss Scobey’s brisk footsteps, Eric Griffith quickly composed his features into an expression of suitable gravity.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Griffith,” she said, sitting down behind her desk. “What you’re asking is simply not possible. All of those files and notes are confidential, under the seal of the Court which presided over the child’s adoption.”

Eric Griffith sighed and said, “Well, I imagine I was hoping for some kind of miracle, Miss Scobey. I was clutching at straws. If I must lose Maud, well—” He smiled directly at Miss Scobey, feeling with an actor’s gratification the cool glint of tears in his eyes. “You must understand how desperately and terribly I need the hope, for myself and for my dear wife, that she will be in heaven when I join her with our Lord Jesus Christ...”

Miss Scobey was suspicious, but troubled by his obvious pain and misery. It was difficult for her to relate this unhappy and shattered human being with the whiskey-drinking braggart she had encountered at their first meeting eight long years ago. Now the bogus tweeds and foxhead tie pin had been replaced by a plain black suit with shiny elbows, a dark narrow tie, a pale blue shirt. The thinning blond hair was neatly combed. Even his eyes seemed different to her, luminous and moist behind wire-framed glasses. In his lapel was a tiny silver cross with a filigree of metal forming a Crown of Thorns around it.

Elizabeth Scobey had deliberately chosen a profession which gave her a constant and ample opportunity to help people — childless couples, abandoned infants, lonely children, all the helpless and needy of the world, that’s what this warm, stout-hearted woman felt she had been put on earth to do something about.

“Mr. Griffith,” she said impulsively, “could you bring your wife to this office? Maybe, just maybe I can have an exception made in this case and have the files transferred here.”

Eric stared down at his hands. “I’ve waited too long. Even a month ago, she might have— But she’s bedridden now, weaker every day.”

“Mr. Griffith, you have my sympathy. I do hope you understand, however, that I can’t do anything about the regulations.”

“Of course. This was just—” He sighed wearily. “...a last chance, a plea to St. Dismas.” Standing, Eric smiled into her troubled eyes and then, with a gesture that surprised and moved her, he patted her hand. “You mustn’t worry about us, Miss Scobey. But there is something you could do for both of us which would be a great kindness.”

“Certainly, Mr. Griffith, if I can.”

“Would you pray for us? Please...”

Miss Scobey felt a sting of tears in her eyes. “Of course, I will, Mr. Griffith. Of course, I will.”

“Thank you, Miss Scobey. God bless you.”

But before he had taken two steps away from her desk, the social worker was on her feet, a quick, restraining hand on his arm. Despite her earlier skepticism, her religious impulses overcame her. “I’ll arrange to have your wife look at those files. We are all on this earth to do the work of the Lord. I feel our dear Lord would want me to—” Her quick min’d was already managing the details. Adam Greene was still Judge William’s bailiff at Court J-11. There would be no need for a formal requisition.

“Are you at the old address in Chester County, Mr. Griffith?”

“Yes, Miss Scobey, we’re still in the same place, R.D. #1, Black Velvet Lane.”

“Then you may expect me about ten Saturday morning...”

Eric Griffith had been expecting approval from Tony Saxe, had quite frankly, in fact, been anticipating a pat on the back for a job well done, but when he completed his account of the meeting with Miss Scobey, Saxe looked despairingly at the ceiling of his office and said, “Goddamn amateur night! You sitting there telling me—”

“What the hell do you mean ‘amateur night’?”

Tony Saxe stood and paced behind his desk, a hand massaging his tanned jaw, light refracting in brittle slivers from his ringed fingers. “It’s just what I figured — you don’t want it bad enough, Griffith.”

A knock sounded and the door opened.

Benny Stiff — stocky, in his forties, with broad, hammered features and skin that looked like it had been baked too long in the sun — held a piece of paper in his thick, muscular hands.

“I just took a call from Chicago, Tony.”

“Yeah, yeah, what is it?” Saxe said irritably.

“They gave us a name. Simon Ethelroyd. Britisher working out of—” Benny glanced at the paper in his hand. “—a place on the east coast of Ireland, Ardglass, the man calls it, about thirty or forty miles south of Belfast. Handles imports, exports, with a boat at St. John’s Point.”

“That’s about as useful as last week’s newspaper,” Tony Saxe said.

Eric said angrily, “If you’d stop this infantile posturing, Saxe, and just tell us—”

Saxe cut him off with a gesture — an abrupt, chopping motion with a glittering hand. “You still haven’t thought the damned thing through,” he said. “You pulled a little showboating con game on this dumb broad, and you think that hacks it. Just tell me this, Eric, just tell me one damned thing,” Saxe said. “What’re you planning to do when she shows up at your house? Sprinkle salt on her tail and grab them records when she turns around?”

“I’m glad you haven’t lost the light touch, Tony. I’ll tell you exactly what I’m going to do,” Eric said, speaking in measured accents. “I intend to take those files and notes from Miss Scobey and destroy them. End of scenario. What in hell did you expect me to do?”

“Christ!” Saxe slammed the palm of his hand down on the top of his desk. “So what do you think she does then?”

“It sure ain’t the end of the script,” Benny Stiff said.

“You think she’ll just drive back to Philadelphia and forget the whole business? Take a nap, watch television, and never mention to anybody that some crazy madman named Eric Griffith gave her a big snow-job about a dying wife and then snatched a bunch of official records from her? You think she won’t mention that to her neighbor, her boss, her boyfriend maybe? Hell, no. She’ll drive to the nearest police station and blow a whistle you could hear all the way from City Hall out to the Main Line.”

“Well, ultimately it would be only her word against mine, which is a risk we’ll just have to take.”

“You still don’t understand. We can’t afford any risks in this deal. No flaps, nobody blowing whistles.” Tony Saxe was speaking slowly and quietly, but with bitter intensity. “Maud filled me in on how it was when that old broad came out to interview you and her. Told it back with all the trimmings. So just you try to make a play toward the kid, Eric! Try for adoption or power of attorney, or just to get her confidence — with shrewd lawyers and accountants watching your every move—”

Saxe made a helpless gesture with his hands, then let them drop to his sides. “That’s when this Scobey character is pure poison, because she can finger you for a phoney and a liar. Christ, do I really have to spell all this out?”

“I’m afraid you will,” Eric said. “Frankly, I know no way to guarantee her silence.”

Tony Saxe exchanged a tight smile with Benny Stiff and said, “You don’t have much of an imagination, Eric.”

“Now what’s that supposed to mean?” Eric said, but his throat was suddenly dry because he saw now what was expected of him.

“It’s like I figured,” Tony Saxe said. “You just don’t want it bad enough. You like the idea of you and Maud living it up like royalty, putting the con on a helpless kid. But for the hard work that’s got to be done, you got a pair of blinders on. Because you won’t face the problem staring you in the face.”

“Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that I—?”

“I’m not suggesting one damned thing. Benny? You hear me suggest anything?”

A smile flared across Stiff’s hard face. “Not a damn thing, boss.”

“I’m not telling you anything, and I’m not suggesting anything. Maybe you understand the problem now, maybe you don’t.”

Tony Saxe leaned forward over his desk, supporting his weight on his hands, staring evenly into Eric’s eyes. “But I just got one more thing to say. My gravy train just stopped, Eric, and it don’t move until you solve your little problem. Otherwise, I can’t risk it.”

“I think we understand each other,” Eric said at last, relieved at the solid timber of his voice. “Of course, a bit of plain speaking would have cleared matters up at the outset. Still, the sunburst of the English language never shone too bright on the Levant, did it, Tony?”

The grinning black face, the rolling white eyes, the tittering malice of Coralee’s laughter shot in a frightening fashion through the clouds of perfume, the smothering weight of furs and gowns, the unendurable pressure of the walls closing in on her, constricting her lungs and throat, compacting her body into a squeezed and hobbled mass on the floor of the musty closet...

Maud struggled to free herself, her lips flattened over her teeth, a strangling sound breaking past her corded throat muscles.

And Coralee was laughing at her, the sound rolling like thunder through her dream.

Striking out with her arms and legs, Maud kicked the sheets and blankets into a tangle at the foot of her bed. She lay still then, gradually waking as the dread, familiar dream faded away into the depths of her mind.

There were tears on her cheeks, and she could feel her heart racing and striking against her ribs. She turned on the bedside lamp and picked up the pills she laid out each night beside a glass of water. Two blue and two yellow and four sips of water... after which she lay breathing deeply and waiting for the residual fear of the dream to disappear and her poor laboring heart to slow down.

“Eric,” she said. “Eric, please. Hold my hand.”

There was no response, no sound from his bed. When she raised herself on an elbow, she saw he wasn’t there, saw his robe and pajamas neatly folded over the bedstead.

She lay back, darker thoughts streaking her mind, remembering last night. Eric had been preoccupied at dinner, hardly touching his food, and then had shut himself off in the small bedroom he used as a study, drinking and playing old jazz records until at last Maud had guessed the reasons behind his strange behavior. Even now, the memory of the scene with him held blurred edges of terror, an awareness of implications their strained words had only hinted at.

“Would you please turn that damned music down?”

“I’ll do precisely what I like, Maud. I’ll do what I must.”

“And I know what that must is, don’t I, Eric...? What you and Tony Saxe are planning.”

“If you know so much, why are you asking me about it?”

“For God’s sake, do you have to?”

He had said something then she didn’t understand. “There’ll be no singing or winning if I don’t.”

“Then I want you to promise me something, Eric. You know I’m not too strong, you know how I worry. So, unless you promise me never to mention this subject again—”

“You’ll what, my dear?”

“Don’t make me say it, Eric.”

He had laughed drunkenly. “Ira Washburn would replace you with your understudy. You’d make a ridiculous Lady MacBeth with that attitude. Goodnight, Maudie. I haven’t heard a word of this...”

From the garage behind the house, she heard the station wagon starting up. Feeling bereft and vulnerable, Maud stood and went to the window, pulling back the curtains on an early spring morning still gray and chill, the mists rising like fogs from the patch of lawn behind the Griffiths’ home.

The black station wagon was pulling out of the driveway, Eric at the wheel, but this would have been only a guess if she hadn’t known his profile so intimately, because there was little visible of him now, what with the collar of his jacket pulled up high around his turtleneck sweater, the big, dark sunglasses and the peak of a tweed cap shadowing his forehead.

The Saturday morning turned clear and bright with the rising sun, dissolving a ground mist as fine as lace and revealing the first of the spring flowers — snowdrops and yellow star-grass, Miss Scobey noticed, identifying these along with pinkings of early clover.

On her drive to Chester County that morning, Miss Scobey’s Volkswagen threaded the narrow roads, twisting through rolling meadows and open country, where horses were out to pasture and winter-rotted haystacks and manure piles were steaming in the first heat of this sunny day.

Despite the glory of the weather, for which she had duly and enthusiastically thanked the Lord, Miss Scobey’s thoughts were again censorious as she reflected on that strange gentleman, Eric Griffith, and his troubled wife, Maud, at death’s door and still unrepentant in the shadow of her Maker.

The files and notes relevant to the Griffiths were on the seat beside her, tucked into her old leather briefcase. She had reread them last night and once again been filled with exasperation at the Griffiths’ heartless indifference to their orphaned niece, Jessica Mallory.

Turning onto a narrow black-topped secondary road, Miss Scobey resolved to temper her judgment with Christian mercy, putting out of mind the abrasive evidence in the files and remembering instead the miraculous transformation, the growth in grace that had occurred in the case of Eric Griffith. And perhaps there was hope as well for his wife, and if Miss Scobey would be the instrument of the Lord in Maud’s salvation, then she would, she must, perform the role with forbearance and kindness. As a token of this Christian goodwill, Miss Scobey had stopped at a health food store in Philadelphia to buy a suitable present for the ailing Mrs. Griffith — a round, squat jar of rose-hip jelly now tied with a fancy green ribbon and resting on the seat beside her briefcase.

Frowning, Miss Scobey braked her car, slowing it down to a stop at a road barrier, a long wooden sawhorse with lanterns suspended at either end of it. A crudely drawn sign reading ‘detour’ and an arrow were tacked to the crossbar, diverting traffic (for no good reason that Miss Scobey could understand) into a narrow dirt road flanked by stands of timber and deep, cavernous excavations which had been dug out many years ago for their rich veins of feldspar and mica.

The silence out here in the back country was restful and almost complete, the stillness trembling now and then with the cry of birds and the sound of spring winds high in the trees.

Turning onto the dirt road, she saw that the steep, downward sides of the old mica pits still sparkled in the sun where sharp bits of the spikey mineral pierced the brown earth. She drove on slowly, her car dappled with the light filtering through the big trees that arched over the road.

Glancing up, she saw in her rearview mirror that a black station wagon had turned into the lane behind her and was closing the distance between them rapidly. Miss Scobey slowed down and angled off as far as she could toward the right side of the road, straightening the wheel when she heard the thorn-bushes brushing the side of her car.

Cranking down the window beside her then, she waved to the station wagon to pass — overtake was the word the British used, she recalled from the first and only time she had been abroad, a charter flight which had included a walking tour of the Cotswolds and a weekend of sightseeing in London. She checked the rearview mirror again and saw to her surprise and irritation that the big black car gave no intention of going around her but had slowed to match her speed and was now only six or eight feet behind her bumper.

She despised this sort of motoring discourtesy, so unnecessary, so stupid, but there was nothing for her to do but move back into the middle of the lane, because directly ahead of her there was the lip of a deep mica pit, its steep, bramble-choked sides cutting sharply down into a gorge, whose floor was covered with shards of rock and winter-black shrubbery.

What happened next was as unexpected and ghastly as a fatal lightning bolt. Swerving to the left, the station wagon’s motor roared with a rush of crescending power and then it was abreast of Miss Scobey’s small Volkswagen, the driver looming high above her on this rutted country road. There was something familiar about him, the set of his shoulders, a reddish-blond glimpse of sideburns, but Miss Scobey couldn’t be sure if she knew him or not because his features were almost completely obscured by the collar of his tweed jacket, sunglasses, and the pulled-down peak of his cap.

The big black vehicle angled sharply toward her and she cried out desperately, “Watch it, watch it, you idiot!” but even as her straining voice echoed on the cool and fragrant spring air, there was the hideous sound of grinding metal. The station wagon crunched heavily into the side of her car and sent it spinning out of control down the steep side of the mica pit, turning and crashing end over end until it landed on its roof on the bottom of the man-made ravine, wheels spinning futilely in the air.

Miss Scobey lay in a tangled heap in the wreckage of her car, upside-down and hopelessly disoriented, her head and cheek pressed harshly against the windshield and dashboard, one of her arms twisted at an unnatural angle through the spokes of the steering wheel.

In her shock and confusion, she felt no pain at all, no particular concern or anxiety, remembering only the crash of the two cars, the grating metallic wrenchings and ruptures that still seemed to be exploding in her eardrums.

Later, in her drifting, dreamlike condition — she couldn’t guess how long it had been since the accident — there was the sound of footsteps, and she saw — and how bewildering this was — a man’s arm coming through the open window and a hand closing on her briefcase, snaking it free from the car.

There was some pain now, a sharpening clarity, and Miss Scobey was grateful when the man’s arms and hands came through the window once again. Touching her shoulders, the hands moved along her arms to her throat, strong hands, warm, strong hands, tightening now, slowly but inexorably, and Miss Scobey realized with a touch of wonder that these hands had not come to help her. Her second-to-last thought was how grossly unfair this whole business was. Her last thought was, what a shame to waste that lovely jar of rosehip jelly, smashed and broken against the windshield.

Miss Scobey did not live long enough to see the smoke begin to curl from the rear of her car or to hear the crackle of flames.