The Seeing

Chapter Two

When it was subsequently confirmed that Daniel and Monica Mallory had died in the crash of Philadelphia-bound Flight 61 — along with crew members and sixty-seven other passengers including a senior United States congressman and a team of Japanese trade experts — the judicial and welfare systems of Pennsylvania moved into action, speedily and humanely, to provide for the Mallorys’ only child, four-year-old Jessica.

She was taken that same morning by a juvenile court departmental car to a living facility, where she was given breakfast and a brief medical examination. Then she was mildly sedated and put to bed in a ward with a dozen other youngsters waiting to be processed and assigned to foster homes throughout the city.

A social worker by the name of Elizabeth Scobey was assigned to prepare a case history on Jessica Mallory and her parents. Miss Scobey was a practical, no-nonsense person in her early forties, with short, shiny brown hair, a stocky figure that was nonetheless firm and quick and active. As a rule she wore pants suits of durable double-knit in subdued colors, and her bustling, nervous energy complimented her customary expression, which was one of amiable severity. Miss Scobey’s eyes were by far her best feature, warm and dark and lively, glinting on occasion with humor. She had never married. The one young man who had shown attention to her some years ago (he had been a clerk in the city amusement tax office) was drafted in the early days of the Vietnam War and married a Southern girl he’d met during his basic training in Georgia.

Perhaps because of this lack of a family outlet for her warm-hearted emotions (her black cat, Morticia, could only absorb a fraction of it), Miss Scobey had a limitless reservoir of love and sympathy for the orphans and the neglected children assigned to her custodial files.

Elizabeth Scobey worked in an office in the center of the city. From her desk she looked out on Philadelphia’s ornate and gingerbread City Hall with the figure of Benjamin Franklin perched on top. Past that gray and intricately structured edifice, she could see — on good days — the green expanse of Fairmount Park, and on superb days, with the wind coming off the river like sparkling wine, the black drives twisting through the park all the way to the great white and columned art museum.

On this crisp, late fall day, Miss Scobey sat at her desk studying the information she had obtained by a routine court order on Jessica Mallory and her parents. The couple had had a joint checking account at the Penn Central Bank, with a current balance of four hundred and sixty-seven dollars. In the Mallory apartment there were modest wardrobes of clothing, as well as toilet articles, toys, and children’s books, and a neat stack of unpaid bills which Miss Scobey found in a kitchen drawer — the usual dry cleaning, market and drugstore bills, and last month’s phone bill for fifty-odd dollars.

Miss Scobey had been impressed and touched by the bright travel posters. It seemed such a brave attempt to provide a sense of color and space in the modest apartment.

In the child’s room, a plank of unpainted wood had been placed across two filing cabinets to form a desk. On this makeshift desk were sheets of ruled notepaper covered with what she assumed to be the late Daniel Mallory’s handwriting, some sort of scientific work apparently, symbols and equations which meant nothing to Miss Scobey.

In one of the filing cabinets were two framed diplomas. Daniel Mallory had earned a degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania, and his wife, Monica, née Griffith, a bachelor’s in classics studies from Bryn Mawr. Daniel had been twenty-eight at the time of his death, and Monica, twenty-six.

In the same drawer she found Jessica Mallory’s birth certificate. Clipped to it was a handwritten promissory note, dated five years earlier. It was an IOU made out to Monica Griffith in the amount of two thousand dollars and signed in a bold, flourishing script: Boniface.

The IOU was not notarized, so Boniface, whoever she or he might be, Miss Scobey reasoned, was someone Monica Griffith must have known and trusted — possibly a relative.

Miss Scobey tapped her pencil against the top of her desk, a rhythmic gesture of frustration. The puzzling thing about the case of Jessica Mallory was that there had been no response so far from friends or next of kin. Usually the exact opposite was true. A tragedy of this sort (and, of course, the crash had been covered by the newspapers and networks) usually lent a spurious but therapeutic celebrity status to children orphaned so cruelly and suddenly. In most cases the phone calls with offers of succor and support would start immediately. A grandparent in the Midwest. An aunt and uncle in Toledo. A cousin in the armed services. Bonds of blood were stronger than steel, Miss Scobey believed, and they were strongest in just such emergencies.

But not in the case, it would seem, of little Jessica. Two weeks had passed since the death of her parents, and she was now living with a foster family — fine, solid people named the Farrs. Yet in that two weeks, no one had called to inquire about Jessica. No one on the face of the earth seemed to care what might have happened to the little girl. And this not only puzzled Miss Scobey; it angered her. Because somebody should care.

What was fueling Miss Scobey’s impatience and exasperation in this particular case was her conviction that Jessica Mallory wasn’t alone in the world. On one of Miss Scobey’s visits to the Farr foster home, Jessica had indicated as much. Standing at the windows of her small, pretty bedroom, she had pointed out into the shadowy street. “I am waiting for him,” she had said quite clearly, but Miss Scobey’s practiced, tactful questions couldn’t elicit any more than this single, unexpected statement. “I am waiting for him...”

Miss Scobey, however, was not about to give up. Pouring herself a fresh cup of coffee from the office Silex, she placed a note pad and a sharpened pencil on her desk and picked up the telephone to try to find some conduit to the child’s past.

First she called the churches in the neighborhood where the Mallorys had lived — St. Andrew’s Catholic, St. Mark’s Lutheran, and the Second Presbyterian. She drew only blanks. Next she got out the Philadelphia telephone directory and began dialing the Mallorys and Griffiths listed in the city. Scobey made a good start that day, but the job was so seemingly endless that she asked her supervisor for assistance. With the help of two efficient young clerks assigned to her, she completed the check the following afternoon. Yet the result was the same — nothing but blanks.

Each set-back served only to strengthen Miss Scobey’s resolve. She cabbed across the city to Thirtieth and Market Streets where, on producing credentials, she was allowed access to the morgue of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.

Settled comfortably in a reading room under bright overhead lights, she began an examination of the obituaries that had been collected for the past ten years under the name Mallory. It gave her a pang to see the most recent entry, Daniel and Monica, survived by daughter Jessica.

Nothing in the Mallory file was of any help, and it wasn’t until, hours later, deep in the Griffith file, that she stumbled on her first clue. Her eyes were so tired by then that some of the words had begun to blur together and, as a result, she’d almost flipped past the significant information on a clipping dated five years earlier.

“Mrs. Mary Griffith, widow of Eric Griffith, Sr., survived by son, Eric B. Griffith, and daughter, Monica Griffith Mallory...”

Miss Scobey felt a pleasurable thrill of elation. This was the link. Mrs. Mary Griffith was Jessica’s deceased maternal grandmother. And Eric B. Griffith was the child’s uncle.

Removing her glasses, Miss Scobey massaged her eyes with her fingertips, her weariness more than counter-balanced by the gratitude she felt at having found the little orphan’s next of kin. As she collected the obits to return them to the files, she saw through the window that the darkness was laced with the season’s first thin streaks of snow. Miss Scobey then decided that she would have a Stouffer’s TV dinner tonight to celebrate her victory. A special on beef stroganoff with au gratin potatoes and new peas had caught her eye in the frozen-food section earlier that day. She’d treat herself to that with a glass of red wine and pick up a quarter pound of chicken livers for Morticia. Then she’d get on the track of Eric B. Griffith bright and early in the morning.

By the time she’d stopped for lunch the following day, some of her enthusiasm had diminished. She could find no Eric B. Griffith listed in the phone books for Philadelphia or its suburbs — Germantown, Darby, Cynwyd, St. David’s, Bryn Mawr, and Chestnut Hill. After an avocado and alfalfa-sprout sandwich and a cup of tea, Miss Scobey continued her dogged pursuit at the public library, casting her nets wide and covering New Jersey from Camden to the seashore, south through Media and Chadds Ford to Delaware. With her tired and reddened eyes, she probed the agate-type directory listings in Atlantic City and communities south of it. And from there scoured the phone books of Doylestown, Coatesville, Newcastle, Marcus Hook, and Wilmington.

Once again, Miss Scobey’s overworked eyes nearly betrayed her. In the township of London-grove, Pennsylvania, located in Chester County thirty miles southwest of Philadelphia, she found what she had been looking for — the name of Eric B. Griffith, as clear as daylight. She realized she had missed it the first time she had turned the page and only the sheerest good luck — an omen, you might say — had prompted her to turn back and recheck the names.

Tightening her scarf against the cold evening winds that would be coming off the river, Miss Scobey left the library and started home with the pleasant conviction that she had at last achieved a breakthrough in the Jessica Mallory case.

The following morning she dispatched a letter on official stationery to Mr. Eric B. Griffith, R.D. #1, Black Velvet Lane, Londongrove, PA 19130, advising him of Jessica’s present address and circumstances, and requesting a meeting with him to discuss certain arrangements and considerations in regard to his niece’s future.

When that letter failed to elicit a reply, Miss Scobey — one week later — sent off a second letter by registered mail to the same address. Somewhat to her surprise, a receipt for this letter was returned promptly with a carelessly scrawled signature requiring a bit of guesswork on her part to identify it not as “Eric Griffith” but as “Maudie Griffith.”

Miss Scobey surmised that the couple had been out of town and had missed her first letter. However, since another week went by with no further response from either Eric or Maud Griffith, Miss Scobey was forced to conclude that they had no intention of answering her letters.

Attempts to contact the Griffiths by telephone were equally fruitless. On two occasions the receiver was definitely lifted, but no one replied to her queries. Her “hellos” fell into a windy silence. On both occasions the connection was broken abruptly. On her third attempt, a man answered but mumbled his replies in a chuckling, deep-South drawl which she was almost certain he put on to deceive her.

The line hummed and grunted with responses such as “They’se not at this place no-how... I thank you-all got da wrong numbah.”

Simmering with exasperation, Scobey put down the receiver, more determined than ever to get to the bottom of this nonsense. Tomorrow was her day off and Elizabeth Scobey had a gratifying notion about how she would spend her free time.

By nine the next morning her blue Volkswagen was pointed south on the Industrial Highway, traveling past stands of frost-blackened trees and snow-patched fields enroute to the tiny village of Londongrove.