The Seeing

Chapter Five

Judge Emory Williams’ clerk, Adam Greene, a portly, middle-aged black man with gray curls circling his bald head, picked up the ringing phone.

“Courtroom J-11. Judge Williams.” Court was in recess until the following morning, and the empty benches and faded brown-wood jury box gleamed softly in the thin afternoon light. “Yes, sir. But she’s in a meeting now in Judge Williams’ chambers. I can take a message and—”

Adam Greene heard a door opening and glanced past the judge’s bench to the chambers. Miss Scobey waved a goodbye to the judge and strode in her energetic fashion down the center aisle toward Adam Greene’s desk.

He smiled at her and held out the phone. “Call for you, Miss Elizabeth.”

“Thank you, Adam.” Placing her bulging briefcase on the desk, she took the phone and said, “Yes, this is Miss Scobey,”

After listening for a moment, she frowned and said, “Well, I don’t see any reason why not. But I’ll have to check with the foster home first. They usually have a schedule, you know. Nap time, play in the park, that sort of thing... Where can I reach you?”

Miss Scobey wrote down the telephone number of the Barclay Hotel on a notepad that Adam Green pushed toward her. Nodding her thanks, she said into the phone, “All right, I’ll call you back, Mr. Holcomb.”

Later that afternoon, closer to dusk than daylight, Mrs. Farr answered the ring of her doorbell. A tall man in a tweed topcoat stood on the porch. The faint light drifting down through the trees touched the reddish glints in his graying hair.

“Mrs. Farr? My name is Dalworth, Andrew Dalworth.”

“Yes, yes. Miss Scobey called.”

“It’s very good of you to let me come by on such short notice.”

At the curb in front of her home, Mrs. Farr saw a long black limousine with a uniformed chauffeur standing beside it. In the back of the car she saw the profile of another man, a younger man, with a mustache and rimless glasses.

“Come right in,” Mrs. Farr said, opening the door wider and wiping her hands on her apron. “Just make yourself comfortable and I’ll go get Jessica.”

Dalworth sat down on a straight-backed chair, unbuttoned his topcoat and placed his hat on his knee. The room was warm and comfortable with shining wooden floorboards bordering the edges of a rose-patterned carpet. White china pots of Boston ferns stood on the wide windowsills.

A light step sounded on the stairs. Dalworth turned and saw a small child looking around the bannister at him. For a second or so, neither of them spoke. Then the little girl came slowly into the room and said unexpectedly, “Do you have any dogs where you live?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Don’t you like dogs?”

“Oh, yes. I’m very fond of dogs. I do have some, in fact, Collies and Shepherds on a farm in Kentucky. My wife loved dogs but since she—” Dalworth cleared his throat, wondering why he felt so oddly nervous with this grave child. “By the way, my name is Dalworth. Andrew Dalworth,” he said.

“Do you have any horses?” Jessica asked him.

“Yes, there are a few hunters still on the horse farm and I’m developing some racing stock in California.”

“Your wife is dead, isn’t she?”

Dalworth nodded slowly, again struck with the confusing feeling that the conversation had somehow got out of his control. He was baffled with himself, uncomfortable with this strange helplessness, but he had enough humor to smile at the situation — a man at home with heads of state and captains of industry, shy in the presence of a four-year-old child.

Then he asked. “Do you have friends your own age to play with here?”

She came closer to him and said, “There’s a boy in the corner house. His name is Thomas and he has a pet frog.”

“Well, that’s nice. What does he feed his frog?”

Jessica shook her head. “I better not tell you, Mr. Dalworth. You might not like it.”

Dalworth was beginning to feel more at ease. She was composed and direct. “Well, try me.”

“All right. We give it dead flies. We find them in Tommy’s attic. We helped by leaving orange peels up there...”

She smiled as she said this and Dalworth was struck with her beauty. A perfect replica of her mother, he thought, with shining dark hair cut in bangs across a forehead whose texture was like ivory with a blush of pink in it. Her eyes were startlingly blue and candid, with lashes so dark and long that they seemed like little shadows over her eyes. When she smiled, her mouth was wide and generous and clean as a small kitten’s. She was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt trimmed in red — an outfit that, even at this age, accented her trim waist and fine, square shoulders. On her feet were red sneakers over short, white socks.

“Would you like to see my room, Mr. Dalworth?”

“Yes, of course, Miss Mallory.”

Upstairs, she pointed proudly at the low table near her bed and the two place-settings of milk and cake.

“Now isn’t this nice,” Dalworth said.

“We can have our own tea party,” Jessica said. “You sit over there and I’ll sit here and I’ll pour the tea. It’s really milk, you know.”

Dalworth lowered himself into a small chair and held out a doll-sized cup to Jessica, who poured milk into it with judicious precision. Again he wondered at this performance, at what he was doing handling miniature cups and saucers and sipping tepid milk while wedged uncomfortably in the confines of a child’s rocker.

“Is your tea hot enough?” she asked him.

“Oh, yes. It’s fine, just fine.”

“Are you going to get some more horses?”

“I expect so,” he said.

“We’ll like that.”

He was as puzzled by her comment as he was by his own presence here, and he thought of Holcomb waiting for him, and the land called Easter Hill in Ireland with its vast meadows and stone barns, and the men on various boards awaiting his decision in a dozen cities, and he wondered if he could ever explain his behavior to them or to his dear wife, Anna, if she were alive... Was it some kind of illogical guilt on his part, or a stubborn need to joust with fate — to set things right in some fashion?

“I thought you’d come sooner,” Jessica said. “I kept watching from the window.”

“Didn’t Mrs. Farr tell you when she was expecting me?”

“Yes. But I knew before that.” She sighed wistfully and said, “I thought you might be here last week.”

“I don’t understand, Jessica. I wasn’t in the city then.”

“Well, I don’t understand, either. What should I call you? Should I call you Mr. Dalworth? Does ‘Andrew’ sound polite?”

He smiled and said, “I think that sounds about as polite as anything I ever heard.”

It had become dark outside and the trees created shadows that darkened Jessica’s clear blue eyes and, as he looked into them, Dalworth realized that he might never explain how he felt right now to his business associates, but he knew with a sudden confidence that he could have explained his feelings to Anna, who had dreaded so much that he would be lonely.

“Jessica, I must be going now.”

What the little girl said in reply to this was so astonishing that Dalworth, who had risen to leave, knelt beside her and stared with wonder into her eyes.

“I’m not sure I understand, dear,” he said gently. “Would you mind telling me again?”

“Yes, of course, Andrew.” She studied him solemnly. “I said you were right, that she’d understand.”

He put his hands on her slim shoulders and shook his head slowly. “How did you know I was thinking of someone else just then?”

The little girl raised her hands and let them fall gently to her sides. “I’m not sure, Andrew. It was something about seashells at first. It was as if I could hear my Mommy talking about them...”

“Yes, go on,” Dalworth said. “But you weren’t talking about your mommy when you said ‘she’d understand’, were you?”

“No, I think that was somebody else,” Jessica said.

It wasn’t guilt, logical or illogical, that stretched between them, Dalworth thought. It was a tangible link, a trembling filament he sensed without understanding...

“Who was that other person, Jessica? Who did you think would understand me?”

“I think it was—” The child frowned and put a hand on Dalworth’s arm. “Maybe it was—” Then she sighed and the curiously intense light in her eyes seemed to fade slowly away. “Will you come to see me again, Andrew?”

And Dalworth knew then that the link between them had somehow been broken.

“I’d like to visit you again, if I may.”

“We can have another party then,” Jessica said. “And we can talk about the dogs...”

As the limousine made a left turn toward the expressway, Stanley Holcomb said, “I’ve checked the airport, sir. They’ve okayed our revised flight plan. Do you want dinner at the hotel or on the plane?”

Dalworth looked out the shiny windows of the limousine, the headlights of rush-hour traffic moving over him in rhythmic intervals, like the sweep of a metronome. Ahead of them, horns were sounding. The night had dropped swiftly over the city, bringing into sharp relief the long streams of glittering cars.

“I may be staying in town for another few days,” Dalworth said. “As you know, I’ve been thinking about finalizing those negotiations on the Irish property, the Easter Hill place. This might be the time for it.”

“Right, sir. I’ll rearrange your schedule.”

Dalworth laughed. “She definitely knew what I was thinking about.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“It’s nothing, Stanley. It’s not important.”

But he wasn’t telling the truth, Dalworth knew. It was important, as important as anything in his past or future. His thoughts were turning on the Mallorys, all three of them. Jessica had known somehow about the seashells — a casual comment, words lost months ago on the winds of time — and the little girl had known... and she had known he was thinking about Anna. He had been thinking that Anna would understand how he felt about the little girl, and as if that thought had been something physical and tangible, she had taken it from his mind, saying, “Yes, she would understand.”

And Anna would, he knew. His wife would have responded with the same warmth that he had, intrigued and caught by the look of her cool blue eyes, the intensity of her expression, and the trust and urgency that emanated from her. He could still feel her light touch on his arm. And he realized there was something... a power he didn’t understand.

“Stanley, here’s what I want you to do when we get back to the hotel. Call Juvenile Hall and get me the earliest possible appointment—” There was a faint but challenging smile on Andrew Dalworth’s face. “I want to talk with Miss Elizabeth Scobey.”