Outside, a figure stepped from the doorway across the street from the building in which Caroline Evans and her children lived. The face tipped upward for a moment, scanning the darkened windows one last time.
A moment later, apparently satisfied, the figure vanished into the night as completely as if it had never been there at all.
CHAPTER 6
On Monday morning, Anthony Fleming was feeling almost as dispirited as Caroline Evans had on the day before. He’d spent all day Sunday in his apartment — not a good idea, given the size of the apartment, and its emptiness.
Children — that’s what it needed. That’s what he needed.
Anthony liked children — liked their energy, their vitality. That was the one problem with living in The Rockwell these days; there weren’t enough children. In fact, there were practically no children right now. Only Max and Alicia Albion’s foster daughter, Rebecca Mayhew, but even having Rebecca in the building — sweet though she was — wasn’t the same as having half a dozen kids running from one apartment to another, making life miserable for Rodney, but giving the old building a feeling of vitality. That’s how it had been when he still had Lenore and the kids. Not just his own apartment, but the whole building had vibrated with life as the twin boys organized hide-and-seek games that were never confined to a single apartment, but ranged from floor to floor, and sometimes even into the attic.
Once, a little girl had tried to go down into the basement to hide, but fortunately Rodney had seen her just in time, and kept her away from the maze of steam pipes and old electrical wiring that made going into the building’s substructure an adventure for anyone who had work to do there.
But as time had inevitably gone by, the handful of children had dwindled away until only Rebecca was left. Anthony remembered well the day Max and Alicia had brought her home. Her brown eyes looked almost as large as those of the child in a terrible painting that hung in Virginia Estherbrook’s apartment. Not over the fireplace, of course; a portrait of Virginia herself occupied that spot, in costume as Cleopatra. The picture of the child hung on one of the walls, where its huge eyes seemed forever fixed on the image of Virginia. Even Virginia admitted that the painting should have been done on black velvet, but she said the child seemed to speak to her. Given its grotesquely large eyes and the single tear that ran down its left cheek, Anthony wondered just what, exactly, the seemingly genderless child might be saying, but he’d certainly never risked Virginia’s wrath by asking. When Max and Alicia had brought Rebecca down to introduce her to him and his family, the first thing that had flashed through his mind was that picture. Rebecca had hung back from Lenore and the twins, clinging to Alicia’s hand as if it were a lifeline. But then Samantha, who looked the same age as Rebecca despite the two years difference in their ages, led the younger girl off to indulge in one of those whispering and giggling sessions that Lenore had always understood perfectly but that he had always found totally mystifying. They’d instantly become best friends, and from that point on Rebecca had spent almost as much time in Anthony’s apartment as in the Albions’, her eyes sparkling with laughter.
But then, after Samantha and the boys had gone and Lenore had—
He cut the thought short, pushing it away with an almost physical force, driving it back into that far corner of his mind where so much of his past dwelt, hidden in the darkest reaches of his consciousness.
Better to think about Rebecca, though every day she seemed more and more like the lonely waif who’d first clung to Alicia’s hand, her eyes constantly growing a little larger, and a little emptier.
It had been Rebecca whom Anthony had first thought of on Saturday, when he’d met the girl in the park who’d been sitting on the bench with her mother, watching her brother play baseball. A perfect playmate for Rebecca. A year younger, perhaps, but closer in age than Rebecca and Samantha had been.
And the woman—
Anthony put the thought out of his mind. It was too early to start thinking about that again. And yet something deep inside him had responded to the woman in the park, even though they’d hardly spoken. He searched his memory, and found the name.
Evans.
Caroline Evans.
Conjuring up an image of her, he suddenly felt better, and even the large rooms of his spacious apartment suddenly didn’t feel quite so empty. Quickly cleaning up the dishes from his breakfast of cold cereal and coffee, he gathered up the clutter of the Sunday Times, straightened it out and folded it neatly for recycling, then left the apartment.
“Lovely morning, Mr. Fleming,” Rodney observed as he came out of the elevator into the lobby.
“That it is,” Anthony agreed, pausing just long enough to entrust yesterday’s newspaper to Rodney. “Put this in the recycling bin for me, will you?”
“Yes, sir,” Rodney replied. “And have a good morning.”
For the first time in months, Anthony felt a genuine smile come over his face. “Do you know, I think I very well might!”
From the window of her room on the seventh floor, Rebecca Mayhew watched Anthony Fleming leave the building, and wished she could go with him.
She couldn’t, of course; she knew that. She still wasn’t feeling very good, and this morning Aunt Alicia had told her to stay in bed. But the sunlight pouring in through her window had been irresistible, and she’d finally crept out of bed to the chair by the window. She was spending more and more of her time in that chair, looking out into the park. During the winter, it had been wonderful — with the trees bare of leaves she’d been able to see everything that was happening. Skaters whizzing around on Rollerblades, weaving in and out of the walkers and the joggers. And down to the south, she could see the baseball diamonds, where there were always half a dozen games going at one time.
A long time ago, when she’d first come to live with Alicia and Max, she used to go to the park with Samantha and her twin brothers. Then Samantha had started getting sick, and after a while she and Sam stopped going to the park and spent most of their time in Sam’s room. Finally Sam had had to go to the hospital, and Aunt Alicia had been so afraid she’d catch whatever it was that Sam had that she wouldn’t let Rebecca go visit her. “Plenty of time when Samantha comes home,” Alicia had told her. But Sam hadn’t come home.
Now Rebecca was alone, and even though Dr. Humphries said she was going to be fine, Rebecca wasn’t so sure. Except that this morning, as she gazed out into the spring sunshine and watched the birds building nests in the trees across the street, she’d had a feeling that maybe, finally, she really was going to start feeling better. And as she watched Mr. Fleming leave the building and start down Central Park West, there was something in the way he was walking that made her feel like maybe something was about to happen.
Something good.
Suddenly, as if he’d felt her watching him, Mr. Fleming turned around and looked up at her. Seeing her peering down from the window, he waved at her, and even from her room on the seventh floor, Rebecca could see his smile. It was the first time she’d seen him smile since the awful thing had happened to his family, and the smile told her she was right.
Everything was going to get better.
She could just feel it.
It was seeing Rebecca Mayhew in the window that finally made up Anthony Fleming’s mind, and when he walked into his office on West 53rd Street, right next door to the Hundred Club, he smiled brightly at Mrs. Haversham, who was his only employee. She looked after the mail, took care of the bills, and did the bookkeeping. The business itself, the management of money, was conducted by Anthony Fleming. It was a business he both enjoyed, and was good at, and over the years he had managed to shape it into his idea of near perfection: he invested only on his own behalf, and on the behalf of a few people he enjoyed as friends as well as clients. He never invested his clients’ money in securities he would not have in his own portfolio, and he believed in putting his money where his faith was. Thus, both his funds and his clients’ were invested as conservatively as the décor of his office, which was done entirely in old mahogany, old leather, and old prints.