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.
Chapter Three
Once she was beyond the iron and stone growth of the city, the countryside was lovely — low, rolling meadows, rugged Quaker meeting houses, church steeples white against the gray skies, and horses and big-horned Santa Gertrudis cattle standing like woolly cut-outs on distant hills. This was horse country — pony clubs, point-to-point races, horse shows, and fox hunting with well-schooled hunters and hounds coursing over a challenging terrain of stone hedges and split-rail fences.
The estate homes in the country dated back to the Revolutionary War, with double chimneys, immaculately tuck-pointed fieldstone walls, kennel runs, and schooling rings.
Eric B. Griffith’s name was on a mailbox in front of a two-story red brick rowhouse, which stood, inside a white picket fence, at the intersection of an unpaved country road and Black Velvet Lane.
Aware that she was being watched from the upper window of the house, Miss Scobey went up a rough flagstone walk and rapped loudly with a brass knocker shaped like a grinning fox-head. The door was opened by a tall man whom Miss Scobey judged to be in his early or middle thirties.
“Yes? May I help you?” the man said.
“Are you Mr. Eric B. Griffith?”
“Now look, if you’re selling something—”
“My name is Elizabeth Scobey. I’m a Social Service worker assigned to juvenile court in Philadelphia. May I come in, Mr. Griffith?”
“Yes, I believe we did receive some correspondence from you, Miss Scobey,” Eric Griffith said. “Actually, my wife Maud takes care of the mail. I find it a bloody bore. Also, we travel a great deal, Miss — Scobey, was it?”
As she nodded, Griffith flexed his hands in front of him and went on talking, a tension in his voice that struck Miss Scobey as being at variance with his casual smile.