The woman behind the counter took the book back, and he asked where Lilac Street was.
“Why, it’s up the hill three blocks and to the right.” She smiled at him and became a template for the rest of the population, people with something to smile about.
He left the store and began walking through a neighborhood of big, well-kept houses, some of them made of stone inset with transoms of stained glass. It occurred to him that he’d never imagined who had the girl-that is, what kind of people. If he’d had to guess he would’ve said outlaws, or sick-minded people who wanted a lightning rod for their electrical meanness, or just someone who wanted a kid to train up as a serving girl. As he walked deeper into the fine neighborhood, he realized that Morris Hightower’s lead was another fool’s errand, that there were no child thieves living in houses like these. People who hired thugs to steal little girls didn’t live in fine mansions with copper trim and beveled-glass entries, with sunrooms and carriageways, wrought-iron fences and belvederes.
He reached 653 Lilac Street and stood at the fence, his head cocked up at the three-story Victorian soaring into the Kentucky sky. Seventy-five feet of billiard-table lawn stretched to the marble front steps that led up to the leaded glass door. Another dead end. He would walk back into the business district and find the railroad station and leave his usual plea with the agent. Suddenly a woman who seemed to be in her late twenties opened the front door and put a milk bottle out with a note in it. She was thin and ordinary-looking, but under her brown bangs were a set of intense eyes, and she fixed them on him for a long moment before turning inside. She actually looked at him. Noticed him. And there was connection in that look, as though she might somehow be on the same page as he was. He could have turned and walked back to the boat, but after standing there for a full minute he decided instead to walk to the far corner, and when he arrived there, he saw that an alley ran through the middle of the block, parallel with Lilac Street. He entered it and walked along the rear of the great homes, casually inspecting their garages and wash houses and flower gardens. Behind 653 he stopped alongside a low iron fence and saw a young girl in the yard with short golden hair sticking up at all angles, idly nudging a rubber ball through the grass. Seated on a bench next to a marble birdbath was the woman he’d seen out front. He waved at her and smiled, trying to control himself. He glanced at the girl to see if her face matched the cameo burned into his brain.
“Hi,” he said. “This your little girl?”
She looked at him as though she suspected he were dim-witted. “Naw. I just take care of her sometimes. I work for her folks.”
“She looks like a happy little thing.” He wondered what he could say that would keep the conversation going. “I’ve got a niece at home looks exactly the same.” Then the child turned toward him, and with a thrill he knew it was her. “Is she happy, too? Cheerful, I mean.” He fought to steady his voice.
Vessy took out a handkerchief and blew her nose, looking at him with suspicion. “You not from around here, are you?”
He gave her a laugh. “No, I’m visiting an army buddy who lives up the hill a bit. I left a prescription at Baumer’s and decided to take a walk while they filled it.”
Vessy nodded. “That druggist is the slowest old man. Rolls them pills one at a time.”
“What’s the little girl’s name?”
“Madeline. They tell me she’s a orphan and as far as her being cheerful is concerned, I don’t know. I sure would be if the man who calls himself my daddy was the richest man in town and I had somebody waitin’ on me hand and foot, plus a free-spendin’ momma and music teachers and all.”
He looked up and down the street and could smell the wealth of the neighborhood. Even the dirt under his thin soles seemed rich.
“She’s young to be taking music, isn’t she?”
“She can sing like a Victrola, that one. She’s liable to perform in a opera house somewheres when she grows up.”
“Nice people, the ones who adopted her, I bet.”
“Sometimes they ain’t too nice to me, but that one there, they spend like a princess on her.”
He looked at the girl’s yellow dress, at the silk bands running through the hem. Her shoes looked to be new strap-on flats and her barrettes were banded with garnets. Parents who bought her such things would send her to the finest schools and provide for her in a manner he could never imagine. He caught the girl’s eye, but her expression was unreadable. To her he was only a stranger in wrinkled clothes. “She looks like a princess in the making, anyway,” he said at last.
Vessy stood up and grabbed the child’s hands, raising her arms straight up and wiggling them. “Are you a princess yet, sweet thing?” she crooned.
The child looked at him boldly, as if to ask, “By what authority do you want to change any of this?”
“I better get down to Baumer’s,” he said, moving on.
Vessy began to swing the child in a slow circle, chanting “Sweet thing’s a princess,” and the girl giggled brightly. He listened to their playing voices as he walked down the alley.
SAM ATE lunch by himself in the café and sleepwalked through the two o’clock trip. That afternoon he lay in his bunk and drank from Charlie Duggs’s bottle, wondering what to do, whether or not to rob the girl of a good life and cause her to live in a freezing flat in Cincinnati while her mother scrambled to buy what poor food she could, what cheap clothes, what cheap life. The fact that he had survived well enough without natural parents settled on him. Had they not died, he might have been living barefoot in a muddy cane field in south Louisiana. But he couldn’t miss what he never possessed, and he knew that the girl had a better memory of her folks. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to decide what to do, and in the course of the afternoon he changed his mind a dozen times.
The Ambassador cruised that night and Sam watched the people from Ohio and Kentucky behaving themselves, people who seemed to be cut from a different bolt of cloth than he was. He thought he might wire Elsie, even though she would be in the middle of suffering through the awful transition caused by Ted’s death. He doubted that the local sheriff would take his word that Lily was abducted, and knew that a stranger would never be believed in this town, not against a man living on Lilac Street. Mostly he worried about what he was taking from Lily. Isn’t that what parents wanted most for their children? A better chance at living a prosperous life? Especially a single parent with a teenager to feed and raise, an unemployed single parent who would never in her life have more than ten dollars in her pocketbook at one time.
When the band played “Home, Sweet Home” and the boat rubbed against the shore at midnight, Sam helped stack tables and started with the sweepdown and kept working, finishing up the Texas and mounting to the roof to go after pigeon droppings and cinders in the dark, sweeping the tarred surface by memory as the big bell banged and the whistle ripped through its departure song, the stars swinging above as the boat turned upriver, its escape pipes sending long breaths of steam up against the night sky. He walked to the stern and leaned on his broom, watching the lights of Graysoner slide backwards on the dark Ohio. Behind him he heard a pilothouse window slide open and Mr. Brandywine’s nasal question, “What’s wrong, son?”
That word, “son,” hit the back of his neck like a stone. Any man could be anyone’s father, was that it? He turned in the dark. “I’m just trying to wear out this broom.”
“You can’t fool me. I can read you like a book.” The old man was hollering over his shoulder now, stepping on the spokes of the great wheel.