The cat, Amy Johnson, ignored the question.
That was thirteen months ago.
***
In Emerald, Annie glanced behind her but didn’t yet see her Uncle Clark anywhere on the old two-lane that led toward Pilgrim’s Rest. She was almost home. On her cell phone, she called her divorce lawyer in Maryland, near the Navy Academy where she taught. She’d been postponing talking with this man, whom she’d met only twice and who charged her for every minute of conversation. When she reached him, she spoke quickly. He assured her that the final settlement would be awaiting her signature and Brad’s when she returned to Annapolis after the holiday. “Enjoy the Fourth,” he advised. “Relax.”
“I’ll relax when I’m divorced.”
“I doubt it,” the lawyer predicted.
She hung up, not wanting to chat about her personality at three hundred dollars an hour.
Annie passed a field of ripening corn. She had not been home to Emerald since early spring and she made an effort now to notice the changes in the summer trees and farmland as she sped by them. More often than not she was, she admitted, in front of or behind the moment, planning for the next problem, remembering the last crisis. Her aunt Sam was always telling her that life was what was happening in the side view. But moving forward, Annie ignored the periphery and while she admitted their loss and tried to remember to look left and right, usually she forgot.
Today was, however, her vacation, her birthday, her trip home. So she slowed slightly and as she did so, saw around her soybeans and tobacco, wheat and corn bowing to the strong storm wind. On both sides of the old highway stretched out an America that nearer to Emerald had been replaced by huge concrete box stores stretching across hot parking lots in which high-wheeled trucks and big SUVs banged into each other. But here on the outskirts, the world was still local. People still kept machines and repaired them. In a yard across the road from her, a man bent under the hood of an old truck. Here the long flat green land was lush and ripe and empty. A boy was making his bicycle jump in a driveway. A woman kept looking into her mailbox, hoping for more than was there.
Annie’s fingers loosened on the steering wheel as she waited at the familiar stoplight blinking at the crossroads. Rolling her neck side to side on the headrest, hearing the crackle in her vertebrae, she felt everything easing. Across the intersection, two little girls ran out of a peanut field beside an orange-red brick ranch house with aluminum white columns and an over-sized door. The little girls wigwagged their arms when Annie blew her horn. She waved her Navy lieutenant’s hat at them so that her hair flew out, wild and gold. She wanted them to see that the fast driver of the powerful convertible, the military officer, was, like them, a girl.
While Annie had ostensibly been hurrying to protect the Porsche’s leather seats from the coming rain, the truth was—as her uncle Clark always said when asking her to slow down—she was speeding because she liked to go fast. Speed had long been the gauge by which she’d judged herself. During her four years with Brad at the Naval Academy, she’d been secretly frustrated that in aviation tests he was consistently the faster flyer. To be fastest, to be first, mattered. Now her chance was coming. A week ago, her commanding officer had told her that she had been chosen to take a test flight in a new experimental model of an F-35 Lightning II vertical-landing fighter jet; she’d be trying to break a speed record. A chance was all she wanted. “I can do this,” she’d assured Commander Campbell with her infectious smile. “I’m a flyer.”
“That you are, young lady,” he’d agreed in the outmoded way of his that she tried to ignore. “Concentrate on flying. Don’t be running off and getting married again.”
“Amelia Earhart was married, sir.”
He hunched his shoulders, as if nothing more needed to be said about Amelia Earhart.
She couldn’t resist. “Her plane didn’t crash because she was married.”
He hunched his shoulders again, returned her salute, and left.
***
As Annie sped around a rattling tractor, her cell phone rang. The caller’s area code was one she didn’t recognize.
“Lt. Annie Goode,” she said briskly.
“This is Vice Detective Daniel Hart.” The young man had a pleasant low voice. “I’m with the Miami Police Department. I’m calling about a fraud investigation and I need to locate your father, Jack Peregrine.”
The detective’s inquiry took her entirely by surprise. Her response was to accelerate. She passed two cars one after the other. Their drivers looked at her, taken aback by the noise of the sports car’s racing motor.
“Jack Peregrine,” the young man repeated, making a strange crunchy noise. “Sorry, I’m eating trail mix. I missed my lunch.”
“You shouldn’t,” she told him.
“You’re right,” he agreed affably.
“I wouldn’t know my father if I fell over him on the sidewalk.”
“A sidewalk? I love sidewalks but who walks anymore? My ex-wife would borrow a car to drive to her car in a parking garage.”
Annie downshifted before the Porsche banked a curve. “Detective Hert—”
“It’s Hart. Like, you know, thump, thump, thump. Sgt. Daniel Hart. Here’s the thing. Your dad, Jack Peregrine. I had him under surveillance. He gave me the slip.”
About to show her impatience, oddly she laughed instead. “Join the club. The ‘slip’ from what?”
“Well, for us it was a case of false pretenses, but now the FBI’s involved. They want him for defrauding Cuba.”
She laughed again, but a tight tense laugh that went on longer than she wanted. “I’m sorry? Defrauding Cuba?”
“Some swindle of a Cuban artifact. I don’t know why Americans just don’t leave Cuba alone.”
She asked Hart how her father had given him “the slip.”
He explained that Jack Peregrine had been the subject of a recent stakeout. Peregrine fled his Hotel Dorado room in South Beach, Florida, minutes before an attempt to arrest him. He climbed into the next room by the balcony and allegedly robbed the occupants of their digital camera on his way out.
Annie noticed her knuckles were white. “How’d you get this phone number?”
“We tossed your dad’s room before he took off. It was on the back of an old photo in his jacket. Says ‘Annie,’ and has this number on it.”
The news was astounding to her. “I’ve used this cell phone for less than a year! And I’ve had nothing to do with my father since I was seven.”
“What can I tell you, Annie? He had your number. So, you on your way to Emerald? Bride comes home?”
The man’s easygoing familiarity with her life angered her. “Is somebody playing a fucking joke on me?”
“Hey, take it easy.” There was a crackling noise of a plastic bag being crunched. “This was an old photo of Jack Peregrine with a cute little girl. Says Breakers Restaurant in West Palm. The little girl’s you, I figure. Bangs, pearl necklace, cowboy jacket. Great smile.”
Annie fought off the vivid memory of that pearl necklace and that cowboy jacket, both gifts from her father. She turned her neck side to side, trying to loosen the tension.
“So you haven’t seen him since you were seven?” The detective spoke casually, as if they were catching up on old friends.
Her hands gripped the Porsche’s leather-wrapped steering wheel. “No, I saw him once. Eight, nine years ago but I didn’t talk to him that time.”
Hart sounded skeptical. “Why not?”
The thought struck her that Hart was a crank caller of some sort. Or maybe some other crook in pursuit of her father. It wouldn’t be the first time. “Can you prove you’re with the police?”
“Sure. Badge number…” He reeled off a realistic-sounding series of numbers. “Detective Sergeant, Miami Vice—” He paused.
She asked, “Are you waiting for a joke here?”
“It happens.” Hart had a very engaging voice. “Sorry, let me put this other call on hold.” He came back on
the line. “So, about your dad’s mess. Feds told me to back off. Where’s the respect for locals anymore?”
Annie asked again to know what Hart meant by her dad’s “mess.”
“He stole a relic, alleged relic, that if it exists, belongs to the people of Cuba. La Reina Coronada del Mar.”
The Spanish words floated up at her out of her childhood; she’d heard them often from her father. “Queen of the Sea?”
“You know it?”
Annie thought back. “…A statue?”
“Sixteenth-century. Peru. Virgin Mary.”
Memories hurried in. Her father had told her long stories about La Reina Coronada. “The Queen of the Sea. I used to have dreams about that statue. I used to dream I was trying to save her from drowning.” She wondered why in the world she had just told this complete stranger a childhood dream of hers.
Just as oddly, he replied, “Did you save her?”
“No, I woke up.”
“Yeah. It’s too much for a kid. For years after my dad died, I was always dreaming I was trying to pull him out from under a car wreck. He died in a car wreck. He was a cop.”
Neither spoke for a moment. Then Hart asked, “So you ever get the impression your dad actually had hold of the Queen of the Sea?”
With a glance at her speedometer—92 miles per hour—she took her foot off the accelerator, breathing carefully while she slowed the car. “Sergeant Hart, I got the impression my dad had hold of the golden flip-flops of Helen of Troy and a MapQuest to Shangri-la.” Her father had told her thousands of extravagant lies: that there was buried treasure in his backyard, that the neon-blue plastic sunglasses he’d given her as a birthday gift would endow her with super-powered X-ray vision. “It’s what he did for a living, ‘false pretenses,’ lies to con suckers. He was a con artist.”
Hart laughed his pleasant laugh. “Still is. No offense but I wouldn’t trust Jack Peregrine if he walked on water and then turned it into wine.”
“Trust me,” Annie said, “If he could turn water into wine, he’d sell it.”
Hart’s jaunty guffaw surprised her. It was rare that people laughed aloud at her jokes. His response warmed her into asking, “So the FBI is what, shoving you aside? Federal intervention?”
“You should talk. You’re U.S. Navy.”
She couldn’t read his tone. “You have a problem with the Navy?”
“Well, I remember the Maine. Listen, I’m just trying to do my job, Lieutenant Goode. Protecting people like you.”
“Funny, that’s my business too.” Annie was accustomed to, but not particularly tolerant of, sarcasm about the military.
Hart laughed. “I gotta tell you, I was impressed, what I read about you. You and your husband flying the Hornet in Operation Desert Fox. I mean you guys bombed the shit out of some sand.”
Indignantly, she asked if he’d been reading files on her.
“Don’t take it personally. Anyhow, I need your cooperation. The FBI says this relic Coronada’s real, they say your dad’s got it, they want it and him both.”
She shook her head as vehemently as if he could see her. “You think that relic’s real? No way.”
Hart claimed to have better information. “FBI says it’s a sixteenth-century gold statue of Mary with Inca jewels and a thorn from the Crown of Thorns.”
Annie snorted. “Total bullshit.”
“I figure you love your dad.” Again, his familiarity jarred her. “Well, the guy’s in a serious mess here and you need to tell him, come see me, turn himself in. We can work a deal.” Abruptly Hart announced he had to take another call. “Fly safe, Lieutenant.”
“Hello? Hello?”
As Annie hit redial, she memorized the caller’s number. It was a skill she’d had since she was a toddler, a short-term photographic memory. When her father had discovered this talent, he’d used it to win bets against unsuspecting strangers who’d been sure she wouldn’t be able to repeat a column of figures after a brief glance. She had dreaded disappointing him by being wrong.
Sergeant Hart’s good-natured baritone sent her to his voice mail. “MPD, Vice Sgt. Dan Hart speaking. Keep it brief. Thanks.”
“This is Lt. Annie Goode. Call me back, Sergeant Hart!”
To her puzzlement, she felt so shaken that she had to pull over to the side of the highway. For five minutes she sat there crying, her head against the steering wheel.
Then with a short scream of tires, she raced the Porsche back onto the asphalt. Annie’s best friend Georgette, a psychiatrist, had told her once that speed was her way of staying ahead of the past. “Damn straight,” Annie had admitted.
She hit 60 miles per hour in 4.3 seconds.
Chapter 2
Speed
For Annie’s seventh birthday, Sam bought her niece a balloon ride. For her eighth, Sam arranged a thirty-minute “Sky Ride” with Dwight Kelvin (D. K.) Destin, U.S. Navy, Retired, a middle-aged African-American Vietnam War vet who owned the tiny local airfield in Emerald, built—he said—on land once farmed by his Algonquin ancestors. He took the little girl up in a Pawnee Cropduster that had his insignia black eagle painted on its side. She so loved this lesson, during which for a few thrilling seconds D. K. handed her the steering yoke, that she persuaded him, a wheelchair-bound grouch, to repair the Piper Warrior her father had left in the Pilgrim’s Rest barn and to teach her to fly it. As fast as it could go.
Going fast had been a habit with her father. But by flying, she could go even faster. On her first ride in the King of the Sky, Annie yelled suddenly and long from joy, a noise no one in Emerald had ever heard the somber child make.
“Feel good?” D. K. Destin asked her. “Want to fly it solo someday?”
She nodded yes, with her solemn blue eyes. “Fast,” she repeated.
“The faster the better,” he agreed. “That’s my philosophy. And I can’t even get out of this chair.” When a Vietcong MiG had winged his A-6E Intruder attack bomber on a deep-strike mission, D. K. had crashed into the China Sea where he had held his unconscious navigator up out of the waves on a fragment of wreckage for five and a half hours, longer than he would have needed to (according to him) had anybody “given a fuck about us.” After rescue, emergency surgery on the carrier saved the navigator but left D. K. unable to walk.
***
After a few dozen hours in the air together, the old combat flyer told her that she was, like him, born to fly. He made her kiss the black eagle painted on the fuselage of his Cropduster and although she was embarrassed, she did so to pledge her allegiance to aviation. Two years later D. K. proclaimed that for her sake he was cutting back on beer. He wanted to live long enough to see her an Annapolis graduate and a commissioned pilot. Annie was going to be Lt. D. K. Destin’s final mission for the U.S. Navy. “Baby, you gonna wave at eagles. You’ll say, ‘’Scuse me, cloud, y’all move on over, here comes the best in the north, south, east, west, and headed for the Milky Way.’ And here’s what you’ll tell the whole fuckin’ world: ‘I am Annie P. Goode and I am Goode to go!’”
It was vaguely evident to Annie, flying high with D. K. above the farms of Emerald, that he was training her to be his victory over a smashed career. After she’d won her first flying competition, he’d made this goal explicit, asking her to take a sacred vow on her gold medal, swearing that someday she would show the U.S. Navy how D. K. Destin, a black man with Occaneechi blood, a man the military had used as a scratch pad, could make her a flyer who was faster than anybody else in America. Annie would be D. K.’s proof that this country’s passing him over for the Medal of Honor had been “racist malefaction.”
“For a little bitty white girl,” he noted with satisfaction, “you are fuckin’ good.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to talk like that,” she primly advised him.
“Talk? Don’t get hung up on ‘talk.’ They shoot you out of the sky? Your plane’s on fire and you’re falling in the shit faster’n a wino off an overpass? You’re going down, the Ch
ina Sea’s rising up, and a lot of water’s saying, ‘Hellowww, baby!’ You know what, Annie? You don’t give a flying fuck how you’re supposed to talk.”
As the years in Emerald went by, Annie proved just how fast she was. She proved it on the ground as well as in the air. Her junior year in high school, she won blue ribbons in hundred-yard dashes. More and more ribbons hung from hooks on the walls of her room. She told a classmate who was urging her to join the cheerleading squad, “I don’t want to cheer somebody else on. I want somebody else to cheer me on.” By her senior year, the Emerald High band was doing just that, playing “Annie P. Goode” at track meets, scored to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” As soon as she walked onto the field toward the starting block, they would start playing:
Go, Annie, go, go, go!
Annie P. Goode!
D. K. Destin dreaded every one of those track meets. He had nightmares that Annie would trip or that someone would knock into her, that she’d suffer some disabling injury (like his own) that would ruin her chance to be accepted at Annapolis where she would learn to fly jets.
His other nightmare was that her father would return out of the blue and take her away.
But Jack Peregrine never returned and Annie never was injured. In fact, ironically, her success in track was one of the reasons so many colleges, including the Naval Academy, wanted to recruit her.
By the time Annie was twenty-one, she was flying faster and higher than D. K. had ever gone, for by that time she was piloting F-14 Tomcats and then F/A-18 Super Hornets straight up into clouds at an acceleration fast enough to make her bones shake. Her white Navy helmet was stenciled “Lt. Annie P. Goode,” with D. K.’s logo of a black eagle under it, and her white jacket was decorated with commendation ribbons. The only midshipman at the Academy who could fly faster than Annie was the midshipman she married. Brad Hopper.
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 2