The Four Corners of the Sky

by Michael Malone

  “Call me back every ten minutes.”

  Malpy whimpered but Teddy fell quickly to sleep.

  After a while, Sam started her imitation of Katherine Hepburn. “‘Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.’”

  Because niece and uncle had lived for years with a woman who owned a movie store and who responded to life crises almost exclusively by quoting classic films, the inimitable Hepburn voice, even badly mimicked, was somehow as soothing as a lullaby.

  “African Queen,” Annie said.

  Howling wind tore a whole tree loose with a terrible noise; it crashed near the house. “Oh God,” moaned Sam. “This is scary.”

  Clark began: “‘Fasten your seat belts.’”

  Annie finished. “‘It’s going to be a bumpy night.’”

  “You two are making fun of me, aren’t you?” Sam shined the flashlight in their faces.

  Annie and Clark told her yes, they were, and made her laugh. On they went, thinking of more quotes for Sam, soothing her with the murmur of memory; it was what they had done for decades, watching old movies on the couch together, eating with chopsticks from their Chinese takeout boxes.

  Finally Sam told them to stop. “It’s like getting your hair brushed too long. First it’s a pleasure, then it gets on your nerves.”

  Silence fell. After a long pause, Clark asked, “Know why the poor man became a baker?”

  Annie answered, “Because he kneaded the dough.”

  “Guess I already told you that one. How about the butcher that backed into his meat grinder and got a little behind in his work?”

  Sam muttered, “Please. Top ten worst.” She phoned Georgette, whose line was busy or dead.

  Gradually the noise of the storm subsided. Malpy stopped squeaking. Clark pushed open the cellar doors and they looked out. Rain was falling but the wind had eased. Pilgrim’s Rest had survived another storm.

  Back in the front hall, Sam lit the half-dozen kerosene lanterns she kept for such an emergency, just as she kept extra water in jugs and extra gasoline in cans, extra salt for the driveway, first aid kits, antidotes. She telephoned Georgette next door again and reached her. “I told you to call me in ten minutes! Have you got candles?”

  Georgette said she had found the five-dozen candles Sam had given her during last winter’s predicted power outage. “I was on the phone with my mother. I told her I was alone hiding in the basement in the middle of a twister and she said she’d gotten a birdie on the eighth hole.”

  Sam sighed. “Tell me something you don’t know.”

  “Okay. Annie’s not up in that plane. Is she?”

  “Ask her.” Sam handed Annie the phone. Clark and she carried the lanterns around to check the house.

  Annie told Georgette that she definitely planned on going to St. Louis. “The storm’s pretty much over.”

  “It is? Look out the windows.”

  “I have to find my dad.”

  “Wouldn’t you have done it by now? I mean, almost twenty years? It’s a big house, but it’s not that big.”

  “Don’t be funny. This so-called friend of his, Rafael Rook, called and says he’s got terminal cancer.”

  “But somehow you don’t believe it.” Georgette sighed. “Take it from me. They do die. George is in an urn next to his Rotary awards. On the other hand, Kim’s in a golfing retirement center shooting birdies. Count your blessings? Okay, I’m going to bed. I wanted to watch the History Channel. It was the excavation of Pompeii. I don’t know why a petrified dog should be so fascinating.”

  Annie’s shoulders relaxed; it soothed her to talk to Georgette. “I’ll keep you posted. I’ve got to settle this so I can get back to Maryland for my test flight.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s always some world record or other with you. Sam wants me to drive back to Maryland with you to meet your condo buddy Trevor.”

  “Why don’t Sam and Clark worry about getting themselves dates and leave us alone? Salut, chérie.”

  “Love you. I strenuously advise you not to fly to St. Louis tonight but when did you ever listen to me?”

  Annie raised an eyebrow. “When you told me marrying Brad was a good idea.”

  “Don’t ever listen to me.” Georgette shrugged her soft shoulders. “I’m a sucker for muscles. I’d like to swing through a jungle like Lucy, from one Homo erectus biceps to another. I’d teach them all to talk and they’d all grunt that they loved me. A bientôt.”

  ***

  As she packed, Annie called Trevor at Chesapeake Cove. Their agreement was a long-standing one: she took care of his West Highland terrier whenever he went on vacation; he took care of her cat whenever she had to leave home. Now she asked if he could watch Amy Johnson if she had to be away longer than she’d originally thought?

  He could. He asked if they’d escaped the tornado. The news had said it was close.

  “Very close. But we’re fine. Georgette’s upset because she can’t get the History Channel.”

  “I don’t blame her.”

  “She’s my oldest friend and she’s never met you.”

  “Define oldest,” Trevor said.

  “You’ve seen her picture in my living room. She’s a doctor, she’s single, and she spent last summer on an archeological dig in Sicily.”

  Trevor said, “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Nothing. What’s wrong with you? You’re single.”

  “True.”

  “I need another favor.”

  “Date your friend?”

  “No. Help me find my father. He sent me a letter he’s dying. A FedEx! He’s in St. Louis. But I’m not sure where. The Miami police are after him. He’s an ex-con; there should be a criminal record. Can you find out what he’s been up to?”

  Trevor said he’d always wondered why Annie hadn’t asked him to do this for her before. Here she was with a criminal father who’d disappeared; here she was with a friend who worked with criminal databases at the FBI. Seemed like a match. He was happy to check into Jack Peregrine.

  When Annie was carrying Teddy to her pagoda bed, the lights came back on. The old dog’s cloudy blind eyes, blue as glass, seemed to be looking right at her. “What do you think, Teddy?” she asked the Shih Tzu. “What should I do? If I were Claudette, I’d get on a train and I’d meet a millionaire but then I’d remarry my husband.”

  The dog licked the air, as if to test out this option from The Palm Beach Story. Then she shook her head.

  “Right. I don’t want to remarry Brad.” Annie took Teddy with her to the black baby grand piano on which long ago Sam had played duets with Georgette’s aunt Ruthie. The old yellowed sheet music was still in the bench. She found a pastel copy of “Lara’s Theme” from Dr. Zhivago. “Ruthie Nickerson” was written elaborately on the cover, and in the same blue ink “con amore.”

  Photographs crowded together on the piano’s closed lid. As a child, Annie had grown accustomed to freezing with a grin half-a-dozen times a day, while Sam recorded her life with a camera of one sort or another: Annie at Brownie camp, on the track team, on her way to an Emerald High dance, Annie the naval midshipman, Annie putting wedding cake to Brad’s lips, Annie stretching, eating, napping, Annie just holding up her hands in surrender to the lens. When she’d protested at being subjected to daily photography, Clark had asked her to indulge her aunt: all these pictures were Sam’s proofs of a happiness she hadn’t expected. They were like red votive candles lit in a church, pledges of gratitude.

  On the piano there were a few framed snapshots of the young Sam and Jack as well. And there was an old photo in a bright ’70s frame of five teenagers seated on the Pilgrim’s Rest porch. All were tan and wore shorts and T-shirts, their arms hung over one another’s shoulders, all laughing, knocking into each other: Sam, Clark, Jack, Georgette’s father George Nickerson, and a pretty girl who was leaning out at an angle from the porch rail to crook her elbow around Clark’s neck. Annie had been told that this was George’s sister Ruthie, who’
d run off with a married man. In the picture Ruthie appeared to be very attractive but it was hard to see her face because of the huge sunglasses she wore.

  There was also a solo picture of Clark, thin and squinting into a Vietnamese sunset. Beside it was a wedding photo of Clark and his first wife, Tuyet, who’d died shortly after he’d brought her home to America, of a rare kind of cancer. Nearby was a framed newspaper photo of Sam leaping to hit a tennis ball (“Peregrine Takes Title” said the small headline) and stuck in the corner of the frame, as if to emphasize the contrast, was a snapshot of Sam at sixteen, unhappy in a prom dress, in front of the Pilgrim’s Rest Christmas tree, with a valiant chin, standing between her intoxicated father the judge and her sedated mother Grandee of the Savannah Worths, all three of them with smiles that would, Clark said, “scare the Munsters.”

  Scrambling to get down from Annie’s arms, Teddy knocked off a small black-and-white picture at the piano’s far edge. As the old Shih Tzu trotted indignantly onto her velvet poof and sighed a long sigh settling there, Annie picked up the photo. It was a picture she didn’t remember, of her dad and her, from their days on the road, shortly before he’d left her in Emerald. She had always divided her past between those blurred years of travel and the start of her “real life” when she had come to live at Pilgrim’s Rest. It was a jolt to see the old life—a professional snapshot taken in an elegant beachside restaurant—here in the Pilgrim’s Rest living room.

  More startling, the picture was the same as the one that the Miami detective Sergeant Daniel Hart had described seeing in her father’s room. One of the photos must be a copy of the other. In the restaurant banquette, she was snuggled next to the sandy-haired, open-armed Jack Peregrine. His gleaming suit and slender tie made more luminous his deep-tanned smiling face and his trim blonde mustache. Annie was wearing her favorite dress, the green velvet, and her cowboy boots. Her head rested against the crisp white of her father’s shirt; above her head his tan fingers held a cigarette. On the banquette table sat a cake with candles. Other diners filled in the background around them, laughing women, men in thin ties and sleek suits.

  Annie took the photo out of its frame. On the back in her father’s handwriting was scrawled, “Annie and Jack, The Breakers, Palm Beach.” They had been celebrating her seventh birthday a few weeks ahead of the event, for the picture was dated June 1982. So from here they must have driven to St. Louis and then east to Emerald, where on July Fourth he’d given her away to Sam and Clark.

  Palm Beach and Miami. The Hotel Dorado on the letterhead of the folded note in Jack’s flight jacket was in Miami. The convalescent home Golden Days was in Miami too. The detective Hart and the peculiar Rafael Rook had also both called her from Miami.

  Miami. What had her father and she been doing there? Life at The Breakers looked affluent and happy. At what joke of her father’s was she laughing? Why had they left Miami and driven suddenly to St. Louis and then just as suddenly come east to Emerald?

  There had been earlier birthday celebrations of Annie’s that had ended in tears. Her dad had often joked about her crying at her parties. He’d recounted how on her fifth birthday, she’d run out of her hotel bedroom wailing, “Be quiet!” at a drunken, startled crowd of his friends. How, on her third birthday, beside some motel swimming pool in the moonlight, she’d screamed at a friend of her father’s to stop swinging a stick at a big piñata hanging from a palm tree. But the man had whacked the Mexican paper donkey anyhow until it broke in two and the other adults had laughed although Annie had kicked at their legs to make them stop.

  On that occasion, her father had picked her up, rocking her back and forth, laughing, showing her how the piñata donkey was made to be broken, how it held a broken clay pot of candies and trinkets. She had been inconsolable.

  But in this photograph of a celebration of her seventh birthday at The Breakers, Annie’s head was tilted with laughter. She studied this child, who wore a small pendant with her velvet dress, recalling that her father had given her that tiny ruby the year before but had then taken it back, “just borrowing it,” he’d said. Presumably he’d sold it. The thought occurred to her now that when he’d shown up running through the cornfield into Pilgrim’s Rest on that strange hot summer day, when he’d given Sam the raw ruby for Annie’s seventeenth birthday, he’d done so in order to make up for the pendant that he’d “borrowed” ten years earlier.

  “Happy birthday, have a good life,” Annie said aloud to the happy child in the picture. She slid it back into its frame and returned it to the piano.

  Looking up, she saw her aunt and uncle in the hall watching her; holding chopsticks; they were eating together from a large platter of spicy tuna rolls. With the now sagging helium multicolored balloons settled around their feet, they looked as if they were standing in a rainbow.

  Sam came over and blew out the kerosene lantern on the mantel.

  “I told you this was a twister,” Clark said, swiping at the smoky air.

  “If you tell me one more time, I’m going to clobber you,” Sam warned him.

  Annie showed them the Palm Beach picture. “I don’t remember this being here.”

  Sam explained that it had come out of Annie’s suitcase. “It was in there when you arrived, along with twelve thousand dollars cash and your birth certificate. Wrapped in a velvet dress. A few years ago I came across it and put it in a frame.”

  Annie said she had a vague memory of those chandeliers in the domed ceiling of The Breakers, the tall beautiful windows and elegant chairs. She thought she could remember the sound of the ocean outside but might be imagining it.

  “Your dad lived in Miami off and on,” Sam said, studying the picture. “He called me once from The Breakers, maybe a couple of years ago and said he’d just been remembering how the two of you had stayed there on your birthday.”

  Annie pointed at the photograph. “See this menu on the table? Dad bet a guy a hundred dollars he could show me a page of this menu for fifteen seconds and that then I could repeat it word for word, including the prices…I was scared I would get it wrong.” She moved away from the piano. She didn’t want to remember how hard she’d tried to impress her father; the pleasure she’d taken in his laughter; how, with big pieces of pastel chalk, she would painstakingly, accurately write down the numbers of cars’ license plates on the asphalt of motel parking spaces after the cars had driven off; how she’d correctly identify all the cards in the discard pile of poker games. She’d done it for his praise. “He was grooming me to count cards for him. He always wanted us to go to Vegas. At least I didn’t end up working for criminals.”

  “Really?” Sam picked up her niece’s U.S. Navy officer’s cap from the couch, flicked the brim skeptically.

  “Don’t start. Where’s that birth certificate that said Claudette Colbert was my mother? Could you find that?”

  “I could find the straw from your first milk carton. Probably in the same suitcase as that jacket of your dad’s, up there in the attic.”

  Annie said her real question was why should Jack Peregrine, for whom only the future had ever felt real, now want her to bring him so many pieces of the past?

  Clark took off his glasses as if to make sure they were the ones he’d been wearing for years. “My real question is, why are you doing it?”

  In the hall, Annie opened the front door and looked up at the black sky. “D. K. won’t clear me if it’s not safe.”

  Sam sighed. “Could we remember that D. K. crashed his plane into the China Sea?”

  “That was in broad daylight,” Clark said. “Look on the bright side.”

  Chapter 15

  The Aviator

  Annie phoned D. K. again about the King of the Sky, which he still garaged for her at Destin Airworks. He had checked out the plane and needed to do a little more work on the engine. Give him an hour.

  She checked through the Pilgrim’s Rest kitchen cabinets while she tried to reach Hotel Dorado in Miami. The usual jar of candied papaya pie
ces that nobody wanted sat on the top shelf. The bag of Snickers bars was hidden where Clark always hid candy from himself, behind the big cobwebby cans of pureed pumpkin that every Thanksgiving Sam planned to make into pies but never did.

  No Jack Peregrine was registered at Hotel Dorado.

  She called the number on the letterhead for Golden Days. A woman answered in a bright southern voice. “G.D., may I help you?” The woman sounded bizarrely like Annie’s ex-mother-in-law Mama Spring Hopper, who had always cursed in abbreviations. But “G.D.” proved to be short for Golden Days, an extended-care home. The receptionist conceded cheerfully that most of their patients were “pretty terminal,” but declined to provide details about how they’d gotten that way. She did admit that as far as she could tell from her “guest book,” they had never had any “residents” named Jack Peregrine, after which she cheerfully clicked off.

  Annie arranged dried fruit into geometric patterns on the kitchen table while trying to reach Trevor. When he finally called back, he reported that he’d discovered a few things about her dad: an agent friend had found eleven charges against John Ingersoll Peregrine, with three convictions, a total of twenty-five months served, half-a-dozen aliases. There were three outstanding felony warrants in two states. Also Florida reported an APS for a recent jailbreak. The charges were consistent with Annie’s description of her father as a “swindler” and included a variety of white-collar fraud crimes, including forged checks, fake options and securities, counterfeited land deeds, shakedowns, hustles, stings.

  She asked if there were anything in the folder about an incarceration in Cuba a year or so ago. Or anything about Cuba’s interest in a sixteenth-century religious artifact known as La Reina Coronada del Mar that Jack had allegedly stolen? After a long pause, Trevor said no, he saw nothing about Cuba. “Reina what?”

  “Reina Coronada del Mar. The Queen of the Sea. A gold statue.”

  Trevor said such a statue was nowhere mentioned in the files. Curiously, however, the sheet on Jack Peregrine had come to an abrupt end eleven months ago with a sealed indictment. Everything after that was closed.