On the road as a child with her father she would lie on a towel beside a motel pool while he named the stars for her. One night he told her how, millions of light-years from the Milky Way, hundreds of new stars were igniting. Among them was this quartet of galaxies. The galaxies were uncontrollably drawn toward each other, just as if they were falling in love, just the way he had fallen in love with Annie’s mother before Annie was born.
He said the stars were on fire because of their love for each other. It had all happened millions of years ago, and millions of years ago he had loved Annie, even before she was born, eons before she’d floated down to Earth, a tiny perfect piece of an exploding star. He’d been waiting for Annie a million years before he’d been born himself.
Long after their starry nights on the road, when he’d talked about the galaxies falling in love, Annie was studying astronomy at Annapolis. She had learned then that there’d even been a little truth in her father’s story of the play of gravitational draw. In the southern constellation Phoenix, 160 million light-years from Earth, four galaxies that made up Robert’s Quartet crowded together into space, pulled there by a kind of attraction. And drawn together there, stars in Robert’s Quartet did burst into flames.
Stars did fly toward each other, irresistibly, as if they were falling in love. And millions of years later, lovers on Earth drew together and fell in love, watching the stars fall.
Annie flew through the night of stars, wanting like everyone else to be loved forever. She headed the Hopper jet to latitude 25°47’35” N, longitude 80°17’36” W, Miami, Florida.
***
At this moment, in a small bare Golden Days hospital room in South Beach, Rafael Rook sat beside the bed of a slender man who smoked a cigarette. Raffy spoke quietly. “It seems by no means an inevitability, Jack, all things considered, from all points of view, and with your past relationship not so good, that your daughter Annie will be arriving here in Miami to help you through your present troubles.”
The slender man in the bed raised the cigarette to his lips with bandaged fingers. “She’s on her way,” he said. “As sure as the sun.”
“Ah,” smiled Raffy. “The great Swan tells us, ‘the rain it raineth every day.’”
“She’s coming.”
part two
South
Chapter 29
It’s a Wonderful World
After the muggy hues of Emerald, North Carolina, Miami had almost blinded her. Miami was in Technicolor. Annie felt as if she’d awakened in a tropical cartoon of hot pink birds and purple flowers, set to salsa music. What’s more, she felt rested, although the rest had been imposed on her.
It was July 6. She hadn’t found her father. She hadn’t reached Daniel Hart. Rafael Rook had set up two meetings that he’d skipped and another one for today to which he was now hours late. She was waiting for him at the Hotel Dorado.
The hotel stood proudly among other rainbow-painted buildings along the oceanfront in South Beach. Its curved windows, neon flutes, and wavy roof made it the prettiest in the line of boxy Deco buildings on the shore. It looked like the sort of place Jack Peregrine would enjoy staying in.
From the chilly air of the silvery lobby, with its steel S-shaped bar and blue velvet stools, Annie moved back outside to the deck chairs beside its turquoise pool. There she again studied the message she’d been handed by a desk clerk hours ago; it claimed that Rafael Rook would be coming to see her here (presumably to pick up the courier case) at one this afternoon. She squinted at her watch. It was after three.
With her hair hidden inside her black Navy baseball cap, in her fresh, ironed white T-shirt and black shorts, Annie and the little white dog Malpy seemed to be the only black-and-white objects in the vivid landscape. In the long open avenue of sand across the street, a yellow lifeguard station stood under an orange striped umbrella. Beyond the beach, sun glittered on blue ocean. Even wearing sunglasses, she found it hard to see in the afternoon light. It was hard to hear, too, above the squawking macaws and the boisterous merengue music booming out of the honking cars that cruised in a caravan up and down Ocean Drive more slowly than pedestrians weaving in and out of their way.
Her father had told her to go to the Dorado to meet Rook. As he’d also written to her on Dorado stationery and it was on a Dorado notepad that he’d long ago scribbled his mysterious password, the hotel seemed a key, somehow at the heart of whatever this big con/sting/dying-wish of his was. And while there were no records of his having ever registered here, some of the older staff—a waitress, bell captain, concierge—had recognized him from a police photo that Annie’s friend Trevor had emailed her. The concierge remembered her father’s cufflinks, the waitress his tips, and the bell captain recalled that while Jack never seemed to have any luggage, he’d nonetheless been always immaculately dressed. These people had no idea what his actual occupation, or his real name, was.
On arrival, after a few hours sleep, Annie had begun her search, helped by Trevor’s useful access to FBI information. There appeared to be no Peregrine in any phone listing of Dade County Directory Assistance, or on any driver’s license or police record or in any hospital or any morgue.
She drove to the Golden Days “rest home,” entering glass doors etched “Center for Active Living” only to be stopped at the lobby desk by a Miss Napp (as she identified herself), who stretched out her hand—lavender manicured fingernails—as if she were going to sing “Stop in the Name of Love.” Miss Napp said visiting hours had not begun; moreover, they had no patient named Jack Peregrine, nor any patient with any of the aliases Annie read off her father’s fake business cards. Under persistent questioning, the receptionist’s tight, made-up face grew increasingly hostile: only visitors who could give the right name of the patients they wanted to see would be allowed in to see those patients. It was hard to argue with such a rule; nevertheless Annie refused to leave. Finally Miss Napp called security. Two men who looked as if they’d been taking steroids walked Annie to the door and stood in front of it with their arms crossed (as much as they could cross their arms), until she drove away in her rental car.
Back at the hotel, after further unsuccessful phone calls to the Miami Vice Sergeant Daniel Hart, who remained “away from his desk,” she kept herself busy on her laptop; she answered her emails, went over her divorce papers from the lawyer, paid her bills, prepared for her fall class at Annapolis, and edited a lecture she would deliver in November at the International Organization of Women Pilots. She ironed her dress uniform.
Finally she bought a bathing suit and took a swim in the hotel pool, where a peculiar sense of peace came suddenly over her, an acceptance that there was nothing more she could do until she could do something. It was a strange unsettling sensation.
After her swim, with Malpy on her lap, Annie fell asleep on a blue deck chair by the pool. At some point she was half-awakened by what indistinctly felt like a shadow moving across her cheek, leaning over her, shading a coppery sun. Then the shadow moved away. She sat up startled, looking around, but there was no one near the pool. It must have been a dream. She fell back asleep.
Her cell phone sang shrilly on the table.
The caller was Sergeant Hart, finally returning her messages. While he had the same pleasant baritone as in their previous talk days earlier, he had taken on a curiously inquisitorial tone. “This is Daniel Hart, MPD. Do you have Jack Peregrine with you here in Miami?”
Confused, Annie rubbed her face to awaken. No, she confessed, she hadn’t yet located her father; that’s why she’d kept calling Hart, hoping he could help her.
He replied brusquely, “Withhold his whereabouts again, I’ll bring you in as an accessory.”
Baffled, she sat up. “What?”
Hart sounded bizarrely annoyed. “You should have told me you were headed to St. Louis as soon as you heard from him. You flew there to help him avoid arrest. Aiding and abetting an escaped suspect is a felony.”
“Hey, just a minute here—”
“I’m on my way to the Dorado now. I’m sorry you picked it. My ex loves that bar so much it makes me sick even to set foot in it.”
Annie swung her legs over the chair side. “What the hell are you talking about? What’s that got to do with me?”
“Sit tight. Don’t make me arrest you.”
“Are you nuts?” Indignation lifted Annie to her feet and sent Malpy tumbling. The little dog trotted to the pool and lay down, staring at his reflection in the water.
Hart added, “And stay away from Rafael Rook.”
Annie paced along the pool edge. “How do you know Rafael Rook?”
“You always answer a question with a question, Annie?”
Once again she was taken aback by his use of her name. “What are you, spying on me? What’s it to you if I see Rafael Rook?”
Hart told her that her “Cuban muchacho” had “a rap sheet thick as the Miami Yellow Pages,” that Rook and her father were notorious in the city for all the cons they’d pulled off together in the last ten years. If she persisted in “hooking up with them”—
She exploded. “Goddamn it, I’m not committing crimes with Jack Peregrine. He’s my father—”
“Ma Barker had sons.”
“This is insane! He said he was dying of cancer. I’m just trying to find him before it happens!”
Hart turned abruptly affable. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
He was not.
For another thirty minutes, Annie paced the Dorado lobby. After a while, she returned to the large tiled swimming pool and paced beside it. Daniel Hart never arrived. The cell phone number he’d given her still didn’t answer; his office at the Miami Police Department kept putting her on hold.
A tan waiter with bleached hair, who’d been staring at her legs as he hurried past, almost ran into her. She grabbed at his tray of martinis and stopped the blue glasses from tipping.
“Good reflexes,” he told her.
She asked him if he knew where she could go rollerblading.
He gestured up the boardwalk, adding in an expansive outburst, “You’re getting a burn. Sun’s a bitch.” He pointed at her legs.
***
On rented red rollerblades, gleaming with sunscreen, running shoes tied around her neck, Annie skimmed along the boardwalk of Ocean Drive, eating slices of an orange, dodging in and out of batches of beach-walkers. She felt her breathing slow as she sped along.
The therapist she’d seen only once had accused her of an addiction to exercise. Perhaps it had seemed that way to a man who could sit in a chair all day, ingesting chocolate-coated coffee beans. But Annie had been raised by a tennis player, her aunt Sam, and by—in his youth—a long-distance runner, her uncle Clark, and from the age of seven on, from sleepy dawns in lap pools to cold nights on track fields, her days had been busy with sports. In sports, as in the Navy, there were rules, and there were prizes; both the restrictions and rewards were ways of keeping life in order. She liked it that in a track event, there were no limits except those of her body’s willingness to refuse defeat. Although smaller than her teammates, Annie had graduated from Emerald High School with four varsity letters. “There’s nothing a woman can’t do,” her aunt had promised her, and Annie had believed it and had proved it on track fields and diving boards, in the muddy sleet at Annapolis, in the sky.
All right, she told herself as she skated along Miami streets, so what if the peculiar Rafael Rook hadn’t shown up and neither had this equally bizarre detective, Daniel Hart? So what if her father remained the receding mirage he had always been? So what if she had no name for her mother but the one on a birth certificate that was obviously a joke, since it was impossible that her mother was Claudette Colbert, who’d been in her seventies when Annie was born? Hadn’t Claudette Colbert done all right as a role model?
When a child, of course, Annie hadn’t recognized the famous name of the dead movie star and so had believed when she’d first seen her birth certificate that Claudette Colbert really was her mother’s name. Aunt Sam, the film lover, had tried to break the news to her gently and had eventually introduced her to the actress by playing her a tape of It Happened One Night.
From the moment Annie watched Claudette Colbert dive off her father’s yacht in the beginning of that film, then hop on a night bus in Miami and wisecrack her way north with Clark Gable—the man for whom Clark Goode had been named—she had liked the small unflappable woman with her chic French bangs, throaty voice, and civilized laughter, with her new moon of an eyebrow raised at the folly of men.
She had asked Aunt Sam for more Claudette Colbert movies and had watched them all, loving the way there were so many airplane pilots in the films; how nothing ever fazed the woman, not Mohawks, not Japanese prison camps, not Nero, not running an egg farm with Fred MacMurray or racing around Paris with Don Ameche in his taxi, not even a whole trainload of drunken quail hunters on their bacchanalian way to Palm Beach.
Annie had replayed Claudette Colbert’s movies until she’d memorized them, pausing the tapes to study the actress’s gestures. The star gave the child something with which to fill in the otherwise empty concept called “my mother.”
Not that she looked for someone to do the day-to-day job. Sam did fine. But she was naturally curious about the original and as there were no other candidates but the star’s name on the certificate, it was to the star that she turned. Jack had told her so many contradictory stories that it was clear he couldn’t remember what absurdity he’d previously made up about the woman who’d borne Annie. So why not take Claudette Colbert as a maternal ideal?
By her teen years, Annie’s enthusiasm for Claudette Colbert faded. The star became just a French joke she shared with Georgette. “Comme ma mère, Claudette, toujours dit,” she would say to her friend. She hadn’t thought much about her “real mother” for years now. Oddly enough, it was her father’s out-of-the-blue demand for help that had brought that unknown woman back into view.
Weaving quickly through traffic, Annie urged herself to take a wry Claudette look at the last few days. So what if—as seemed quite possible—this lunatic misadventure did not provide her with her real mother’s real name? Be fair, what had been lost from her life that had been there yesterday morning? She’d missed a birthday party, that’s all, and she had never really liked her birthday parties anyhow, not after the one when her father had carried her around a roomful of adult strangers who had laughed too loudly too close to her face and had smelled of alcohol.
So what? Her family, her friends, would all still be there in Emerald when she returned from Miami. Meanwhile, wasn’t it a revelation that she could spend three whole hours with Brad Hopper, whom she was divorcing, without crying her eyes out or wanting to murder him? Wasn’t it in fact pleasant that here she was in Miami skating along beside the white beach and blue sea? As Clark joked when she fell off her bike once, “Try again. Life goes on. Don’t you believe in re-cycling?”
Maybe when this was over, she could just sit in Emerald for a while, visiting with Sam and Clark, with D. K., with Georgette and other friends she hadn’t seen for ages. She could take the time to let life go on.
Pulling down her Navy cap, Annie ducked her head and doubled her speed. As she skated into a neighborhood of shady streets, she found herself on a familiar block; pastel stucco houses with tall skinny palms and wide twisted banyans lined a curving flat avenue. When her cell phone sang at her, she sat on the curb to answer it. She heard a female voice she didn’t recognize.
“Is this Lt. Anne Goode?”
“This is Annie Goode, yes? Who is this please?”
The woman had a low smoky voice. “You’re Jack Peregrine’s daughter? In Emerald, North Carolina?”
Annie was so surprised she answered the question. “Yes, but I’m in Miami now. Who is this?”
“Don’t let Jack drag you into something that can get you both in real trouble.” The call abruptly ended.
“What the hell?” Annie said alo
ud. On her cell phone the incoming call was listed as “Private.” Who had it been? Some enemy of her father’s, or some friend? Someone who wanted to steal the courier case, or to whom the case actually belonged? Was it the same person who had arranged to have Jack Peregrine beaten bloody in the Royal Coach Motel? If so, why warn Annie? She would ask Trevor if there were some way to discover the number for a “Private” incoming call.
Looking across the intersection, she recognized the low pink stucco building with its logo in frosted glass—a sun on a horizon line. She’d unknowingly made her way back to “Golden Days,” the extended care facility for “active living,” where earlier Miss Napp had called security on her.
Suddenly she heard a car braking and then the violent screech of skidding tires. She spun around in time to see a pedestrian walk right into the path of a slow-moving large white sedan. The car’s front fender hit the man and he rolled off the hood like a doll made of rags. His cloth knapsack flew into the air. He lay motionless in the gutter.
Out of the big car scooted a tan elderly woman, whose hair and slacks and sleeveless nylon sweater were as pink as her Oldsmobile was white. With a groan the woman bent down to her victim. Quickly, Annie skated across the street and knelt beside the prostrate man. “Don’t move him,” Annie said to the woman.
“I didn’t! Is he dead?”
“I don’t think so.” There was no blood on the man and Annie could feel him breathing. Then his eyelid fluttered and one large rather sweet black eye blinked at her.
The woman grabbed her arm. “He’s dead.”
Gently Annie lifted the victim’s eyelid with her fingers; a round black eye stared curiously back at her. She turned to the terrified driver. “He’s not dead.”
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 23