The minty drink was very good. As Annie sipped it, she studied the fake business cards she’d found hidden inside the lining of her father’s leather flight jacket. These cards had different typefaces and introduced different men:
Henry Frank
Antiques and Artworks Appraised
Jarvis J. Rochard III
Deputy Under Secretary, Department of the Interior
Edward Fettermann
Vice President
Southern Hemisphere Mining Corporation
Different addresses were inscribed at the bottoms of the cards. There’d even been a card with the name Clark Lewis Goode.
None of the cards told the truth. Not one of them said,
Jack Peregrine
Confidence Man
It had been on the backs of cards such as these that her father had long ago written out the words by which he’d taught her to read: Cat. Hat. Annie. Dad.
Now with a crayon, Annie wrote single words on the backs of the fake calling cards. She wrote con on one. She wrote art on a second. Then on a third card she found herself writing the word love—as if she were making a little version of that Love sign the waitress Chamayra had advised the world to hang out.
She studied the three cards, silently playing with them as she waited for Chamayra to bring her back news about where Dan Hart might be.
Con. It meant at odds, opposed to, contra; as in pro and con. But to “con” something also meant to study it. Her father had conned his art, was a pro at the con. On the other hand, he was not always enough of a pro, since he was also an ex-con. Annie wryly tore the con card in two.
Art. Raffy had claimed her father’s cons were works of art, that Jack had enough confidence in that art to save the whole city of Miami. Confidence. It meant “with faith.” But her father’s faith was specifically that he could con others into believing his lies. Even if the lie was his love. Hadn’t he conned her that way? Hadn’t she believed in the love he’d betrayed by disappearing? She looked a while at the love card, then she set her mojito down on it, sliding her glass around until the word blurred.
While con meant against, in Italian it was the word for with. So con amore was what Ruthie Nickerson had written on the sheet music of “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago that was in Sam’s piano bench at Pilgrim’s Rest—“with love.” With love to whom? For whom? Jack? Or had some old piano teacher just written that the song should be played passionately?
Annie might as well admit it; like Sam, like Raffy, like who knows else, she had loved the con man Jack Peregrine. But it was from him that she’d learned that love was the biggest con there was; he would make you feel confiding, confidential love, then when you loved him back, you got left in the road in the rain. You were conned by a pro and the art of it was you never saw it coming.
To hear her father tell the story, the only person who’d been able to resist this con-art love of his had been Annie’s mother, who’d walked away.
She looked at the unsigned postcard her father had given her, with the Life cover photo of Claudette Colbert smoking on the tropical balcony.
Claudette died today. Here’s to a great lady.
I’m fine. Hope you’re ditto. Better this way.
Reach for the sky…
Taking the flowery birthday card from her purse, she compared their handwritings. As she suspected, they had the same Greek final e’s, the same wide capital letters with their curving loops like smoke rings. She had little doubt that her father had written both in a fake hand.
Annie’s phone rang although it took her a while to hear it in the noise of La Loca. Georgette was calling from Emerald, where she was in bed reading about the Roman ruins at Baalbek. She just wanted to check in to hear the news from Miami. Annie gave her the highlights, then asked if Georgette knew what had happened to her mysterious aunt Ruthie, the one who’d run off with a married man when she was still a teenager.
Georgette found her friend’s interest in this distant past strange, given all that had happened to her in these last few days. Why would she ask about an aunt of Georgette’s that no one had seen or heard from in well over a decade? Annie explained how the woman at Golden Days yesterday had reminded her of images of Ruthie in the Nickerson house. Georgette thought it highly unlikely that her aunt Ruthie had flown first to St. Louis, then to Miami, merely to catch a glimpse of Jack Peregrine, particularly if—according to Kim—she had chewed him up and spit him out back when he was a teenager.
“Your mom didn’t stay in touch with Ruthie?”
“No way.” Georgette’s mother Kim had disliked her sister-in-law intensely, consistently calling her a “cold fish,” a “ball buster,” someone who “could care less about her family,” and who had ruined the life of the married man from Emerald with whom she’d “eloped,” abandoning him within weeks. (His wife had taken him back and they’d moved away.) By some unexplained means Ruthie had gotten herself admitted to an Ivy League college on a mysterious scholarship. After graduating, she had climbed some unknown ladder to success. According to Kim, she’d never given her only brother, Georgette’s father George, the time of day. In fact, when George had died of a sudden heart attack, all Ruthie had done was send flowers with a message that she was out of the country and unable to attend the funeral. Kim had vowed then never to forgive her and presumably never had.
“How old is Ruthie now?” Annie asked.
Georgette had to compute it: somewhere around forty-three or forty-four or forty-five.
The only time Georgette had ever known Ruthie to come back to Emerald had been when Annie herself had met her, when they’d been in ninth grade.
“I sort of remember that,” Annie said.
She let the memory form, enlarge: they’d driven home from school that day with Georgette’s mother. Georgette was in tears because she’d been hit in the face with a field hockey stick. Pacing in the Nickerson drive near a rental car was a tense, well-dressed, attractive woman clearly waiting for someone to come home.
With shocking curtness, Kim did not even greet this woman but told her, “There’re three cartons in the garage. The other stuff you can box yourself. It’s all in the front bedroom upstairs. I’m sure you’re too busy to stay for dinner.”
Kim hurried inside the house. The woman looked at the teenagers with deep-blue eyes unfathomable to Annie, then calmly introduced herself as Georgette’s aunt Ruthie.
Later that night, at home at Pilgrim’s Rest, Annie raced downstairs with her algebra notebook; studying for her final exams, she couldn’t solve a problem with which Clark would have been useful had he been there. She had little hope that Sam could help her with the math; she expected only sympathy.
Ruthie Nickerson sat at the kitchen table with Sam, drinking wine. The Scrabble game that Annie and Sam had been playing after dinner was still on the table. As Annie entered the room, the stranger was saying something about Clark, how she was sorry he had to stay late at the hospital tonight, how she would like Sam to tell him hello from her. Sam, with a tug at her short nut-brown hair, introduced the woman as Georgette’s aunt, visiting next door.
The woman said, “We already met. Hello again, Annie.”
Sam took Annie’s hand, proudly squeezed it. “Jack’s daughter I was telling you about.”
The woman raised her glass. “Where is he?”
Annie raised her eyebrow. “My bet is, jail.”
Ruthie toasted Annie with the wine. “Good guess, babe. Listen, sorry. Sam said that’s your sky puzzle. While she was on the phone, I did a little of it.”
Annie shrugged. “It just sits there.”
Taking a praline from a candy box labeled “New Orleans,” Ruthie bit into it with beautiful white teeth. “So, how do you like life here in Emerald?”
Annie shrugged again. “Okay.”
“I hated it.” Deftly, the strange woman slid three Scrabble squares onto the board, moving down from a j in the word rajah to form the word jack. “I didn’t know Jack
had a kid. We lost touch a long time ago.” She started spelling ruth off the r in rajah. “The good old bad old days.”
Sam moved away the woman’s hand, flicking the little wood Scrabble squares across the board. “Come on, Ruthie, stop messing around. No proper names.”
Sipping her wine, the coppery-haired woman shrugged. “Hey, ruth means sorrow and compassion. Jack’s a word too. It means, oh, an apparatus to jack up a price or an automobile; it means jack-o-lantern, jack-in-the-box, lumberjack, blackjack, hijack, jack-of-all-trades, straightjacket, jackrabbit, let’s see, jackpot. Jack means whatever the jackshit you want it to.”
With perverse pleasure, Annie laughed, impressed by all the rapid effortless words, aligning herself with this stranger against the aunt she knew and loved. “Jack,” she agreed, “means a lot of things.”
Ruthie, swallowing the last bite of her praline, reached for Annie’s algebra notebook and pencil, glanced at the unsolved problem written there. “What are you looking for?” she asked the teenager. “The roots of that cubic?”
“I don’t usually have trouble with this kind of thing,” Annie felt she needed to say.
Ruthie wrote something on the margin then handed her back the notebook. “Just a little glitch. One of the solutions is an imaginary number. Try 2i and the others will come. Okay?”
Annie looked at the equation, now solved “…Oh. Right.”
Sam folded, unfolded the dishcloth.
The woman leaned over, affectionately rubbing Sam’s short hair. “You never let it grow out?” She found a brush in her purse and drew it through her own rich wild hair. “Listen to this, Annie. Sam’s mother cut Sam’s hair off when she was about your age. Just ran at Sam with the scissors, held her down and cut it off. Right, Sam?”
Annie’s heart jumped in horror. “Why did she do that?”
The stranger said mildly, “I think she went crazy after her husband killed her little boy.”
“Ruthie, for Christ’s sake,” Sam muttered.
“Oh he didn’t do it on purpose. Accidents happen.”
The phone rang and rang. Finally Annie pulled her eyes away from the visitor. “I’ll get it in the hall; it’s probably Georgette,” said Annie. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too.”
Annie ran out of the kitchen and through the house to the hallway. From the kitchen she could hear Georgette’s aunt saying to Sam, “So Jack had a kid. Amazing. Where’s her mother?”
Sam’s reply was too soft to hear.
“Georgette, I’ll call you right back,” Annie whispered, hanging up so she could tiptoe back to the doorway of the kitchen, where she was shocked to see Sam in tears, her long tan strong arms stretched out across the table toward Georgette’s aunt. Ruthie said to her, “Well, if this woman ever does show up, she’ll see who the real mother’s been.”
Sam cried more. “I wish you could stay a little longer. Clark would be glad to see you.”
“Would he? Why?”
The two were silent a moment and then Sam nodded. “That was a miserable summer, wasn’t it? We all messed up.”
“You can mess up a lot before you’re even twenty when you’re moving too fast.”
They left together by the kitchen door. Annie watched them slowly walking through the back yard, past the old rose garden, past the orchard of plum and peach trees, toward the Nickerson house. She went into the morning room to look at the blue-sky puzzle that had been left practically untouched for years. There was now only a third left to go.
That night Annie had a version of her old dream that she’d had so often when she was younger that it had been called “Annie’s dream.” She was flying in her small red airplane over the ocean but this time she had all the flying knowledge that she’d learned from D. K. Destin. Down below her she saw the small ship in the tumbling waves. On the ship stood the young woman in a gold cape. The woman raised her arms, calling on Annie to save her before her ship sank under the waves. This time when Annie’s dad flew past her in his little red plane, she didn’t even bother calling for him to come help. He soared away to the horizon, leaving behind him a trail of curling smoke. She flew as fast as she could to the ship but it was sinking quickly, waves swelling over the bow. Annie awakened in a sob and Sam came hurrying into her room, promising her everything would be all right.
Everything pretty much was. Annie’s life was full and immediate. The next day Georgette and she were preoccupied with composing a letter to old Mr. Neubruck next door, who had called the police because of the noise of their latest party, informing him that his refusal to recycle and his massive use of pesticides on his tomatoes were polluting the planet.
Within a week, they were no longer discussing the mysterious Ruthie, who had left in the night with cardboard boxes from the Nickerson house. (Georgette’s mother said they contained Ruthie’s share of the family plates and silverware but such objects seemed too mundane to interest such a woman.) She never, as far as they knew, returned to Emerald.
Annie never had the dream again and she forgot about Sam’s crying in the kitchen. Still, a vague memory persisted of a handsome woman who’d known how to do algebra and who had made Annie laugh by playing with such quickness on the possible meanings of the word Jack.
Now, all these years later, how odd that the memory had fluttered back at her—like approach lights blinking—the day after she’d seen the woman on the lawn of Golden Days. And even more oddly after she’d seen the woman, or someone like her, standing at the hotel pool.
Georgette thought Annie should go to bed. “This is just a series of coincidences that you’ve gotten fixated on because you’re tired. And I’ve got to go to sleep.”
“Why do all my friends keep telling me they need to go to sleep?”
Georgette yawned. “Human. Your friends are human.”
“Trevor is in bed by ten o’clock.”
“Bring him on,” said Georgette.
“Brad went to bed early too. What I need’s someone who can’t sleep.”
Georgette suggested that midnight might be a good time to go out looking for such a night owl. “Didn’t you say you were in a bar? Bars are full of insomniacs.”
Chapter 40
Moonstruck
At La Loca, Chamayra finally returned with Sergeant Hart’s home address, which proved to be only a few blocks away.
“Danny’s phone’s dead, so maybe go by the house.” The waitress added, “Don’t be causing trouble, okay? Raffy’s left me a message saying don’t talk to nobody about your dad. Where is he?”
“My dad? I hope he’s in Golden Days.”
“No, where’s Raffy? He’s suppose to be like here now and, hey, you see him?” She flung out her arms at the crowded room. “So now I’m gonna worry. You go check on Danny. I can’t leave. I can’t lose my job.” The short woman wiped sweat from her gleamy arms and face.
“I’m sorry I’m causing trouble.”
Chamayra pointed at the words “La Loca” on her turquoise shirt. “I been doing my nurse training a long time and waiting tables a lot longer. You ask me? Everybody’s like in the same crazy boat. Name of the boat? La Loca. Everybody’s like, you know, sailing off the edge of the world fast as they can get there. So I say, just whoa. Hang out the Love sign.” She leaned into the booth and shook the blue fish netting overhead, where the plastic G.I. Joes tangled with the Barbie dolls. “Raffy’s totally like got this thing how Dan’s gonna bust him big-time. No way.”
“No way?” Annie’s eyebrow went up. “Isn’t Hart trying to arrest Raffy? He sure looked like it yesterday at Golden Days when he chased him down Ficus Avenue.”
Upset, the waitress slapped her hands on her arms. “You kidding me? You saw him at Golden Days chasing Raffy?”
“Yes, yesterday.”
“Yesterday?! Why didn’t you tell me? Motherfucker, I got to get your dad out of that place pronto. Those two pingitas, Raffy and your dad, gonna get me fired! What is their problem?”
�
�It’s a cops and robbers sort of thing with them,” suggested Annie.
“Men, they’re so stupid. And me, I had to have boys. And you know what they’ll grow up to be?” Chamayra hoisted her tray of dirty dishes. “Men.”
“Probably.”
***
Driving along a moonlit street beside the midnight blue of the bay, Annie finally found Hart’s small bungalow (its curb number obscured by weeds). The sawed-up trunk of a large magnolia tree lay scattered about the front lawn in raw stacks. Mounds of chippings and sawdust matted the patchy grass and there were six piles of branches arranged in a tall circle as if in the morning the yard would be the setting for some horrific auto-da-fé. On a grass-choked driveway a blue pickup truck was parked with its doors flung open and with a windsurfer in the back. In the garage sat a vintage Thunderbird coupe, pale blue with a white hardtop and color-match rings on the whitewall tires and porthole windows.
The 1920s Spanish stucco house had its windows and metal screen door thrown wide open. Out of the windows she could hear Otis Redding sadly singing, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now),” as if the house itself were in mourning. The only light was the blue wavering shimmer of a television screen. Chamayra had given her no idea whether Hart lived here alone or not. No one answered her repeated call through the opened door and finally she walked uninvited into the darkness.
Without the sound on, a baseball game in a half-empty stadium played on a flat screen television at the other end of the room.
“Sergeant Hart? It’s Annie Goode. Daniel Hart? Anybody home?” Turning from the small arched foyer into the first room, she tripped over something metallic and sharp that turned out to be a chainsaw. Rubbing her ankle, she felt for a light switch.
A recessed light revealed a living room in disarray. There were half-emptied packing boxes on the bare terra-cotta tile floor. On built-in shelves along the walls, CDs, DVDs, and hardcover books had been stacked among wood angels, clay mermaids, and tin-toy bands.
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 34