Nothing, however, would have made Raffy leave the Dorado bar. At first sight he recognized the long-legged blonde as Ms. Skippings of Golden Days. And when he heard the man she was falling all over introduce himself as Lt. Brad Hopper, U.S. Navy pilot, Raffy nearly choked. Brad Hopper was the name of Annie’s husband (or her ex-husband, he wasn’t sure which), but at least Raffy definitely remembered that name, and how many Brad Hoppers who’d been Navy pilots were there likely to be in this world, much less Miami, much less the Hotel Dorado where Annie was staying, or would be staying if she were here, which she wasn’t? Not many.
The Cuban slid to a closer table in order to eavesdrop more easily. He heard Brad mesmerizing Ms. Skippings with gossip about sex-addict superstar celebrities to whom he’d sold private jets. He then bragged to her about his heroics in Desert Fox. He then told her—hard for Raffy even to listen to—how his unhappy marriage had ended with his wife’s infidelity.
As Raffy eavesdropped, suddenly he caught a distant glimpse of Annie herself. She was walking past the bar entrance but, fortunately, she was at the far end of the lobby. Her clothes were soaking wet and she was laughing with a young man whose clothes were also wet, although it was not raining. The man had his back to Raffy, but when he reached the elevator bank, he turned around and kissed Annie. Horribly enough, the man was Sgt. Daniel Hart.
To Raffy’s great relief, Brad, with his back to the lobby and his eyes wandering down Ms. Skippings’s long legs to her stiletto heels, didn’t see Annie at all. Nor did he notice Raffy as anything more than a small thin man with a guitar case who was leaving the bar. Raffy positioned himself to block Brad’s view of the elevator doors as Annie and the detective moved inside them.
***
The elevator ascended and the doors opened on the eleventh floor. Dan and Annie kept kissing. An old bellboy in his seventies was tiredly pushing a full luggage cart along the corridor.
“Honeymooners?” he asked them. They laughed as they helped him maneuver his cart into the elevator. “Don’t go to bed mad. It’s worked for me and my wife, fifty-two years.” The doors closed on him.
***
In Emerald, Georgette was leaving another voice mail on Annie’s cell phone. “Annie, it’s me. What’s wrong with your phone? I hope you get this message. Watch out. I don’t know what’s happening with your divorce but maybe Brad’s going for alimony. He’s in Miami. He’s looking for you. He’s checked into the Dorado. I told him you’d gone to see a girlfriend in Palm Beach but that I didn’t know her name. It was the only thing I could think of. Whatever you’re up to and I think I know, watch yourself! And don’t call me till morning. Somebody needs to get some sleep.”
***
For a long time, the Dorado lobby had been empty of guests, except for a slender young Cuban who sat behind a large fig tree, leaning against the neck of his guitar case.
Raffy was coming to definite deductive conclusions.
Brad Hopper and Melissa Skippings had left the hotel together and he had seen them rubbing against each other as they waited for the valet to bring her SUV.
Daniel Hart had not yet come down in the elevators. From the way they’d been kissing in the lobby, it seemed unlikely that he was up there in Annie’s room arresting her. It was three in the morning. Things were getting more complicated than Raffy felt that he could handle alone.
He stole a phone from a man at the bar and used it to try to reach Annie’s aunt Sam.
“‘How full of briars is this working day world,’” sighed Raffy to himself. “But, on the other hand, ‘Journeys end in lovers meeting, every wise man’s son doth know.’ And the great Shakespeare was a wise man.” He listened to the rhythmic rings of the phone as he called Emerald.
part three
East
Chapter 42
The Secret Heart
Sam in her bedroom at Pilgrim’s Rest thanked Raffy Rook for calling her. She really appreciated all he was doing, although she didn’t necessarily agree that Sergeant Hart was a lying s.o.b. who’d pretend to anything, even love, to trick Annie into giving up Jack and his Cuban gold statue, whatever that was. In Sam’s view, the best thing Raffy could do would be to pack Jack and Annie both into a car and drive them up to Emerald where she could get her brother some serious medical attention. That was her dream now that Annie and Jack had reconnected. To bring Jack back home.
“‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’ Sam,” Raffy told her.
“Oh yes, The Maltese Falcon,” she replied, to his confusion, for he knew as little about the movies as she knew of Shakespeare. “‘I like talking to a man who likes to talk.’ Good night, Mr. Rook. Take care of Annie and Jack.”
“I am honestly making that effort.”
“I believe you.”
***
For years, in the middle of the night, Sam had wandered into unused bedrooms on the third floor of Pilgrim’s Rest. No one lived in them anymore. The musty smell of long emptiness always washed over her like memory. Her brother Jack’s narrow childhood room with its single dormer window had nothing in it anymore of his young exuberance. Instead, the room was crammed wall-to-wall with mismatched pieces of furniture removed from other parts of the house because they were broken or because they had fallen out of fashion—a grandiose gaslight chandelier, a three-legged Chinese Chippendale chair that Jack had broken, a white quilted vanity that had belonged to their mother, the once formidable Eugenia “Grandee” Worth. None of this furniture would ever be used at Pilgrim’s Rest again; yet over generations little of it had been discarded, out of some family refusal to admit defeat that was probably indistinguishable in the end, thought Sam, from sloth or despair.
Every summer she took a carload of “stuff” into town and put it out on the sidewalk in front of Now Voyager with a sign: “Free! Take It!!” Dozens of little wicker baskets, a big plastic globe of the earth, an electric fondue pot, a poplar kitchen hutch with a broken drawer and a missing leg. Every summer, people stopped and took all the things away. Yet the next summer Pilgrim’s Rest was somehow filled to overflowing.
A year ago, in one of her periodic cleanouts of the house (during which she could never bring herself to discard very much), she had rolled the round top of an old bleached oak table from in front of the closet door (she never put clothes in that closet, which she associated with their father locking up Jack). On the floor inside, she found yellow boxes of Super-8 films that her teenaged brother had shot in his “movie phase,” when he had announced his intent to become a great film director. This passion had gradually faded, like his other passions, replaced by newer enthusiasms. The expensive camera equipment had been put away with the metal detector and the fossil collection and the speed bike, the magician’s kit, the telescope.
When Sam had first come across the short films, she’d decided to convert them into a DVD as a present to Annie. But after she’d looked at the originals, she’d never shown the DVD to her niece.
All of the teenaged Jack’s silent movies were shots of his next-door neighbor Ruthie Nickerson. Close-ups of Ruthie’s eyes, of the angle of her cheek, tangle of her hair; long tracking shots of the quick rhythm of her walk. George Nickerson’s seventeen-year-old sister had been fearlessly intimate with the camera in those days, had known that she was beautiful, and in Jack’s movies had dared the viewer not to respond, just as in life she had forced everyone around her into an awkward acknowledgment of her effect on them.
One entire ten-minute film was a single shot of Ruthie standing by the dormer window in Jack’s room on a summer’s afternoon. She wore a long white thin linen shirt, slightly opened to the waist by an easy breeze. She wore nothing but the thin shirt and loose white shorts. Staring into the camera, she smiled a wonderful smile. And when she grew bored with smiling, she turned to look out the window.
Suddenly, in the last moment of the film, the camera jerked away from Ruthie and quickly panned to the doorway. There stood Sam and Jack’s mother Grandee, thin, was
pish, unstrung, silently raving at the boy with the camera, at the girl by the window. The footage ended in a sudden blackout.
When watching this movie, years after the fact, Sam understood for the first time what had happened just before the family explosion she’d always called “That Psycho Night.”
Home after her sophomore year at college, Sam returned late one afternoon from playing tennis with her friend Clark Goode. That summer she taught tennis in the morning and practiced three hours a day, determined to keep up her game, for she depended on a sports scholarship for her tuition; her father had declined to pay her way to college (he thought she wasn’t smart) and her mother hadn’t cared whether she’d gone or not.
It had been a hard summer for Sam. In the spring she had fallen in love with a girl in her dorm, who not only had not loved her back but who had expressed horror upon learning of her feelings. Clark had enlisted in the Army and been sent to Vietnam; now home on leave, he had just announced that, despite his firsthand knowledge of the war’s hellish futility, he was heading back to Saigon in a week to begin a second tour of duty.
In that heavy, heated dusk, Sam was staring lethargically out her window when suddenly she heard her mother shrieking from Jack’s bedroom. She rushed into the hallway where she was almost knocked over as Ruthie ran past her, down the stairs.
Sam had to pull apart Jack and their mother by force. Jack, shirtless, a long-limbed knobbly teenager, hurled himself down the stairs and out of the house in pursuit of Ruthie.
Hours later, Sam found him stretched out on their front lawn, smoking marijuana and staring at the stars. His thin chest looked moon-white against the dark summer tan of his arms.
Jack told Sam with bitterness that Ruthie had no further use for him. He blamed their “crazy bitch of a mother” for ruining his chance for happiness. Sam tried a number of strategies to console him, from “you’ll win Ruthie back” to “time heals all.” She finally resorted to jokes about her being even more unhappily in love than he was. At least, cracked Sam, Jack had a girlfriend to lose.
But to her distress, her brother did not respond with his habitual flippancy. Instead he started to cry; something she hadn’t seen him do for years. He muttered that without Ruthie he didn’t want to live. Pushing Sam off, he vanished into the night. She heard him jumpstart their father’s car and drive it away.
Distraught, Sam called Clark, who came over at once. They spent the night driving around Emerald searching unsuccessfully for Jack. A friend of theirs, a rookie cop (who many years later would become Emerald’s chief of police), assured Sam that there were no reports of car accidents anywhere in the county and Jack would be fine.
At dawn, Clark dropped her back home. On the Nickerson porch next door, Ruthie sat on the steps, smoking a cigarette. Clark went over to talk to her. Sam was at the Pilgrim’s Rest door when she heard a loud crash and a scream. She rushed into the dining room, where she saw Jack smashing their mother’s antique chairs onto the top of her antique table. Grandee was beating him on his back with her fists. Then she picked up a three-foot-tall Tiffany vase that had belonged to her Worth father and hit her son across the shoulders with it. Blue and purple glass petals shattered onto the rug. Jack shook off the glass like water in a rainbow. Grandee flung herself on the floor crying.
Sam ran to the living room where her father sat still as death, drinking his tumbler of cognac, pretending none of it was happening.
“Dad, do something.”
He looked up and said in his stiff-mouthed way, “Go to bed, Samantha.”
She shook him so hard the glass flew from his hand. “Do something before they kill each other!”
He didn’t look at her. “There’s nothing anyone can do.” He picked up the glass from the rug and poured himself more cognac.
Sam left him when she heard the front door slam. Jack was driving off again. She cajoled her mother up the stairs, one by one, by promising that she would repair the Tiffany vase, that it wasn’t very damaged at all.
“He made me do it,” Grandee whispered. “Why does he make me do things I hate myself for? He does it on purpose.”
“No he doesn’t,” Sam kept repeating. “He loves you. He loves you.”
By the time Sam had cleaned up the broken chairs and glassware, it was morning and she had to leave for her summer job at the tennis camp. All day long she was overwhelmed by the sad certainty that whatever “family” the four Peregrines had ever formed together, this summer had ended it forever.
Five days later, Sam sadly drove Clark to the airport to start his long trip to Saigon.
A few weeks after that, Jack’s friend George came over to Pilgrim’s Rest to tell him that Ruthie had run off with a married man in the night.
The next evening Jack was stopped a hundred miles from home for speeding in a stolen car, which luckily he had not yet driven out of the state of North Carolina, so his father still had connections to get the seventeen-year-old’s sentence commuted. Jack had to pay back his fine by clearing two acres of Peregrine underbrush. Over the next month, he worked ten hours a day at the task. His muscles hardened, his skin darkened. Sam’s foreboding proved true. Jack did not ever speak again either to his father or to his mother. He worked till nightfall, walked to town, returned to sleep in the barn.
Six months later, Judge Peregrine was dead. During the judge’s funeral, Jack stole all the cash he could find in the house, threw his suitcase into his mother’s Mercedes coupe, and left Emerald, as he wrote Sam, forever.
But it wasn’t forever. Over the next quarter of a century, he came back to Pilgrim’s Rest three times—once to bring home the infant Annie and the King of the Sky, once when his daughter was seven, and once when he ran out of the cornfield and gave her a ruby for her seventeenth birthday.
***
Now it was time, Sam told herself, for her brother to come home again. She took a DVD she’d labeled “Jack’s Movie” across the lawn to Georgette’s house. It was three in the morning.
Georgette’s sleep-swollen eye peeped cautiously through the front-door glass in her hallway. Only last Christmas she’d had her house burglarized by an ex-con drug addict she’d been treating for bipolar disorder; she’d told him at the police station, “As your therapist, I hope you get help. As a homeowner, I hope you get eight to ten. And give me back my Dad’s silver Rotary trophy!”
As soon as Georgette saw Sam waiting outside her door, she swung it open and yelled, “Stop ringing that buzzer! How do you know I’m not upstairs having wild sex with six men?”
Sam pushed past. “If you are, it’ll have to wait.”
Georgette saw a DVD in her neighbor’s hand. “I am not watching Diabolique with you if that’s what this is all about. I have to be at the hospital in four hours. There isn’t a movie you could name that I’d want to watch.”
Sam sat down on the first chair she came to. “Yes, there is.”
Locating glasses in the pocket of her pink fluffy bathrobe, Georgette examined the DVD case. “‘Jack’s Movie.’ What does this mean? ‘Jack’s Movie’? Is this about Annie’s dad?”
“Yes.” Sam walked back to the front door as if she’d changed her mind about her late-night visit and decided to return home immediately. But then she slowly let the back of her head fall against the doorframe. She looked at the younger woman. “You may want to sit down.”
“Is Annie’s dad dead?”
“No. Well, as far as I know, no.”
“Is this about Annie and the Miami detective?”
“Oh, did you talk to Rafael Rook too? He thinks Annie’s spending the night with that detective Daniel Hart.”
“How does he know? She called me and talked about floating around with this detective in outer space. She sounded intoxicated. And/or she’s in love.”
“Already?” Upset, Sam shook her head no, then yes. “Well, I can’t think about that now.”
Georgette took the older woman by the arm, leading her back into the hall. “Sam, what�
��s the matter with you?”
“Annie may call you about her mother tomorrow. I want you to be prepared.” Sam pulled Georgette down beside her on the painted pine bench.
“Prepared for what?”
“I’m pretty sure I know who Annie’s mother is.” She pressed Georgette’s hands in hers. “Your aunt Ruthie is her mother.”
Georgette laughed. “You’re joking.”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
Georgette looked at her. “No, you don’t. Who told you this?”
“Nobody. Nobody tells me a goddamn thing in this family.” Sam thrust the DVD at her. “Watch this home movie. If you don’t see what I see, we’re both crazy.”
Georgette stood up, frowning. “Let me process this. You think my aunt Ruthie is Annie’s mother because of a movie?”
“Well, tell you the truth I’ve wondered about it ever since Ruthie came back here that night, you remember? You and Annie were fourteen, I think. But this is footage Jack shot of Ruthie about a year before Annie was born.”
The young psychiatrist held out her hand. “Sam, I want to take back what I said. I guess maybe there is a movie you could name that I’ll watch at three in the morning.”
They went to the Nickerson “family room,” still so called, although there was no one in the family living here but Georgette. Together, while the cat Pitti Sing purred for attention, the two women viewed the DVD of the short silent films that Jack had made of the teenaged Ruthie.
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 38