Georgette turned off her DVD player. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. Ruthie was hot. It’s clear Jack was crazy about her. It’s clear your mother Grandee was crazy.”
“Don’t go there. Talk about Annie.”
“I guess you’ve got a point about Annie. There’s a…”
“Family resemblance?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?” laughed Sam tensely.
“Sort of. Still it’s a stretch. Wouldn’t somebody have said something?”
“People don’t say things.”
Georgette snorted. “Get into psychiatry. People say things to me for fifty nonstop minutes. You can’t stop them from saying things. They keep saying things as I shove them out the door.”
Sam rubbed her hand affectionately on the case of the DVD. “You didn’t see Jack’s face when Ruthie ran off. I always suspected he went after her when he robbed us at Dad’s funeral…But I couldn’t even think about it then. Dad had…drowned. Mama’d gone even crazier. This is before your time, of course.”
“It’s a relief to find something that’s before my time,” admitted Georgette. “So you think Ruthie is Annie’s mother? Wow. Ruthie stood right out there in the yard with us that night in the ninth grade. And then she just packed up the Nickerson salad forks and left and never came back.”
Sam said that she didn’t think Ruthie knew that Annie was the child she’d given up at birth. Once, pressed, Jack had told Sam that Annie’s mother had abandoned him, believing their just-born baby had been adopted. Sam suspected Ruthie had no idea that Jack had kept the child and that the child was Annie.
Georgette wondered, “Why didn’t you ever ask Jack about Ruthie’s being the mother?”
“I did ask him,” Sam sighed. “I asked him the last time I saw him. I asked him on the phone for years. He says the mother was just some girl he’d known in Barbados.” Leaping to her feet, Sam paced the hallway, nearly tripped up by Georgette’s Siamese cat. “You know what I think? He was always scared he’d lose Annie if Ruthie found out.”
Georgette’s cat brushed against her legs. “He did lose Annie, Sam! Wasn’t that always Annie’s point? He lost her when he left her here. And Ruthie didn’t find out because she didn’t want to…Do I call Annie, tell her about Ruthie, is that what you want?”
Sam took a long breath. “No. No. I don’t want you to say anything till she gets through this mess with Jack. Please. I just want you to be there if she needs you.” Sam picked up the young woman’s bathrobe belt, which was hanging tangled at her feet. “You want to trip and fall on this thing?”
“Oh Sam, don’t cry.” Georgette hugged her.
After Sam left, Georgette rubbed her plump white arms as if she were warming herself. “Sacrebleu!” she said to her cat Pitti Sing, who arched softly against her ankles.
Chapter 43
Misleading Lady
Across the lawn at Pilgrim’s Rest, Clark Goode was awakened by a knock on his bedroom door. He had drifted off into a dream in which he was teaching his first wife Tuyet and the seven-year-old Annie to fly-fish on Emerald’s Aquene River. In the dream, his childhood tormenters the Fanhart brothers had suddenly ambushed him, just as they’d often done on his way home from school many years ago. But in the dream, Clark was an adult, dressed in his operating scrubs and towering over the Fanhart bullies, who were still fat little boys in the third grade. Easily, triumphantly, he chased them away. But when he turned around, both Tuyet and Annie had disappeared.
“Clark?”
He woke fully, expecting a hospital emergency. But Sam was saying, “It’s Brad. He just called me about Annie.” Sam held the old dog Teddy in her arms.
“What? What’s wrong! Where is she?”
“It’s okay.” Sam shook his foot. “Somewhere in Miami.”
“Somewhere? Why is Brad calling you about Annie in the middle of the night?”
Teddy dropped from Sam’s arms onto the bed, where she tried to make a pillow comfortable by pawing at it. “Brad’s in Miami too. At the Hotel Dorado.”
Sitting up, Clark turned on his light. “Just tell me! Is Annie okay?”
“I think she’s on a date.”
“What?” Clark felt for his glasses. “Brad called to tell you Annie was on a date?”
“No, Georgette told me that. When Brad got to the Dorado, she wasn’t in her room. He’s trying to find her; he even called Georgette.” Sighing, Sam sat down at the foot of Clark’s bed.
To wake himself, Clark yanked hard at his hair. “I’m having trouble here. Go back. Brad’s in Miami?”
“Yes. Clark, will you catch up? He went there to talk Annie out of the divorce.” Sam started folding the coverlet bunched at the bed’s end into neat squares.
As Clark checked the old plastic radio alarm clock by his bed, he noticed Sam was still in her slacks and shirt. “Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I went over to Georgette’s and woke her up.”
“Why?”
“To have a serious talk with her about Annie. Because if Annie needs help, she’ll call Georgette. She always calls her.”
“That’s because your line’s always busy because you’re calling her.”
“Go ahead and laugh.” When Sam had come home, she’d been unable to sleep. Then Brad had called.
“Why isn’t Brad asleep? Why are Georgette and I the only people trying to sleep in this group?”
Sam wanted Clark to come down to the kitchen with her for some more of the leftover sushi. “It won’t be any good in the morning.”
“Neither will I.” He yanked the coverlet away to stop her from unfolding, refolding, unfolding it.
“There’s no need to be sarcastic, Clark. Also I had a call from Rafael Rook.”
“Really? You’re just a little magpie, aren’t you?”
“This is serious.” It seems that Jack had asked Rook to keep an eye on Annie, so Rook had been hanging out at the Dorado, when Brad Hopper had suddenly come into the bar. Then Annie had shown up in the lobby in soaking wet clothes with a man whom she’d taken up to her room. “It was that Miami detective, Daniel Hart. I told you.”
Clark felt with his bare feet for his loafers. “Told me what?”
“That Annie was on the edge.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I’ve told you that for years.” But, luckily, Sam noted, Brad had been distracted when Annie had walked past him kissing Sergeant Hart.
“Is ‘luckily’ really the word we want here?” Clark asked. He felt he had to add that Sam was not making any sense. It was a shame he didn’t have any chlorpromazine hydrochloride in his medical bag.
She gave a theatrical laugh. Sense? Did it make any sense that after what Annie had gone through over the past few days—flying in a storm to St. Louis, flying to Miami, seeing her dying father for the first time in a decade—did it make any sense that Annie—in whose closet the hangers, all facing the same way, were 1.5 inches apart, in whose condominium the little kitchen looked as if the entire USS Enterprise crew had been in there cleaning it all day—did it make sense that Annie—hurrying to find Jack before she had to be back in Annapolis for a test flight!—would take the time off to wander around in wet clothes with a strange man at the wee hours of the morning, and take that strange man up to her hotel room?
Clark yanked his bathrobe from Sam, who was folding it as well. “I thought you said you liked Sergeant Hart.”
“Clark, please! I called her. Six times, maybe more. Her phone’s off.” She punched a soft spot in the pillow for the restless Teddy. “What if she marries him on the spur of the moment? You of all people know how that can work out.”
He leaned over the window bench to look at the sky, an indigo blue. “I don’t think Elizabeth Taylor spent any more time thinking about marriage than you do.”
Sam carefully placed Teddy on the softened pillow then lay down beside her. Finally she said, “I told Georgette about Ruthie.”
Surprise
d, he walked back to the bed. “Told her what about Ruthie?”
Sam squeezed her arms. “I showed her those movies Jack made of Ruthie. Tell me that was okay. I decided that if Jack tells Annie that Ruthie’s her mother…”
Clark sat quietly beside her, rubbed her back. “If Jack wouldn’t say it to you, he’s not going to say it to Annie. Besides, you don’t even know if it’s true. Jack told you he met Annie’s mother in Barbados.”
“Oh, Jack’ll say anything.”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“I think I always suspected it.” Sam sighed. “Ruthie takes off, then six months later Jack takes off, then a year later he shows back up with a blue-eyed blonde-haired baby.”
“Lots of people have blue eyes and blonde hair.”
Sam gave him a look. “You know what, Clark? Movies don’t lie.” She reached out for the old Shih Tzu, held her against her chest. “It used to hurt my feelings so much when Annie would go on about ‘Where’s my “real” mother?’”
Clark nodded. They sat together silently a while longer, listening to Teddy’s light rasping snore.
Sam said, “I want her to be happy. Fall in love and be happy.”
“Not necessarily the same thing.” He returned to the window where now the deep blue of the sky was washed with purple.
“Tell me something good,” she demanded.
“Annie will fall in love and be happy.”
“Clark, don’t joke.” The dog wriggled away, toppling with a wheeze off the bed.
“Why not? Here’s a new one. You heard about the optometrist who fell into a lens grinder?”
“And made a spectacle of himself? That’s not a new one. I haven’t heard a new one from you in twenty years.” Sam rolled from the bed, picked up Teddy and walked with her to the door. “Okay, I’m leaving. Good night. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Sam?” She turned back. “I think you’re a great mom.”
“Don’t change your mind,” she said. “I’m fixing up Jack’s old room, just in case he wants to come recuperate at home.”
Clark smiled at her. “Just in case.”
From the pocket of her shorts, Sam’s cell phone played a jaunty melody. She answered. “Oh, hi…No, I haven’t heard a word.”
Worried, Clark asked, “Who is that?”
But Sam was laughing. “Sure, come on over for breakfast,” and she slapped the lid shut.
“Was that Georgette?” He looked at the Nickerson house next door where lights were burning.
“No, it was D. K.”
“Hey, let’s ask Georgette over too. She’s awake. We could look up how to play bridge on the Internet.”
Sam glanced out the window. “Those are just the lights Georgette always leaves on. Don’t bother her. She needs her rest.”
He snorted elaborately. “Oh, okay! I was headed right over there to wake her up. But that’s good advice, Sam. Not to barge in on somebody while they’re sleeping.”
Teddy growled with impatience until Sam took her away.
Left alone, Clark lit a cigarette and leaned far out the opened window, turning south, away from the Nickerson house, toward the dark roll of green fields, as if he could see Annie all the way in Miami if he looked hard enough.
But all he saw were stars, making way for dawn.
***
Hours later he was awakened by a sweet smell. Down in the kitchen, Sam was flipping flapjacks at the stove griddle.
At the kitchen table, dressed for work but still in her pink fluffy bedroom slippers, Georgette sleepily drank coffee from one of the “Movie Mugs” Sam sold at Now Voyager. This one showed Claudette Colbert in Misleading Lady.
“I’ll give you this, Sam,” said Georgette, studying her mug. “In so far as an ’80s girl can look like a ’30s star, Ruthie looks a little like Claudette. It’s the eyes. What color were their eyes? Isn’t that weird? We only have black-and-white photos. D. K., what color were Ruthie’s eyes?”
At the back door, D. K. Destin smoked a cigarette, leaning from his wheelchair to puff the smoke outside. “Give me a break, how the hell am I suppose to know what color? White people’s color. Green, blue, one of those colors.”
Clark walked into the kitchen with a yawn. “So what’s happening?”
“Banana pancakes,” Sam told him.
The kitchen wall phone rang. Georgette answered it. “Peregrine-Goode residence.”
“Hello,” said a cheerful male voice. “My name is Trevor Smithwall, I’m Annie’s next-door neighbor. Are you Aunt Sam?”
Georgette made a phhtt noise. “Do I sound like a grown woman’s aunt? I’m Annie’s friend Georgette Nickerson.”
“Oh, you’re Georgette. I probably know more about you than you can imagine.”
Georgette told him that he had no idea how imaginative she could be.
“Who is it?” asked Clark. “Why don’t people say who they’re talking to?”
When Georgette explained who it was, Sam ran at her. “Ask about Amy Johnson. Did something happen to Annie’s cat?”
Trevor passed along his assurances that Annie’s cat was fine. No, he was calling to tell Annie’s family that the best thing they could do would be to encourage her not to try to solve her father’s legal troubles. Trevor would have told her so himself but she had not returned his calls—
“Join the crowd,” said Georgette. “So just lay it out, Trev, what’s this got to do with you? You’re with the FBI.”
Trevor admitted that was true.
“I know it’s true. That’s why I’m asking, what’s this got to do with you?”
“Just tell her to stay out of her father’s problems and come home. And tell her to call me. Nice to talk to you. Bye.”
Georgette relayed Trevor’s cryptic advice to the others.
Dropping her spatula in the sink, Sam shut off the gas griddle. “That’s it. I’m going to Miami and bring Jack home. I can’t stand this stress anymore.” She made a quick phone call to the college student who worked summers at Now Voyager and asked her if she could take care of the store for a few days, that Sam had to go to Miami. The request elicited a groggy “No problem,” which Sam decided to take at face value.
“What’s the fastest way I can fly to Miami?” she asked D. K., who was soaking his cigarette butt under the faucet.
“In a plane,” he told her.
“Can’t you tell when I’m serious?”
Clark said, “I need to get to the emergency room where things are a little calmer.”
***
Clark and Georgette drove together to Emerald Hospital. Neither spoke until they reached River Road. Below them, the Aquene River roiled over its banks, fast, muddy red, still floating debris from the storm. “You know aquene is the Algonquin word for ‘peace’?” Clark finally said.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we got some of that?” sighed Georgette.
As they parked in the staff lot and walked toward the hospital, she suddenly asked, “Okay, what do you think of Sam’s theory that Aunt Ruthie is Annie’s mother?”
She turned to wait for him to answer her. For a moment, he ambled along with his old briefcase swinging slowly at his side, not speaking. “Clark,” she repeated, “What do you think of Sam’s theory?”
He took off his round tortoise-shell glasses, rubbed his dark-blue eyes, wiped the glasses on the lab coat he already wore. “I think we ought to tell Sam more often that she’s done a great job raising Annie.”
He walked to the entrance, where young smokers gathered. “Y’all should quit,” he told them. The smokers stared at him, hostile.
Georgette walked Clark through the busy hospital corridor to Pediatrics. “We could find out. I could take my blood. Ruthie’s my aunt.”
He nodded. “That’s between you and Annie. So, you hear the one about the midget fortune-teller who got arrested but she was so little she slipped through the jail bars and escaped? Well, they put out an all points bulletin on her that said—”
; “—Small medium at large,” Georgette finished the pun for him.
He made a rueful noise. “I guess I need to get some new puns or some new friends.”
Chapter 44
Daughters of Destiny
Bright and early, Annie arrived at Golden Days for her appointment with her father’s doctor. Too bright, too early. She had an excruciating headache from last night’s margaritas and a queasy stomach that hadn’t been helped by all the hot salsa and mole she’d eaten at La Loca. Far more unsettling was her sense that she’d undergone a transformation in her personality. Insofar as she’d ever known herself, Lt. Anne Peregrine Goode did not wake up in bed in a hotel room with a stranger who was hugging her family dog.
But that’s where she’d found herself at 7 a.m., in a Miami hotel bed with Malpy and Daniel Hart. She’d managed to free the dog without waking the detective. The prospect of having him prove indifferent or tasteless or stupid or smug or not everything she had felt him to be last night was unbearable to her. Better to slip away and if he never got in touch again, it would be sad, but so be it. Awakening him appeared, however, to be only a remote possibility, since once again he looked to be dead. Despite Malpy’s licking his face he did not budge.
Undeterred by physical pain and psychological shock, she’d listened to messages on her hotel phone line—including multiple requests from both Sam and Trevor to call them back or at least to turn her cell phone on, as well as news from Georgette that Brad had checked into the Hotel Dorado and was looking for her. She didn’t feel up to talking to Trevor (much less Brad) but she did phone Sam. Sam was driving to the RDU airport. Annie managed to persuade her that she, Annie, was perfectly fine and could take care of Jack and that Sam should return immediately to Emerald and wait for news. “There is no need for any of you to come to Miami. Please don’t come to Miami. I am handling this! I don’t know why people don’t realize I can handle things! I flew fuckin’ combat missions!”
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 39