The Four Corners of the Sky Page 18

  “That’s a tough one,” admitted Judge Patterson, nodding. “You could maybe sue him for support. For money.”

  Annie struggled to sit maturely in the large leather chair. “No.” She gave her head a fierce shake. “I don’t want money.”

  “What would you like?” asked Judge Patterson.

  The child thought. Finally she sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “I told you it was a tough one. Well, think it over and let me know. It’s an interesting question.”

  Judge Patterson located Sam and sat with Annie in the lobby to wait for her. “You ought to be a judge yourself,” she told the child. “The bench could use some more smart women.”

  For the next year, whenever adults asked Annie what she planned to be, she told them “a judge like my grandpa and Judge Patterson.” Some people in Emerald thought this was “precious.” Some thought the less Annie knew about her grandpa the better.

  Clark warned Annie, with one of his terrible puns, that she was too fast to be a judge. What she wanted was wheels. “Whoa, slow down, you’ve got the court before the horse. You need a job where you don’t sit still.”

  Years later, when Annie flew her first mission for the Navy, she joked to Clark that he’d been the one first to predict and then to make possible the “dangerous” profession of aviation from which he’d tried to divert her.

  “See, Clark, it all balances out.” She patted his shoulder. “As long as you and Sam don’t go anywhere, I can go 1200 miles per hour.”

  “So Sam and I just get to hang around here waiting?”

  She laughed. “That’s what parents do.”

  ***

  On the Pilgrim’s Rest porch, Sam sat with her cell phone on the table beside her rocker, waiting for Annie to call to say she’d made it to St. Louis. Clark was still at the hospital, where he was removing a .22 slug from the thigh of a ten-year-old whose little brother had accidentally shot him with one of the family guns.

  Sam couldn’t sleep. She told herself to stop worrying about Annie. Annie flew every day in all kinds of weather—much faster than she was flying the King of the Sky to St. Louis tonight. In fact it was almost impossible to conceive of the speeds Annie flew. How was it imaginable for anyone to travel at 1000 miles per hour, at 2000? What must that feel like? In a big passenger plane, you had almost no sense of speed at all and yet you were sometimes going as much as 600 miles per hour. But suppose you were moving three times that fast? It must feel…well, impossible to grasp.

  Sam looked over at the Nickerson house next door. All the lights were off except the one in Georgette’s bedroom. She went back inside. In the hallway her glance caught something glittering. It was the pink baseball cap that Annie had worn here nearly twenty years earlier; the cap Sam had taken out of the suitcase with Jack’s flight jacket tonight. Annie had forgotten and left it sitting on the newel post.

  The green and red beads spelling ANNIE on the front of the cap drew Sam’s attention again. A few of the brass-set round beads sparkled in the chandelier lights as she turned the pink brim. Finding the bone-handled magnifying glass that Clark kept in the hall table drawer because he couldn’t see the print on envelopes as well as he once had, she studied the capped round beads, noticing that they’d been painted over with green, blue, and red paint. Where the paint had worn away was where the sparkle was. She scratched more paint off with her fingernail; wherever she removed the paint, a shimmering twinkle of bright color flared in the light.

  In the kitchen she scrubbed with a soapy brush on the water-based paint until all thirty-seven beads were clean. There would have been, she counted, forty-two little beads spelling ANNIE, except that five were missing.

  She took the pink hat into the living room to hold under a halogen lamp so she could examine the exposed beads in its brighter light.

  In her excitement, Sam couldn’t stop herself from calling next door. Georgette took a long time to answer her phone.

  “Did I wake you up?”

  Georgette told Sam that she’d been trying to read herself to sleep with her own upcoming conference paper on sleep disorders but that all she’d done was convince herself that her paper was stupid.

  “I know the feeling,” Sam commiserated. “When I can’t sleep, every wrong I’ve ever committed slips in through the cracks in the doors and windows like the ghosts in Poltergeist.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “I want you to come over here and look at something.”

  But Georgette didn’t want to get dressed in order to come over to examine Annie’s childhood baseball cap. Besides, Georgette’s appraisal of the true value of the glass beads on the cap was useless. Although she had grown up working in Nickerson Jewelers, she had never possessed what her mother Kim had called “an eye for the real thing.” “So, good night, Sam. I have a feeling those glass beads are just glass beads. You’re sounding a little too much like my mom.”

  But Sam Peregrine had always had a good eye. Good enough to win the state championship in her division in competitive tennis singles for six years running and to make it to the finals last year against opponents half her age. Still good enough to spot an intact 1922 print of Murnau’s Nosferatu in a tin can at a Paris flea market last autumn. Still good enough to see that the “glass” beads spelling the five letters of Annie’s name on the pink baseball cap, the cap that Jack had always oddly insisted that Annie “hang onto,” were not glass beads at all: they were precious stones.

  Those beads, mounted in bezel-rimmed settings of cheap brass, were in fact, in Sam’s opinion, ten rubies, fifteen sapphires, seven diamonds, and five emeralds, all of very high quality and each approximately 6.5 millimeters in diameter, or three carats in size.

  And here, thought Sam, Clark and Annie had always given her such grief about never throwing anything away.

  Chapter 23

  Family Honeymoon

  Annie was more than an hour west of the small Kentucky airfield where she’d refueled. She was thinking about the odd peacefulness she felt with Sam and Clark at Pilgrim’s Rest. From her childhood, there had been the part of Jack Peregrine in her that was relentlessly unsettled, like a craving for salt she couldn’t satisfy. But that restlessness eased when she came home to the tall house where she’d lived as a child. At Pilgrim’s Rest she could look out over the land and wait for the reddening of the sky and the sound of Clark and Sam’s voices as they pushed together in the porch swing at dusk. They were in her memory—though she knew them now to be far more complicated—like the clear figures in an old-fashioned snow globe of America that had somehow survived on this small hill in this small town. Here at Pilgrim’s Rest she could wait for the breeze to lift the air, for Teddy’s old arthritic sigh, for what in the moment let her feel easy, when her shoulders, her neck, her hands, everything loosened, because she was home.

  But she never stayed long. She was her father’s daughter and needed to move. Pilgrim’s Rest was too fenced in. Her first remembrance of the place was its borders: the white gateposts, the red barn doors, the corners of the blue-sky puzzle, the square picture that she’d painted on the barn wall for Clark. And the vast open world outside the fences pulled her to the horizon.

  As an adult it was only in the fast world of the sky that she found the ease she’d once felt at home with Sam and Clark, Georgette and D. K. Maybe, she thought, this trip to St. Louis could somehow help her bridge horizons and borders. Maybe her father would ask for her forgiveness for old injuries she’d almost forgotten; he would tell her how to reach a mother she hadn’t much thought about for a long time. And when that happened, Annie’s sinews would untighten for good, all the restlessness would still.

  Or maybe not.

  Who knew what Jack Peregrine would tell her, or whether it would be true? How much could she trust a man who made his living by telling lies? Would he now, even on his deathbed, if he were on his deathbed, tell her the truth about anything?

  Annie gave the little
white Maltese a pat, awakening him. “It’s a good thing I’m going to St. Louis,” she said. He looked at her sleepily. “Okay, Malpy, here’s where you say, ‘You’re absolutely right.’” The dog barked in a cooperative manner.

  There was a faint, almost imperceptible catch in the Piper’s engine before its steady humming resumed. Some pilots might not have noticed but Annie had unusually acute hearing. At medical checkups in Annapolis, she had always scored in the top one percentile on auditory tests, as well as tests of her vision, reflexes, and coordination; it was why she was the pilot so often picked to fly test runs. Georgette teased her: “You’ve got the brain, you’ve got the body. We just need to work on the heart a little bit.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my heart,” Annie insisted to her friend.

  “Really? Seems to me it hurts.”

  “My neck hurts, that’s all. Pinched nerve.”

  “Right.”

  Now Annie moved her neck side to side, hearing the crunch and crackle. At Annapolis she’d had to wear a brace late in her senior year, so painful was the pinch, or alternatively compressed disk, or myofascial trigger points, or displaced vertebrae—the neck specialists all had different diagnoses. Clark thought Annie’s problem went all the way back to the motorbike accident. Georgette thought it was psychosomatic.

  In the King, flying through the black night, Annie rolled her neck, humming, “Don’t tell me the lights are shining, any place but there.” She rubbed at the knot in her shoulder’s muscle. The instrument panel was so familiar she knew right where to tap it when a light blinked. The red engine-overheat warning light flashed on, then off. Or had it? Was she losing thrust? No, indicators looked fine. “…Lights are shining, any place but there.”

  ***

  Back in Emerald, Clark returned home from the hospital after removing the bullet from his young patient’s leg and assuring the parents that the wound was superficial.

  In the kitchen he ate a little more birthday cake. Sam found him there. “You’re going to get diabetes,” she prophesized, watching Clark cut off a second piece of the cake.

  “That’s your only hope for justice, isn’t it?” His weakness for late-night sweets never put weight on him. “Did Annie call?”

  “Not yet.” Sam said she had some news: the beads on Annie’s pink childhood cap were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. She couldn’t wait to tell her.

  “That’s ridiculous.” Clark carried the baseball cap into the morning room and under a lamp studied the beads of colored glass. He said the odds were a million to one that they were real gems.

  “Well, they are,” Sam said, leaning over his shoulder. “And Annie will be glad Jack wanted her to have something valuable from him, some kind of inheritance.” Her brow tightened. “Especially if he’s dying.”

  Clark looked closely at the beads. “If these beads are real, Jack’s getting her mixed up in something criminal.”

  “It won’t be the first time,” admitted Sam.

  “And dangerous. Don’t even bring this up to her.”

  She sighed. “I care about one thing. Is that terrible? Her happiness. Let them settle this before he goes. All I want is Annie to be happy and get married and have children and bring them here for me to play with.”

  “That’s more than one thing.”

  “No it’s not.” She surfed cable movie channels for a late-night classic, settling on Giant.

  They watched for a while. Clark broke off a taste of the cake for Teddy, who took it back across the hall to her pagoda.

  Sam mused, “You remind me of Jordy Benedict. How Jordy rejects Rock Hudson’s macho ranch business and becomes a doctor and marries a Mexican nurse.”

  Clark slowly scraped icing from his cake. “Except my father was no Rock Hudson and he was in the not-so-macho landscape nursery business.”

  “That’s what Rock Hudson did in All that Heaven Allows. Maybe your dad was secretly gay.”

  “As far as I know,” Clark said, “my father was not secretly anything. When we cleaned out his drawers and closets after he died, there wasn’t a secret in them. Unless you count a box of gold-plated golf tees that had never been used. It was heartbreaking how unsecret he was. And for another thing, I did not marry a Mexican nurse; Ileanna as you know was a radiologist from Argentina.” He grabbed the remote, switched it to the Southeastern Doppler “Storm Alert” on the Weather Channel.

  For a while, they listened to alarmist predictions for the St. Louis area.

  “We should have gone with Annie.” Clark ambled to the door. “We could have all died together.”

  He returned with another piece of birthday cake to find Sam on the floor, briskly touching her toes. Finally she stopped, out of breath, and crawled back to the couch. “Is the only point of life to look better when we die?”

  Clark said, “You look pretty good for your age.”

  “What a compliment. I’m not through talking about Annie’s search for love.”

  He scooped off the icing from the cake and ate it. “It seems to be not so much Annie’s search for love as it is your search for love for Annie. What are you, her personal love shopper?”

  She muted the Weather Channel. “Brad is hanging in there. Maybe she should give him another chance.”

  “Sam, it’s only in old movies that women never stop loving their first husbands. Believe me, Ileanna moved onto a new life before my U-Haul left the driveway. Before the tax year was out, she’d married her accountant.”

  “You ought to do that. You wouldn’t get audited so much.”

  Clark finished his cake. They sat watching the weather. It wasn’t good. Finally he announced that he’d met a radiologist at Emerald Hospital and thought he’d invite her home. Maybe they could cook Jill’s sautéed chicken with ginger recipe. “That recipe’s the only good thing Jill left you.”

  “Not true.” Sam turned off the television. “She left me those damn tropical fish. I thought those fish were going to live forever. I thought they were going to outlive me.”

  “They might have, if your mother hadn’t poured bleach in their tank. There’s always a silver lining.”

  Sam laughed. “Are you planning to leave me for another radiologist?”

  “Nope. It’s just you and me, kid. Family honeymoon.” He clinked his empty tea mug against her empty wine glass. “Well, you and me and that woman you met on the cruise to Alaska.”

  “Her name was Rachel as you very well know. And she went back to her partner.”

  “She did? I’m sorry.”

  Sam smiled at the lanky man in his loose, frayed khakis; she patted his arm. “This town has had their hearts set on us ever since I had a meltdown at St. Mark’s about your dying. And then you didn’t even die.”

  He smiled back at the tanned woman, trim in her golf slacks and polo shirt. “Remember when Georgette and Annie had the wedding for us under the big beech tree, with ‘borrowed’ rings from Nickerson Jewelers? What were they, nine, ten?”

  Sam headed for the kitchen. “You just couldn’t get over Ileanna in time.”

  “In time for what?” Clark followed her. “Like you were waiting? Like you could get over anything. You radicals are so damn conventional.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Jill.” He put his dishes in the deep Victorian sink. “Jill.”

  Sam butted him from behind. “There were plenty before Jill and there’ve been plenty after her too.”

  Clark laughed as he rinsed plates. “Plenty? Sam, you’re starting to believe your own FBI report.”

  Sam was proud of the FBI file on her. Back when she’d been an active protester, showing up at rallies and marches and vigils, the government had kept a secret dossier on her. She sent away for it under the Freedom of Information Act. To her surprise, she found herself accused of sleeping with radical Lesbians she’d never even met. She told everyone she felt like a disappointment; her real life had been so much less exciting than the Right had pretend
ed. In her real life, she’d been hard-pressed to find any partners at all, much less well-known rabble-rousers like the names in the secret report.

  “Your problem,” Clark said, wrapping the leftover cake in aluminum foil, “is you pick the wrong people.”

  “I pick the wrong people?” She folded the dishtowel. “Ileanna got your Chicago house and everything in it! What is it with you and radiology?”

  Clark opened the front door to call Malpy in before he remembered that Malpy was on his way to St. Louis with Annie. “I admit, that particular radiologist was a mistake.”

  The phone in the hall rang. They both reached for it.

  But it was only Brad Hopper. He wanted Sam to know that he was landing right now at Lambert–St. Louis in one of the Hopper corporate jets. He had an unexpected passenger with him, someone that D. K. Destin had forced him to take along. A guy named Don somebody, some kind of businessman buddy of D. K.’s. The guy was asleep in the cabin. D. K. had practically blackmailed Brad into giving this freeloader a lift.

  Brad said it had been a rough flight to St. Louis, but if Annie’s father was dying and had asked for Annie and if she had gone to find him—well, that was a wonderful thing for her to do, considering the negative comments Brad had heard her make about her father. “But you can’t help loving your dad. Losing Jack’s going to wipe her out.”

  “Yes, it is,” agreed Sam. “But she doesn’t know that yet. You’ve got to help her now, Brad. We need to keep Jack out of jail and get him in a hospital. Be there for her. You want her back? That’s the key.”

  Brad told Sam he had well-placed connections in St. Louis. “I’ll see what I can do.”