The Four Corners of the Sky Read online

  “No,” said Annie, staring again out the window, pressed against its frame so she couldn’t be seen from the yard. The swirls of dirt on River Hill Road swelled, rolling nearer.

  Georgette gestured at a large, not very good oil painting on the wall, a “professional portrait” of her father George, aged twelve in blue blazer and tie, with his sister, aged fourteen, in pink summer dress and pearls. “All I’ve got’s my aunt Ruthie’s running off with a married man. Otherwise, the Nickersons were ‘a terminal snooze.’ You don’t even know who your mother is.”

  “Lucky me.”

  Annie heard tire noise and then Sam calling, “Jack!”

  Both girls squeezed to lean out the window.

  Georgette shrieked, “Oh my God!” as a brown state highway patrol car, with spinning lights, came skidding fast through the open gate.

  Across the yard, Annie heard Sam shout, “Run!” She watched her father dash to the blue Corvette, which soon leapt forward spraying pebbles. The patrol car slewed around in a circle, almost hitting Aunt Sam as it roared back over the crest of the hill in pursuit of the Corvette.

  On the TV screen, Jean-Paul Belmondo happened at that moment in the À bout de souffle subtitles to be saying to Jean Seberg, “Don’t use the brakes!” Georgette slapped her big creamy hands. “Merde! ‘Don’t use the brakes.’ I’d like to live my whole life like that, like your dad just drove out of here! Brakeless.”

  “With the cops after you?” Annie shrugged, she hoped in a nonchalant Gallic way, but it was in fact hard to breathe. “No thanks.”

  The two teenagers hurried back to Pilgrim’s Rest where a distraught Sam kept saying, “I’m going to kill him!” She could explain little more about Jack’s appearance than what they’d seen for themselves. According to Sam, Jack was the same selfish nut he’d always been. She wasn’t sure she could endure many more of these startling appearances of his, his flying at her out of nowhere like she was Janet Leigh in a shower.

  Sam held up a small red dirty marble, saying that Jack had thrust it into her hand just before running off to his Corvette, and had yelled back at her, “Tell Annie happy birthday! Tell her to hang onto that baseball cap!” Then he’d disappeared.

  “What else is new?” said Annie. “What baseball cap?”

  “Oh, you know,” Sam said.

  “I have no idea.”

  Sam sat down, catching her breath. “That little pink hat you had on when you came here. I kept it.”

  “You keep everything.”

  “You never know,” Sam admitted. “Look how Jack wanted the King of the Sky back after all these years.”

  Annie returned the dirty red marble to Sam with contempt. “Trust me, Sam, he’ll forget about the King by tomorrow.”

  Chapter 5

  Since You Went Away

  The highway patrolman in pursuit of Jack blew a tire at 101 miles per hour on the interstate ramp and flipped his car���although miraculously he walked away from the accident. The Emerald County sheriff, a friend of Sam’s, came to Pilgrim’s Rest with the news. He’d learned from D. K. Destin that Jack had raced into Destin Airworks in the blue Corvette and was attempting to break open the cockpit door of the King of the Sky with a lug wrench when D. K., in his wheelchair, knocked the wrench out of his hand with a lead pipe. D. K. thought he might have broken Jack’s wrist. Jack had wanted to take the plane and D. K. told him that the King wasn’t his, plus its carburetor was on the fritz and up on a rack anyhow. Then they’d heard a siren and Jack ran to the Corvette and drove off. “I’ll be back,” he’d yelled.

  Both D. K. and the sheriff had known Jack from his childhood; neither of them believed anything he said.

  The sheriff told Sam that, two weeks earlier, in Savannah, her brother had been arrested for swindling a retired couple; he’d taken their certified check for ten thousand dollars as a deposit on a historic landmark home located on (the aptly named) Bull Street. He’d offered to sell this couple the 1880 mansion cheaply ($1.6 million) because he was dying. On vacation from the West Coast, knowing nothing of Savannah, they’d believed him.

  Caught and thrown in a holding cell, Jack faked epilepsy and was rushed to the hospital. In an orderly’s outfit he escaped from the ER unit. Hot-wiring a Corvette in the staff parking lot, he headed for some reason home to Emerald.

  The sheriff warned Sam, Clark, and Annie that if Jack did get back in touch with them and they failed to notify the authorities, they would be subject to criminal charges.

  In an effort at French cynicism, Annie asked, “Is there a reward and can a relative collect?”

  “Annie, we’ll split it.” The sheriff admitted he was still burned because, a long time ago, he had paid twenty-five dollars to join Jack’s motorcycle gang, a club handicapped by its failure to secure even a single motorcycle to ride around on for more than one evening’s illicit joyride. “Let him go,” the sheriff warned the teenager.

  “No problem.” Annie, congratulating herself on having cut her father dead, expressed the hope never to see him again.

  Later that evening, Sam lamented her failure to do something to help Jack. Clark mildly noted that Jack appeared to be more in need of a criminal lawyer than Sam’s devotion. “You’re like a blind mole bumping along the sides of a black hole. By black hole, I mean for example, your old girlfriend Jill dumping you after seven years. I mean your brother Jack leaving you to deal with your mother.”

  Sam agreed that love was blind. “Give me a break, Clark. You’re always saying, ‘Look on the bright side.’ Well, if you love somebody, well, maybe you can’t see where you’re going and maybe there’s no light ahead, but that doesn’t mean you don’t keep going.”

  Clark ran the stems of his glasses back and forth in his hair. “Sam, doesn’t it worry you that you sound like the government’s old policy in Vietnam?”

  “I’m making love, not war. And I plan to keep going.”

  “Well, I’m out of here,” said Annie, determined not to let her father’s sudden intrusion upset her. “The only place I’m going is Paris.” As she walked through the morning room, she paused automatically at the huge jigsaw puzzle of the blue sky that still sat, unfinished, on the mahogany table. The puzzle was more than half-filled now, connected from its edges toward the hole still in its middle. Studying the scattered blue bits of cardboard, she slid two of them together.

  Sam came up beside her, the old Shih Tzu in her arms. “I keep thinking I should throw this stupid puzzle away but I can’t bring myself to do it. You know, your dad had a rough time in this house. Think about being locked in a closet, hour after hour, like our father did to Jack. Our father the judge. Boy, was he ever a judge.”

  The front door bell rang its old three-note melody. It was D. K. Destin with his wife Dina, of Dina Destin’s Barbecue. She was there to confess that this morning a highway patrolman had been in the diner showing people an APB photo of Jack Peregrine, asking if anyone knew where his family lived. Dina gave this state trooper directions to Pilgrim’s Rest, thereby leading them to Jack. She apologized. She’d thought Jack was a million miles away.

  “You got that right, baby,” D. K. told his wife. “That’s where Jack’s gone now. ‘And don’t you come back no more.’”

  They all had nachos and margaritas in the kitchen. From Annie’s bedroom, where she was packing her suitcase for France, she could hear them loudly laughing. It baffled her that “grown-ups” could find anything so funny about life.

  Late that night Jack telephoned Sam from the road.

  “Hold onto my leather jacket,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow, tell you where to send it.”

  Sam told him to come back right now and turn himself in or leave them alone. “Jack, since you went away, I’ve gotten older. I can’t take much more of this send-things-and-save-things and you tearing out of the cornfield like North by Northwest.”

  He laughed. “Love ya, Sam. Gotta go.”

  But of course, as Annie predicted when Sam recou
nted this conversation, Jack didn’t call them the next day, although his sister waited near the phone. He didn’t call the day after that, or for month after month, or as far as Annie knew, ever.

  Sam kept Jack’s old brown leather flight jacket that he’d flung off in the hot summer barn. It was unnecessary to instruct her to hold onto things. Her habit was not to throw even the useless away. While she never talked about the past, she did keep its relics, amassing memories in boxes. She was impervious to facetious warnings that the attic floor of Pilgrim’s Rest was going to collapse under the weight of what Clark called her great conscious collective. The past needed saving. Clark should understand that. All the biographies he read, all the time he spent cleaning the old pieces of blue glass bottles they’d dug up gardening. Without the past, she told him, our lives would be as thin and shallow as the news.

  So, that day, Sam had gone to the attic and squeezed between stacked boxes (one of all her old girlfriend’s exercise videotapes) and found the baseball cap with the word ANNIE spelled in bright-colored glass beads, packed with some other childhood clothes of her niece’s, like the green velvet dress, the small cowgirl boots, the neon-blue sunglasses.

  As she studied Annie’s cap, Sam noticed something written in pen on the inside band—a faded almost indecipherable sequence of numbers and letters. They made no sense to her but she put the cap back in the suitcase and added her brother’s flight jacket to it.

  ***

  The morning after Jack’s escape in the Corvette, Sam scrubbed dirt from the red stone that he’d told her to give Annie as a birthday gift. The stone looked like a ruby. Sam asked Georgette’s mother, Kim Nickerson, who’d inherited the local jewelry store from her deceased husband George, to examine the stone. Kim (called that by Georgette since the seventh grade, with a familiarity that Annie found both alien and enviable) said that it was a ruby. It was a good ruby, worth at least a thousand dollars. Georgette’s mother, a mercenary enthusiast, was sure this ruby proved that Jack’s old story was true: There were precious gems buried at Pilgrim’s Rest, whose recovery might well be “finders keepers.”

  The town of Emerald had long dined out on Peregrine fortune and misfortune, gossip of how Peregrines used their wealth to build a mansion on a hill and in general felt so superior that most of the town privately rejoiced when personal tragedy struck them and all their money was swept away in some crash or other, leaving them nothing but their name to feel smug about—and eventually not even that. The town assumed the Peregrines’ money came from financial savagery—tobacco trading, bank foreclosures, and the like. But occasionally there floated to the surface old tales of untold wealth in buried precious stones, rumors passed along for generations.

  In their spare time, from grade school to high school, Jack and his neighbor George Nickerson shoveled through hundreds of square feet of hard clay looking for buried emeralds and rubies. They never found a thing except the foundations of a swimming pool that Jack and Sam’s father had long ago filled in.

  “There was never anything in that ground but ground,” George was often in his later years to complain to Kim.

  But maybe, just maybe, Kim now whispered at the counter of Emerald Jewelers, holding her magnifying glass to the unpolished ruby, maybe George had been wrong and Jack’s teenage story had been true after all.

  Beside Sam, Annie leaned on the counter. She turned to Georgette. “Je ne crois rien.” Both the high school graduates raised their eyebrows in a practiced way.

  “Ton pere et la vérité sont l’etrangers, et ma mère Kim est tristement une femme très folle.” replied Georgette.

  “Bien sur, Gigi, et mon pere est un tas du merde.” Annie and her friend laughed.

  “You girls are going to have the best time in Paris,” gushed Kim, having no idea what they were saying. “And then you’re both going to fall in love and have wonderful lives.”

  They did have the best time in Paris. Annie even kissed a taxi driver on a dare from Georgette. She did it because Claudette Colbert had fallen in love with a Parisian taxi driver played by Don Ameche in the old movie Midnight, which she’d seen several times. Because her birth certificate said Claudette Colbert was her mother, she’d seen all the actress’s films.

  Unlike Don Ameche, this cabbie charged the American girls full fare.

  ***

  While Annie was in Paris, D. K.’s wife Dina suddenly died in a fall. He made Sam swear not to tell Annie until she returned. Sam promised but then told her anyhow, knowing she would want to be at the funeral of her beloved teacher’s wife. Sam even paid for Annie and Georgette to fly home on the Concorde and she was right to think the fact that Annie had flown at twice the speed of sound across the ocean would give pleasure to the grieving young pilot.

  Chapter 6

  Always

  When they returned a month later from France, Annie and Georgette discovered that Georgette’s mother had begun spending her weekends in the local library, researching Annie’s family and the possibility that long ago Boss Peregrine had buried treasure at Pilgrim’s Rest. Moreover, she’d bought a metal detector to search, with Sam’s permission, for emerald rings and ruby necklaces in the yard. So far, she hadn’t found anything but metal jar lids and belt buckles. She blamed her failure on the Peregrines themselves, just as she blamed her husband George’s death of a massive heart attack at Emerald Jewelers on the Peregrines, because Sam and Jack’s crazy mother had broken the store window with a hammer and that’s when George’s heart attack had happened.

  Listening to all the town gossip about the Peregrines, Kim Nickerson had come to believe that the more information she had about Annie’s dead ancestors, the more likely the dead were to give up their buried treasure to her. It eventually became, as Georgette said, an idée fixe. So whenever “the girls” returned home from college for the holidays, she would bribe them to go with her to view the locations of the Peregrines’ long downfall. Both girls found these tours tedious; year after year Georgette’s mother repeated the same anecdotes, in narrative log-jams that monotonously meandered through irrelevant details to some point or other that she usually forgot.

  While Georgette loved her mother, she’d never really liked her. The two of them were always, as Georgette explained to Annie after completing her first psychology course, profoundly incompatible, a fact that Kim could never admit because she couldn’t grasp it. Georgette said this was because her mother, while not bright, had been a pretty child, a pretty teenager, and a pretty young woman, and as prettiness had been her only gift, naturally she overvalued it. According to Georgette, in the past her mother had taken secret pleasure in her daughter’s gawky plumpness, loving to dress them in similar outfits—like tangerine stripes—in which Kim looked crisp and her child Georgette looked like the giant Garfield the Cat balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Kim was so lacking in, and oblivious to, her daughter’s very different gifts that she failed to notice that Georgette was very smart, with a belle laide je ne sais quoi that someday would dazzle somebody or other.

  Annie certainly had no desire to drive around town with Mrs. Nickerson on her college breaks, hearing about dead Peregrines, but because she loved Georgette (and was vaguely interested in the family history), she kept going.

  They saw the boardinghouse where Peregrine females were “taken in like laundry” during “the War of the Confederacy.”

  They traced the footings of the Aquene River landing where Boss Peregrine’s grandfather burnt to a crisp in a steamboat explosion.

  They walked through the courthouse lobby where Boss’s father was driven so mad by his son’s death at Gettysburg that he shot two Yankees occupying the town and got himself hanged.

  They located the exact spot on River Street where Boss, stabbed in the back of the neck, “dropped down dead as a dead dog,” in front of his own bank, and the spot in St. Mark’s cemetery where his Negro mistress leaped into his grave—to the mortification of his widow.

  Georgette’s mother lure
d “the girls” with dainty pimento cheese sandwiches to listen to her tell them how Jack and Sam’s father, the judge, “lost it all due to alcohol, down to his self-respect and lower than that.” How Grandee, Sam and Jack’s mother, had gone so crazy that the sheriff was forced to subdue her on Main Street in her bare feet, because she was breaking store windows with a hammer and then dancing on the bloody glass.

  Over deviled eggs, Kim told them how Jack remained a bad influence on George until Kim straightened him out and married him and gave birth to Georgette.

  She told them how Jack was jilted by George’s sister Ruthie and left town.

  How Sam started kissing a woman in public and then openly lived with her till the woman ran off.

  How the judge drove off River Road at a high curve “on a fateful night” and drowned in his car in the fast Aquene rapids below, his body not recovered for weeks, and how Grandee was unable to grasp the fact that he was dead and kept asking for years where her husband was.

  Kim said she knew the whole story: Sam had called the police at midnight to say that the judge was missing. Emerald police had gone looking and found his tire marks in the muddy ruts of River Road, gouged over the side. It took them three weeks to dredge the car from the water below and by then the judge’s body was “no more recognizable than the side of a cow in a meat locker.”

  Some people said it was odd that Judge Peregrine had driven off to Raleigh in the worst rainstorm in a decade; they started rumors of suicide but the rumors didn’t go anywhere. Judge Peregrine’s funeral service at St. Mark’s was the biggest that Emerald had enjoyed since the funeral of his grandfather, the Boss.

  The funeral was when Annie’s father had robbed his dead father, stolen his sister’s car, and left town for good. “I was the one who saw him go,” Kim boasted. “‘He’s got your car!’ I yelled at Sam. But would she do a thing about it?”