The Four Corners of the Sky Read online

  Aunt Sam and Uncle Clark didn’t contradict her when she’d told them her father was a criminal but Sam could or would give her no details other than that in the year of Annie’s birth a card had arrived from Jack, postmarked Key West, with the entirely surprising news that he was raising an infant daughter on his own and that the two were “doing fine.” A year after that, he’d shown up with this baby (Annie) and his single-engine airplane. The two of them, father and daughter, stayed at Pilgrim’s Rest slightly less than a month, during which time Annie learned to walk. He then took Annie away and left the King of the Sky behind.

  Afterwards, Sam heard nothing for six years. Then out of the blue he called to ask if he could drop Annie off “temporarily.” Two days later, he arrived with the child asleep in his red Mustang convertible, stayed only long enough to beg Sam for help because he was “in big trouble.” He didn’t explain what kind of trouble, or where the girl’s mother was, or who her mother was, or how he could bear to leave his daughter behind on her seventh birthday, after he’d kept her with him for so many years on the road. He asked his sister to hide Annie if anyone came to the house in the following weeks asking for him, and to say that she hadn’t seen him in years. Then he kissed her good-bye and told her, “Annie’s a great kid. I’ll be back.”

  But of course he wasn’t.

  In Annie’s early years at Pilgrim’s Rest, she asked Sam to tell her stories about her father’s youth. Sam told her tales of his escapades back when their next-door neighbor George was his buddy and the two boys were always “in trouble.” Stories of how they sold off family heirlooms at a Raleigh flea market and used the money to take the bus to California (the Phoenix police returned them); how they spent months on end digging in the yard for buried rubies and emeralds that they never found. But Sam told only childhood stories. She said that by the time Jack reached his teens, she was in college with her own troubles and knew little of her brother’s adolescence, except that when George’s sister Ruthie ran off with an older married man it had broken Jack’s heart.

  Mostly Sam defended him. She denied Clark’s claim that he had robbed his dead father on the day of the man’s funeral, leaving Sam behind to deal with their crazy mother. She assured Annie that he’d always had a good, loving heart.

  Pressed to explain why, if Jack’s heart was so good, he had dropped his only child off like an unwanted pet at the pound, Sam would fall back on assurances that he had loved his daughter “more than he could say.”

  “Obviously,” the girl agreed as soon as she’d mastered the ironical eyebrow she had learned from Claudette Colbert.

  “Let it go,” advised Sam.

  In large part Annie did. But one day, in her teens, out jogging alone, she was running slowly along the path that wound through the old cemetery of St. Mark’s Church, where all the Peregrines were buried, and she came across a story her father had never told her. Studying the family grave markings there, she noticed a little marker with small curved wings, sunk in grass and obscured beneath the big purple blossoms of a rhododendron. Crawling under that bush’s branches, she rubbed at the moss and lichen obscuring the name on the grave. When she finally was able to decipher the carved letters, the sight knocked the breath out of her and she slithered quickly backwards, as if she’d been bitten. The small stone said:

  John Ingersoll Peregrine

  1946–1948

  Taken From Me

  John Ingersoll Peregrine was her father’s name.

  Out of breath after racing across town to her aunt’s store, she asked Sam to explain why her father had a grave that said he’d died. Sam, her brow furrowed, handed Annie a glass of water, her remedy for all ills, then explained that the name John Ingersoll Peregrine was the name of Sam and Jack’s older brother, whom they’d never met because he’d died at two years old, before they were born. She said that their mother Grandee had chosen to give the dead boy’s name, John Ingersoll Peregrine, to the baby Jack. It might seem odd but it must have been Sam’s mother’s way of coping with the loss of her first son. The child who’d died so young had been called “Johnny,” whereas Annie’s father had always been called “Jack.” Sam was sure that Jack, wherever he was, was alive and doing fine and that Annie shouldn’t worry about him.

  Annie ran next door where Georgette’s mother told her that, yes, there had been a baby Peregrine but she hadn’t been able to find out much about it. She clamped her hands over her eyes, her ears, her mouth in a hyperbolic pantomime.

  Annie returned to Sam with Kim Nickerson’s report. Why was the gravestone at St. Mark’s so hidden? Why had the town been reluctant to talk about John Ingersoll Peregrine?

  Sam’s teeth bit her mouth, then she sighed, then she said that it wasn’t a happy subject. Johnny had died in an accident. Her mother had been pregnant with Sam at the time.

  “What kind of accident?”

  Sam rubbed her eyes. “In a pool we used to have.”

  “A pool? Where?”

  “Just in the yard. Where the herb garden is now.”

  “The pool that’s gone?”

  But at that moment a shopper interrupted them, bustling into Now Voyager hoping for a just-released movie; Annie learned no further details about her long dead toddler uncle Johnny. That evening her aunt had brushed the questions aside, claiming she was late to a hospital board meeting. A teenager with her own life, Annie wasn’t much intrigued by a long dead relative she’d never met. She let the subject drop. In fact, in general she lost interest in asking Sam about Kim’s Peregrine stories. It was best to keep on the move anyhow, stay out of reverse, stay out of the past. The past was a deep pool covered by grass, like the grave marker of John Ingersoll Peregrine.

  Chapter 9

  Remember the Day

  The storm rumbled across the fields that rolled down from Pilgrim’s Rest. Clark pulled off his glasses to examine the tiny brown and red object that Annie had unhooked from her father’s letter. “It’s a dry fly. Royal Coachman.” He showed her the key. “And this looks like, I don’t know, maybe a powerboat key. Maybe Jack’s planning on a sort of reconciliation father-daughter fly-fishing trip before he passes away, if he’s passing away, which I’m having trouble believing. He’s only forty-eight.”

  Annie studied the FedEx envelope. “Why would he be in Miami, in a place called Golden Days Center for Active Living?”

  Sam rubbed her white hair. “I’m older than Jack, and I’m way too young for one of those places.”

  “You play tennis,” Clark reminded her. “Jack played the horses.”

  “You don’t die at forty-eight from playing the horses.” Tightening her brow, Sam felt the stationery’s logo. “Cheap. Golden Days. He told me he was calling from a hospital.”

  Annie shrugged. “Why’s he saying, ‘Meet me in St. Louis,’ if he’s in Miami? If he’s dying, why’s he hopping around the country?”

  Clark rubbed her back. “Travel was always Jack’s strong suit.”

  Annie opened the porch door to look up at the greenish-black swirls of fast-moving clouds. “That’s one way to put it.”

  What did she remember of that last trip her father and she had taken to St. Louis? She could recall only how long the bridge had looked, reaching over the Mississippi River, how high the Arch had curved above the city, how the arch was sometimes gold, sometimes silver in the sky.

  She suddenly remembered the television screen in a motel room in St. Louis, on which Egyptian clouds were gusting around in The Ten Commandments as Moses parted the Red Sea. She’d been watching that movie. Her father had been trying, unsuccessfully, to reach somebody on the phone. She’d been hiding under his arm, upset with Moses for closing the Red Sea over the Pharaoh’s horses. Terrifyingly, there was a banging on their door, a raspy voice calling out, “Pizza.” Her father threw her into a closet so fast he hurt her arms. Peeking out, she saw a big man in a windbreaker kicking at the door, snapping the chain and falling into the room. The man shoved her father back into the des
k chair, tipping it. “Nice to meet you, Jack.”

  Her dad said, “You’ve got the wrong guy. Swear to God.”

  The man showed him a black pistol under his belt. “Be nice. Your little girl, where is she?”

  “Not here.”

  But Annie ran from the closet, hurling herself at this man, knocking him off-balance. Quickly her father crashed the man’s head down onto the glass coffee table, cracking the glass. The man fell to his knees as abruptly as the Israelites had done when Moses parted the sea in The Ten Commandments. He rolled off the table and dropped unconscious onto the rug.

  Grabbing their suitcases, Annie’s father hurried her through the motel parking lot. When they passed a cream-colored BMW with a Florida license plate, Annie said that just this morning she’d noticed the same car, with the same plate numbers, in the truck stop where they’d had breakfast in Memphis. Her father said, “Good girl,” and he used the gun to smash the BMW’s headlights.

  Two hours later, they stopped at a service station and he bought her candy bars, so many that they fell out of his arms all over the seat, like a shelf had collapsed on a candy rack.

  “Who was that man back there?” she asked him.

  “The Crocodile,” he said, nodding, breathing carefully. “Tick tock tick tock.” The Crocodile who’d chased after Captain Hook was one of her father’s favorite names for their pursuers. “That was a little scary, wasn’t it? You did great, Annie. You did. A-plus. You saved us.” He pressed her small hands against his puffed-out cheeks, making a funny splattery noise as he pushed in on her fingers. Although she was still frightened, the noise made her laugh. She poked her fingers in his cheeks hard.

  He asked, “Do you love me, darlin’?”

  “No.”

  “Oh for the love of Mike.” Reaching across the seat, he hugged her to him, close against the steering wheel. “Nothing bad’s ever going to happen to you,” he promised, pointing through the windshield at the white crescent of the moon tilted among the stars. “The moon is my witness,” he vowed. “The moon’s smiling because you’re so beautiful.”

  “Be quiet,” she told him sternly. “I don’t want to go back to that motel.”

  “Me either. Don’t like their room service.” He kissed the top of her head.

  “Where are we going now?” she asked.

  But he just sat there, his arms folded over the steering wheel.

  His failure to move scared her. “Go,” she told him.

  “Okay.” He nodded, turning the ignition. “Let’s go home.”

  His proposal surprised her because she hadn’t ever formulated what home might be, other than this speeding car, and out its windows the blur of land and towns flying by them on the sides of the highways. “Where?” she asked. “Where I went when I was a baby?” For he’d told her often about the trip to his childhood town, Emerald, about his leaving the plane the King of the Sky at Pilgrim’s Rest with his sister, although Annie had no memories of her own by which to judge his stories.

  “That’s right. Emerald City, darlin’.”

  “You said Pilgrim’s Rest was a pit of snakes.”

  “Oh no no. It’s the best place in the world.”

  With the old familiar surge of speed, he headed up the ramp onto the interstate. She read a sign for 55 East. After driving a while, he told her, “Snuggle down. I’m the Wizard of Nod and we need to take your ruby shoes to bed.”

  She held out her legs, braced the cowboy boots with their green lariats against the dashboard. “I’m not sleepy.”

  “Sure you are.” He tapped a cigarette from his pack.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you’re the queen of the world and queens need to rest.” He slipped the pink baseball cap onto her head like a crown.

  The next day he left her in the yard at Pilgrim’s Rest.

  ***

  Out on the Pilgrim’s Rest porch, Annie’s twenty-sixth birthday banner, hand-painted by Sam, tore loose from the overhang as the storm swirled overhead. A few of the Mylar birthday balloons had floated from the hall into the morning room where Annie, in her Navy shorts and T-shirt, stood in the bay window beside the old library table. The giant jigsaw puzzle of the sky was filled in now, except for a circle of about six inches diameter right in the middle of the flat blue rectangle. She idly searched among the pieces. Near the bay window, a branch fell from the oak tree.

  Clark held out the fishing fly when he walked into the room. “I checked. It’s definitely a Royal Coachman fly. Meaning what? Why can’t Jack ever just say things?”

  “Who knows?” Sliding the little key out of her pocket, she put it with the fishing fly back in the envelope. Lights blinked on in the window across the lawn. “Looks like Georgette’s home. I’m going over.”

  “She’ll just analyze you.” Georgette, now a resident in psychiatry at Emerald Hospital, did therapy on her neighbors. “You wouldn’t believe her theories about me.”

  “Clark, I heard her theories about you ten years ago.” Annie turned back to the jigsaw puzzle, fitting together two of the pieces.

  He watched her. “Sam just doesn’t want to finish this damn thing. It’d be easy but then she wouldn’t have it here on the table taking up space and collecting dust.”

  As he spoke, Sam came into the room. “Guess what, Clark? Life takes up space and collects dust. How’s that?” She reached over, tugging at her niece’s dark-gold tangled hair. “D. K. can get you to a Raleigh flight in the morning. You can fly to St. Louis and find Jack and bring him home. I’ll fix up his old room for him.”

  Exasperated, Annie gestured at the world outside. “Find him where? How do I know where we stayed in St. Louis? I was seven years old!”

  Her uncle was listening to the wind. “No flight’s leaving RDU tonight, that’s for sure. This will turn into a twister, I kid you not.”

  Sam took the balloons back into the hall. “This is not turning into a twister, Clark; you always think it’s a twister. But I admit it’s getting ugly. I canceled the birthday party. I called my list and Georgette is calling hers. What we’ll do with two-dozen spicy tuna rolls, I don’t know.” She held up a small blue Samsonite suitcase. “Found this in the attic.”

  Annie took the bag, surprised by how familiar it looked. “Good God, I came here with this.”

  Sam had found it behind boxes of big out-of-fashion Christmas lights. “I was pretty sure I’d packed Jack’s leather jacket in here, when he left it behind. Remember that day? When he showed up like North by Northwest, right before you and Georgette went to Paris?”

  Annie raised her eyebrow. “The last time any of us ever saw Jack? Strangely enough I do remember that day.”

  Sam said, “Give him a break. He could be dying.”

  “Or not.” Clark shrugged.

  When they opened the blue Samsonite, the past jumped out. The old brown leather flying jacket her father had often worn lay on top of her pair of small lavender jeans. Her pink hat with shiny multi-colored glass beads was folded inside the green velvet dress that she remembered as once having been her favorite.

  Sam held up a pair of child’s plastic neon-blue sunglasses.

  Annie took them, looked through their lenses. “Dad said they had X-ray vision. I wanted sunglasses because he always wore them.”

  Sam recalled that Jack had always admired great sunglasses. He’d always commented when women wore sunglasses in the movies. Simone Signoret in Les Diaboliques, Anouk Aimée in La Dolce Vita, Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim, Audrey Hepburn—

  “Sam, we get the idea.” Clark looked at the bright blue plastic glasses. “I remember these.”

  Sam vigorously shook the brown leather jacket. A small automatic pistol fell out of a pocket and onto the floor. “Jesus Christ! That’s been there the whole time.”

  Clark picked up the gun. “Jack was an idiot.” He removed the clip.

  Annie studied the black automatic; it was probably the gun her father had taken from the intruder in th
e St. Louis motel that night. The man he’d called The Crocodile. Was the place they’d been that night the St. Louis motel where he wanted her to meet him now? What was its name? A neon sign…the image wouldn’t come.

  She felt in the jacket’s zipped pockets and in one of them she found an extremely large emerald on a thin chain.

  Clark said, “Well, Annie, looks like your dad packed a rod and wore women’s jewelry.”

  Sam told him to stop. “It’s no time to joke.”

  Clark shrugged. “Tell me when.”

  Sam took the emerald to the light. “Jesus Christ!” she said again.

  Annie felt carefully around the lining of the jacket; then picking up a letter opener from the table, she ripped apart its frayed silk. Long expired credit cards, drivers’ licenses, passports, all with her father’s photo but with different names, fell out onto the hall carpet. Hundred-dollar bills fell out too, fifteen of them, loose.

  “Looks real.” Clark felt the money.

  Annie shuffled through a stack of business cards, all different.

  Under a lamp’s light, Sam examined the green rectangular gem. “There’s no way this isn’t an emerald.” She showed the stone to Annie and Clark. “You think Kim’s theory could have been true? Somehow Jack dug up a bunch of precious stones in the yard?”

  Annie sneered. No, it wasn’t true, no truer than her father’s endless promises to make her a queen.

  Clark noted with a wry noise that it was no wonder Jack wanted his jacket back, but why had he waited so long to get in touch?

  Feeling carefully inside the jacket’s lining, Annie found a folded sheet of notepaper from a Hotel Dorado in South Beach, Miami, Florida. On it was written 678STNX211. She made a derisive noise that was an unconscious imitation of Clark’s. “Dad wants whatever these numbers are to. It’s like a computer password, or bank account, or something. He was always writing numbers down; he could never remember them.”