The Four Corners Of The Sky (47 page)

Annoyingly the hotel had said they wouldn’t tell him where their guest was, even if they knew where she was, which they didn’t. Annie wasn’t in the hotel bar or pool because Brad had checked them all. He was standing right here in the Dorado lobby at this very minute.

“You’re in the Hotel Dorado?” Georgette climbed all the way out of her bed, turned on her light and found her glasses on the floor.

“I sure am.”

To give herself time to think, she fluffed her pillows. “Why did you go to Miami?”

“It’s a holiday.”

Georgette snapped at him. “Brad, don’t get cute.”

“Okay, I’m sorry.” He was used to women chastising him. “I’m here trying to get Annie to call off our divorce. I already got her to put it off for a month.”

“You did?” With her glasses on, Georgette felt surer of herself. “I thought she was signing the final papers in just a few days.”

“Come on, Georgette,” he chuckled. “You never thought that was really going to happen, did you? I told her, if she postponed, I’d lend her one of our jets to get out of St. Louis. That’s how she got to Miami. Things were a mess in St. Louis, you know, with the storm? She could have never gotten here by now except for me.”

Privately, Georgette was happily thinking, “Wow, are you going to be sorry you brought Annie to Miami,” but out loud she took a judgmental tone. “You blackmailed her?”

Brad was defensive. “I just cut a deal. And she checked the jet in fine, so that’s no problem. What’s wrong with saving a marriage? Marriage is a sacrament.” He paused. “I think. I’m not really a churchgoer anymore.”

Now ready with an alibi, Georgette said Annie was spending the night in Palm Beach at a friend’s home, a female friend, someone she had met recently in Chesapeake Cove, someone whose name Georgette couldn’t recall just now. Annie had phoned her earlier tonight and had mentioned how she was going to stay with this friend and how she’d be back in Miami early in the morning to talk with her father’s doctor at Golden Days. Annie always did what she said she was going to do, right? She was undoubtedly asleep right now, with her phone charging overnight. So Brad should just stop worrying; he should check into his own room at the Dorado, go to bed, and call Annie in the morning.

Brad was accustomed to taking women’s advice. He decided to do exactly as Georgette suggested. “Thanks, Georgia. You’re a peach.” Brad had long made “Georgia” into a seductive intimacy. He added, “I don’t know what this Atlanta boy would do without you. Night night.”

“Night night.”

“Tell Annie to call me if she calls you.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“You’re the best. I love you.”

Georgette had to remind herself (as she headed down to her kitchen where the birthday cake Sam had given her probably hadn’t been too damaged by being thrown in the trash bin), she had definitely to remind herself, that getting involved even in the most peripheral way with Brad Hopper would be less like eating a healthy peach and more like eating a gallon of Häagen-Dazs Triple Chocolate with a Sara Lee pound cake on the side. She would regret it.

Georgette wheeled around in the hallway and returned to bed.

At the Dorado, on his way to the elevator, Brad was drawn into the bar by the murmur of women’s voices and the chinkle of a cocktail shaker. He decided to have a nightcap. Gliding onto a blue bar stool, he fell quickly into a conversation with a tall silvery blonde who was drinking vodka martinis with a less-attractive brunette. They both wore low-cut pullovers and very high heels whose toes looked lethal. Brad offered to buy “the ladies” another round. The brunette said that unfortunately she was just leaving and was going to catch hell for getting home so late. She tottered away, dangerously tacking. The blonde, however, accepted the drink offer, explaining immediately to Brad that she’d had a very annoying day. On top of annoying problems at work, there had been an annoying run-in with her ex-husband, and an annoying quarrel with her brand-new fiancé with whom she had planned to celebrate her engagement tonight here at the Dorado, her favorite restaurant.

Brad made a comic and appealing show of searching under the barstools. So, where was her fiancé? He wasn’t here, he wasn’t there, where was he?

The blonde laughed. Her laugh wasn’t a good one and she seemed to know it and shut it off. She said that her fiancé, a financial planner, had been forced to fly out tonight with his boss, all the way to Japan, leaving her to eat dinner here at the Dorado with her friend, who wasn’t even really her friend but her future sister-in-law, who’d just left. It was all extremely annoying.

Brad couldn’t have been more sympathetic.

A few miles away, on a starlit beach, Dan and Annie were slow dancing in the surf. From the open door of the blue pickup truck, parked beside them, Etta James sang, accompanied by lush violins.

At last

My love has come along.

My lonely days are over

And life is like a song…

It was such easy dancing for Annie, for whom pleasure had never come easily. Such slow, easy dancing. Who would have thought you could kiss, be kissed like this, while you danced? Not Annie, not until now.

Overhead, a meteor shower fanned out to the east and west. They watched the faint shooting stars.

She said, “Probably the Southern Delta Aquarids. Really, it’s just debris from a comet’s tail. Just cosmic debris.”

“Aren’t we all?” Dan murmured. “I mean humans. Just cosmic debris? But just for a tiny bit of time, don’t you think we can be pretty wonderful?”

At the Dorado bar, Brad Hopper leaned closer to the blonde. Watching them from a dark corner was Rafael Rook, who sipped morosely on a soft drink. The Cuban was very upset. Not about the Queen, which he knew was locked up in Annie’s room. And not about Diaz, who seemed to have fallen for the story that the Queen had been hijacked to Havana. He was upset about Jack Peregrine, who had told him not to lose sight of Annie. But this morning stupidly Raffy had panicked, jumping out of her car when she had threatened to go to the
MPD
. Now he couldn’t find her. She wasn’t in the hotel and her phone switched him to voice mail. He’d been waiting here at the Dorado for hours, assuming she would come back. But now it was past midnight and where was she? Moreover, waiting for Annie, he’d had to blow off his promise to meet Chamayra at La Loca earlier and he was now too apprehensive to return Chamayra’s furious messages. Nobody could get madder faster than Chamayra.

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.

S
am 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.