The Four Corners Of The Sky (9 page)

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 the 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.”

Sam turned the pink baseball cap around, inside out, examining it. She pointed at the faded ink scribble inside the small hatband. “Hang on. I remember seeing something written in here too. Look.”

Annie examined the pale ink marks in the light: 362484070N. She was still studying the scribbled sequence when her cell phone rang.

She was surprised by the jolt she felt, like a scramble out of sleep, like a plane in a graveyard spiral, disoriented. The thought raced through her that someone on the phone was going to tell her that her father was dead.

But a familiar voice jumped in and out of static. “Babe? That you, A? A? Can you hear me?”

“Brad?…Brad?”

“Yeah, babe. Happy birthday.” It was her almost ex-husband Brad Hopper, who phoned her every few weeks, ostensibly to settle specifics about their divorce but actually to urge her to call it off.

“Brad. Can we talk later? You’re breaking up and I’m busy now.”

“You’re always busy, A.” He started quickly singing, “Happy birthday to you…”

“Brad—”

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…Guess what you’re getting as a present? Me. I’m on my way to Emerald.”

O
utside the wind shrieked and there was more static in the connection. “You hear me, A?” He had always called her “A,” as if his saying “Annie” would waste her time. “So, what are you so busy with? Busy-ness, that was one of our problems.”

“‘Our problems,’ not my problem?” She muttered, “You must be in therapy.”

Brad laughed just a little too long to mean it. “Hey, that’s your buddy Georgette’s thing, not mine. What happened to your party tonight?”

“How’d you even know about it?”

“Georgette.”

Annie glared out the window in the direction of the Nickerson house, where more lights were now coming on. “Brad, I wish you’d stop calling Georgette or you’d marry
her
or something.”

“No, you don’t,” her almost-ex said with his oddly rapid Georgia accent. “You want you and me to get back together and that’s why, deep down, A, you don’t want a divorce.”

“Really?” She gave him her well-known raised eyebrow, knowing that although he couldn’t see it, he could sense it.

“Really,” he agreed. “That’s why the paperwork’s taking so long.”

She sighed. “The paperwork’s taking so long because your lawyer won’t return my lawyer’s phone calls.”

He chuckled conspiratorially. “You bet.”

Annie began pacing the hallway. “The final papers are at your lawyer’s, Brad. You sign them.”

“I’m never home.” He laughed again. “I just sold a jet in Charleston and I’m headed your way.” Brad, retired from the Navy and now in the Reserves, was the figurehead of Hopper Jets, the highly successful Atlanta-based private aircraft company that had been founded by his grandfather and was actually run by his mother and his twin sister Brandy. “Anyhow, Georgette just told me Sam called your party off because of the weather. It’s not so bad.”

Annie stared out the window, where she saw Clark out in the yard, bent over by the wind, tying the barn doors shut. The wind blew the tall man’s yellow slicker sideways like a big flag of surrender. “You’re crazy, Brad. It’s very bad here. Georgette told you it wasn’t bad?”

“Yeah, well, you know she’d love to see me.” Brad, whose mother had persuaded him that he was the apple of the world’s eye, had always theorized that Georgette had a crush on him; he’d felt sorry for her as a result. “Sam sent me an invite to your party, so I wasn’t like crashing or anything.”

Annie grimaced at her aunt. “Sam sent you an invite?”

“She’s my bud.”

“Apparently everybody is.”

“So weather’s really bad there?”

She pushed away the balloons. “Major storm. Stay where you are, Brad.” Watching Sam, who was rereading the letter Jack had sent, she added, “I may be leaving town anyhow. I just found out my dad is dying.”

Brad was surprised. “No way!”

“He wants me to bring him the
King of the Sky
to St. Louis tonight. I’m thinking I should go because if he
is
dying, maybe he could tell me something about my mom.”

“Your mom? You don’t have a mom.”

“Everybody’s got a mom. I’d like to know who mine is.” Sam looked over at her. Annie, checking her watch, made a face at the phone. “Brad, even your mom’s better than none at all.”

“Ah, A, come on.” Brad hated for Annie to make cracks about his mother. It was an old argument.

“Fine. Bye. I’ve got to go deal.”