Copyright

Copyright © 2009, 2010 by Michael Malone

Cover and internal design © 2010 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

Cover photo © Corbis

Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

(630) 961-3900

Fax: (630) 961-2168

www.sourcebooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Malone, Michael

The four corners of the sky / Michael Malone.

p. cm.

1. Women air pilots--Fiction. 2. Air pilots, Military--Fiction. 3. Abandoned children--Fiction. 4. Mothers and daughters--Fiction. 5. Fathers and daughters--Fiction. 6. North Carolina--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3563.A43244F68 2009

813’.54--dc22

2008038938

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Part Two

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Part Three

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Part Four

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Part Five

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Epilogue

About the Author

Reading Group Guide

Back Cover

For Maggie

Acknowledgments

My deep and lasting thanks to Hillel Black, Peter Lynch, Dominique Raccah, and Peter Matson.

My appreciation to the Bogliasco Foundation for the generous fellowship that allowed me to work on The Four Corners of the Sky in a setting as memorable as the company I met there.

My gratitude to the three Annies for whom the heroine of this romance is named: Dr. Ann Hackmann, The Reverend Ann Stevenson, and Professor Ann Rosalind Jones.

Among the many who gave me advice and information about aviation, let me especially thank Captain Marion Barnett, U.S. Air Force, Retired.

Thanks to my first two readers, Sue Martin and Cathy Wagner. Thanks to Astrid Giugni for the algebra.

And, as ever, there would be no book without Maureen.

Prologue

July 4, 1982

In small towns between the North Carolina Piedmont and the coast, the best scenery is often in the sky. On flat sweeps of red clay and scrub pine, the days move monotonously, safely; but above, in the blink of an eye, dangerous clouds can boil out of all four corners of the sky and do away with the sun so fast that, in the sudden quiet, birds fly shrieking to shelter. The flat slow land starts to shiver and anything can happen.

In such a storm, on Annie Peregrine’s seventh birthday, her father gave her the airplane and minutes later drove out of her life.

When thunder scared her awake she found herself in their convertible, parked atop a hill near a barn. Off in the distance rose a large white house with a wide white porch. A white pebble road curved away behind the car, unreeling like ribbon on a spool. Annie looked past two rows of rounded black trees to where fields of yellow wheat spilled to the edge of the sky. Her father and she must have arrived at Pilgrim’s Rest, the Peregrine family house in Emerald, North Carolina, toward which they’d been driving all day.

Sliding from their car, she saw him, slender and fast-moving, his white shirt shimmery, as he ran toward her out of the barn and across the dusky yard.

“Annie!” Reaching her, her father dropped to his knees and hugged her so fiercely that her heart sped. “I’m in trouble. I’ve got to leave you here a little while with Aunt Sam and Clark. Okay?”

She couldn’t speak, could only shake her head. How often had he told her that the house where he had grown up, that Pilgrim’s Rest had been for him a pit of snakes, a cage of tigers?

He kept nodding to make her nod too. “Okay? I’ll be back. Just hang onto your hat.” Pulling a pink baseball cap from his pocket, he snuggled it down onto her head. Colored glass beads spelled ANNIE above its brim; a few beads were missing, breaks in the letters.

Across the driveway a tall woman with short thick hair banged open the large doors of the barn. She called out to Annie’s father. “Jack? Jack! Jack! Jack!”

Annie’s father turned her around to face the woman but kept talking with that nodding intensity that always meant they would need to move fast. “See my sister Sam over there? I told you how nice she is.” The sound of sharp thunder flung the child back into the man’s arms. “So’s Clark. They’ll take care of you. I’ll call you. Remember, you’re a flyer.” He yanked her small hard blue suitcase out of the convertible, dropping it onto the gravel beside her. “Give Sam the cash.”

“Stop it. Where are you going!”

“Annie, I know. It’s rotten.” A drop of rain fell on his face like a fat fake tear. Drops splattered on the suitcase’s shiny clasps. “Go look in the barn. There’s a present for you. ‘Sorry, no silver cup.’”

She kicked him as hard as she could. And then she kicked over the blue suitcase. “I want to go with you,” she said. “You!” But before she could stop him, her father had run to their car and was driving away.

She raced after the Mustang, down the pebble road between the dark rows of large oak trees. It was hard to make her voice work loudly but finally it flamed up her throat and she could shout at him to come back. She was already crying, already knowing she couldn’t run fast enough.

Behind her, the tall woman named Sam kept calling, “Jack! Jack!”

Annie echoed her, hoping it would help. “Dad! Dad!”

The convertible braked to a skidding stop, her father twisting around in the seat to call out, “Your birthday present’s in the barn, go look in the barn! Annie! Don’t forget. You’re a flyer!”

She screamed as loudly as she could, “You stop!”

The wind caught his scarf as he sped off; it flew into the air behind him. Then he was gone and the green silk scarf lay coiled near her feet. She ground it into the pebbled road with her small leather cowboy boots; they were as green as the scarf and stitched with lariats. She had wanted these boots so badly that only a week ago her father had turned their car around, drove them back fifty miles to some small town in the middle of a flat state; he took her to the store where she’d seen the boots in the window and he bought them for her. “Never wait to say what you want,” he told her. “It’s no fun to go back. And sometimes you can’t.”

But now she’d said what she wanted and he’d left her anyhow. Dust and rain stung Annie’s eyes shut and the world turned black. The tall woman’s voice was calling again. “Annie! Annie!”

Furious, the child flung herself into the gully beside the road, tumbling down a tangle of vines and underbrush; she lay there in the rain, hiding from the woman Sam until her voice, solicitous and worried, passed by, still shouting, “Annie! Annie!”

After a while, the woman’s voice faded and there were no sounds but the hard wind and rain. Annie decided to walk along the road in the direction her father had gone. Maybe he would stop for gas or food and she would find him again.

But suddenly her pink baseball cap blew off, whisking over the bank. She chased the cap onto a path that wound up to a hilltop, where it caught against a pair of closed white wooden gates. On a post beside these gates there hung a wood sign with painted letters. It said, “Pilgrim’s Rest, 1859.” And above that, “Peregrines” was carved in the wings of a wood hawk flying. She undid the heavy iron latch of the gates and pushed her way through the opening.

In the yard, gusty stinging rain and wind slapped at her, shoving her against the front of the barn. Its immense gray weathered doors blew suddenly apart as if she had knocked on them in a fairy tale and some invisible sorcerer with power over the elements had ordered the wind to sweep her inside.

The barn was an enormous dark empty space, with high rafters and a sweet strong smell. Outside, the storm was close and noisy, but the barn was quiet. Annie walked into the middle of the shadowy space. There, alone, sat an old airplane. It was a fixed-wing single-engine plane, a Piper Warrior painted cherry red with blazing yellow stripes and a silver propeller on its black nose. The door to its cockpit was swung open. From the seat the beam of a large red battery lantern was shining on the plane so clearly she could see the fresh footprints of her father’s shoes in the thick dust on the wing. She ran over to the plane, crawled behind its wheel cap and beat her head against her knees in a shout of grief so hopeless that the noise she made scared her. She cried until she heard an unfamiliar man’s voice call her name, “Annie.” Quickly she bit at the cloth on her knee, quiet, listening. The voice moved away.

Above her, beneath the airplane’s low curved wing, she could make out spiraling green letters curled like a dragon’s tail, spelling the words, King of the Sky.

While they’d traveled on highways together, her father had told her about his old airplane, the King, how he and she could have been moving much faster back and forth across America if they’d only had the use of the King of the Sky, how the plane was “just sitting there in the barn” at his childhood home Pilgrim’s Rest, in a town called Emerald. He’d told her that someday they’d go get the King and they’d fly it all over the country.

Annie had never much believed such a plane existed, any more than the lost treasures and magic elixirs and prison tunnels he’d also described.

Now she hugged the King of the Sky’s wheel with both arms and legs. “I’m a flyer,” she said. “A flyer. A flyer.”

part one

North

July 4, 2001

Chapter 1

The Bride Comes Home

On her twenty-sixth birthday, U.S. Navy Lt. Annie Peregrine Goode was speeding home from Annapolis for the weekend, going 74 miles per hour, enjoying the sharp turns and brisk shifts of well-tuned gears. As she had done since her father had left her at Pilgrim’s Rest when she was seven years old, she would spend her birthday there with her aunt Sam and Sam’s housemate for decades, Clark Goode.

The sky was busy with a storm coming. Clouds bunched together, swelled and darkened to a black roil that fell in shadows over the land. On the highway, a strong wind pushed the clouds scudding ahead of the young woman’s fast-moving convertible. Her ponytail tucked inside a Navy cap, she raced the car through heavy air. On the seat beside her sat a container of precisely chopped carrots, celery, and cucumber slices from which she snacked. Her flight instructor’s uniform was white, the pants and jacket spotless. Her gray sports car was a Porsche Carrera. She and her soon-to-be-ex-husband Brad had bought it because it could accelerate to 60 miles per hour in 4.3 seconds.

In front of her an old Volvo station wagon with long green cones tied to its roof bounced off onto the shoulder to give her room the driver mistakenly thought she needed to maneuver around him. The slow-moving white car belonged, Annie knew, to her uncle, Dr. Clark Goode, doubtless on his way home.

Tapping her horn as she passed him, Annie slowed down, calling out, “Hi, Clark! Pull over!”

He waved out his window. “Annie! Be careful!”

She stopped precisely on the shoulder ahead of him, running back to the tall, thin man as he stepped from the opened door of his car.

“Hi, sweetheart.” He folded her in his arms. “Happy birthday! Weather Channel’s predicting a tornado.” He gestured at the clouds, then at the long plastic cones on the roof of his station wagon. “They’re for the roses.”

She hugged him again. “Will you stop listening to the Weather Channel?”

Behind round tortoise-shell glasses, Clark studied her. “You look a little anemic. Teaching too much?” A pediatrician, he had long been checking her health.

“I’m fine.”

He felt her left hand, touching the ring finger with good-humored taps. “Divorce final?”

A year ago, Annie had left her husband but she still wasn’t legally divorced. “Next week, the lawyer swears.”

“Hmm.” Clark nodded, the quiet blue of his eyes speckled as light through an old window. “Hmm.”

She rubbed his hands between hers. “Don’t ‘hmm’ me. Let’s get home before it rains.” She checked her watch. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes and you’ll be there when, in…about an hour?”

“Ha. Don’t mock the late-middle-aged.” Comfortably he curled his lanky frame back into the Volvo. “You were speeding, sweetheart. Slow down.”

“Clark, it’s good to be home.” Annie raced back to her Porsche, revved the motor, and rocketed away.

“Too fast.” He shook his head, slowly starting his station wagon.

Annie’s uncle never went over the speed limit; in fact, he rarely reached it. He preferred walking to driving and occasionally walked even the two miles to the hospital where he ran a pediatric clinic. When Annie was fifteen and he’d been teaching her to drive, he’d told her, “Slow down,” so often that she had begged her aunt Sam to give her lessons instead. “Where are you going, you have to get there so fast?” Clark would ask the teenager. “Everywhere,” she’d tell him, although there was really no place in particular she wanted to go; she just didn’t want to be left behind.

Clark had always acknowledged amiably that he saw no reason for speed except to save a life. In Emerald Hospital’s hallway, generations of children had heard the same old slow stories as they waited outside the ER. In the same unhurried way, he moved his cushioned rocker, one foot nudging it in a steady (and to the child Annie, maddening) rhythm of three taps, pause, three taps, pause, while he watched baseball games, with slow shadows inching across vivid green grass on the television screen. Clark loved almost nothing that moved fast, except Annie.

Now she was racing so quickly along Old 41 that within less than a minute he could no longer see her gray Porsche ahead of him. “Too fast,” Clark repeated and rubbed at his hair and checked his speedometer.

As she drove, Annie glanced at her bare left hand on the wheel where once she’d worn a wedding ring. Her husband had fought their divorce; she’d avoided the fight. As a result, the settlement was still “pending final papers.” It wasn’t like her not to finish things. For what was she waiting? Certainly not for Lt. Bradford Hopper, a textbook example of a false hypothesis—that he loved her—on the basis of which the logic of her life had crashed into mistake after mistake.

A year ago, when she had flung her suitcase into the Porsche and told Brad, “I’m leaving you,” he shouted at her, kicking at their doorstep, “Get back here! You can’t leave me!” And she told him with the steely distinctness that was always her response to his fits, “Watch me!”

***

The fight took place at their small stucco house on the San Diego base where they were both pilots. They were not long back from Kuwait, but long enough for Brad to start an affair.

He blocked her path to the Porsche, jumping up and down on the hard asphalt as if it were a trampoline. “A, you come back here right now! What’s the matter with you?”

“The matter?”

As always her irony ricocheted off him. “Yeah, what’s the matter!” He repeated it. “What the fuck’s the matter?!”

“How about, you cheated on me!” Their hands fought at the Porsche’s door handle. “How about, you cheated on me in my own bed! I’m taking the cat and the car.”

“What?”

“You don’t want the cat and I trust the car!” She’d grabbed at Brad’s fingers, feeling the wedding ring she’d put there. “Back off, Brad or I’ll break your wrist, I swear to God. You won’t fly for a month.”

“You’re nuts.” But he believed her, pulled away his hand before she could slam the car door on it.

In the Porsche’s rearview window, as she skidded away from the replicated row of military houses, she watched him kicking over a big green garbage can at the curb. His attack on the can looked so much like the tantrums he’d had at Annapolis that she stopped the car with a jolting bounce to watch him. Then she leaned over to ask the slender cat in the carrier beside her, “Was I crazy? Why did I ever marry him?”

The cat, Amy Johnson, ignored the question.

That was thirteen months ago.

***

In Emerald, Annie glanced behind her but didn’t yet see her Uncle Clark anywhere on the old two-lane that led toward Pilgrim’s Rest. She was almost home. On her cell phone, she called her divorce lawyer in Maryland, near the Navy Academy where she taught. She’d been postponing talking with this man, whom she’d met only twice and who charged her for every minute of conversation. When she reached him, she spoke quickly. He assured her that the final settlement would be awaiting her signature and Brad’s when she returned to Annapolis after the holiday. “Enjoy the Fourth,” he advised. “Relax.”

“I’ll relax when I’m divorced.”

“I doubt it,” the lawyer predicted.

She hung up, not wanting to chat about her personality at three hundred dollars an hour.

Annie passed a field of ripening corn. She had not been home to Emerald since early spring and she made an effort now to notice the changes in the summer trees and farmland as she sped by them. More often than not she was, she admitted, in front of or behind the moment, planning for the next problem, remembering the last crisis. Her aunt Sam was always telling her that life was what was happening in the side view. But moving forward, Annie ignored the periphery and while she admitted their loss and tried to remember to look left and right, usually she forgot.

Today was, however, her vacation, her birthday, her trip home. So she slowed slightly and as she did so, saw around her soybeans and tobacco, wheat and corn bowing to the strong storm wind. On both sides of the old highway stretched out an America that nearer to Emerald had been replaced by huge concrete box stores stretching across hot parking lots in which high-wheeled trucks and big SUVs banged into each other. But here on the outskirts, the world was still local. People still kept machines and repaired them. In a yard across the road from her, a man bent under the hood of an old truck. Here the long flat green land was lush and ripe and empty. A boy was making his bicycle jump in a driveway. A woman kept looking into her mailbox, hoping for more than was there.

Annie’s fingers loosened on the steering wheel as she waited at the familiar stoplight blinking at the crossroads. Rolling her neck side to side on the headrest, hearing the crackle in her vertebrae, she felt everything easing. Across the intersection, two little girls ran out of a peanut field beside an orange-red brick ranch house with aluminum white columns and an over-sized door. The little girls wigwagged their arms when Annie blew her horn. She waved her Navy lieutenant’s hat at them so that her hair flew out, wild and gold. She wanted them to see that the fast driver of the powerful convertible, the military officer, was, like them, a girl.

While Annie had ostensibly been hurrying to protect the Porsche’s leather seats from the coming rain, the truth was—as her uncle Clark always said when asking her to slow down—she was speeding because she liked to go fast. Speed had long been the gauge by which she’d judged herself. During her four years with Brad at the Naval Academy, she’d been secretly frustrated that in aviation tests he was consistently the faster flyer. To be fastest, to be first, mattered. Now her chance was coming. A week ago, her commanding officer had told her that she had been chosen to take a test flight in a new experimental model of an F-35 Lightning II vertical-landing fighter jet; she’d be trying to break a speed record. A chance was all she wanted. “I can do this,” she’d assured Commander Campbell with her infectious smile. “I’m a flyer.”

“That you are, young lady,” he’d agreed in the outmoded way of his that she tried to ignore. “Concentrate on flying. Don’t be running off and getting married again.”

“Amelia Earhart was married, sir.”

He hunched his shoulders, as if nothing more needed to be said about Amelia Earhart.

She couldn’t resist. “Her plane didn’t crash because she was married.”

He hunched his shoulders again, returned her salute, and left.

***

As Annie sped around a rattling tractor, her cell phone rang. The caller’s area code was one she didn’t recognize.

“Lt. Annie Goode,” she said briskly.

“This is Vice Detective Daniel Hart.” The young man had a pleasant low voice. “I’m with the Miami Police Department. I’m calling about a fraud investigation and I need to locate your father, Jack Peregrine.”

The detective’s inquiry took her entirely by surprise. Her response was to accelerate. She passed two cars one after the other. Their drivers looked at her, taken aback by the noise of the sports car’s racing motor.

“Jack Peregrine,” the young man repeated, making a strange crunchy noise. “Sorry, I’m eating trail mix. I missed my lunch.”

“You shouldn’t,” she told him.

“You’re right,” he agreed affably.

“I wouldn’t know my father if I fell over him on the sidewalk.”

“A sidewalk? I love sidewalks but who walks anymore? My ex-wife would borrow a car to drive to her car in a parking garage.”

Annie downshifted before the Porsche banked a curve. “Detective Hert—”

“It’s Hart. Like, you know, thump, thump, thump. Sgt. Daniel Hart. Here’s the thing. Your dad, Jack Peregrine. I had him under surveillance. He gave me the slip.”

About to show her impatience, oddly she laughed instead. “Join the club. The ‘slip’ from what?”

“Well, for us it was a case of false pretenses, but now the FBI’s involved. They want him for defrauding Cuba.”

She laughed again, but a tight tense laugh that went on longer than she wanted. “I’m sorry? Defrauding Cuba?”

“Some swindle of a Cuban artifact. I don’t know why Americans just don’t leave Cuba alone.”

She asked Hart how her father had given him “the slip.”

He explained that Jack Peregrine had been the subject of a recent stakeout. Peregrine fled his Hotel Dorado room in South Beach, Florida, minutes before an attempt to arrest him. He climbed into the next room by the balcony and allegedly robbed the occupants of their digital camera on his way out.

Annie noticed her knuckles were white. “How’d you get this phone number?”

“We tossed your dad’s room before he took off. It was on the back of an old photo in his jacket. Says ‘Annie,’ and has this number on it.”

The news was astounding to her. “I’ve used this cell phone for less than a year! And I’ve had nothing to do with my father since I was seven.”

“What can I tell you, Annie? He had your number. So, you on your way to Emerald? Bride comes home?”

The man’s easygoing familiarity with her life angered her. “Is somebody playing a fucking joke on me?”

“Hey, take it easy.” There was a crackling noise of a plastic bag being crunched. “This was an old photo of Jack Peregrine with a cute little girl. Says Breakers Restaurant in West Palm. The little girl’s you, I figure. Bangs, pearl necklace, cowboy jacket. Great smile.”

Annie fought off the vivid memory of that pearl necklace and that cowboy jacket, both gifts from her father. She turned her neck side to side, trying to loosen the tension.

“So you haven’t seen him since you were seven?” The detective spoke casually, as if they were catching up on old friends.

Her hands gripped the Porsche’s leather-wrapped steering wheel. “No, I saw him once. Eight, nine years ago but I didn’t talk to him that time.”

Hart sounded skeptical. “Why not?”

The thought struck her that Hart was a crank caller of some sort. Or maybe some other crook in pursuit of her father. It wouldn’t be the first time. “Can you prove you’re with the police?”

“Sure. Badge number…” He reeled off a realistic-sounding series of numbers. “Detective Sergeant, Miami Vice—” He paused.

She asked, “Are you waiting for a joke here?”

“It happens.” Hart had a very engaging voice. “Sorry, let me put this other call on hold.” He came back on the line. “So, about your dad’s mess. Feds told me to back off. Where’s the respect for locals anymore?”

Annie asked again to know what Hart meant by her dad’s “mess.”

“He stole a relic, alleged relic, that if it exists, belongs to the people of Cuba. La Reina Coronada del Mar.”

The Spanish words floated up at her out of her childhood; she’d heard them often from her father. “Queen of the Sea?”

“You know it?”

Annie thought back. “…A statue?”

“Sixteenth-century. Peru. Virgin Mary.”

Memories hurried in. Her father had told her long stories about La Reina Coronada. “The Queen of the Sea. I used to have dreams about that statue. I used to dream I was trying to save her from drowning.” She wondered why in the world she had just told this complete stranger a childhood dream of hers.

Just as oddly, he replied, “Did you save her?”

“No, I woke up.”

“Yeah. It’s too much for a kid. For years after my dad died, I was always dreaming I was trying to pull him out from under a car wreck. He died in a car wreck. He was a cop.”

Neither spoke for a moment. Then Hart asked, “So you ever get the impression your dad actually had hold of the Queen of the Sea?”

With a glance at her speedometer—92 miles per hour—she took her foot off the accelerator, breathing carefully while she slowed the car. “Sergeant Hart, I got the impression my dad had hold of the golden flip-flops of Helen of Troy and a MapQuest to Shangri-la.” Her father had told her thousands of extravagant lies: that there was buried treasure in his backyard, that the neon-blue plastic sunglasses he’d given her as a birthday gift would endow her with super-powered X-ray vision. “It’s what he did for a living, ‘false pretenses,’ lies to con suckers. He was a con artist.”

Hart laughed his pleasant laugh. “Still is. No offense but I wouldn’t trust Jack Peregrine if he walked on water and then turned it into wine.”

“Trust me,” Annie said, “If he could turn water into wine, he’d sell it.”

Hart’s jaunty guffaw surprised her. It was rare that people laughed aloud at her jokes. His response warmed her into asking, “So the FBI is what, shoving you aside? Federal intervention?”

“You should talk. You’re U.S. Navy.”

She couldn’t read his tone. “You have a problem with the Navy?”

“Well, I remember the Maine. Listen, I’m just trying to do my job, Lieutenant Goode. Protecting people like you.”

“Funny, that’s my business too.” Annie was accustomed to, but not particularly tolerant of, sarcasm about the military.

Hart laughed. “I gotta tell you, I was impressed, what I read about you. You and your husband flying the Hornet in Operation Desert Fox. I mean you guys bombed the shit out of some sand.”

Indignantly, she asked if he’d been reading files on her.

“Don’t take it personally. Anyhow, I need your cooperation. The FBI says this relic Coronada’s real, they say your dad’s got it, they want it and him both.”

She shook her head as vehemently as if he could see her. “You think that relic’s real? No way.”

Hart claimed to have better information. “FBI says it’s a sixteenth-century gold statue of Mary with Inca jewels and a thorn from the Crown of Thorns.”

Annie snorted. “Total bullshit.”

“I figure you love your dad.” Again, his familiarity jarred her. “Well, the guy’s in a serious mess here and you need to tell him, come see me, turn himself in. We can work a deal.” Abruptly Hart announced he had to take another call. “Fly safe, Lieutenant.”

“Hello? Hello?”

As Annie hit redial, she memorized the caller’s number. It was a skill she’d had since she was a toddler, a short-term photographic memory. When her father had discovered this talent, he’d used it to win bets against unsuspecting strangers who’d been sure she wouldn’t be able to repeat a column of figures after a brief glance. She had dreaded disappointing him by being wrong.

Sergeant Hart’s good-natured baritone sent her to his voice mail. “MPD, Vice Sgt. Dan Hart speaking. Keep it brief. Thanks.”

“This is Lt. Annie Goode. Call me back, Sergeant Hart!”

To her puzzlement, she felt so shaken that she had to pull over to the side of the highway. For five minutes she sat there crying, her head against the steering wheel.

Then with a short scream of tires, she raced the Porsche back onto the asphalt. Annie’s best friend Georgette, a psychiatrist, had told her once that speed was her way of staying ahead of the past. “Damn straight,” Annie had admitted.

She hit 60 miles per hour in 4.3 seconds.

Chapter 2

Speed

For Annie’s seventh birthday, Sam bought her niece a balloon ride. For her eighth, Sam arranged a thirty-minute “Sky Ride” with Dwight Kelvin (D. K.) Destin, U.S. Navy, Retired, a middle-aged African-American Vietnam War vet who owned the tiny local airfield in Emerald, built—he said—on land once farmed by his Algonquin ancestors. He took the little girl up in a Pawnee Cropduster that had his insignia black eagle painted on its side. She so loved this lesson, during which for a few thrilling seconds D. K. handed her the steering yoke, that she persuaded him, a wheelchair-bound grouch, to repair the Piper Warrior her father had left in the Pilgrim’s Rest barn and to teach her to fly it. As fast as it could go.

Going fast had been a habit with her father. But by flying, she could go even faster. On her first ride in the King of the Sky, Annie yelled suddenly and long from joy, a noise no one in Emerald had ever heard the somber child make.

“Feel good?” D. K. Destin asked her. “Want to fly it solo someday?”

She nodded yes, with her solemn blue eyes. “Fast,” she repeated.

“The faster the better,” he agreed. “That’s my philosophy. And I can’t even get out of this chair.” When a Vietcong MiG had winged his A-6E Intruder attack bomber on a deep-strike mission, D. K. had crashed into the China Sea where he had held his unconscious navigator up out of the waves on a fragment of wreckage for five and a half hours, longer than he would have needed to (according to him) had anybody “given a fuck about us.” After rescue, emergency surgery on the carrier saved the navigator but left D. K. unable to walk.

***

After a few dozen hours in the air together, the old combat flyer told her that she was, like him, born to fly. He made her kiss the black eagle painted on the fuselage of his Cropduster and although she was embarrassed, she did so to pledge her allegiance to aviation. Two years later D. K. proclaimed that for her sake he was cutting back on beer. He wanted to live long enough to see her an Annapolis graduate and a commissioned pilot. Annie was going to be Lt. D. K. Destin’s final mission for the U.S. Navy. “Baby, you gonna wave at eagles. You’ll say, ‘’Scuse me, cloud, y’all move on over, here comes the best in the north, south, east, west, and headed for the Milky Way.’ And here’s what you’ll tell the whole fuckin’ world: ‘I am Annie P. Goode and I am Goode to go!’”

It was vaguely evident to Annie, flying high with D. K. above the farms of Emerald, that he was training her to be his victory over a smashed career. After she’d won her first flying competition, he’d made this goal explicit, asking her to take a sacred vow on her gold medal, swearing that someday she would show the U.S. Navy how D. K. Destin, a black man with Occaneechi blood, a man the military had used as a scratch pad, could make her a flyer who was faster than anybody else in America. Annie would be D. K.’s proof that this country’s passing him over for the Medal of Honor had been “racist malefaction.”

“For a little bitty white girl,” he noted with satisfaction, “you are fuckin’ good.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to talk like that,” she primly advised him.

“Talk? Don’t get hung up on ‘talk.’ They shoot you out of the sky? Your plane’s on fire and you’re falling in the shit faster’n a wino off an overpass? You’re going down, the China Sea’s rising up, and a lot of water’s saying, ‘Hellowww, baby!’ You know what, Annie? You don’t give a flying fuck how you’re supposed to talk.”

As the years in Emerald went by, Annie proved just how fast she was. She proved it on the ground as well as in the air. Her junior year in high school, she won blue ribbons in hundred-yard dashes. More and more ribbons hung from hooks on the walls of her room. She told a classmate who was urging her to join the cheerleading squad, “I don’t want to cheer somebody else on. I want somebody else to cheer me on.” By her senior year, the Emerald High band was doing just that, playing “Annie P. Goode” at track meets, scored to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” As soon as she walked onto the field toward the starting block, they would start playing:

Go, Annie, go, go, go!

Annie P. Goode!

D. K. Destin dreaded every one of those track meets. He had nightmares that Annie would trip or that someone would knock into her, that she’d suffer some disabling injury (like his own) that would ruin her chance to be accepted at Annapolis where she would learn to fly jets.

His other nightmare was that her father would return out of the blue and take her away.

But Jack Peregrine never returned and Annie never was injured. In fact, ironically, her success in track was one of the reasons so many colleges, including the Naval Academy, wanted to recruit her.

By the time Annie was twenty-one, she was flying faster and higher than D. K. had ever gone, for by that time she was piloting F-14 Tomcats and then F/A-18 Super Hornets straight up into clouds at an acceleration fast enough to make her bones shake. Her white Navy helmet was stenciled “Lt. Annie P. Goode,” with D. K.’s logo of a black eagle under it, and her white jacket was decorated with commendation ribbons. The only midshipman at the Academy who could fly faster than Annie was the midshipman she married. Brad Hopper.

From the start, D. K. didn’t like Brad. When Annie announced she was marrying her classmate, D. K. bluntly asked her, “He can go fast but can he go slow? If you want to know if he loves you so, it’s in his kiss.”

“Don’t be gross,” Annie told the old flyer.

“Baby, that’s the last of your worries,” he rightly predicted.

Clark also had his doubts about the marriage. Only her optimistic aunt Sam kept saying, “Brad’s the One.”

He wasn’t.

Now, legally separated from him, Annie lived alone and taught flying, mostly to men, some of them men like Brad Hopper. She taught them to fly combat jets off carriers for Air Wing Three of the U.S. Navy. A few of her students afterwards sent her emails from Key West or Jeddah or Fujairah, telling their news or congratulating her on promotions or commendations. Their emails quoted back to her the blessing with which she’d sent each of them on a first solo flight. It was what D. K. had yelled at her morning after morning: “You’re Goode to go!”

***

Annie’s passion for velocity was a trait she knew she had inherited not from D. K. nor from Clark or Sam, but from Jack Peregrine. “We fly through the air,” he had sung to her at bedtime. “Jump, Annie!” And she would fly off the bed into his embrace; he would hold her tightly by her small forearms, swinging her around in a skipping circle until, dizzy, she would sail off, landing back on the bed, scared but laughing. “You’re a flyer,” he’d say, placing the too-large pink baseball cap on her head like a crown. “You’re off to see the gizzards of the wonderful wizard of Nod.”

“It’s not Nod, Dad, it’s Oz!”

“For the love of Mike, is it? Well, I’m the wizard of Nod, darlin’, and I’m going to make you the Queen of the World.”

Decades later, as an adult, she found herself humming, “Wonderful wizard of Nod,” when she climbed into bed. Long after her father was out of her life, she could still hear his voice singing. He would sing with the radio or the television; when he heard Latin music, he’d pull her into a dance. “Come on, one, two, cha-cha-cha.” And they would dance around the motel room and he would promise, “I’m going to leave you a million dollars. You’ll be the richest queen in the whole wide world.”

The word “leave” always frightened her. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

But, just like a wizard, her father had gone away, taking his smile and his stories with him. And so, of all the tales he’d told her, she had come to believe that not one of them was true.

The story of “The Queen of the Sea” was one of his most elaborate tales. He’d added to it for years, working out its details, changing it this way or that as they’d crisscrossed the big country together on long, wide, unending highways.

He told her that a long time ago, caravans of mules, roped together fifty by fifty, lurched over the mountains of Panama, weighed down with silver from the Potosi mines, with Peruvian gold, with emeralds.

When the mules reached the port of Nombre de Dios, a fleet of Spanish galleons with empty hulls was waiting for them. Crews of slaves loaded the ships with treasure and they set sail on the Carrera de las Indias, around the Cabo, their sailors keeping watch for the high bluffs of the Havana Harbor, where they could safely drop anchor before the long voyage to Spain. Many ships never even reached the open Atlantic but sank with their cargo near Cuba. Over the centuries, hundreds of ships sank. Indeed, by the time of Fidel Castro, the Cuban government was estimating that in their territorial waters lay a hundred billion dollars worth of sunken treasure from these ships. They said that all the spoils, collected or not, belonged to the Cuban people. Their researchers were particularly interested in a sunken ship called La Madre del Salvador.

Her father said that La Madre was a Spanish vessel that in 1549 a sudden storm had blown up against the reefs near Havana. It sank, bilging tons of gold and silver ballast onto the floor of the sea. A nobleman on board, Don Carlos de Tormes, drowned while removing a statue from a small trunk in his cabin, a wood trunk covered in ornate leather and clasped with ornate iron. In the trunk was a gold effigy so precious that Don Carlos had written home about it in a letter still preserved in a museum in Seville. He called it La Reina Coronada del Mar, the Queen of the Sea. It was a reliquary, fifteen-inches high, of the Virgin Mary, crusted with gold and jewels that a year previously had belonged to Inca priests. The priests had handed over the temple treasure to a small squadron of Spanish soldiers who had hacked to death randomly selected members of the Inca community and then expressed their perfect willingness to butcher everyone else. Gold seemed to calm the Spanish down.

A skilled goldsmith fashioned the statue of Mary out of the plunder. He dressed her in the style of the Peruvian earth mother Pachamama and beat out a broad golden cape, studding it with little rubies and sapphires and diamonds. He made her a gold crown, capping it with seven large emeralds, sixty carats apiece, each on a gold rod that formed a sunburst. In the Virgin’s arms was a small silver baby who wore a crown of silver thorns. On her breast a little silver door opened into her heart cavity. Her heart was a 135-carat star ruby, resting on a tiny box that held, allegedly, a real thorn from Christ’s crucifixion crown, with supposedly his real blood on it.

As Annie’s father told the story, when La Madre del Salvador sank, everyone aboard drowned, including Don Carlos, who died clutching the Queen of the Sea. For centuries the Queen slept in his skeletal arms, floating slowly along the dark coral reefs among rusted anchors and broken olive jars and bits of majolica bowls, all part of the wreckage of more than five hundred other Spanish ships that had spilled their spoils along the silver route. Time rolled on, nudging the statue loose from the proud nobleman’s bony hands, until finally its crown snagged on a spar near the Colorados Reef. Then one day, a fisherman, diving to untangle his net from the reef, saw a gleam of gold only ten feet below the surface. Diving deep to the shimmer, he freed La Reina Coronada del Mar and took her home.

Jack told Annie how in 1815 this devout fisherman had donated the Queen of the Sea to a monastery in his remote village. Afterwards, for decades, rumors spread in that part of Cuba about a relic recovered from the reefs. But eventually the stories muddled into idle chitchat until finally only a few old people had ever even heard of the statue.

In 1898 a war had started in Cuba called the Spanish-American War. The U.S. Army invaded the island to free people like the fisherman and they bombed the monastery. Annie’s father told her how an American armament officer, searching for survivors in that monastery, found in its rubble the jeweled statue of the Virgin Mary and took it home with him to North Carolina. This officer’s name was Joseph Peregrine.

Once home, Peregrine rebuilt the house and called it Pilgrim’s Rest. In 1900 he changed the name of the whole town from Aquene (its Occaneechi name) to Emerald. Because he was the richest man around, no one objected. Everyone called Captain Peregrine “Boss” and he bossed everyone in his family and in Emerald until somebody killed him. Before his sudden death, Boss had taken all the jewels out of the statue and buried them at Pilgrim’s Rest where nobody could find them, until generations later his great-grandson Jack did just that. Or so Annie’s father told her.

When a child, riding along the highways, Annie did not understand most of the details of what her father said about La Reina Coronada del Mar. But it was a story she liked to hear. It was a story about a mother, even if only a gold one fifteen inches high; a mother who was lost for a long time and then miraculously found. Back then Annie still hoped to find her own mother some day. She’d always thought that she would suddenly pick her mother out of a crowd, maybe by spotting and identifying her with her special neon-blue X-ray sunglasses, although her mother and she had never met, although her father had made up a different, unbelievable story every time she’d asked him who her mother was.

In her first year at Pilgrim’s Rest, Annie started having a recurring dream in which she confused the Queen of the Sea with her unknown mother. She had this dream so often that her aunt and uncle began to call it “Annie’s dream.” Still asleep, she cried out and they hurried to her room and told her it was just a dream. But she knew that and it didn’t help.

In this dream, she was flying a little red airplane over a blue ocean. The colors were uncomplicated, like colors in a crayon box. Red, blue, yellow. Water and sky were the same bright crayon-blue so that there was no way to know air from ocean except for a black line between them. Flying beside her was her father, also in a red airplane. Their planes looked like a children’s ride at an amusement park.

As Annie’s plane floated out of clouds, she saw a small wooden ship, a Spanish ship with square sails, sailing precariously through the ocean. At the prow of this ship stood a young woman, whom Annie knew to be her mother. The woman had red-gold hair. She wore a gold cape like the Queen of the Sea. Her ship was sinking and she was shouting for help.

Annie flew back up to her father’s plane, shouting for him to do something. But he sped far ahead until he was only a fleck of red on the blue horizon. She couldn’t keep up with him. So she turned back to try to help her mother. But she was not in time. Waves swept over the ship and her mother disappeared beneath the sea.

And that’s when Annie woke up.

The first adult to whom Annie told the details of this dream was neither Sam nor Clark but her flying teacher, D. K. Destin. She told D. K. one day when he was maneuvering them in and out of white clouds high above Emerald; the sky looked so much like the sky in her dream that she began talking about it. She told him about the woman on the ship that she couldn’t save. She explained about the golden statue of the Queen of the Sea in her father’s story and she told him as many details as she could remember.

D. K.’s cornrows shook as he blew away her father’s tale of sunken treasure with a loud puff of air. “Sugar Pie, the man was yanking your chain. There’s no ‘Queen of the Sea.’ He was as full of it as a mountain of guano under a pile of cow patties.”

“What’s guano?” she asked the cranky pilot.

“Shit.”

Annie giggled. “Guano. That’s a funny word.”

“It’s real.” He took her hand, slapped it at the control panel of the small Cessna. “This is no story. Wham! You’re shot down in the China Sea! You’re squiggling through a puckered pocket of metal and all of sudden your legs won’t work. What the fuck, your legs won’t work!”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“Damn right. Your lungs are bustin’ in that cold black salty water and no air to breathe. Air’s so high up on top of you, you can’t even see it. And you know what? Swimming best I could up out of that water, if I’d spotted a little gold statue of the Virgin Mary with million dollar emerald eyes, right there in front of my nose on some fucking coral reef, I wouldn’t have stopped for two seconds of my dying breath to get that sucker loose. Not two seconds!”

“Amy Johnson wouldn’t have stopped for two seconds either.”

“Damn right,” he agreed. “Amy’s in the fuckin’ English Channel, poor thing, her plane’s down in the fog and all they come back up with was her pocketbook with her goddamn lipstick in it. In real life, you gotta make some choices.”

The dead World War II pilot Amy Johnson had recently become Annie’s idol. D. K. had told her about the beautiful young British flyer who was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia and who died at only thirty-eight in World War II while ferrying bombers for the RAF. Annie had Amy’s picture on her bedroom wall. D. K. was full of such lore about bygone pilots and their heroic deeds.

“Courage,” he told her. “That is the only thing worth guano. All the money in the world’s not worth shit.” He slapped her hand again on the panel. “What’s the only thing?”

“Courage.”

“That’s right. Give me that toothless smile of yours, Orphan Annie.”

She frowned, indignant, tightening her lips over her missing front teeth. “I’m not an orphan, I’ve got Sam and Clark. I’ve got parents.”

D. K. laughed. “You got too many! You got more than you know what to do with.”

She covered her mouth grinning. “You’re guano.”

“And love’s a game of give-and-take, baby. Me and your Uncle Clark. We both loved America, we gave it all we had and the U.S. took it all and look at us now.”

“What’s wrong with you and Clark?”

“Not a damn thing.” The old vet D. K. banked his plane and they headed home.

Chapter 3

Thunder on the Hill

When, at seven years old, Annie first heard her “uncle” Clark Goode calling to her as she hid in the barn beneath the airplane, she had to wipe her eyes on the knees of her jeans in order to see him. A tall, thin man in khakis and plaid shirt stepped through the big doors, closing them against the rain. Crouched on the dark dirt, the child hugged the wheel cover of the Piper single-engine plane, frightened by the sound of the doors and by the lightning that cracked across the sky, as if one of the fairy-tale giants in her father’s stories had broken open heaven with a sledgehammer.

The tall man ambled over to the lantern and when he saw her he tapped three reassuring pats on the plane’s wing. “Hi there, Annie,” he said. He had sandy hair and wore glasses with round tortoise-shell rims. Offering her a pair of little blue plastic sunglasses, he asked, “These yours? I found them in the yard…”

She took the glasses but didn’t speak.

“Sam’s out there looking for you…Want one?” He held out an unopened can of soda.

Annie, struggling to sound indifferent, quoted her father. “‘Sorry, no silver cup.’”

“That’s a good one.” The man had a slow soft accent that she later learned to identify as Tidewater. “That’s from an old movie called Stagecoach.”

“I know. My dad says it, ‘no silver cup.’”

“Your aunt Sam loves movies too, so I watch a lot of them. She’s out there driving up and down the road, calling for you, figuring you ran after your dad.”

“My dad drove too fast.”

He nodded. “Always did…Some storm, huh?” There were loud rattles of noise like giants stomping on the barn roof.

“Is it a hurricane?” She had seen those in movies on TV.

“Nope.” The man sat on the ground next to the plane, wiping reddish dirt from his hands, looping his arms around his knees, bending his head so it was in line with hers. “It’s hail. Ever seen hail?”

Worried, she shook her head, watching his face. “Maybe it’ll get my dad?”

He looked at her, thought about it. “No chance. Jack will be okay. I promise.” Tilting his head, he smiled. “Jack’s always okay, right? Just when you think he’s done for?”

She stared at the man squatting there beside her, wondering how he understood her father so well. As if he’d heard the question, he added, “Your dad and his sister Sam and I sort of grew up together. He was her little brother. Well, still is.” He took off his wet glasses, shaking the rain from them, cleaning them carefully on his shirtsleeve. “My name’s Clark Goode.” He held out his hand but Annie ignored it. “I live here with Sam. Your dad ever mention he had a big sister named Samantha, Samantha Anne?”

“That’s my name backwards. Mine’s Anne Samantha.” She scooted a few inches from behind the wheel cover. “My dad showed me Sam’s picture. On their bikes. He said he brought me here before. When I was a baby?”

“I believe he did.”

Annie tightened her arms around her jeans, leaning over her knees just as the man was doing, his hands clasped on his long arms. She considered pretending she personally recalled that earlier visit to Pilgrim’s Rest but decided to admit, “I don’t remember coming here.”

“I don’t remember when I was a baby either. I bet you’ll like Sam.”

Annie stared at him glumly.

“She’s nice,” he said.

There was a loud crack of rumbling noise. Annie slid herself a little nearer the man. “Thunder on the hill,” he said calmly and finding a small stick, drew circles with it in the dirt. “So Jack hit the road? Gold prospector but it never pans out.” Seeing her confusion, he added, “That’s a pun. Pun’s when a word means two things at once. Like a pan you find gold in or ‘pan out’ like something works out or it doesn’t.”

“I know,” she said, although she hadn’t heard of puns before.

“Did your dad mention where he was going or when he’d be back?”

She shook her head, dropping it with a sigh to her knees.

They sat together awhile, neither speaking. The hail stopped clattering. The barn grew darker and Annie inched forward again, closer to the man. They were quiet a few minutes longer. Finally she said, “His license plate is MJ87143. I can remember any numbers I see.”

“Amazing.”

She felt compelled to admit, “I can only remember for a while if it’s a lot of numbers.”

“Still.”

“This airplane has a number.” She pointed at the Piper. “NC48563.”

“Exactly right.”

“My dad said this plane’s my birthday present. Probably not true.”

The tall man stood up slowly, kicked the wheel. “Sure it’s true. Been sitting in the barn a long time waiting for you to get here.”

Surprised and pleased by his easy agreement, Annie scooted back to show him her father’s dragon tail of letters curled beneath the plane’s wing, spelling King of the Sky.

He admired the writing with her.

“I bet it’s fast,” she said.

“Probably. I’m kind of a slow-lane guy myself.” He suggested they leave the barn to look for Aunt Sam while there was still some light to see by. “Sam calls her movie store Now Voyager. What’s your favorite movie? We could watch one tonight and get some takeout. You like Chinese food?”

Annie’s favorite movies were Top Gun and Blazing Saddles but she wasn’t about to tell the stranger that. “Do I have to stay here?”

“You’re welcome to. Doc Clark is what my kids call me—I’m a kids’ doctor. Or just Clark’s fine.” Leaning down, he offered Annie his hand again but she still wouldn’t take it. “Fair enough,” he said. “Come on in when you feel like you want to. I’m not going anywhere. Neither is Sam. And well, Annie, this is a damn dumb thing Jack’s done but we’ll sort it all out.”

She hugged her legs, the small lavender jeans dirty and wet. “My dad’s in trouble again.”

Clark nodded at her, slow, unruffled. “But let’s look on the bright side. He enjoys it.”

“Annie! Annie!”

Suddenly the tall tanned woman she’d first seen on the porch came running through the barn doors, her clothes wet through. Holding Annie’s pink baseball cap, she crawled under the plane’s wing and pulled the child into her arms. Annie struggled backward, startled by the stranger’s closeness. But the woman nudged her gently toward her again. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m your aunt Sam. Everything’s going to be okay. I’m so sorry.” Slowly she rocked them back and forth together, huddled beneath the plane.

There was something in the warm feel of the woman’s neck, in her arms, that was familiar. Her eyes were familiar too, like Annie’s father’s, green as emeralds, but sadder, with a small furrowing crease of worry between the eyebrows that, in Annie’s growing up, was never to go away.

On the first night of Annie’s arrival, in the large long hallway of Pilgrim’s Rest, Sam helped her unpack her blue suitcase; it was filled with her clothes, including her favorite dress and her white jacket with gold buttons. Tucked beneath the clothes was $12,000 in hundred-dollar bills, around which was wrapped, with a rubber band, a birth certificate from a hospital in Key West, stating that Anne Samantha Peregrine had been born there on the Fourth of July at 8:42 p.m., that she’d weighed 6 lbs., 3 oz., that Jack Peregrine was her father and Claudette Colbert was her mother. Looking at this certificate, Annie asked Sam to pronounce her mother’s name and Sam sounded upset when she did so. “Claudette Colbert.”

That first night, while Annie picked sadly at the Chinese takeout food, Sam told her about the time she’d been here before, when her father unexpectedly showed up with her in Emerald; how he brought the plane, the King of the Sky, on a rented flatbed truck, its wings dismantled, and parked it in the barn. Annie was only twelve months old then and they stayed at Pilgrim’s Rest only three weeks. But during their visit Annie took her first step, running into Sam’s arms.

Annie said nothing when she heard this story but she’d been intrigued. Then Sam had brought out a bright yellow birthday cake and put on a video of The Wizard of Oz, because Annie, lying, had told her it was her favorite movie, figuring it would be a safer choice than Top Gun. When Judy Garland chanted, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,” the child, to impress the two solicitous adults, made a joke—having first rehearsed the remark silently to herself—“Okay, I guess I’m in No Place now.”

Sam and Clark laughed, pleasing her despite her grief.

The next morning there was a card on the kitchen table that said, There’s No Place Like No Place. Welcome Home. Sam was at the stove, flipping pancakes with a dexterity that couldn’t but impress Annie. She even flipped one behind her back and caught it in the pan. “Tennis,” she explained. “You play?”

Annie shook her head.

“You want to?”

Annie shrugged.

“I’m going to practice today. You could help me out. I pay fifty cents an hour.”

Over breakfast Sam told her niece that Clark and she shared her family house but that they weren’t married, they were just friends. She added, “I don’t know why people say ‘just friends.’ It’s the hardest thing in the world to be.”

Annie stared at her aunt carefully. “Are you two gay?” She was trying to shock her.

Sam said, “I am but Clark’s kind of gloomy.” She held out the yellow birthday cake. “Double chocolate inside.”

“You shouldn’t eat cake for breakfast.”

Sam cut two pieces. “Of all the things we shouldn’t do in America, this is way down the list.”

The phone rang and hoping it was her father saying he was coming back for her, Annie held her breath until Sam returned from the hall. “Clark’s at the hospital. Says we should come there and have lunch with him. He’ll show you around his clinic.”

“Is my mother dead?” Annie asked abruptly. “If she is, can I see her grave?”

Sam said she didn’t know who Annie’s mother was; that, despite her frequent questions, Jack had never told her.

***

A few weeks later, Sam came home with a black and white female Shih Tzu puppy, tiny and imperious, whose sale had been advertised on the staff bulletin board of the pediatric clinic. She gave the dog to Annie, claiming it resembled Toto in The Wizard of Oz, which it did not. Annie named the Shih Tzu Teddy B, after a stuffed bear of similar size, the loss of which, in some motel on the road with her father, had left her for weeks inconsolable.

Like Annie, Teddy cried through most of her first night at Pilgrim’s Rest. After that, the little Shih Tzu pretty much took over the house.

Another present arrived in an express mail truck a week later. It advertised itself as “The World’s Biggest & Hardest Jigsaw Puzzle.” Clark, who had ordered it, set the puzzle out on a table by a bay window in a room called “the morning room,” although no one knew why it was so described. The jigsaw puzzle was a giant photograph of blue sky, nothing but blue, with—so its box claimed—20,000 tiny, nearly indistinguishable pieces. It was as large as the mahogany top of the fat spiral-legged table onto which Clark poured all its pieces.

Inviting Sam and a resistant Annie to help him assemble the sky, he told them, “We’ll get the corners first. Annie, see if you can find a corner.”

While she was still wary of these two strangers and did not yet return their smiles, she couldn’t resist proving how quickly she could locate in the huge pile of particles of blue cardboard a piece that had a 90-degree angle.

“Great!” Sam exclaimed. “We’re on our way.”

The little girl wrinkled her mouth in disdain. “This will take years to put together.”

Clark smiled. “Let’s look on the bright side.”

“It probably will take years. Decades,” promised Sam, her sad eyes for a rare moment as playful as her brother Jack’s.

The day the puzzle showed up was also the day that Annie’s eventual best friend, Georgette Nickerson, plummeted into her life. Georgette lived next door but had been away at a camp for overweight children—which her mother had forced her to attend.

The plump little black-haired girl had suddenly come loudly skittering into the kitchen of Pilgrim’s Rest, flinging herself at Sam and shouting, “I missed you! I hated that camp, they starved us and they threw us in the lake and kicked big orange balls at us. I ate purple Jell-O day and night, night and day.” She spun around at Annie. “Who are you?”

Sam introduced her niece, who was overcome not so much with shyness as surprise when the fat little girl flopped down abruptly on the floor beside the Shih Tzu and barked loudly. “Woof woof woof!!” The dog barked back at her, growling. “I don’t have a pet. My mom thinks I’d eat it. Is this yours?”

“Yes,” Annie said. “Her name is Teddy B.”

“My name’s Georgia Georgette Nickerson, can you believe it? I make people call me Georgette. Dumb, huh? I was named after a state and after my dad George. That’s like naming your child like, you know, Rhode Island Rhodette.”

“No it’s not.”

“My dad had a heart attack and died. My mom says the police are after your dad.”

“He’s too fast for them,” insisted Annie, pushed to his defense.

Over the years, Georgette’s fast-rising scale of laughter and Teddy’s sharp bark, and the hum of Sam’s and Clark’s voices at Pilgrim’s Rest, softly moving back and forth in the slow Southern dusk, conversation leisurely as a river, became for Annie the sound of safety. After dinner, the four of them would sit together at the mahogany table, with Teddy curled on the cushion of the best chair and Georgette staying until her mother telephoned from next door to demand her return, and they’d talk over their separate days, while idly looking for connecting pieces of the puzzle of the sky. Its frame wasn’t hard to assemble; in a month, they had all four corners in place. After that, things slowed down.

Annie’s father Jack was, as she predicted, too fast for the police. The state patrol eventually found that he’d sold the red Mustang with license plate MJ87143 to someone in Atlanta who hadn’t looked too closely into whether or not he’d really owned it. Sam pestered the police and even hired private investigators to search for her younger brother, but without success.

At first, Annie missed him, and his songs and stories, with an ache that hurt like a bruise. But carefully she taught herself to stop hoping. She taught herself that she was alone in her life and would always be and therefore would rely only on herself.

Of course she wasn’t alone. Outside her door waited family and friends. But it was a long time before she heard them there. Months passed before she laughed again as loudly as she had when her father had sung his funny songs. And from her first weeks at Pilgrim’s Rest, she wasn’t restful. She started having the dream about the woman in her gold cape on a ship in the ocean, the mother she’d never seen, the mother whose real name Sam and Clark could not tell her because they didn’t know it. She would wake up from her nightmare as the little ship was sinking and she couldn’t save the drowning woman and her father was flying away.

For months, whenever it rained in Emerald so hard the sky went black, Annie could see Jack Peregrine’s car racing away from her over the hill.

But finally, as months became years, even rain was just rain.

Chapter 4

Wings

Growing up as a child with Sam and Clark, with her friend Georgette and with her flying teacher D. K. Destin, Annie had to learn new styles, very different from the fabled schemes and exuberant stories of her father. In the town of Emerald, stories were for the most part just boring local gossip, tales of neighbors’ daily triumphs and travails. She felt them to be much smaller than the tales—like the saga of Spanish treasure under the sea—that her father had told her. Only D. K.’s stories of the great pilots of old had for her the same kind of magic.

Still, over the years Annie listened to Georgette’s jokes and Clark’s puns and Sam’s way of comparing everything in their lives to the movies and eventually their worlds became hers and her father’s romance faded. Georgette and she were soon best friends and all through their Emerald school years spent nearly half their lives companionably in one another’s company, despite or because of their differences: Annie, small and neat, practical, athletic, serious; Georgette, funny, dreamy, zaftig. Both ironic about life but ready for life to do big things with them.

And then when Annie was seventeen, on a summer day, ten years after her father had just dropped her off at Pilgrim’s Rest, he suddenly returned, calling her name.

Sam’s heart almost stopped, she later claimed, when her brother ran noisily crashing out of a cornfield and raced into their barn. In the vegetable garden, where on her knees she’d been tying up tomato plants, she had to use a fence post to pull herself to her feet because her legs went wobbly. Sam called the event, “The day Jack showed up like Cary Grant chased by the crop duster in North by Northwest.”

By this time, it was too late for Jack Peregrine to lay claim to Annie. For almost eleven years, she’d lived a “normal” life without him. She had just graduated from high school, had broken up with her first serious boyfriend, and had been accepted at Annapolis. Her family was now Sam and Clark, who had long since officially adopted her. Her dog Teddy had grown old and they’d recently acquired a new puppy, an exuberant Maltese named Malpy, for Malpractice, whom Teddy tolerated with a begrudging noblesse oblige.

They made a reasonably content family and on vacations together spent more time studying stars from campsites than learning card tricks in hotel rooms, as she’d done with her father. They hiked and climbed rocks and kayaked, then returned together to a home that stayed put. She ate real food at a real table and went to bed in her own room and had her height and weight measured annually by Clark, who’d inoculated her against everything he could think of. Thanks to D. K. Destin, she had her pilot’s license and could do loop-the-loops in the King of the Sky. She wore on her flying jacket the Navy wings and handmade black eagle badge that D. K. had given her. She drove the car Sam bought for her on her sixteenth birthday. She went to the same schools in the same town where she’d started in the second grade because she’d tested so well.

“Give your dad credit,” Sam urged. “He taught you to read and write.”

But Annie gave him credit for nothing and credited nothing he’d ever said to her. The fact that he had endlessly told her she was smart and beautiful was meaningless. He had also told her that her mother was Claudette Colbert and that he’d make her the queen of the world.

On the hot summer afternoon when Jack Peregrine showed up at Pilgrim’s Rest, Annie was next door with Georgette. They were lying on the floor in Georgette’s bedroom, listening to Metal Urbain’s Les hommes morts sont dangereux and watching a muted tape of Goddard’s À bout de souffle with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. For a party that night, they planned to retro-dress like Jean Seberg in the movie, with short hair and sunglasses, crisp striped shirts, their collars up, and belted flaring skirts that perfectly fit them. They had been enthusiastic Francophiles all year, tying thin black cashmere sweaters around their necks, pulling filters off Mrs. Nickerson’s cigarettes to smoke them, and otherwise preparing themselves to spend a month in France on a language immersion program before they left for their separate colleges. Annie even renamed her friend Gigi (for Georgia Georgette, and because it was like Gigi in the movie musical set in Paris), though the nickname never stuck.

When Sam spotted her brother Jack from the garden, her first thought was Annie. How would Annie feel? She ran into the barn, where she found him “in a state” because the King of the Sky, the plane he’d left there seventeen years ago, was missing.

“Are you kidding?” she shouted at him. “You’re standing there asking me where your goddamn plane is?!! How about your daughter?”

“Where’s Annie?”

“Next door!” Sam pointed angrily to the Nickersons’ house.

“She okay?”

“She’s fine!”

Jack had an excuse for dropping Annie off a decade earlier and disappearing. He claimed he’d been locked up in prison, and that in prison he’d come to believe that the best thing he could do for Annie was to stay away from her and let her have a normal life.

Frustrated, Sam punched at him, shoving him to the dirt floor. “You are so full of shit, Jack.”

“Come on, Sam. Where’s the King of the Sky?”

“Annie flies that goddamn plane, which you gave her, damn it!”

Jack dusted himself off, grinning. “She does? That’s wonderful. She flies a plane? Wow. Really?”

“Really. She’s going to Annapolis.”

“Really? How’d she learn to fly?”

“D. K. taught her. The plane’s at his place. Aren’t you going to ask me how I am?”

“How are you?”

“Jill left me. Mom died. Clark lives here.”

“I know all that.”

Sam pointed again at the Nickerson house. “Go talk to your daughter, she’s next door! But let me warn her you’re here. You know, this kind of shock is rough on normal people.” Sam ran inside the house and telephoned her niece.

Across the yard, grabbing at Georgette, Annie held the phone against her heart. “Oh my God, Sam says my jerk of a dad’s in the barn. I don’t want to see him, okay!”

“Oui, Jacques qui?” Georgette leaned far out the window, her spiked black and purple streaked hair giving her the look of a sooty gargoyle. “Tu ne sais pas Jacques. Oh, there he is!”

From Georgette’s window the two girls watched as Jack ran toward them through the grass, waving up to his daughter as if it had been ten minutes ago that he’d last seen her, not more than ten years. Even from so far away, she could tell that he was thinner and that his pants and his T-shirt were loose. He came close enough to the Nickerson house for her to see that he held a small dirty cloth sack, like a bag of marbles.

The white puppy Malpy raced around him in a friendly frenzy, yapping so loudly that on Georgette’s bed, Teddy lifted her head and growled before returning to sleep—uninterested in either Jack Peregrine or New Wave Cinema.

From the high vantage of Georgette’s window Annie could see a blue Corvette at the edge of the cornfield, its nose to the road, the way her father always parked his cars—ready to go. She was furious because tears started down her face. She swiped them away.

Her father stood in the yard below the Nickerson windows, yelling up at her, “Hi, Annie!”

She didn’t answer but, with slim tanned arms leaning over the sill, stared out at the fields behind him.

“You look beautiful! Come on down, say hello.” He made his arms into wings.

She fought to ignore him.

“I hear you’re a flyer. Going to Annapolis. Good for you! Come on, let’s go to the airfield, take a ride in the King! Hey, look at you. I missed you so much!” Her father started doing a cha-cha dance, an imaginary partner in his arms.

Annie pulled her head back inside the window without replying, noticing as she did so that a brown car was coming toward them up the hill, red dirt blowing in spirals on the road, swirling closer.

“Come on, Annie! I owe you one!” She could hear her father calling her name like a chant.

Georgette was saying, “Go down there and talk to him!”

“No.”

Her friend tried tugging at her. “Go talk to him! I don’t mean like you’re lucky, but, God, my dad’s permanently dead. At least yours shows up every ten years. Plus my dad just owned a jewelry store. My mom just sells engagement rings and flexy watchbands. Boring! Your dad’s a criminal. Go over there!”

“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 recounted 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 lured “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?”

The answer was presumably no.

After the reception, Jack and Sam’s mother retired to her bedroom, locked the door behind her, and stayed there for a year, overcome, the town assumed, by grief. Sam told the cleaning lady, who “did the house” once a week, that she was never to bother Grandee, that Sam would clean her room herself. But the cleaning lady later told Kim that she’d once seen the judge’s widow crouched on her brass bed, eating a live mouse, her lips smeared shining red. Grandee would still be loose in Emerald, a certifiable madwoman, if she hadn’t stabbed Sam with scissors and the sheriff hadn’t talked Sam into signing her mother into a home.

In fact, said Kim, not to mince words, over the centuries the whole Peregrine family had gone bat-shit crazy.

Annie had no reason to doubt the truth of these sad stories; she knew far less about her family than Georgette’s mother did; in fact she knew only what Mrs. Nickerson told her. And, given these sagas of dementia and sudden death, of lost wealth and lost love, of a house filled with such sorrow, she could easily understand why her father had called Pilgrim’s Rest a pit of snakes, a cage of tigers, and had told his young daughter that he’d never go back there; why Aunt Sam—although insisting that her own childhood at Pilgrim’s Rest had been “just fine”—had such sad eyes and why she declined to talk about any family but the one she and Clark and Annie had made for themselves.

Chapter 7

The Smiling Lieutenant

Racing the storm home to Pilgrim’s Rest in her convertible Porsche, Annie outdrove the memories that had unexpectedly jumped out at her because of Miami Detective Daniel Hart’s phone call.

Thunder rolled across the tobacco fields and a fat drop of rain splashed her knuckles as she downshifted to turn onto the gravel road that wound to the top of River Hill. Speeding up the drive, she parked efficiently in the open barn.

Above the porch of Pilgrim’s Rest a banner flapped loudly from the overhang, its letters spelling Happy Birthday Annie. 26!!!

Aunt Sam, tall and nutmeg-tan, ran onto the porch. The storm blew the door from her hand, slapping it against the house. Sam’s cropped hair was prematurely white now, but she still played tennis every day and she still looked trim in her shorts and purple T-shirt with the logo of her movie rental store Now Voyager across it. She was waving a FedEx envelope. Annie had the irrational feeling that her aunt was gesturing “Back up,” as if she were trying to warn her to turn around.

Clark’s Volvo drove slowly into view behind her. He backed into the barn beside the Porsche and emerged carrying the two large plant cones. “You win,” he called. “You beat me.”

Malpy ran into the yard from the side of the house and raced in circles around Annie. Wind blew back the Maltese’s white fur from his face.

Sam, running toward them, stopped suddenly. Then she shouted, “Phone,” turned around, and hurried back inside the house.

“Gonna let loose!” Clark yelled. As if to prove his point, rain poured suddenly down; a twisting gust yanked his hat off and spun it like a top across the yard. Dropping the cones, the long-legged doctor loped after it. Up on the porch steps, he shook his legs to unstick his rain-soaked khaki trousers. Behind him, his little white dog shook his short wet legs too.

“Hi Malpy.” Annie kissed the Maltese. “Teddy still bossing you around?”

Clark said, “Bosses everybody.” The Shih Tzu (who’d been chosen for Annie because they were the longest-lived of dogs) was now nearly twenty, blind, arthritic, self-important as ever; these days, Clark said, she never left the velvet poof in her pagoda except to reassert her supremacy over Malpy.

Annie stood with her uncle on the porch, looking out at the rain. On the horizon a black mass of clouds tinged with an eerie green twisted and swirled off to the east, like an old satin cloak dragged across the sky.

Clark rubbed water off his sandy hair. “Actually I got here only two minutes after you did. Just goes to show.”

“I had to pull off the road for a phone call. A weird cop from Miami, looking for Dad. I told him I had no idea.”

Clark nodded thoughtfully. “Why’d he call you?”

She shrugged. “Exactly.”

“You bring your cat?”

She told him that her friend Trevor was taking care of Amy Johnson back in Chesapeake Cove.

“That’s good.” Clark wiped his glasses on his shirt. “I just don’t see why you never ask that fellow down to meet us. Plenty of room at Pilgrim’s Rest.” Trevor, her condominium neighbor, was a single man her age.

“He wouldn’t take the time. Workaholic.”

Clark shrugged excessively and pointed at her.

“Don’t start,” she warned. She pointed at the house next door. “But Georgette would like Trevor.” Annie had been trying to fix up Georgette since high school.

Georgette now lived alone with a Siamese cat named Pitti Sing; her mother Kim had moved recently to a golf community in Southern Pines. Clark shook his head at his neighbor’s house. “You want to talk workaholic? Georgette’s at the hospital fourteen hours a day; at night, she watches television or she comes over here, watches movies with Sam and me. I want her to fall in love.”

Annie touched his face. “You want everybody to fall in love.”

“I tried it myself a couple of times. I enjoyed it.” Clark stepped back as wind blew the rain in on them. “It’s let loose. Told you.” He stretched his hand out into the downpour as if to test it. “My grandma used to say they would get rain so big one drop could drown a cat. So when I was little, whenever it rained, I hid our cat in a dresser drawer—”

Annie had heard this story before. “—and your cat had her first litter right on top of your blue crewneck. That’s why you went into pediatrics.”

“It’s sure why I never wore that blue crewneck again. So, go on in and happy birthday.” Gesturing at her Navy uniform, Clark held up the forefinger that meant a pun was coming. “You hear about the red ship that collided with the blue ship and all the sailors were marooned?”

“Top ten worst,” she said. She ranked most of his puns in the “top ten worst.”

He pushed on his glasses, bent to examine the service ribbons on her white jacket. “So, is that for sure, you’re getting divorced next week?”

She shrugged. “The lawyer swears.”

Clark nodded. “Good.”

She nodded back. “Yep.” They’d been able to talk to each other with nods since the day they’d met long ago in the Pilgrim’s Rest barn.

“About love?” he added. “Next time, go for the package. Looks, brains, job. Don’t settle.” He hugged her. “Or on the other hand, settle and be happy.”

“Got it, Clark.” She smiled at him, his favorite smile.

“You’re not planning on taking Brad back, are you? Don’t even think that.”

She raised her eyebrow at her uncle. “Aren’t you always telling me I move too fast?”

“That’s sure what I told you when you married Brad.”

Annie changed the subject. “Want to hear some good news? I can’t wait to tell D. K. He’ll love this.” She said she had been chosen to test pilot a new short-takeoff vertical-landing carrier jet they were testing for Navy purchase. An F-35. The Lightning II.

“Lightning II, that’s great. Sounds easygoing.”

“I think I can get it over 1200 miles per hour. That’ll be a speed record. So it’s July 14, five in the morning. Another pilot will do the same test.”

“How do you feel about this?”

“Don’t mind competing. Don’t like losing. There’re a couple of guys faster than I am. At flight school, Brad could always kick it over that extra point-whatever. But who knows, this could be my time.”

Clark patted her cheek softly. “I’m mystified as to why anybody would want to set a speed record at five in the morning; five in the evening either.” He rubbed her back. “But, hey, you like that dark blue world.”

“I do.” She looked at the roiling clouds. “I do like it up there.”

Aunt Sam stepped out to join them on the porch. She stared at her niece. “That was the phone. What’s wrong with you? Were you crying?”

“A little while ago. But I’m fine.” Annie looked carefully at her aunt; the vertical lines between Sam’s eyebrows were frowning more than usual. “What’s wrong with you?”

Sam squeezed Clark’s hands. “What’s the matter with Annie, Clark?”

“Nothing. Her divorce isn’t final yet.”

Sam reached out to her niece. “A FedEx just came for you, from Jack.”

Annie stepped away. “From Dad? I just got a weird phone call from Miami about Dad.”

Sam pointed back inside at the hallway. “This FedEx came just a little while ago with some balloons. Was the phone call from Miami a man named Rafael Rook?”

Annie shook her head. “Rafael Rook? No, it was from the Miami police. A Sgt. Daniel Hart. He’s looking for Dad. For ‘fraud.’”

Clark said he wasn’t surprised. “The police were always looking for Jack for fraud. But balloons? That’s a first.”

“Happy Birthday to me,” Annie said flatly. “I’m twenty-six. I haven’t heard a word in a decade. Now it’s a FedEx card and balloons. Sweet.”

“So, who’s Rafael Rook?” Clark asked Sam.

“A good friend of Jack’s. He wanted to talk to Annie.”

The porch door slapped again, loudly, flung against the house by the strong wind. Clark pulled it shut. “Sam and Georgette have been working on your party for a week. But we better cancel. This could be the big one. A real twister.”

“That’s what you always say.” Annie pulled her aunt closer. “Okay, Sam, what’s the problem? Something’s wrong with you, and it’s not my birthday party getting rained out. What’s this about?”

Frowning, Sam put her hands on Annie’s shoulders. “It’s Jack.”

“What’s he done now?”

“He wants you to come to St. Louis right away, Annie. He’s dying.”

Chapter 8

The Man from Yesterday

The storm had darkened the sky and in the hall Annie had to turn on a light. Carefully she read the small grubby wrinkled sheet of writing paper that was all there was in the FedEx envelope. Its letterhead showed a gold sun either rising or setting on a gold horizon line. Below the sun was an address: Golden Days Center for Active Living on Ficus Avenue in Miami, Florida. The penciled handwriting slanting up across the note was unsteady and smeared.

Annie,

Meet me in St. Louis where we stayed before. Fly the King. Crucial. Sam says she kept my flight jacket. I need it. Did you hang onto your pink cap? Bring it. I hear you’re brilliant and beautiful. Always were. If something happens to me, remember, Queen, King, Sam. I love you. Come fast.

Dad (Jack Peregrine)

PS Lindbergh

Nothing else was written under PS. Instead, pinned to the paper by the minuscule hook of a fuzzy dry fishing fly was a small key. A key to what, she had no idea, although it looked like a file cabinet or maybe a lawnmower key.

For a long time, Annie stood there in the hall of the house, turning the letter in her hands, caught between rage and distress. A dozen helium Happy Birthday! balloons floated on the ceiling.

Wet through, Clark and Sam returned from the yard, where they’d done what they could to protect their gardens from the storm—stake the hollyhocks, secure the cone protectors over the roses, wrap the peonies and shrubs and borders. Malpy shook rain at Teddy, who growled at him.

Sam, running a towel through her short hair, watched Annie.

Her niece held out the FedEx. “And this was it?”

Sam dried her arms. “No…Well, yesterday Jack calls and tells me he’s dying and to give you this FedEx that was coming today…I guess I must have told him you always come home on your birthday.”

“Good God, Sam, how much do you talk to Dad? According to this Sergeant Hart, he had my goddamn new cell-phone number written on the back of a photo.” Annie jerked loose her white Navy shirt.

“Sit down, you’re upset,” Sam told her.

“I sure am.”

Sam looked defensive. “I don’t talk to him much. Not all that much. Lately twice a month, he calls.”

“Twice a month?”

“Lately. He just asks me how you are, then he hangs up.” Sam took Jack’s letter from her niece, studied it. “But yesterday, out of the blue, he calls, says how he’s really sick, asks me if you still fly the King of the Sky. Then today this FedEx comes. He says he’s dying, but well, you know Jack.”

“Not very well.” Annie shrugged.

“All I can hope is,” sighed Sam, “he’s lying. He usually is. That’s all I can hope.”

“What’s the fraud they’re after him for?” asked Clark, returning downstairs in dry shorts and T-shirt.

“False pretenses,” said Annie. “Ha-ha.”

“And a Miami detective called you about it?”

She summarized her conversation with the pleasant-voiced Detective Hart about the gold relic, the Queen of the Sea.

Sam gave a sympathetic squeeze to her niece’s arm. “Cuba thinks Jack’s got something that’s real?”

“Stupid Cuba,” Clark muttered. “Sam, you ought to change out of those wet clothes.”

Sam hushed him. “Don’t be a doctor. The other thing is—this guy’s been calling all afternoon—”

“Sergeant Hart?” asked Annie.

“No. Rafael Rook. A weird-talking guy. He’s in Miami too. He says Jack’s really ‘going fast.’”

Annie raised her eyebrow in a way she’d copied from old Claudette Colbert movies. “Jack was always going fast. With Jack, it was always the back of that leather flight jacket you were looking at. Dumps me for nearly twenty years and now a FedEx message he’s dying, lend him my plane, and rush him his flight jacket to St. Louis? I don’t think so.” She unbuttoned her shirt, fanning herself. “I’m going to go put on some shorts. First it’s pouring rain, now the air’s dead. I’ll hurry.”

“Everything will be okay,” said Clark, shaking his head, watching Annie race up the stairs two at a time. “No hurry.”

***

When Annie thought of her father, it was always scenes of perpetual motion and precipitate change. A measureless highway of mildewed motels.

It was not until she was flying jets for the Navy that memories of those road trips rushed out of the past at her as if they’d been waiting in the sky. The scenes were underscored with fragments of old songs.

“Meet Me in St. Lou-ee, Lou-ee,” he’d sung to her when they’d gone to that city once and had almost gotten killed in a motel there.

“Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby,” he’d sung in a white and gold hotel suite, marching in from the bathroom, carrying a cake with five sparkling candles, with a crowd of strangers in loud-colored clothes around her bed, laughing so loudly so close to her that she’d burst into tears.

“La Bamba” he’d sung in the shiny plastic booth of a Taco Bell while carefully cutting a burrito into small pieces. “This is all we’ve got for supper, Captain Kid, we’re busted. If money mattered, we’d need to ‘go back and get a shitload of dimes.’” She’d laughed with him at the reference to Blazing Saddles. That time they’d driven all night and then had slept in the red Mustang at a rest stop with the doors locked and with a can of Mace nearby. “Just spray it in their face,” he told her.

“Whose face?”

“Anybody that gets in this car.”

When she asked him why they were always speeding down the road, he made his arms into wings and glided around her in the parking lot. “Because we’re Peregrines! The peregrine falcon is the fastest bird in the world, Annie. It can do a 45-degree dive at 217 miles per hour! Imagine that. Lindbergh in the Spirit of St. Louis could only go 117 miles per hour. So that little Peregrine bird is going 100 miles per hour faster than Lindbergh!” Years later, to her amazement, she was to discover that this fact about the diving speed of a peregrine hawk was one of the few true things he’d told her.

When she’d asked her father to identify the shadowy men from whom they were running so fast, and who’d occasionally almost caught them, he’d exasperatingly offer her cartoon names, like “Snidely Whiplash” or “The Penguin” or “The Man from Yesterday” or “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”

Whenever she wanted to know who her mother was, he made up some romantic story: Her mother was a circus acrobat, her mother had the highest IQ ever recorded in her hometown, her mother was the heir in exile to the throne of some small country whose name he would change from one nonsense word to another.

Even as a child she’d noticed inconsistencies. He was a compulsive liar, in fact a professional one. The only constant in his remarks about her mother was the claim that this woman had always said how much she loved Annie and how wonderful she thought Annie was. But the truth was hard to avoid: It did not appear that her mother had wanted a daughter in her life, however wonderful she might have thought her. And when Annie asked why her mother had left them, the answer was always that she’d thought her child would be better off with her father. Even at five and six, Annie found this assumption, if true, culpably naïve on her mother’s part.

Whenever she asked Jack Peregrine about his own work (fathers on television had jobs), he told her that he “lived a Life of Art.” By five, she had decided that what he called “a Life of Art” was in fact a life of crime. With her small solemn face she had watched him with a skepticism that time only increased. He was always on the phone, sometimes in a language she didn’t understand—he said it was Shangri-lang—always meeting strangers in peculiar places, sending cryptic messages, getting envelopes in return. Packages got left on his car seat or atop a restaurant table or even inside a trashcan in a city park once. Envelopes often had cash in them.

Just before they’d driven suddenly to Emerald that last time together, she’d sneaked a look at an unstamped mailer that had been slipped under their motel room door; inside it she’d found an Irish passport with a picture of her father but with a different name. Folded in the passport was a street map of Havana, Cuba.

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 desk 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 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.”

Chapter 10

No Time for Love

Outside 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.”

“Go deal. It’s bizarro, babe. But I’m sorry your dad’s sick. See, I’m nice about him.”

Annie couldn’t stop herself. “I’m nice about your dad.”

“My dad’s dead.” He sighed.

“I was nice about him when he wasn’t dead. Later, Brad.”

“Okay, later, A.”

She hung up with a decisiveness that she knew reminded him of his mother, Spring Hopper, the real estate mogul. Annie had always understood that Brad feared and admired the cut-to-the-chase take on life that she shared with “Mama Spring,” who hated her (and vice versa). Brad had kept photos of the two women in his wallet, separated by a divider. The one of Annie was one that she disliked, from the local newspaper, titled “Emerald’s Young Top Gun,” a picture of her in her Navy flight suit, arms folded, with her helmet stenciled “Lt. Annie P. Goode” with the black eagle, standing in a starry sky with a vacuous grin as if she’d just successfully straightened out the Milky Way. In the photo her fake smile (she had to admit) looked rather like Mama Spring’s.

Sam had hung this same photo of Annie, proudly enlarged, on a big posterboard headlined, “My Niece Lt. Anne Samantha Peregrine Goode!!!” The board sat in the window of Sam’s movie store so that everybody in town could keep up with Annie, whether they wanted to or not. Annie found the window display embarrassing and asked Sam to remove it. Sam refused. “Love means never being sure you won’t be totally mortified by the people who love you.”

“No fooling,” Annie replied.

She had separated from Brad immediately after walking into their bedroom and finding him having sex with their squad leader’s wife. She told him then that she was never again going to make herself so vulnerable. “It’s over, Brad. You need to know that.”

“I don’t know it, A. I don’t want to know it.”

Clark, who’d never thought Brad a particularly wise choice, had tried not to say I told you so. But after the separation, when Brad began begging her to come back, her uncle warned her, “Take some time to find your bearings, Annie. I married my second wife too fast, when I was still mourning my first. Result: Divorce.”

She raised her Claudette Colbert eyebrow at him. “The only thing I didn’t do fast enough with Brad was leave him.”

Annie and Brad had met at Annapolis on the first day of their first year. By the time they graduated—Brad by the skin of his perfect teeth, and despite (or in his view, because of) his strategic use of uppers under stress—they’d been engaged for two years. He had set out from the beginning to win Annie’s affection because she was pretty and Southern and, like his mother, so competent that she could run his life without troubling him about it.

In the beginning she resisted Brad’s flirtation. But the first time that they flew a jet together, she fell in love. In the air, he was exciting, intense, the fastest midshipman at the Academy. On paper, he was perfect too: good-looking, star athlete, only son of wealthy parents who doted on him. But in the end—at least this was Georgette’s theory—Annie fell in love with Brad because the more she pushed him away, the more he resisted going. It was the opposite of her begging her father not to leave.

With the highest academic grades in their class, she’d been given her choice of assignments on “Selection Day.” She’d chosen the Fighter Weapons School in San Diego, where, after initial training in Pensacola, she would train to fly new Navy jets. Brad, a top-ranked midshipman Naval Aviator (holder of a speed record), had also been offered a billet in San Diego. The day they heard their assignments, they lay on his bed in his boyhood room in a wealthy Atlanta suburb, where taped to the ceiling was a poster of a blonde spilling out of a bikini that he’d put up back in the tenth grade. That the poster hadn’t been removed should have been, Annie later mused to Georgette, a clue.

After they finished their pilot training, before they were to ship off together to the Persian Gulf on the USS Enterprise, Annie and Brad suddenly announced a wedding date. They called their families and gave them only three weeks notice to come to California for the ceremony, which was to be a quiet, almost stealthy one, since their base commander had told them (presciently as it proved) that so quick a marriage would be a dumb-ass idea.

Worried but sounding cheerful, Sam and Clark flew with Georgette and D. K. Destin from North Carolina, bringing all the way across the country the little Maltese terrier Malpy and the old Shih Tzu Teddy.

The service was held in an ugly desert town west of the San Diego base. Georgette was Annie’s maid of honor and D. K. Destin, in his wheelchair, gave her away with Sam, Clark, and the two dogs (Malpy wearing a plaid bow tie, Teddy a plaid hair bow). That three such adults and two dogs should perform this ceremonial function much distressed Brad’s formidable mother, who told her daughter Brandy that she felt strongly that “a g.d. freak zoo is no substitute for a father of the bride.”

All through the wedding rehearsal, Annie and her new mother-in-law watched each other like gunslingers in the street.

The South Carolinian Mrs. Hopper, who referred to herself in the third person as “Mama Spring,” fired a shot: Where the g.d.h. was Annie’s g.d. father? If Brad’s father, Daddy Alton, could make it all the way from Atlanta on oxygen with emphysema, surely Daddy Jack, father of the bride, could have gotten his b-u-t-t to San Diego as well?

Annie returned fire in a barrage of sarcasm: the family she wanted here was here. Daddy Jack was irrelevant and had either fled the country or had his b-u-t-t locked up in a federal penitentiary.

Mama Spring volleyed back with a sardonic smile. Couldn’t the father of the bride have gotten a special family leave of absence from prison in order to come give his little girl away, so Annie could have enjoyed what any normal girl craved, a church and a lace veil and a satin train and a g.d. maid of honor in something coordinated, instead of having a size-eighteen sleazepot (Georgette Nickerson) at the rehearsal dinner announcing she planned to wear a black bustier with pink satin elbow-length gloves tomorrow? After all, Annie was marrying the most eligible young bachelor in all Atlanta, a large city where the active Junior League was practically draped in black, a whole city where every good mother at every good club had wanted Brad to marry her daughter, instead of marrying somebody nobody knew, and without a spit of notice either! But Annie didn’t even seem to realize her good fortune! Why, when Mama Spring had first come out, her picture was in every paper in the state.

“Luckily the same thing didn’t happen to me,” muttered Annie’s aunt Sam as she sat down at the hotel bar’s piano and began to play “Take My Breath Away” from the Top Gun soundtrack.

Brad’s invalid father Daddy Alton took a puff of the oxygen attached to the back of his wheelchair as Mama Spring sank onto a barstool in tears. He ordered two White Russians and drank them both while Brad’s twin sister Brandy was comforting her mother.

Later, alone with “the bride’s party,” Sam was taking requests at the piano (she played by ear and only needed to hear someone hum a melody in order to reproduce it). She played “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” for D. K., then “Only the Lonely” for Clark, then confessed to both that Brad’s behavior was scaring her. The young man appeared to be on the verge of a fit. Had the others noticed how he kept scratching at his scalp, how his knees kept bouncing up and down and his foot twitching as if some irascible puppet master was jerking on his strings? “What’s that boy’s problem?”

D. K. Destin pressed big brown fingers together into a pinch, held them to each nostril. “Brad’s on a sleigh ride in the snow. Our baby’s marrying a junkie.”

“No, she isn’t,” Sam insisted, her face a wrinkle of worry. “That’s not possible.”

“Anything’s possible,” Clark admitted. “Lot of Huey pilots in ’Nam were cokeheads. Who could blame them?”

“Not me,” said D. K. “I wish I’d had a little snort, anything to pass the time all those hours I was hanging onto two feet of scrap metal in the Commie China Sea waiting for a God-Almighty U.S. Navy ’copter to show up. Stress can get to you.”

Sam frowned. “What stress is Brad under?” He had not been shot out of a jet plane and crashed into the ocean; all he was doing was getting married.

“Easy for you to say,” Clark told her.

She wondered, “Are we going to make it through tonight and tomorrow?”

Clark and D. K. together told her, “No.”

“Oh God,” sighed Sam. “You think Brad’s not the One?” Since Annie’s adolescence, her three surrogate parents had devoted considerable speculation to who would be the right man for their adopted child. Whenever she brought home a new boyfriend, Sam would ask, “Is he the One?”

“He’s not the One,” sadly agreed Clark and D. K. on the eve of her wedding to Brad Hopper.

Chapter 11

The High and the Mighty

It was not only in retrospect that Annie’s wedding was a failure. No one much enjoyed it even at the time, certainly not Annie, too busy to notice that it wasn’t an auspicious occasion, although she marched so briskly into the justice of the peace’s office in her Navy uniform and recited her vows so quickly, like a pledge of allegiance, it was as if she suspected she would change her mind if she slowed down. Brad’s mumbled response to the solemn questions could scarcely be heard and he had trouble keeping his eyes open during the chaplain’s (admittedly unsolicited) homily on Jesus wanting everybody—except presumably Himself—to have a lot of Christian children. In general the groom was looking, to his dispassionate sister Brandy, “totally wasted,” and his bride “totally hyper.”

Brad’s best man, Lt. Commander Steve Wirsh, had driven out from the base with his wife Melody. After the rehearsal Melody paddled up and down the hotel pool in a hot pink thong and a black sports bra, attracting attention, including Brad’s. Wirsh, mistaking Clark and Sam for Annie’s parents, chastised them for allowing their blind dog to bite Melody on the thumb. He was taken aback when Clark cheerfully offered to have Teddy put to sleep immediately.

“Oh my God, oh my God, don’t do that! We didn’t mean that.” Melody tried to kiss Teddy, who growled at her.

After the ceremony, at Hôm Qua, the local Vietnamese restaurant that D. K. had chosen for his wedding gift dinner party, young Wirsh gave a speech about America’s imperial destiny that Sam could only endure by eating an entire steamed sea bass.

Annie overheard Mama Spring Hopper lamenting to Brandy that the whole bridal party was “nothing but a parade at the g.d. Mardi Gras!” with Sam a make-no-mistake-about-it pervert, and who ever heard of a purple satin tuxedo? With Clark, Annie’s uncle, who wasn’t even her uncle but just a man who lived with a Lesbian, never saying two words a bat could hear through a megaphone. With the maid of honor, Georgette Something, looking like Madonna half way through a Kahlúa and chocolates binge—Madonna the rock star not the Virgin Mary—shouting out wedding toasts that would have been worse had they not been incoherent; so drunk she had fallen flat on her face, unable to catch the bride’s bouquet, despite the bride’s having tossed it straight at her.

Plus those two horrible dogs had run off with Mama Spring’s purse and torn it to shreds.

And to top it all off, that big crippled black man with dirty cornrows, wearing black pajamas and sitting in a wheelchair with Move the F Over! on the back of it, that man had told Daddy Alton that Daddy had only himself to blame for even being in a wheelchair, whereas the black man claimed he had gotten his disability by being shot out of a plane for his country. The whole thing had so upset Daddy (admittedly not a veteran, except of thirty years of two packs a day) that he’d ordered three mai tais in a row from a waitress talking Asian gibberish and had made a fool of himself by singing “Strawberry Fields Forever” with that awful Sam playing it on the piano. In Mama Spring’s view, and Brandy could take it to the bank, the bride’s entire wedding party was like one horrible preview of what Liberals would do to America if given a chance. It assuredly wasn’t the kind of wedding party anyone would want to paste in a book of Treasured Memories.

At this point, Annie had heard enough. Thrusting her champagne glass at Georgette (who drank it), she tapped Brad’s mother on the shoulder. “A parade? How about my bridal party,” she said with her icy smile, “is a paradigmatic symbol of progressive democracy?” When that produced a blank stare from Mrs. Hopper, Annie jabbed her with a finger. “I’ll rephrase. Drop the g.d. subject of my wedding right now, you racist bitch.”

Mrs. Hopper wailed, “Daddy Alton!” and sobbed convulsive tears. The tears brought Brad running, followed by Daddy Alton as fast as he could get there, drunk, with his oxygen tanks weighing down his wheelchair.

Brad’s mother cried that Annie’s remark had “devastated” her; she was no racist; she made turkey sandwiches for the homeless and served them herself in her church community room.

Brad asked both bride and mother to apologize, “just to smooth things over this little bump.”

Mother and bride stared at him ominously, their eyes warning: “You think this is a ‘little’ bumpy? Stand back.”

At 1 a.m., Georgette (unaccustomed to heavy drinking) succumbed to alcohol poisoning, throwing up on Mama Spring after spinning both D. K. and Daddy Alton around in circles in their wheelchairs to an MTV number on the television above the bar. She’d been working hard to get a little dancing going—the Vietnamese restaurant was not really made for dancing—an excuse that did not make Brad’s mother feel any better about being vomited on.

In the women’s bathroom, where Annie was trying to wash off her maid of honor’s face and hair, Georgette kept insisting that Brad had put the make on her two summers ago when he’d run into her at the Atlanta airport.

“You wish,” retorted the disbelieving Annie. “Georgette, keep your damn head down.” She bent her friend over the sink.

Georgette threw up again and passed out.

She wasn’t the only one. Daddy Alton, who’d had too many mai tais for his oxygen to handle, sang “The High and the Mighty” with Sam and then accused his wife of sleeping with their yardman, a Georgia Tech senior, and then he too passed out. Mama Spring screamed, “He’s dead! Is there is a doctor in this godforsaken dump?!”

The owner of Hôm Qua Restaurant stepped out of the shadows and raised his hand. Clark acknowledged the man with a wave, then leaned over and pulled up Daddy Alton’s eyelids. “He’s fine.”

At 2 a.m., D. K. Destin grabbed Brad by the hair and threatened to kill him if he ever hurt Annie.

Mama Spring threatened to kill D. K. if he threatened to kill her son.

“Let’s all say good morning,” Clark proposed. “Then nobody will have to kill anybody.” Turning, he bowed to the physician-restaurateur, who stood patiently by the door with his car keys in his hand. “Cám o’n rat nhieu. Ban that tot. Tam Biet.”

The owner bowed. “Vinh biet.”

Clark laughed.

Annie told Sam, “This is the worst wedding I’ve ever been to. And it had to be mine.” She burst into tears.

“Come on, everybody,” Clark said. “Let’s look on the bright side.”

“Oh shut up, Clark,” Sam said, hugging Annie who was hugging Teddy. Malpy barked. “What did that Vietnamese man say that was so funny?”

“I said good night for now and he replied, ‘Good-bye forever.’ Sort of how they felt in Vietnam in general.”

***

A month later, Annie and Brad were deployed to the Gulf, where their air wing distinguished itself in Operation Desert Fox, a strike campaign from Kuwait against Iraqi forces. Annie and Brad flew F/A-18 Super Hornets off the aircraft carrier Enterprise in four separate successful bombing raids, for which they each received a minor medal. Both enjoyed what they were doing.

During the two-year tenure of the young couple’s marriage, Mrs. Hopper never (“thank you, g.d. Jesus”) laid eyes on Sam and Clark, Georgette and D. K. again, nor on Jack Peregrine once. But she continued to ask Annie with a careful innocence about “the father of the bride” whenever they spoke, which was too often for Annie.

Nevertheless, as Sam remarked to Clark and Georgette when, a few months after the wedding, they sat at Pilgrim’s Rest, looking through the wedding photos, it was as if Brad’s mother could never recover from Jack’s absence, as if she had always imagined him some rumpled grumpy Spencer Tracy, who should have been grousing in his armchair about losing the teenaged Elizabeth Taylor to a younger man and having to pay for it, whereas Annie’s father had failed even to show up, proving himself, Sam had to admit, no Spencer Tracy.

Clark passed around a snapshot of Mrs. Hopper taken at that tempestuous banquet in the Vietnamese restaurant. He noted dryly that Mama Spring was no Spring Mama either. Indeed, she might be more accurately called “Mama Late Summer. Or even Mama Nearly Autumn.” Nevertheless, Mama Spring had been dressed for Annie and Brad’s wedding as if she’d expected to pick up Keanu Reeves at a salsa bar later that night.

Georgette added—in the wry voice that Sam and Clark had always appreciated far more than her own mother ever had—maybe Mama Spring had been dressed up for that Georgia Tech senior Daddy Alton had accused her of sleeping with. Maybe that undergraduate had been waiting for her next door at the Marriott. Maybe Georgette had slept with him too. She put her hands over her eyes. “Oh God, don’t make me remember that night. I think I did sleep with a friend of Brad’s that night. It was the worst night of my life.”

“You don’t know that yet,” Clark pointed out.

Sam sighed. “You think Annie will be happy with Brad?”

“No,” promptly answered Clark.

“It’s so easy to be negative.”

As it turned out, negativity was the better bet.

***

After their tour in Kuwait, Annie and Brad returned to the San Diego base where Lt. Commander Wirsh’s wife Melody had time on her hands and decided to spend it having sex with her husband’s best friend. Annie caught them at it and left him. The news came as no surprise to her family in Emerald.

Georgette, now a psychiatry intern at Chapel Hill, explained it all.

Annie had married Brad because she’d wanted to best Mrs. Hopper.

Annie had married Brad because he had none of her father’s quicksilver tempo, which she’d taken to mean that he would be like Clark, steadfast and trustworthy.

Annie had married Brad because he’d outflown her in three speed test competitions.

Interrupting this analysis, Annie asked her friend, “How about, I married Brad because I made a stupid mistake?”

“That too,” agreed Georgette.

When Annie phoned Mrs. Hopper to congratulate her on the separation—“You win”—Brad’s mother pretended not to know what she meant and offered sincere hopes that the young couple would reconcile someday because a marriage between a man and a woman was a sacred sacrament—

“Oh, shut the fuck up.” Annie slapped her phone shut.

Over the next few months, Brad confessed eagerly to anyone who would listen that “maybe” he’d done wrong by getting caught sleeping with his buddy Steve Wirsh’s wife.

He phoned Georgette to ask her to tell Annie he could do better.

“You can’t do better until you stop being scared of Annie because you’re scared of your mother.”

“Think so?” Brad loved to hear theories about himself, although he never assimilated them.

“Afraid” seemed at first an odd adjective for Georgette to apply to such a daredevil as Brad. After all, he would fly a plane in the worst weather with a kind of reckless glee. But interior weather did frighten him. Annie could scare him with a scream. “I don’t want to talk about it,” was his white flag.

The night Annie had flown home to California after a flight test at Ali Al Saleem and had found him naked in their bedroom on top of Melody Wirsh, he’d retreated without a struggle. “Aw, shit, this sucks,” was all he could think of to say. Annie could think of a lot of things but said none of them. She knew that if she opened her mouth, she would not be able to stop weeping.

On the night she left him, the wildness of her hair (a long unruly tangle) so exasperated her that when she saw herself in the mirror at the motel to which she’d driven in an exhausted rage of tears, she’d cut off her curls to her scalp and thrown the hair in the wastebasket along with her wedding ring.

“I hate him,” she told the mirror.

The Navy agreed to transfer her to Annapolis, far from the California desert where Brad and she had danced in jets together, and to give her an assignment teaching at the Academy. She cried from time to time as she drove across the country in the Porsche. On the seat beside her, the gray Persian cat Amy Johnson ignored these emotional displays and licked a paw.

***

In Annie’s condominium in Chesapeake Cove, on the top floor of a building called Harbor Lights, there was only room for herself and her cat. A few weeks after she settled there, she saw a young man, pleasant-looking in Brooks Brothers khakis, in the hall with a white dog, a West Highland terrier. The next night, the young man rang her apartment bell to ask if she were okay, explaining that he’d heard crying coming through her door. He pointed at his dog, who was furiously wagging his tail and tugging against the leash to leap on her. “My Westie, Elliot Ness. I’m Trevor Smithwall, 7C.”

Annie apologized, promising with her appealing smile that she would try to keep her sobbing down after eleven. When the Westie spotted the cat, he broke free, chasing Amy Johnson into the living room where he got himself clawed on the nose. Carefully Annie lured the dog from under a chair and handed him to her neighbor. “Would you keep holding him,” Trevor asked, “while I go get his eye drops?”

“I can do that,” she agreed. “I’m Annie Goode; I’m at the naval base.”

“Figured.” Trevor pointed at her white uniform, then at his ID, which was hanging from his blazer pocket. “FBI.”

“Figured.”

Over that first hard year for Annie, Trevor became a good friend. One night they even made a feint at sex but quit before they got there, accepting that they weren’t attracted to each other. Relieved, they began to see one another almost daily, sometimes for dinner, when they would talk over problems at work, how both wanted to move faster up the ladders of their careers, how both worried about falling off the ladders, or being pushed.

Annie was not much of a consumer (preferring to build a retirement fund for the rainy day that would inevitably come) but the few things she did buy were of the best quality, like her entertainment system. Trevor preferred to spend his money on fine wines and restaurants. So there were many occasions, late at night, when he would knock on Annie’s door, holding out a bottle of Montrachet and a DVD and they’d sit together watching a classic film on Annie’s large state-of-the-art flat-screen. Or they would play poker. Annie almost always won. She’d played poker since she was four years old. They both looked forward to their evenings although they told each other they should be out dating instead.

“This is awful,” Annie told Georgette on the phone after one of her evenings with Trevor. “I could end up like Sam and Clark.”

“Well, you could end up like Sam or Clark but unless you were really schizophrenic—”

“You know what I mean. Why is it only in chick flicks that good friends fall in love? In real life, we keep falling in love with people like Trevor’s ex-girlfriend—”

“You’re in love with Trevor’s ex-girlfriend?”

“People like Brad! People that, if we were totally honest, we didn’t even really like!”

Georgette argued that there was something sort of appealing about Brad, so Annie should forgive herself for making such a stupid mistake.

“I’ll forgive myself the day I sign our divorce papers.”

“And when will that day be, Annie?”

“Why do you keep asking me? Because you want to marry him? Remember when you threw up at my wedding?”

“Obviously you do,” grumbled Georgette.

“Well, you were onto something when you puked. You had the right idea.”

Georgette agreed that she often did.

***

At Pilgrim’s Rest, Annie idly tapped her birthday balloons while waiting for Georgette’s voice mail. “Call me,” she said. “My dad’s dying.”

She glanced at the storm clouds through the hall window when her cell phone rang. “Georgette?”

But it was Brad again. “A? I’m a little delayed here in Charleston; air traffic gets so freaked. I’ll be there in a couple of hours. Got you a great present.”

“Brad, don’t give me a present. I’m divorcing you.”

“For better for worse.”

“You should have spelled out how ‘for worse’ would be me seeing you screwing Melody Wirsh.”

“That’s gross.”

To Annie’s relief, she found this remark so bizarre that she laughed.

Brad sighed at her unfairness in referring to that ancient “misunderstanding.”

“What?”

“I’ll make it up to you, A. I’m on my way.”

“Don’t bother—” But he’d hung up.

“Maybe,” said Annie aloud, “Brad ought to try slowing down.”

Standing silently in the hallway, eating a saucy chicken wing, Clark nodded at her. “Good. Now you’re getting nowhere.”

Chapter 12

Make Me a Star

Only two weeks after leaving Brad, Annie was teaching her first squadron of Navy pilots how to land fighter jets on the decks of pitching aircraft carriers so that the tailhooks would stop their planes from rolling into the sea. She knew she was good at her job. But she worried she was a failure at love. As she lamented to Georgette, she had a fatal weakness for loving men who couldn’t stay true to her. “If it’s fatal, get over it,” advised her friend, sitting beside her on the porch at Pilgrim’s Rest. “Here, I’ll write you a prescription.”

Annie studied the script. “This is for sunblock.”

“Right. You need to get out more. Get on a ship and go to South America.”

Annie said that she got on a ship every morning.

Georgette grabbed Annie’s knee to stop her from pushing the swing faster. “A cruise ship. You need a relaxing cruise ship. I’m thinking like what’s her face? In that movie Sam loves?”

“Bette Davis, Now, Voyager?”

“Yeah. You need more facials and salsa contests and less landing Super Hornets on an aircraft carrier. Not that life-and-death’s not a blast too.”

Annie decided to see a therapist. She found the wrong one in Annapolis. Her analysis lasted only one session, which the therapist spent accusing her of trying to overthrow male authority. “You make me sound like the French Revolution,” she retorted. The therapist kept tossing chocolate-coated coffee beans in his mouth as he suggested that anger at her husband was actually fear of the phallus. Annie said no, it was actually anger at her husband. He suggested that she appeared to be sitting on great reserves of anger; it seemed likely that her father, her “uncle,” or her Lesbian aunt, or some combination, had abused her and she’d completely repressed the knowledge. Annie said that such a supposition was unchallengeable but bogus. Her father’s only abuse had been leaving her alone. Sam and Clark’s only abuse had been their rarely doing the same.

As she strode out of the therapist’s office, Annie said she wouldn’t be back. One hundred and forty dollars an hour was too much to pay to watch somebody eat candy.

“I do it for the caffeine,” he said.

“It’s too much to pay to watch someone eat a pound of caffeine.”

But alone later with Amy Johnson, in her neat, spare apartment, Annie found herself so upset that she called Georgette at one in the morning. “Be my friend and my therapist both? We could do it officially on the phone. I’ll pay you by the hour.”

“At one in the morning? Not on your salary.”

“This fat jerk said I had a fear of men.”

Georgette laughed. Men, she said, were the least of Annie’s fears. What scared Annie was losing rank, not being in charge.

Annie asked: But had she left Brad to forestall his leaving her?

“Possibly.” Georgette thought it just as likely that Annie had left Brad because she’d found him in their bed banging the Implant Slut with the ridiculous name of Melody.

“Good answer,” said Annie.

“A good answer is the answer you want,” Georgette said. “Am I going to confuse friendship with therapy and tell my best friend she has repressed her pathological dread of abandonment by leaving her husband but not divorcing him, which frees her from the threat of intimacy with another man? That a reaction formation to male irresponsibility has produced in her a pattern of obsessive-compulsive over-achievement within a sexist patriarchal hierarchy like the U.S. Navy where she is addicted to a steady supply of high grades, top prizes, and speed records? So, yes, she does want to overcome and supersede men. But she also wants to overcome and supersede women. She is an equal opportunity superseder. And she has a serious eating disorder. Am I going to say any of that, even when she wakes me up at one in the morning? How many best friends have I got?”

Annie asked, “What serious eating disorder?”

Georgette made a spluttering phht phht noise. “You say the collapse of your marriage was devastating and yet you never huddled in a fetal position for days, or went on a binge of sex with strangers, or faced the look on the checkout woman’s face when you rolled six gallons of ripple ice cream onto the conveyer belt. Did you? Did you ever gain, or for that matter lose, a fucking pound?”

Annie assured her friend that she was a mess and she was getting a divorce.

“You haven’t even formally filed. Why is this divorce so slow and messy when you’re so fast and in charge?”

“Okay, Georgette, are we going to talk ‘messy’? You’ve still got boxes of unsent Christmas cards on your dining room table and it’s March!”

“Aha, this is why friends can’t do therapy on friends. My patients haven’t seen my table, much less my closet.”

“You haven’t seen your closet yourself, not in years. You couldn’t.”

“You can trash my closet all you want and you still won’t be divorced.”

Annie assured Georgette that the latest delay on the final proceedings (she was legally separated, don’t forget) had to do only with lawyers stalling to pad their bills; she would be finished with her marriage to Brad by the end of next week. “By Bastille Day, Gigi, je serai en liberté.” She then changed the subject. “I want you to meet my neighbor Trevor. For his last vacation, he went on a dig to Baalbek.”

“What does Trevor think about how long your divorce is taking?”

“Nothing. Nothing!”

“What’s the matter with him?”

Nevertheless, the next morning, a bleak March weekend, Annie, off-duty, drove all the way from Annapolis to Emerald in order to keep on arguing with Georgette about why she wasn’t divorced yet.

As soon as Sam had seen her niece driving up River Hill Road in her gray convertible, she’d telephoned Brad, whom she knew to be in Atlanta, visiting his mother. He flew straight to Emerald the next day to try to “smooth things over” with his estranged wife.

Annie refused to see him, although she did hide with her old dog Teddy at the top of the stairs, listening in on her husband’s lament to his aunt-in-law. Sam spotted Annie crouched there on the second-floor landing, head pressed between the rails, just as she’d done when she was a child, with the black-and-white little Shih Tzu on her lap. Her eyes were squeezed shut in the same way too, and seeing the young woman, Sam’s heart ached for the child.

There’d been a time, a few years after Annie’s arrival in Emerald, when Sam and she had stood in the yard on a crisp starry night, watching Clark set up her new telescope. They’d found Venus luminous in the low southwestern evening sky. “The Queen of Love,” Sam had said. “Don’t bother asking Venus about anything but love because she doesn’t care about anything else.”

“Annie can make any kind of wish on any kind of star she wants,” Clark assured the child. “Doesn’t have to be Venus.”

Annie tightly scrunched an eye shut and peered with the other into the telescope at the resplendent black-mirrored sky. “Is that Venus that’s so bright?”

Clark looked. “Yep. That’s her.”

Still staring into the lens, Annie said, “I wish you both would never die.”

On either side, they took her hands. “We plan,” said Clark, “to put it off as long as possible. Tell you what, I’ll quit smoking.”

Sam added, “I plan to clean out the attic and the basement before I die.”

Annie laughed. “That’ll never happen.”

They laughed together and looked up at the stars.

Thinking of that starry night, Sam lied to Brad; under orders not to reveal her grown niece’s presence in the house, she claimed Annie.

The handsome naval officer choked up, telling Sam that for some reason Annie thought he didn’t respect her. Whereas, deep down in his heart, even though everybody always said that he himself was the best pilot they’d ever met, deep down he believed Annie was the best, male or female, ever seen in the sky. “I mean, I’ve got the big T and that’ll just always kick ass in the end, but truth is, she’s Number One. And you tell her I said so.”

“What the hell is the big T?”

Brad hit himself in the abdomen. “You know. Testosterone.”

With an elaborate thoughtfulness, Sam considered this idea. “Ah…but otherwise, Annie’s got at least a tiny little bit of a future in flying?”

“I don’t know why y’all have to be so sarcastic. She’s the best. I mean, before she went nuts about our problem. Probably not doing so good now. When she stresses, well, you know…”

Sam swung an imaginary tennis racket overhead as if she were going to serve Brad’s head to the other end of the hall. “Well, it’s true, having her marriage blow up in her face did stress her out a little bit.”

Brad said he had no idea how their lives could have gone so fatally wrong so fast. “I wish you could help me smooth this over. Why can’t she just move on?”

“I’ll give you a hint,” growled Sam, the invisible racket swinging back and forth. “Naked married woman under naked married man, not married to each other. Man would be you, you dumb big T dickhead!”

Brad yanked at his thick black hair. “I sure see where she gets this aspect of her personality.” He rapidly cracked his knuckles in an elaborate tattoo. Couldn’t Sam look at it from Brad’s point of view? He was always getting shot out of the water by Annie’s smart bombs and it was no vacation. “Sam, with her, it’s twelve o’clock high every day of our lives.” And while he’d be the last to deny that, given his wedding vows, he’d been out of line with Melody, he felt Annie should admit that she was partly to blame for his “slipup”: she had a Terminator temper and she’d been so busy trying to prove she was the number-one pilot in the Navy that she hadn’t made enough time for their marriage; otherwise she would have known that Melody didn’t mean a thing to him. Annie was a “mental capacity natural” so she didn’t understand how hard Brad had to work to stay ahead of the game. He’d had a tough time on some exams he’d taken just before Annie’d caught him with Melody. Plus he really suspected Melody had given him sex pills without his knowing it. He was strictly off all substances now but he had to admit he’d gotten a little high that night after hearing he’d flunked the one exam he thought he’d passed. Melody came over to the bungalow to borrow some olive oil and then she’d started to rub it on—

“Jesus Christ, just be quiet!” Sam exclaimed, hearing a floorboard creak above her. “It wasn’t a ‘slipup’! It’s not something to ‘smooth over.’ You are so full of shit, I could, I could—” At a loss, Annie’s aunt, still almost as athletically trim as Brad himself, swung the imaginary tennis racket down onto his skull while with her other hand she landed a hard jab in the pilot’s washboard abdomen. They stared at each other, both surprised. Then straightening up, Brad grinned. “I see where she gets her temper too…Nice left.”

“Thanks.” Sam took a long breath. “All right, forget about Annie then. Get divorced. Aren’t you a Republican? Why don’t you move on?”

“I’ll never get over Annie.”

“Why not?”

His face furrowed. Finally he gave up thought. “I don’t know what to do without her.”

Sam couldn’t help but respond. “Oh, Brad.” Frowning unhappily, she walked him to the door. “Okay, gut it up. Quit the pills—”

“I’m off those uppers. If Annie told you—”

“She didn’t tell me anything. Say you’re sorry, mean it, try to win her back.”

Brad shook his head. “No-go. I asked her to take me back. Know what she said? ‘How dumb are you?’”

“Well, you are dumb,” Sam conceded. “But brains aren’t everything. Like I used to tell Annie myself, ‘Maybe I’m not as smart as you—’”

“Wow, Sam, I used to say the same thing.” He hugged her like a comrade.

“‘But, Annie, you can still learn a lot from me,’ that’s what I used to tell her. So, try again.”

“No-go.” The young lieutenant added with the world-weariness of youth, “Life’s a bitch.”

“Honey, you don’t know the half of it,” Sam predicted.

He stepped out the door onto the porch then slipped back inside. “I’m not a Republican. I don’t even believe in politics.”

She shook her head at him. “Jesus Christ, what does that mean? You can’t not believe in politics. It’s not like the tooth fairy, Brad…You want me to give Annie a message?”

“Yes.” He nodded mournfully. “‘Don’t hate me.’”

Sam hugged him. “She’s just mad.”

“How long you think it’ll last?”

She rubbed his arms briskly with strong tanned hands. “Oh, twenty, thirty years, max. I love you, you jerk. No cause why I should, love’s funny that way…Hang on.” She ran up the stairs, whispering into the hall. “Annie, Brad’s leaving! Annie?” Sam looked for her niece, but her bedroom was empty. As Annie’s father Jack had done as a boy, she had climbed out the window, run across the roof and swung down the old wisteria vine that twisted around the back porch corner post. She was sitting on the ground, beside the thick root, her head in her arms.

If Brad had known Annie better he might have looked near that wisteria. But he didn’t know her well at all. He drove next door to see if she were with Georgette and if not, to get Georgette’s advice. Not finding the young psychiatrist at home, he called her at the hospital and poured his best wheedle into his voice. “My heart’s about broken. I flew all the way here and Annie won’t see me. I’m staying at the Omni; meet me for a drink? I need help and all the roads are leading back to you, Georgia.”

With a sigh, Georgette declined. He was the only person who made her like her full name, Georgia Georgette. He knew it and was always singing “Georgia on My Mind” whenever he saw her. He was a very good-looking man. “You know what, Brad? I see you, I see a box of Dove bars in the freezer. I know they’re bad for me but I eat them anyhow and all of a sudden, they’re gone and I feel sick.”

“Come on, Georgia. Just one old sweet song!”

“You cheated on my best friend.”

“Yeah. I know. And she’s totally right to be mad. But she won’t even see me and I flew all this way…I’m not a rocket scientist. I need help figuring out what to do. Come on. I need some company and you’re the absolute best.”

Georgette sighed.

He said, softly sad, “Omni in half an hour? Room 1405. Really nice suite; I’ll get room service.”

“Brad, if you were the last man in my entire life who was going to ask me to come have a drink with him at his hotel—and, frankly, you very well might be—I would say no. Why? Because if I was on the Titanic, Annie would get me into a lifeboat.”

“Well, hey, give me a break. I can’t help it if I’m not ‘Women and Children.’”

“What?”

“And let me tell you, Annie was no piece of cake. It was always twelve o’clock high with her.” He had liked the sound of that phrase when he’d said it earlier to Sam.

Georgette hung up the phone. Brad figured he’d lost the connection.

***

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that disloyalty made Annie angry. Her absent mother, her capricious father, her unfaithful husband, all had produced a young woman determined to bring down the gavel on Life until Life behaved in a dependable way. Annie was faithful. It was the gift she gave and that she wanted to receive. Georgette’s loyalty, Sam and Clark’s loyalty sat safe at the core of her and she loved them for it. The Navy’s dependability was one reason she had chosen the Navy. Its discipline was reliable. She wanted not only to defend her country but also to help keep it in order, the way she kept her closet in order—her shoes side by side on the shoe rack, her tailored uniforms, blue and white, evenly spaced, her slender white T-shirts and jeans ironed and in a row.

As a student at Annapolis, she’d beaten back inconsistency and fought against limits, including those of her own muscle and bone. She’d endured instructors who’d bullied her and classmates who’d harassed her. She had worked hard every waking minute of her four years at Annapolis. She’d graduated fit and trim and first in her class. The only clues to what it had cost her were the pale purple circles under her blue eyes and the pinched nerve in her neck.

When Annie received her commission, she made a pledge that she would never let the Navy down; in return, the Navy would never forsake her. After all, despite D. K. Destin’s complaints that the Navy had abandoned him, the truth was, they had shown up for him in the rescue helicopter, hadn’t they? And each time she’d landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the tailhook had grabbed the wire and the jet stopped. She believed that if she should by chance end up clinging to the wing of a plane in the middle of the ocean, they’d send a helicopter for her just as they had for D. K. She believed the Navy would be like Sam and Clark and Georgette. Reliable. Unlike Brad, unlike her father, she could count on the Navy. She trusted that she was someone who could be counted on. If she were asked to help, she would help; if she were asked to rescue…

Annie picked up her phone and called Georgette again, this time reaching her. “I just made up my mind. I’m going to fly the King of the Sky to St. Louis tonight and give it to my father.”

“What?”

“He needs it. I can’t bitch about his not coming through for me and then not come through for him. He’s dying and he needs help.”

Georgette took a loud breath. “Well, this emotional breakthrough of yours couldn’t come at a worse time.”

“What does that mean?”

“Have you looked out the window, Annie? My satellite dish just blew by your porch. Clark’s twister may be headed to Emerald. Sit still, I’m coming over.”

Chapter 13

Twelve O’Clock High

Pummeled by rain, Georgette hurried into Pilgrim’s Rest. The wind was blowing so hard that Clark had to help her close the door. He draped her soaked raincoat on the newel post.

“Clark, you may finally be right about the weather. It could be a twister coming.” Georgette pointed out the window. “I saw old Mr. Neubruck’s gas grill fly through my yard. He’ll blame me.”

“Check out the Weather Channel. It’s a bad twister, fifty miles from here.” Clark pointed overhead. “I predicted this.”

“For like fifteen years.”

“Well,” he said, “Annie’s up in her room.”

“Please tell me she’s developed a sense of humor because she just said she’d decided to fly the King of the Sky to St. Louis tonight to give it to her dad!”

“I know. Stop her.” Clark explained what had happened.

Georgette mulled it over. “She’s got to think Jack will help her find her mother.”

“She’s crazy.”

“That’s a loose diagnosis, Clark.” She added that Brad had just called her, with the remarkable hypothesis that Annie would take him back if he flew from Charleston to Emerald in this storm and proposed to her.

“He’s crazy too.”

“Clark, stick to pediatric orthopedics. You can’t just keep saying Annie’s crazy, Brad’s crazy.”

“They are. You need to stop encouraging Brad. He already gets enough of that from Sam. Let’s not have him keep fighting this divorce.”

Georgette sighed, still single. “At least Annie got married so she could get divorced. I’m a doctor. It used to be that people wanted to marry doctors.” She pulled off her rubber rain hat and shook out her spiky black hair.

Clark said, “Those were women who wanted to marry male doctors. Like me. I’ve had two different women propose to me in the last five years.”

“Right, and did you marry either of them? Would you like my analysis of why you’re divorced and living with a Lesbian, Dr. Goode?”

The tall thin man laughed. He’d known Georgette since her early childhood, had encouraged her medical school aspirations, and now saw her daily at Emerald Hospital. “I’ve heard your analysis, dozens of times. You see, here’s your problem, Georgette. You’re in psychiatry and men don’t want a wife who’s going to analyze them for free.”

The young woman snorted. “‘Free.’ Oh. So ‘free’ is my problem? If I ever have another date, I’ll charge him.”

“There you go. Go talk to Annie.”

Pulling a small damp box wrapped in birthday paper from her raincoat, she fluffed up the ribbon. “This is for her birthday.”

Clark warned her with his raised forefinger. “You shrink-wrap it?”

“Please, only new puns.”

“That’s hard at my age. Go on. She’s up there, hanging from her door doing chin-ups or something till D. K. gets her plane ready. She doesn’t have the body weight to hold that Piper down in thirty-mile-an-hour winds.”

“Lucky her.”

Clark called after Georgette as she headed up the stairs, “Tell her she can’t fly to St. Louis! She won’t listen to Sam and me. We’re old.”

She turned back and did a sixties dance step. “I’m bookin’, man. Don’t sweat it. I’m hip, I’m cool—”

“Fine. Mock the elderly.”

Georgette ran up the stairs to the second floor, where she found Annie in her bedroom, finishing a set of abdominal crunches. She sat on the bed to watch her. “So, your birthday party’s cancelled. Frankly, the old gang was relieved. You only see them once a year and they feel like you’ve, you know, left them behind.”

Annie’s left elbow briskly tapped her right knee. “Behind how?”

Georgette fluffed pillows. “Well, to keep up with you, they have to study Sam’s big window display at Now Voyager. For them, life is a little more landlocked: complaining about husbands, kids, jobs. By the way, Jennifer had another boy.”

Annie’s right elbow tapped her left knee. “How can so many kids we went to high school with have kids now?”

Georgette pointed at the retro chrome clock on the wall, spinning her finger in a circle. “Well, frankly, it’s not like at our age we’d be Burmese child brides. The bio bell is tolling.”

“We’ve got a whole decade.” Finishing another set of sit-ups, Annie touched both elbows to both knees. “I’m shooting for pregnant at thirty-five.”

“If you want to make thirty-five, you might rethink taking this solo trip in a superannuated single-engine airplane tonight.” Flying the King of the Sky to St. Louis through a tornado was, in a phrase Georgette said she had used only this morning to a detox patient who’d tried to jump off the hospital roof, “not a good travel plan.”

The plump young woman tossed the wrapped gift onto the rug beside Annie, whose legs were now doing scissors, stretched in air over her head. “Here, will you open this? I’ve got to get back. Pitti Sing’s freaking out.”

“Hang on. Three more…”

Sliding off the bed, Georgette ripped open the wrapping paper herself. Inside was a tiny set of handsome miniature screwdrivers and pliers and wrenches, in a red leather case with Annie’s initials in gold, APG. “You know, for the girl who thinks she can fix everything.”

“Except her life,” smiled Annie, leaning over to kiss her friend’s head. “Perfect present.” She saw the little scar on Georgette’s knee, from the accident when they were eleven years old, and felt a twinge of the old guilt. She had taken Georgette for a ride on Sam’s silver Honda 125 (without Sam’s permission) and had skidded off a turn on River Hill Road, crashing into the underbrush below. Georgette still felt faintly queasy whenever she even saw a motorcycle. Annie’s broken collarbone had healed far sooner than her regret about endangering her friend.

Georgette pointed out the window at the rain. “And by the way, Brad was planning to surprise you by braving the storm and showing up tonight to propose.”

“What?”

“Not that you’re divorced. But he’ll never get out of Charleston, even in a Hopper jet. I better go. My mother’s going to call any minute to see if I’m dead.” Thunder cracked loudly and the lights went off and on. “Listen, don’t dig me out if the house falls in on me; let archeologists discover my skeleton in a thousand years and say, ‘God, she had great bones!’”

They walked together downstairs, in unison the way they’d done as children.

“Annie, about your dad? Maybe he’s dying, but at least you hadn’t seen him for decades.”

“That’s a comfort, Gigi.”

At the door Clark handed Georgette her raincoat. “If Jack’s dying, it’ll be the first time.”

Sam joined them in the hall. “Stop talking about it. Clark, you’d better go tape the windows. Georgette, stay here tonight.” Sam suggested they all watch a movie to get through the storm. “Les Diaboliques. Clouzot. I’ve got a great print.”

But Georgette moved to the door. “Isn’t that a movie about Lesbians that really aren’t Lesbians? I love you, Sam, but not that much. I like new movies.”

Sam said she liked old movies because she herself was old.

“Right. Old enough to be my mother,” agreed Georgette. “And as you know, I’ve always wished you were.”

“Only because I spoiled you.”

“Thank God.”

Sam noted that she had only told Georgette the same things she’d told Annie—that she was smart and strong and could do anything she wanted to do. That she was beautiful and lovable and someday she’d find the right someone to love her as she deserved.

Georgette let Sam help her into her raincoat. “You introduced me to high heels and Häagen-Dazs espresso ice cream. When Kim sided with Mr. Neubruck after he’d called the police on us about blasting out our Nirvana tape all night, you told Kim, ‘You were young once too.’ I’ll never forget that. Not that Kim ever was young.”

“Honey, your dad told me one night your mom sank a 30-foot putt at the golf course at midnight in her bra and panties.”

“Sam, you made that up.”

“Call me when you get home,” Sam urged. “I don’t like your being alone over there.”

“Neither do I.”

“You’ll find the One, Georgette.”

“That would be nice, just somebody to open jars.”

Sam shrugged. “You’ll find him. And he’s going to love you like nobody’s loved you.”

Georgette, laughing, asked Annie, “Why does Sam always sound like some awful soundtrack song?”

“Clark and I blame it on Jill.”

“Her old girlfriend?”

“Yeah, she ran off to Belize and can’t defend herself.”

Sam handed Georgette her yellow rain hat. “I’m serious. The two of you should drive up to Annapolis after the holiday. Georgette should meet this condo neighbor of yours, Trevor Smithwall. He’s an FBI analyst, Georgette, and an archeology buff. Isn’t that right, Annie? They’re made for each other.”

“Ignore her, Georgette.” Annie left for the kitchen, to help Clark tape the windows.

Sam tied the hat straps under her neighbor’s chin. “I’m serious, honey. Trevor sounds like a nice guy.”

“Sam, you think Brad’s a nice guy. Even I wouldn’t go that far.”

“But this guy Trevor could be your type.”

Georgette buttoned her raincoat. “He’s my type if he’s got a combined total of at least three arms and legs and he weighs less than four times his IQ. Can he spell his last name? Has he been convicted of any capital crimes—I don’t mean just charged, but actually convicted?”

“Stay here.” Sam ran to the kitchen and returned with a big plastic bag of spicy tuna rolls and half the birthday cake, none of which Georgette wanted, but all of which she took.

Sam opened the door. “Run. It’s raining.”

“Oh really?”

“Call me when you get home!”

“Sam, I live next door!”

“Call me, Georgette! And if this gets worse—”

“I know! Go to the basement.”

Sam found Clark alone in the morning room, attaching big Xs of masking tape to the bay windows. She hugged her arms around her Now Voyager T-shirt. “Where’s Annie?”

“Still taping kitchen windows. So you hear Brad’s going to fly here? I guess he’s ready for life at twelve o’clock high again.” Brad’s repeated use of the phrase about Annie’s stress had become a family joke.

The sound of the swing on the porch banging against a window startled them. Sam ran outside to tie it to a corner post. Thunder booms rattled the house and all the lights flicked suddenly off and on.

In the darkness the telephone rang. Carrying her plate of sashimi, Annie hurried in from the kitchen to answer it, assuming it would be Brad again. Sam, Clark, and the dog Malpy squeezed around her in a circle.

It was a strange man with a soft, faintly accented voice. He asked for Annie Peregrine.

“This is Annie Goode. Who is this? Is this the Miami police?”

“Miami police? Those pingitas!” the man exclaimed. “No! This is Rafael Rook. Your papa asked me to call you. ‘Rescue or else the day is lost,’ as the Swan of Avon would put it, and in fact did. Shakespeare. Annie, your papa gravely needs your help.”

Lightning forked over the sky. Another branch from the oak tree crashed into the yard. She had trouble hearing the soft-spoken man.

“I’m sorry. Why did you say you’re calling?”

“I’m a friend of your papa’s from Miami. Pretty much his one and only in these sorrowful times.”

Rafael Rook had an odd husky young voice, like rustling straw, with a curious style, as if he’d learned to talk from old paperbacks piled into book bins and sold for a quarter. He told Annie that he was calling her from a South Beach Sam’s Club in order to urge her to hurry to St. Louis at the dying wish of her dying father, who was dying.

“From what?” she asked.

“He asked me specifically not to discuss it. A man like that! The key to happiness, Annie, is an education. I am Cubano. Well, I think of myself so. I left Havana young and fell into bad company. I never had the good fortune of college. But your father? Definitely, absolutely an education.”

“I bet.” Not noticing, she dipped her white tuna into too much wasabi and teared up when she swallowed it.

Rook said, “Jack tells me he taught you to do fractions at four years old.”

Annie admitted that this was in fact true. Her father had taught her to read and write, add and subtract, ask questions. Maybe that was why, she sarcastically allowed, she was interested in the question of whether or not he really was dying.

“Nothing’s certain, you agree?” Rook sounded as if he wanted to discuss the matter. “But brief candles, quintessence of dust, no way around it. Still, should Jack go to that undiscovered country alone? You, his only child, you’re all he’s got.” Rook paused. “And myself, if you’ll permit me, I have the honor to be his friend. Some in Miami may even tell you, who’s Jack Peregrine? Who cares if he’s dying or not? I reply, is this what life comes to, a man who lost thirty thousand dollars at Hialeah in an afternoon, smiled, what a smile, and drove to Palm Beach and picked up the tab for the whole table at the finest restaurant, a la carte? Where are those friends now that ate Jack’s chateaubriand? Not at his side.”

“You’re in Miami?” Annie set down the plate of sashimi. “Is my dad in St. Louis?”

But the bizarre Latino caller could not be deterred from his philosophizing. “What does Jack’s fate tell you about the human race?—”

She interrupted. “Mr. Rook, if you and my father are such close friends, tell me something he’s said to you about my mother. Does she live there in Miami with him?”

He was clearly taken aback. “Your mother? Jack’s a bachelor.”

Sam kept plucking at Annie’s sleeve, whispering, “Jack could be making it up. He could do handwritings, voices, anything.”

But whoever this stranger was, he wasn’t her father. Even after all these years apart, Annie was sure she would recognize her father’s bright metallic voice. Rook’s timbre rustled like leaves blown across a yard. “You’re sure you’re a close friend?”

He puffed dismay. “Close? What could be closer than lying side by side in a prison cell in son-of-a-bitch Cuba?”

His response wasn’t the one she’d expected. “Cuba? My dad was in prison in Cuba? When?”

Rook said, “To me it feels like yesterday. One year, twelve long months, in that cell. Jack gave me the will to survive. Otherwise? I would have slit my throat on a rusty can lid, if I’d had a can, which I didn’t. I would have woven a noose of my own rotted trouser legs. They took away even time. No watches. But the worst was a bastard threw my guitar to the floor and just slowly stepped on it for the cruel pleasure.”

She asked if he were a musician.

“Ah…Here’s a question: Is what we are, what we might have been? Or is what we are, what with such sorrow, we have become?” He paused as if expecting her to offer an answer. When she didn’t, he added, “‘I have a reasonable good ear in music.’ To my mother’s grief I chased rumba down many excessively scummy streets. I could tell you—”

“Don’t. Mr. Rook! Mr. Rook—”

“In Miami my cousin found me a job with a dance band. Sad to say, many years later I returned to Havana, with your papa, and that’s when the bastards got us.” Over Annie’s attempts to interrupt, Rafael described how, for twelve months in a small slimy lightless cell, her father had recited Shakespeare from memory every night until dawn. “Oh, the poems and songs. He could just pull out a little verse every night from his head and it would be enough to keep me from misery. Compared to him, that Spider Woman Kiss, that was just silly movies. But this was Shakespeare. Thing of beauty, your papa. I can never repay him…What a heartbreak. And yet death comes to us all if we’re mortal, which they say historically we are—”

Annie took advantage of the young man’s necessary intake of breath. “Just stop there, okay! If my dad’s dying, why did he leave Miami and rush off to St. Louis?”

That sudden decision, Rook confessed, remained a mystery. In fact, Jack had left Golden Days entirely against Rook’s advice.

“What about his doctors? Isn’t Golden Days a hospital?” Annie paced, yanking the phone cord free of the leaping Malpy.

“Golden Days? It’s a petty creep down a dusty hall. I had a connection there and we slipped him in but I would not recommend it. Now he very much needs you to meet him in St. Louis with the King of the Sky. There are people who…do not wish him well.”

Annie didn’t doubt it. “What does Dad want, the big emerald?”

“Big emerald?” The Cuban sounded greedy. “You found a big emerald?”

“Or the password in his jacket? Do you know what this password’s to?”

A little too eagerly, he asked her to tell him what the password was.

She declined to do so. “Rook, what the hell are you and my father up to? Why does he need a plane? Can he even fly a plane? Frankly, I never thought he could.”

Rook claimed that Jack could do anything. Conversely, Jack and he were up to nothing. “I would basically like to offer him a helping hand at this juncture, because of my great debt to him; that’s the simple truth, Annie, no insinuation that truth is simple.”

Annie sat down in the chair that Clark carried over to her. “‘Juncture,’ meaning he’s definitely dying?”

“What’s definite? But when a man’s about to slip off a mortal coil, Annie—I feel I can call you Annie, because he talks about you all the time—a man goes to the core. So, if you want my advice, if it’s a password of Jack’s, it will have something to do with you, he is so proud of your accomplishments—”

The remark took her aback. Never before had she considered that, despite their long separation, her father might talk about her, and apparently with pride. She was surprised that he would even know of any accomplishments of hers. Sam must have told him. “Have you heard of my aunt Sam?”

The man said yes, “absolutely, of course. His sister Sam sends him news about your goings on. Impressive, number one in your class. In the end, Annie, you cannot take it or leave it with familia. This is what—you agree?—gives us our humanity.”

Although reluctantly moved to hear that her father had boasted about her, and although already planning to fly to St. Louis, she took a caustic tone. Even if he were dying, she asked, why should she deliver a plane to St. Louis to a man who’d thrown her away when she was seven years old?

Rook coughed as he mumbled, pardon him, but if he had been blessed with Annie’s brains, and if his padre were dying—which he wasn’t alive to die, because he had already died, young and much too fast, of this bastard cancer. And his father’s father, Simon Rook, had died even younger, in fact a horrible death off the coast of Cuba, thanks to the lying cabrones in the CIA.

Annie jumped to her feet, pacing. Sam rescued the plate as she flung out her arm. “Twenty years ago my ‘padre’ unloaded me on his sister and waltzed off into the ozone! So you’ll excuse me if I don’t get worked up over Jack Peregrine’s ‘dying’ wish. So fuck you!” Her outburst surprised her.

Rook’s rejoinder was also unexpected. He shouted loudly: “Excuse me, that is absolutely, definitely a lie! You have insulted me!”

But then she heard a pounding noise, grunts, and shrieks and realized he wasn’t talking to her anymore but to someone in his vicinity. Where had he said he was? South Beach? A store?

Finally he blurted out in a choked way that a vicious old lady was trying to wrestle out of his hand his mobile phone, claiming it was hers.

Annie heard more thumps and shouts. Then Rook was yelling, “I believe we still have a tiny ember in Florida of what once upon a time we called Liberty. Do not accuse me of committing a crime! Why would I steal your cheap cell phone? It’s pink!”

Annie could hear a woman’s voice shouting something about how this man had stolen her purse out of her shopping cart and that he was a foreigner who thought he could get away with robbing her because she was old, whereas people like him had no right even to be in Florida.

Rook shouted back, “Pardon me, my great-grandfather Isaiah Rook was a rabbi in Miami! My mother’s brother was up to his waist in the Everglades for Alpha 66 and my grandfather Simon Rook was personally recruited for a little something called Operation 40 by names you’d toss your cookies at if you heard them! That is what the fuck I’m doing in Florida!”

“What’s going on? What’s wrong with Jack?” whispered Sam, tugging at Annie’s sleeve.

Annie shouted into the phone. “Listen to me, Rook!”

The Cuban was panting. “Good-bye! The same to you!…Not you, Annie. That old lady, she’s gone, gracias a Dios! I apologize…Ah, let me take slow breaths. As the Great Buddha said, ‘El camino no está en el cielo. El camino está en el corazón.’”

Annie ignored a sarcastic impulse to inquire into Buddha’s ability to speak Spanish and instead asked Rook to tell her exactly what was wrong with her father’s health.

Rook caught his breath loudly, like a balloon losing air, slowly calming himself. “He’s dying.”

“Dying from what?”

“Slings and arrows. Life. Pretty much.”

“Was it an accident?”

He coughed. “Accident? Annie, I’ll tell you my personal theory. When you’re born, in my opinion, they send you down here with everything worked out ahead of time, like, you know, a fixed race or a stacked deck of cards or a book they wrote the end of first. It could be your astronomical stars, your karma or, I don’t know, a lot of people are into this personal feng shui—From cancer, I’m sorry to tell you.”

Annie caught at the reality of the word. “Cancer? What kind?”

“Terminal.”

“Cancer?” cried Sam.

Clark whispered, “Get the name of Jack’s doctor. I could phone, see what’s going on.”

But the Cuban suddenly shouted again, “You called the cops on me, lady? You called the cops? Annie, I gotta go!”

“Call back,” she demanded. “I don’t know where in St. Louis he is!”

“Good bye!”

“Don’t hang up!”

There was a loud crackle in the phone.

Annie turned to her aunt. “Rook hung up.”

“Call him back.” Sam grabbed Annie’s arm.

Annie dialed the incoming number, but voice mail announced, “This is Evelyn Whitestone’s phone. Please leave me a message.” Then the line went dead.

Chapter 14

The Palm Beach Story

Sam said, “I told you he was weird, that Rafael Rook.”

Picking up the sashimi, Annie absently ate it whole. “He said he was in prison with Dad in Cuba.”

“Your poor dad. He would have hated that.”

“Anybody would have hated it.” Annie turned to Clark. “So he says Dad’s dying of cancer.”

“What kind?”

“He didn’t say.” Annie sat down on the bottom stair. “I remember one time when Dad told some suckers he was dying of cancer because he wanted to sell them this fake land and I flipped out because I believed he was dying and he told me it wasn’t true, it was just a trick, he was fine.”

Clark rubbed her back. “I’m sure he is fine.” He noted that they should all remember how Jack had pulled the same “I’m dying, buy my house cheap” trick in Savannah and had been arrested for it. “Dying’s not in his personality.”

Abruptly all the lights went out and they heard the porch door tearing loose. In the dark Malpy raced around the room barking wildly, begging to be picked up.

“Clark, I hope you and the Weather Channel are happy at last!” shouted Sam, upset by more than the weather. “Now it is a damn tornado.”

The screen door shattered loudly as it blew off the porch.

Clark called out through the darkness. “Get the dogs. Go to the basement!”

Grabbing up Teddy and Malpy, they felt their way down the steep steps to the old Pilgrim’s Rest cellar, where Sam had collected all the broken objects, old toys, cracked leftovers of past generations that she couldn’t squeeze up into the attic. Here in the cool stone space, Peregrines had hidden for over a hundred years from bad weather and other calamities, like Yankee invaders and teenaged parties with amplified music.

Between the furnace and three of Annie’s bicycles, illuminated in the beam of Sam’s large flashlight, they stood together, listening to the cracks of snapping trees overhead. Sam used her light to see her cell phone to call Georgette, who told her, “Thanks. I’m in my basement, sitting on a moldy beanbag.”

“Call me back every ten minutes.”

Malpy whimpered but Teddy fell quickly to sleep.

After a while, Sam started her imitation of Katherine Hepburn. “‘Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.’”

Because niece and uncle had lived for years with a woman who owned a movie store and who responded to life crises almost exclusively by quoting classic films, the inimitable Hepburn voice, even badly mimicked, was somehow as soothing as a lullaby.

“African Queen,” Annie said.

Howling wind tore a whole tree loose with a terrible noise; it crashed near the house. “Oh God,” moaned Sam. “This is scary.”

Clark began: “‘Fasten your seat belts.’”

Annie finished. “‘It’s going to be a bumpy night.’”

“You two are making fun of me, aren’t you?” Sam shined the flashlight in their faces.

Annie and Clark told her yes, they were, and made her laugh. On they went, thinking of more quotes for Sam, soothing her with the murmur of memory; it was what they had done for decades, watching old movies on the couch together, eating with chopsticks from their Chinese takeout boxes.

Finally Sam told them to stop. “It’s like getting your hair brushed too long. First it’s a pleasure, then it gets on your nerves.”

Silence fell. After a long pause, Clark asked, “Know why the poor man became a baker?”

Annie answered, “Because he kneaded the dough.”

“Guess I already told you that one. How about the butcher that backed into his meat grinder and got a little behind in his work?”

Sam muttered, “Please. Top ten worst.” She phoned Georgette, whose line was busy or dead.

Gradually the noise of the storm subsided. Malpy stopped squeaking. Clark pushed open the cellar doors and they looked out. Rain was falling but the wind had eased. Pilgrim’s Rest had survived another storm.

Back in the front hall, Sam lit the half-dozen kerosene lanterns she kept for such an emergency, just as she kept extra water in jugs and extra gasoline in cans, extra salt for the driveway, first aid kits, antidotes. She telephoned Georgette next door again and reached her. “I told you to call me in ten minutes! Have you got candles?”

Georgette said she had found the five-dozen candles Sam had given her during last winter’s predicted power outage. “I was on the phone with my mother. I told her I was alone hiding in the basement in the middle of a twister and she said she’d gotten a birdie on the eighth hole.”

Sam sighed. “Tell me something you don’t know.”

“Okay. Annie’s not up in that plane. Is she?”

“Ask her.” Sam handed Annie the phone. Clark and she carried the lanterns around to check the house.

Annie told Georgette that she definitely planned on going to St. Louis. “The storm’s pretty much over.”

“It is? Look out the windows.”

“I have to find my dad.”

“Wouldn’t you have done it by now? I mean, almost twenty years? It’s a big house, but it’s not that big.”

“Don’t be funny. This so-called friend of his, Rafael Rook, called and says he’s got terminal cancer.”

“But somehow you don’t believe it.” Georgette sighed. “Take it from me. They do die. George is in an urn next to his Rotary awards. On the other hand, Kim’s in a golfing retirement center shooting birdies. Count your blessings? Okay, I’m going to bed. I wanted to watch the History Channel. It was the excavation of Pompeii. I don’t know why a petrified dog should be so fascinating.”

Annie’s shoulders relaxed; it soothed her to talk to Georgette. “I’ll keep you posted. I’ve got to settle this so I can get back to Maryland for my test flight.”

“Yeah, well, it’s always some world record or other with you. Sam wants me to drive back to Maryland with you to meet your condo buddy Trevor.”

“Why don’t Sam and Clark worry about getting themselves dates and leave us alone? Salut, chérie.”

“Love you. I strenuously advise you not to fly to St. Louis tonight but when did you ever listen to me?”

Annie raised an eyebrow. “When you told me marrying Brad was a good idea.”

“Don’t ever listen to me.” Georgette shrugged her soft shoulders. “I’m a sucker for muscles. I’d like to swing through a jungle like Lucy, from one Homo erectus biceps to another. I’d teach them all to talk and they’d all grunt that they loved me. A bientôt.”

***

As she packed, Annie called Trevor at Chesapeake Cove. Their agreement was a long-standing one: she took care of his West Highland terrier whenever he went on vacation; he took care of her cat whenever she had to leave home. Now she asked if he could watch Amy Johnson if she had to be away longer than she’d originally thought?

He could. He asked if they’d escaped the tornado. The news had said it was close.

“Very close. But we’re fine. Georgette’s upset because she can’t get the History Channel.”

“I don’t blame her.”

“She’s my oldest friend and she’s never met you.”

“Define oldest,” Trevor said.

“You’ve seen her picture in my living room. She’s a doctor, she’s single, and she spent last summer on an archeological dig in Sicily.”

Trevor said, “What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing. What’s wrong with you? You’re single.”

“True.”

“I need another favor.”

“Date your friend?”

“No. Help me find my father. He sent me a letter he’s dying. A FedEx! He’s in St. Louis. But I’m not sure where. The Miami police are after him. He’s an ex-con; there should be a criminal record. Can you find out what he’s been up to?”

Trevor said he’d always wondered why Annie hadn’t asked him to do this for her before. Here she was with a criminal father who’d disappeared; here she was with a friend who worked with criminal databases at the FBI. Seemed like a match. He was happy to check into Jack Peregrine.

When Annie was carrying Teddy to her pagoda bed, the lights came back on. The old dog’s cloudy blind eyes, blue as glass, seemed to be looking right at her. “What do you think, Teddy?” she asked the Shih Tzu. “What should I do? If I were Claudette, I’d get on a train and I’d meet a millionaire but then I’d remarry my husband.”

The dog licked the air, as if to test out this option from The Palm Beach Story. Then she shook her head.

“Right. I don’t want to remarry Brad.” Annie took Teddy with her to the black baby grand piano on which long ago Sam had played duets with Georgette’s aunt Ruthie. The old yellowed sheet music was still in the bench. She found a pastel copy of “Lara’s Theme” from Dr. Zhivago. “Ruthie Nickerson” was written elaborately on the cover, and in the same blue ink “con amore.”

Photographs crowded together on the piano’s closed lid. As a child, Annie had grown accustomed to freezing with a grin half-a-dozen times a day, while Sam recorded her life with a camera of one sort or another: Annie at Brownie camp, on the track team, on her way to an Emerald High dance, Annie the naval midshipman, Annie putting wedding cake to Brad’s lips, Annie stretching, eating, napping, Annie just holding up her hands in surrender to the lens. When she’d protested at being subjected to daily photography, Clark had asked her to indulge her aunt: all these pictures were Sam’s proofs of a happiness she hadn’t expected. They were like red votive candles lit in a church, pledges of gratitude.

On the piano there were a few framed snapshots of the young Sam and Jack as well. And there was an old photo in a bright ’70s frame of five teenagers seated on the Pilgrim’s Rest porch. All were tan and wore shorts and T-shirts, their arms hung over one another’s shoulders, all laughing, knocking into each other: Sam, Clark, Jack, Georgette’s father George Nickerson, and a pretty girl who was leaning out at an angle from the porch rail to crook her elbow around Clark’s neck. Annie had been told that this was George’s sister Ruthie, who’d run off with a married man. In the picture Ruthie appeared to be very attractive but it was hard to see her face because of the huge sunglasses she wore.

There was also a solo picture of Clark, thin and squinting into a Vietnamese sunset. Beside it was a wedding photo of Clark and his first wife, Tuyet, who’d died shortly after he’d brought her home to America, of a rare kind of cancer. Nearby was a framed newspaper photo of Sam leaping to hit a tennis ball (“Peregrine Takes Title” said the small headline) and stuck in the corner of the frame, as if to emphasize the contrast, was a snapshot of Sam at sixteen, unhappy in a prom dress, in front of the Pilgrim’s Rest Christmas tree, with a valiant chin, standing between her intoxicated father the judge and her sedated mother Grandee of the Savannah Worths, all three of them with smiles that would, Clark said, “scare the Munsters.”

Scrambling to get down from Annie’s arms, Teddy knocked off a small black-and-white picture at the piano’s far edge. As the old Shih Tzu trotted indignantly onto her velvet poof and sighed a long sigh settling there, Annie picked up the photo. It was a picture she didn’t remember, of her dad and her, from their days on the road, shortly before he’d left her in Emerald. She had always divided her past between those blurred years of travel and the start of her “real life” when she had come to live at Pilgrim’s Rest. It was a jolt to see the old life—a professional snapshot taken in an elegant beachside restaurant—here in the Pilgrim’s Rest living room.

More startling, the picture was the same as the one that the Miami detective Sergeant Daniel Hart had described seeing in her father’s room. One of the photos must be a copy of the other. In the restaurant banquette, she was snuggled next to the sandy-haired, open-armed Jack Peregrine. His gleaming suit and slender tie made more luminous his deep-tanned smiling face and his trim blonde mustache. Annie was wearing her favorite dress, the green velvet, and her cowboy boots. Her head rested against the crisp white of her father’s shirt; above her head his tan fingers held a cigarette. On the banquette table sat a cake with candles. Other diners filled in the background around them, laughing women, men in thin ties and sleek suits.

Annie took the photo out of its frame. On the back in her father’s handwriting was scrawled, “Annie and Jack, The Breakers, Palm Beach.” They had been celebrating her seventh birthday a few weeks ahead of the event, for the picture was dated June 1982. So from here they must have driven to St. Louis and then east to Emerald, where on July Fourth he’d given her away to Sam and Clark.

Palm Beach and Miami. The Hotel Dorado on the letterhead of the folded note in Jack’s flight jacket was in Miami. The convalescent home Golden Days was in Miami too. The detective Hart and the peculiar Rafael Rook had also both called her from Miami.

Miami. What had her father and she been doing there? Life at The Breakers looked affluent and happy. At what joke of her father’s was she laughing? Why had they left Miami and driven suddenly to St. Louis and then just as suddenly come east to Emerald?

There had been earlier birthday celebrations of Annie’s that had ended in tears. Her dad had often joked about her crying at her parties. He’d recounted how on her fifth birthday, she’d run out of her hotel bedroom wailing, “Be quiet!” at a drunken, startled crowd of his friends. How, on her third birthday, beside some motel swimming pool in the moonlight, she’d screamed at a friend of her father’s to stop swinging a stick at a big piñata hanging from a palm tree. But the man had whacked the Mexican paper donkey anyhow until it broke in two and the other adults had laughed although Annie had kicked at their legs to make them stop.

On that occasion, her father had picked her up, rocking her back and forth, laughing, showing her how the piñata donkey was made to be broken, how it held a broken clay pot of candies and trinkets. She had been inconsolable.

But in this photograph of a celebration of her seventh birthday at The Breakers, Annie’s head was tilted with laughter. She studied this child, who wore a small pendant with her velvet dress, recalling that her father had given her that tiny ruby the year before but had then taken it back, “just borrowing it,” he’d said. Presumably he’d sold it. The thought occurred to her now that when he’d shown up running through the cornfield into Pilgrim’s Rest on that strange hot summer day, when he’d given Sam the raw ruby for Annie’s seventeenth birthday, he’d done so in order to make up for the pendant that he’d “borrowed” ten years earlier.

“Happy birthday, have a good life,” Annie said aloud to the happy child in the picture. She slid it back into its frame and returned it to the piano.

Looking up, she saw her aunt and uncle in the hall watching her; holding chopsticks; they were eating together from a large platter of spicy tuna rolls. With the now sagging helium multicolored balloons settled around their feet, they looked as if they were standing in a rainbow.

Sam came over and blew out the kerosene lantern on the mantel.

“I told you this was a twister,” Clark said, swiping at the smoky air.

“If you tell me one more time, I’m going to clobber you,” Sam warned him.

Annie showed them the Palm Beach picture. “I don’t remember this being here.”

Sam explained that it had come out of Annie’s suitcase. “It was in there when you arrived, along with twelve thousand dollars cash and your birth certificate. Wrapped in a velvet dress. A few years ago I came across it and put it in a frame.”

Annie said she had a vague memory of those chandeliers in the domed ceiling of The Breakers, the tall beautiful windows and elegant chairs. She thought she could remember the sound of the ocean outside but might be imagining it.

“Your dad lived in Miami off and on,” Sam said, studying the picture. “He called me once from The Breakers, maybe a couple of years ago and said he’d just been remembering how the two of you had stayed there on your birthday.”

Annie pointed at the photograph. “See this menu on the table? Dad bet a guy a hundred dollars he could show me a page of this menu for fifteen seconds and that then I could repeat it word for word, including the prices…I was scared I would get it wrong.” She moved away from the piano. She didn’t want to remember how hard she’d tried to impress her father; the pleasure she’d taken in his laughter; how, with big pieces of pastel chalk, she would painstakingly, accurately write down the numbers of cars’ license plates on the asphalt of motel parking spaces after the cars had driven off; how she’d correctly identify all the cards in the discard pile of poker games. She’d done it for his praise. “He was grooming me to count cards for him. He always wanted us to go to Vegas. At least I didn’t end up working for criminals.”

“Really?” Sam picked up her niece’s U.S. Navy officer’s cap from the couch, flicked the brim skeptically.

“Don’t start. Where’s that birth certificate that said Claudette Colbert was my mother? Could you find that?”

“I could find the straw from your first milk carton. Probably in the same suitcase as that jacket of your dad’s, up there in the attic.”

Annie said her real question was why should Jack Peregrine, for whom only the future had ever felt real, now want her to bring him so many pieces of the past?

Clark took off his glasses as if to make sure they were the ones he’d been wearing for years. “My real question is, why are you doing it?”

In the hall, Annie opened the front door and looked up at the black sky. “D. K. won’t clear me if it’s not safe.”

Sam sighed. “Could we remember that D. K. crashed his plane into the China Sea?”

“That was in broad daylight,” Clark said. “Look on the bright side.”

Chapter 15

The Aviator

Annie phoned D. K. again about the King of the Sky, which he still garaged for her at Destin Airworks. He had checked out the plane and needed to do a little more work on the engine. Give him an hour.

She checked through the Pilgrim’s Rest kitchen cabinets while she tried to reach Hotel Dorado in Miami. The usual jar of candied papaya pieces that nobody wanted sat on the top shelf. The bag of Snickers bars was hidden where Clark always hid candy from himself, behind the big cobwebby cans of pureed pumpkin that every Thanksgiving Sam planned to make into pies but never did.

No Jack Peregrine was registered at Hotel Dorado.

She called the number on the letterhead for Golden Days. A woman answered in a bright southern voice. “G.D., may I help you?” The woman sounded bizarrely like Annie’s ex-mother-in-law Mama Spring Hopper, who had always cursed in abbreviations. But “G.D.” proved to be short for Golden Days, an extended-care home. The receptionist conceded cheerfully that most of their patients were “pretty terminal,” but declined to provide details about how they’d gotten that way. She did admit that as far as she could tell from her “guest book,” they had never had any “residents” named Jack Peregrine, after which she cheerfully clicked off.

Annie arranged dried fruit into geometric patterns on the kitchen table while trying to reach Trevor. When he finally called back, he reported that he’d discovered a few things about her dad: an agent friend had found eleven charges against John Ingersoll Peregrine, with three convictions, a total of twenty-five months served, half-a-dozen aliases. There were three outstanding felony warrants in two states. Also Florida reported an APS for a recent jailbreak. The charges were consistent with Annie’s description of her father as a “swindler” and included a variety of white-collar fraud crimes, including forged checks, fake options and securities, counterfeited land deeds, shakedowns, hustles, stings.

She asked if there were anything in the folder about an incarceration in Cuba a year or so ago. Or anything about Cuba’s interest in a sixteenth-century religious artifact known as La Reina Coronada del Mar that Jack had allegedly stolen? After a long pause, Trevor said no, he saw nothing about Cuba. “Reina what?”

“Reina Coronada del Mar. The Queen of the Sea. A gold statue.”

Trevor said such a statue was nowhere mentioned in the files. Curiously, however, the sheet on Jack Peregrine had come to an abrupt end eleven months ago with a sealed indictment. Everything after that was closed.

To Annie it was impossible to believe that her father had reformed. But perhaps he’d gotten so good at his crimes that he was no longer caught, either by the police or by those mysterious men he’d always named for cartoon villains—The Crocodile, Dr. No—those men who’d barged into their lives on the road and threatened them. Like the large man with a gun who’d kicked open the door to their motel room at midnight while they were watching The Ten Commandments…She stopped talking mid-sentence. “Wait! Royal Coach, that’s it! Trevor, thank you, thank you!”

He chuckled at her exuberance. “For what?”

“The name of the motel. Dad and I were watching The Ten Commandments in the Royal Coach Motel in St. Louis. A man broke in, we got away from him, and we drove straight to Emerald and Dad dropped me off here at Pilgrim’s Rest. So it’s the last place we stayed together. Royal Coach Motel. That’s where he’s gone.”

“Sorry. I’m not following you.”

She said it didn’t matter, she’d explain it all when she returned to Chesapeake Cove. She was heading to St. Louis tonight in her Piper Warrior.

“Why don’t I see if I can get a field agent there to check things out for you?”

Annie couldn’t explain why she felt that she had to go herself to find her father, but she did.

“Well, good luck.” Trevor said to let him know what she found out. “And I’ll check into this Cuba thing…So, any message for Amy Johnson? We’re headed for bed.”

“Tell her I miss her, not that she’ll care.”

“You never know with cats. People either.”

Annie said, “You do know with cats. That’s what I like about them.”

She ran back to the living room where Clark and Sam were sharing more spicy tuna rolls. “I figured it out. Dad’s in the Royal Coach Motel in St. Louis!”

“Ah.” Clark nodded slowly. “The fishing fly. Royal Coachman. What a jerk.”

“Dad knocked a man out and took his gun. There was a pink neon coach with four horses on the motel sign near the pool.”

Clark mildly wondered why Jack hadn’t simply written down the name of the motel in his cryptic note to her. “I repeat. What a jerk.”

“Never write things down,” Annie explained; it was in the top five of her father’s old crime “lessons.”

The Royal Coach still had its St. Louis listing. The young man at the desk told her that the motel had been in business in the same location for over thirty years. No one was registered as Jack Peregrine but the clerk, a friendly and bored college fellow, described in detail a late check-in yesterday of a man vaguely fitting her description of her father. The man had returned to the night desk around 1 a.m., borrowed a pair of scissors, and while sitting in the lobby had cut off his very good trousers above the knees. Annie asked the clerk to check the name on the registration.

The man had registered as Clark Goode.

“Fucking wonderful!” Annie took a breath. “I’m sorry. That’s not my father’s real name. Clark Goode is my uncle’s name and he’s right here in North Carolina and has been all week.”

“Listen,” confided the clerk, “nothing surprises me. Last night I had a transvestite pull in driving a 35-foot Gulfstream Yellowstone RV; checked in as Barbra Streisand. But maybe it was Barbra.” The clerk added that the man who’d cut off his own trousers had specifically insisted on a particular room in the motel, 115, when he’d arrived—an unusual request, since all the rooms were identical.

That evening the clerk had noticed the man swimming back and forth in the motel pool. Then, hours later, he’d seen him once more, at the pool’s edge, this time smoking a thin cigar, lying on his back on the concrete as if he were sunbathing, although it was three in the morning. The man had appeared to be staring up at the stars, not that you could see many.

Annie asked if it were possible to speak with whoever had cleaned Room 115. The intrigued clerk told her to call back in fifteen minutes. She did so and learned then from a Guatemalan maid, whose story the desk clerk translated, that just this morning the maid had seen two men in the parking lot with the person who’d cut off his trouser legs. He’d walked back to his room with these two men, talking nonstop in an agitated way. An hour afterwards, the maid had found bloody towels in the 115 bathroom, where the fan ventilator cover from the ceiling had been removed and was lying on the tile floor of the shower.

***

Clark telephoned St. Louis hospitals to see if a Jack Peregrine had been admitted to any of them; he hadn’t.

“He hates hospitals,” Sam said. “He wouldn’t go on his own. What do you mean bloody towels? Like hemorrhaging?”

Annie shook her head. “No no. One of those guys probably knocked him down. Well, I’ve got a lead now.”

“Have some coffee first,” said Clark.

Sam sighed more loudly than ever. “I’m having a martini. This is all ‘putting me way behind in my drinking.’”

Clark absentmindedly identified the quote. “Thin Man. You don’t drink.”

“That was yesterday.”

Outside on the roof it sounded as if a gutter was ripping loose. Malpy wriggled under the couch to hide. Sam and Clark hurried to the porch to check the damage.

Annie was running upstairs to repack when the phone in the hall rang again. She picked it up. No one answered. “Hello…Who is this please? Hello, Peregrine-Goode residence…”

Malpy began barking, feeling Annie tense.

“…Hi there. That you, darlin’?” The voice was her father’s. No chance of error. She lowered the receiver but slowly brought it back to her ear.

“…Annie?”

“Yes?”

“Annie? It’s Dad. Meet me in St. Louis?” He laughed weakly. “How often you get to say that in life?”

Annie sat down. “Where are you? Are you in a hospital? Were you hemorrhaging?”

He laughed again, as always, easily. “You going to hang up if I wasn’t?”

Why, she asked, exasperated, wasn’t he in the hospital if he were dying? Why was there blood in his motel bathroom? Why had he gone to the Royal Coach motel pretending to be Clark Goode?

Her questions appeared to please him. “I knew you’d figure out Royal Coach. I tried to be careful, in case somebody grabbed Raffy when he was mailing you the key. They got to me anyhow. Bad luck.”

“Who got to you? And you should go to a hospital; you sound awful.”

“If you could just fly the King to St. Louis tonight…I’d fly it back to you in Emerald, I promise.”

While the unexpected had not been unusual from her father, this request amazed her. “Can you even fly a plane? And if you can, damn it, why don’t you just rent one!”

He seemed to have trouble breathing and it took several starts for him to get through a sentence. “There’s something in the King I need. I can’t really talk now. I’ll explain when you get here. Did Sam find my jacket?”

Annie squeezed her hand tightly around the phone. “Yes and I ripped open the lining. I’m sure you’ve replaced all the fake cards by now, so what do you want? The gun, the cash? Some password? Is that a password you wrote in the lining of that old pink cap—”

“You kept that cap. Great. Bring it. I’m leaving you a million dollars, darlin’. Just in case, the key I sent’s an extra; the panel’s in the King’s hold—”

“Shut up! I don’t want to hear this bullshit, okay? It’s just, it’s just bullshit!” She said that it enraged her that he was so sure she would drop everything, two decades after he’d dropped her, and fly to St. Louis to give him her airplane!

He coughed. “But aren’t you coming?”

“Yes, I’m coming! That’s not the point. You can’t assume I’d come!”

“Sure I can. Because you love me. It’s even odds I’ll be dead by the end of the month anyhow. So, Annie, don’t you feel a little bit like, well, making up? Take it from me, you’ll only regret the things in life you didn’t do.”

That he should offer her this “advice” on how to live her life was so preposterous, she couldn’t even respond.

“You there, sweetheart?”

“…Your buddy, Rafael Rook, says you’re ‘going fast.’”

“Raffy told you that?”

“Is it cancer?” she asked.

“What’s the difference? Okay, tell me the numbers written in the cap.”

Her mouth set stubbornly the way it had as a child. “Why should I?”

He laughed cheerfully if without much volume. It had always infuriated her that life struck him as funny. “Because you’ve got me at your mercy, Annie. It’s ‘Add and Subtract’ time, like we used to play in the car. You still can remember a bunch of numbers? I never could. It amazed me the way you did it. You could remember anything. Tell me the numbers.”

Annie was angrily poking her finger at the ornate family motto carved into the square newel post at the foot of the stairs, where a peregrine falcon held a scroll in its talons on which Gothic letters spelled Peregrinus ego sum.

“Yes, I can still remember numbers,” she told him.

“Bet you’re still a damn good poker player.”

“Yes, I am.”

He coughed. “Okay. What’s your price to tell me those numbers? You could say…” He chuckled. “It’s life or death.”

“Then you should go to the police.”

“Come on, tell me. I’ll owe you. There’s got to be something you want.”

“From you?”

“Think about it.” He was quiet.

Annie thought about it.

And then all at once she knew that there was in fact something she wanted and that there was a deal she could make with him. She wanted information that she’d long ago put away hoping for, telling herself the knowledge was in any case useless, impractical, unnecessary. She said, “Okay, there’s something I want from you.”

“Good.”

“If I come to St. Louis, I’ll tell you the numbers if, only if, you’ll tell me how to find my mother. And don’t tell me she was Claudette Colbert either. That’s what I want. That’s the only reason I’m coming. My mother.”

“…I don’t know where your mother is, or how you could find her. That’s the truth.” His cough was rattling. “But if you come, I’ll tell you everything I know.”

Annie took a slow breath. “Okay, you give me enough information so I can find out about her. Her name, is she married, does she have other kids? And when I find out everything you know, then I’ll tell you the password.” She glanced at her watch. “I can get the King to Lambert in about five or six hours if I start now. Just don’t die before I get there.”

Again he chuckled with that old infuriating ease. “For the love of Mike, you grew up one tough lady. I’m trying my best here…My game’s a little off.”

“Are you calling from your own cell phone?”

He said he was and gave her a number.

“And stop using Clark’s name. Where are you?”

He said she should stay away from the Royal Coach too. He’d had a “slight screw up” there. Meet him in the Admirals Club at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport as soon as she could manage. He’d wait for her there, as long as it took. But if something should happen to him, just in case, remember this: King, Queen, Sam.

She interrupted. Did he know the Miami police were trying to arrest him in a fraud investigation? That the FBI was involved?

“That’s the least of it, honey. Okay, Admirals Club. Sooner’s better than later.” Again, he seemed unable to breathe easily.

“How sick are you?”

His laughter sounded tight, as if it hurt. He quoted, “‘I am peppered, I warrant, for this world.’”

“You stop it, just stop it!”

“Oh sweetheart, old times. Happy Birthday, Annie. For the record, you really were born on the Fourth of July...You see Flight for Freedom? Great movie. The flying part, I mean...Rosalind Russell, she’s an aviator. And she’s got this line, something like, ‘Dad always used to say, when you’re safe...you’re dead.’ It’s true. Fly to the future, Annie. The future’s always there.” He hung up.

Annie slowly replaced the receiver. She was still staring at it when Sam and Clark came back inside.

Sam hurried over to her. “What in the world’s the matter with you?”

“That was Jack,” Annie said.

“What?” Sam sat down.

“He quoted Shakespeare and some Rosalind Russell movie and then he hung up on me.”

“That was Jack?” Sam bent over, rubbing her arms.

“Daniel Hart calls, Rafael Rook calls, now Dad calls. Is this a set up?”

“How did he sound? Dying?”

Taking slow breaths, Annie walked to the porch, looked out at the still roiled sky. “What does dying sound like? He didn’t sound good. He told me to fly to St. Louis and look for him in the Admirals Club.”

Sam punched at air with a hard jab. “If I hadn’t believed he was really on his deathbed, I never would have given you that FedEx! Why do I fall for him?”

“My question for over a quarter of a century,” said Clark.

“Well, Clark’s right. You can’t fly tonight.” Sam peered out the window. “This storm has stalled.”

“Okay, that’s settled.” Clark held up the sushi platter. “Anybody want some more?”

Sam started pushing the two of them toward the kitchen. “Let’s forget about Jack. People like Jack don’t die.” She sighed, unable to persuade herself. “Let’s eat supper. Who’s for forty pieces of chicken korma? Annie, how about some sushi?”

But Annie was back on the phone to D. K. Destin, asking him if the King of the Sky’s engine was fixed, if he could get it fueled fast and ready to fly. She’d be at the airfield as soon as she could get there. Please make sure she was good to go. Because she was flying to St. Louis.

D. K. gave a loud derisive laugh into the phone, like a man gone melodramatically mad in a horror movie. “What do Amy Johnson, Amelia Earhart, Bessie Coleman, and Wiley Post have in common?”

Annie knew what he meant but pretended otherwise. “They were all great pilots.”

“And?”

“Their planes crashed.”

“And?”

“They died.”

“Hello baby.”

Chapter 16

So Proudly We Hail

Annie and Clark stood in the kitchen, looking out at the rain. Clark said, “Annie, I wouldn’t count on the truth from Jack.”

Annie shook her head stubbornly. “Either he’ll tell me about my mother or he won’t. He’ll die or he won’t. Either way, it’ll be over.”

From behind Sam’s “Gore 2000” magnet on the refrigerator, Clark took a photograph of Annie at a track meet, sprinting to the finish line, her hair flattened against her face, her face twisted, her smile triumphant. He nodded. “You’re going to St. Louis. I accept it but I don’t like it.” He volunteered to drive Annie the eight hundred miles to Missouri instead.

Annie smiled at her uncle. “Clark, if you drove me, Jack would die of old age before we got there. I’m flying the King.” She had calculated that the Piper Warrior could make it with one stopover to refuel. She could be at Lambert Airport not long after midnight, Central Time. The real question was, would her father even show up? “I’m thinking I should call that detective in Miami, Sergeant Hart.” She started to dial his number from memory on her cell phone.

Sam grabbed the phone, agitated; she shoved it into the pocket of her shorts. “No, please, don’t call the police. They’ll put Jack in jail. He couldn’t stand it. Please!”

A sigh, then Annie relented. “…Okay, okay, I won’t call the police.”

“Just till we sort things out,” Sam pleaded.

Annie took her aunt by the arm and walked with her back and forth in the kitchen, soothing her. “But if he’s really ill, shouldn’t he be in a hospital? If he’s bleeding all over motel bathrooms?”

Sam stopped, pulled away. “You said it was practically nothing!”

Annie backpedaled. “Well, I mean, it’s not that serious or he wouldn’t be on the phone asking me to lend him an airplane, would he? It’s just some little screw up.” From long thinking about how to interpret her father, she knew he would always be experiencing “little screw ups.” Time after time the calamities were a complete surprise to him, as if they’d only by the remotest chance had anything to do with him at all. It dawned on her now that this was a trait he shared with her soon-to-be ex-husband Brad. She recalled how Brad had looked up at her mystified when she’d caught him on their bed in that “slip up” with Melody Wirsh, as if Melody’s presence in the bed was as much of a shock to Brad as to Annie.

Clark held up the huge emerald on its chain. “Where do you suppose Jack got this thing?”

“Not by paying for it at Tiffany’s,” replied Annie.

Sam examined the emerald again. It was doubtless worth a hundred thousand, she theorized. It was very large and looked to be perfectly formed.

“Great. Maybe he wants to trade it for my mother’s name.” Annie zipped the stone with the fake business cards and the hundred dollar bills inside her father’s flight jacket. “Let’s go.”

Clark left them to go check on Georgette before he brought the car around to the porch.

Annie repeated the numbers from memory, “362484070N and 678STNX211,” and wrote them on a message pad, handing the pad to Sam. “Keep this.”

Sam checked the numbers against those on the pink cap. “Perfect. And I can’t remember a phone number long enough to call it.” They walked together through the hallway. “More and more I just remember what happened ages ago, millions of little things, just flashes, from when I was a kid. When you’re young, you don’t have time to remember your life. When you’re my age…” Sam rubbed at her white hair. “The past starts to push the present aside.” She pulled from her shorts pocket the copy of Annie’s birth certificate that she’d found in the attic. “Know what I mean?”

“Not really.” Annie studied the certificate.

Sam’s familiar frown deepened. “Well, like when I was eating the chicken korma, I was remembering squeezing soy sauce out of a plastic packet in a booth at House of Joy. The soy sauce squirted onto my mother’s blouse sleeve. A gray silk blouse with two little covered buttons at the cuffs. Grandee was furious at me and hit the back of my hand hard with her fork. She didn’t like chopsticks and always used a fork.” Sam answered an accusation no one had made. “All right, all right, my mother wasn’t a loving person. But she had great style.”

Annie patted her hands. “No wonder you eat everything with chopsticks, even French fries.” She took Sam back into the living room, pointed out a photo on the piano. In the picture, Sam stood among thousands of placard-waving protesters at the 2000 inauguration in Washington. “You’ve got the love thing and style too. Look at you. It’ll always be 1968, Sam.”

“I wish,” sighed her aunt. “Check out the gray hair in that crowd. We’re practically on walkers. Where are all the young people?”

Annie pointed at a group photo of her first flight-school class at their graduation. “Here we are. In a land called Reality where you know you can’t change human nature.”

“The world is fixable, Annie. You just need to get the real news so you know what to fix.”

Annie straightened the Navy photo. Two of those classmates were dead now. She said, “We’d rather hear the news on comedy shows.”

Sam helped Annie slip into Jack’s old leather flight jacket, rolling up its sleeves for her. “That’s about the only place you can hear the real news these days. Vietnam, we had Cronkite.”

Laughing, Annie put on her Navy cap. “Sam, just leave war to pros like me.”

“You think you’re so cynical. Good lord, you telephone Georgette practically every day. There’s no reason to do that but love.”

“Sure, and I buy organic. But most of all, I work hard to get promoted and—” Annie smiled, patting her flat abdomen, “—stay in shape.”

Sam pushed a curl back off her niece’s forehead. “Well, an elliptical trainer won’t make your heartstrings zing—”

Annie started melodramatically up the stairs. “Please, I beg you, don’t sing some awful love song.” Her mockery of Sam’s romantic songs was an old joke between them. “Love is not a many-splendored thing. Love does not make the world go round.”

Sam called after her, “Yes, it does.”

Annie turned back at the landing. “Well, I hope it doesn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry because I am looking forward to a major apology from Jack Peregrine!”

Sam patted the carved peregrine hawk in the newel post as she shouted up the stairs to her niece. “Love means saying you’re sorry and hearing ‘I’m sorry,’ every goddamn day of your life. But oh sweetie, maybe you won’t hear it from Jack.”

There was no answer. Annie had already gone into her room.

“I’m talking to thin air,” Sam muttered.

The tall white-haired woman walked back to the piano and picked up the Navy photograph in which her niece was smiling broadly, saluting her commanding officer, Commander Campbell, as he pinned a Commendation Medal on her. Sam compared the photo to the one of the seven-year-old Annie with Jack, seated in The Breakers restaurant. In both pictures, Annie had the same jubilant smile. “Oh, Anne Samantha, look at you.” Sam moved her fingers for a moment against the glass of each picture frame, tapped each small exultant face. “Look at you.”

The day that Annie’s acceptance to Annapolis had arrived in the mail, Sam had felt the heft of the Academy’s packet, thinking that it wouldn’t be so heavy if it were a rejection; thinking, as she raced up the stairs to Annie’s bedroom, that this news would help her niece, this would fix things. Because Annie had been shut up there all day crying. A boy had thrown her over for another girl, a girl on her track team, the girl from whom Annie had to accept the hand-off baton on the last leg of a 4 x 400 relay race. Only a week ago, the girl had dropped the baton behind the fast-sprinting Annie in the blind hand-off and so they’d lost the race. Annie had been furious at the girl, who’d smiled at her smugly, bafflingly. Then the boy had broken the news. After school, Annie had driven home crying so hard that she’d begun hyperventilating and Sam had finally had to hold a paper bag to her face. She hadn’t cried that hard since the day her father had left her at Pilgrim’s Rest when she’d hidden in the barn behind the wheel of the Piper Warrior.

Late through the night Sam had sat beside the bed where Annie had finally fallen asleep. She knew how her niece must feel. Sam had cried the same way when her partner Jill had not only left her but had charged her for more than her share of their condo equity.

***

Wes Campbell, Annie’s commanding officer at the Annapolis base, called her cell phone while she was packing. He was sympathetic. “Lieutenant, it’s okay. Family emergency. I see here you’re owed three separate weeklong leaves that you never took. Make this one of them.”

“I just need to find my dad, sir. I don’t need a week.”

“Lieutenant, you’re taking a one-week leave starting at 0800.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll be back well in time for my test flight.”

Campbell chuckled. “I know that. We’re counting on you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No hesitation?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, good.” Commander Campbell liked the young female officer, whom he had personally chosen for the new F-35 Lightning II test flight. He made his joke about how times had changed from his own all-male days at the Academy in the ’60s, when midshipmen still wore glasses and had acne and everyone’s haircut was as flat as the runway on an aircraft carrier. He made this joke so often to female midshipmen, it was like a rite of passage when they first heard it from him.

He asked, “Your dad go by Peregrine or Goode? You gals here at Annapolis have so many names hyphened together, it’s hard to know what the hell to call you.”

“I don’t know what name my father’s going by these days, sir,” was Annie’s reply.

The commander frowned as he hung up; he often didn’t catch the tone of this generation’s remarks. Was that humor? Just a fact?

***

Up in her bedroom, Annie slid her neatly coiled jump rope in her duffel bag, then studied her birth certificate before placing it in her purse. The piece of paper looked real. Had she actually been born in that hospital in Key West, twenty-six years ago on the Fourth of July at 8:42 p.m.? Had she really weighed 6 lbs., 3 oz.? Was it even possible that her mother’s name had, quite coincidentally, really been Claudette Colbert? Unlikely.

There was a lull in the storm; rain fell slow and soft. Clark was waiting in his Volvo to drive to the airfield when Annie carried her Navy duffel bag out onto the porch. Malpy raced into the opened car. Clark called to Sam, now kneeling in a flowerbed, moving fallen branches off the plants. “Let’s go!” They’d driven off so many times in just this way, year after year.

Sam leaned into the car, upset. “We lost most of the hollyhocks and foxglove but for some reason those hideous orange irises of yours look pretty good.”

“Every cloud has a silver lining, as I learned when my cousin died and left me his classic GTO.” Clark pointed behind Sam. “Did you lock the front door? Go back and check the door.”

“Nobody’s going to rob us,” Sam said. “A tornado just went through here. People are busy.”

“Drug addicts don’t mind a little storm. Remember that burglar that broke into Georgette’s house in the ice storm?”

“That was nothing. She played her barking Doberman tape and he ran off.”

“I’m locking the door.” Clark loped up onto the porch to lock the front door and then returned to the car.

Annie checked her watch. “You want to drive me to the airfield or not?”

“I do not. Did I ever?” He started slowly forward.

From the backseat, Sam called, “Be careful, Clark. The drive’s flooded.”

“Wait’ll she gets to the sky.” Her uncle eased the station wagon out into the gravel road. “This cousin’s GTO, which I sold for two hundred bucks—”

Annie took a long breath. “—would be worth a fortune today.”

“Would be worth a fortune today.”

From the back seat Sam muttered, “I’ve got an Armageddon feeling. Like Tippi, being driven away from the doomed house at the end of The Birds.”

Annie turned around and repeated what her father had told her so often as he’d spun her in the air all those years ago. “Don’t worry. I’m a flyer.”

Clark pointed up at the car roof. “So proudly we hail.” Tiny pellets of hail were striking the car.

“Now, there you go,” smiled Sam. “We are actually hearing a new pun. You never know what life will bring.”

Chapter 17

The Great Waldo Pepper

Shortly after Annie’s birth, Jack Peregrine had won in a poker game in Key West, or so he’d told Sam, the old single-engine 1975 Piper Warrior, with engine troubles, that he’d brought to Emerald. In the barn at Pilgrim’s Rest he repainted its body. He planned to fix its engine and even burnt a crude landing strip into a long flat meadow behind the barn. But as far as Sam knew, Jack had never flown the little red and yellow Warrior on whose wing he had written, “King of the Sky.” Instead the plane waited unused in Emerald until the seven-year-old Annie began sitting in it alone for hours, hoping she could, by her stoicism in the cockpit, compel her father to return. She found an ignition key taped to the underside of the wheel cap, near where on her arrival she had huddled so long crying. She used this key to pretend to start the plane, although the motor was long dead.

One Sunday evening, as Sam, Clark, and she sat on the couch with Teddy, watching the movie The Great Waldo Pepper, the quiet little girl suddenly announced that she intended to fly the Piper Warrior herself. It was, after all, her airplane.

For the next two years, Annie spent daily hours in the barn playing at flying the single-engine plane, cleaning it, studying it. Since the birthday when Sam had given her that first ride with Georgette in a tethered balloon and the flying lessons in the Pawnee Cropduster at D. K. Destin’s airfield on the outskirts of Emerald (“Private Planes, Sell or Rent, Low Monthly Rates, Rides, Instruction, Groups or Single”) the small airport had become her favorite place, and D. K., one of the few African American naval combat pilots in Vietnam, had become for a while the most important person in her life. At every meal she asked in her solemn watchful way for flying lessons with the retired lieutenant. It was the first thing for which she asked her aunt and “uncle,” other than information about her missing parents.

Sam tried to assuage Clark’s concern about Annie’s flying mania. “It’s like horses, a phase.” But years passed and the phase didn’t. On rainy afternoons Annie read every book the school library had on aviation; she talked endlessly with D. K. about the triumphs of women pilots, how Katharine Wright had worked right beside her brothers Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk; how Amelia Earhart had flown solo across the Atlantic in 1932; how Jacqueline Cochran, who had broken the sound barrier as early as 1953, held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history, more than 200 of them, including in 1964 a speed record of 1,429 miles per hour in the F-104 Starfighter; how the astronaut Sally Ride had rocketed into space from a launch pad in Florida and the whole country had sung to her, “Ride, Sally, Ride!” How Amy Johnson (Annie’s idol because the beautiful British pilot had looked so glamorous and been so daring) had taken the record for flying solo from England to Australia in a secondhand De Havilland Gipsy Moth that her father had helped her to purchase, even though back then girls were not supposed to fly planes.

Annie used her earnings from her weekend job at Now Voyager to pay for subscriptions to aviation magazines, which she scanned each month for stories about women pilots. Sometimes she wrote to these women, asking for their autographs. A retired female air-circus flyer, who’d done nine 360-degree loops in an old Cessna 150 to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, wrote her back, enclosing a poster from her flying circus days. The poster was still on the bedroom wall beside Annie’s treasured black and white signed photograph of Amy Johnson. Near them was a framed commemorative U.S. Post Office sheet that D. K. Destin had given her of the stamp for Bessie Coleman, the African American pilot who’d had to make her way from Texas to Paris in 1921 to get a license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale because they wouldn’t give her one in America.

“That’s right. Her own country treated Bessie like dog-doo on its shoe,” groused D. K., when handing Annie the framed stamps. “So Bessie got herself to France! The Froggies let that girl fly. ‘Ma chérie, over here you can fly your derrière off if you want to!’ That’s a French word, ‘civilization,’ don’t you forget it. You don’t gotta be a white boy to fly; hell, you don’t gotta be able to walk to be able to fly.”

Annie said, “I want to fly to France.”

“I bet you will one of these days. But you gotta get from one end of Emerald County to the other first. Finish that checkpoint list. Master, on. Radios, on. Mixture, rich.”

One gray morning on her sixteenth birthday, Annie piloted the Piper Warrior solo for the first time. It was scary without D. K. in the plane next to her, correcting, adjusting, without his tapered big fingers signaling her as if in an urgent language for the deaf. She’d felt shaky, first climbing into the plane alone, and she’d stepped back down onto the wing.

He hurried toward her in his wheelchair. “Get back in there! Don’t you prove me right! I’m a sexist child of my times, girl. So you show me a girl can do solo. Show me you can do it, Sugar Pie, because you can; you’re the best in the west, east, south, and you know it.”

Annie believed him because, scared as she was, she knew he was right. She climbed back into the plane and he waved her off.

It was D. K. who had replaced the engine in Jack Peregrine’s Piper Warrior and had driven it out of the Pilgrim’s Rest barn and flown it right up off the unmown field into the air with the girl, thrilled, beside him. Day after month after year, with the songs of R&B girl groups like the Shirelles and the Supremes blasting from a boom box beside them—“Baby, It’s You” and “Come See About Me” and his favorite, Betty Everett’s “It’s in His Kiss”—D. K. made her a flyer. He told her that in the cockpit of a plane, nothing mattered but how good you were.

When Annie’s pilot license arrived in the mail, she announced to Clark and Sam that they better sit down to hear her news. She planned to go to Annapolis and wanted their help to get there. She wanted a career in the Navy.

Clark not only sat down, he looked as if it might be hard for him to get back up.

“I guess we can’t fight destiny,” Sam said.

“It’s not destiny, it’s Destin,” growled Clark. “It’s that damn D. K. Destin.”

Sam advised him, “Don’t blame D. K.”

That night on the porch, waiting for Annie to return from a party, they argued some more.

“You know what? I blame you, Sam! You’ve been behind this from the get-go! Secretly egging her on.”

“It wasn’t all that secret.” Sam smiled, pride in the corners of her mouth. “D. K. says Annie’s a natural.”

Clark slapped his hand on the porch rail. “He says he’s a natural too! You want Annie pushing herself up River Hill in a damn wheelchair for the rest of her life?”

“That was in Vietnam. We’re not in Vietnam, we’re in North Carolina.”

“We could be in a lot of places where Annie could get herself killed.”

“Why did you say that? I’m already worried. Where is she, why aren’t she and Georgette home? It’s after eleven.”

Clark showed her his watch. “It’s ten after eleven. Take it easy.” It was in this back and forth way that they calmed each other.

When the catalogue arrived from the Naval Academy (the Navy was the first branch of the armed services willing to train women pilots), it started the worst fight of the family’s life together. Clark accused D. K. and Sam of collusion in supporting Annie’s desire to go to Annapolis. “It’s all his macho Mach and fixing up damn Jack Peregrine’s damn Piper Warrior. And it’s you, Sam, with your ‘women can do anything,’ even stupid things like drop bombs for the U.S. Navy.”

“Nobody said I was going to drop any bombs,” Annie shouted. “What is it with you two and bombs?”

“Right,” Clark threw open his arms. “I’m sorry, those Tomcats aren’t carrying missiles. My mistake.” He swung an arm in outstretched irony, knocked over the salt and pepper shakers on the table, quickly sprinkled salt over his shoulder. “Have a life, have children—”

Annie yelled at her uncle. “You don’t have children! This is because I’m a girl! You think a girl can’t be a fighter pilot?”

Sam agreed. “You’re a Republican and a sexist pig, Clark Goode.”

To their shock, Clark, leaped to his feet, shouting. “I’m a Republican and I think a girl ought to have more sense! And D. K. should have more sense! And Sam, the Great Liberal, you should have more sense. But I’m a sexist pig because Annie wants to go learn how to fire Sidewinder missiles on poor bastards on the other side of the fuckin’ world?”

His outburst, indeed the length of his sentence, left Sam and Annie slack-jawed and produced an agitated growl even from Teddy. “Take it easy,” Sam advised.

“Excuse me. I was eighteen years old in Nha Trang and my friend’s head was blown off and hit me in the fucking chest. And I’m a sexist pig? Why do you want Annie fighting some idiotic war for fat rich bald men to make money blowing up other countries and then make more money selling them reconstruction?”

Sam handed him a baby aspirin from her pocket. “Take this before you have a heart attack! For God’s sake, Clark, it’s 1993. There are no wars anymore! The Navy’s a career for Annie, not an invasion.”

“Oh, fine! Then there’s no problem!”

Clark slammed out of the house in a temper so uncustomary for him that the aunt and niece looked at each other stunned. He didn’t come home till late that night and strode past them straight to his room.

But the next morning he was back in the kitchen, slowly making coffee as usual. He raised his mug when they sat down to breakfast. He said, “I guess the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” He took Annie’s hand. “You want to join the Navy?”

The young woman squeezed his hand affectionately. “You joined the Army. You thought it was right to go to Vietnam.”

He moved his hands away to his glasses, took them off, put them back on. “I was wrong, Annie. There was nothing right about it. Nothing.”

She noticed his hands were old, freckled. “Yes. I want to fly jets. D. K. says I’m really good.”

“Of course you are.” He kissed her hands, one, then the other, pressing them together. “It’s just…” He sighed. “You want to fly, fine. Fly tourists to Heathrow, fly college kids to Cancun.”

She pulled away. “I want a chance to do something special and the Navy’s my chance. Sam! Tell him it’s my life.”

Clark folded his napkin. “I know it’s your life. That’s my point.” He left the kitchen.

Sam called an old friend, a state senator, about Annie’s applying to Annapolis. The senator arranged a nominating letter. Jack Peregrine’s daughter became the flyer that she had always assumed her father had never become himself, just as she’d assumed he’d never swum around Manhattan, or won a Silver Star, or beaten Minnesota Fats at nine-ball, or almost sold her to gangsters for $25,000 dollars, or studied with Einstein—unless he’d misheard Einstein’s theory of relativity and thought E=mc2 meant that nothing could ever be true.

***

At Destin Airworks on the outskirts of Emerald, Sam, Clark, and D. K. huddled under the overhang. The wind suddenly swung back like a boomerang, bringing rain again, blowing the black eagle banner sideways above the hangar. Annie untied the lines from the wings of the Piper Warrior. The plane was old but—as D. K. said—“If you keep your parts oiled, old can be better than new.”

D. K. was much grayer than when he’d first begun to teach his prize pupil; his tight cornrow braids, even his once sable-brown skin, had grayed. And his torso had so fattened from decades of being confined to his wheelchair that he wore nothing but black pajamas all year like, he said, “the fuckin’ Viet Cong.”

Now that Clark and Sam had seen the latest air traffic weather readout, they were urgently trying to stop Annie from leaving for St. Louis until morning.

“I continue to blame the two of you for this whole thing,” Clark told Sam and D. K. “If it wasn’t for you two, she wouldn’t know how to fly a plane.”

Sam said, “Oh shut up, Clark. If it wasn’t for the two of us, you’d have her still riding a tricycle.”

“That’s a real slow way to St. Louis,” laughed D. K.

Annie called from under the plane. “Just keep talking among yourselves if it makes you feel any better.”

“Fine,” sighed Sam. “If you’re flying…fly.”

Chapter 18

Flight

Lifting himself in his wheelchair to ease his back, the crippled vet said maybe it was just as well that his legs were numb because everything else had started to hurt. “Getting old sure isn’t for sissies.”

Staring glumly at the weather radar on D. K.’s small screen, Clark mumbled, “Isn’t getting old what we want Annie to do?”

D. K. admitted that Annie’s insistence on taking her small plane up in this rain, when no commercial planes were flying, was “Mustang but shaky.”

“‘Mustang’ meaning foolish bravado?” asked Clark.

D. K. stroked his grizzled cornrows. “There’s a lot of bravado rusted in gook at the bottom of the China Sea. Bad day, you get hosed, you deep-six fifty million bucks worth of A-6E without a cloud in the sky, so what the fuck, who knows?”

Clark looked dubiously at the black whirling clouds. “I hope you do. Exactly how dangerous is it?”

“Don’t ask me, Clark. Dina fell down four little steps and she was dead the next morning. I knew this old guy, flew in the 303rd, Hell’s Angels, out of England, 364 combat missions by 1945. Not a scratch on him.” D. K. shrugged, shoving his wheelchair over to the Piper Warrior and calling under the wing. “You done under there? You check it all again?”

“Done.” Annie crawled out from where swirling script still faintly spelled King of the Sky. She wiped her hands on an old towel and handed the vet her checklist. Then she took her uncle aside. “Clark, you want to know something, don’t ask D. K., ask me.”

“You’ll just say you can do it.”

“’Cause that’s the answer. The answer is, I landed a fifty-two-thousand pound Super Hornet fighter jet in force-three winds on the deck of the USS Eisenhower when it was rolling in twenty-foot swells. That’s the answer.”

“Annie’s got the stuff,” D. K. called over agreeably.

“Excuse me.” Clark pointed at the wheelchair. “You had the stuff, according to you, D. K.”

D. K. winked at his star pupil. “In St. Louis, whatcha wanna bet, they won’t be firing rockets at her.”

Sam patted Clark’s arm ironically. “‘We’ve got that going for us.’ But, D. K., is the King of the Sky mechanically sound for a long trip?”

Annie made a comic choking noise. “Sam, you’re a woman who’s owned—just in the twenty years I’ve known you—a Gremlin, a Pinto, and a Yugo, and you’re asking about good mechanics? Ha!”

“It is what it is.” D. K. spun away in his wheelchair, calling to Sam to help him throw on the runway lights. “Go, Annie P. Goode!” he yelled over his shoulder.

Clark masked his distress by giving Annie a wry hug. “If this is good-bye, can I have your Porsche?”

“No. It goes to Georgette. What do you need a Porsche with a souped-up eight for? You never go over forty.” Annie tossed the duffel bag into the plane along with the tote bag of food Sam had packed for her. “You okay, Clark?”

“I baked you a cake. You know how long it takes to squirt icing for ‘Happy Birthday, Annie’ out of a soggy paper cone? Too long. That’s why your cake says ‘Happy B’d’y, A.’ I figured, know what? She’ll think Brad made it.”

“You baked a cake for me?”

“I’m freezing it. So come back.”

She straightened her uncle’s glasses; one stem was taped. “Okay.”

He held up the Maltese. “Say goodnight and good luck, Malpy.”

Lightning lit the distant sky and thunder echoed along the tin roof of Destin Airworks. Jumping out of Clark’s arms, the dog raced off into the darkness.

Sam was wet through by the time she ran back into the hangar. “Annie, I changed my mind. Let’s do call the St. Louis cops. You’re right. Let the police find Jack! You stay out of it.”

Annie retied her shoes. “No, you were right. If we try to bring in the police, he’ll either disappear or shut down. If he’s got something to tell me about my mother, now’s when he’ll do it.”

Sam frowned. “Remember, you can’t believe everything he says.”

“Don’t warn me. I’m the one who lived with him. I’m the one he almost took twenty-five thousand dollars for.”

Sam sighed. “Oh, he just saw that in some old movie.” She patted Jack’s leather jacket, which Annie was now wearing. “What I mean is, you may not find out what you want about your mother.”

Annie kissed Sam’s cheek. “Then I won’t. Stop worrying.”

“When I’m dead, I’ll stop worrying.” Sam looked out at the rain. “So tell Jack from me: Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Like die?”

“Like die; don’t do anything stupid like that.” She tapped Annie’s nose and stepped away from her. “Either one of you.”

“I promise.” Annie climbed up onto the wing.

Lights on the runway glimmered in the hard rain. Clark stepped back to the little television screen to watch the red splotch on the Doppler moving toward them.

While Clark was looking at the weather report, Annie waved at Sam and climbed briskly into the cockpit. Sam watched the propeller turn over, catch, and the little plane head out onto the tarmac.

D. K. Destin’s growling voice crackled into Annie’s headphones when she reached the end of the ramp. “Tower One to King of the Sky. You got that big maple to clear. You see it?”

“Roger.”

“You always cut it too close, Annie. And it’s bigger’n it used to be. Wind gusting to 22 knots. Go ahead.”

“D. K., you don’t have a Tower One. You’re sitting in a pickup truck and you always say Tower One. Like there’s a Tower Two?”

“You crack me up, baby. Go ahead.”

She turned the nose of the rattling Warrior into the wind, pushed the throttle forward, squeezed her fingers around the plane’s yoke and headed it bucking in protest down the runway. “Don’t call me baby, you sexist child of your times. Departing runway 27.”

“Wind fifteen…eighteen, nineteen. Too much wind. Roger that? Taxi back? Taxi back. Roger that?”

“Negative. I’m good to go. Thank you. Go ahead.” The windsock flapped frenziedly. Annie had a breathtaking sensation—a kick of the heart—that she was making a stupid mistake and couldn’t even say why. She peered out across the airfield. There they stood, under the light, Sam and Clark, huddled in the hangar doorway, wet through, waving to her. Above them fluttered D. K.’s huge tattered banner with its hand-stitched black eagle flapping wildly as if fighting hard not to fall from the sky. She waved back at her aunt and uncle, although she knew they could barely see the plane, much less her face inside it.

The radio spluttered. “You listening to me, Annie? Go ahead.”

“Roger. Departing VFR westbound. Over.”

Why in God’s name had she insisted on going to St. Louis in the King of the Sky? Even if Rafael Rook (whoever he was) was right that Jack Peregrine was dying and that seeing Annie was his dying wish, why should Jack Peregrine get his dying wish? Clark and Sam, far more deserving, had had many wishes that had never come true. Why should she respond to a request for help, or unearned forgiveness, or whatever he wanted this plane for? Why, against all reason, including her own (she knew far better than Clark and Sam the danger in the sky tonight), had she felt (as undeniably as she felt hunger or cold) that whatever it took so she could have this talk with her father, she would do it? That if it took her flying a rattling thirty-one-year-old Piper Warrior into a storm that had caused the cancellation of all commercial flights, she could fly it. She would just head west-northwest, 290 degrees, and slip around the weather system, and fly herself to St. Louis. She would do it because, as the odd Rafael Rook had predicted, she could not take it or leave it.

D. K.’s voice rumbled. “Wind sixteen. Down to fourteen, ten. Okay, Annie, ain’t no mountain high enough. Go!”

Halfway down the runway, she eased slightly off the throttle, pressed her face against the dirty window, her eye on the windsock under the light on the hangar roof.

“Baby, what the fuck you doing? Left rudder, full throttle, full throttle.”

“D. K.! Stop mothering me!”

She watched the sock flick backwards, fall, quickly fill again, unfurling full and straight, pointing away. Oddly she suddenly remembered a rainy night, when she’d sat next to her father at the steering wheel of his red Mustang in the predawn quiet of some big city intersection. There was a soft rain so shiny black on the streets that they’d lost their boundaries; buildings shimmered in black pools broken by splashes of traffic. There was a fat man in the backseat of the car. Her father was betting this man that he could drive thirty blocks hitting green lights without ever having to stop for a red one.

In the Warrior now, all these years later, it was as if she could feel her father’s leaning over her, rubbing his face softly in her hair and whispering, “Darlin’, the readiness is all.” The car jumped forward. She could hear her laugh joining his as block after rainy block flew by, green, and green, and green.

Annie went fast to full throttle. Lightning pulsed in the clouds, silhouetting the wall of trees. She let the wind take the plane as if a giant had lifted it in the palm of a hand and moved her over the treetops. With a tip of one bright wing shaking leaves from the tallest maple, she left home behind her.

D. K. Destin’s voice crackled in her ears. “Mustang Annie, who do you owe?”

“Baby, it’s you…” Annie saw a far-off jet approaching from the southeast. “Hey, you got something coming in. Private jet? Over.”

“Fuck, yeah! Hot spot tonight. Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide, go ahead.”

“Love you, D. K., over and out.”

Chapter 19

Honor among Lovers

Shortly after the little Warrior soared away, a huge roaring noise suddenly shook the hangar at Destin Airworks and a white jet landed and taxied back to not far from where Sam and Clark were still standing beneath the overhang. The jet’s bold insignia Hopper Inc. glistened in the big yellow arc light. Brad Hopper leaped out of the cockpit in a crouch, tenting a briefcase over his head against the rain.

He ran up to Sam and Clark, said “Aw, shit!” and cupped his hands to look out at the black sky. “Was that Annie? Did she just fly out of here?”

Clark yelled above the noise of the still-humming jet. “I swear, we really postponed the birthday party. We’re not having it without you.”

“We told you it was canceled, Brad!” Sam hugged him.

The handsome young man ignored Clark as he hugged Sam back. “Hi, Sam. Was that Annie?”

“Brad! Jesus, I can’t believe you’re here! She took off five minutes ago. She’s flying the King of the Sky to St. Louis.”

“In this storm?! I figured D. K. wouldn’t let her go till morning.” From his raincoat pocket Brad pulled out a small velvet jewelry box with a black silk bow. It was as hip as his stylish black jacket and square-toed shoes. “I had everything planned. I was going to propose.” He stared at the ring box, perplexed, as if it had tricked him.

“You don’t need to propose. You’re married to her,” Clark reminded him grouchily.

Sam stepped between them. “She needs help. Go to St. Louis, Brad. If you miss her at the airport, try the Royal Coach Motel.” She touched his face. “You’ve got a mustache. That’s new.”

“Yeah. You like it?” Brad touched his fingers to the trim black mustache.

“It looks good.”

Clark rapped her shoulder. “Sam!”

Brad stared at one, then the other, uncertain.

She shoved him. “Go, go on. ‘Just raise your hand up, Chief.’”

Not sure what she meant by the “Chief” remark, Brad nonetheless felt moved to kiss Sam. “Where’s that wankhead D. K.?”

Clark pointed to the lights of D. K.’s “office,” a trailer nearer the runway. Brad ran off through the rain in that direction.

“You’re crazy,” Clark told Sam. “Why are you encouraging him? Don’t encourage him.”

“Oh Clark, she’s got to marry somebody. She wants to have a baby.”

“Says you. Besides, that’s no reason to marry the same somebody twice. How many times does she have to be Mrs. Hopper Two? Or t-o-o? Two times?”

“Funny.” Sam found a pack of Destin’s unfiltered cigarettes on a shelf crowded with engine parts. She shook one out. “You’re probably right.”

Clark stared at her. “What the hell are you doing, smoking?! What about your vow to give it up if Jimmy Carter won?”

Sam inhaled with satisfaction. “Yeah, well, the right wing outfoxed me and Jimmy both. Jimmy and Rosalynn are taping up Sheetrock in Uganda these days and neocons are running the country.”

“Maybe so, but they’re only smoking the occasional Cuban cigar, even though of course they despise Cuba as an enemy of the freedom to hang out in Mafia night spots where big shots used to be able to have a little fun.”

“You’re getting cynical, Clark.”

“No, I’m not. I love my country.”

“And don’t think I don’t know you’ve been sneaking cigarettes for years.”

They stood for a while, watching Brad’s silhouette gesticulate behind the dirty window of D. K.’s small trailer. Finally Sam asked, “Do you believe Jack was actually in prison in Cuba?”

“It’s entirely possible.” Clark grabbed at the cigarette but the athletic Sam spun easily away from him and sucked in a long drag before grinding it out.

After calling for Malpy, they decided to wait there for the Maltese to return from whatever exploration he was on. They stared together into the night, Clark leaning against a doorpost, Sam leaning on him.

Sam sighed from time to time.

Clark said, “Annie’s too smart for Brad.”

Sam sighed again. “Smart? Love’s not smart. Hey, I’m not stupid and I opened a joint bank account with a woman who ran off with my life savings to Belize, and it was her investment manager at the bank that she ran off with. The bitches.”

“Sam, there’s no honor among thieves.”

“I guess they were really in love.”

“Will you stop defending Jill?”

“I want Annie to be happy.” Sam looked sadly at car taillights in the dark, hurrying away from her. “That’s all I want.”

Clark laughed, shaking his head. “Jeez, our generation. Annie’s right. We still believe it all—true love, true grit, New Deal, huddled masses, anything your heart desires. We still think if you want something, you can have it.”

“‘Keep hope alive,’ Clark.”

“Were you happy? Why should Annie be happy?”

Sam said, “Because in America things are supposed to get better.”

Chapter 20

Wing and a Prayer

The little plane was shaking. Her fingers doing a drumbeat on her instrument panel, Annie cheered as she climbed through the turbulence. To her surprise, a single sharp bark echoed her. She shouted again. There was another unmistakable yelp.

“Malpy?!”

Annie twisted around to see the opened tote bag in the tail of the aircraft. Out of it scooted the Maltese.

“Oh, great! Malpy! How’d you get in here?”

The little dog crawled toward her, flopping from side to side and made it finally into her lap, where he snuggled his head against her stomach, lifting his chin with a whimper. “Okay. Shh shh shh,” she told him.

The plane shuddered with a buck and Malpy yipped in a plaintive fret.

“We’re fine! Why, Claudette Colbert could do this, right?”

She radioed D. K., asking him to tell Clark and Sam that Malpy was in the plane with her, that she’d set her course for Elizabethtown, Kentucky (her refueling destination) and that she would call air traffic there with her ETA. “So, whose private jet was that?” she asked.

“That was Mr. Brad Hopper Jets, that guy I never liked and told you not to marry? New VLJ Mustang.”

“What? Brad?”

“How many husbands you got?”

“None,” Annie said. “I don’t have any husbands. I’m getting a divorce. Over.”

“Roger that.” D. K. growled, “Man just slammed into my office, madder’n Charlie at My Lai, ’cause you’d left. He even know you’re divorcing him? Over.”

“Don’t tell him where I’m headed…It’s rough up here, D. K. Go ahead.”

“You can do it, baby. Feel the wind and ride it. Wing and a prayer. You can do it. Roger that...Over.”

“Go ahead…D. K.? I can’t hear you. Come in.”

“Annie? Come on in, Annie…”

“D. K., go ahead.”

All D. K. heard was static.

***

Back on the ground at Destin Airworks, Clark put his wet arm around Sam’s shivering back. “Malpy must have sneaked in the damn plane again.”

“It was the chicken korma. I packed some with the coffee. She’ll call us. She’ll be fine…Clark, this is where you say, ‘She’ll be fine.’”

They walked out of the hangar into the rain.

Sam clutched his arm. “I don’t even know if I want her to find Jack. Could be he’ll just hurt her.”

In his slow soft drawl, Clark tried to offer comfort. “If Jack loves anybody, he loves her.”

Sam pointed out that terrible things were done out of love and that love was no excuse for them.

“Let’s go get that cake out of the freezer,” Clark suggested.

Just as they were getting into the Volvo, D. K.’s truck squealed to a stop beside them. “Annie’s got your dog with her,” he yelled from his window.

“We figured.”

D. K. yelled out the window again. “That was her cheatin’ husband Hopper in the VLJ.”

“We saw him,” Clark said.

Sam rose to the young man’s defense. “Brad flew up to propose to Annie. He really wants to patch things up.”

“Too bad he dropped a nuke on their marriage bed,” D. K. shouted.

“He’s following her to St. Louis,” Sam yelled.

D. K. laughed. “Yeah?”

Clark asked mildly what “Yeah?” meant.

“Means I don’t give him any fuckin’ fuel till I fix my fuckin’ radio. I’m hearing nothing but duck-quack on it. It’s going to take ’least two hours, maybe three, for me to fix that radio. Brad can chill.”

Sam jumped out of the Volvo to run to D. K.’s truck window. “Here, I forgot. Take this sushi and chicken korma.” She handed him a large plastic bag. “And you and Clark have never been fair to Brad.”

“Love don’t come easy,” D. K. predicted, gunning his motor with his special hand-levers. “You know that, Sammy. Didn’t your girlfriend leave you and run off to Cancun?”

“Belize! Jill went to Belize.”

“Wherever.” He thanked her for the food, popped his clutch, and was gone.

As Clark drove carefully away from the airport, his pager beeped. It took Sam a while to find his cell phone and call the number back.

“My name is Dan Hart,” said a pleasant voice. “I’m trying to reach an Anne Peregrine Goode. She’s not answering her cell. Is she available? Or a Dr. Clark Goode?”

“Clark’s right here. When you call our house, he gets the page.”

“Is Annie there?” the man asked.

“No. I’m her aunt. Are you a friend of Annie’s?”

“I gotta tell you, I love the way she laughs. She’s funny as hell.”

“Annie?” Sam was confused. “Funny?”

“Will she be back home soon?”

“Sorry?” Sam was more confused. “You mean, in Maryland?”

“Aren’t I reaching you in Emerald, North Carolina?”

Sam said they had just this minute left Annie at Destin Airworks. “She’s taking off for St. Louis to see her father.”

Hart’s attitude changed. “Give me her flight number. Where’s Destin Airworks?”

“It’s her own plane.” Sam caught her breath. “Oh, wait, wait a minute, Hart. Sergeant Hart. You’re the Miami police detective!”

“Yeah, I just flew in here. Can you confirm her father’s in St. Louis?” His tone was challenging.

Clark whispered at Sam, “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

She waved the phone at Clark to be quiet. “Listen, Sergeant Hart. What kind of fraud are you accusing Jack of? Does he have a lawyer? If he doesn’t, I want to find one for him.”

“You ask a lot of questions, ma’am.”

“So do you, Sergeant.”

He laughed but cut it off. “If you talk to your niece, have her phone me at Miami Police, Vice and Fraud.”

“She knows nothing about any fraud. She’s just trying to get Jack medical help. My brother’s very ill.”

Hart took on an even more official briskness. “Then the best thing his family can do is assist the law in finding him. Have her phone me. Nice to speak to you, Mrs. Goode.”

“My brother is not a criminal and my name’s Peregrine. Sam Peregrine.”

The pleasant voice returned. “Ah, Sam, like Grace Kelly, Tracy Samantha Lord.”

“What?”

“High Society. Philadelphia Story.”

Sam gripped the phone. “You like old movies?”

“Love ’em.”

“Wait a minute. How old are you, Mr. Hart?”

“Twenty-six.”

“That’s a good age. Don’t waste it.”

“‘Stuff that dreams are made of.’” He hung up.

Sam recounted the conversation. “If I’d known he was a cop, I wouldn’t have told him about St. Louis.”

“Sam, you’d tell Goldfinger where you kept Agamemnon’s mask.” Clark dimmed his lights at a fast-approaching car.

“That young man knew his movies,” murmured Sam.

The speeding car whooshed past them in the opposite direction, headed toward Destin Airworks so fast that Clark felt the pull of the wind tunnel buffeting the Volvo. The fast-moving car swerved onto the exit ramp to the airfield and slammed to a stop beside Destin’s “business office” in front of which sat D. K.’s pickup truck, decorated with caustic bumper stickers about the government and with a big medallion of his trademark black eagle spread across the hood.

A young man jumped out of the car, ran through the rain, and exploded into the office. He was a good-looking young man, tawny-haired, wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt. “Excuse me, sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Lt. Annie Goode,” he said with a friendly smile. He began stretching his legs as if they’d been cramped.

D. K. Destin sat perched in his wheelchair, smacking the side of a transmitter radio in the expectation that repeated blows would solve the problem. He yelled at the young man, “Who are you?” as he rolled out from behind the desk.

“My name’s Dan Hart.” The tawny-haired man spoke affably. “Her aunt just told me she was here at the airfield. Is that her jet there on the runway?”

D. K. shook his cornrows, bemused. “No. It’s her husband’s. She’s divorcing him. Thank the fuck God.”

Hart pulled out an old photo of a handsome man seated in an elegant restaurant banquette with a little girl of six or seven. “That’s Annie, right?” D. K. took the picture and laughed at it. “I mean I know she’s a lot older now.”

“Try twenty years,” advised D. K. “But that’s her. Where’d you get this?”

“It’s got her phone number on it. She still got that smile?”

“What’s it to you?” asked the grouchy vet in the wheelchair.

“I need to talk to her. Are you the Destin of Destin Airworks?” Hart held out his hand to shake.

“Damn right.” D. K. studied the young man for a moment. “What do you want Annie for? ’Cause it’s not just to shoot the breeze.”

Hart met D. K.’s stare. “I’m with the Miami Police Department. I’ve got a warrant on Jack Peregrine. I was just told she was flying out of your place to go get him in St. Louis. She may think she’s helping her dad. But this is more complicated than she knows and she could get hurt. I mean bad hurt.”

D. K. thought this information over and made a snap judgment—as was his nature. “She left fifteen minutes ago. Took off in her Warrior.” He pointed out the office door at the runway. “The guy who owns the jet’s in the john. Her soon-to-be ex, I hope to Jesus, Brad Hopper.” D. K. pointed at the toilet door. “He’s going to St. Lou to get her back. He’ll make it in half her time and be there waiting for her. She’s just trying to get her fuckup of a dad into a hospital, so he can die there, I guess.”

Hart asked quickly, “Is there some way you can get me a ride on this guy’s jet but not tell him I’m a cop looking for Annie? I swear to God, I’m really trying to help her. Jack Peregrine’s got some major-league crooks after him, and he’s got the U.S. fucking government after him, which as we all know…”—he gestured at the political stickers on D. K.’s wheelchair—“…makes organized crime look like babies in a playpen.”

D. K. stared at the detective a moment. Then abruptly he spun his wheelchair toward the restroom door just as Brad was slamming out of it. The crippled pilot looked at Brad and then at Daniel Hart. He made another of his snap judgments. He growled, “Dan, this is Brad Hopper. That’s his jet. Brad, Dan’s a friend of mine, local businessman, needs a quick ride to St. Louis. He paid me two-hundred bucks and I’ll give it to you.” (Dan looked at him alarmed.) “That’s all he’s got. It’s about a woman he’s in love with. Ain’t it always? Give him a lift and you’re cleared for takeoff.”

Brad made a derisive noise. “I get it. Your radio’s working fine. You just been holding me up so I could give a lift to your lovesick bud here.”

D. K. nodded cheerfully. “We’re all standing in the shadows of love, Brad, don’t you know that?” He wheeled himself backward to his desk and opened a metal cashbox, from which he took two hundred-dollar bills. “Better use Runway Two-Seven. Only one we got.”

When Brad took the money, D. K. made sure their fingers didn’t touch.

“Thanks for the loan. I’ll pay you back,” Dan told D. K. after Brad had left the room.

“That guy loves money.” The cranky vet had never forgiven Brad for breaking Annie’s heart. “I lost my legs and that was nothing compared to losing Dina. My wife. Money don’t mean shit and only shits don’t know that.”

Chapter 21

Imitation of Life

On the slow drive home to Pilgrim’s Rest, Clark and Sam talked as they always did, slowly, easily. They talked about Annie’s risky flight—it distressed them—and about Brad’s reconciliation prospects, which Clark considered nil.

They speculated about what Jack really wanted from Annie, and why he wanted it. Was he trying to cut some deal with the law to reduce a sentence, or with criminals to stop them from beating him to death for unpaid debts? What was he trading—the plane, the emerald?

“That was a very real emerald in his jacket,” Sam mused. “That emerald was big enough to be in the Smithsonian.”

“Oh, Sam, come on.”

“Clark, you don’t know your jewelry. Remember the summer Jack showed up like North by Northwest, right after Annie graduated, when the highway patrol almost got him, that little ruby he gave me for Annie; it’s worth thousands now. You know what? Maybe Kim was never crazy. Maybe there were Peregrine jewels buried at Pilgrim’s Rest.”

Clark snorted his skepticism. “Sam, you’ll believe anything. That ruby came out of a bucket at some ruby farm in the Smokies. And if that emerald’s real, then Jack stole it. Maybe he stole it from the Smithsonian.”

Sam nudged him impatiently. “Just listen. Say Kim was right and there was a stash of precious stones. What if Jack found them? He always said he was going to be a millionaire.”

Clark drove slowly, approaching the turnoff for River Hill Road. “You just listen! One, practically all that Peregrine land is gone. You sold it. That land is now sitting under a hundred acres of sweet potatoes and Christmas trees.”

“That doesn’t mean there’re not gems buried in it.”

“Two, you’d never find them. A hundred acres of clay and muddy river? You couldn’t even find your motorcycle when it flew out from under Annie and crashed down in that gully and she broke her collarbone, so you’re not going to find a couple of little rubies and emeralds.”

Sam frowned at the memory. “What an awful day. Thank God you were there to get her to the hospital.”

Clark carefully turned onto the gravel road at the top of the hill. “This St. Louis thing is not about real emeralds. It’s a wild goose chase. Jack’s up to some scam, whether he’s working with the law or against it, and he needs Annie to pull it off. She’ll figure that out and she’ll come home.”

“I hope so,” said Sam sadly, sinking back into her seat. She was quiet for a while, looking out at the black Aquene River hurrying along below them.

Clark reached over for her hand. “I know why you want those Peregrine jewels to be real.”

She smiled wanly. “How about, ‘It was a toss-up whether I go in for diamonds or sing in the choir. The choir lost’?”

“Don’t give me Mae West.” He squeezed her hand. “It’s about Jack. It’s about hoping that if your little brother’s after some real jewels, then he isn’t dying. Am I right?”

Sam hugged herself. “Possible.”

Clark clicked the turn signal before the gates of Pilgrim’s Rest, although there was no one else anywhere behind them. “And Jack’s not dying. You’ll see. It’s a big con.”

Sam kept running her fingers along the ridge of an old scar on her forearm, “What I remember most is how he was always trying to make me laugh. He’d jump up and down on my bed and make faces. ‘Come on, Sam, don’t cry, don’t cry.’”

Clark nodded. “I know.”

She stared out the car window at the flat, empty night. “It took a lot to get Jack down. But that goddamn closet, that’s what got to him. Otherwise he could blow off even the tough stuff. Poof, like a dandelion. Dad would take away his allowance, his dinner, Jack would laugh. Dad would lock him in his room, Jack would sneak out the window and crawl along the roof into my room and we’d splice into the TV antenna and watch late night movies together. He would stick his face in front of the screen and act like a hyped-up announcer: ‘Get more out of life, go to the movies!’”

Pulling into the driveway to the house, Clark gave Sam’s hand another slow pat. “You and your movies.”

Sam said she was not to be teased out of her faith that movies showed people how to live their lives with a great score and the boring parts cut out. In movies you could be braver and luckier than in your real life. And better looking. Sam herself, who had watched a movie a day since her adolescence, suspected that without their comfort she might have taken to drink, or worse. Given their Peregrine genes, Sam sighed, Jack and she had really needed Hollywood.

It was true that despite their blessings, the Peregrines had always been a sad family. Most of them were American enough to believe they had a right not to be sad, an inalienable right not only to the pursuit of happiness, but to its capture. So, while a few had skidded down the shale of life without digging in their heels, most Peregrines had died scrabbling at every outcropping they passed along the way—a new job, a new marriage, a drink or a sport or a church or a chance—determined to grab the American dream before they landed at the bottom. Wasn’t it the national story that failure was the fault of those who failed? That if people only got themselves to the right place at the right time, they could find a fortune in emeralds and rubies? That not believing the dream was not to believe in their country?

So for hundreds of years the Peregrine family had lived unhappily on a hundred-plus acres of rich farm land (their slaves did the farming) that had once been the home of the Algonquin ancestors of D. K. Destin, who was always saying that the Peregrines should give the “native As” their land back.

Sam was the first Peregrine to sell off any of the family land. She sold all but ten acres and used the profits to build Clark’s pediatric clinic at Emerald Hospital.

“Best thing I ever did,” she always told the town, who found it hard to believe it could be a happy thing to give away over $3 million worth of land to a hospital and to try instead to rent out movies for a living.

But Sam was absolutely sincere. “That land was cursed,” she told the town. “And now the curse is lifted.”

It was true that war and weather, bad luck and their own dissatisfactions had plagued her family since 1795 when the first Peregrine house washed away in a flood. They’d built another one on the hill above the fast red river that the Algonquins had named Aquene, which meant “Peace”—not that Algonquins had gotten much peace after the first pockmarked Europeans showed up in their yard.

A third Peregrine home rose out of the rubble of the second. Nestled just below the hill’s crest, it was a large two-story white frame house with eight chimneys and a wide, columned porch and two copper-roofed wings that had their own small porches in back. This house was named Pilgrim’s Rest. But it was never very restful. During the Civil War, Federal troops had commandeered it and the family had been forced to move to a boarding house; a few had even hid in a makeshift tent in the woods and sneaked over at night to steal their own chickens. During Reconstruction, they’d moved back to the house and for the next seventy-five years felt sorry for themselves because they were no longer well-to-do.

They were not well-to-do, that is, until 1899. That’s when Joseph Peregrine returned from the Spanish-American War, via the Philippines. He returned a hero. A Spanish rifleman in Cuba had shot out his right eye and he had the patch and the medal to prove it. Joseph was a flashy man; he renamed the town “Emerald” and wore an emerald ring as large as a marble and was called “Boss” and opened a bank and ran it like he was J. P. Morgan. When he lavishly refurbished the dilapidated Pilgrim’s Rest, gilding its cracked molding with gold leaf and replacing its pine with mahogany and marble, rumors started to spread about where he’d gotten all his money. The rumors turned to buried treasure when his wife began displaying at their annual New Year’s party rubies the size of quail’s eggs on her locally famous bosom. The prevalent theory was that Boss, on his way home from war, had gone prospecting in the Blue Ridge Mountains, that he had squinted over flume lines, sluicing rubies and emeralds out of the dirty water. The town speculated that he had stashed away hundreds of these precious stones somewhere on his property; that whenever he needed money, he sold one of them; that he had so many gems he could never run out; that his neighbors the Nickersons knew all of this for a fact, Mrs. Peregrine having told them that the Boss refused to reveal even to her where he’d hidden the jewels.

When Boss Peregrine died suddenly in front of his own bank—with the one eye, he hadn’t noticed a farmer, enraged about a foreclosure, approaching to stab him in the back of the neck—any secret about his treasure died with him. Despite his written wish, Boss’s widow didn’t bury him with his emerald ring, but wore it herself, along with the ruby necklace, to his funeral. At the service, the St. Mark’s minister asked the congregation to meditate on the word “Peregrine,” a word carved in the newel post in the marble entryway to Pilgrim’s Rest. Above the name was a peregrine hawk, wings wide, with Boss’s personal motto in its beak: Peregrinus ego sum. The minister said the phrase came from a play by Plautus and meant, “I am a pilgrim,” although it also meant, “I am a Peregrine.” “Peregrine” was why, the minister mistakenly explained, the house had been named “Pilgrim’s Rest.” Boss Peregrine was on a journey to heaven, where, if it was God’s will, he’d soon be enjoying a pilgrim’s rest for all eternity.

Privately, the minister thought Boss Peregrine had no chance at even a stopover in heaven and that he would have done better to buy a new organ for a Christian church than to carve puns in Latin on his grandiose staircase and give his son a silver baby tub with his name engraved on it—a Greek name, Ulysses, the name of that Yankee general who had been elected president of the United States when the people of Emerald hadn’t wanted the states to be united at all. The War had happened a long time ago, but not long enough for Rev. Maddocks, who hadn’t appreciated Boss’s telling him not only to get over the Confederacy but to shake hands with the future by joining the Republican Party. The reverend also blamed Boss for the disruption in the cemetery at the funeral, when a “family Negress” jumped weeping into the open grave, with every appearance of intimate grief, for reasons no one wanted to admit they understood.

Boss’s obituary called him “the quintessential American,” which was true enough: there was no edge of the earth he wouldn’t push his way into—even as far away as Cuba and the Philippines. For him the frontier was always filled with desirable things that somebody else was going to grab first if he didn’t get a move on. But wherever Boss’s wealth had come from, it hadn’t made him happy. Only his mistress had given him any joy—despite which fact it had never occurred to him that he loved her. Nor had his wealth protected him from getting stabbed to death in the street.

So Boss was laid to rest with other dissatisfied Peregrines under a heavy gravestone in the Emerald cemetery where the mistress famously flung herself at the coffin and then into the grave and then moved penniless to “Darktown,” where she married a Native American tobacco farmer named Destin.

From his grave, Boss, if he could watch anything, watched his son lose the family bank and his grandson—Sam and Jack’s father—lose his two-year-old son in a pool accident and then years later drown himself, so mysteriously that people in Emerald were still talking about it thirty years later.

The Peregrine graves in St. Mark’s, ponderous gray granite blocks, begged their occupants to Rest In Peace, but, as Sam lamented, her family had never been able to get any grasp on peace at all. Desire kept them stretching for every new thing they’d ever been told they should want. And when it all turned to smoke and wisped through their fingers, desire kept them longing, as Sam’s brother Jack longed for emeralds and rubies buried on Peregrine land.

“And why?” Sam wondered aloud to Clark as they got out of his car. What had Jack really wanted?

Clark pulled the barn doors shut behind the Volvo. “Maybe he really wanted emeralds and rubies.”

Sam said, no, Jack didn’t want money. He wanted what was out of reach, because it was out of reach. Like he’d wanted Ruthie Nickerson, George’s sister, who appeared to have been one of the few people in his life who hadn’t loved him back.

“Love’s a slow dance,” said Clark. “Jack didn’t have the patience.”

Sam caught his arm, stopped him. “If you’re going to say Jill wasn’t the real thing because she left me, you’d be wrong. Just because love doesn’t last, doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything about Jill. Why do people always think you’re talking about them?” Clark’s pager beeped. As he waited for his service to connect him to the hospital, he pointed into the dark. “There’s a deck chair in our driveway.”

Sam looked too. “I think that’s Georgette’s chair.”

“It’s been broken for years anyhow.” Clark tipped the chair over. “It’ll go into that stuffed garage of broken dreams she’s got.”

“Don’t be so cruel. Georgette’s just too busy to have a tag sale.”

“Sam, is there anybody you wouldn’t make excuses for?”

“Hey, you should hear me defending you.”

Together, they carried the teak deck chair up onto the Nickerson patio.

Afterwards, they climbed their porch steps together and righted the overturned green rockers and sat in them. In a while, Sam said, “So, anyhow, this Miami detective thought we were a couple.”

Clark rubbed her knee. “We’re not?”

Chapter 22

Bright Eyes

Samantha Peregrine and Clark Goode were certainly not a couple in any ordinary sense, although when Annie spoke to friends about her “aunt and uncle,” most of them assumed she meant a married couple. But the two hadn’t expected even to be friends, much less to share a home and raise a child.

Both were bachelors, battle-weary after a number of defeats in the wars of love. Both believed the other had suffered more damage in those battles. According to Sam, Clark had never gotten over the early death of Tuyet, whom he’d met and married while a teenager in Vietnam, and that Ileanna, the Chicago radiologist whom he’d hurriedly wed during his bereavement over Tuyet, had sideswiped him. Since his divorce from Ileanna, and despite the earnest efforts of a number of women in Emerald, no one had made a serious claim to become the third Mrs. Goode. It was Sam’s contention that Clark had “given up on love.”

Meanwhile, according to Clark, Sam had never recovered from the loss of her partner, Jill, whom she’d met on a white-water-rafting vacation in Arizona, and who’d run off with someone else after living with Sam for seven years. Sam insisted she was still willing to try again, although she claimed vaguely to friends that she’d been about as lucky in love as the Barefoot Contessa. Few in Emerald had any idea what she meant by this analogy, or that the role in the movie had been played by their fellow Tar Heel, Ava Gardner.

In her good-bye note, Jill said their biggest problem had been Sam’s mother, Grandee, whom Sam wouldn’t institutionalize, and whom the town wouldn’t arrest (even after the widowed Mrs. Peregrine had smashed out the glass of a whole block of front windows on River Street, including Nickerson Jewelers). It was only after Grandee had attacked Sam with a pair of hemming shears (Sam still had the scar on her forearm) that the latter was persuaded to put her mother in a nursing home.

By then, according to Jill’s note, “the damage was done.” Jill left their new condo and Now Voyager, the travel agency on the floor beneath it that they’d started together. She flew off to Belize to start a cave-canoeing business with somebody else. She took their Djuna Barnes first editions and left Sam the tropical fish. Sam had to buy her out of the condo and the business; while shocked by the price Jill demanded, she told her lawyer, “Just do it.”

That winter was a tough one. Sam’s mother was evicted from her convalescent home for hitting a nurse with a concrete elf and Sam had to move her back into Pilgrim’s Rest to care for her. Grandee died of a stroke a year later, a few weeks after biting a piece out of Sam’s shoulder.

Some people in Emerald knew that, between them, Jill and Mrs. Peregrine had broken Sam’s heart, but few felt free to offer their sympathy since (a) they had never admitted that Sam and Jill were anything more than business partners who happened to live together above their travel agency and (b) had never publicly discussed the fact that Sam’s mother was insane.

Sam sat alone in her condo night after night thinking that happiness would always hover outside, like a hummingbird, never resting.

Then one day her old friend, Clark Goode, returned to Emerald. He came back to hire someone to run the family’s business, Goode Landscapes, in which he had no real interest. He was at loose ends since resigning from the Chicago hospital where he and his ex-wife Ileanna had done their residencies. It seemed to Sam that Clark, withdrawn, listless, had resigned from life itself. She knew the feeling.

Running into him one night at a grocery store, and seeing that he had nothing in his cart but frozen pizzas and a bag of doughnuts, on the spur of the moment she invited him to join her for dinner. Clark looked into Sam’s cart, at the packages of shrimp and monkfish, mussels, sausage, and chicken. “I’m making paella,” she told him. “It’s nuts, cooking for one. Go pick up some bread and stuff for a salad. Not iceberg. Come on over, why not?”

They made the paella together and sat in Sam’s condo eating it, watching the old classic comedy The Wrong Box.

“I’m laughing! I’m laughing out loud.” Clark told her, amazed.

“Me too. I can’t believe it,” Sam said.

A month went by. Clark didn’t leave Emerald. The old friends became better friends. Sam told him that their evenings together were the best part of her life these days.

“Me too,” he said.

When her woodstove set fire to her condo and Now Voyager, Clark was the first one there. With a slow look around the blackened living room, he blinked his blue eyes at the smoke. “Still carrying a torch for Jill, huh, Sam?”

She fell into laughter, in a way she hadn’t felt all winter.

Clark sat down on a sooty chair. “Maybe you ought not be alone so much.”

“Maybe not,” she agreed. “I’m moving back to Pilgrim’s Rest. I’ll rent you one of the wings.”

A week later, she took him to the local Chinese restaurant, The House of Joy, for a “serious discussion.” Clark was a little worried that she was going to propose a romance.

“You wish!” she told him with such obvious sincerity that the subject was settled. “We’re here to talk about what you’re going to do next. What’s your passion? What can’t you live without? Mine’s politics and tennis and movies and gardens. And that’s just to start. What’s yours? Because you’ve helped me a lot, Clark, and I’d like to help you.”

If Sam had many passions, Clark found it difficult at first to come up with any single compelling one. He mentioned his love of reading and baseball. But finally he confessed to a large dream that was yet unformed.

“That’s what I want to hear about,” Sam told him. “Talk.”

And so, evening after evening, they began to imagine the details of an up-to-date pediatric clinic here in Emerald that Clark could run.

A few months after Sam had moved back to Pilgrim’s Rest, she brought Clark some news that—as she predicted—took him entirely by surprise. Local buyers had long been approaching her about Peregrine land and she’d just sold them the 118 acres that surrounded the ten-acre site of the house; the land had gone for twenty-six thousand dollars an acre. With the three million, sixty-eight thousand dollar profit, she wanted Clark to help her set up a foundation to build the John Ingersoll Peregrine Pediatric Clinic at Emerald Hospital. She hoped he would stay in Emerald to run that clinic.

Clark was motionless for so long that Sam asked if he were all right. He stood up and nodded. “I’m just fine.”

She asked if he wanted time to think her proposal over. He shook his head. “The answer’s yes,” he said. It was the fastest decision he’d ever made, except in Vietnam or in an operating room, and it was a decision he never regretted.

Over the following year, Clark sold his family’s business and his family house. A year after that, the clinic opened in Emerald Hospital.

At Pilgrim’s Rest, the two “singles” took up watching classic movies after supper almost every night. Clark had never been the film buff that Sam was, although he’d been named Clark by a Southern mother infatuated with Clark Gable. But under Sam’s influence, he became a fan. The famous lines of movies gave them a language that made them feel closer. If Sam wanted a drink, she’d growl in Garbo’s voice, “‘Give me a whiskey and don’t be stingy, baby.’” If Clark was battling a Christmas tree into its stand, he’d snarl like Bogie, “‘Nobody gets the best of Fred C. Dobbs.’” When Sam played on the piano the song Jill had loved most, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” Clark shouted, “Don’t play it again, Sam!” and Sam yelled back, “‘Are you talkin’ to me?’” They were particularly fond of movies in which incompatible misfits, who’d been given to each other by the accidents of life, became friends, to the good of both.

Clark helped Sam restore Now Voyager and, without even having to change its name, reopen it as the town’s first video rental place. Now Voyager was a much greater success in its new incarnation. People so much liked staying home to watch movies that the Paradise, Emerald’s only downtown movie theater, went out of business. Next, Sam started a mail-order service for serious rare film collectors. Eventually customers throughout the country were contacting her for help in locating film footage—even the most obscure independent movie, newsreel, preview, director’s cut, and studio screen-test. Her promise was, “If they made it, and if anybody, from a projectionist to a grandchild, saved at least one print, I can find it for you.” For local customers, she would transfer old Super-8 movies or slides of their children, their weddings, their reunions and graduations and anniversaries, onto first video, then, in later years, DVDs. “Past Perfect,” she called this popular service.

Above the store, her restored condo became a small theatre called Sam’s Place, where friends and neighbors came to “Play It, Sam,” the free double and triple features she showed on rainy weekends. “Bite Night” featured meal movies like Big Night, Babette’s Feast, and Eat Drink Man Woman, and at intermission served a fusion buffet. On “Phys Films” night she screened films like Magnificent Obsession and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and had Dr. Clark Goode speak (to a chorus of “Louder!”) on “Doctors in American Movies.” “Phys Films” started the town rumor that Sam and Clark were a couple, secretly in love. (Though why their love should be kept a secret stumped the theorizers.)

Then one day in July the seven-year-old Annie showed up in their yard, abandoned by her father. Within days of the child’s arrival, they were sitting together on the couch, watching Shirley Temple in Bright Eyes sing about wanting to be an airplane pilot on the Good Ship Lollipop. Within a week, the imperious puppy Teddy, moving from lap to lap, joined them. The couple became a family.

It was Clark who figured out the recurring dream that was awakening Annie nightly in those early months. He brought home some paints and suggested she draw her dream on the barn wall behind the airplane parked there. It was something he asked his child patients to do, draw their dreams. She painted a picture of a girl in a little red airplane that chased after another red airplane on a straight blue line of horizon. Between the sky and the ocean, she painted a brown ship on which a woman in a yellow cape stood, her arms in air.

After Annie finished her picture and carefully cleaned the colors from the brushes, she reached up and put her hand in Clark’s. Clark told Sam that when he felt the life in Annie’s small hot hand race up his veins to his heart, he knew it would stay there the rest of his life.

The next morning, Annie asked Sam if Clark was her in-law. Sam explained that he was not an in-law, but he was an in-love. She said that sometimes in the end an in-love could be more counted on than a “real” relative. “You can always count on Clark,” Sam told the child.

Annie agreed with a quiet solemn nod. “He’s not going anywhere. He promised.” She was predisposed to believe that if Jack Peregrine were any example of a “real” relative, she could do without them.

A year later, Sam and Clark officially adopted Annie at the Emerald courthouse. The judge, a married woman with children, questioned Annie carefully about whether she wanted to live at Pilgrim’s Rest with Sam and Clark. Annie said she did. “You can always count on them.”

As they left the courthouse after the hearing, Annie heard a woman say she’d just been awarded damages because a department store’s elevator cable had snapped and plunged her down two floors, breaking her leg. Annie found this notion of legal retribution for suffering so comforting that the following day, forging an excuse from Clark about a doctor’s appointment, she left school and found her way back to the courthouse. Judge Susan Patterson answered her office door in Bermuda shorts and with her peppery hair held up by a big paper clamp. When Annie said she’d come to ask a question, Judge Patterson told her to take a seat and ask away. Annie said she wanted to find out how she could sue her father for leaving her.

“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 pretended. 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.”

“Find Jack before he gets arrested and get him out of St. Louis. If he needs medical help, get it. Otherwise, bring him here if you can. Just don’t let him get arrested. We’re counting on you.”

Brad chuckled the way he always did before conniving to negotiate a trade; even Sam recognized the laugh. “How ’bout this? I help Jack and you stop Annie from signing the divorce papers.”

Sam tried to walk away from Clark, but he followed her. “I can’t stop the divorce but I can maybe slow it down a little. And don’t tell her we had this conversation. Bye.” She patted the handle as she hung up the phone.

Clark shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”

Sam bit both thumbs. “I wish there were a God and She’d work things out this way.”

“You mean sneaky?” Clark opened the door to the kitchen porch. “What are you going to do, hang out at Annie’s condo, wait for the mail, and shred her divorce papers before she sees them? Why are you Brad’s best friend?”

“She must have loved him.” Sam followed Clark outside. “You’ll have to gut it up, Clark, and let her go.”

He looked at her astonished. “Me? You gut it up and give it up. Sam, you’re getting desperate and she isn’t even thirty!” Clark headed into the backyard. Stars blazed in the summer night as if they’d never been extinguished by the storm. Sam came after him and together they dragged a fallen hickory branch away from the bay window.

She said, “I always believed in ‘the One.’ But you can wake up, you’ve been waiting for ‘the One,’ and your life is gone. Some Like It Hot? You think Jack Lemmon thought Joe E. Brown was the One? ‘Nobody’s perfect.’”

“Sam, listen to me: Joe E. Brown says, ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ and then the movie says, The End. Movies end, life goes on. You think Joe E. Brown and Jack Lemmon lived happily ever after?” Clark ambled off toward the Nickerson house.

“We sort of do,” she shouted after him.

He turned around, walked back to her. “Sort of…but look at us, a couple of old baby-boomers that thought America was going to give the whole world liberty and a great big free clinic. We thought everybody would just get along and go to good public schools and use good public transportation…”

Sam held up the two-fingered symbol. “Peace, baby. I still believe it.”

Clark blew her a kiss with his fingers.

She caught the kiss and brought it to her cheek. “Hey, if I suddenly go straight, Clark, you’re the first to know.”

“Sure.” He gestured at the Nickersons’ house. “Just want to grab Georgette’s cat.”

“Nobody can grab a cat. Leave her alone. She’ll get out of the tree when she’s ready.”

Clark yelled back. “How come you don’t take that advice about Annie?”

Sam called across the long black yard. “Tell me Annie’s okay.”

“Annie’s okay. This yard looks so different.”

“Yeah, it’s got trees lying all over it. I noticed that, Clark. Tell me she’ll find the One. I don’t care if he’s good-looking, homely, rich, poor, dumb, smart, tall, short—”

His voice came through the darkness, steady and slow. “Well, it’s better to love a short man than not a tall.”

“Oh God. No more puns. Top ten worst.”

Chapter 24

The Spirit of St. Louis

At this time, Annie, flying westward through the humid night, was less than fifteen minutes from St. Louis. She was talking aloud to the sleeping dog beside her, remembering numbers. Number games and word games had long been a way to pass the time while flying, a heritage from her father: “A is for Acapulco,” they’d played on the road, coming up with a different foreign city for every letter, “B is for Buenos Aires, C is for Calcutta.” She had loved to be praised for her quick answers. Now she repeated the “passwords” from the Hotel Dorado notepaper and from the inside band of her pink childhood baseball cap. The more she repeated them, the longer she’d remember: 362484070N. 678STNX211.

She said the two codes together. Each was an alphanumeric; joined, they made a combination of twenty numbers and letters that long ago her father had written down for some reason and now couldn’t remember but needed to know.

Nine digits followed by an N, then three numbers, then two letters. N678ST. She repeated it: N678ST. N678ST. Easy. It was an airplane identification code. It had to be.

And NX211. That was also an airplane’s ID number. Every plane in the United States had such an ID. It was federal law. The number painted on the side of the King of the Sky was, for example, NC48563. (The old designation, NC, she had once mistakenly thought stood for North Carolina.) A solitary “N” meant that the plane was registered in the United States. The N was always followed by alphanumerical characters of varying configurations, normally five of them. So N678ST would identify itself to air traffic as “November, six, seven, eight, Sierra, Tango.”

All right, then, one of her father’s passwords had to do with the FAA registry of two airplanes, either real or contrived. N678ST and NX211. She just needed to look up those numbers to find out to whom the planes belonged. But there were nine more numbers: Three, six, two, four, eight, four, zero, seven, zero. She broke them into combinations: There was something familiar about the final four numbers. Four, zero, seven, zero.

Her calculation was interrupted by the faint stutter in the engine again. But the gas gauge showed a quarter tank remaining. She checked the mixture but it was fine. All warning panels seemed to be working. Everything looked okay. Annie patted Malpy, who licked at her hand.

She was thinking about a remark made earlier by her father’s friend Rafael Rook during his odd phone call from Miami. “If it’s a password of Jack’s,” he’d said, “It will have something to do with you, he is so proud of your accomplishments—”

Four, zero, seven, zero. Annie flipped the numbers around as if she were looking at them in a mirror; something she recalled her father doing—he’d hold up a piece of paper to a mirror in a motel room in order to read it. She remembered how he’d done so once as he’d been smoking one of his long thin cigars. He’d puffed out smoke rings at her and said, like the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, “Whooooo aaaarrre yoouuuu?” Afterwards he’d set fire to the piece of paper in an ashtray.

“That’s it, Malpy.” Annie gave the dog a squeeze. “It’s zero, seven, zero, four. It’s the Fourth of July.” July Fourth, her (at least alleged) birthday. The rest of the numbers in the code were inverted as well. Three, six, two, four, eight. They should be eight four two—8:42, her time of birth—and six, three—6 lbs., 3 oz., her birth weight. She only recognized the numbers because her father had mentioned her birth certificate on the phone earlier this evening and she’d checked it. Had his mentioning her birth been a signal? But to what?

Annie was almost letting herself think that it was sweet of her father to remember her birth weight and the exact time of her birth, sweet that he had kept her birth certificate and then enclosed it with twelve thousand dollars in the blue suitcase he’d left with her in the Pilgrim Rest’s yard.

She stopped herself. What was she doing? Her father hadn’t remembered her. He’d left her there in his sister Sam’s front yard and vanished, just as he’d made up the passwords and then had forgotten what they were. Nothing stayed with Jack Peregrine. Nothing held.

Below Annie, the lights of St. Louis sprinkled the far horizon. The name of the city had always given her a good feeling because it was the city that had believed in Lindbergh, whose citizens had come together to raise the money to give him the plane the Spirit of St. Louis.

“St. Louis. Malpy, look!”

As Annie reached for her radio mike, abruptly, the propeller noise changed, then the Piper Warrior engine missed, spluttered. The warning lights came on and stayed on, the engine lost thrust and a sudden air pocket dropped the plane down through the pitch-black night.

The frame of the King rattled loudly, its wings jerking back and forth at a tilt, spilling Annie’s thermos of coffee. Gauges on the instrument panel quivered. The yoke shook in its socket. A small compartment door slapped open and closed. Malpy began to shriek, scrabbling at Annie’s arm to be picked up. “Okay, okay,” she told the dog. “Just take it easy.” She corrected but it was hard to keep the plane flying level again.

“Malpy, we’re in trouble.”

The exasperated air traffic controller at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport lost his temper when Annie described engine trouble and requested emergency landing priority. What the crap was she doing up there in that single-engine Piper in this weather anyhow? He snarled that it was a madhouse down here at STL and unless she was in a death spiral, she would just have to get in line. And whoever the Lt. D. K. Destin was who had called him with her ETA from Destin Airworks, in bumblefuck Emerald, North Carolina, wherever the shit that was, that man had the foulest mouth ever heard in this control room…Okay okay, just hang on. Circle. Keep circling.

She went into a holding pattern. To calm Malpy as she waited for further instructions from the air traffic control tower, she hummed, “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, meet me at the fair…”

A memory of her father softly singing that song floated up from some long ago highway drive. “We will dance the hoochie koochie…” What in the world was ‘the hoochie koochie’? And why had he sung that particular song so often? What did St. Louis mean to him? Why did he want the Piper Warrior brought there after all these years?

As a child she had been always questioning everything, uncertain of Jack Peregrine, checking a compass that couldn’t hold true north. But with Sam and Clark, she’d found her bearings. And now, horribly, her father had brought that disorientation back into her life. Was his asking her to meet him in St. Louis just one more scam of his? Wasn’t it likely that his “I’m dying” was just the setup of another swindle?

When Trevor had scanned the FBI database for her father’s name, he’d found “John Peregrine” under “Confidence Men.” Jack was an “artist” of con art, that’s all. He tricked the gullible and greedy into handing over what money they had for an impossible means of making more.

Make another circle, the ATC radioed her.

Maybe this was some inheritance scheme of her dad’s to get Pilgrim’s Rest away from Sam. Or maybe he needed Annie’s help with a big con that somehow involved an airplane, a con of the sort that had made up her bedtime stories as a child. She’d heard dozens: How he planned to pass himself off as the illegitimate son of the current king of Spain, Juan Carlos I. How he planned to use her photographic memory to access data (like a human keystroke logger), in order to work out the biggest wire-transfer bank heist in history. How he planned to seed a gold mine in the mountain wilderness of Colorado or plant a fake Chagall in Boca Raton. How he planned to sell shares in a cure for aging, shares in the future, in possibility. All the stories were versions of the Queen of the Sea. Con art.

Her father had told Annie with reverence that the showman P. T. Barnum had once glued fish tails to monkeys and persuaded the public they were mermaids. That the swindler Count Victor Lustig (who worked the card tables on Atlantic crossings with Nicky Arnstein) had sold the Eiffel Tower to a reputable Parisian scrap iron dealer. That a larcenous midwesterner named Oscar Hartzell had made sane Americans believe they were descended from Sir Francis Drake and that the Drake millions still sitting in the Bank of England could be theirs. Seventy thousand of them had given Hartzell their hard-earned money to fight for their rights. The big con.

Make one circle, the ATC told her.

It was in him, Jack claimed, to pull off the big con. He could sell Mary’s milk, Buddha’s earrings, and Cleopatra’s suicide note. “Your daddy,” Jack would say grinning to Annie, tossing her in air, “your daddy understands. You sell people dreams they want to believe in. Remember that, darlin’. Tell people that life is what they dream.”

But Annie had developed a different take on life. Life was what you did, not what you dreamed. For years she had made up dreams about the mother she’d never met, dreams that were variations on the romances her father had told her. Her mother a sad princess, a dying star, a lonely heiress, a scientist who could save others but not herself. Always in these romances her mother’s life was incomplete until Annie walked into it. But her dreams weren’t true; deep down she always knew it and by Annapolis she’d given them up. You couldn’t dream a hundred push-ups in a field of frozen mud at Annapolis. You couldn’t dream a plane off the rolling deck of an aircraft carrier. You had to fly it.

You couldn’t dream a safe landing after your engine stopped firing, you had to keep your speed up; you couldn’t let your plane slip into a stall.

The gas gauge of the King of the Sky plunged to empty. Annie hit its glass cover but it didn’t move. She listened to the ATC’s instructions for her shortened clearance.

Suddenly a gust almost flipped the plane. She was close to a snap spin and knew she was in real danger. The engine was practically dead. Annie hadn’t flown the King in a long time. She sped back in time until she could hear D. K.’s voice beside her, talking her through the crisis. “Get the nose down. Listen to me. Not up, down, not up.” With the runway lights of the airport closing in, she fought against instinct, forcing the nose of the Piper lower and banking the plane into a glide less than a thousand feet above the concrete of Lambert–St. Louis International Airport.

Chapter 25

Dark Blue World

The air traffic controller was enthusiastically describing an amazing landing to a young VIP executive who’d asked to see him in the Control Tower. “We’re a nuthouse here at ATCT, it’s Fourth of July, whole corridor’s socked in. So in comes some Navy bimbo in a, get this, 1975 Piper single-engine! She blows in, tail of a tornado, circles, her engine’s conking out, I mean whacked. We gotta give her emergency clearance. Then this shitass 505 from DFW screws up, swings out on her runway, whap in the Piper’s nose. Jesus, this kid, I swear she lifts that damn Piper over the 505 on fumes and still puts it down like a dragonfly on a fuckin’ lily. Another sixty feet, she would have rammed the 202 to London. I’m on the floor popping digitalis like M&Ms. I should retire tomorrow. But how often you gonna see something like that? Welcome to St. Louis.”

The formerly dyspeptic air traffic controller shook hands with a tall young man with rich black hair and a trim black mustache, in an expensive black suit. The man tapped him on the chest. “Excuse me, sir. She wouldn’t like you calling her a bimbo.” He spoke in a Georgia drawl.

“Calling who?”

“The flyer, the naval officer in the Piper Warrior.”

“Jesus, you know her?”

“My wife. And I don’t think you want to be using that kind of language with a lady.”

“Your wife?”

“Lt. Annie Goode. She never used the Hopper.” The young man added wistfully, “Not even when she was on Connie Chung.”

The controller shook him by the arm. “What are you talking about? Was she on the news? Did she hijack that plane or something?”

“Annie, ha! Annie is totally by the book.” The young man introduced himself as Lt. Brad Hopper, U.S. Navy Reserve and president of Hopper Jets, Inc.

“Oh, you’re Hopper. Hopper Jets; yeah, we got your call you were okay with her coming in at your gate. But the message got screwed up. Anyhow we hauled her Piper over to Terminal E already, because—”

Brad shut him off smoothly. “I wanted to come on in and personally thank you for your cooperation. ’Scuse me, I’ve got to take this call.” He flipped open his cell phone. “Hi there, Sam! Yeah, I’m here. She just landed.” He listened for a long while. “Well, hell, you think that’s what Annie really wants? Okay, I’m with you, 100 percent, but I can’t be getting involved in anything that’s not, you know…But I want to help…Listen, I’ll make a phone call, I’ve got friends here. I’ll do it right now…I know, I know, I won’t say a word to her…What, here?…Damn it!…Okay, tell him to stay right where he is. I’ll call you back in ten. Just keep my name out of it.”

***

At the same time, down the corridor, Annie, holding over her shoulder the cloth carrier in which Malpy was squirming, phoned Pilgrim’s Rest and spoke to Clark, who was now in bed reading a biography of Thomas Edison.

Annie skipped over the details of her emergency near crash-landing and told him only that she’d arrived safely in St. Louis. The trip had been routine. No problem.

Clark let out a breath. “God knows what you mean by ‘routine,’ but okay, don’t feed Malpy seafood. Remember he’s allergic. Don’t give him coffee; keeps him awake. I don’t know where Sam is. She’s been running off every few minutes to talk on her cell phone ever since I got back from the hospital…I’m not sure what she’s up to. Maybe she’s in love…”

“It’s overrated.”

Clark said that only the young could be so sure. “By the way, Brad showed up in a jet at Destin’s, right when you were taxiing out.”

Annie had heard that news. “D. K. radioed me about it. I gotta say, it was nice of Brad to set up parking for me here on the Hopper lot.”

“He’s only nice for a reason.”

She noted that everyone was only nice for a reason.

“Brad came to Emerald to propose to you,” Clark warned. “He had an engagement ring in a box with a ribbon. I think Sam’s all for it. For a Lesbian, she’s obsessed with marriage.”

“Brad had a ring? You’re kidding?!” But she sounded a little uncertain as she added, “What do I need Brad’s ring for? I’ve already got a real zillion-carat emerald from Jack Peregrine, right?”

Clark made himself chuckle. “Yep, you’ve got a zillion-carat emerald.” He was wondering if she was thinking of going back to Brad. “Hey, maybe Brad’s got the same ring he gave you the first time. Didn’t you give it back to him when you caught him with Harmony?”

“Melody.”

Clark said, “He’s headed for St. Louis now.”

“No way.”

Suddenly Sam burst into Clark’s room, flipping on the light, stuffing her cell phone into her bathrobe pocket. “Is that Annie?”

Clark put the phone to his chest. “No, it’s Jill calling from Belize; she wants her tropical fish back. Of course, it’s Annie. She’s at the airport—”

Annie interrupted. “I’ve got to go. Headed for the Admirals Club. Just hug her and tell her I’m okay.”

But Sam pulled the receiver away from Clark. “Annie, all those Peregrine emeralds and rubies are real. Really real. Your dad must have dug them up. They’re on your hat.”

Clark took the phone away. “Ignore Sam,” he advised.

“What’s she talking about, emeralds and rubies are real?”

“Just that she loves her brother. Don’t get yourself mixed up in something illegal. Good night, sweetheart. Call us. We love you.”

“You too. Okay, off to find the Dying Dad.”

Sam and Clark talked for a while about how it was a relief that Annie had landed safely in St. Louis, despite the storm. Clark hoped, but doubted, that Jack would be at the Admirals Club waiting for her. “Maybe now we can all get some sleep,” he sighed.

Sam was biting her lip so nervously that Clark asked her what her problem was. “Nothing,” she said evasively and hurried out of his room.

***

At the airport, Annie took a shuttle from the hangar to the main terminal where, glancing up at the dome, she was struck by what she saw. Floating in space above her hung the St. Louis airport’s prize possession, Charles Lindbergh’s 1934 Ryan Monocoupe D-145 with its sleek black-striped body. There was its registration number: NX211 in bold black letters on its orange under-wing, the ID number Lindbergh had been allowed to transfer to this plane from his earlier craft, the Spirit of St. Louis. NX211.

It was the same alphanumerical that made up part of one of her father’s passwords. So that was it. NX211. That’s why the PS in her father’s FedEx said “Lindbergh.” Now she had the bulk of the code, which combined her birth certificate information with the ID number of Lindbergh’s plane. All she needed was the other plane whose identification number was the last part of the password. She could solve this problem and return to her life.

In her peripheral vision she noticed a man, about her age, leaning against the wall by a news rack, leafing through magazines. He looked up, smiling broadly at her. He was a very handsome man with short dark-gold curled hair, wearing tight jeans, a sky-blue T-shirt, and old brown leather cowboy boots. Flustered, she forced herself to look at him. Neither of them looked away. Then Annie continued through the B/C/D connector and headed toward the Admirals Club.

As she passed by this young man, he waved at her. She waved back, but sarcastically.

The young man was the Miami detective whom D. K. Destin had forced Brad to bring along with him from Emerald, the young man who had persuaded D. K. that he had only Annie’s best interests at heart. He had been waiting outside the Admirals Club for Annie’s arrival ever since he’d landed at the airport in the Hopper Jet. As he watched Annie hurry away, he flipped open his cell phone and spoke briefly but urgently into it.

***

Back in Emerald, D. K. Destin, sitting in his wheelchair in the small messy office of his close-to-bankrupt Airworks, suddenly had an urge to call Sam, despite the late hour. He was a man who always acted on his sudden impulses. “I just got a feeling,” the Navy vet told Sam. He described the detective he’d met tonight named Dan Hart—

Sam jumped out of her bed. “Daniel Hart? From Miami?”

“Yeah, him. He was here, looking for Annie. I got Brad to give him a lift in his jet to St. Louis.”

Sam muted the DVD of Simone Signoret in Diabolique. “Why’d you do that? Sergeant Hart’s after Jack. He wants to arrest Jack.”

“Yeah, let him. This guy Hart said Annie’s in over her head with Jack’s crap and I believe him.” D. K. shook out his graying cornrows and spun his wheelchair around to look at a knotty-pine wall crowded with photographs. He located a framed clipping from the News of Emerald Weekly showing a grinning fourteen-year-old Annie pinning a ribbon on him as he sat in his wheelchair in front of the King of the Sky; a blue ribbon she’d just won in the national youth speed race. “Anyhow, why rag on me? You’re the one who told him Annie took off for St. Louis.”

Sam sighed. “I know. He tricked it out of me.”

“Nah, instincts,” D. K. insisted. “I got a good feeling from this guy, Sammy. It’s like I get a tickling in my legs every now and again and I know who’s gonna win the Super Bowl. Hart’s a good guy. He’s trying to help Annie out of a big mess Jack’s trying to get her into. Let the guy do it.”

“Brad can do it. That’s what I sent Brad to do! Get Jack out of St. Louis before he gets arrested.”

D. K. laughed. “You’re such a goddamn fairy godmother. Did you send in the Marines too?”

“Are you still in that office, D. K? Go home.”

“No thanks.” Since the death of his wife, D. K. had hated the sight of his house and almost always slept on the daybed in his trailer at the airfield. “Sammy, love’s a bitch.”

“Love’s a bastard.”

“That too,” he agreed. “Nothing that’s much better though. Beer maybe.”

“Cigarettes.” Sam sighed. “Hey, listen, when I’m eighty, I’m going to start smoking and drinking again.”

“Your mistake was quitting,” D. K. told her. “Like love. You gotta keep at it.”

Chapter 26

Midnight

Inside the spacious Admirals Club, Annie asked a receptionist if she would page Jack Peregrine. To her surprise, the receptionist gestured at Annie’s naval cap and slacks and shirt and said, “Oh, Jack Peregrine. Hang on.” She came back with a co-worker, who asked, “Are you Lt. Anne Goode?”

“Yes, I am,” said Annie, surprised. “Why?”

They told her that a nice elderly woman had come into the Club just recently and left a birthday card for her, insisting that Annie would be by soon and pleading with them to give it to her. It had no envelope and was a flowery Happy Birthday card. To My Daughter it said in raised letters on the front. There was a scribbled unsigned message inside under a terrible poem about a little bud of a girl blossoming into a beautiful woman. The message said:

Annie. Wrong to get you involved.

Stay out of this. Go home. Love you.

She squeezed the birthday card into a tight ball, shoved it into the pocket of her father’s old flight jacket. “Goddamn him.”

“Pardon? Are you okay?” the older of the receptionists asked her. “The woman said to give you the card.”

Annie asked, “What woman? Who left it? What did she look like? Did she give a name?”

“No, no name. Just an elderly woman,” replied the receptionist defensively. “She said that someone had asked her to drop off this card, that you were in the military. We thought it was strange but she said she was running for a plane and she left.” Both receptionists went back to helping other customers.

Annie looked everywhere in the Admirals Club, even waited for a man to come out of the bathroom and asked him if anyone else was in there. No sign of her father. Not much of a surprise. Her cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number. With foreboding she answered it. She almost wasn’t shocked to hear Jack’s voice. “Annie, you okay? Where are you?” He sounded out of breath.

“The Admirals Club in St. Louis, damn it! Where are you?”

“You made it! Sam gave me your cell number but it wasn’t answering. Where’s the King?”

“Terminal E. Are you back at the Royal Coach?”

“Annie, listen.” He gathered more breath. “Tell me the password. Tell me the password! I’ve got a pencil. Go.”

She was pacing so intensely that the Admirals Club receptionists stopped what they were doing to stare at her. “No, you give me my mother’s name. That’s the deal. Give me her name.”

Between short breaths he said, “Geraldine Jeffers…The cops are all over this place. If I try to get to the King, they’ll grab me.”

Memory clicked. “Geraldine Jeffers was in Palm Beach Story. Claudette Colbert played her! Fuck you, Dad.”

“Calm down. Just walk out, go back to the King. There’s a panel in its tail. Use the key I gave you. There’s a courier case in the panel. Take it to Raffy. You understand? Go to the Dorado in Miami. Raffy will meet you there. He’ll find you. Help me out, Annie. And don’t talk to anybody unless you have to. If you have to, say I never showed at the airport, say I blew you off. Don’t let them know you’re going to Miami.”

Her father sounded so close that Annie jerked quickly around to look, as if he might be calling her from a few feet away. But the modern expanse of lobby, granite floor and cherry wood walls, was empty. From the doorway a slender middle-aged woman, wearing flip-flops and a pink sweatshirt with kittens on it, looked in tentatively, then as if she’d made a mistake, closed the door. A small gray-haired Japanese couple in matching blue blazers came in and studied the Departures screen.

“Hang on, Dad.” Annie ran out into the terminal gates area and checked up and down the busy connector to see if she could spot her father. She wasn’t sure whether she would still recognize him even if she did see him. “Are you here in this airport?” she yelled into the phone. “Goddamn it, answer me!”

The young good-looking man in the blue T-shirt, who was still reading at the news rack, glanced over at her.

Annie turned her back on him and lowered her voice. “Answer me, Dad!”

“…I’ve got to go. Just be careful, Annie. I don’t want you hurt.”

She took a fast breath. “A little late for that!”

“We’ll hook back up in Miami. Bring the case. And thank Brad. Here I go.”

Annie muttered, “‘Thank Brad’?”

The phone went dead.

She felt in the pocket of the leather flight jacket. The emerald was there. So was the tiny key. “Use the key,” her father had said. “There’s a panel. Take the case to Raffy.” What case? What panel? She hated this, having her life flipped upside down, like their past on the road, like a plane in a spiral.

The woman in the pink sweatshirt knocked into Annie as she strode out of a Starbucks and headed into the terminal walkway. She was talking on her cell phone, telling someone to hurry because their flight was leaving. Her cheaply dyed hair was pulled back in a ponytail that she kept yanking. “Hey, watch where you’re going!” Annie called after her.

The woman turned back and frowned, yelled, “Sorry,” hurried on.

Annie set down her travel bag, which barked sharply.

Across the corridor the handsome man in the blue T-shirt laughed.

Frustrated, Annie yelled at him. “What are you laughing at?!”

He smiled and called back, “I see a beautiful woman in the midnight hour, it makes me happy.”

“Give me a break.” Annie slammed back through the doors into the Admirals Club, but her heart pounded and to her astonishment, she realized that the jolt came from the compliment the strange young man in the blue shirt had paid her.

Trying to shake off the effect of the remark, she hit Incoming on her phone, reaching the number from which her father had just now called her. A gravel-voiced woman answered immediately with the phrase, “Baggage Claim.” When Annie asked who she was, she said that she was a security attendant at the St. Louis Airport’s East Terminal. Annie advised her to keep a closer eye on her desk phone and hung up.

So her father had been leaving the airport from baggage claim only five minutes ago. Should she run around looking for him in this huge space? Should she call the police on him? Or should she follow his instructions, go to Miami, and assume she would meet him there?

Everything in Annie had been trained to commit to go. But it would take more than a day to fly to the southern tip of Florida in the little Piper Warrior, even if she could find somebody here at STL who could quickly repair or replace its engine. She thought about letting her father, and so her mother, disappear out of her life again. She thought about forgetting this mysterious panel in the King with the courier case inside that she was supposed to deliver to this mysterious Raffy Rook. She could find herself a nice motel here at the airport and get some needed sleep. In the morning she could fly home to Emerald one way or the other and have her birthday party at Pilgrim’s Rest and in general go back to her life without Jack Peregrine in it.

Walking fast as she hurried to a decision, she found herself on the lower level of the main terminal, where she passed a large five-paneled mural on the wall. The mural was titled, “Black Americans in Flight.” Studying the group portrait, she felt disappointed on D. K. Destin’s behalf. He would have loved being one of the pilots depicted there. There could have been a picture of D. K. holding his unconscious navigator up out of the China Sea, clinging to the wreckage of their attack bomber’s fuselage, waiting for rescue for all those hours. She thought of how D. K. hadn’t let his crewmate slip into the sea, how (as Rafael Rook would have said), he had found that he couldn’t take it or leave it.

All of a sudden Annie’s old childhood nightmare curiously came back to her, her dream of flying the little red plane, her father tilting away to the horizon, the woman on the ship in the ocean waves, arms raised as if calling for help.

Now it was her father who was like the woman on the ship in her dream. It was her father who was calling, “Help me, Annie.”

And she couldn’t take it or leave it.

***

Trevor was asleep when Annie phoned him.

Good for her, making it to St. Louis in that storm, he said sleepily. Good for her. Get some rest. Call him in the morning.

“I need your help.” She asked Trevor to check one more thing for her tonight. “Please!”

“I’m trying to sleep here.”

“Come on,” she urged. “Why are you even in bed at this hour? It’s a holiday.”

“It’s almost 1 a.m. You’re going to seriously owe me,” he warned.

“Absolutely. That Burgundy you’re always talking about? Romanée-Conti, 1980? It’s yours.”

“Are you crazy? It’s five thousand dollars a bottle.”

“That is crazy. Forget I offered.” All she needed was the Federal Aviation Administration’s registration information for an aircraft with the identification number, N678ST. Trevor promised to call her back if she’d keep Eliot Ness for a month while he went on a dig to Turkey.

“Deal.”

***

Annie took the long MetroLink ride out to the gate at Terminal E, where a Hopper Jets tug had towed the King of the Sky. As she rode there, she called the Royal Coach night desk clerk. The same young man was on duty; he admitted cheerfully that her odd inquiries were the only interesting things going on at the motel. The strange customer, whom he’d told her about earlier, the man who’d cut off his pants legs and taken a swim and left the bloody towels, the man named Clark Goode? That man had stiffed the Royal Coach with a fake credit card. Annie gave him her card number to reimburse the motel.

“If he comes back, I’ll have to call the cops.”

“He won’t come back,” Annie predicted.

At the Hopper ground transportation desk, she told a female guard that she’d accidentally left a package in her plane. After examining all her paperwork, the guard walked her onto the tarmac and let her reenter the King.

Setting Malpy down in the copilot’s seat, Annie used her flashlight to search for any panel the key might fit. In the rear of the dark fuselage, near the tail, behind a quilted van pad, she located, to her surprise, a built-in panel that had a keyhole in it. The panel looked rusty at the hinges. After so many years of spending so many hours in the King, wasn’t it odd that she would never have noticed this panel? But then there had never been a reason for her to crawl to the far inside tip of the tail to examine the fuselage for hidden compartments.

She fit the key into the lock. It turned. But the section of the panel was stuck shut. Annie felt in the flight jacket pockets for her birthday present from Georgette—the little red leather case with the miniature tools in it. She used its screwdriver to pry loose the panel.

The beam of her flashlight illuminated a small rectangular case of shiny stainless steel inside the dark cavity. It was about a foot and a half long, eight inches tall. Between its two handles, it had a central combination lock with four dials of numbers.

Backing carefully out into the cockpit, Annie removed the protesting Malpy from his large cloth bag, shoved the courier case deep inside it and then put the dog on top.

With a jump down from the Piper’s wing back onto the tarmac, she waved at the guard, calling over, “Found it! Thanks a lot.”

Annie was back in the main terminal by the time Trevor called her. N678ST, he said, was the FAA identification number of a 1983 Cessna TU206 Amphibian, with a 1990 affidavit of ownership issued to a Florida Limited Liability Company named La Reina; La Reina had purchased the small seaplane at an auction of aircraft seized by the U.S. government. The two signatories were Clark Goode and Rafael Rook, both of 302 Ficus Avenue, Miami. The plane appeared to rent hangar space in Key West. “How’s that for helping you out in a hurry? I had to call in some favors.”

“Thank you very much.” Annie repeated, “Clark Goode and Rafael Rook.”

“Yeah. Rafael Rook’s that weird Cuban that called you?”

“Yes, Jack’s best friend.”

“And Clark’s your uncle, sort of.”

Annie air-spit indignantly. “Clark? Clark has no idea he’s been off buying amphibian planes and getting beaten up in motels. My dad just uses Clark’s name. So is this why the FBI’s involved? Is this why the government seized the aircraft? Did my dad and Rook really steal a gold statue called La Reina Coronada del Mar from Cuba? Trevor, I need you to find out about this Queen of the Sea.”

“You’ve got nothing left to trade.”

“I know. You have to do it for friendship.”

With a sigh, Trevor asked Annie to repeat details of the phone call she’d received from the Miami detective, Daniel Hart, about the Queen of the Sea. “I’ll find out what I can,” he promised. He’d also try not to get her father in worse trouble. He’d tell his contacts in Justice that Annie was just a friend trying to locate a long-missing father, that she knew nothing about anything illegal her father might be up to, and that Trevor was just doing her a personal favor.

She pointed out, “Well, it is a personal favor.”

“You know the government. Everything’s personal. I’m going to bed.” Trevor added that Annie’s cat was already in bed with his Westie.

“Don’t make too much of a one-night stand.”

“I thought Brad’s one-night stand was why you left him.”

Annie gave a sharp laugh. “Didn’t I tell you I found out he’d already been sleeping with Melody even before we left for Desert Fox?”

“If you’d known, you could have taken him out in Kuwait. Talk about unfriendly fire.” Trevor yawned. “I’ll call you in the morning, late in the morning. I’m turning off my phone now.”

Back at the Admirals Club counter Annie spoke again with the receptionists. “Any chance you can help find me a seat on a plane to Miami tonight? Any plane.”

The older woman turned to her companion. “Come on, she’s in the military. Let’s see.”

But unfortunately, because of delays and cancellations caused by the storm, there proved to be no seats on any commercial flights to Miami, not even for the military, until 10 a.m. tomorrow. “You could try to hitch with one of the private companies,” the other receptionist proposed. “You’re Navy?”

Annie tapped the insignia on her cap and white collar. “Yes, a lieutenant; I’m a pilot. Combat jets.” She pointed at ribbons on her shirt. “Desert Fox.”

The women were surprised. “You were in the Gulf War?”

When Annie nodded yes, the older receptionist solemnly crossed her hands on her chest. “I think that’s great. My cousin was in Desert Storm.”

Annie said, “My aunt says it’s all about the oil and the armaments industries.” The woman’s frown darkened, but then Annie smiled and she smiled back. “My aunt’s an old hippie.” The younger receptionist smiled too. There was something about Annie’s smile, when she did smile, that was irresistible.

Chapter 27

Let’s Make It Legal

Even near midnight on the Fourth of July 2001, Lambert–St. Louis International Airport was crowded with still largely cheerful people waiting for flights not yet delayed, with families pushing strollers, men and women lugging golf bags and tennis rackets, college students bent under backpacks, headed for far-off places.

In the terminal connector near the Admirals Club, across from where the handsome man in jeans and boots had gone back to reading his magazine, Annie called home again.

This time Clark answered the phone from his bed. Hearing that Jack had fled the airport after sending Annie to recover a courier case from the fuselage of the King of the Sky, Clark admitted, “Nothing about that man surprises me anymore. Come on back home, Annie.”

“Let me talk to Sam.”

Clark knocked at Sam’s door. “It’s Annie again.” Sam was sitting up in bed with her cell phone in her hand. “What are you up to?”

“Nothing.”

After listening to Annie’s story of what had happened in the airport, Sam told her, “Watch out for Sergeant Hart.”

“Sergeant Hart? In Miami?”

“He may be using you to get to Jack. Don’t say anything incriminating to him if he calls you. I’m getting Jack a lawyer. He shouldn’t have to die in jail. I mean, if he’s dying, which he isn’t. But if he does, bring his body back to Emerald.”

Clark took the phone from her. “Sam’s up to something furtive here, Annie.”

Sam shouted, “No, I’m not. Call us later.”

***

In the corridor, someone grabbed Annie from behind. She spun around, defensive, assuming it was the good-looking man from the newsstand. Instead, her well-dressed, soon-to-be ex-husband Brad Hopper stood in front of her, grinning. He scooped Annie off her feet. “Hey, get you, blast from the past!”

“God, Brad,” she finally was able to say. “What are you doing here?”

“Why, looking all over creation for you.” He grinned his best dimpled grin, the one he had used from infancy to cajole women into spoiling him. Even his formidable mother Mama Spring had been unable to resist it, and neither (for a few years) had Annie.

“So much for flying to Emerald, Brad, like you said you were going to.” Leaning her head around his, Annie looked up and down the corridor for the man in the blue T-shirt but didn’t see him.

Brad set her back on her feet. “I did go to Emerald. You’d taken off for here. Then D. K. blackmailed me into giving some—get this—‘business’ friend of his a freeload ride; said if I wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t give me taxi clearance. D. K. said this guy was trying to hook up with his girlfriend in St. Lou. Whatever.”

Not paying much attention, she nodded. Brad kept talking. “They needed another Hopper jet here anyhow, so I figured, hell, I’ll fly it myself. Because Annie might need my help.” He gave her his sweet look.

“That’s a lot of trouble to go to, Brad.” She was touched, she admitted. “You’ve got a mustache. It looks good.”

“Thanks. Happy Birthday, A.” He clasped her in a hug. “Sam filled me in. Guy from air traffic was gassing on to me about this old Piper Warrior coming in on a w and a p. So I go, that’s Annie! Good job, babe. Rough?”

“Could have been worse. Sam talks too much.”

The little white Maltese’s head stuck out of the cloth carrier, barking shrilly. Brad jerked his hand back. “Malpy? What’s he doing here?”

Annie pulled away, studying Brad’s face. “My dad just told me on the phone to ‘thank’ you. What does that mean? Thank you for what? Has Sam put you up to something with Dad and told you not to tell me?”

Blushing pink, Brad stretched his arms behind his head as if he were starting an exercise. He shrugged in an unconvincing way. “Sam’s my bud. She just wants us to get back together.”

“Wants you and her to get back together?”

“Come on, don’t be sarcastic, A. You and me.” Malpy kept barking. Annie shoved the dog back inside his carrier bag as Brad turned truculent. “Sam said your dad was, you know, real sick. So what’s wrong with her staying in touch? You hate Jack so much, maybe she never wanted to talk about him.”

Annie was taken aback. “Everybody in my life seems to be in touch with each other except me. Why is that?”

He cuffed her chin, a gesture that had always annoyed her. “Here, looks like your shoulder’s bothering you.” Despite her resistance, he took Malpy’s carrier and tucked it under his arm. “Damn, this dog’s a porker.”

Annie decided not to defend Malpy’s weight by going into the details about the courier case hidden beneath him. “So you don’t know what my dad meant by thanking you?”

“No idea.”

They walked down the corridor toward the food court.

“How’s Clark? Haven’t seen him in ages,” Brad lied.

Annie was distracted by the disappearance of the man in the blue T-shirt. “Same. Good.”

“Not my biggest supporter but a great guy.” He looked her up and down. “You look awesome. How long’s it been since I’ve seen you?”

“Eight months.”

“That long? Amazing.” He gave his handsome head a shake.

“Not really, considering we’re getting a divorce.” Annie knew Brad was lying to her about Sam and her dad, but wasn’t sure of what the lie consisted. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. As for her father, presumably he’d done just what he’d said he was going to do—flee the airport for Miami as quickly as possible—so there was no sense in continuing to wait for him here.

She walked with Brad back past the Admirals Club. “I need to fly to Miami,” she said. “But there’re no seats available.”

He replied, “Did you eat dinner?”

“No.”

“You need to eat. Then we’ll figure out Miami. I know people.”

During their marriage the only place Brad hadn’t tried to make decisions for her was up in a jet plane. He had always been proud of her skills as a pilot, just as she’d always admired his. His talent for flying was the first thing, after his looks, that she’d liked about him. But when not in the air, they were as awkward together as footless birds.

On the upper level of the main terminal, they found a table at a “bistro” overlooking the rotunda, near where the Lindbergh plane hung from the ceiling. They ordered chef’s salads that arrived too quickly to be anything but prepackaged. Annie watched Brad eat his food the way he always had, flinging the chopped lettuce about on his plate with his fork, as if he were desperately searching for something missing. Whatever he found, he loudly tried to stab to death. This tossing and stabbing went on until his bowl was empty. The avidity of his eating had once horrified her but watching him now, what she felt was sadness. For what undefined satisfaction was he so violently looking? Why had he never been able to find peace? Why hadn’t she?

Moved to sympathy, she reached for his hand. “Brad, did you ever feel like there was nothing else to want?” Her question confused him; he just stared perplexed at her. She smiled. “I want to apologize. Because I never made you feel peaceful and you never made me feel peaceful and I should have told you sooner it wasn’t working and you wouldn’t have had to prove it with Melody.”

He spoke solicitously. “A, you’re just all upset. Because of your dad dying of cancer and all.” He shook his head in sympathetic mystification at the odd fact of mortality.

She gave up, turned her neck side to side. “You’re right. I’m just all upset.”

“It’s tough. And it’ll be tough on Sam. I’d like her to catch a break.”

Annie looked at him carefully. He had the twitching eyes he always had when fearful of being caught out. She said, “You got my dad out of this airport for her, didn’t you?”

“Hey, don’t be crazy.”

Leaning over the table, Annie grabbed the sides of his head and turned him back to her. “He was in the airport; the police had spotted him and were watching the gates and he said he couldn’t risk contact with me, even though I just flew here in a fucking tornado. He told me to meet him in Miami.” Both Brad’s eyelashes were flickering, twice, a pause, twice more. When she was only five, her father had taught her how, playing poker, people can’t help giving signals about their hands. Brad had dozens of these “tells,” including the eyelash flicker. “So my question for you, Brad?” She paused for a long stare, knowing it would break him. “How are you getting my dad to Miami?”

It took only minutes to trip Brad into admitting that he had helped Sam out (“That’s all I did, try to help!”) by talking to a friend who had a cargo express company that flew out of Lambert to Miami.

Under the table, his leg bounced up and down. “The way Sam talked, all your dad wants is not to die in a prison cell. Why is that too much to ask?”

Her eyebrow went up. “Sam’ll say or do anything for her brother.”

Brad didn’t see why Sam shouldn’t.

His logic stopped her. “Okay. I suppose it’s not too much to ask.” Annie studied the Ryan Monocoupe that had belonged to Lindbergh. “I don’t know if he’s really dying.”

Brad shrugged sadly. “Daddy Alton was on oxygen one minute and the next minute he was on his way to heaven.” Brad horribly sounded exactly like his mother Mama Spring. She wondered if she herself would start saying things Clark or Sam said. Would she start making awful puns and comparing everything in life to an old movie?

Brad was going on about how all he’d ever wanted was to be helpful. How his St. Louis office could bring in a machinist to look at the King of the Sky’s engine and see what could be done to get it flying again. How in the morning he could get her on a flight to Miami. Meanwhile, why didn’t Annie stay the night in St. Louis? Hopper Jets had a suite right here at the Sheraton. They could both stay. He’d sleep on the couch.

Annie slowly shook her fork at him like a metronome. “Don’t try.”

He looked earnest. “We’re still married.”

“We’re legally separated. Let’s keep it legal.”

“Tell me what you want, A, you’ve got it.”

What she wanted was to find her father as soon as she could.

Brad smiled. “You need a private jet.”

“You’ve got plenty of them.”

He tapped the embossed logo on his glossy briefcase: Hopper Jets, Inc. “That’s right. Doing great. Private jets—it’s the way everybody’s going. You hear on the news how the attorney general, what’s his name—? He’s flying private from now on, I heard that on the news tonight. The threat level.”

“From what?”

“Everybody’s going private. It’s the way to go. You should get out of the Navy.”

“I love the Navy.”

Brad shrugged. “Hey, you ask me, serving your country’s just bullshit.” He slipped the white Navy cap from her head and looked at the braided brim sadly. “I tell you, Annie. I was so over that ‘yes sir, no sir’ rulebook, do unto others. I’m about me now. Like you always said, don’t count on anybody, don’t hope, be first, keep it going, see the goal, get there. You taught me all that.”

Annie felt disconcerted to hear her views so brutally summarized. “You make me sound like Ayn Rand for Dummies.”

“I’m not kidding. You nailed it. And Hopper Jets’s doing great now. The tax breaks we’re getting? It’s like Fort Knox is your personal shopper. Still, I’m in the Reserves; they could haul me back. Ali Al Saleem, when I got assigned, you remember? Naval Forward Engagement? Man, I did not want to go.”

She gave his hand a rub. “Everybody’s scared.”

“Oh, I wasn’t scared. I was just having too much fun at the base.” He grinned. “I’m strictly off the pills. Long time now.”

“Good…” They’d always pretended the problem was not a problem.

They talked for a while about jet planes, about the successor to the Boeing FA-18E Super Hornet; about the old superstar, the Blackbird SR-71. Talking the language of planes had been the closest they’d gotten to intimacy. She thought about telling him she had just been chosen to do a test flight of a new F-35 Lightning II.

The waitress was pretty in a hefty, gold-electrolyted way. Brad, as was his habit, began to flirt with her, telling her about his having once met Laura Bush, although he kept referring to the First Lady as Laurel Bush. Annie listened, puzzled that she’d never before registered how loudly Brad spoke, taking up public space as if unaware that anyone else was in it.

Hearing that he was a pilot, the waitress pointed at Lindbergh’s Monocoupe D-145’s bright orange under-wings, suspended in air. Last night, she said, the cleaning crew had noticed a man in a security uniform, standing atop a hydraulic lift that was raised to the height of that airplane. This man had crawled into its cockpit.

Annie interrupted. “Which man? Who was he?”

“Well, that’s the whole point,” said the waitress. The cleaning women had assumed the man was airport personnel when he’d ascended on the lift and climbed into the plane. They’d watched him, figuring he was going to dust off the plane or something and then suddenly he’d crawled back out of the plane onto the lift and had started to do a kind of Latin dance to the Muzak, like a mambo or a salsa, right there on the little platform of the hydraulic lift. When he’d lowered himself to the floor, one of the cleaning women had told him that he was a great dancer. He’d put his arm around her and led her around the floor in big waltzing circles. Then he’d kissed all three cleaning women. He’d run away when one pointed out that he wore a baggage crew jumpsuit, which appeared to have nothing to do with maintenance of the Monocoupe. “Wasn’t that weird?” the waitress asked Brad and Annie.

“Very,” Annie agreed. She did not believe in that much coincidence. While she wasn’t sure why her father had been dancing around in air, she knew for certain that he’d been the man doing so. She pressed for further details but the waitress could give her none.

As they waited for the check, Brad pointed out an ad for Hopper Jets on the wall. “Got our hub in Atlanta, plus new offices in Miami, Houston, and Nashville. Fleet of three-fifty. Leather, marble, whole top of the line, A.”

“Wonderful.”

“Learjet 45s, these new Cessna Citation Mustangs.” He leaned toward her. “Quit the Navy. I’d hire you in a nanosecond.” He grinned with his old seductiveness. “You could jet a lot of celebrities around. We’ve flown stars you couldn’t even imagine.”

“Courtney Love.”

“Who? What’s so funny?”

Annie shook her head. “You had your picture taken with Courtney Love, but it turned out to be a male impersonator.”

Brad stared at her. “I don’t remember that.”

“Sam’s got the picture of you and Courtney in one of her photo albums.” She snatched the check from the waitress who was offering it to Brad. “This is on me.” She pulled out the roll of hundred dollar bills that she’d found behind the lining of her father’s flight jacket.

Brad pushed her hand down. “Annie, Jesus! You don’t want to be flashing that kind of wad!” Holding the money beneath the table’s edge, he looked at it. “You back to the poker?” Annie had played a lot of cards at Annapolis and had invested all the winnings in IRAs that Brad’s divorce lawyer wanted “put on the table” of their settlement. Brad said, “You didn’t use to carry so much cash.”

She shrugged. “People change.”

“I guess. These VIPs we jet around never carry a cent. They are living the sweet life. But I tell you this, doesn’t buy happiness.”

“I thought you were sure it did.” Annie glanced at his hand. He still wore the thin gold band she’d put on his finger at their wedding. It seemed a long time ago.

“No,” he insisted, “Money can’t buy you love.” Brad said he had just sold a jet to a gorgeous country-western superstar who had confided when he’d taken her on a test-flight that her whole life was miserable. “All that gold dust was just sand in her eyes.”

“Is that one of her songs?”

“No, I made it up.” He added, “Mama Spring likes to meet the big names. I hate to disillusion her with how fucked up they are.”

“Your mom sent me a Christmas card.” Spring Hopper stenciled her own holiday greetings and had mailed one to Annie, signed “Mama Spring.” In her note was the news that Brad was “seriously involved” with the daughter of a friend. “She said you were seriously involved with a friend’s daughter.”

“Who? No, I’m not.” He frowned. “Mama Spring’s having trouble. It’s angina.”

“I’m sorry.” The tasteless coffee reminded Annie of all the cups of coffee she had stared into, day after cold winter day, in the first months after she’d left Brad, when she’d awakened at four in the morning and had sat playing solitaire until dawn released her. She pushed aside the coffee and stopped herself from wondering if he had slept with the unhappy country-western star to whom he’d sold a jet. To her surprise, the prospect didn’t hurt that much. Wasn’t such a revelation in itself worth the whole flight to St. Louis? She no longer wanted to choke Brad. It was a great relief.

He was saying, “Yeah, and my sister Brandy’s doing totally okay. Sam told you about her twins?”

No, Sam hadn’t mentioned it and the news gave Annie a strange spasm behind her breastbone. Once, shortly after they’d married, she had thought she was pregnant. Brad had been terrified by the prospect.

“Boys,” he grinned. “Back in February.”

She nodded, forcing cheerfulness into her voice. “Twin boys, wow. Tell Brandy congratulations. Funny, we used to wonder if you and I’d have twins—your grandmother and you being a twin—and here they are. Twins. I told you Brandy would have kids before we did.”

He didn’t remember that either. It was as if they had traveled through their marriage in separate tunnels under the sea, parallel but invisible and inaudible to one another. He was holding his wallet open to show her a picture of two fat little blond babies in blue knit jumpsuits. “Brandy had a rough time last winter. She woke up Christmas Day and Dylan had left her.”

“Left her?” Annie was shocked. Her sister-in-law’s husband had always seemed too passive to choose a piece of chicken off a platter, much less desert his wife on a major holiday.

“But hey she’s got her kids.” Brad pointed at the fat babies. “That one’s named Bradley for me and that one’s Bobby. Cute?”

“Very,” she agreed. “Brad, Brandy, Bradley, and Bobby. Now if you ever have twin girls, will they be Babs and Brenda?”

Hurt by her sarcasm, Brad closed the wallet. “Family’s why you come home. We shoulda had some kids, babe.”

She looked away.

“Not too late.”

“Yes it is.”

“I’m never going to stop loving you.”

She didn’t want to argue with him about whether he’d ever loved her at all. She changed the subject. “So your mom’s basically okay though?”

He flipped the wallet back open to a photo of Spring Hopper smiling at an oversized check she was holding. “Ever since Daddy Alton died, she can’t sit still. Spring Hopper, Inc.’s in the Hundred Million Club now. Just in the last year she’s sold seven luxury homes in this new golf community Windermere Rise. She got elected president of the Atlanta Women’s Realtors Club.”

“Well, Mama Spring always said she loved to close a deal so much she’d sell her own house if she didn’t need it to sleep in.”

Brad looked puzzled. “She was joking.”

Annie doubted it.

“It really worries me about the angina. I sure don’t want to lose her.” He stared around the corridor nervously as if someone might be going to steal Mrs. Hopper from him right then. “You know how I feel about that lady.”

“Yes, I do.” Annie noticed that Brad’s hands were trembling. And there was a little line of sweat by his ear. “You okay?”

“Just hot in here.”

Annie felt his forehead. It did feel hot. “Drink some water.”

On the floor beside her, Malpy managed to twist and wriggle out of the opening of his carrier case. Before Annie could grab him, he raced away from the bistro and took off in the crowded terminal. Annie and Brad gave chase but the little Maltese was quickly lost in the mass of passengers.

Brad trotted after him, turning back as if he expected a football pass, calling, “You need a leash for this dog!”

As Annie ran in and out of storefronts, searching for Malpy, she saw that the good-looking stranger in the blue T-shirt was now standing at a nearby ATM machine. He was in the midst of a phone call on his mobile phone that had apparently upset him. Spinning about in a tight circle, he flung his arms into the air.

Suddenly the little white Maltese sprinted toward Annie, turning back to bark at Brad who was in pursuit. Malpy raced at her, leaping into her arms and she gave him a hard shake and stuffed him into the cloth case.

“Get him a leash.” Brad stopped, hands on his knees, breathing hard. “Be back.” With a wave, he hurried into the nearby men’s room entrance. She suspected he’d gone in there to take a pill or sniff a powder.

She waited. The man in the T-shirt finished one phone call and answered another.

Brad was smiling on his return, rubbing his well-shaped head. He surprised her with a question as they walked along. “You think life’s ironic?”

“Brad, life’s so ironic that after nearly twenty years my dad suddenly sends a FedEx to Emerald saying he wants to see me before he dies. Then he cons me into flying here through a twister, then he blows me off and disappears. Then Sam cons you into flying my dad to Miami. Now here you and I are, chasing Malpy. Yes, I think life’s ironic.”

Brad’s handsome face turned defensive. “I didn’t fly Jack anywhere. Personally.” He crumpled with sympathy. “I guess he’s a little mixed up from being so sick and then getting the crap beat out of him.”

Annie said “Ah.” She recalled that she’d often said “Ah” when married to Brad; he’d never appreciated the variations she could play on the short syllable. “How do you know he was beaten up? And did Sam tell you who beat the crap out of him?”

He shook his head vigorously. “Probably muggers.” He couldn’t hold her gaze. “Annie, losing your dad’s a tough assignment, take it from me. Look, hell with it. I’ll fly you to Miami myself, right now.”

His sudden decision surprised her. “You will?”

Brad slowly nodded, pleased by his generosity. He’d fly her in the new Cessna VLJ that he’d just brought here from Charleston. He’d enjoy showing her what it could do. They could be at Miami International Airport in a few hours. True, he had been scheduled to spend the Fourth of July with his mother in Atlanta but Mama Spring would understand. Annie and he could have a blast in Miami; catch a Marlins game, scuba, stay at the Biltmore in Coral Gables—

She interrupted the fast burst of talk that was another indication that he was high. “I’ve flown the Citation Mustang.”

He nodded in a rush. “You can fly anything. Anything.”

Annie looked closely at his eyes. His pupils were now pinpoints. On their wedding day, he had promised that he was quitting drugs for good. When she’d found out otherwise, he’d allegedly gone cold turkey but six months later he had blamed his infidelity on amphetamines.

She patted his flushed face. “Listen to me, you need to get some sleep. Lend me your jet. I’ll fly it to Miami and bring it back Friday.” He winced skeptically at her. “Okay, look, I’ll make a deal. We’ll fly together to Atlanta. But then you go to your mom’s. I’ll go on to Miami alone. You need to get home and go to bed.”

“You’re a riot.” He patted her hand. “Lend you my jet.”

She felt his pulse. It was racing. “Come on, do this for me, Brad, come on.”

He stared at her hand on his, then looked her up and down again, head to foot. “You just look great. Life treating you okay, Annie? Well, I don’t mean now, with losing your dad…”

“I’m okay.”

“Sam says you could marry somebody else on the rebound from me.”

“Sam said what?” Annie glanced over at the ATM. The man in the blue T-shirt was no longer standing there. After a search, she spotted him in the crowd by a distant gate, walking away, speaking into his cell phone. “Brad, I’m not getting married again for a long time.” The man turned down a corridor and was gone.

Brad grinned at her. “Don’t get a divorce and then you won’t need to get married again for a long time. Good plan?”

She gave him a rueful smile. “Don’t you think I need a break?”

He looked hurt. “What happened wasn’t so bad.”

“Yes it was.” She gave his hand a quick squeeze. “Come on, I’ll drop you in Atlanta. Lend me the jet.”

Brad brought out the ring box from the pocket of his Italian suit jacket, showing her the diamond. “Marry me again?”

It was a much larger diamond than the first one he’d given her, which she’d liked and had, in fact, missed looking at after she’d returned it. Annie wore very little, and very good, jewelry—a small string of pearls, a plain gold bracelet. This new diamond setting was the sort of thing she didn’t want, and amazingly enough she was beginning to feel absolutely sure that she didn’t want Brad either. He had come to win her back, was even really helping her, but it was over. She shook her head slowly. “I’m sorry. No.”

“Okay,” he grinned. “But can we have sex?”

It made her laugh, as he’d hoped. “No. No sex either. Keep on being the good guy here.”

He gave an elaborate pretense of thought. “Okay, last offer. Will you slow up on this crazy divorce? Just one month. You wait one little month and you can fly my plane to Miami tonight.”

“Come on, that’s blackmail!” Their whole marriage had been negotiated this way, like clauses in contracts drawn up by hard-boiled lawyers.

“Yep, it’s blackmail.” Brad held out his hand.

She thought about it. “If you get off in Atlanta.”

He grinned. “I copilot.”

“As far as Atlanta.” She held out her hand.

“No divorce for a month?”

She sighed, then nodded.

His glance flickered sideways to two young laughing stewardesses hurrying in tight skirts down the corridor.

Chapter 28

Breaking the Sound Barrier

As CEO of Hopper Jets, Brad was persuasive when he assured the air traffic controller that, despite Lieutenant Goode’s earlier daredevil landing of the Piper Warrior, she was a serious, decorated military flight instructor with the proper license and endorsements; she was one of the best pilots male or female ever seen in the sky, a flyer ranked second at the Naval Academy and second at Fighter Weapons School at San Diego only to Brad himself. All Brad wanted was quick clearance from ATC. If the air traffic controller couldn’t trust the U.S. Navy…

“Why is it, A, I can talk anybody into anything except you and my mama?”

Annie pushed Malpy down inside the cloth carrier atop the courier case. “Because we know you better than anybody else.”

“You think?”

“I think. And take your hand off my butt.”

“Just trying to help.”

Annie shook off Brad’s hand as they climbed into the cockpit of Hopper Jets’ newest acquisition, the Cessna Mustang jet.

They waited for clearance on the taxi runway where Brad talked to her through their headsets. It had always been her favorite way of hearing his voice. “They’re phasing out the Super Hornet?”

“Looking into the F-35,” she said.

“I hear it’s got problems.”

“Everything’s got problems.” She adjusted her helmet.

Ten minutes later, they were first for takeoff. “You good to go?” she asked him.

He wriggled in the copilot’s seat. “All yours, babe. Take this thing to the max. You break the sound barrier, it makes the earth tremble.”

Annie smiled. It was a joke of theirs, from the past when they’d thought they’d have a future.

At 12:53 a.m., July 5, sprays of rocket bursts and roman candles exploded above as the VLJ started its tight loop.

The logistical nightmare caused by all the backed-up planes had shortened the temper of the surly traffic controller. But now as he watched the super-light Hopper jet corkscrew straight up into the night, headed for the stars, he turned to face his overworked staff and grinned at them widely. To grin widely was not something this man ever did. “You see that?” He shouted at them, “That woman’s a goddamn flyer! God bless America!” They stared shocked at their boss until he yelled at them to get back to work.

By chance, as Annie flew to the southeast of the airport, the last clusters of red white and blue fireworks burst into air, illuminating the stainless steel of the St. Louis Arch. The Cessna Mustang seemed to go right through the fireworks. Then it tilted in a falconlike glide and headed toward Atlanta, Georgia.

“Does it get much better than this?” Brad was not really asking a question and Annie did not give him an answer.

She tipped a wing of the jet at the catenary arch over the Mississippi River, in tribute to the city whose merchants had purchased an airplane for Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh would christen it the Spirit of St. Louis and honor it years later by transferring its ID to the Monocoupe D-145 that was now hanging from the ceiling in the St. Louis airport—high off the floor but not high enough to stop her father from taking something (she had no idea what)—out of its cockpit.

***

The Hopper jet was very fast and the flight was not a very long one. When they landed in Atlanta, Brad climbed onto the wing and then leaned in to kiss her good-bye. “You find Jack, tell him, well, good luck. You don’t want to let your daddy die in jail.”

“No, I guess I don’t,” she agreed.

Brad looked better, his eyes no longer darting. “Maybe Jack let you down when you were little, but give him a chance. Could be he’s just trying to make it up.”

“Could be…”

“I’m all for a second chance.”

She rubbed his cheek, touched the mustache. “I know you are. Third, fourth, fifth chance.” She smiled at him. “Thanks for the loan.”

“You owe me a month of marriage.” He acknowledged her raised eyebrow. “Name only. But we’re not signing any papers for thirty days.”

She nodded. “After that we’re getting a divorce.”

“No, we’re not.” Brad patted her gloved hand. “You take care of yourself, A. Happy Birthday. You’re looking great.”

She gestured at his muscular body, fashionable clothes. “You too.”

He socked himself in the stomach. “I keep at it. Wow, our first year at Annapolis? That bastard Johnson shoving our faces down in the slush with his boot? Remember that? ‘Give me another hundred!’ And it’s sleeting ice? Those were hard times.”

She nodded. “Yes.” But those weren’t the hard times she remembered. “Take it easy.”

“Always do.” He brought out the ring box again but before he could open his hand to show her, she closed her fingers over his.

“It’s a very nice ring,” she said. “I’m grateful.” She moved his hand back down to his side, smoothed out his lapel. “But no.”

Brad put the box back in his pocket. “You’re not going to find anybody better, A.”

“Probably not.”

“In a month, I’ll ask you again.”

She turned back, looked seriously at him. “Why? Why would you? We weren’t happy.”

He frowned as if thinking through their life together. “I was pretty happy. And let’s face it, babe, you weren’t ever happy. I mean, before it was my fault, you weren’t happy either.”

The truth of what he said took her aback. She’d always blamed him for her unhappiness as she’d blamed the boyfriends before him, or the stress of school, or her father or…She nodded at him. “You’re absolutely right, Brad.”

He looked puzzled. “Don’t be sarcastic.”

“I’m not being sarcastic. It’s true.” She cradled her helmet. “It was great, flying with you again. I’ll take care of your jet.”

He gave her a thumbs-up. “I know you will.”

She had decided against telling him this news but now she offered it in gratitude. “I’m taking the Lockheed JSF X-35 up later this month.”

His eyes widened. “Pax River?”

She was surprised. “You know about these tests?”

He shrugged. “You hear things.”

Excitement slipped into her voice. “Brad, the landing’s totally vertical. I mean zero. You can drop it on a dime. There’re two of us testing for the Navy in a couple of weeks.”

He swung his headset from its strap. “Who’s the other one?”

“Don’t know. But I’ll get higher faster.”

He grinned. “Than anybody but me.”

It was true. She’d never clocked as fast a speed as Brad Hopper had.

“Dropping the X-35 on a ship…” He said it as if it were ice cream on his tongue. “Love it. Well, if you can’t do it, babe, just call me.”

“I can do it. Bye.”

“Remember, thirty days.”

Brad leaned into the cockpit to kiss her. She turned her head so his lips, a thin hard hot line, pressed against her ear. Handsome as ever, he jumped down to the tarmac and waved good-bye. Tightening the strap on her helmet, she watched him turn under a floodlight and grin. His grin had always both attracted and infuriated her. She knew, looking at that grin, that there was no doubt in his mind about her. He was sure that she would never divorce him.

But she would.

She recalled that she’d never liked the way Brad jabbed his tongue into her ear. While his lovemaking was efficient and generally effective, his kisses had never done for her what the old songs Sam played on the piano had claimed for romance; they had never given her the sort of chills run up and down your spine, take your breath away feeling of love songs. With Brad it had not been an unchained melody, rope the moon romance. She laughed at herself. So? Life’s not a movie, love’s not a song. Hadn’t her father taught her that love didn’t last?

On the road as a child with her father she would lie on a towel beside a motel pool while he named the stars for her. One night he told her how, millions of light-years from the Milky Way, hundreds of new stars were igniting. Among them was this quartet of galaxies. The galaxies were uncontrollably drawn toward each other, just as if they were falling in love, just the way he had fallen in love with Annie’s mother before Annie was born.

He said the stars were on fire because of their love for each other. It had all happened millions of years ago, and millions of years ago he had loved Annie, even before she was born, eons before she’d floated down to Earth, a tiny perfect piece of an exploding star. He’d been waiting for Annie a million years before he’d been born himself.

Long after their starry nights on the road, when he’d talked about the galaxies falling in love, Annie was studying astronomy at Annapolis. She had learned then that there’d even been a little truth in her father’s story of the play of gravitational draw. In the southern constellation Phoenix, 160 million light-years from Earth, four galaxies that made up Robert’s Quartet crowded together into space, pulled there by a kind of attraction. And drawn together there, stars in Robert’s Quartet did burst into flames.

Stars did fly toward each other, irresistibly, as if they were falling in love. And millions of years later, lovers on Earth drew together and fell in love, watching the stars fall.

Annie flew through the night of stars, wanting like everyone else to be loved forever. She headed the Hopper jet to latitude 25°47’35” N, longitude 80°17’36” W, Miami, Florida.

***

At this moment, in a small bare Golden Days hospital room in South Beach, Rafael Rook sat beside the bed of a slender man who smoked a cigarette. Raffy spoke quietly. “It seems by no means an inevitability, Jack, all things considered, from all points of view, and with your past relationship not so good, that your daughter Annie will be arriving here in Miami to help you through your present troubles.”

The slender man in the bed raised the cigarette to his lips with bandaged fingers. “She’s on her way,” he said. “As sure as the sun.”

“Ah,” smiled Raffy. “The great Swan tells us, ‘the rain it raineth every day.’”

“She’s coming.”

part two

South

Chapter 29

It’s a Wonderful World

After the muggy hues of Emerald, North Carolina, Miami had almost blinded her. Miami was in Technicolor. Annie felt as if she’d awakened in a tropical cartoon of hot pink birds and purple flowers, set to salsa music. What’s more, she felt rested, although the rest had been imposed on her.

It was July 6. She hadn’t found her father. She hadn’t reached Daniel Hart. Rafael Rook had set up two meetings that he’d skipped and another one for today to which he was now hours late. She was waiting for him at the Hotel Dorado.

The hotel stood proudly among other rainbow-painted buildings along the oceanfront in South Beach. Its curved windows, neon flutes, and wavy roof made it the prettiest in the line of boxy Deco buildings on the shore. It looked like the sort of place Jack Peregrine would enjoy staying in.

From the chilly air of the silvery lobby, with its steel S-shaped bar and blue velvet stools, Annie moved back outside to the deck chairs beside its turquoise pool. There she again studied the message she’d been handed by a desk clerk hours ago; it claimed that Rafael Rook would be coming to see her here (presumably to pick up the courier case) at one this afternoon. She squinted at her watch. It was after three.

With her hair hidden inside her black Navy baseball cap, in her fresh, ironed white T-shirt and black shorts, Annie and the little white dog Malpy seemed to be the only black-and-white objects in the vivid landscape. In the long open avenue of sand across the street, a yellow lifeguard station stood under an orange striped umbrella. Beyond the beach, sun glittered on blue ocean. Even wearing sunglasses, she found it hard to see in the afternoon light. It was hard to hear, too, above the squawking macaws and the boisterous merengue music booming out of the honking cars that cruised in a caravan up and down Ocean Drive more slowly than pedestrians weaving in and out of their way.

Her father had told her to go to the Dorado to meet Rook. As he’d also written to her on Dorado stationery and it was on a Dorado notepad that he’d long ago scribbled his mysterious password, the hotel seemed a key, somehow at the heart of whatever this big con/sting/dying-wish of his was. And while there were no records of his having ever registered here, some of the older staff—a waitress, bell captain, concierge—had recognized him from a police photo that Annie’s friend Trevor had emailed her. The concierge remembered her father’s cufflinks, the waitress his tips, and the bell captain recalled that while Jack never seemed to have any luggage, he’d nonetheless been always immaculately dressed. These people had no idea what his actual occupation, or his real name, was.

On arrival, after a few hours sleep, Annie had begun her search, helped by Trevor’s useful access to FBI information. There appeared to be no Peregrine in any phone listing of Dade County Directory Assistance, or on any driver’s license or police record or in any hospital or any morgue.

She drove to the Golden Days “rest home,” entering glass doors etched “Center for Active Living” only to be stopped at the lobby desk by a Miss Napp (as she identified herself), who stretched out her hand—lavender manicured fingernails—as if she were going to sing “Stop in the Name of Love.” Miss Napp said visiting hours had not begun; moreover, they had no patient named Jack Peregrine, nor any patient with any of the aliases Annie read off her father’s fake business cards. Under persistent questioning, the receptionist’s tight, made-up face grew increasingly hostile: only visitors who could give the right name of the patients they wanted to see would be allowed in to see those patients. It was hard to argue with such a rule; nevertheless Annie refused to leave. Finally Miss Napp called security. Two men who looked as if they’d been taking steroids walked Annie to the door and stood in front of it with their arms crossed (as much as they could cross their arms), until she drove away in her rental car.

Back at the hotel, after further unsuccessful phone calls to the Miami Vice Sergeant Daniel Hart, who remained “away from his desk,” she kept herself busy on her laptop; she answered her emails, went over her divorce papers from the lawyer, paid her bills, prepared for her fall class at Annapolis, and edited a lecture she would deliver in November at the International Organization of Women Pilots. She ironed her dress uniform.

Finally she bought a bathing suit and took a swim in the hotel pool, where a peculiar sense of peace came suddenly over her, an acceptance that there was nothing more she could do until she could do something. It was a strange unsettling sensation.

After her swim, with Malpy on her lap, Annie fell asleep on a blue deck chair by the pool. At some point she was half-awakened by what indistinctly felt like a shadow moving across her cheek, leaning over her, shading a coppery sun. Then the shadow moved away. She sat up startled, looking around, but there was no one near the pool. It must have been a dream. She fell back asleep.

Her cell phone sang shrilly on the table.

The caller was Sergeant Hart, finally returning her messages. While he had the same pleasant baritone as in their previous talk days earlier, he had taken on a curiously inquisitorial tone. “This is Daniel Hart, MPD. Do you have Jack Peregrine with you here in Miami?”

Confused, Annie rubbed her face to awaken. No, she confessed, she hadn’t yet located her father; that’s why she’d kept calling Hart, hoping he could help her.

He replied brusquely, “Withhold his whereabouts again, I’ll bring you in as an accessory.”

Baffled, she sat up. “What?”

Hart sounded bizarrely annoyed. “You should have told me you were headed to St. Louis as soon as you heard from him. You flew there to help him avoid arrest. Aiding and abetting an escaped suspect is a felony.”

“Hey, just a minute here—”

“I’m on my way to the Dorado now. I’m sorry you picked it. My ex loves that bar so much it makes me sick even to set foot in it.”

Annie swung her legs over the chair side. “What the hell are you talking about? What’s that got to do with me?”

“Sit tight. Don’t make me arrest you.”

“Are you nuts?” Indignation lifted Annie to her feet and sent Malpy tumbling. The little dog trotted to the pool and lay down, staring at his reflection in the water.

Hart added, “And stay away from Rafael Rook.”

Annie paced along the pool edge. “How do you know Rafael Rook?”

“You always answer a question with a question, Annie?”

Once again she was taken aback by his use of her name. “What are you, spying on me? What’s it to you if I see Rafael Rook?”

Hart told her that her “Cuban muchacho” had “a rap sheet thick as the Miami Yellow Pages,” that Rook and her father were notorious in the city for all the cons they’d pulled off together in the last ten years. If she persisted in “hooking up with them”—

She exploded. “Goddamn it, I’m not committing crimes with Jack Peregrine. He’s my father—”

“Ma Barker had sons.”

“This is insane! He said he was dying of cancer. I’m just trying to find him before it happens!”

Hart turned abruptly affable. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

He was not.

For another thirty minutes, Annie paced the Dorado lobby. After a while, she returned to the large tiled swimming pool and paced beside it. Daniel Hart never arrived. The cell phone number he’d given her still didn’t answer; his office at the Miami Police Department kept putting her on hold.

A tan waiter with bleached hair, who’d been staring at her legs as he hurried past, almost ran into her. She grabbed at his tray of martinis and stopped the blue glasses from tipping.

“Good reflexes,” he told her.

She asked him if he knew where she could go rollerblading.

He gestured up the boardwalk, adding in an expansive outburst, “You’re getting a burn. Sun’s a bitch.” He pointed at her legs.

***

On rented red rollerblades, gleaming with sunscreen, running shoes tied around her neck, Annie skimmed along the boardwalk of Ocean Drive, eating slices of an orange, dodging in and out of batches of beach-walkers. She felt her breathing slow as she sped along.

The therapist she’d seen only once had accused her of an addiction to exercise. Perhaps it had seemed that way to a man who could sit in a chair all day, ingesting chocolate-coated coffee beans. But Annie had been raised by a tennis player, her aunt Sam, and by—in his youth—a long-distance runner, her uncle Clark, and from the age of seven on, from sleepy dawns in lap pools to cold nights on track fields, her days had been busy with sports. In sports, as in the Navy, there were rules, and there were prizes; both the restrictions and rewards were ways of keeping life in order. She liked it that in a track event, there were no limits except those of her body’s willingness to refuse defeat. Although smaller than her teammates, Annie had graduated from Emerald High School with four varsity letters. “There’s nothing a woman can’t do,” her aunt had promised her, and Annie had believed it and had proved it on track fields and diving boards, in the muddy sleet at Annapolis, in the sky.

All right, she told herself as she skated along Miami streets, so what if the peculiar Rafael Rook hadn’t shown up and neither had this equally bizarre detective, Daniel Hart? So what if her father remained the receding mirage he had always been? So what if she had no name for her mother but the one on a birth certificate that was obviously a joke, since it was impossible that her mother was Claudette Colbert, who’d been in her seventies when Annie was born? Hadn’t Claudette Colbert done all right as a role model?

When a child, of course, Annie hadn’t recognized the famous name of the dead movie star and so had believed when she’d first seen her birth certificate that Claudette Colbert really was her mother’s name. Aunt Sam, the film lover, had tried to break the news to her gently and had eventually introduced her to the actress by playing her a tape of It Happened One Night.

From the moment Annie watched Claudette Colbert dive off her father’s yacht in the beginning of that film, then hop on a night bus in Miami and wisecrack her way north with Clark Gable—the man for whom Clark Goode had been named—she had liked the small unflappable woman with her chic French bangs, throaty voice, and civilized laughter, with her new moon of an eyebrow raised at the folly of men.

She had asked Aunt Sam for more Claudette Colbert movies and had watched them all, loving the way there were so many airplane pilots in the films; how nothing ever fazed the woman, not Mohawks, not Japanese prison camps, not Nero, not running an egg farm with Fred MacMurray or racing around Paris with Don Ameche in his taxi, not even a whole trainload of drunken quail hunters on their bacchanalian way to Palm Beach.

Annie had replayed Claudette Colbert’s movies until she’d memorized them, pausing the tapes to study the actress’s gestures. The star gave the child something with which to fill in the otherwise empty concept called “my mother.”

Not that she looked for someone to do the day-to-day job. Sam did fine. But she was naturally curious about the original and as there were no other candidates but the star’s name on the certificate, it was to the star that she turned. Jack had told her so many contradictory stories that it was clear he couldn’t remember what absurdity he’d previously made up about the woman who’d borne Annie. So why not take Claudette Colbert as a maternal ideal?

By her teen years, Annie’s enthusiasm for Claudette Colbert faded. The star became just a French joke she shared with Georgette. “Comme ma mère, Claudette, toujours dit,” she would say to her friend. She hadn’t thought much about her “real mother” for years now. Oddly enough, it was her father’s out-of-the-blue demand for help that had brought that unknown woman back into view.

Weaving quickly through traffic, Annie urged herself to take a wry Claudette look at the last few days. So what if—as seemed quite possible—this lunatic misadventure did not provide her with her real mother’s real name? Be fair, what had been lost from her life that had been there yesterday morning? She’d missed a birthday party, that’s all, and she had never really liked her birthday parties anyhow, not after the one when her father had carried her around a roomful of adult strangers who had laughed too loudly too close to her face and had smelled of alcohol.

So what? Her family, her friends, would all still be there in Emerald when she returned from Miami. Meanwhile, wasn’t it a revelation that she could spend three whole hours with Brad Hopper, whom she was divorcing, without crying her eyes out or wanting to murder him? Wasn’t it in fact pleasant that here she was in Miami skating along beside the white beach and blue sea? As Clark joked when she fell off her bike once, “Try again. Life goes on. Don’t you believe in re-cycling?”

Maybe when this was over, she could just sit in Emerald for a while, visiting with Sam and Clark, with D. K., with Georgette and other friends she hadn’t seen for ages. She could take the time to let life go on.

Pulling down her Navy cap, Annie ducked her head and doubled her speed. As she skated into a neighborhood of shady streets, she found herself on a familiar block; pastel stucco houses with tall skinny palms and wide twisted banyans lined a curving flat avenue. When her cell phone sang at her, she sat on the curb to answer it. She heard a female voice she didn’t recognize.

“Is this Lt. Anne Goode?”

“This is Annie Goode, yes? Who is this please?”

The woman had a low smoky voice. “You’re Jack Peregrine’s daughter? In Emerald, North Carolina?”

Annie was so surprised she answered the question. “Yes, but I’m in Miami now. Who is this?”

“Don’t let Jack drag you into something that can get you both in real trouble.” The call abruptly ended.

“What the hell?” Annie said aloud. On her cell phone the incoming call was listed as “Private.” Who had it been? Some enemy of her father’s, or some friend? Someone who wanted to steal the courier case, or to whom the case actually belonged? Was it the same person who had arranged to have Jack Peregrine beaten bloody in the Royal Coach Motel? If so, why warn Annie? She would ask Trevor if there were some way to discover the number for a “Private” incoming call.

Looking across the intersection, she recognized the low pink stucco building with its logo in frosted glass—a sun on a horizon line. She’d unknowingly made her way back to “Golden Days,” the extended care facility for “active living,” where earlier Miss Napp had called security on her.

Suddenly she heard a car braking and then the violent screech of skidding tires. She spun around in time to see a pedestrian walk right into the path of a slow-moving large white sedan. The car’s front fender hit the man and he rolled off the hood like a doll made of rags. His cloth knapsack flew into the air. He lay motionless in the gutter.

Out of the big car scooted a tan elderly woman, whose hair and slacks and sleeveless nylon sweater were as pink as her Oldsmobile was white. With a groan the woman bent down to her victim. Quickly, Annie skated across the street and knelt beside the prostrate man. “Don’t move him,” Annie said to the woman.

“I didn’t! Is he dead?”

“I don’t think so.” There was no blood on the man and Annie could feel him breathing. Then his eyelid fluttered and one large rather sweet black eye blinked at her.

The woman grabbed her arm. “He’s dead.”

Gently Annie lifted the victim’s eyelid with her fingers; a round black eye stared curiously back at her. She turned to the terrified driver. “He’s not dead.”

The prostrate victim was a slender disheveled Hispanic man, not much older than Annie herself, with long rich black hair, come loose from his ponytail, standing out from his head as if he’d suffered an electrical shock. He had an attractive face with beautiful large soft dark eyes and gently curved full lips. He wore dirty bright-colored clothes that neither matched nor fit—the chino pants were too tight and the short-sleeved rayon shirt (with three fuchsia flamingos across its front) was too big.

The old woman kept shaking Annie’s arm. “What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s fine,” Annie told her. “Are you all right?”

The woman gave her a look of scorn. “He doesn’t look ‘fine.’”

“Fine? Fine?” whispered the man, still not moving. “There is no conclusive evidence that I’m fine.” He added in his soft Hispanic accent. “Things are broken.”

“What things?” Annie asked. “Leg, arm?”

“I think both,” he replied.

“Can you move them?”

“Can? Should? Categorically different. Something’s indisputably broken. But do not,” he turned to the older woman, “let us have any acrimony.” He tried to move and moaned. “We could avoid the hospital, a pleasure for everyone.” Pain spasmed through him loosely. “Three hundred dollars? I am not a greedy man. A trip to a Rite-Aid, a few braces, something for the pain.”

“Aha!” The elderly driver gasped, reaching on the curb for a big blue-beaded pocketbook. “I’m calling the police!” She poured the contents to the pavement, found a large cell phone in the pile. “I know you! You pulled this same stunt on my friend Louise right here at Golden Days. Four hundred and fifty dollars, she paid you.” The woman punched in 911.

“Hang up,” the man said, groaning. He grabbed the phone. “We don’t need the police.” He began lifting one arm, then the other, one leg, then the other; his limbs seemed to move without his volition, like a puppet whose strings were tugged. “I’m feeling much better.”

The old woman looked earnestly at Annie. “I don’t use this phone when I drive. I watch the road. I’m Mrs. Joyce Weimar. I swear before God, he walked right in front of me like a sleepwalker. I was thinking, is he blind? But where’s his dog? Here’s my license, Mrs. Joyce Weimar, just renewed. He’s a crook.”

Annie nodded at Mrs. Weimar reassuringly. She told the victim, “She’s right, you walked right in front of her car.”

“I am wounded she impugns my integrity.”

There was something very familiar to Annie about this man’s soft husky voice and polysyllabic speech. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

The slender man stared at her; an intense look brightened in his immense eyes. He sat straight up in the middle of the street.

Mrs. Weimar squeezed his shoulder. “Just in case, sit still!”

“Lady, really, it was an accident. I don’t want you to worry. Here, help me.” He reached for Annie. His legs were rubbery, his head wobbled, his pants had ripped open and were sliding down his hips, but he made it to his feet while the two women held him up. He kept staring with a peculiar expression at Annie. Then, pressing his heart above the flamingos painted on his shirt, he turned to the white-haired Mrs. Weimar. “This was not an accident.”

“You just said it was!”

He gestured gracefully with his hand, pointing at Annie. “I mean her. She is not an accident. She is, if you ask me, a personalized version, say an allegorical, of fate. I am only His sparrow. His eye is upon the big, we might call it, picture.”

The man’s remarks were making Mrs. Weimar uneasy. “You’ve had a concussion,” she theorized.

“I am taking a lesson from this experience,” the slender man told the two women. “Call it what you will—your sign, your karma, or, if you’re like my mother, Christ our Savior, night and day. But in my opinion, as well as that of the Bard, who nailed it with perfection well before our time, destiny definitely shapes our ends.”

“Oh my God,” said Annie. “Rafael Rook?”

Chapter 30

The Wiser Sex

“Truth is indisputably stranger.” The slender man shook his head so enthusiastically that his hair, glossy black and long, flew out of the string of leather that held it.

“He’s delirious,” Mrs. Weimar said. “Does he make any sense to you?”

“A little,” Annie told her.

Rook held out the woman’s purse as she refilled it. “Mrs. Weimar, just now the hand of Fate gripped your steering wheel and gave it a twist. In consequence of which, I find myself on Ficus Avenue together with this young woman with whom I had an appointment, not in Samarra, which is a great book and overdue at the library.” He hiked up his torn chinos and tried to bow to Annie; the effort obviously drilled a shaft of pain into his scalp for he clutched at his head with both hands.

“Lie down!” insisted Mrs. Weimar.

The man pursed his full lips as if he were going to kiss her. “Mrs. Weimar, this is Lt. Annie Peregrine Goode.”

Annie skidded backwards on her skates in order to look him over. “You are Rafael Rook?”

He bowed politely. “Rafael Ramirez Rook, expatriated from the unhappy island of Cuba. On my mother’s side, the Ramirezes of Havana, silversmiths to the finest families for two hundred years. And as my padre would say, neither Hook nor Crook, but Rook, plain Rook, from Miami, four generations, two Orthodox, two Reformed. My grandpapa believed in America and America left him floating in the surf. Bay of Pigs. So-called.”

“You are the man named Rook who telephoned me in North Carolina?”

“With all respect.” He bowed again. “Call me Raffy.”

She skated in a circle around to face him. “Where’s my father? I know he left St. Louis and came to Miami. I know the police are after him and somebody beat him up.”

“What’s going on with you two?” Mrs. Weimar shoved between them. “Are you in on this thing together? Are you going to rob me?”

Annie pointed at her cap. “I’m a naval officer.”

“Anybody can wear a hat!” The woman shook the Cuban by the shoulders. “He’s a con man.”

Backing away, Raffy held up his hands. “Annie, I apologize. I honestly expected your papa to enjoy a reunion with you in St. Louis. It meant everything to him.”

“Sure. Well I was in St. Louis and instead of a reunion, he ran off from the cops and told me to bring something here to you in Miami.”

Raffy’s face took on a crafty look. “Did you?”

Annie’s temper flared. “‘Did I?’ I flew him the King of the Sky practically through a goddamn twister to St. Louis. I had to beg a man I’m divorcing to lend me his jet to fly here. A man my dad had just conned into flying him to Miami!”

“Jack could always get places.”

“Believe me he better die. Where is he?”

“You don’t make any more sense than he does.” Mrs. Weimar backed away. “Who’s dying?”

Raffy gently brought the elderly woman to Annie. “This is the daughter of a friend who is unfortunately…” He pointed behind him at the Golden Days facility. “In here.”

“My dad’s in Golden Days!?” Annie looked at the stucco building. “I came here this morning. They told me he wasn’t.”

Raffy explained that Jack Peregrine had been admitted under an alias and that security was tight at the extended care facility because they’d recently received so much bad publicity from local television exposés.

Mrs. Weimar took a cigarette out of a pink leather case. “I’ll say! After you eat a meal in this place, you’ll go to McDonald’s and feel like the Four Seasons.” She turned to face the building and gave it the finger. “But you’re not in Golden Days to eat, you’re in there to die.” With a long flaring match from a box in her purse, she lit her slim cigarette.

The slender Cuban jumped away from her. “You could set your hair on fire with a match that big. What are you, the Statue of Liberty?”

The old woman puffed contemplatively. “I need to rest. I feel dizzy.” She sat gingerly down on the curb. Raffy sat beside her, tenderly brushing aside a Palmetto bug. “You all right?”

“You should ask?” She smoked for a moment.

“My grandpapa loved the Statue of Liberty,” he told her.

Nearby, Annie removed her skates and put on the running shoes that she had tied around her neck.

Mrs. Weimar smoked some more. “Coming into the harbor, this is from Russia, my mama saw the Statue of Liberty from her uncle’s shoulders. Talk about tired and poor, they’d had it!”

Rook nodded. “But it all worked out?”

“Her great-great nephew? Three first-rate delis, two in Manhattan, one in Queens. So her whole life, last Sunday of the month, she takes the Staten Island ferry to pay respects to the Statue of Liberty. They got to be friends.”

“That’s a beautiful story. That’s America.” Rook took her hand. “Feel better?”

She slapped his arm. “Watch it. I’ll tell you one piece of news, Joyce Weimar will drop dead in the street before they’ll dump her in a place like this—” She pointed at Golden Days. “Which is what I told Louise Mischoff. I said, ‘Your son Herb is a shit.’ A chazer bleibt a chaser. But Herb wanted her money, so he put her in here and he took it.”

Rook nodded sympathetically. “Gelt gait tzu gelt.”

“Ah, you’re a rabbi.” She pinched off the cigarette ash, returned the butt to her leather case, and slowly rose to her feet. “You two work out your own problems, I’m late to water ballet.”

Holding up his pants, Raffy ran after her. “Mrs. Weimar, give me your phone number. I’ll call you for dinner, maybe a movie. Or we could go dancing. There’s a nice clean place in Little Havana. I used to play guitar there. Very nice.”

She pushed suspiciously past him. “Not on your life.”

He followed, bowing with a smile when she turned. “Forgive me, Joyce, for offering advice to the wiser sex. But the quality of mercy is not strained through a sieve but more or less dumped on our heads like a bucket of heavenly rain. I paraphrase the Bard.”

She thought a moment then gave Raffy’s nose a twist. “Don’t pee on my back and tell me it’s rain. Still, I see why Louise fell for you. You’re cute.”

Mrs. Weimar drove off at 10 miles per hour in her large white Oldsmobile.

Raffy shuffled back to Annie. “That didn’t work out,” he said mournfully.

“I thought you said you were a musician. Why are you flopping off cars and swindling old women?”

His sigh was itself a melody. “Maybe music’s the food of love, but it was never, in my particular case, so much the food of food. Then I met your papa.”

“Could you make this brief?”

“Brevity—”

“In fact, don’t even talk.” She pointed at Golden Days. “Just get me in there if that’s where my dad is.”

The Cuban, brushing off his clothes, claimed that to get her access to a patient’s floor, he would have to make clandestine arrangements with a friend who worked a later shift. There were complications.

She was not surprised. “What’s my dad even doing back there? I thought he left.”

Raffy glanced all over the sky evasively. Early in the morning, he’d returned home—and he pointed to a modest stucco duplex down the block—to find Jack Peregrine lying on the curb, more or less dead. At first Raffy thought they’d finished him off, but when he put his ear to Jack’s mouth, he could hear him cursing. So he’d rushed him into Golden Days, because it was only half a block from his house and because a nice nurse on staff was a close friend. Chamayra had helped them twice now by faking the paperwork and giving Jack a bed where he could hide out. Still, it was tricky for her to sneak people up to the floor where she’d put him. She might do it for Raffy. It would depend…

“Don’t blackmail me, Rook. I’ll go straight to the police. Who beat him up?”

Jack’s friend could only speculate. “He had more than a few enemies. Don’t we all?”

“No, we don’t,” said Annie. “Not that kind. And you’re sure he’s dying?”

“Terminal, he said.”

Annie scoffed. “He was telling suckers he was terminal ten years ago when he was selling them prime real estate in Savannah, Georgia. ‘I have to sell my house, I’m dying, you can have it for a song.’” She moved closer. “Why didn’t you ever show up at the hotel?”

“I was collared by that s.o.b. Hart! You didn’t get my messages?” Raffy swore that he’d been headed into the Dorado lobby today when he’d been suddenly set upon by Sgt. ažln> Haim ng thl dyi Miamihe policeTn hviolefond ykindetectihava hadraggshed hiscote ir aqu hacheaintm hisco nick andrStished hiabe o c priers he’acccauhed hische mmittakinwithng JacPwhedrSnice” Raffd couldn