The Four Corners Of The Sky (23 page)

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.”

A
t 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?