The Four Corners Of The Sky (28 page)

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.

A
s
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.”

A
fter 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.