The Four Corners Of The Sky (51 page)

Annie was stunned into a loud protest. “Stop that! No, I’m not!”

On stage, the fat little girls slid to an end in a blended slur of vowels. “Was blind but now I see…a heck of an engineer.”

Jackie lost control. “Believe you me, Paisley or Pammy or whatever your name is, I will fight you in court till the day I die and I swear before Almighty God you will never set one foot in my mama’s house!”

Annie had pulled her arms away from the woman’s strong grip. “I’m sorry! Jackie, I never met your father. I’m at the wrong funeral.”

“Ha. You just happen to know my name and show up here. Nice try.” Jackie spit the words at her as two big flat-faced men, calling to her sympathetically—“Come on now, sister”—tugged her back up the aisle and shoved her down in her chair.

The male teenager who’d been forced to shut off his cell phone joined the singers on the stage. Tall and pasty, he swayed back and forth for a while then began in a loud aggrieved tone, “My grandpa was a complete A hole. But like hey okay who isn’t?”

Annie heard
hsst, hsst!
behind her. It was Rafael Rook at the rear of the room, dressed in lime-green floppy trousers and a yellow shirt with alligators cheerfully dancing on their hind legs. She glared at him then turned back to the stage.

The teenaged Buchstabe, dirty-haired, acne-faced, and with his huge hands clinched at his sides went on to say that his grandfather should never have bothered coaching at
SFU
and that in fact no one should bother attending any college anywhere in the miasmic swamp of meaninglessness that was “this total shit ass dog crap, like listen up, the fucked up world you fucked up, you assholes!” There was a gasp from the front row. Jackie lurched forward bellowing, “If Daddy was alive, Martin, he would kick your filthy mouth right off of your filthy head!”

“I’m keeping it real here, Aunt Jackie, so fuck you.”

Jackie’s brothers pulled her back into her chair.

A hand squeezed Annie’s shoulder. She looked around, recognizing the cinnamon-colored fingers. Rafael crouched in the row behind her. “It’s Rafael Rook,” he whispered unnecessarily. “It’s okay, Annie, it’s okay, really. Your dad’s not in that box. It’s Coach Ronny Buchstabe.” He sighed. “
SFU
didn’t even send him a lousy wreath. People just have lost all sense of gratitude and I consider it a shame.” Annie glared furiously at him. “Really,” he repeated. “It’s not Jack. A mistake.”

She whispered in a rage. “I figured that out! You and my father told me he made up the name Ronny Buchstabe! Golden Days sent me here to his funeral!”

“Miss Napp?”

“Yes!”

“Doesn’t have a brain in her head. Poor Chamayra, they just fired her. And she has—I regret to say—possibly as a result, expressed the desire never to see me again in this world, or the next. ‘There is no following her in this fierce vein.’”

“Where’s my dad?”

“We need to talk about that.”

One of the young mothers with a big baby turned around. “Shhh!” she said loudly. The teenaged girl had resumed playing a mournful “Amazing Grace” on the electric organ keyboard.

Rook leaned closer to Annie’s ear. “Chamayra let your dad, well, borrow Room 540, I guess because the poor old coach had gone to
ICU
and then I guess the coach all of a sudden, or maybe it wasn’t sudden, died. ‘Gilded monuments of time, tomorrow and tomorrow and—’”

“Rafael, please!” Too upset to sit still, Annie slipped into the aisle and started up the exit. The Cuban hurried after her.

“Come back here!” Annie turned to see Buchstabes staring reproachfully at her. Jackie was pointing her out to the family, no doubt as the evil young woman who’d stolen Coach Ronny’s affections and was planning to grab his estate from the rightful heirs.

Jackie’s brothers grabbed her stout arms. Other Buchstabes grabbed the brothers’ arms. Bursting out of the middle of this huddle, Jackie ran screaming at Annie, “I want my mama’s sterling coffeepot back!
And
her diamond solitaire! I know you took them!”

The teenaged girl on stage stopped playing the keyboard, the singers stopped harmonizing, just stared with their mouths open. The teenaged boy slapped his hands in air. “Keep it real, Jackie! Fuckin’ A!”

With a grunting noise Jackie charged down the middle aisle after Annie, her thick Buchstabe hands reaching out in an angry twitch as if to grab her. She was not nearly fast enough.

T
he wet Florida heat steamed from the asphalt of the parking lot. Feeling nauseated, Annie borrowed Raffy’s cell phone. (“I don’t want to know where you got this phone!” she told him.) She reached Georgette, who was between patients. “Georgette, you didn’t tell Sam that Dad was dead, did you? It’s the guy whose name Dad stole, Coach Buchstabe, that’s dead.”

Georgette made a
phht phht
laughing noise. “No, I didn’t tell Sam anything. Frankly I wondered if you were still drunk.”

“Drunk? When was I drunk?”

“
Phht phht!
” repeated the young doctor. “Now you don’t make any more sense than the rest of us. I love it. Where’s your detective, Sergeant Hart?”

“I left him asleep at the hotel.”

“Um hmm. Seriously, Annie, you need to come home. Your friend Trevor called. He said you’re not answering his messages. He says to stay out of your father’s problems.
Chérie,
je m’excuse,
but are you involved with Trevor—I hesitate to say ‘too’ but…too?”

“Trevor?” Annie snorted, which made her teeth hurt in a way she’d never before experienced. She watched Raffy, who’d run back to Rest Eternal and given his arm to Coach Ronny’s elderly sister, Clara Louise, widow of McGreb Wholesale Plumbing. It vaguely occurred to Annie that Raffy might be lifting the old woman’s wallet out of her large embroidered purse. “Georgette, please, it’s 110 here and that’s just the humidity. I’m hung over in a parking lot at a cut-rate funeral home in Miami with a criminal Cuban that I was kissing a few days ago and I’ve got a headache and last night I went windsurfing and had sex with a cop who wants to arrest me.”

“Because of the sex? Was it
while
you were windsurfing? Damn, I’m proud of you.”

“Georgette, stop, why do you and Clark always have to be funny?”

“We succeed?”

Annie tried not to laugh; it was painful.

Georgette felt she needed to ask one little thing. “Did your dad tell you who your mother was?”

Annie said, “No. He told me he
wouldn’t
tell me.”

Georgette sighed loudly. “Okay. Now, at the risk of sounding like a therapist, how do you feel about Daniel Hart?”

“Oh, come on.”

“Just blurt it out. The truth. Whatever comes to mind.”

Annie looked at the braid on her military jacket cuff, at the asphalt, at the sky, at the cheerful alligators on Rafael Rook’s shirt off in the distance as he chatted with Mrs. McGreb. All right, she told Georgette. The truth? The truth was that last night she’d had the best conversation, the most fun, the greatest sex, the easiest time with a man in her adult life. And it terrified her. The truth? Loving and being loved was scarier than landing a jet plane on a rolling ship. But if you did it right, how wonderful. She was unable to stop thinking of Dan Hart even now, in midst of, frankly, chaos.

Georgette was silent a moment. Finally she said, “Chaos is good. For you, it’s good.” She added, “What about Brad?”

Unconsciously, Annie looked around the parking lot as if Georgette might be going to warn her that Brad was in it somewhere. All she saw was Jackie Stump pulling her elderly aunt away from Raffy and shoving the old woman into the long white limousine. Annie repeated, “What about Brad?”

“Just a second…” Georgette put Annie on hold. “Sorry, apparently I’ve got a patient naked in the cafeteria. Brad, your husband, who’s looking for you all over Miami.”

“Why does everyone keep calling Brad my husband?”

“Isn’t he?”

Annie just wanted to point out that her life was none of Brad’s business.

“Um hmm. So where
is
Brad this morning?”

Annie assumed that he was still asleep at the Dorado.

“Brad and Dan both. Um hmm.”

“Georgette, please stop saying
um hmm
.”

“That’s what psychiatrists say. It takes a lot of training not to say anything more than
um hmm
.” Georgette took another call; a patient with agoraphobia was going to be late again because it was so hard for him to leave his house. “Annie,
à bientôt
. Please lock yourself in your room and get some rest. For God’s sake, you’re having sex with a stranger on a windsurfer. Don’t cops have partners? Maybe I could fly down tonight and meet him.”

It was Annie’s impression that Dan had had a partner before he’d gotten fired but she really didn’t know that much about him.

Georgette suggested wryly that she shouldn’t bother learning at this point. “It’s too late to start getting to know somebody after you’re already in love with him. Just go with the flow.”

Annie gave her puff of disgust. “I’m not in love. You think I’m in love?”

It certainly sounded that way to Georgette.

“You’re right,” Annie suddenly admitted. “I don’t even know him and I want to spend the rest of my life with him.”

“That’s what I call going with the flow! Okay, I’ve got to see about this naked patient. But did you happen to find out from your dad if that woman who looked like my aunt Ruthie
was
my aunt Ruthie?”

“No, that was just a stupid idea of mine.” Annie explained that she’d learned from Rafael Rook that the woman she’d seen at Golden Days was named Helen Clark and she was the mistress of a Miami racketeer. Thinking she could be Ruthie Nickerson had been a crazy idea. It was just an odd resemblance. “Why, did you find out something else about Ruthie?”

“No, nothing.
A tout à l’heure
.” Georgette felt very guilty for not telling Annie what she’d learned from Sam. But she’d decided she should honor Sam’s wish that she wait until Annie herself brought up the subject of Ruthie’s being her mother. On the other hand, obviously Jack had told his daughter nothing about Ruthie, because no matter how bad Annie’s hangover or how alluring Sgt. Daniel Hart, if she had had any idea that her best friend’s aunt might be her mother, she would have mentioned the fact. On the other hand, surely Annie should be able to count on her best friend to tell her what Sam had said. On the other hand…

In the parking lot, Raffy glided up to Annie. “I apologize,” he murmured.

“I could have killed you,” she admitted, handing him back the phone. “I just went through thinking my dad was dead and turns out he’s fine.”

Raffy’s dark eyes flickered away from her. “Annie, ‘fine’ could be a stretch in regards to Jack. I don’t know what it is lately about his personal karma, because when I met him, he was A Man Loved by the Gods, but these days…?”

Grabbing his chin, Annie shook it. “Just nod at me. Is Jack still hiding out at Golden Days?”

Rook used his free hand to hitch up his trousers. “No. Annie, here’s the thing. He’s gone.”

She jerked the small man to her so hard he wobbled. “Don’t tell me he
is
dead because I don’t believe it.”

Rook frantically waved his hands. “Ms. Skippings found out Jack was there and that’s when she fired Chamayra.
”

“Skippings threw my dad out?”

“In a sense. He left in her car.”

“Chamayra’s car?”

“Ms. Skippings’s. Could you quit that for a second?” Annie let go of him; she felt awful.

He caught her as she stumbled, off-balance. “You look green.”

“It’s the heat. I think I’m going to throw up.”

Hurrying her across the parking lot into the log cabin restaurant, Good Mornin’, he rushed to a restroom on whose door was painted a picture of Betty Grable in a bathing suit.

Ten minutes later, he led Annie gently to a rustic pine table beside a window that squinted grimily at Rest Eternal. “Drink this tomato juice. Take these.” He held out aspirin. “You’ve been through a lot.”

“More than you know,” muttered Annie as she swallowed the pills. Something in his look made her blush and she added, “At least I was hoping it was more than you know.”

“You and Daniel Hart, who could predict it? ‘Clubs could not part them.’” He confessed that last night he had seen her, soaking wet, arm in arm with Hart, going up into the hotel elevator and not coming down. He had seen this from the Dorado bar where he’d been waiting for her, while keeping a watch over Brad Hopper, who was also in the bar.

Annie dropped her head into her hands. “Brad was in the bar? Great.”

The slender man nudged the coffee cup at her. “Forgive my bluntness. If you’re worried that your husband saw you kissing Sergeant Hart, he missed it completely.”

Annie looked out at him through her fingers. “We’re getting divorced.”

“In my opinion, all things considered, a wise plan.” Raffy tapped pepper into his tomato juice.

The coffee, which Annie tried to drink, was both too hot and too weak. “I can’t think about that now. Where did Dad go?”

“Poor Jack.” He spoke with sympathy. “‘There is a tide in the affairs of men’ and your papa took it. When the bastard Miami police showed up at Golden Days with—my best guess from their shoes—
FBI
agents, Jack stole an
SUV
from the parking lot. Which—it must be admitted—turned out to be Ms. Skippings’s Lexus.”

“He stole Skippings’s car?” She laughed but quickly stopped because of the pain when her scalp moved. “So, where’d he go?”

Surprisingly, Raffy seized her hands. “Annie, I heard on the radio coming here—but, as we know, there’s no reason to believe the press.” After a pause, he hurried ahead. “They found her Lexus in the bay. But there could be many explanations—”

She pulled her hands away.

Raffy dropped his eyes to his coffee, shaking the mug as if he were reading his fortune in it. “The car went off the causeway, through the crossrail, and they found it on the bottom of the bay. They sent out divers.”