The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [0]
Copyright © 2009, 2010 by Michael Malone
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Cover photo © Corbis
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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