The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [159]
All at once a blaze of light bounced behind her. Dan’s pick-up truck came splashing along the sand toward where she sat and stopped with its headlights searching the waves. In the truck bed was his blue windsurfer board. Its slack white sail flapped against its mast in the quickening breeze as he dragged it to the surf. “Sailed one of these?”
“Only once.”
He stripped off his pants and shirt, gesturing at her to do the same. “Think you could hang on?”
Annie laughed, recalling the shake and stretch of skin as her fighter jet shot off the carrier deck and climbed the sky. “I think I could hang on,” she said.
Sitting on the board, they were floating on the black swells of water, then they were standing, their hands together fighting the sail into trim, Dan balanced behind her so close that she could feel his heart against her back, the heart that he’d said was broken but that felt too strong and steady to break. Quickly he was letting her hands guide his on the bar, responding to how well she could feel the wind.
The windsurfer board raced along the waves, a thread on the foam, sewing the sea.
His face in her wet hair, his mouth warm against her ear, their heads turned and they were kissing, kissing as the board rose with the swell of the wave. He pointed far ahead where a star fell gleaming far off in the night sky and spilled down into the sea. She thought she was crying but she couldn’t be sure, because how could she tell her own salt tears from the ocean?
***
At this moment, six hundred miles north in Emerald, the phone beside Georgette Nickerson’s bed once more awakened her. Grouchily sitting up to answer what she assumed was another call from Annie, she knocked her glasses to the floor.
But unexpectedly the caller was Brad Hopper. Apologizing—with an edge of accusation—for phoning Georgette so late, he wondered if she might be able to tell him where her best friend could be. He knew the two of them kept in daily touch, or at least they had done so all during Brad’s marriage to Annie. He’d called Pilgrim’s Rest but Sam hadn’t been able to help him with Annie’s whereabouts and he’d figured maybe Georgette could.
Georgette said, “She went to St. Louis. Then she went to Miami.”
Brad was aware of that much. In fact Annie had gone to Miami thanks to him, in his jet. He even knew that she was staying at the Dorado in South Beach. The problem was, she hadn’t returned to the Dorado tonight and it was awfully late for her to be out, given the circumstances. He’d had the assistant manager check her room but they’d found no one in it but that Maltese dog.
Annoyingly the hotel had said they wouldn’t tell him where their guest was, even if they knew where she was, which they didn’t. Annie wasn’t in the hotel bar or pool because Brad had checked them all. He was standing right here in the Dorado lobby at this very minute.
“You’re in the Hotel Dorado?” Georgette climbed all the way out of her bed, turned on her light and found her glasses on the floor.
“I sure am.”
To give herself time to think, she fluffed her pillows. “Why did you go to Miami?”
“It’s a holiday.”
Georgette snapped at him. “Brad, don’t get cute.”
“Okay, I’m sorry.” He was used to women chastising him. “I’m here trying to get Annie to call off our divorce. I already got her to put it off for a month.”
“You did?” With her glasses on, Georgette felt surer of herself. “I thought she was signing the final papers in just a few days.”
“Come on, Georgette,” he chuckled. “You never thought that was really going to happen, did you? I told her, if she postponed, I’d lend her one of our jets to get out of St. Louis. That’s how she got to Miami. Things were a mess in St. Louis, you know, with the storm? She could have never gotten here by now except for me.”
Privately, Georgette was happily