The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [162]
Raffy was coming to definite deductive conclusions.
Brad Hopper and Melissa Skippings had left the hotel together and he had seen them rubbing against each other as they waited for the valet to bring her SUV.
Daniel Hart had not yet come down in the elevators. From the way they’d been kissing in the lobby, it seemed unlikely that he was up there in Annie’s room arresting her. It was three in the morning. Things were getting more complicated than Raffy felt that he could handle alone.
He stole a phone from a man at the bar and used it to try to reach Annie’s aunt Sam.
“‘How full of briars is this working day world,’” sighed Raffy to himself. “But, on the other hand, ‘Journeys end in lovers meeting, every wise man’s son doth know.’ And the great Shakespeare was a wise man.” He listened to the rhythmic rings of the phone as he called Emerald.
part three
East
Chapter 42
The Secret Heart
Sam in her bedroom at Pilgrim’s Rest thanked Raffy Rook for calling her. She really appreciated all he was doing, although she didn’t necessarily agree that Sergeant Hart was a lying s.o.b. who’d pretend to anything, even love, to trick Annie into giving up Jack and his Cuban gold statue, whatever that was. In Sam’s view, the best thing Raffy could do would be to pack Jack and Annie both into a car and drive them up to Emerald where she could get her brother some serious medical attention. That was her dream now that Annie and Jack had reconnected. To bring Jack back home.
“‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’ Sam,” Raffy told her.
“Oh yes, The Maltese Falcon,” she replied, to his confusion, for he knew as little about the movies as she knew of Shakespeare. “‘I like talking to a man who likes to talk.’ Good night, Mr. Rook. Take care of Annie and Jack.”
“I am honestly making that effort.”
“I believe you.”
***
For years, in the middle of the night, Sam had wandered into unused bedrooms on the third floor of Pilgrim’s Rest. No one lived in them anymore. The musty smell of long emptiness always washed over her like memory. Her brother Jack’s narrow childhood room with its single dormer window had nothing in it anymore of his young exuberance. Instead, the room was crammed wall-to-wall with mismatched pieces of furniture removed from other parts of the house because they were broken or because they had fallen out of fashion—a grandiose gaslight chandelier, a three-legged Chinese Chippendale chair that Jack had broken, a white quilted vanity that had belonged to their mother, the once formidable Eugenia “Grandee” Worth. None of this furniture would ever be used at Pilgrim’s Rest again; yet over generations little of it had been discarded, out of some family refusal to admit defeat that was probably indistinguishable in the end, thought Sam, from sloth or despair.
Every summer she took a carload of “stuff” into town and put it out on the sidewalk in front of Now Voyager with a sign: “Free! Take It!!” Dozens of little wicker baskets, a big plastic globe of the earth, an electric fondue pot, a poplar kitchen hutch with a broken drawer and a missing leg. Every summer, people stopped and took all the things away. Yet the next summer Pilgrim’s Rest was somehow filled to overflowing.
A year ago, in one of her periodic cleanouts of the house (during which she could never bring herself to discard very much), she had rolled the round top of an old bleached oak table from in front of the closet door (she never put clothes in that closet, which she associated with their father locking up Jack). On the floor inside, she found yellow boxes of Super-8 films that her teenaged brother had shot in his “movie phase,” when he had announced his intent to become a great film director. This passion had gradually faded, like his other passions, replaced by newer enthusiasms. The expensive camera equipment had been put away with the metal detector and the fossil collection and the speed bike, the magician’s kit, the telescope.
When Sam had first