The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [20]
“There was never anything in that ground but ground,” George was often in his later years to complain to Kim.
But maybe, just maybe, Kim now whispered at the counter of Emerald Jewelers, holding her magnifying glass to the unpolished ruby, maybe George had been wrong and Jack’s teenage story had been true after all.
Beside Sam, Annie leaned on the counter. She turned to Georgette. “Je ne crois rien.” Both the high school graduates raised their eyebrows in a practiced way.
“Ton pere et la vérité sont l’etrangers, et ma mère Kim est tristement une femme très folle.” replied Georgette.
“Bien sur, Gigi, et mon pere est un tas du merde.” Annie and her friend laughed.
“You girls are going to have the best time in Paris,” gushed Kim, having no idea what they were saying. “And then you’re both going to fall in love and have wonderful lives.”
They did have the best time in Paris. Annie even kissed a taxi driver on a dare from Georgette. She did it because Claudette Colbert had fallen in love with a Parisian taxi driver played by Don Ameche in the old movie Midnight, which she’d seen several times. Because her birth certificate said Claudette Colbert was her mother, she’d seen all the actress’s films.
Unlike Don Ameche, this cabbie charged the American girls full fare.
***
While Annie was in Paris, D. K.’s wife Dina suddenly died in a fall. He made Sam swear not to tell Annie until she returned. Sam promised but then told her anyhow, knowing she would want to be at the funeral of her beloved teacher’s wife. Sam even paid for Annie and Georgette to fly home on the Concorde and she was right to think the fact that Annie had flown at twice the speed of sound across the ocean would give pleasure to the grieving young pilot.
Chapter 6
Always
When they returned a month later from France, Annie and Georgette discovered that Georgette’s mother had begun spending her weekends in the local library, researching Annie’s family and the possibility that long ago Boss Peregrine had buried treasure at Pilgrim’s Rest. Moreover, she’d bought a metal detector to search, with Sam’s permission, for emerald rings and ruby necklaces in the yard. So far, she hadn’t found anything but metal jar lids and belt buckles. She blamed her failure on the Peregrines themselves, just as she blamed her husband George’s death of a massive heart attack at Emerald Jewelers on the Peregrines, because Sam and Jack’s crazy mother had broken the store window with a hammer and that’s when George’s heart attack had happened.
Listening to all the town gossip about the Peregrines, Kim Nickerson had come to believe that the more information she had about Annie’s dead ancestors, the more likely the dead were to give up their buried treasure to her. It eventually became, as Georgette said, an idée fixe. So whenever “the girls” returned home from college for the holidays, she would bribe them to go with her to view the locations of the Peregrines’ long downfall. Both girls found these tours tedious; year after year Georgette’s mother repeated the same anecdotes, in narrative log-jams that monotonously meandered through irrelevant details to some point or other that she usually forgot.
While Georgette loved her mother, she’d never really liked her. The two of them were always, as Georgette explained to Annie after completing her first psychology course, profoundly incompatible, a fact that Kim could never admit because she couldn’t grasp it. Georgette said this was because her mother, while not bright, had been a pretty child, a pretty teenager, and a pretty young woman, and as prettiness had been her only gift, naturally she overvalued it. According to Georgette, in the past her mother had taken secret pleasure in her daughter’s gawky plumpness, loving to dress them in similar outfits—like tangerine stripes