The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [202]
The last night of her vacation, Sam drove to downtown Emerald to see a late movie with George Nickerson and his fiancée Kim. While they were inside the Paradise, a terrible storm came squalling over the hills and tore a great oak tree in the Pilgrim’s Rest lawn out by its roots. It lay on its side across the yard, like a giant tangled in a net.
By the time they left the movie house, the storm was over. Sam returned home to find both Jack and her father gone and her father’s car missing. She found their mother sitting on the floor of the living room. Her clothes had blood on them. The framed pictures of Johnny from atop the black grand piano were arranged around her on the floor like candles around a saint.
When Sam asked what had happened, Grandee said only, “Accident.”
Sam took her upstairs, undressed her, put her in the shower, and helped her wash the blood off herself. Grandee went limp, offering no resistance. By the time Sam got her into bed and returned downstairs to call the police, she heard Jack coming in the door. His clothes were wet from the rain and he was red with mud. He told Sam to hang up the phone. She needed to sit down.
He said that a few hours earlier when a friend had dropped him home from the local pool hall, he’d found their mother sitting there on the floor with blood on her clothes, just the way Sam had found her. But Jack had also found a note from their father propped on the hall table. Sam needed to read this note before she decided to call the police. So Sam hung up the phone and opened the envelope he handed her. The letter, on thick paper with the judge’s name engraved at the top, was in her father’s upright stiffly formal handwriting.
Dear Family,
I have come to a conclusion that feels to me irrevocable. Mother and I have quarreled again. I can endure no longer the unhappiness that weighs on me. I hope that you will forgive or at least understand my decision.
Father
The rest of his letter dealt with financial matters.
Finally Jack pulled the letter away from Sam; she just kept petting the piece of paper as if it were alive. He said he had been out all this time looking for their father’s car but had been unable to find it. He figured their dad had driven the car into the river.
Sam called her friend, the new police chief, and told him she feared her father had committed suicide. When he arrived, she showed him the note. He urged her to hope; maybe they’d find her father safe and sound. He agreed that in the meanwhile there was no need to awaken Mrs. Peregrine tonight.
The Emerald police started a search for the judge.
At breakfast the next morning, Grandee appeared not to know that something had happened. She kept asking where her husband was.
The police found ruts on a high bend in River Road, three miles from the house, where the judge’s large sedan had clearly gone off the road into the Aquene River. They began dredging for the car. Questioned on the local news, the chief spoke of how bad a storm there had been last night and how strong and fast a current; how, in the same storm, ten miles to the north, two men foolishly trying to scavenge debris from the river had drowned in a dinghy. He reminded the town that he’d told them for years they needed a guardrail on that curve in River Hill Road. He said the judge might have had a fatal accident.
It took a week to find and pull up the car, which had been swept half a mile down the river by the current. It took another week to find Judge Peregrine’s body, which had been sucked out of the driver’s seat. The police chief brought the judge’s wedding ring back to his wife. The chief thought the family shouldn’t view the body, which was—he told D. K.—“a god-awful mess.” The town thought Mrs. Peregrine had very bad luck—first her baby son drowning in her swimming pool and then, twenty years later, her husband drowning in the river. There were a few rumors about suicide, but the rumors faded quickly