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By Root 564 0

town to her aunt’s store, she asked Sam to explain why her father had a grave that said he’d died. Sam, her brow furrowed, handed Annie a glass of water, her remedy for all ills, then explained that the name John Ingersoll Peregrine was the name of Sam and Jack’s older brother, whom they’d never met because he’d died at two years old, before they were born. She said that their mother Grandee had chosen to give the dead boy’s name, John Ingersoll Peregrine, to the baby Jack. It might seem odd but it must have been Sam’s mother’s way of coping with the loss of her first son. The child who’d died so young had been called “Johnny,” whereas Annie’s father had always been called “Jack.” Sam was sure that Jack, wherever he was, was alive and doing fine and that Annie shouldn’t worry about him.

Annie ran next door where Georgette’s mother told her that, yes, there had been a baby Peregrine but she hadn’t been able to find out much about it. She clamped her hands over her eyes, her ears, her mouth in a hyperbolic pantomime.

Annie returned to Sam with Kim Nickerson’s report. Why was the gravestone at St. Mark’s so hidden? Why had the town been reluctant to talk about John Ingersoll Peregrine?

Sam’s teeth bit her mouth, then she sighed, then she said that it wasn’t a happy subject. Johnny had died in an accident. Her mother had been pregnant with Sam at the time.

“What kind of accident?”

Sam rubbed her eyes. “In a pool we used to have.”

“A pool? Where?”

“Just in the yard. Where the herb garden is now.”

“The pool that’s gone?”

But at that moment a shopper interrupted them, bustling into Now Voyager hoping for a just-released movie; Annie learned no further details about her long dead toddler uncle Johnny. That evening her aunt had brushed the questions aside, claiming she was late to a hospital board meeting. A teenager with her own life, Annie wasn’t much intrigued by a long dead relative she’d never met. She let the subject drop. In fact, in general she lost interest in asking Sam about Kim’s Peregrine stories. It was best to keep on the move anyhow, stay out of reverse, stay out of the past. The past was a deep pool covered by grass, like the grave marker of John Ingersoll Peregrine.

Chapter 9

Remember the Day

The storm rumbled across the fields that rolled down from Pilgrim’s Rest. Clark pulled off his glasses to examine the tiny brown and red object that Annie had unhooked from her father’s letter. “It’s a dry fly. Royal Coachman.” He showed her the key. “And this looks like, I don’t know, maybe a powerboat key. Maybe Jack’s planning on a sort of reconciliation father-daughter fly-fishing trip before he passes away, if he’s passing away, which I’m having trouble believing. He’s only forty-eight.”

Annie studied the FedEx envelope. “Why would he be in Miami, in a place called Golden Days Center for Active Living?”

Sam rubbed her white hair. “I’m older than Jack, and I’m way too young for one of those places.”

“You play tennis,” Clark reminded her. “Jack played the horses.”

“You don’t die at forty-eight from playing the horses.” Tightening her brow, Sam felt the stationery’s logo. “Cheap. Golden Days. He told me he was calling from a hospital.”

Annie shrugged. “Why’s he saying, ‘Meet me in St. Louis,’ if he’s in Miami? If he’s dying, why’s he hopping around the country?”

Clark rubbed her back. “Travel was always Jack’s strong suit.”

Annie opened the porch door to look up at the greenish-black swirls of fast-moving clouds. “That’s one way to put it.”

What did she remember of that last trip her father and she had taken to St. Louis? She could recall only how long the bridge had looked, reaching over the Mississippi River, how high the Arch had curved above the city, how the arch was sometimes gold, sometimes silver in the sky.

She suddenly remembered the television screen in a motel room in St. Louis, on which Egyptian clouds were gusting around in The Ten Commandments as Moses parted the Red Sea. She’d been watching that movie. Her father had been trying, unsuccessfully, to reach somebody on the phone. She