The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [29]
Clark held out the fishing fly when he walked into the room. “I checked. It’s definitely a Royal Coachman fly. Meaning what? Why can’t Jack ever just say things?”
“Who knows?” Sliding the little key out of her pocket, she put it with the fishing fly back in the envelope. Lights blinked on in the window across the lawn. “Looks like Georgette’s home. I’m going over.”
“She’ll just analyze you.” Georgette, now a resident in psychiatry at Emerald Hospital, did therapy on her neighbors. “You wouldn’t believe her theories about me.”
“Clark, I heard her theories about you ten years ago.” Annie turned back to the jigsaw puzzle, fitting together two of the pieces.
He watched her. “Sam just doesn’t want to finish this damn thing. It’d be easy but then she wouldn’t have it here on the table taking up space and collecting dust.”
As he spoke, Sam came into the room. “Guess what, Clark? Life takes up space and collects dust. How’s that?” She reached over, tugging at her niece’s dark-gold tangled hair. “D. K. can get you to a Raleigh flight in the morning. You can fly to St. Louis and find Jack and bring him home. I’ll fix up his old room for him.”
Exasperated, Annie gestured at the world outside. “Find him where? How do I know where we stayed in St. Louis? I was seven years old!”
Her uncle was listening to the wind. “No flight’s leaving RDU tonight, that’s for sure. This will turn into a twister, I kid you not.”
Sam took the balloons back into the hall. “This is not turning into a twister, Clark; you always think it’s a twister. But I admit it’s getting ugly. I canceled the birthday party. I called my list and Georgette is calling hers. What we’ll do with two-dozen spicy tuna rolls, I don’t know.” She held up a small blue Samsonite suitcase. “Found this in the attic.”
Annie took the bag, surprised by how familiar it looked. “Good God, I came here with this.”
Sam had found it behind boxes of big out-of-fashion Christmas lights. “I was pretty sure I’d packed Jack’s leather jacket in here, when he left it behind. Remember that day? When he showed up like North by Northwest, right before you and Georgette went to Paris?”
Annie raised her eyebrow. “The last time any of us ever saw Jack? Strangely enough I do remember that day.”
Sam said, “Give him a break. He could be dying.”
“Or not.” Clark shrugged.
When they opened the blue Samsonite, the past jumped out. The old brown leather flying jacket her father had often worn lay on top of her pair of small lavender jeans. Her pink hat with shiny multi-colored glass beads was folded inside the green velvet dress that she remembered as once having been her favorite.
Sam held up a pair of child’s plastic neon-blue sunglasses.
Annie took them, looked through their lenses. “Dad said they had X-ray vision. I wanted sunglasses because he always wore them.”
Sam recalled that Jack had always admired great sunglasses. He’d always commented when women wore sunglasses in the movies. Simone Signoret in Les Diaboliques, Anouk Aimée in La Dolce Vita, Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim, Audrey Hepburn—
“Sam, we get the idea.” Clark looked at the bright blue plastic glasses. “I remember these.”
Sam vigorously shook the brown leather jacket. A small automatic pistol fell out of a pocket and onto the floor. “Jesus Christ! That’s been there the whole time.”
Clark picked up the gun. “Jack was an idiot.” He removed the clip.
Annie studied the black automatic; it was probably the gun her father had taken from the intruder in the St. Louis motel that night. The man he’d