The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [49]
Trevor said he’d always wondered why Annie hadn’t asked him to do this for her before. Here she was with a criminal father who’d disappeared; here she was with a friend who worked with criminal databases at the FBI. Seemed like a match. He was happy to check into Jack Peregrine.
When Annie was carrying Teddy to her pagoda bed, the lights came back on. The old dog’s cloudy blind eyes, blue as glass, seemed to be looking right at her. “What do you think, Teddy?” she asked the Shih Tzu. “What should I do? If I were Claudette, I’d get on a train and I’d meet a millionaire but then I’d remarry my husband.”
The dog licked the air, as if to test out this option from The Palm Beach Story. Then she shook her head.
“Right. I don’t want to remarry Brad.” Annie took Teddy with her to the black baby grand piano on which long ago Sam had played duets with Georgette’s aunt Ruthie. The old yellowed sheet music was still in the bench. She found a pastel copy of “Lara’s Theme” from Dr. Zhivago. “Ruthie Nickerson” was written elaborately on the cover, and in the same blue ink “con amore.”
Photographs crowded together on the piano’s closed lid. As a child, Annie had grown accustomed to freezing with a grin half-a-dozen times a day, while Sam recorded her life with a camera of one sort or another: Annie at Brownie camp, on the track team, on her way to an Emerald High dance, Annie the naval midshipman, Annie putting wedding cake to Brad’s lips, Annie stretching, eating, napping, Annie just holding up her hands in surrender to the lens. When she’d protested at being subjected to daily photography, Clark had asked her to indulge her aunt: all these pictures were Sam’s proofs of a happiness she hadn’t expected. They were like red votive candles lit in a church, pledges of gratitude.
On the piano there were a few framed snapshots of the young Sam and Jack as well. And there was an old photo in a bright ’70s frame of five teenagers seated on the Pilgrim’s Rest porch. All were tan and wore shorts and T-shirts, their arms hung over one another’s shoulders, all laughing, knocking into each other: Sam, Clark, Jack, Georgette’s father George Nickerson, and a pretty girl who was leaning out at an angle from the porch rail to crook her elbow around Clark’s neck. Annie had been told that this was George’s sister Ruthie, who’d run off with a married man. In the picture Ruthie appeared to be very attractive but it was hard to see her face because of the huge sunglasses she wore.
There was also a solo picture of Clark, thin and squinting into a Vietnamese sunset. Beside it was a wedding photo of Clark and his first wife, Tuyet, who’d died shortly after he’d brought her home to America, of a rare kind of cancer. Nearby was a framed newspaper photo of Sam leaping to hit a tennis ball (“Peregrine Takes Title” said the small headline) and stuck in the corner of the frame, as if to emphasize the contrast, was a snapshot of Sam at sixteen, unhappy in a prom dress, in front of the Pilgrim’s Rest Christmas tree, with a valiant chin, standing between her intoxicated father the judge and her sedated mother Grandee of the Savannah Worths, all three of them with smiles that would, Clark said, “scare the Munsters.”
Scrambling to get down from Annie’s arms, Teddy knocked off a small black-and-white picture at the piano’s far edge. As the old Shih Tzu trotted indignantly onto her velvet poof and sighed a long sigh settling there, Annie picked up the photo. It was a picture she didn’t remember, of her dad and her, from their days on the road, shortly before he’d left her in Emerald. She had always divided her past between those blurred years of travel and the start of her “real life” when she had come to live at Pilgrim’s Rest. It was a jolt to see the old life—a professional snapshot taken in an elegant beachside restaurant—here in the Pilgrim’s Rest living room.
More startling, the picture