The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [50]
Annie took the photo out of its frame. On the back in her father’s handwriting was scrawled, “Annie and Jack, The Breakers, Palm Beach.” They had been celebrating her seventh birthday a few weeks ahead of the event, for the picture was dated June 1982. So from here they must have driven to St. Louis and then east to Emerald, where on July Fourth he’d given her away to Sam and Clark.
Palm Beach and Miami. The Hotel Dorado on the letterhead of the folded note in Jack’s flight jacket was in Miami. The convalescent home Golden Days was in Miami too. The detective Hart and the peculiar Rafael Rook had also both called her from Miami.
Miami. What had her father and she been doing there? Life at The Breakers looked affluent and happy. At what joke of her father’s was she laughing? Why had they left Miami and driven suddenly to St. Louis and then just as suddenly come east to Emerald?
There had been earlier birthday celebrations of Annie’s that had ended in tears. Her dad had often joked about her crying at her parties. He’d recounted how on her fifth birthday, she’d run out of her hotel bedroom wailing, “Be quiet!” at a drunken, startled crowd of his friends. How, on her third birthday, beside some motel swimming pool in the moonlight, she’d screamed at a friend of her father’s to stop swinging a stick at a big piñata hanging from a palm tree. But the man had whacked the Mexican paper donkey anyhow until it broke in two and the other adults had laughed although Annie had kicked at their legs to make them stop.
On that occasion, her father had picked her up, rocking her back and forth, laughing, showing her how the piñata donkey was made to be broken, how it held a broken clay pot of candies and trinkets. She had been inconsolable.
But in this photograph of a celebration of her seventh birthday at The Breakers, Annie’s head was tilted with laughter. She studied this child, who wore a small pendant with her velvet dress, recalling that her father had given her that tiny ruby the year before but had then taken it back, “just borrowing it,” he’d said. Presumably he’d sold it. The thought occurred to her now that when he’d shown up running through the cornfield into Pilgrim’s Rest on that strange hot summer day, when he’d given Sam the raw ruby for Annie’s seventeenth birthday, he’d done so in order to make up for the pendant that he’d “borrowed” ten years earlier.
“Happy birthday, have a good life,” Annie said aloud to the happy child in the picture. She slid it back into its frame and returned it to the piano.
Looking up, she saw her aunt and uncle in the hall watching her; holding chopsticks; they were eating together from a large platter of spicy tuna rolls. With the now sagging helium multicolored balloons settled around their feet, they looked as if they were standing in a rainbow.
Sam came over and blew out the kerosene lantern on the mantel.
“I told you this was a twister,” Clark said, swiping at the smoky air.
“If you tell me one more time, I’m going to clobber you,” Sam warned him.
Annie showed them the Palm Beach picture. “I don’t remember this being here.”
Sam explained that it had come out of Annie’s suitcase. “It was in there when you arrived, along with twelve thousand dollars cash and your birth certificate. Wrapped in a velvet dress. A few years ago I came across it and put it in a frame.”
Annie said she had