The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [51]
“Your dad lived in Miami off and on,” Sam said, studying the picture. “He called me once from The Breakers, maybe a couple of years ago and said he’d just been remembering how the two of you had stayed there on your birthday.”
Annie pointed at the photograph. “See this menu on the table? Dad bet a guy a hundred dollars he could show me a page of this menu for fifteen seconds and that then I could repeat it word for word, including the prices…I was scared I would get it wrong.” She moved away from the piano. She didn’t want to remember how hard she’d tried to impress her father; the pleasure she’d taken in his laughter; how, with big pieces of pastel chalk, she would painstakingly, accurately write down the numbers of cars’ license plates on the asphalt of motel parking spaces after the cars had driven off; how she’d correctly identify all the cards in the discard pile of poker games. She’d done it for his praise. “He was grooming me to count cards for him. He always wanted us to go to Vegas. At least I didn’t end up working for criminals.”
“Really?” Sam picked up her niece’s U.S. Navy officer’s cap from the couch, flicked the brim skeptically.
“Don’t start. Where’s that birth certificate that said Claudette Colbert was my mother? Could you find that?”
“I could find the straw from your first milk carton. Probably in the same suitcase as that jacket of your dad’s, up there in the attic.”
Annie said her real question was why should Jack Peregrine, for whom only the future had ever felt real, now want her to bring him so many pieces of the past?
Clark took off his glasses as if to make sure they were the ones he’d been wearing for years. “My real question is, why are you doing it?”
In the hall, Annie opened the front door and looked up at the black sky. “D. K. won’t clear me if it’s not safe.”
Sam sighed. “Could we remember that D. K. crashed his plane into the China Sea?”
“That was in broad daylight,” Clark said. “Look on the bright side.”
Chapter 15
The Aviator
Annie phoned D. K. again about the King of the Sky, which he still garaged for her at Destin Airworks. He had checked out the plane and needed to do a little more work on the engine. Give him an hour.
She checked through the Pilgrim’s Rest kitchen cabinets while she tried to reach Hotel Dorado in Miami. The usual jar of candied papaya pieces that nobody wanted sat on the top shelf. The bag of Snickers bars was hidden where Clark always hid candy from himself, behind the big cobwebby cans of pureed pumpkin that every Thanksgiving Sam planned to make into pies but never did.
No Jack Peregrine was registered at Hotel Dorado.
She called the number on the letterhead for Golden Days. A woman answered in a bright southern voice. “G.D., may I help you?” The woman sounded bizarrely like Annie’s ex-mother-in-law Mama Spring Hopper, who had always cursed in abbreviations. But “G.D.” proved to be short for Golden Days, an extended-care home. The receptionist conceded cheerfully that most of their patients were “pretty terminal,” but declined to provide details about how they’d gotten that way. She did admit that as far as she could tell from her “guest book,” they had never had any “residents” named Jack Peregrine, after which she cheerfully clicked off.
Annie arranged dried fruit into geometric patterns on the kitchen table while trying to reach Trevor. When he finally called back, he reported that he’d discovered a few things about her dad: an agent friend had found eleven charges against John Ingersoll Peregrine, with three convictions, a total of twenty-five months served, half-a-dozen aliases. There were three outstanding felony warrants in two states. Also Florida reported an APS for a recent jailbreak. The charges were consistent with Annie’s description of her father as a “swindler” and included a variety of white-collar fraud crimes, including