The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [75]
But Sam Peregrine had always had a good eye. Good enough to win the state championship in her division in competitive tennis singles for six years running and to make it to the finals last year against opponents half her age. Still good enough to spot an intact 1922 print of Murnau’s Nosferatu in a tin can at a Paris flea market last autumn. Still good enough to see that the “glass” beads spelling the five letters of Annie’s name on the pink baseball cap, the cap that Jack had always oddly insisted that Annie “hang onto,” were not glass beads at all: they were precious stones.
Those beads, mounted in bezel-rimmed settings of cheap brass, were in fact, in Sam’s opinion, ten rubies, fifteen sapphires, seven diamonds, and five emeralds, all of very high quality and each approximately 6.5 millimeters in diameter, or three carats in size.
And here, thought Sam, Clark and Annie had always given her such grief about never throwing anything away.
Chapter 23
Family Honeymoon
Annie was more than an hour west of the small Kentucky airfield where she’d refueled. She was thinking about the odd peacefulness she felt with Sam and Clark at Pilgrim’s Rest. From her childhood, there had been the part of Jack Peregrine in her that was relentlessly unsettled, like a craving for salt she couldn’t satisfy. But that restlessness eased when she came home to the tall house where she’d lived as a child. At Pilgrim’s Rest she could look out over the land and wait for the reddening of the sky and the sound of Clark and Sam’s voices as they pushed together in the porch swing at dusk. They were in her memory—though she knew them now to be far more complicated—like the clear figures in an old-fashioned snow globe of America that had somehow survived on this small hill in this small town. Here at Pilgrim’s Rest she could wait for the breeze to lift the air, for Teddy’s old arthritic sigh, for what in the moment let her feel easy, when her shoulders, her neck, her hands, everything loosened, because she was home.
But she never stayed long. She was her father’s daughter and needed to move. Pilgrim’s Rest was too fenced in. Her first remembrance of the place was its borders: the white gateposts, the red barn doors, the corners of the blue-sky puzzle, the square picture that she’d painted on the barn wall for Clark. And the vast open world outside the fences pulled her to the horizon.
As an adult it was only in the fast world of the sky that she found the ease she’d once felt at home with Sam and Clark, Georgette and D. K. Maybe, she thought, this trip to St. Louis could somehow help her bridge horizons and borders. Maybe her father would ask for her forgiveness for old injuries she’d almost forgotten; he would tell her how to reach a mother she hadn’t much thought about for a long time. And when that happened, Annie’s sinews would untighten for good, all the restlessness would still.
Or maybe not.
Who knew what Jack Peregrine would tell her, or whether it would be true? How much could she trust a man who made his living by telling lies? Would he now, even on his deathbed, if he were on his deathbed, tell her the truth about anything?
Annie gave the little white Maltese a pat, awakening him. “It’s a good thing I’m going to St. Louis,” she said. He looked at her sleepily. “Okay, Malpy, here’s where you say, ‘You’re absolutely right.’” The dog barked in a cooperative manner.
There was a faint, almost imperceptible catch in the Piper’s engine before its steady humming resumed. Some pilots might not have noticed but Annie had unusually acute hearing. At medical checkups in Annapolis, she had always scored in the top one percentile on auditory tests, as well as tests of her vision, reflexes, and coordination; it was why she