Free The Four Corners Of The Sky by Michael Malone

small key. A key to what, she had no idea, although it looked like a file cabinet or maybe a lawnmower key.
    For a long time, Annie stood there in the hall of the house, turning the letter in her hands, caught between rage and distress. A dozen helium
Happy Birthday!
balloons floated on the ceiling.
    Wet through, Clark and Sam returned from the yard, where they’d done what they could to protect their gardens from the storm—stake the hollyhocks, secure the cone protectors over the roses, wrap the peonies and shrubs and borders. Malpy shook rain at Teddy, who growled at him.
    Sam, running a towel through her short hair, watched Annie.
    Her niece held out the FedEx. “And this was it?”
    Sam dried her arms. “No…Well, yesterday Jack calls and tells me he’s dying and to give you this FedEx that was coming today…I guess I must have told him you always come home on your birthday.”
    “Good God, Sam, how much do you talk to Dad? According to this Sergeant Hart, he had my goddamn new cell-phone number written on the back of a photo.” Annie jerked loose her white Navy shirt.
    “Sit down, you’re upset,” Sam told her.
    “I sure am.”
    Sam looked defensive. “I don’t talk to him much. Not all that much. Lately twice a month, he calls.”
    “Twice a month?”
    “Lately. He just asks me how you are, then he hangs up.” Sam took Jack’s letter from her niece, studied it. “But yesterday, out of the blue, he calls, says how he’s really sick, asks me if you still fly the
King of the Sky
. Then today this FedEx comes. He says he’s dying, but well, you know Jack.”
    “Not very well.” Annie shrugged.
    “All I can hope is,” sighed Sam, “he’s lying. He usually is. That’s all I can hope.”
    “What’s the fraud they’re after him for?” asked Clark, returning downstairs in dry shorts and T-shirt.
    “False pretenses,” said Annie. “Ha-ha.”
    “And a Miami detective called you about it?”
    She summarized her conversation with the pleasant-voiced Detective Hart about the gold relic, the Queen of the Sea.
    Sam gave a sympathetic squeeze to her niece’s arm. “Cuba thinks Jack’s got something that’s real?”
    “Stupid Cuba,” Clark muttered. “Sam, you ought to change out of those wet clothes.”
    Sam hushed him. “Don’t be a doctor. The other thing is—this guy’s been calling all afternoon—”
    “Sergeant Hart?” asked Annie.
    “No. Rafael Rook. A weird-talking guy. He’s in Miami too. He says Jack’s really ‘going fast.’”
    Annie raised her eyebrow in a way she’d copied from old Claudette Colbert movies. “Jack was always going fast. With Jack, it was always the back of that leather flight jacket you were looking at. Dumps me for nearly twenty years and now a FedEx message he’s dying, lend him my plane, and rush him his flight jacket to St. Louis? I don’t think so.”[__] She unbuttoned her shirt, fanning herself. “I’m going to go put on some shorts. First it’s pouring rain, now the air’s dead. I’ll hurry.”
    “Everything will be okay,” said Clark, shaking his head, watching Annie race up the stairs two at a time. “No hurry.”
----
    When Annie thought of her father, it was always scenes of perpetual motion and precipitate change. A measureless highway of mildewed motels.
    It was not until she was flying jets for the Navy that memories of those road trips rushed out of the past at her as if they’d been waiting in the sky. The scenes were underscored with fragments of old songs.
    “Meet Me in St. Lou-ee, Lou-ee,” he’d sung to her when they’d gone to that city once and had almost gotten killed in a motel there.
    “Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby,” he’d sung in a white and gold hotel suite, marching in from the bathroom, carrying a cake with five sparkling candles, with a crowd of strangers in loud-colored clothes around her bed, laughing so loudly so close to her that she’d burst into tears.
    “La Bamba” he’d sung in the shiny