Keeper of the Light

  “Do you understand what Dr. Simon is saying?” Kevin asked.

  The man stared at her. “Are you saying Annie’s dead?”

  Olivia nodded. “I’m sorry. We worked on her for over an hour but there was…”

  “No!” The girl threw herself at Olivia, knocking her into the wooden arm of one of the chairs. She flailed at her with closed fists, but Kevin wrapped his arms around her from behind before she could cause any real harm. “She can’t be dead!” the girl screamed. “There wasn’t any blood.”

  Alec O’Neill extracted the girl from Kevin’s grip and pulled her into a hug. “Shh, Lacey.”

  Olivia regained her balance and set a hand on the girl’s back. How did she know about the blood? “She was bleeding inside, honey,” Olivia said.

  The girl pushed Olivia’s arm away. “Don’t call me honey.”

  Alec O’Neill pulled Lacey closer to him and she began to weep against his chest. Olivia looked at Kevin. She felt helpless.

  “I’ll stay with them,” Kevin said.

  Olivia walked to the door but turned back to face the family once more. “If you have any questions, please call me.”

  Alec O’Neill looked across the room at her and Olivia stood fast, forcing herself to face the hurt in his eyes. She’d taken something from him. She needed to give him something back.

  “She was very beautiful,” she said.

  Jonathan and the helicopter pilot were standing in the hallway, and she had to pass them to get to her office.

  “Nice job,” Jonathan said, his tone mocking.

  She ignored him and walked into her office, where she cranked open her windows to let in the cold air. The snow was still falling, so silently that when she held her breath she could hear the thunder of the ocean two blocks away.

  After a while, Kevin poked his head in her door. “You okay, Olivia?”

  She turned away from the window, sat down behind her desk. “Yes. How’s her family?”

  Kevin stepped into the room. “Dad and the son went in to see her,” he said as he sat down across the desk from her. “Daughter didn’t want to. I think they’ll be okay. Pretty solid family. Mom was the hub, though, you know, so it’s hard to say.” He shook his head. “Life sucks sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Looks like this one was pretty rough on you.”

  She felt a tear hit her cheek and Kevin plucked a tissue from the box on her desk and handed it to her.

  “Cramer’s an asshole,” he said.

  “I’m all right.” She sat up straight, blew her nose. “So, do you ever have to comfort Jonathan or Mike? Hand them tissues?”

  Kevin smiled. “You think women have exclusive rights on feeling like shit?”

  She thought of Alec O’Neill’s eyes when she’d left the waiting room. Those eyes were going to haunt her for a long time. “No, I guess not,” she said. “Thanks for stopping in, Kevin.”

  It was after seven. Her shift was long over. She could leave now, anytime she wanted. She would drive to her house on the sound where she would have to tell Paul what had happened tonight, and for the second time that night she would watch a man crumble. What was it about Annie O’Neill?

  Olivia looked down at her hand where it rested in her lap. She turned it palm side up and thought she could still feel it—the life, the warmth of Annie’s heart.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Paul Macelli turned off the Christmas tree lights at seven forty-five and returned to the dining room table, where the turkey, the sweet potatoes, the green beans had grown cold. The gravy had formed a skin and he dabbed at it with his knife, watching the pale brown film coat the silver. He’d lit candles, poured wine. He was trying, wasn’t he? But damn Olivia. She gave his anger justification at every turn. Her work was more important than her marriage. Even on Christmas she couldn’t get out of the emergency room on time.

  He looked up at the darkened tree. He probably wouldn’t have bothered with one this year, but Olivia had bought it on her own a week earlier, a mountainous blue pine that she set up herself in front of the window facing Roanoke Sound. She decorated it with the ornaments they’d collected over the nine years of their marriage and strung it with tiny white lights. Last year he had dropped the crystal star they’d always put on top, and so, he thought nobly, it was up to him to find a replacement. He knew exactly what he wanted, had seen it weeks earlier in Annie’s studio. He’d been excited by the prospect of having a legitimate reason to go back, a legitimate reason to see her and feel himself surrounded by her stained glass and photographs. But she hadn’t been there on that particular morning, and he struggled to mask his disappointment as Tom Nestor, the ponytailed artist who shared her studio, wrapped the ornament in tissue paper for him.

  “I feel bad charging you for this,” Tom said. “Annie’d probably just give it to you.”

  Paul had smiled. “Annie would give everything away if she could,” he said, and Tom smiled back, as though they shared a secret, as though they both had the privilege of knowing Annie’s true nature.

  He’d brought the ornament home and set it on top of the pine. It was a stylized stained glass angel in an oval frame with a light behind it. The angel’s silver-white robe had that look of liquid silk that was Annie’s trademark. How she was able to do that in glass he would never understand.

  The first time Olivia saw the angel, her face paled and a look of utter defeat came into her eyes.

  “Do you mind?” he’d asked her.

  “Of course not,” she said, with a truly admirable attempt at sincerity. “It’s lovely.”

  He heard Olivia’s car pull into the garage, directly below the dining room table. Paul felt the scowl grow on his face as the engine sputtered to a stop, and in a moment Olivia came in the front door, pulling her gray scarf from her neck. She glanced into the dining room and shook her head quickly, as if to rid her sleek brown hair of the clingy snowflakes.

  “Hi,” she said quietly. She took off her coat and hung it in the closet by the front door.

  Paul slouched in his chair and let his scowl speak for him, not liking himself much at that moment.

  “Why don’t you have the lights on?” Olivia asked. She hit the wall switch and Annie’s angel sprang to life, the silvery robe seeming to swirl in the glass.

  He didn’t answer, and Olivia moved to the table and sat down across from him. Sylvie, their gray Persian cat, leaped softly to her lap. “I’m sorry to be so late,” Olivia said, her white hands absently stroking Sylvie’s back. “We had a terrible case come in.”

  “Everything’s cold.”

  She glanced at the food, then back at him. Her eyes were beautiful. Green. Dark-lashed. A striking contrast to her white skin. “Paul,” she said, “the case that came in—it was Annie O’Neill.”

  He drew himself up straight in the chair. “What?” he said. “Why?”

  “She was working at the women’s shelter in Manteo tonight and she got in the middle of some gunfire.”

  “Is she all right?”

  Olivia shook her head. “I’m sorry, Paul. She died.”

  He stood up so quickly she jumped, and the silverware shivered on the table. “Is this some kind of sick joke?” he asked, although he knew Olivia was not the type for jokes, sick or otherwise.

  “The bullet went straight through her heart.”

  The glowing angel taunted him from high above Olivia’s head. “Please tell me you’re lying. Please, Olivia.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She was so calm. So cool. He hated her just then. “Excuse me,” he said. He turned and started up the stairs, Olivia close on his heels. He pulled his suitcase from the hall closet and carried it into their bedroom, where he tossed it on the bed. Olivia hung back in the doorway as he pulled some of the neatly pressed clothes from his closet and threw them into the suitcase still on their hangers.

  “What are you doing?” Olivia asked.

  “I have to get out of here.” He
felt trapped by her voice, by her presence. She could never understand.

  “Paul.” She took a step toward him and then seemed to think better of it, retreating once more to the doorway, gripping the jamb with her fingers. “This is crazy, Paul. You barely knew her. You were infatuated with her. That was your own word, remember? You said it was one-sided, that she was happily married. I met her husband tonight. I had to tell him…”

  Paul leaned toward her. “Shut up,” he said. She took a step back into the hall and he knew he had scared her. He was scaring himself. This was a new and alien Paul Macelli, not the person he’d been for the past thirty-nine years.

  Olivia clasped her hands in front of her, the fingers of her right hand playing with the diamond-studded wedding ring on her left. When she spoke this time, her voice was small. “You can talk about her if you like. I know I said I didn’t want to hear it anymore, but this is different. I’ll listen. Just please don’t leave, Paul. Please.” Her voice cracked and he winced. He wanted to put his hands over his ears to shut her out.

  He stepped into the bathroom and gathered up his toothbrush, his razor, the case for his eyeglasses. He walked back into the bedroom and dumped them on top of the clothes in the suitcase and zipped it closed. Then he looked up at Olivia. Her lips and cheeks were still red from the cold, her eyes blurry behind tears he had no desire to watch her spill. He looked past her, into the hall where he could see the faint light from the tree downstairs.

  “I’m sorry, Olivia.” He pushed past her, moving as quickly as he could, letting his shoes pound the hardwood stairs so he would not be able to hear her if she cried.

  He was usually cautious on the road, but tonight he drove recklessly. The few other cars on the long wide highway that ran the length of the Outer Banks crept along the slick road, but he bore down on the gas pedal of the gray Honda, feeling the car slip out of his control over and over again and not caring. He didn’t even slow down when he passed Annie’s studio in Kill Devil Hills, although he did look over. Sometimes the lights inside the studio would be on at night, creating a vivid montage of stained glass in the front windows. Tonight, though, the glass walls in the front of the building were black and opaque-looking, like pieces of slate.

  The snow silently battered his windshield, and he nearly missed the turn into the parking lot of the Beach Gazette. There was one other car—a blue station wagon—in the lot, and he wasn’t surprised to see it. Gabe Forrester, the Gazette’s police reporter, was already here, probably delighted to have a meaty story to liven up his job.

  Paul didn’t bother to stop in his own office before knocking on Gabe’s door. Gabe was just getting off the phone. “Macelli!” he said. “You look like hell, fella. What are you doing here this time of night?”

  “I heard about that murder over in Manteo and thought maybe I could help you out. Do a color piece on her.” He tensed, hoping that Gabe would look puzzled and tell him he had no idea what he was talking about. Maybe Olivia had made it up after all.

  “Yeah, a big one.” Gabe leaned back in his chair, his broad, square face sober. “Annie O’Neill. You probably don’t know her, being new here and all.”

  “I did a story on her in Seascape.”

  “That’s right. Well, you’re the perfect fella for the color stuff then, I guess.” He shook his head with a rueful smile. “She was one of a kind, I’ll say that. I have to call my wife to tell her and I keep putting it off. There’ll be one of the biggest funerals you’ve ever seen around here.” Gabe looked out the window. The snow was slowing down, the flakes small specks of glitter beneath the streetlight. “I don’t know how I’m gonna break it to my kids,” Gabe continued. “She was Jane’s softball coach last year and Jimmy’s den mother years ago. Crazy lady. Good heart, but a little wacky.” He pursed his thin lips, flattened his palms on the top of his desk. “Poor Alec. Do you know her husband, the vet over at the animal hospital in Kill Devil Hills?”

  Paul shook his head and sat down across the desk from Gabe because his knees were giving out. He rested his hands on his lap. “How did it happen?” he asked.

  Gabe sighed. “She was serving food to the women and kids over at that Battered Women’s Shelter in Manteo when this guy—” Gabe lifted a notepad from his desk and read the name “—Zachary Pointer, came in and started threatening his wife. He had a gun and he was aiming it at her, talking about how it was Christmas, how could she keep the kids from him on Christmas, et cetera, et cetera. Annie stepped between them to protect the wife. She talked to the guy, you know, trying to reason with him, and the bastard fired. That was Annie for you. It happened just that fast.” Gabe snapped his fingers. “Pointer’s in custody. Hope they fry him.”

  Paul shivered inside his coat. He worked at keeping his face calm and unreadable. “I’d better get started on the article,” he said, standing up. At Gabe’s door, he turned back. “Uh, are you going to be talking to the family?”

  “I was planning on it. You want that part?”

  “No, no. I was going to say, it’s probably best if just one of us does it. You know, not make them go through it twice. So I’ll let you handle that, okay?” There was no way he could talk to Alec O’Neill. He’d never met him, never wanted to meet the man Annie slept with night after night, although he had seen him a few times. The last time had been at Annie’s studio. Paul had pretended to be absorbed in the stained glass when Alec walked in for a word with his wife. There was a mirror in the piece Paul was looking at, and in it he watched Annie and Alec speak to one another, their backs to Paul, their voices soft, intent, their heads together. As Alec started to leave, Annie slipped her hand to the seat of his jeans, and Alec kissed her temple. Paul had shut his eyes, trying to block that display of intimacy from his mind. No, he could not talk with Alec O’Neill.

  He stopped in the file room and pulled the thick folder on Annie. He was familiar with it, having looked through it numerous times while he was writing the freelance article about her for Seascape. He carried the folder into his office and settled down at his desk, not bothering to take off his coat.

  There were dozens of articles. Annie as community leader. Annie as stained glass artist. As photographer. As president of the Animal Welfare League. Many of the articles referred to her as Saint Anne, a nickname that had made her giggle. The oldest article, nearly brown with age, was from 1975. The headline read: Artist Heads Fight to Save Keeper from Eviction. Ah, yes. Annie’s first claim to fame in the Outer Banks. Paul spread the article flat on his desk and scanned it. In 1975, the Park Service had planned to take over operation of the Kiss River Lighthouse site. They wanted to use half of the keeper’s house as their headquarters, the other half as a museum of sorts for the tourists. Annie had met old Mary Poor, the keeper who was then in her seventies and who had lived in the house most of her life. Annie thought the eviction was an incredible injustice. She gathered public support for Mary’s cause and the Park Service relented, allowing the old woman to retain one half of the large keeper’s house for her own use.

  There was a picture of Annie with the article that, for a moment, made the muscles in Paul’s chest contract to the point of pain. He stared hard at the picture, then closed his eyes. An infatuation. Go to hell, Olivia.

  He’d been told by the editor of the Gazette that he wrote in an “overly emotional” style, a complaint he’d also heard during his years on the Washington Post. How he would avoid that in writing Annie’s color piece, he didn’t know. “You could romanticize a flu epidemic,” the Post editor once told him. “Forget you’re a poet when you walk through your office door.”

  Paul spent the next hour putting together the bare bones of the article on Annie and then made a list of who he would interview in the morning. Tom Nestor, of course, and the director of the Battered Women’s Shelter. He jotted down a few more names. He had time. The Gazette was only published three times a week. This issue wouldn’t be out until the day after tomorrow.

  He left his office and got bac
k in his car. The suitcase taunted him from the back seat. So, where are we going now, huh, Paul? He knew a few places he could find a room, but that could wait. He pulled onto Croatan Highway again and started driving north, turning off after a couple of miles into the parking lot near Jockey’s Ridge. He got out of his car and began walking through the sand toward the enormous dunes. The snow had stopped while he’d been in his office, and now the sky was cloudless and alive with stars. The dunes quickly surrounded him on all sides, like an eerie moonscape, and he relished the quiet, the solitude. His heavy breathing was the only sound as he hiked up the slope of the largest, snow-dusted dune, swinging his arms back and forth to stay warm. His breath fogged up his glasses, and he took them off to finish the climb.

  The muscles in his thighs were stiff by the time he reached the summit. He slipped his glasses back on and turned to face north. A bitter cold wind blew stinging particles of sand against his cheeks, and he rammed his ungloved hands deep into his coat pockets. He was above everything here. He studied the horizon, waiting.

  Yes. There it was. The pinpoint of light. It disappeared, and he counted. One, one-hundred, two, one-hundred, three, one-hundred, four, one-hundred. There it was again. The Kiss River Lighthouse. He watched the light glow and vanish in the distance, setting its languorous, hypnotic pace. A clear white light. Annie had told him during one of the interviews that she saw no point to clear, uncolored glass. “It’s like being alive without being in love,” she’d said, and then she’d told him about her fantasy of putting stained glass in the windows of the Kiss River Lighthouse.

  “Women,” she’d said, “in long, flowing gowns. Roses, mauves. Icy blues.”

  He hadn’t written any of that in the Seascape article. There were many things she’d said to him that he’d kept entirely for himself.

  A gust of cold air tore through his coat and stung his eyes.