Keeper of the Light

  “How could you still care about Clint after what he did?” Alec interrupted her.

  “He really wasn’t part of it.”

  Alec glanced at her sharply. “What do you mean, he wasn’t part of it? He held you down while another man raped you.”

  “But he…”

  “You said he was only mildly retarded. Didn’t he know the difference between right and wrong?”

  “Yes, but… Paul used to say I should give him a chance to redeem himself, that he was just a kid then, and…”

  “No.” Alec squeezed her hand hard. “What happened was too big, too much to forgive, ever.”

  Olivia bit her lip. “Annie would never have turned her back on her brother,” she said, “no matter what had happened in the past.”

  “Annie did many asinine things in the name of charity.”

  “Clint needed me, though. Once I was on my feet, once I was established as a physician, I really should have tried to see him. Avery certainly didn’t know how to take care of him. My own mother didn’t know how. We lived in a sewer, Alec. You’d be sick if you could see where I lived, and I just left him there to rot.” She pulled her hand out of Alec’s and brushed her bangs off her forehead. “A couple of years ago, Ellen wrote to tell me she’d heard he had died. Most likely he was an alcoholic, like my mother. No one ever told him it could kill him. If I’d helped him, he’d probably still be alive.” She looked at Alec. “I deserted him.”

  “To survive. You had no damn choice.”

  She closed her eyes, trying to take in his words, to believe them. Then she sighed. “I could really use a rest room,” she said. She pulled down the visor to look in the mirror, groaning when she saw her face. Her nose was red; her mascara had run onto her cheeks in elongated gray triangles.

  “We’ll stop at the next gas station,” Alec said.

  He waited for her in the parking lot of the small gas station. He cleaned the windshield of the Bronco and took off his jacket and tie before getting behind the wheel again. There really was something radically wrong with his air conditioner.

  He could not scrape the image from his mind of Olivia’s brothers holding her down while the leviathan seventeen-year-old raped her. Only in his mind, it was his daughter he saw on that floor. Maybe Olivia had been right the night before when she’d said that Lacey should be reined in a little more. He had no idea where she was at night, who she was with. He was not being much more help to her than Olivia’s mother had been passed out on the couch.

  Olivia got back in the car, her face scrubbed clean of makeup. Her recent sunburn had all but disappeared, and she was once again anemically pale, her green eyes and dark lashes a dramatic contrast to the whiteness of her skin. She was still pretty, though. Perhaps even more so.

  “You okay?” he asked, as she buckled her seatbelt.

  She nodded. She was perspiring, her bangs damp across her forehead.

  “Why don’t you take off your jacket?”

  “I can’t. My skirt is pinned together.”

  He laughed, and it felt wickedly good—a sudden, welcome release—but Olivia didn’t smile. “Do you think I care?” he asked. “Take it off. It’s too damn hot in here.”

  He held the jacket while she leaned forward to slip her arms out of the sleeves. He folded it and set it on the back seat.

  “Better?” he asked, and she nodded. They were both quiet as he began driving again, and it was a few minutes before he realized she was crying, her face turned to the window, her sniffing practically silent. He pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road and turned off the ignition.

  “Olivia.” He undid her seatbelt as well as his own and pulled her into his arms. For a moment, she clung to him and he felt the dampness of her skin beneath her thin white blouse.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, when she could finally get the words out. She had pulled away from him slightly, her face lowered, the top of her head brushing his lips. He shut his eyes and rested his lips there, in the warm silk of her hair.

  “I haven’t talked about it for so long,” she said. “I haven’t even thought about it.” She looked up at him, tears glistening on her dark lower lashes. “Thank you for saying there was nothing I could have done about Clint. I’ve always thought I should have been able to rise above what happened to me somehow. Put the past aside and help him, but…”

  “But you knew you couldn’t do that and take care of your self at the same time.”

  She nodded. “God, I was lucky I was raped. It got me out of there.”

  “No,” he said. “You were not lucky. You would have found some other way out.”

  “I don’t know.” She let go of him, sitting back in her seat, her eyes closed. “It got me out of there, but it took such a toll.” She opened her eyes, and there was a faraway look in them as she stared out the window of the car. “It left me afraid of men and terrified of sex and feeling more worthless than I already felt.”

  Alec studied the steely edges of her profile. “You’ve over come all that, though, haven’t you?”

  She nodded. “Paul changed it for me. He was so incredibly patient.”

  Yes. He imagined Paul would be that way.

  Olivia smiled, that dreamlike look still in her eyes. “I was so nervous,” she said. “I’d gotten it in my mind that I didn’t heal properly after the rape, that I couldn’t let anyone casually touch me, or try to make love to me, because I didn’t know how I would react, physically or emotionally. Paul was the first person I met who I knew I could trust, who would bear with me. I wanted to make love so badly, but it still took about four or five nights for us to…complete the act. He’d get in a little further each time before I’d freeze up.” She blushed, red blotches forming quickly on her white cheeks, and looked over at him. “Am I embarrassing you, talking this way?”

  “No.” His voice was more of a whisper than he’d intended. “I like listening to you, and I need you to remind me about Paul, because sometimes when I’m with you I forget about him.”

  She held his eyes for a moment before continuing. “He’d write poetry,” she said. “Every day he’d show up with a new poem, chronicling our progress. Sometimes they’d be sweet and touching, others were metaphorical—a hunter with his spear closing in on his prey.” She laughed. “Finally we did it. I was twenty-seven years old and it was my first orgasm ever, and I’d had no idea it could be so…powerful.”

  “You came the first time you made love?” He knew the question was tactless the moment he’d blurted it out, but Olivia seemed unperturbed.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s pretty easy for me. I can’t not come.”

  “You’re lucky. Annie…” Alec hesitated, discovering he could not talk about this quite as openly as Olivia. “It was always hard for Annie,” he said, “though I figured out after a while that she just didn’t care. Sex didn’t mean much to her. She only wanted to feel close, to feel cared about. She said being close was the medicine she needed to feel good, and sex was just a side effect.”

  Olivia frowned. “All those years you were married to her, you had to put your sexual feelings on hold?”

  “No. You forget I was married to the world’s most generous woman. I never went without.” He had a sudden stab of guilt for talking about Annie so candidly. “Whew,” he smiled weakly. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

  Olivia returned his smile. She stretched her arms out in front of her and sighed. “How about dinner?” she asked. “I’m starving, and I could use the air conditioning.”

  They stopped for dinner, switching to the safe topic of the lighthouse and their respective speaking engagements. Back in the Bronco, Olivia fell asleep, her head cradled between the seat back and the window. He woke her as they crossed over the bridge into Kitty Hawk. The sunset was too beautiful to miss, the sky surrounding them with purple and gold. They rolled down their windows to let the Bronco fill with the damp evening air and the scent of the sound. Olivia undid her seatbel
t and turned around, getting to her knees to look out the rear window. There was a skewer-thin run in her stocking where it covered her calf, and her blouse puckered above the safety-pinned waistband of her skirt in a way that touched him, that made him reach over to lightly run the back of his fingers over her hair.

  She sat down again as they drove into Kitty Hawk, and Alec turned onto Croatan Highway in the direction of her house.

  “Will you be all right alone tonight?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She reached into her purse for her keys. “As soon as you woke me up and I got a whiff of Outer Banks air, I felt better.” She leaned her head back against the seat and looked over at him. “Even though I only have one friend here—namely, you—it feels like home.”

  Alec smiled at her. Then, on an impulse, he made a U-turn at the next intersection.

  “What are you doing?” Olivia asked.

  “I’m taking you someplace. You’ve earned the right to see it.”

  “The lighthouse!” she said as he took the right turn off the highway toward Kiss River.

  The road leading out to the lighthouse was dark, the trees forming a green-gray tunnel for the Bronco. Alec pulled into the small parking lot, surrounded on all sides by shadowy bayberry bushes. Night had fallen quickly over Kiss River, and the beacon was already on. It flashed as they got out of the Bronco, illuminating Olivia’s white, awestruck face.

  “It’s spooky out here,” she said. The keeper’s house was dark, and no one was in sight as they walked across the field of sea oats, Olivia craning her neck to look up at the light. “Two hundred and ten feet is taller than I’d imagined.”

  Alec held up one of the keys on his key ring. “I’m not supposed to have this,” he said. “Mary Poor gave it to Annie years ago.” He opened the door and stepped into the dark hallway, feeling on the wall for the light switch.

  “Oh, my God,” Olivia said as light filled the hall and illuminated the circular staircase. She walked forward and looked up. “Two hundred and seventy steps.”

  “They’ll probably be better to manage with your heels off.” He waited for her to slip off her shoes before he started up the stairs. “You don’t have a problem with vertigo, do you?” His voice echoed off the sloping, white brick walls.

  Olivia looked straight up at the eerily lit circles of stairs above her. “I guess I’ll find out,” she said.

  They stopped at the third landing for Olivia to catch her breath. From the narrow window they could just make out the outline of the keeper’s house, asleep in the darkness.

  The circle of stairs grew tighter and he could hear Olivia’s breathing as well as his own. “We’re almost there,” he said.

  They had reached the narrow landing, and he unlocked the door to the gallery, stepping back to let Olivia out first.

  “It’s extraordinary,” she said as a warm wind swept across their faces. She looked up. “Look how close we are to the stars. Oh.” She started as the lens directly above them flashed its light over their heads, and Alec laughed.

  He leaned his elbows on the railing and looked out at the ocean. The moon lit up the water, and the waves looked like glittering strips of silver rushing toward the shore.

  “Once I locked Annie and myself up here for the night,” Alec said. “I dropped the key to this door over the railing.”

  “Intentionally?”

  “Yes.” It seemed unbelievable that he’d once had such a spontaneous idea of fun. “We couldn’t get down until morning, when Mary Poor let us out.” He smiled at the memory and felt suddenly close to Annie. If Olivia were not here, he would talk to her.

  Olivia leaned on the railing next to him. “Thanks for this,” she said. “For letting me come up here. I know you think of the lighthouse as yours and Annie’s.”

  He nodded, acknowledging the truth in her statement. “You’re welcome.”

  They watched the lights of the boats slip across the horizon for a while longer. Then Alec filled his lungs one last time with salt air. “You ready to go down?” he asked.

  Olivia nodded and stepped back through the door to the landing, but something on the ground caught Alec’s eyes. “Just a sec,” he said. He walked around to the sound side of the gallery and gripped the cool iron railing in his hands as he stared into the darkness between the keeper’s house and the woods. The flash of light cut a path between him and the ground, and in that clear white light he saw a bulldozer standing next to two fresh, deep scars in the earth.

  He walked Olivia to her front door. He held one arm out to her, and she stepped into his hug. He softly kissed her temple.

  “Thanks for your help today,” he said.

  She took a step away from him and smiled. “Thank you for yours. It was a little more than you bargained for.” She unlocked her door, then turned to face him again. “You don’t have to call me tonight, Alec.”

  “Are you saying you’ve had enough of me for one day?”

  “No.” She hesitated for a moment. “It’s just that I feel very close to you today, and I’m not so sure that’s good.”

  His heart did a little flip before he thought of Annie. Will you wait a year?

  He nodded. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then.”

  His house was empty when he got home. He heated a slice of frozen pizza in the microwave and sat down at the kitchen table to eat it, that morning’s Beach Gazette spread out in front of him. There, in the upper right-hand corner of the front page, was a picture of Annie. Alec set the pizza down and lifted the paper. The headline was bold, the letters enormous: K.D.H. EMERGENCY ROOM ACCUSED OF COVER-UP IN O’NEILL DEATH. He read through the article twice, the muscles in his hands contracting into fists. Then he picked up his car keys and stormed out of the house.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Olivia was relieved to get out of her suit and stockings and into the shower, where she scrubbed away the more painful remnants of the day. Then she put on her robe, poured herself a cup of tea, and sat down at the kitchen table with the pieces of stained glass she had cut at the studio the week before. She was wrapping the smoothed edges of the glass with copper foil when there was a knock at her front door. She looked up, startled by the anger in the sound.

  She set down the piece of glass she’d been working on and walked into the living room. The room was dark, just a dim pool of light spilling across the carpet from the kitchen. She walked quietly to the window nearest the door, where she peered out to see Alec standing in the porch light. He was dressed in white shorts and a navy blue T-shirt, and he was raising his fist to knock again.

  She tightened the sash of her robe and opened the door. “Alec?”

  He walked into the living room and thrust a copy of the Gazette in front of her.

  “Have you seen this?” he asked. He was angry, and she stepped away from him, away from the unfamiliar flame in his eyes.

  She took the paper, raising it into the stream of light from the kitchen, and read the headline: K.D.H. EMERGENCY ROOM ACCUSED OF COVER-UP IN O’NEILL DEATH.

  She frowned at him. “A cover-up?” she said. “I don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, Alec.”

  He pulled the paper from her hands. “It seems as though you left out a few details when you told me what happened the night Annie was brought to the ER.” He spoke with a controlled sort of calm, yet she could hear anger behind the words.

  She pulled her robe more snugly around her, remembering the messages from the reporter on her answering machine the night before. She was afraid she did know what lay below that headline. There certainly had been no “cover-up” of Annie’s treatment in the ER, but everyone involved had known better than to discuss the case publicly. There were people—including some of the ER staff—who thought her attempt to save Annie had been preposterous. Reckless. Alec knew enough about medicine that, with the facts presented to him by someone other than herself, he might draw a similar conclusion.

  Right now, he had the same accusatory look in his eyes that he w
ore in that photograph in Annie’s studio, and she wished there was a way to change that, to bring back his smile. She was about to lose something that had become precious to her. Alec’s friendship. His trust.

  “Shall I read it to you?” he asked, and he began reading without waiting for her reply. “Olivia Simon, one of the Kill Devil Hills Emergency Room physicians vying for the position of medical director, was involved in a cover-up in the death of one of the Outer Banks’ most beloved citizens, Annie Chase O’Neill. So states Dr. Jonathan Cramer, another emergency room physician who is also in the running for the director’s position. ‘Dr. Simon has made serious mistakes in judgment,’ Cramer said yesterday. ‘She often acts as though she owns the emergency room.’ He cited in particular the O’Neill case. Ms. O’Neill was shot last Christmas while working as a volunteer at the Manteo Battered Women’s Shelter. Cramer stated that, ‘in that type of case, usual procedure is to stabilize the patient and send them by helicopter up to Emerson Memorial, where they have the facilities to deal with severe trauma. We can’t handle that sort of thing here. I argued that we should prepare the patient for transport, but Dr. Simon insisted we treat her in the ER. Annie O’Neill didn’t stand a chance.’”

  “Oh, Alec, that’s crazy,” Olivia said, but Alec continued reading, and Olivia knew this one article was enough to kill any chance she’d had at the directorship position.

  “Dr. Simon worked in the emergency room of Washington General in the District of Columbia for ten years prior to coming here. ‘She’s used to the heavy stuff in D.C.,’ Cramer said. ‘She doesn’t understand the limitations of a small facility like this.’

  “Michael Shelley, current director of the free-standing emergency room, denied any cover-up and said the entire case was being blown out of proportion. Dr. Simon could not be reached for comment.