Keeper of the Light Read online

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Olivia bought a strawberry ice cream cone at the deli and sat on a bench across the street from the cedar-sided building that housed Annie’s studio. The front wall of the building was composed of ten large windows. She could see that stained glass panels hung inside them, but from her seat directly under the midday sun, she could not make out their shapes or designs.

  She’d done this one other time, sat on this bench and stared at the studio. It was just a month or so after Paul started talking about Annie, back when she was alive. Already Annie had assumed a larger-than-life dimension in Olivia’s mind, and she’d sat here hoping for a glimpse of the woman that never came. She’d lacked the courage to go inside the studio. She couldn’t be certain of her reactions if she came face to face with her. Paul was very bright, very attractive. If he were trying to seduce Annie, it could only be a matter of time until she gave in. Olivia imagined letting Annie see her, get to know her. If the woman had a shred of decency, she wouldn’t want to hurt her.

  Her reasons for sitting on this bench today were different. Now she just wanted to understand the pull Annie’d had over Paul. She already felt herself changing. She was beginning to enjoy her volunteer work at the shelter, although she had never simply given her skills away before. Her medical training had always included an unspoken focus on pulling in a hefty income.

  At first she had found the work at the shelter painful. She’d take the stories of the shelter residents home with her and lie sleepless in her bed, the tired faces of the women filling the empty darkness of her bedroom. The plight of those women and their children opened old wounds in Olivia she thought had healed long ago. She understood too well how it felt to be a victim, how it felt to be poor and desperate, and she had to continually remind herself that she was strong now. She was skilled. The consummate professional, Paul had once said of her, and she’d thought at the time that he’d meant it as a compliment. Still, seeing the hungry, battered children at the shelter triggered memories of snowy winters spent with one pair of thin-soled shoes, or meals of canned beans and a single hot dog, to be split between herself and her brothers, Clint and Avery.

  She swallowed the last of her ice cream cone and stood up. The beach traffic was heavier now that some schools were out for the summer, and she crossed the street carefully. She was cautious these days, aware that every move she made affected the tiny life forming inside her as well as her own.

  The small wooden sign next to the door read simply, STAINED GLASS AND PHOTOGRAPHY. She stepped inside, closing the door behind her and shutting out the street sounds. It took her a moment to adjust to the quiet, cool, multicolored beauty of the room. A man sat at a broad work table directly in front of her and he looked up when she walked in. Smoke curled in the air above him as he stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray on the table. He was a large man, with hair the color of shredded wheat tied back in a ponytail, and a ragged mustache above generous lips. His thick hand held some sort of tool, and he raised it from the piece of glass on which he was working.

  “Let me know if you have any questions.” His voice was deep, raspy.

  Olivia nodded, and walked to the right, away from his eyes. She was moving in slow motion, it seemed. She felt drugged, hypnotized, by the sunlit colors on either side of her. The studio was small and high-ceilinged, and the glass walls in the front and back were covered from floor to ceiling with stained glass panels in all sizes. Overwhelming. At first she could barely separate one piece from the next, but then her eye was drawn to a long panel, perhaps five feet by two, of a woman in Victorian garb. Her white dress seemed to flow and sway on the glass, and Olivia was reminded of the small angel Paul had bought for their Christmas tree. The woman peered out, coy-eyed, from beneath the brim of her flowered hat.

  The man at the work table caught her staring. “That one’s not for sale,” he said.

  “It’s beautiful,” Olivia said. “Did Annie O’Neill make it?”

  “Uh-huh. I kept it for myself when she died.” He laughed, a soft, guttural chuckle. “Told myself she would’ve wanted me to have it, since it was my favorite. The ones on the right side there were all Annie’s. Not too much of hers left. Most of it’s been sold.”

  Much of it, she guessed, to Paul.

  “The rest I made,” the man continued. He gestured toward the east end of the studio, where a maze of white temporary walls were covered with framed photographs. “Photographs are mostly mine, too, although Annie was an accomplished photographer in her own right.”

  Olivia walked toward the photographs. The first few walls were covered with color prints—seascapes, sunsets, nature shots—most of them with Tom Nestor’s signature in the lower right-hand corner. There was a surprising delicacy to the pictures for such a large man.

  She turned a corner and found photographs of three people she remembered all too well—Annie’s husband and two children. The shot of the girl was from her shoulders up. She grinned mischievously, deep dimples carved into her lightly freckled cheeks, her full red hair blowing wildly around her face.

  The photograph of the boy had been taken on the beach. He stood shirtless next to his surfboard, his dark hair slicked back and droplets of water sparkling starlike on his chest.

  Between those pictures was a black and white portrait of Alec O’Neill. Olivia was drawn to his eyes, pale beneath his dark brows, the pupils little black daggers that made her shiver. He wore a black cardigan sweater and a white T-shirt, the dark hair on his chest just visible at the neckline. His head was tilted, one hand against his temple, as though his elbow rested on his raised knee, perhaps, or on a table out of the camera’s range. There was no smile. His lips were flattened, tight, the perfect match for the cold accusation she saw in his eyes.

  She stepped away, his eyes following her as she turned the corner to come face to face with a huge black and white portrait of Annie herself. Olivia stared. Annie looked familiar in her creamy-skinned beauty, but like a stranger in the lively contours of her face. Her hair was an untamed halo of pale silk against the glossy black background.

  “They broke the mold after they made Annie.” The man had come up behind her, and Olivia turned to face him.

  “Did you take it?”

  “Yes.” He seemed to have difficulty shifting his gaze from Annie to Olivia, but he finally reached forward to shake her hand. “I’m Tom Nestor,” he said. He smelled like smoke.

  “Olivia Simon.” She looked back at the portrait. “She must have been a wonderful subject for a photographer.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He dug his hands into the pockets of his denim overalls. The sleeves of his blue-striped shirt were rolled up to his elbows, and thick blond hair covered his meaty forearms. “You know, you hear about people dying, you think, I can’t believe it, but then you start facing up to it. It took me months to believe it with Annie, though. Sometimes I still think she’s going to walk through that door and tell me it was all a gag, she just needed some time away. I love the idea that she might…” His voice drifted off and he shrugged and smiled. “Oh, well.”

  Olivia remembered the woman on the table in the Emergency Room, the flat line of the monitor, the life slipping out of her hand.

  “I should really get another artist in here,” Tom continued. “I can’t pay the rent on this place myself. Alec—Annie’s husband—he’s been helping me out. But I just can’t imagine working with someone else. I worked with Annie for fifteen years.”

  Olivia turned to face him. “My husband did a story on her in Seascape Magazine.”

  Tom looked surprised. “Paul Macelli’s your husband? I didn’t realize he was married.”

  No, she imagined he hadn’t spoken of her much. Maybe he’d never even told Annie he was married. “Well, he’s…we’re separated,” she said.

  “Oh.” Tom fixed his gaze on Annie’s picture again. “He still comes in here from time to time. Said he’s fixing up a new house. He bought a lot of her stained glass. He wanted
that Victorian lady you were looking at, but I’m not parting with her.”

  Olivia glanced at the rest of the photographs and then walked back to the center of the studio. She touched the corner of a stained glass panel hanging from the ceiling. “How do you do this?” she asked, running her fingers over the dark lines between the segments of blue glass. “This is lead, right?”

  Tom sat down behind the work table. “No, actually that’s copper foil covered with solder. Come over here.”

  She sat down on the chair next to him. He was working on a panel of white irises against a blue and black background. For the next ten minutes, she watched in fascination as he melted ropes of silvery solder onto the copper-wrapped edges of the glass, while the colors from the panels in the windows played on his hands, his cheeks, his pale blond eyelashes.

  “Do you give lessons?” she asked, surprising Tom no more than herself.

  “Not usually.” He looked up at her and grinned. “You interested?”

  “Well, yes, I’d like to try. I’m not very creative, though.”

  She had never done anything like this. She’d never had the time, never taken the time, to learn a skill so thoroughly unrelated to her profession.

  “You might surprise yourself,” Tom said. He named a price and she agreed; she would have agreed to any amount.

  Tom glanced down at her sandaled feet. “Wear closed-toed shoes,” he said. “And you’ll need safety glasses, but I think I’ve got an old pair of Annie’s somewhere around here. You can use them.”

  Before she left she bought a small, oval-shaped panel Annie had made—the delicate, iridescent detail of a peacock feather. She was leaving the studio when she nearly tripped over a stack of magazines piled close to the door.

  Tom sighed. “I’ve got to do something about this mess.” He waved a hand toward the magazines and a few piles of paperback books stacked next to them. “People have been bringing in their books and magazines for years. Annie would take them to the old folks’ home in Manteo. I haven’t wanted to tell people to stop, ’cause Annie would have had my head, but I just don’t feel like driving over there.”

  “I can take them sometime,” Olivia said. When? she wondered. Her impulsivity was beginning to worry her.

  “Hey, would you? That’d be great. You just tell me when you’re headed out that way and I’ll load you up.”

  She arrived at the studio at exactly eleven the following Saturday. Tom fitted her with Annie’s green safety glasses, Annie’s old green apron. He drew a pattern of squares and rectangles on a sheet of graph paper, laid a piece of clear glass over it, and showed her how to use the glass cutter to score the glass. Her first cut was perfect, he said, as were her second and third.

  “You have a natural feel for this.”

  She smiled, pleased. She had a steady hand; she was used to a scalpel. She only needed to adjust her pressure to the fragile glass.

  Her head was bowed low over her work when she heard someone enter the studio.

  “Morning, Tom.”

  She looked up to see Alec O’Neill, and her hand froze above the glass.

  “Howdy, Alec,” Tom said.

  Alec barely seemed to notice her. He was carrying a camera case, and he stepped through a side door in the studio, closing it behind him.

  “What’s in there?” Olivia asked.

  “Darkroom,” said Tom. “That’s Annie’s husband, Alec. He comes in a couple of times a week to develop film or make prints or whatever.”

  She glanced at the closed darkroom door, and returned her attention to her work. Her next cut splintered a little, and she jerked her hands quickly away from the glass. “Shouldn’t I be wearing some sort of gloves?”

  “No.” Tom looked offended. “You want to feel what you’re doing.”

  She worked a while longer, glancing at her watch from time to time, hoping she would be finished before Alec O’Neill came out of the darkroom. Her next cut was crooked. This was not as easy as she’d thought. She had hung the peacock feather in her kitchen window, and now that she had a better sense of the work that had gone into it, she was anxious to see it again, to study it from a new perspective.

  She was using pliers to break apart a scored piece of glass when the darkroom door squeaked open, and she kept her eyes riveted on her work as Alec O’Neill walked back into the studio.

  “I left the negatives in there,” he said to Tom.

  “Those closeups you made of the brick came out good,” Tom said.

  Alec didn’t respond, and she felt his eyes on her. She lifted her face, slipped off the glasses.

  “This is Olivia Simon,” Tom said. “Olivia, Alec O’Neill.”

  Olivia nodded, and Alec frowned. “I’ve met you some where.”

  She set down the pliers and lowered her hands to her lap. “Yes, you have,” she said, “but not under very good circumstances, I’m afraid. I was the physician on duty the night your wife was brought to the emergency room.”

  “Oh.” Alec nodded slightly. “Yes.”

  “You were what?” Tom leaned back to look at her.

  “I stopped in to take a look at your wife’s work, and I liked it so much that I asked Tom to give me lessons.”

  Alec cocked his head at her, as though he were not quite certain he believed her. “Well,” he said after a moment. “You came to the right guy.” He looked as though he wanted to say something more, and Olivia held her breath, aware of the still, colorful air surrounding the three of them. Then he gave a slight wave of his hand. “I’ll see you in a couple of days, Tom,” he said, and he turned and left the studio.

  “You were there the night Annie died?” Tom asked, once the door had closed behind Alec.

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “It wasn’t a night I particularly want to remember.”

  “But, Christ, I mean that’s weird, don’t you think? We stood right over there,” he pointed to the photographs, “and talked about her, and you never said a word.”

  She looked over at him. His heavy blond eyebrows were knitted together in a frown, and his eyes had reddened.

  “Aren’t there things you just can’t talk about?” she asked.

  He drew back from her, and she knew that, unwittingly, she had struck a nerve in him.

  “Yeah. Right.” He shook his head to whisk away what ever emotions had been stirred loose in him over the past few minutes. “Didn’t mean to jump on you. Let’s get back to work here.”

  She returned to her work, but as she cut, as she measured, she was aware of Tom’s troubled silence, and she knew that this was yet another man who had loved Annie Chase O’Neill.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “You’re coming to graduation tonight, aren’t you?” Clay looked across the table at his father, while Lacey drowned her frozen waffle in maple syrup.

  “Of course,” Alec said. “I wouldn’t miss it.” He wondered how Clay could have thought anything else, but he guessed his actions hadn’t been too predictable lately.

  “How’s the speech coming?” he asked. Clay had seemed uncharacteristically nervous the past few days, and right now he was tapping his foot on the floor beneath the table. He’d been carrying his notecards around with him, wedged into his shirt pocket or clutched in his hand. Even now the cards were perched, dog-eared and smudged, in front of his orange juice glass. Alec felt a little sorry for his son. He wished there was some way he could make it easier for him.

  “It’s fine,” Clay said. “By the way, is it okay if I have a few people over after?”

  “Sure,” Alec said, pleased. “It’s been a while since you’ve done that. I’ll disappear.”

  “Well, no, you don’t have to disappear,” Clay said quickly.

  Alec reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He set it on the table next to Clay’s cereal bowl. “Take what you need for food and whatever.”

  Clay stared at the wallet for a moment. He glanced at Lacey befor
e he opened it and pulled out a twenty.

  “Can’t get much with that,” Alec said. He took his wallet back and handed Clay a couple more twenties. “You only graduate once.”

  Clay held the bills on the table. “You act like money’s nothing these days,” he said, carefully. Alec had the feeling both his kids thought he was losing his mind. He was not working; he was spending freely. But he wasn’t quite ready to tell them about the insurance policy. He needed to keep it to himself a while longer—a sweet, tender secret he shared with Annie.

  “You don’t need to concern yourself with finances other than your own,” Alec said.

  Clay looked around the room. “I’d better get home early today to get this place cleaned up.”

  “I’ll do it,” Lacey volunteered, surprising them both. “It’ll be your graduation present.”

  Alec spent the day with his camera on the beach at Kiss River. He was taking slides for a change, pictures he would use when he spoke to the Rotary Club in Elizabeth City next week.

  He and Clay arrived home at the same time and they barely recognized the house they walked into. It smelled of lemon oil, and whatever it was Annie used to put in the bag of the vacuum cleaner. The living room was spotless, the kitchen scrubbed and sparkling and full of color from the stained glass at the windows.

  “God,” Clay said, looking around him. “Seems a shame to have a party here. I hate to wreck the place.”

  Lacey walked into the kitchen from the laundry room, a basket of clean clothes in her arms.

  “The house looks fantastic, Lace,” Alec said.

  She set the laundry basket down and wrinkled her freckled, sunburned nose at her father. “It was getting to me,” she said.

  Alec smiled. “Yeah, it was getting to me, too. I just didn’t have the energy to do anything about it.”

  “Thanks, O’Neill,” Clay said. “You can always get a job as a maid if you flunk out of high school.”

  Alec was staring at the laundry basket. There on top, neatly folded, was Annie’s old green sweatshirt. He picked it up, the folds coming undone, the worn fabric falling over his arm.