Diane Chamberlain - Keeper of the Light

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 before 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.