Read the book: «Keeper of the Light»

Praise for

Diane Chamberlain

‘Fans of Jodi Picoult … will love this!’

—Heat magazine

‘Emotional, complex and laced with suspense, this fascinating story is a brilliant read.’

—Closer

‘An excellent read.’

—The Sun

‘This complex tale will stick with you forever.’

—Now magazine

‘This exquisite novel about love and friendship is written like a thriller … you won’t want to put it down.’

—Bella

‘A bittersweet story about regret and hope.’

—Publishers Weekly

‘A portrayal of lives turned upside down.’

—Star

‘A brilliantly told thriller’

—Woman

‘An engaging and absorbing story that’ll have you racing through pages to finish.’

—People’s Friend

‘This compelling mystery will have you on the edge of your seat.’

—Inside Soap

‘Chamberlain skilfully … plumbs the nature of crimes of the heart.’

—Publishers Weekly

‘So full of unexpected twists you’ll find yourself wanting to finish it in one sitting. Fans of Jodi Picoult’s style will love how Diane Chamberlain writes.’

—Candis

Also by Diane Chamberlain

The Lost Daughter

The Bay at Midnight

Before the Storm

Secrets She Left Behind

The Lies We Told

Breaking the Silence

The Midwife’s Confession

The Shadow Wife

Diane’s next novel will hit the shelves in May 2012

The Good Father

Keeper of the Light

Diane Chamberlain

GETS TO THE HEART OF THE STORY

www.dianechamberlain.co.uk

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m indebted to Cher Johnson, Mary Kirk, Arlene Lieberman, Suzanne Schmidt, Laura and Pete Schmitz and Joann Scanlon for reading various drafts of Keeper with enthusiasm and insight.

Veterinarian Holly Gill, emergency room physician Martha Gramlich, Outer Banks nurse Betsy McCarthy, Outer Banks artist Chris Haltigan, stained glass artist Jimmy Powers, lighthouse enthusiasts David Fischetti, Hugh Morton and John Wilson and National Park Ranger Warren Wrenn all shared their expertise with me and graciously endured my endless questions. Also, The Keeper’s Log, issued by the United States Lighthouse Society, proved to be an invaluable source of inspiration.

I’m grateful to Peter Porosky for altering my vision and to my former editor, Karen Solem, for her faith, patience and wisdom.

CHAPTER ONE

Christmas 1990

It rained the entire day. It rained with such force that the shrubs next to the emergency room parking lot lay flat to the ground and the new roof sprang a leak. One of the nurses set a bucket on the floor of the waiting room to catch the water, and within an hour the rain had filled it to the brim.

Olivia Simon watched the downpour through the broad windows of her office. The rain sapped her concentration, and the journal on her desk was still open to the article she’d started hours before. There was something unnatural about this rain. It sucked the oxygen from the air and made it hard to breathe, and it pounded above her head like marbles falling on a sheet of tin. Just when she thought she could no longer tolerate the noise, it stopped. In the silence, Olivia watched the sky turn light and shiny, like the inside of an eggshell. Then suddenly, it was snowing.

She walked into the reception area, where Kathy Brash and Lynn Wilkes had been playing pinochle for the last abysmally quiet two hours.

“It’s snowing,” Olivia said.

They lifted their rained-dazed eyes to hers, then turned their heads toward the windows.

“Unreal.” Lynn stood for a better look, her white coat scraping a few cards from the table.

“It’s beginning to be an annual tradition on the Outer Banks,” Kathy said. “Last Christmas we actually got snowed in.”

Olivia looked at her watch. Five-thirty. She couldn’t afford to get stuck here tonight.

Lynn took her seat again. “Want us to deal you in, Olivia?”

Olivia declined, and returned to her office. She couldn’t make herself join them tonight. She was too antsy, too preoccupied. She needed to get home.

She sat behind her desk and dialed her home number.

“It’s snowing,” she said when Paul answered.

“Yeah, I know.” He sounded irritated. She was getting accustomed to the curt tone he used with her these days. “When are you getting out of there?”

“Soon. Just a half hour more.” She’d had no choice but to work today. Of the four emergency room physicians, she had the least seniority. She wished she could tell Paul that it had been worth her while coming in today, worth their being apart when, God knows, they needed the time together. But all she had seen in eleven long hours was a scraped knee and a case of severe post-turkey indigestion. On days like this, she found herself missing the chaos of Washington General, where she’d worked for the past ten years, where her seniority had given her some control over her schedule. It scared her these days, being away from Paul. When she wasn’t close enough to touch him, she was afraid he might disappear.

They’d spent last Christmas with his family in Philadelphia.

Paul had written a poem about her and stitched it into a sampler sometime during the long hours she was at work and he was not. The sampler hung in the study, and now each time she looked at it she wondered how the warmth Paul had felt for her one short year ago could have disintegrated so quickly.

“Turkey’s falling off the bone,” he said now. “Should I take it out?”

Olivia started to answer, but just then the police radio in the hall outside her office coughed to life.

“Hold on, Paul.” She held the receiver away from her ear and listened as Kathy sat down in front of the radio.

“Kill Devil Hills Emergency Room,” Kathy said.

“We’ve got a gunshot wound to the chest.” A male voice broke through the static. “Female. Mid to late thirties. Pulse one-fifty and thready. B.P. seventy-five over forty.”

“What’s your ETA?” Kathy asked.

“Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. It’s fucking snowing out here.”

Olivia stood up. “Paul, I’ve got to go.” She hung up the phone and raced to the treatment room. “Call Jonathan,” she said as she passed Kathy. Jonathan Cramer was not Olivia’s favorite physician to work with, but he was the back-up physician tonight and he lived closest. He could be here in seconds.

She was soaping her hands and wrists at the treatment room sink when Jonathan arrived. “Gunshot, huh?” he said as he rolled his shirtsleeves over his beefy forearms. “We’ll stabilize her and fly her up to Emerson.”

Olivia turned on the EKG monitor. “We haven’t even seen her yet.”

“She’s going to need a trauma unit.”

Olivia began setting up the intubation tray. Jonathan had last worked in a sleepy Louisiana hospital. Gunshot wounds were probably not his area of greatest confidence. He had been here a little over a year, the first physician hired by the new free-standing emergency room, the only emergency facility serving North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She’d been told she’d be on an equal plane with him, with equal say in all decisions made. Yet she often wondered if someone had neglected to pass that information on to Jonathan. “Let’s see her first,” she said.

They had the treatment room ready by the time the two paramedics wheeled the woman into the ER. Her shirt and bra had been cut off. The bullet hole in her left breast was deceptively small and bloodless. That could mean only one thing—the bullet had penetrated the heart. Olivia felt a rush of adrenaline. Surgery was the only possible course of action and they had no time to waste.

“Get the surgical tray,” she said to Kathy.

“What?” Jonathan was helping one of the paramedics fit the inflatable MAST trousers on the woman’s legs. “Forget it, Olivia. Let’s get her out of here and up to Emerson.”

“Get me two units of O-negative packed cells,” she said to Lynn as she checked the woman’s vital signs. It would take the helicopter forty minutes to fly her to Emerson, probably longer in the snow, and at least another fifteen minutes before she could get into surgery.

“She won’t make it,” she said.

Kathy produced the surgical tray. The instruments rattled against one another in her trembling hands. She had pinned her dark hair up, and Olivia wished she’d thought to do the same. Her fine brown hair was a little longer than chin-length, and each time she lowered her head it slipped forward, like blinders.

“You can’t be serious,” Jonathan said. “We’re not set up for anything like this.”

“Fifty over thirty,” Lynn said. “I can’t get a radial pulse.”

“Hang normal saline wide open. And do a cutdown, please, Jonathan,” Olivia said. This woman needed blood fast.

“Olivia, this isn’t the goddamned District of Columbia. She needs a trauma unit.”

“Start a bicarb bolus,” she said to Lynn. “And epinephrine. And get that blood hung.” Then she turned to Jonathan. “Look. We can ship her up to Emerson and you and I both know she’ll die on the way. Working on her here might not be ideal, but it’s the only chance she has.” She turned back to the table and did the cut-down herself, slipping the scalpel into the blue vein in the woman’s groin. She picked up the large bore needle.

“I can do it.” Kathy took the needle from her and fit it into the vein. Her hands no longer trembled and Olivia admired her for getting her fear under control so quickly.

Jonathan glowered at her. “I won’t be a part of this. I’m calling the helicopter.” He turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

Olivia stared after him, dumbfounded. “I don’t believe it.” She turned to one of the paramedics. “Call Dr. Shelley,” she said. “Tell him to get over here stat.” She began swabbing Betadine on the woman’s chest and side. Then she slipped her hands into the sterile gloves Lynn held out to her.

“Maybe we should send her up,” Lynn said quietly. Perspiration glowed on her forehead.

“We’re going to do our best for her, Lynn.” Olivia picked up a second scalpel from the tray and noticed the tremor in her own hand. She was suddenly aware of being the only physician in the room. Steady, come on, steady. She set the scalpel between the woman’s ribs and felt all her concentration flow into the task ahead of her. She bore down. No blood at all. She cut deeper, through the layers of muscle, until she reached the heart cavity. Blood suddenly gushed from the wound she’d created. It poured down the front of her scrubs and onto the floor, and the paramedic standing nearest her let out a moan.

“No BP,” Lynn said. “And no pulse.”

Olivia looked up at the flat green line on the monitor behind the patient’s head. She felt a film of sweat break out across her own forehead. They were losing her. She had to widen the incision. She looked at the tray of instruments. “No rib spreader?”

Kathy shook her head.

Of course they had no rib spreader. Olivia set the scalpel again and forced it through the woman’s fifth rib. Once the wound was wide enough, she slipped her hand inside. She cautiously curved her fingers around the woman’s heart, then slid her thumb over the surface, hunting for the bullet hole. She found it quickly—a little dimple in the heart’s smooth surface—and held her thumb over it to block the flow of blood. Then she found the exit wound in the back of the heart. She covered it with her middle finger and felt the heart contract in her palm. She looked at the monitor as a cheer went up in the room.

“We’ve got a pulse!” Kathy said.

Olivia smiled and let out her breath. There was little they could do now except wait for Mike Shelley, the director of the ER, to get over here. She wasn’t sure how long she could hold her position. It was painfully awkward. She was nearly crouching, her spine twisted to keep her hand in the right position on the heart. If she moved her fingers, the woman would die. It was that simple. The muscles in her thighs began to quiver, and her shoulder ached.

She could hear the helicopter making its approach, the familiar thud as it landed on the roof. She hoped they would need it, hoped they could repair the damage to this woman’s heart and stabilize her well enough to make the trip.

For the first time she looked at the woman’s face. Her skin was white and lightly freckled. She wore no makeup. Her hair was cherry-wood red, long and full. It fell over the edge of the table in a mass of corkscrew curls. She looked like an advertisement for Ivory soap.

“Who shot her?” She raised her eyes to the younger of the two paramedics, trying to get her mind off her own discomfort.

The paramedic’s face was as white as the patient’s, his brown eyes wide. “She was a volunteer at the Battered Women’s Shelter in Manteo,” he said. “Some guy came in, threatening his wife and kid, and this lady got in the way.”

The Battered Women’s Shelter. Olivia felt a spasm of pain in her own chest. She had to force herself to ask the next question. “Does anyone know her name?”

“Annie somebody,” said the paramedic. “O’Brien. O’Something.”

“O’Neill,” Olivia whispered, so quietly none of them heard her. She let her eyes run over the body in front of her, over the creamy white, freckled breasts, the softly sloping waistline. She closed her eyes. Her shoulder burned; the tips of her fingers were numb. She was no longer certain they were in exactly the right place. She lifted her eyes back to the monitor. She would be able to tell by any change in the heartbeat if her fingers were slipping.

Had it only been a month since Paul had written that article for Seascape Magazine? She remembered the pictures of the stained glass in Annie Chase O’Neill’s studio. The women in silk, the sleek blue heron, the sunset on the sound. Paul had changed after that story. Everything had changed.

Mike Shelley arrived and she saw in his dark eyes his shock at the scene. But he scrubbed quickly and was at her side in seconds. “Where’s Jonathan?” he asked.

“He thought she should go up and I thought she should stay. So he left to call the helicopter and he hasn’t come back.”

Mike threaded the curved needle with his gloved hands. “Maybe she should have gone up.” He spoke very quietly, very softly, his lips close to her ear. “This way her blood’s on your hands.”

Olivia’s eyes stung. Had she made the wrong decision? No, this woman would never have survived the trip. Never.

Mike had to work around her fingers. If she moved just a fraction of an inch, the blood poured from the bullet holes. The pain in Olivia’s shoulder became a steady fire and the shaking in her legs spread to the rest of her body. Still she held her position while Mike slipped a tiny piece of felt beneath her thumb and stitched it into place. But the exit hole was not so easy to close. It was large and nearly impossible to reach without damaging the heart in the process.

She watched the lines deepen in Mike’s forehead as he struggled with the needle.

“Please, Mike,” she whispered.

He finally shook his head. The felt refused to hold, and the blood seeped, then poured from the back of the heart. Olivia felt the heat of it on her fingers as the green line of the monitor shivered and flattened, and the room grew hushed with failure.

For a moment no one moved. No one spoke. Olivia could hear Mike’s breathing, rapid and deep, keeping time with her own. She straightened up slowly, gritting her teeth against the pain in her back, and looked at Kathy. “Is any of her family here?”

Kathy nodded. “Yes, and we called Kevin in. He’s with them in the little waiting room.” “I’ll tell them,” Mike said.

Olivia shook her head. “I should do it. I was with her from the start.” She turned and started walking toward the door.

“Whoa.” Mike caught her arm. “Better change first.”

She looked down at her blood-soaked scrubs and felt a ripple of doubt. She was not thinking clearly.

She changed in the lounge and then walked to the small, private waiting room. Through the high window in the hallway she caught a glimpse of snowflakes dancing in the darkness. She wished she could step outside for a second. Her muscles still burned. And she hated what lay ahead of her. She hoped Kevin Rickert, the social worker, had prepared them for what she had to say.

Kevin looked relieved to see her. “This is Dr. Simon,” he said.

There were three of them—a girl about thirteen who looked strikingly like the woman she had just left on the table, a boy a few years older. And a man. Annie’s husband, Alec O’Neill. He was dark-haired, tall and thin, with an athletic tightness to his body. He wore jeans and a blue sweater, and he held his hand toward her, tentatively, his pale blue eyes asking her what his future held.

She shook his hand quickly. “Mr. O’Neill.” She would make the words come out very slowly. “I’m so sorry. The bullet went straight through her heart. The damage was too extensive.”

There was still hope in his eyes. It was always that way. Until you said it clearly, until you stopped mincing words, that hope would be there. The son understood, though. He looked like a younger version of his father—the same black hair, striking pale blue eyes beneath dark brows. He turned to face the wall, his shoulders heaving, although he made no sound.

“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 back 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. Annie.

An infatuation. One-sided.

Paul sat down on the cold sand and buried his head in his arms, finally allowing himself to cry, for what he’d lost, for what he’d never had.

CHAPTER THREE

June 1991

Alec O’Neill’s favorite memory of Annie was also his first. He had been standing right where he stood now, on this same beach, and it was as moonless a night then as it was now, the night air black and sticky like tar. The lighthouse high above him flashed one long glare every four and a half seconds. The wait between those light flashes seemed an eternity in the darkness, and in one of those blasts of light he saw a young woman walking toward him. At first he thought she was a figment of his imagination. It did something to your head, standing out here alone, waiting for the beacon to swing around again and ignite the sand. But it was a woman. In the next flash of light, he saw her long, wild red hair, a yellow knapsack slung over her right shoulder. She was probably a year or two younger than him, twenty or so. She started speaking as she drew near him, while he stood mesmerized. Her name was Annie Chase, she said, her husky voice a surprise. She was hitchhiking down the coast, from Massachusetts to Florida, staying close to the water all the way.

She wanted to touch the ocean in every state. She wanted to feel the water grow warmer as she moved south. He was intrigued. Speechless. In the beacon of light he watched her pull a Mexican serape from her knapsack and spread it on the ground.

“I haven’t made love in days,” she said, taking his hand in the darkness. He let her pull him down to the blanket and fought a sudden prudishness as she reached for the snap on his jeans. It was, after all, 1971, and he was twenty-two and five years beyond his first time. Still, she was a complete stranger.

He could barely concentrate on the sensations in his own body, he was so enchanted by hers. The beacon teased him with glimpses of it, delivered in four-and-one-half second intervals. In the tarry blackness between light flashes, he would never have known she was there except for the feel of her beneath his hands. It threw off their rhythm, those lambent pulses of light, made them giggle at first, then groan with the effort of matching his pace to hers, hers to his.

He took her back to the cottage he shared with three friends from Virginia Tech. They had just graduated and were spending the summer working for a construction company on the Outer Banks before going on to graduate school. For the past couple of weeks, they’d been painting the Kiss River Lighthouse and doing some repair work on the old keeper’s house. Usually they spent the evenings drinking too much and looking for women, but tonight the four of them and Annie sat together in the small, sandy living room, eating the pomegranates she had produced from her knapsack and playing games she seemed to have invented on the spot.

“Sentence completion,” she announced in her alien-sounding Boston accent, and she immediately had their attention. “I treasure …” She looked encouragingly at Roger Tucker.

“My surfboard,” Roger said, honestly. “My Harley,” said Roger’s brother, Jim. “My cock,” said Bill Larkin, with a laugh. Annie rolled her eyes in mock disgust and turned to Alec. “I treasure …”

“Tonight,” he said. “Tonight,” she agreed, smiling.

He watched her as she plucked another red kernel from her pomegranate and slipped it into her mouth. She set the next kernel in her outstretched palm, and she continued to eat that way as they played—one kernel in her mouth, the next in her palm—until her hand had filled with the juicy red fruit. Once the shell of her pomegranate lay empty on her plate, she held her handful of kernels up to the light, admiring them as if they were a pile of rubies.

He was amazed that his friends were sitting here, stone cold sober, playing her games, but he understood. They were under her spell. She had instantly become the red-hot core of the cottage. Of the universe. “I need …” Annie said. “A woman.” Roger groaned. “A beer,” said Jim. “To get laid,” said Bill, predictably. “You,” Alec said, surprising himself. Annie took a bloodred ruby from the pile in her hand and leaned forward to slip it into Alec’s mouth. “I need to be held,” she said, and there was a question in her eyes. Are you up to it? her eyes asked him. Because it’s not a need to be taken lightly.

In his bed later that night he understood what she meant. She could not seem to get close enough to him. “I could love a man who had no legs, or no brain, or no heart,” she said. “But I could never love a man who had no arms.”

She moved in with him, abandoning her idea of hitchhiking down the coast. It was as though she had found him and fully expected to be with him forever, no discussion needed. She loved that he was studying to be a veterinarian and she would bring him injured animals to heal. Seagulls with broken wings, underfed cats with abscessed paws or torn ears. In the course of a week, Annie came across as many hurt animals as the average person encountered in a lifetime. She did not actively seek them out, yet they found her. He understood later that they were drawn to her because she was one of them. Her injuries were not physical. No, physically she was perfect. Her pain was hidden, and over the course of that summer he realized she had given him the task of making her whole.

He stood now in the thick black air, a prickly tension in him as he waited out the seconds between the light. Twenty years had passed since that first night. Twenty excellent years, until this last one. Until Christmas night, a little more than five months ago. He still came out here three, maybe four nights a week because more than any other place, it reminded him of Annie. Was it peace he felt here? Not exactly. Just close to her. As close as he could …

There was a rustling sound behind him. Alec turned his head, listening. Maybe it was one of the wild mustangs that roamed Kiss River? No. He could hear the steady footsteps of someone coming through the field of sea oats, up from the road. He stared in their direction, waiting for the light.

“Dad?”

The beacon caught his son’s black hair, red T-shirt. Clay must have followed him. He walked through the sand to stand at his father’s side. He was seventeen, and this past year had grown to Alec’s height. Alec still had not adjusted to standing eye-to-eye with his son.

“What are you doing out here?” Clay asked. “Just watching the light.”

Clay didn’t respond, and the beacon swung around once, then twice, before he spoke again. “Is this where you come at night?” he asked, his voice hushed. Both he and Lacey had taken on this careful tone when they spoke to him.

“Reminds me of your mother out here,” Alec said.

Clay was quiet for another minute. “Why don’t you come home? We can rent a movie or something.”

It was Saturday night and Clay was two weeks away from his high school graduation. Surely he had things he’d rather do than spend the night watching movies with his father. In the next flash of light Alec thought he saw fear in Clay’s blue eyes. He rested his hand on his son’s shoulder.

“I’m all right, Clay. Go on now. You must have plans for tonight.”

Clay hesitated. “Well, I’ll be over at Terri’s.” “Fine.”

Alec listened to the sound of Clay’s footsteps retreat across the field. He listened until he could hear nothing other than the waves breaking against the shore. Then he sat down on the beach, his elbows resting on bent knees, and stared out at a small yellow light on the black horizon.

“Remember, Annie, the night we saw the boat on fire?” He spoke out loud, but his voice was a whisper. So long ago—a decade, maybe more. They’d been sitting right where he sat now and probably they had made love, or were about to, when they spotted the ball of gold light on the horizon, shooting yellow tendrils into the sky and spreading shimmery waves of liquid gold into the water. The keeper’s house was locked tight and dark, Mary Poor asleep for the night, so Alec had driven out to the road to call the Coast Guard from a pay phone. They were already on the scene, he was told. Everyone was off the boat and safe. But by the time he’d returned to Annie she was weeping, having created her own scenario. There were children on board, she told him, old people too feeble to save themselves. He comforted her with the truth, but it was many minutes before she could let go of her own catastrophic vision. They watched the fire burn itself out, until the black smudge of smoke against the night sky was all that remained.

They’d made love on this beach as recently as last summer. The park was closed at dusk, but over the years they had never felt the chain across the road was meant for them. No one had ever disturbed them, not once, although until two years ago they’d known that Mary was sleeping close by.

They’d swim at night, too, when the water was calm enough. Alec was always first back to the beach because he liked to watch her lift up from the black water, a glittering specter in the stark white bursts of light. Her hair was darkened and tamed by the water, sleek and shiny over her shoulders and breasts. Once last year she’d stood in the water, wringing it from her hair and looking up at the beacon. She said something about the lighthouse, about its being as much a comfort to those on land as on sea. “It’s a touchstone,” she said. “It keeps you safe the same time it helps you chart your course.” He’d felt a lump in his throat, as though he knew what lay ahead, what he was going to lose. He’d thought it would be the lighthouse. He hadn’t known it would be Annie.

The lighthouse had been the only real source of friction between them. It stood close to the water, unlike its neighboring lighthouses at Currituck Beach to the north and Bodie Island to the south, which sat, secure, farther inland. Each year the ocean crept closer to the foundation of the Kiss River Light, and Alec joined the desperate battle for its preservation, while Annie distanced herself from that work.

“If it’s time for the sea to take it, we should just let it go.” Every time she’d say those words Alec would picture the graceful white brick lighthouse crumbling into the ocean and feel nearly overwhelmed with sadness.

He closed his eyes now as he sat on the beach, waiting for the next blast of light to shine red through his eyelids. If you stayed with the lighthouse long enough, your heartbeat slowed almost to the rhythm of the light, until it barely seemed to beat at all.

CHAPTER FOUR

Olivia was obsessed with Annie Chase O’Neill. It was getting worse instead of better, and now as she sat in her living room watching Paul and the tanned young boy he’d hired carry boxes and furniture out to the rented U-Haul, she felt the obsession crystallize inside her.

She hadn’t wanted to be here when Paul moved his things out. She hadn’t expected him to do it this soon, this abruptly, but he’d called early this morning to say he had the truck, did she mind? She said no, because she wanted to see him. She would take any opportunity to see him, even though every meeting left her bruised. A little more than five months had passed since he walked out, yet she still ached at the sight of him. Even now that he’d met with a lawyer and signed a long-term lease on a cottage in South Nags Head, she still clung to the hope that he would take a good look at her and realize his mistake.

He stopped now in the arched doorway between the living room and dining room, pulling a handkerchief from the pocket of his khaki shorts to wipe his forehead.

“Are you sure about the dining room set?” he asked.

He’d taken his shirt off sometime in the last hour and his skin glistened. His dark blond hair was damp and pushed back from his forehead, and his glasses caught the light from the windows behind her head. She felt a futile wave of desire, and looked past him into the dining room.

“It’s yours,” she said, holding a finger to mark her place in the journal on her lap. “It’s been in your family for years.”

“But I know you love it.”

He was not without guilt, she thought.

“It should stay in your family.”

He looked at her a moment longer. “I’m sorry, Liv.”

She’d heard those words from him so often these past few months they no longer had any meaning. She watched him lift the two chairs from one side of the table and head toward the door.

She sat glued to the sofa, afraid to see the rest of the house and the gaps he had left her. Once he and the boy were gone she would brace herself and walk through. Slowly. It would be good for her. Maybe reality would sink in. Maybe she would stop hoping.

Paul walked back into the house, into the dining room. Olivia rose and stood in the arched doorway as he and the boy turned the table upside down and unbolted the legs. When the last screw was removed, Paul stood up to look at her. He adjusted his gold wire-rimmed glasses on his nose and gave her a quick grin that meant nothing. A nervous gesture. He still had that slightly gawky, appealingly academic look that had attracted her ten years earlier, when he worked at the Washington Post and she was a resident at Washington General. She thought now of how quickly she could change this scene. With just a few words she could have him back. She let the fantasy unfold in her mind. “I’m pregnant,” she would say, and he’d drop the table leg and stare at her. “My God, Liv, why didn’t you tell me?” Maybe the news would snap him out of the crazy stupor he’d been mired in all these months. But she would say nothing. She didn’t want the baby to be his reason for coming home. If he came back to her it would have to be because he still loved her. She could accept nothing less.

She poured herself a glass of ginger ale and took her seat again in the living room while they carried the table out to the truck. She listened to Paul’s voice rising up from the driveway and through the open front door as he told the boy to get himself some lunch. “I’ll meet you at the new house at two,” Paul said. Then he came back into the house, walking slowly through the kitchen, the study, the bedrooms, to see if there was anything else he could take from her. When he was finished, he sat down in the rattan chair on the opposite side of the living room from Olivia. He was holding Sweet Arrival, the slim volume of poetry he’d published a few years earlier, and one of the copies of the book they’d written together, The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit, and he rested them in his lap.

“So,” he said. “How have you been?”

She sipped her ginger ale. “Busy.”

“What else is new?” His voice bit her with its sarcasm, but then he softened. “That’s good, though, I guess. Good to keep yourself occupied.”

“I’ve started doing some volunteer work at the Battered Women’s Shelter.” She watched his face closely. The change in his features was abrupt. The color left his cheeks and his eyes widened behind his glasses. He leaned forward.

“Why?”

She shrugged. “To fill the time. I work there a couple of evenings a week. They really need the help. Infections pass like wildfire through a place like that.” It had been hard at first, working there. Everyone spoke of Annie in the same reverent tone Paul had used. Her photographs adorned the walls, and her stained glass seemed to fill every window, bathing the broken women and restless children with color. “It’s a rough place, Liv.”

She laughed. “I used to work in D.C., remember?” “You can’t predict what’ll happen in a place like that.” “It’s fine.”

He sat back, letting out a sigh. Olivia knew he had spent the last few weeks covering Zachary Pointer’s trial. She had not read the articles he’d written. She didn’t want to know how he would allude to Annie, didn’t want to read of his delight in seeing Pointer locked up for life.

“Look,” Paul said to her now. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time. Don’t get mad, okay? I mean, whatever your answer is, I won’t hold it against you. I know you’re human.” That quick, nervous grin again. He fanned absently through the pages of Sweet Arrival, while she waited for him to speak again. “When you realized it was Annie in the emergency room that night—did that affect how you treated her?” he asked. “I mean, did you try as hard to save her as you would have if she were just some …” He must have seen the look on her face, because the words froze on his lips.

Olivia tightened her fingers around the glass of ginger ale. She stood up. “You bastard.”

He set the books on the end table and walked toward her, rested his hand on her elbow. “I’m sorry, Liv. That was out of line. It’s just that … I’ve always wondered. I mean, if it had been me in your position, I don’t know if I could have … “

She jerked her arm away from him. “You’d better go, Paul.”

He walked back to the end table, not looking at her, not speaking to her, and she watched as he gathered his things together and left the house. When he was gone, she sat down again, her legs too weak to carry her through the house. How far they were from a reconciliation if he could think that of her. Hadn’t she wondered about it herself, though? In her bleakest moments, hadn’t she asked herself the same question? She knew the answer. She had tried—with every ounce of strength in her—to save Annie O’Neill’s life. That night had been the hardest she’d ever endured in an emergency room and she was certain she had done her best, although the irony of the situation had not been lost on her for a moment. She had, quite literally, held the life of the woman her husband loved in her hands.

Paul had not hidden his infatuation with Annie from her, and at first that had made Olivia feel safe. If Annie had been a threat, she thought, he would never have been so open about his feelings. It started with the spread he did on her in Seascape. He spoke admiringly of her, but the admiration quickly turned to adulation. It was like a sickness in him. It was one-sided, he assured her—Annie barely knew he was alive. Yet he could speak of nothing else. Olivia heard lengthy descriptions of Annie’s physical beauty, limitless generosity, charming quirkiness, boundless energy and extraordinary artistic talent. She listened, feigned interest. It was a phase, she told herself. It would pass. When it didn’t, she carefully, tactfully suggested he was going a little overboard. No, he said. She didn’t understand.

It wasn’t until Paul mentioned Annie’s two children that Olivia began to feel truly threatened. Paul was one of six children in a closely knit family. He was hungry for a family of his own, and all the medical tests had pointed the finger at Olivia as the reason they had none. She’d finally had surgery this past fall to improve her chance of conceiving, but by then it was too late. Even at the hospital, while holding Olivia’s hand after the operation, Paul spoke of Annie. She had once donated her bone marrow, Paul said. “Can you imagine that? Undergoing surgery to save the life of a total stranger?”

“Yes, Paul, you’ve convinced me.” Olivia spoke in anger for the first time. “She’s a saint.”

After that, he stopped talking to her about Annie, which worried Olivia even more because she knew by his brooding silence that Annie was still much on his mind. He was restless in his sleep. Losing weight. At the breakfast table he pushed his food from one side of the plate to the other. He lost track of their conversations, misplaced his car keys, his wallet. When they made love—their futile attempts at conception—his fingertips felt as dry as ash on her skin, and no matter how close their bodies were she felt the gulf between them that she couldn’t narrow with her words or her touch.

She had asked him outright if he and Annie were lovers, and he hadn’t bothered to mask his disappointment when he told her they were not. “She’s completely in love with her husband and committed to her marriage,” he’d said gloomily, in a way that let Olivia know he no longer felt any such commitment himself. Obviously, the platonic nature of his relationship with Annie had been dictated by Annie herself and not by Paul.

After walking out on her the night Annie died, Paul had taken an apartment close to his office. He’d written her a long letter, filled with his apology and confusion. He knew he couldn’t possibly have Annie now, he wrote, but knowing her made him realize what he was missing with Olivia. Olivia’s self-esteem, which had taken a lifetime to construct from the scrappiest raw materials, disintegrated in the few minutes it took her to read his words.

She saw him from time to time over the next few months when he needed things from the house. Clothes. Tools. The computer. She watched his hands as he folded, lifted, packed. She missed his touch—she’d started getting massages once a week just to feel another human being’s hands on her skin. Paul was no longer cool when he spoke to her, and there was occasionally a smile in his eyes when he saw her. She clung to the hope that the smile meant there was something left between them, something she could build on, but he never gave her the chance. He never stayed in the house longer than he had to, except for that one night in April when she’d shamelessly begged him to stay and he relented, only to kill her with the regret she saw later in his eyes.

What had become of the man she’d married, the man who had written an entire volume of poetry about her, who had helped her put her past aside and made her feel safe for the first time in her life? Who made love to her as though she were the only woman he could ever imagine loving? The man who had not yet met Annie O’Neill. She wanted him back. She needed him back. Olivia stood now at her living room window, the room behind her taunting her with new empty spaces to fill, as she watched the U-Haul disappear behind a dune. Out of the hundreds of times they’d made love, why had the forces of nature picked that particular night to leave her pregnant?

She felt a sudden determination replace her dejection. Like the room behind her, she had empty places to fill, and she would fill them with the qualities that had drawn her husband to Annie. But first she would need to learn what they were, and as her impulsive decision to work at the shelter had shown her, she would do whatever it took to find out. She had to admit the truth to herself: Paul’s obsession with Annie had become her own.

CHAPTER FIVE

Alec woke up with Annie’s old green sweatshirt beneath his cheek. He’d taken to sleeping with it, a practice which seemed absurd to him during daylight hours but to which he surrendered at night. The sweatshirt was little more than a rag Annie used to throw on for her early morning runs. When he’d come home from the emergency room that Christmas night, he’d found it lying on her side of the four-poster bed, a crumpled patch of green on the old, faded double wedding ring quilt. He’d slept with it that night, except that, of course, he hadn’t slept at all.

He’d given all her other clothes away after offering them to Lacey, who’d cringed at the thought of wearing them. The sweatshirt, though, he couldn’t part with. He hadn’t washed it and surely after all these months it had taken on more his scent than hers, but it comforted him all the same.

He had a Save the Lighthouse Committee meeting this morning, and he shaved for the occasion, quickly, avoiding a long look in the bathroom mirror. He did not like to see the toll these last few months had taken on his face.

Clay and Lacey were already at the breakfast table when he came downstairs. They were arguing, which was typical of them lately, but they fell silent when he walked into the room.

“Morning,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Morning, Dad,” Clay said, while Lacey mumbled something under her breath.

Tripod walked over to Alec with his jaunty, three-legged gait, and Alec bent low to scratch the German shepherd’s head. “Anybody feed the animals?” he asked.

“Mmm,” Lacey said, and he took her reply to mean yes.

Alec poured himself a bowl of raisin bran, picked up a stack of photographs from the counter, and took his seat at the table. He looked through the pictures while he ate, holding them in one of the few patches of clear light that flowed through the kitchen windows. Annie’s stained glass colored nearly all the light in the room, splashing greens and blues and reds against the white cupboards and countertops.

Alec studied the photograph he’d taken from the base of the lighthouse, looking up at the black iron gallery. “Your pictures are getting stranger and stranger, Alec,” Tom Nestor had told him when Alec stopped by Annie’s old studio to use the darkroom. Alec propped the picture up against his coffee cup as he dipped his spoon into the raisin bran. It was a weird picture. He liked it.

“Dad?” Lacey asked.

“Hmm?” He turned the photograph on its side to see how it looked from that angle.

“Miss Green is going to call you this morning.”

“Who’s Miss Green?” He raised his head to look at his daughter and she quickly dropped her gaze to her cereal bowl. Why did she do that? “Lace? Look at me.”

She raised her eyes, dark blue and wide like her mother’s, and he had to struggle not to look away himself.

“Who’s Miss Green?” he repeated his question.

“My counselor at school.”

He frowned. “Are you having problems?”

Lacey shrugged and looked down at her bowl again. She played with her spoon, her fingertips stubby and sore-looking. She’d always bitten her nails, but this raw look, this biting them down to the quick, was new. “She’s on my case about my grades.”

Clay laughed. “What do you expect, O’Neill? You haven’t opened a book all semester.”

Alec set a quieting hand on Clay’s arm. “I thought you were getting all A’s, Lace.”

“Not this year.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner so I could have helped you?”

She shrugged again, a little spasm of her slender shoulders. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Bother me.” He felt his face cloud over. “You’re my daughter, Lacey.”

The phone rang on the wall behind him.

“That’s probably her,” Lacey said. Her face had gone white beneath her freckles.

“You’re in deep shit now, O’Neill,” Clay said as Alec stood up to answer the phone.

“Dr. O’Neill?” the woman said, her tone formal, removed.

“Yes.”

“This is Janet Green, Lacey’s counselor.”

He had an immediate image of her: dark hair sprayed into place, too-pink lipstick, a smile wide and false. Someone too cold, too rigid to be working with teenagers.

“Lacey mentioned you’d be calling.” Lacey had certainly waited until the last minute. He watched his daughter pick at her raisin bran, her head bowed, her long red hair falling like curtains on either side of the bowl.

“I live near you,” Janet Green continued. “I’d like to stop by this afternoon and talk with you about Lacey. Save you a trip in.”

Alec looked around him. Last night’s dishes, streaked red with tomato sauce, cluttered the counter next to the sink. The spaghetti pot was still on the stove, one long strand of spaghetti stuck to its side in the shape of a question mark. Pieces of mail and old newspapers littered the countertops, and his pictures of the lighthouse were strewn everywhere. “Let’s just talk on the phone,” he said. “Well, did she tell you why I want to see you?” “She said her grades aren’t very good.” “No, they’re not. She’s really plummeted, I’m afraid. She has nothing above a C and she’s failing biology and algebra.”

“Failing?” He shot Lacey a look. She leaped from her chair as though he’d touched her with a live wire, swung her book bag from the counter to her shoulder, and flew out the door. He lowered the receiver to his chest. “Lace!” he called after her, but he saw the red blur of her hair as she ran past the kitchen window and out to the street. Alec lifted the phone back to his ear. “She took off,” he said.

“Well, I know she’s upset. She’ll have to take biology and algebra in summer school if she wants to pass the year.”

Alec shook his head. “I don’t get it. She’s always been a straight-A student. Shouldn’t I have known about this sooner? What about her last report card? I would have noticed if she was slipping.” “Straight C’s.”

He frowned into the phone. “She must not have shown it to me. That’s so unlike her.” He’d never seen a C out of either of his children. For that matter, he’d never seen a B.

“Your son’s kept up with things quite well despite losing his mother, hasn’t he? I hear he’s going to be class valedictorian.”

“Yes.” Alec sat down again at the table, suddenly exhausted. If it were not for the lighthouse meeting, he would go back to bed.

“And he’s going to Duke next year?”

“Yes.” He watched his son get up from the table. Clay took a peach from the fruit bowl and waved as he walked out the door.

“I think Lacey’s a little concerned about what that’ll be like, having her brother gone, just the two of you in the house.”

Alec frowned again. “Did she say that?”

“It’s just a feeling I got. She seems to have had a very difficult time adjusting to her mother’s death.”

“I—well, I guess if her grades are down …” She was failing. He’d had no idea. “I haven’t picked up on anything unusual.” He hadn’t looked for anything. He’d let his children fend for themselves these past few months.

“You’re a veterinarian, right, Dr. O’Neill?”

“Yes.”

“Lacey said you’re not working right now.”

He wanted to tell her it was none of her business, but he held his tongue for Lacey’s sake. “I’ve taken some time off.” He’d thought he’d take a few weeks off after Annie died. The weeks turned into months, the months accumulated at breakneck speed, and he still had no intention of returning to work.

“I see,” Janet Green said, her voice dropping a degree or two to the level of pure condescension. “By the way, are you aware Lacey’s had two detentions in the last few months for smoking on school grounds?”

He started to tell her that Lacey didn’t smoke, but obviously this woman knew his daughter better than he did. “No, I didn’t know that,” he said. “Thank you for telling me.”

He got off the phone and sat down at the table again, drained. This weariness was new for him. He was known for his energy, for his inability to sit idly for more than a minute or two. Now he was too tired to wash the spaghetti pot.

They ate spaghetti a few times a week. It was easy. Boil water, open a jar of sauce. Every once in a while one of the kids would cook, but they were not much more inventive than he was.

Annie used to make everything from scratch. Even bread. Two loaves of honey whole wheat every Saturday. The house would fill with the smell. This kitchen had been alive back then. She’d leave certain items on the countertops—a row of fruit along the backsplash, or colorful packages of exotic teas on the windowsills—so she could admire them while she worked.

Back in those days, Annie would usually get home ahead of him and create something wonderful in the kitchen, and often—in his memory, it was every other day or so—he’d come home and invite her into the bedroom and she would hand the spoon over to one of the kids, who would groan and resign themselves to another late dinner. Annie, the flush of longing already burning in her cheeks, would tell them, “Remember, loves, it’s elegant to dine late.”

That was the way this house operated back then. Annie had been a firm believer in spontaneity. “This is a house without rules,” she’d say. “We have to trust ourselves and our bodies to tell us when to sleep, to eat, to get up in the morning. To make love.”

It had only been in the last couple of years that the kids realized there were plenty of rules in this house—they were just not the same rules their friends lived by, but rather the peculiar rules of Annie’s creation. She allowed no clocks in the house, although Alec always wore a watch. Lacey and Clay were free to make their own decisions in the matter, both of them following their mother’s example until last year, when Clay began wearing a watch identical to Alec’s. Before that, Clay and Lacey were often late for the school bus, or on a few bizarre occasions, extremely early. They had never had a curfew, which made them the envy of their friends. Even when they were small, they were allowed to go to bed anytime they pleased. They regulated themselves quite well, actually, which probably had something to do with the fact that the O’Neills did not own a TV.

Lacey and Clay were never punished for their few misdeeds, but were rewarded frequently, just for existing. When they were young, Alec had often felt like a spectator in all of this, Annie setting the tone for the way they were raised. He caught on quickly, though, discovering that if you treated kids with respect they behaved responsibly. Lacey and Clay had always been a testimony to their methods. “The most important thing is that you’re having fun and you’re safe,” Alec would tell them before they went out. He took delight in that, in trusting them when the parents of their friends weighed their kids down with warnings, threats, and reprimands.

On a whim, Alec got up from the table and went upstairs to Lacey’s room. He opened the door and shook his head with a smile. The room was a wreck, the bed unmade, clothes heaped everywhere, the hamper in her corner overflowing. Her desk was stacked with books and tapes and papers, and the walls were covered with posters of decadent, noxious-looking musicians. On the shelf that ran around three sides of her room, at the level of his shoulders, sat her antique dolls, providing a weird contrast to the depraved young men. There were thirteen of the dolls, neatly spaced on the shelves he’d built five years ago. Annie had given her a doll for each birthday. Right now they looked out at Alec with placid smiles on their haunting, small-toothed mouths.

She’s smoking, damn it. Should he talk to her about it? What would Annie have done? An open discussion at the dinner table, most likely, with no accusations, no expectations, no demands. Alec let out a long sigh. He wasn’t up to it.

Tripod hobbled into the doorway and leaned heavily against Alec’s leg. Alec gave the dog a perfunctory scratch behind one ear as they stared together into the disaster that was Lacey’s room. Annie had been no sterling housekeeper—she was notoriously disorganized—but she’d been a master at cramming things into closets and cupboards, and the house always had the appearance of neatness. Lacey’s room had certainly never looked like this when Annie was alive, but Alec could hardly hold his daughter responsible for the mess in this room when it only reflected what was going on in every other room in the house.

He leaned against the door jamb and shut his eyes to block out the reproachful, saucer-eyed stares of the dolls. “I’m screwing up, Annie,” he said, and he felt Tripod turn his head to look up at him at the defeated tone of his voice.

At ten-twenty that morning, Alec pulled into the parking lot of the Sea Tern and slipped into the space between Nola Dillard’s BMW and Brian Cass’s old station wagon. He was late again, but he was loaded with excuses this time. First the call from Lacey’s counselor, which admittedly had not taken that long but which had forced him to spend a good hour thinking about his life. Then there was the call from Randi, begging him to come back to work. She was handling just about everything since he’d left, and she’d been tolerant at first. Very understanding—a quality of Randi’s he had always criticized her for. She let people walk on her, and now he was doing the walking. Well, she was starting to fight back. This was the third phone call this week, but he wasn’t about to bend. He told her once again he wasn’t ready to return to work. He wasn’t sure he would ever be ready.

“Here he is.” Nola Dillard stepped toward him as he walked into the meeting room at the back of the restaurant. Her jaw had a peculiar set to it. She clutched his arm, her heavy, flowery perfume filling the air between them, and whispered close to his ear. “We’ve got problems, hon.”

“Thought you got lost, Alec.” Walter Liscott stood up and pulled out the chair at the head of the table for him.

“Sorry I’m late.” He took the seat Walter offered him.

The entire Save the Lighthouse Committee was assembled in front of him. Two men in addition to himself and two women, already well into their coffee and doughnuts. They had undoubtedly grown accustomed to his tardiness by now. Sondra Carter, the second woman on the committee and the owner of a small boutique in Duck, had suggested it was his little tribute to Annie, who had never been on time for anything in her life.

The waitress appeared in the room and poured Alec a cup of coffee. “Help yourself to a doughnut, Dr. O’Neill,” she said.

Alec nodded and set his notebook on the table. He looked at Nola, wondering what she had been trying to tell him.

“Okay,” he said. “This morning we’re brainstorming fund-raising ideas.”

Walter ran his hand over his thinning gray hair. He cleared his throat and began speaking in a deep, syrupy voice. “We were talking before you came in, Alec. And the truth is, we’re not altogether in agreement on something.”

Alec tensed. “What are you saying, Walter?” he asked. He would have to come on time from now on. Didn’t want to invite a mutiny.

“Well …” Walter cleared his throat again and glanced at the others. He’d obviously been selected as their spokesperson. “While we’re all in agreement on the goal of this committee—raising funds to save the lighthouse—we’re not in agreement on how the lighthouse ought to be saved. Me for one, I don’t want to bust my tail raising money and then have them screw the whole thing up by trying to move the damn thing and topple it over in the process.”

“I agree,” Sondra said. “Either our money goes to building a sea wall around the lighthouse, or they get none of it.”

“Hold it.” Alec raised his hand. “You all know the choice on how the lighthouse is saved is not ours to make.”

“That’s right,” Nola said. Her white-blond hair was pinned up as usual and she wore her gray power suit this morning, a blue Dorsett Realty pin attached to the lapel. She pointed a long red fingernail at Walter. “The Park Service wants to save the lighthouse as much as we do, Walter. They won’t agree to something they’re not absolutely certain will work. Come on, folks,” she pleaded. “We’ve worked so hard and the money’s starting to come in. Now that it’s getting close, y’all are chickening out.”

“I’m just afraid they’ll make the wrong choice.”

Walter sounded close to tears, and Alec understood his concern. Everyone in this room loved the Kiss River Lighthouse and understood its fragility. Up until a few weeks ago, the plan had been to build a sea wall around it. Within a few years, the lighthouse would be on its own small island in the sea. An aesthetically appealing solution. Now, quite suddenly, the Park Service had changed its mind and was speaking very seriously about moving it—building a track, lifting it up, and sliding it 600 yards inland, all at the cost of several million dollars. It was a frightening and impossible concept to comprehend. Not only did he understand Walter’s fears; he shared them.

“Nola’s right,” Alec said. “We have to trust the engineers to come up with the best solution. We can’t second-guess them.”

Nola winked at him. “I move we get on with the meeting.”

“I second the motion,” Brian said.

There was some grumbling, but no one left the table, and Alec led them through an hour of ideas. A silent auction. An educational brochure to generate interest. More talk shows and speaking engagements. It wasn’t until he was driving home that he let his own fears surface. Engineers were human. Fallible. What if they destroyed the lighthouse by trying to save it?

He was at his desk in the den when Lacey got home from school. He spotted her through the window. She was out on the sidewalk talking to Jessica Dillard, Nola’s daughter and Lacey’s best friend. Jessica was grinning, but there was a meanness in the grin, an ugly superior quality that surprised him and made his heart ache for his daughter. Jessica stood with one hand on her hip. Her sleek blond hair rested on her shoulders and she had a cigarette elegantly balanced between her fingers. She looked very much like her mother.