Keeper of the Light

she really like, Alec? When they talk about her at the shelter she sounds like she should be canonized.”

He laughed. “I doubt they canonize atheists.” He turned the air conditioner up another notch. “She had very strong values and she put her money where her mouth was, literally. She donated practically all the money she made to various causes. Animal rights, AIDS, the homeless, the right-to lifers.”

“The right-to-lifers?”

“Oh, yeah. She was a rabid antiabortionist. I made donations to Planned Parenthood to try to nullify her effort.” He smiled at the memory. “Made her mad as hell.”

“I’m surprised she’d be antiabortion. She sounds so liberal.”

“She was about most things, but she was also very pro-family.” He looked up at the studio windows. “People talk about her like she was perfect, but she wasn’t. She was human. She’d get moody sometimes.” He felt a little guilty, tarnishing Annie’s image in Olivia’s mind, but those strange periods of melancholy were as much a part of Annie as her altruism. It was a moodiness that came and went in waves. He never understood it, and she never seemed able to explain it to him. She would withdraw from him, from everyone. It’s my dark side, she’d tell him, and he could almost see the black shroud settling over her shoulders, over her head. He learned quickly there was nothing he could do to turn the tide of those moods. All he could do was wait for them to pass on their own. It bothered him enormously that she had died in the midst of one, that she had died troubled.

“I’ve come to admire her.” Olivia sounded almost shy. “Now that I know how challenging it is to work in stained glass, I look at her things and I’m in awe.”

He was touched. He looked up at the studio and could just make out one of Annie’s few remaining stained glass panels, a design of beveled glass. “She was an extremely talented artist,” he said. “I think she could have gone a lot further if I hadn’t dragged her out of school to get married.”

“Where was she going?”

“Boston College.”

“Really?” Olivia looked slightly stunned. “That’s where my husband went. He graduated in seventy-three.”

“That would have been Annie’s class,” Alec said. “Next time you speak to him, ask him if he knew her. Her maiden name was Chase.”

Olivia was quiet for a moment. “Well,” she said finally, reaching for the handle of the door. “Thank you for lunch.”

He stopped her with his hand on her arm. “Do you have many friends here?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Just at work.”

He pulled out his wallet and removed a business card. He turned it over and wrote down his home phone number. “Keep me posted on how things go with your husband,” he said, handing it to her.

“Thanks.” She started to step out of the car.

“Olivia?”

She turned to look at him.

“I want you to know how glad I am that you were the doctor in the emergency room that night.”

She smiled. “Thank you,” she said. She got out of the car and closed the door softly behind her. He watched her step around the front of the Bronco, brushing a strand of her sleek, dark hair from her face.

Her husband was a fool.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was the fourth time Olivia had stopped in to look at the crib. She’d intended to go directly home after Alec dropped her off, but the little shop was right across the parking lot from the studio and it had a lure on her she could feel from a mile away.

The crib was a white Jenny Lind, and she could picture it in the small third bedroom of the house. It would look wonderful, that clean white against the sunny yellow wallpaper she had already picked out. She wished she could buy the crib now, today, but there was still the chance that Paul might stop by the house for something. She didn’t want him to learn he was going to be a father from the sudden appearance of a crib rather than from her.

She was still clutching Alec’s business card when she returned to her car. It was soft as felt from months of being carried in his wallet. She slipped it into the back of her own wallet, gnawing on her lip. She had lied to him. Omitted things. She hadn’t told him that Paul was the author of that article on Annie in Seascape. What choice did she have? She couldn’t take the chance of telling him, of having him realize it had been Annie that Paul worshiped.

When she got home, she made a batch of cookies—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d baked—and changed into a blue flowered blouse Paul had always loved on her. She studied her map at the kitchen table, checking it against the address he’d given her, while the house filled with the smell of oats and brown sugar. She carried the cookies out to the car and drove the ten miles to South Nag’s Head.

It was close to six when she pulled up in front of his house, a small gray cottage one block from the ocean, in the midst of the tourists and their summer rentals. It was new. She could smell the cedar siding as she stepped onto the front deck and knocked at the door. She had to knock a second time before Paul opened it.

“Olivia,” he said, not bothering to mask his surprise.

She smiled. “I wanted to see your new house.” Her tone was that of an intimate friend. Curious. Caring. “And I made some cookies for you.”

He stepped aside to let her in. “You baked? I didn’t think you knew how to operate an oven.”

His house felt like a shrine to Annie. Each of the four large windows in the living room was adorned with a stained glass panel—two of the silk-clad women, and two underwater scenes filled with tropical fish and fluid strips of blue and green in that distinctive Annie O’Neill style. Tom Nestor had explained that technique to her at length— twice—and she still could not begin to understand how it was done.

“Your house is very nice, Paul,” she said.