Keeper of the Light

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.