Keeper of the Light

“She’d like that,” Alec said, handing her a check. “I think being forgotten was one of her biggest fears.”

He could hear Lacey’s music blasting from upstairs when he got home, but he stopped in the den first to call Nola.

“I have some news,” he said, “and you’re not going to like it. Brace yourself, okay?”

“What’s that, hon?”

“I’m resigning from the lighthouse committee.”

There were two beats of silence before Nola spoke again. “You’re joking,” she said.

“No.”

“Alec, why in God’s name would you…?”

“I couldn’t begin to explain it to you, Nola. I nominate you as the new chair, and I wish all of you great luck with your endeavors.”

“Wait! Don’t you dare hang up. You owe us an explanation, Alec. I mean, really, don’t you think? What am I supposed to tell the others?”

He ran his fingers over the silky blue on Lacey’s present. “Tell them I’ve had an epiphany,” he said. “Tell them I’ve been set free.”

He carried the box upstairs and knocked on Lacey’s door.

She let out a little scream. “Don’t come in yet, Dad,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m not dressed. Just a second.”

He heard her frantically rooting around in her room, and he wondered what he would find when he was finally allowed in.

She opened the door after a minute or two. She was dressed in her usual shorts and T-shirt, with her hair tucked under a wide-brimmed straw hat.

“What’s with the hat?” he asked.

“Nothing.” She was a little winded. She looked at the box in his hands. “What’s that?”

“A very belated birthday gift.”

She took the box from him and sat down on her bed, and he leaned against the door frame to watch her. She bit her lip as she raised the lid.

“Oh.” She gasped. “She’s incredible, Dad.” She lifted the doll from the tissue paper and touched its hair. “A redhead.” She looked up at him. “Where did you ever find one with red hair?”

He shrugged and looked secretive.

Lacey stood up and placed the doll in the center of the shelf above her dresser, just below the poster of a leather-vested, long-haired thug.

“Well,” she said, sounding suddenly timid. “I have something to show you too, but you’re gonna freak, Dad.”

Alec smiled and folded his arms across his chest. “You know what, Lacey? I think I’m just about unfreakable right now. What is it?”

She kept her eyes on him as she slowly lifted the hat from her head, revealing exceedingly short red curls. She had cut off every speck of black, leaving herself with very little hair at all, but all that was there was red.

“Oh, Lace,” he said. “It’s beautiful.” He pulled her against him, and she stayed easily in his arms. He held her close, pressing his cheek against the damp curls and breathing in the sweet, clean scent of her hair.

Someday he would have to tell her the truth about her parentage. Someday he would have to tell Tom. But not now. Right now, she was his.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Was it this painless to end a marriage?

Olivia got out of bed with the realization that she had not once thought of Paul since he left the house the afternoon before. Of course, she had worked late last night, later than she had to, letting the patients absorb her time and attention. She’d worked until she was so exhausted that she knew sleep would be immediate and dreamless once she got in bed.

Now, as she showered, as she dried her hair, she had the feeling she was carefully holding thoughts of Paul at bay, as if letting them in, letting them get a grip on her, might be more than she could manage.

She was thinking of Alec, though. She had the day off, and as she busied herself with housework, she listened for the phone to ring, willing him to call. She would not call him again. He needed to work this out in his own good time.

Around noon, she reluctantly left the house to go to the store. She had two bags of groceries with her when she turned onto her street an hour later, and she spotted Alec standing on the pier behind her house. Although she was three or four houses away, her view of him was nearly unbroken, and she stopped her car to watch him. He was leaning against one of the pilings, shading his eyes to look out at the sound. An aching tenderness filled her. What a horrendous day he must have had yesterday. As stunned as she had been by what she’d learned about her husband, it could not compare to what he’d learned about his wife.

She drove on, and he must have heard her pull into the driveway, because by the time she started unloading the groceries, he was helping her.

“I’m glad to see you,” she said, looking at him over the top of the car. “I wasn’t sure if you’d call, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“I thought I was taking a risk coming over here.” He lifted a bag of groceries into his arms. “I figured maybe Paul would be here, and I’m not ready to meet up with him yet.” He stopped midway to her front door. “He’s not here, is he?”

“No.” She unlocked the door. “Come in.”

He followed her into the kitchen and set his bag next to hers on the table. “So—” he glanced up at her as they began unloading the groceries “—have you spoken to him?”

She put a quart of milk in the refrigerator, then leaned back against the counter. “He stopped over yesterday afternoon,” she said. “He was very apologetic, very distraught. Absolutely dripping with remorse.” She heard the mockery in her voice and wondered if she sounded as hard to Alec as she did to herself. “He’d been a fool, he said, and he destroyed the taped interviews he’d made of Annie and burned all her pictures.” She shook her head. “I guess he never did lose his flair for drama. I told him about the baby, and if guilt could kill, I would have had a dead man on my hands.” She smiled ruefully. “He said he wants us to get back together, that we should try to work things out for the baby’s sake, but I just…” Her voice caught suddenly, surprising her, and she turned her face away from Alec.

“It’s all right, Olivia,” he said quietly. “Let it out.”

She shook her head. “But I’m not sad.” Tears filled her eyes and she wiped at them with her fingers. “Really, I’m not.”

Alec reached his arm toward her. His fingers slipped around the nape of her neck, and she let him pull her to him, shutting her eyes as his arms closed around her.

He held her, letting her cry for a long time. He offered no platitudes, no words of false comfort, as though he knew that her only chance for healing lay in her tears.

“I’m through with him.” She spoke into his shoulder. “It’s over. I don’t love him anymore. I don’t think I have for a long time.” She was quiet for a moment, relishing the closeness of Alec’s body, knowing this was where she wanted to be. She flattened her hand against the small of his back. “Yesterday must have been terrible for you,” she said. “Yes.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Sometime,” he said. “But not right now.”

“Mary Poor knew exactly what she was doing, didn’t she?”

“Yes.” Alec pulled gently away from her. “That she did.” He picked up the yogurt and cottage cheese from the table and carried them over to the refrigerator. He bent down to put them on the bottom shelf, and she noticed he was not wearing his wedding ring. It had left a band of light-colored skin on his tanned finger.

When he stood up again, his eyes went to the window above the sink. “Where’s Annie’s peacock feather?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said. “I broke it the night Paul told me that he and Annie had…” She caught herself and looked away from him, out the window, trying to think of some way to finish the sentence without saying too much.

Alec finished it for her. “The night he told you that he and Annie had made love.”

She looked up at him, stunned. “How did you know?”

“Was it just once since you’ve been here?”

“As far as I know.”

“Just before Christmas, right?”

“Yes. But how…”

“I figured it out last night. I spent the night putting clues together. She gave me plenty, and I missed them all because it never occurred to me to look for them.” He leaned back against the refrigerator. “One night, just before Christmas, she came home late from the studio and she was extremely upset. She had a sliver of glass in her hand, and she couldn’t get it out herself. I took it out for her, and she cried the whole time. Then she wanted to take a bath before she came to bed. She said it would help her relax, but I guess she just wanted to wash away any evidence of Paul before she got into bed with me.”

He lowered his eyes to the floor, and Olivia bit her lip.

“When I was thinking about this last night, when I was putting the clues together, I realized something must have happened between her and Paul that night, but I was hoping that maybe they didn’t actually…” He looked up at Olivia. “But they did, huh? I mean,” he smiled wistfully, “it wasn’t just that he tried to coerce her and she steadfastly refused him?”

She returned his sad smile. “Paul said it was…a mutual thing.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t think you knew, Olivia. I figured that if you did, you would have thrown it up in my face when I accused you of being a less honest person than Annie.”

“I considered it,” she said, “but I didn’t want to hurt you.”

He took a step toward her and cupped her head in his palms, kissing her softly on her forehead. “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t think I could have handled hearing it from you just then.” He rested his hands on her waist and sighed. “Now I have to figure out when and how to tell my little girl that Tom is her father.”

“Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose it’s something she needs to know. Medical history and all of that.”

He nodded. “I have to wait, though, until I can accept it myself before I can expect her to. I want to tell her in a way that won’t make her think less of Annie—that will make her feel compassion for her. I don’t think I can do that quite yet.”

“You’re a good father, Alec.”

“I thought you had some doubts about that.”

She shook her head. “About some of your methods, perhaps. But I never doubted your intentions or your love for Lacey.” She touched his cheek. “Are you glad you know the truth?”

He nodded. “Yes,” he said. He raised his hands until his thumbs grazed the sides of her breasts. “It’s eased my guilt about loving you.”

“You took off your ring,” she said.

“So did you.”

She smiled, pressing her forehead to his chin. “Alec…?”

“Hmm?”

“Could we go to bed?”

He laughed, his breath warm against her cheek. “Yes,” he said.

They made love at a more leisurely pace than the last time. The sun outside her window poured warm, thick, honey-like air into her room and slowed them down, made them take their time. She was straddling Alec as he came, and she watched his body strain and arch in the golden light, as he must have watched hers only seconds earlier.

When his breathing had settled down, he opened his eyes and looked at her. “You look beautiful up there,” he said. He stroked his fingers along the gold chain resting against her breasts. “I love you, Olivia.”

She was aware of her nakedness, something that had not concerned her at all only a few minutes ago. But now she felt as though she was all stomach, the rest of her body small and inconsequential.

“It scares me to love you,” she said.

“Why?”

“I just finished loving a man who wished I was Annie. I’m afraid that loving you might end up being the same thing.”

He shook his head against the pillow. “I want you, Olivia,” he said, his hands tightening on her thighs. “I want you just the way you are, with your organized mind, and your craving for structure, and your driving ambition, and your ability to put yourself first.” He touched her lightly where her body was joined to his, and she shivered. “And with your genuine, and thoroughly unsubtle, carnal needs.”

“And with my pregnancy?”

He slid his hands to the firm golden orb of her belly. “I’ve already raised and loved another man’s child,” he said. “I can do it again.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

September 1991

The electricity went out in the Manteo Retirement Home at about eight-thirty in the evening, and the portable radio grew scratchy and unintelligible. The residents, along with some of the staff, huddled together in the candlelit living room, taking turns playing with the knobs on the radio, fighting the dying batteries.

Mary sat off in a corner, the folded newspaper with its finished crossword puzzle resting on her knee. She didn’t need the radio to know what was happening outside. She could feel the devastation in her bones.

She’d opened the window in her room a few hours earlier and let the air blow over her skin. She’d sniffed it, tasted it, and she knew the storm was very close. It’s time, she thought. For days she’d had a feeling about this one. Even before the residents of the Outer Banks were told to evacuate, she knew this storm would be like no other. It would hit head-on, with a sudden punch at the defenseless coastline, the mere preamble to a beating that would last hours.

Trudy tried to talk her into joining a game of canasta.

“If anyone should be used to storms, it’d be you, Mary,” she said when Mary declined. “Look at you, sitting there like a scared little girl.”

She wasn’t scared, but she didn’t bother to defend herself to Trudy. She wasn’t afraid at all.

She went to bed far later than usual, but still she could not sleep. The wind was ferocious. It howled eerily through the big house, and every once in a while she could hear the crackling sound of a tree snapping in two. One of the windows in Jane’s room blew out during the night, and her screams brought everyone out into the hall. Jane spent the rest of the night on the pull-out sofa in the living room.

Mary finally slept a little toward morning. When she woke up, the sky was overcast and foggy, and the little circle of stained glass hanging in her window cast weak, muted colors on the walls of her room.

She joined the others downstairs in the dining room, but she couldn’t eat. After breakfast, when everyone else went out on the porch to look at the downed trees and the broken windows in the neighboring houses, Mary walked into the kitchen, where Gale and Sandy, the only two members of staff who had made it in this morning, were loading the dishwasher. They looked up at her when she walked into the room.

“What is it, Mary?” Gale asked.

“I need one of you to take me to Kiss River,” she said.

Sandy laughed. “You’re nuts, Mary. The Outer Banks flooded last night and they said on the radio a lot of the roads are still under water. We probably couldn’t get there if we wanted to.”

“Please,” she said. She hated this. She hated having to beg, having to depend on these young girls for everything. “I’ll pay you.”

Gale laughed. “With what, honey? Do you have some money tucked away we don’t know about?”

Mary leaned heavily on her cane. Her hip was throbbing this morning. “If you don’t take me, I’ll find another way to get there.”

Sandy and Gale looked at each other, finally taking her seriously. A few weeks ago, someone had gotten to Mary’s puzzle before she did, and when they refused to drive her to the store for another paper, she’d walked the mile there and back herself.

Sandy slipped a plate into the dishwasher and wiped her hands on a paper towel. “All right, Mary,” she said. “I’ll take you. But don’t expect us to get very far.”

Mary rode in the front seat of the van, while Sandy drove. Sandy tried to get her to talk, but finally gave up. Mary had little to say today. She tapped her finger on the top of her cane, straining her eyes through the milky fog, trying to make out where they were.

The main road up the island was clear of water, but the storm had taken its toll on the buildings. Each time the fog thinned, just for a second or two, Mary could see glassless windows in the houses, boards and brush littering the sand. The street was peppered with shingles blown off the roofs.

They turned onto the road that ran through Southern Shores and she wondered how Annie’s family had fared. Had they evacuated? Had Olivia gone with them or stayed here to doctor anyone hurt in the storm? She was head of that emergency room now. Most likely she had to stay.

Alec had invited Mary to dinner last week, and she had been surprised by the invitation, surprised that Alec held no grudge against her for her role in Annie’s betrayal. Olivia had been there—obviously pregnant, a complication Mary had not even guessed at—and she and Lacey and Alec cooked while Mary sat at the kitchen table, observing the outcome of her revelations in the keeper’s house. They were happy people, those three. Survivors of her last, and most likely final, rescue.

Paul Macelli had moved back to Washington, they told her, where he was working once again for the Post and writing poetry, reading it on the weekends to his faithful covey of followers.

“Here we go,” Sandy said, as the van approached a long stretch of road that was under water. Gamely, she put the van into four-wheel drive and plunged in, and in a few minutes they were on dry road again. Sandy patted the steering wheel.

“Good girl,” she said.

Mary looked out toward the sea, but the fog hugged the beach, and there was little she could make out. They hit a few more patches of flooded road before finally reaching Kiss River.

Sandy pulled onto the narrow road that led down to the lighthouse. “Wow,” she said. “Lot of trees down.”

Mary didn’t care about the trees. She barely took note of them. Sandy stopped the car at the edge of the parking lot, and Mary managed to pull the van door open before her young driver had a chance to get out.

“Stay here,” Mary said.

“No way. I’m coming out there with you.”

“I don’t want you with me.” Mary got out of the van and slammed the door shut, surprised at her own strength.

Something in her voice must have convinced Sandy. “If you’re not back in fifteen minutes, I’m coming to find you,” she called out the window as Mary began walking away from the van.

Mary stepped from the paved lot to the wet sand, testing her legs, and began walking in the direction of the lighthouse. A dagger of pain cut into her left hip with each step, and her cane sank into the sand as she walked, but after a minute or two, the pain lessened and she thought no more about it.

She was nearly on top of the bayberry bushes before she saw them. The fog clung to the ground, to Kiss River, as it had many times in the past, and she had to rely on some inner sense of direction to keep herself on course. She found the path through the bushes, and once on the other side of them, could make out a couple of bulldozers and a truck laden with long, steel beams. They rested idly next to the keeper’s house. She walked a bit closer to the house, squinting, looking for damage. There was a bald spot on the roof where it had lost a few shingles, but the house itself was still standing, still in one piece, as far as she could see. A few windows were blown out, though. And right next to the cistern, a backhoe was tipped precariously onto its side.

The sea must have been all the way up here, she thought. And if it had been high enough to reach the house, it had been plenty high enough to…

She turned around and squinted up into the sky for the white tower, the black iron gallery. Maybe it was just too foggy to make it out. She walked in the direction of the lighthouse, barely using her cane now at all. She kept her eyes skyward. Had she gotten confused? Was she walking in the wrong direction? In her heart, though, she knew that wasn’t the answer. She’d known since last night, when she’d listened to the rain spiking against the roof of the retirement home and the wind snapping trees in half as though they were kindling. She’d known then what she would find out here today.

She took a few more steps. Quite suddenly, a gust of wind swept the fog out into the ocean, and she could see the scene in front of her as clearly as if she were looking at a painting in a museum. The sea hissed and swirled around the jagged remains of the Kiss River Lighthouse. The tower was one-third as tall as it had been, the cylinder of white bricks chewed off at an angle, and a few dozen feet of the circular stairs jutting into the thinning fog. The ground was littered with huge chunks of brick, the scene so startlingly clear that she wondered how she had missed it a few minutes earlier. The lens itself was nowhere to be seen, and she pictured it lying on the floor of the ocean, an enormous, prism-studded shell.

She glanced over at the bulldozers again, and the truck, waiting and ready to build a track that would not be needed. She shook her head, remembering the time she and Annie had sat up on the gallery and she’d told the younger woman, “If it’s time for the sea to take the lighthouse, we should just let it go.”

Mary could not resist a bittersweet smile at the memory. She began walking slowly back to the parking lot, the pain in her hip kicking to life once again as she shuffled through the wet sand. When she had nearly reached the row of bayberry bushes, she turned around for one last look at her lighthouse. “The time has come, Annie,” she said. “It’s finally come.”

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.

ISBN: 978-1-4592-0422-5

KEEPER OF THE LIGHT

Copyright © 2002 by Diane Chamberlain

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