Olivia looked toward the corner of the playground where the older kids were playing dodgeball. Her brother Avery had the ball, and she watched as he threw it hard at one of the girls who jumped out of the way just in time. Yes, Avery would take great pleasure in beating up Tim Anderson. He would use any excuse at all for a fight.

Mrs. Jasper looked at Olivia. “Maybe Clint should go home for the rest of the day. Shall I call your mother?”

Olivia shook her head, aware that Mrs. Jasper knew the futility of calling Mrs. Simon. “I’ll walk him.” Olivia held out her hand to her brother and he locked his blue-stained fingers with hers. Blueberry season was long over, and the few dollars the Simon children had earned picking the berries had already been spent. Still, it would be weeks before the stain left their fingers.

She walked Clint home, hoping their mother had passed out on the sofa by now, because Olivia knew what she would say when she heard Clint had gotten beaten up again. She’d shake her head, her thin, uncombed hair sticking up in dark tufts from her head. “God must’ve screwed up the day he made you two, Livvie,” she’d say, as though Clint couldn’t understand how she was insulting him. “Gave you Clint’s brains on top of your own, so it’s up to you to take care of him.”

Their mother was on the sofa, her doughy face pressed into the soft cushions. The bottle lay on its side on the floor next to her. Olivia tucked Clint into his bed, one of three in the cramped bedroom she shared with her brothers. Clint was worn out from his ordeal and fell asleep quickly, the blood scabbed and scratchy-looking around his nose. Back in the living room, Olivia picked up the bottle from the floor next to the sofa and put it as high as she could reach in the kitchen cupboard so her mother would have to hunt for it when she woke up. Then she left the house, thinking she would have to make Clint a card, too, when she got back to school. She knew it was all either of them would get.

Olivia stopped sweeping the deck to listen. Someone was in the house. She peered through the sliding glass doors into the living room, but it was too dark to see. Had she forgotten to lock the front door after Alec left?

“Olivia?”

Paul. She let out her breath as he stepped onto the deck. She was annoyed he thought he could simply walk into this house at any time, but she was too relieved to see him to say anything that might put him on the defensive. “You startled me,” she said. If he had come over twenty minutes earlier he would have gotten quite a surprise himself. She thought of the peacock feather in the kitchen. She would have to keep him from seeing it.

“Sorry. I knocked, but you probably couldn’t hear me out here.” He sat down at the table and looked up at her. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “If you’re willing.”

“Of course I’m willing.” She rested the broom against the house and sat down across from him.

“Did you mean it when you said I could talk to you about Annie?”

She didn’t let the disappointment show in her face. “Yes.”

“I need to. You were right when you said there was no one else I could talk to. No one who cares about me as much as you do.” He tapped his fingers nervously on the table. “This isn’t easy, but ever since you stopped over and you were so…kind, I just thought maybe I should try telling you the truth.”

Olivia locked her hands together in her lap. “I thought I knew the truth.”

He shook his head. “You know most of it. You know I fell in love with someone I couldn’t have, and that I sort of got crazed in that process. But what you don’t know is…” He looked up at the wooden ceiling and took in a deep breath. “Oh, Liv.” He shook his head at her. “I’m so sorry. When we got married I couldn’t imagine doing anything like this. Anything that would hurt you.”

“You slept with her.”

Paul licked his lips. “It was just one time,” he said. “Right before Christmas. I felt as though I had to, as though…”

“More than you had to honor your vows to me?” She thought the pain in her chest might kill her. He’d made love to both of them. He’d compared them, and Annie had emerged victorious.

“I should have left you earlier,” he said. “I didn’t feel good about it, but I convinced myself that you were somehow to blame, with your late hours and…” He stopped talking and looked out into the darkness again.

“And what?”

“Just the kind of person you are. A little rigid, while Annie was so free-spirited and full of life and…”

“Stop it!” Olivia stood up. “You must think I have no feelings at all.”

He looked up at her and continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I just got swept up into it. She was such a good person.”

“Oh yes, she sounds wonderful. She was cheating on her husband, Paul. How good is that?”

“It was my idea, not hers. I pushed her. I mean, I didn’t rape her, she wanted to do it, but…”

“Paul, I said I’d listen, but I can’t. It just hurts too much.”

He stood up and, to her surprise, took her in his arms. She didn’t fight him. She couldn’t. It had been too long.

“I still care about you, Liv,” he said. “But she destroyed me. I wish to hell that we never moved here. I wish I’d never met her.”

He smelled warm and familiar, yet all she could see when she closed her eyes was the image of him in bed with Annie. She pulled away from him with a whimper. “Go home, Paul,” she said. “Go back to your little shrine.”

He hesitated for a moment before turning to leave. Olivia waited until she heard his car pull out of the driveway. Then she walked into the kitchen and removed the peacock feather from the window. She took it outside to the end of the pier, lifted it over her head in the darkness, and brought it down hard on the piling, listening with enormous satisfaction to the breaking of the glass.



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


Paul ran into Alec in the supermarket—literally—their carts colliding as he turned the corner by the dairy case. Alec broke into a smile when he saw him, and Paul nearly groaned with dismay. He was trapped.

“Paul!” Alec gave him a hearty handshake. “You’ve been on my mind a lot lately.”

“I have?”

Alec leaned on his cart as though he was settling in for a long discussion. “The lighthouse material you sent me is terrific. I talked to Nola about it, and with a little more information we can put together a booklet rather than a brochure. The printer’s agreed, and we’ve figured out a way to distribute it nationally.”

“Fantastic,” Paul said. He rearranged the packages in his cart to avoid looking at Alec.

“I have an idea for your next interview with Mary Poor,” Alec said. “Get her to talk about herself. People used to call her the ‘Angel of the Light.’ I have a few old articles about her I can send you so you’ll know what to ask her, in case she turns out to be the modest type. Then maybe later in the summer we can get her to give a few of us a tour of the keeper’s house. Does she seem up to it?”

“A tour of the house?” Paul moved his carton of vanilla ice cream from one side of his cart to the other. “I’m not sure,” he said. “She was sitting in a rocking chair when I spoke with her, so I don’t know how well she gets around.” He was not at all certain he could handle another interview with the old woman, much less a tour of the house. How much could his nerves take? He had gotten sick after the first interview, had to pull off on a side street in Manteo to throw up in the gutter.

“Well, we’ll see,” Alec said. “By the way, why didn’t you tell me you did that article in Seascape on my wife?”

Paul tried to read his tone. Alec was smiling; there was nothing accusatory in his face. It was more that he thought Paul was being modest. “Oh, well. I didn’t know what kind of memory that would be for you.”

“It was a very nice tribute to her. She loved it.”

Paul smiled himself. He’d never known that. She had never said that to him. “Thanks,” he said. “That means a lot. How did you figure it out?”

“Your wife was the doctor on duty the night Annie died. I guess you knew that, huh?”

Paul froze. “Yes.”

“So, I’ve spoken with her—with Olivia—a few times to understand exactly what happened that night. You know, I just needed to sort it out in my head.”

“Right.” How much had Olivia told him? Paul’s palms began to sweat on the bar of the shopping cart.

“Olivia’s been very helpful to me,” Alec said. “It helps knowing she was the one treating Annie.”

“Yes, I…it must.”

“Did you know that you and Annie were in the same class at Boston College?”

How the hell did Alec know that? “Uh, yes. It came out during the interviews.”

“You didn’t remember her from back then?”

“There were a lot of students in that class.”

Alec looked down at his grocery cart and Paul followed his eyes to the frozen foods, cans of vegetables. “Annie would have a fit if she could see this,” Alec said, nodding toward the cart.

“Well, I’ve gotten into the frozen stuff myself, lately,” Paul said. “Speaking of which, we’d better get going before everything thaws.” He started to push his cart past Alec.

“Right,” Alec agreed. “Oh, by the way, I’m reading The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit.”

Paul turned back to look at him. “How…?”

“I’d mentioned something about how well you wrote to Olivia, and she thought I might like to take a look at it. That’s when you two met, huh? It must have been something, watching her in action.”

“Olivia?” he asked, stupidly, the memory jarring him. She had been young and pretty, caring and efficient, and he had been genuinely smitten. He had seen something in her that made him think, yes, she could be the one to help him forget, and for the longest time she had unwittingly done exactly that.

Alec rested his elbows on the bar of the shopping cart again. “As I’m reading about the train wreck, though, it makes me realize how poorly equipped our little emergency room is to handle a major trauma,” he said. “Like a gunshot to the heart.”

Paul was disturbed by Alec’s candor. Did he think they were friends? “I guess that’s true.” He glanced toward the inviting open aisle behind Alec’s head, then looked at his watch. “Well, I’ve got to get this stuff home,” he said. “I’ll see you at the next lighthouse meeting.” He pushed his cart away, cringing, knowing that his exit had been totally graceless.

Something seized him as he pushed the cart past the meat aisle. A sort of panic. He could not focus his eyes on the list he’d written an hour earlier. He stared down at the steaks and chops and bloody roasts. He abruptly took his hands from the cart, did an about-face, and walked out of the store, picturing his ice cream melting through the seams of the carton, dripping into a pool on the floor.

He got in his car and drove the two blocks to the beach at Nags Head. It was still early, just seven-thirty in the evening, and the beach was nearly empty. A few fishermen stood close to the water and occasionally a couple walked past him, hand in hand. He sat down in the sand and waited for the tension to leave his body.

Alec had spoken to Olivia. At length. Obviously, though, she had not told him anything earth-shattering or he never would have treated Paul with such goodwill, such respect. God. He had spent so much of his time and energy hating that man. Half his life.

A young couple and their dog ran along the water’s edge, laughing. The woman’s long hair was a true brown, and yet in the fading sunlight Paul could almost kid himself into thinking it was red.

Boston College. There were a lot of students in that class. Alec had bought it. Paul shook his head. How could Alec believe that anyone could have been on the same campus with Annie Chase and not have known her?



CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


Paul had been cast as the lead in Boston College’s freshman production of Angel Street. He had been an average student in high school, disdaining math and science in favor of literature and poetry and the endless melodrama of his own imagination. He’d also been president of the drama club, and he had a natural talent for which he was awarded a scholarship to B.C. His family would not have been able to afford to send him to a good school any other way, although his father’s Philadelphia fireworks business had done well during Paul’s high school years, and his mother had tucked away nearly every cent she’d earned as a maid. Still, there were six Macelli children—Paul and his five sisters—and they were all bright, all ambitious. They would all want to go to school.