Nora Robets - Key of Light

To question her ethics, she admitted. She wouldn't have felt this awful grief, she realized. Grief that this part of her life had been taken away from her. Maybe she was crazy for refusing the offer to take it back. Maybe she was making a huge mistake by deviating from the sensible, the tangible . She could go back and speak to James, tell him she'd changed her mind. She could slide back into routine again, have what she'd always had.

And it would never be the same.

That was the grief. Her life was changed, irrevocably. And she hadn't taken the time to mourn the loss. She did so now, with every piece she touched, every minute she spent in the space that had once been the most important part of her life.

She revisited a thousand memories, so many of them part of the day-to-day routine that had meant nothing at the time. And everything once it had been taken away.

Flynn pulled open the door. "Where do you want to—" He broke off when she turned toward him. Her eyes were dry, but devastated. She held a rough stone sculpture in her arms as she might a child.

"What is it?"

"I miss this place so much. It's like something's died." Very gently, she replaced the sculpture on a shelf. "I acquired this piece, about four months ago. It's a new artist. He's young, with all the fire and temperament you'd expect from the feel of his work. He's from a small town in Maryland, and he's had a little local luck, but no major gallery showed any interest. It felt good to give him his first real break, and to think of what he might do, what we might do in the future."

She ran a fingertip over the stone. "Someone bought this. I didn't have anything to do with that part, don't even recognize the name on the invoice. It's not mine anymore."

"It wouldn't have been here or have been sold if it wasn't for you."

"Maybe, but those days are over. I don't have a place here anymore. I'm sorry for what I said before. Very sorry I hurt your feelings."

"Forget it."

"No." She drew a breath. "I'm not going to say I didn't have some concerns about how you might handle this whole thing eventually. I can't claim that I have absolute trust in you. That conflicts with loving you, and I can't explain it. No more than I can explain how I know the key's not here. How I knew that the minute I walked in to get the keys from Tod. I still have to look, have to finish what I started. But it's not here, Flynn. There's nothing here for me now."

Flynn closed the door of his office, a signal that he was writing and was not to be disturbed. Not that anybody paid a great deal of attention to the signal, but it was the principle of the thing.

He let the idea for the column simply flow out initially, a kind of serpentine river of thought that he would channel into a more disciplined form on the second pass.

What defined the artist? Were artists only those who created what was perceived as the beautiful or the shocking, those who formed some piece of work that delivered a visceral punch? In painting, in music, in literature or theater?

If so, did that make the rest of the world nothing more than the audience? Passive observers whose only contribution was applause or criticism?

What became of the artist without the audience?

Not his usual sort of column, Flynn mused, but it had been kicking around in his head since the night he and Malory had searched The Gallery. It was time to let it out.

He could still see the way she'd looked in that storeroom. A stone figure in her arms and grief swimming in her eyes. In the three days since, she'd kept him and everyone else at arm's length. Oh, she paid lip service to being busy, to following different angles on her quest, to putting her life back in order.

Though from his point of view there'd never been any real disorder to it.

Still, she refused to come out. And she wouldn't let him in.

Maybe the column was a kind of message to her.

He rolled his shoulders, tapped his fingers on the edge of his desk until his mind shifted back and found the words.

Wasn't the child who first learned to form his own name with letters a kind of artist? One who was exploring intellect, coordination, and ego. When the child held that fat pencil or bright crayon in his fist, then drew those letters on paper, wasn't he creating a symbol of himself with lines and curves? This is who I am, and no one else is quite the same.

There is art in the statement, and in the accomplishment.

What about the woman who managed to put a hot meal on the table in the evening? To a Cordon Bleu chef, this might be a pedestrian feat, but to those who were baffled by the directions on a can of condensed soup, having that meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and string beans hit the table in unison was a great and mysterious art.

"Flynn?"

"Working," he snapped without looking up. "You're not the only one." Rhoda shut the door at her back, marched over and sat in a chair. She folded her arms across her chest and stared holes at Flynn through her square-framed glasses.

But without the audience, ready and willing to consume the art, it becomes congealed leftovers to be dumped… "Damn it."

He shoved back from his keyboard. "What?"

"You cut an inch from my feature."

His hands itched to pick up his Slinky. And wrap its coils around Rhoda's skinny throat. "And?"

"You said it was running a full twelve inches."

"And what you had was eleven solid inches, and an inch of fill. I cut the fill. It was a good piece, Rhoda. Now it's a better piece."

"I want to know why you're always picking on me, why you're always cutting my pieces. You barely put a mark on John's or Carla's, and they're all over my work."

"John handles sports. He's been handling sports for over a decade. He's got it down to a science."

Art and science, Flynn thought and made a quick shorthand note to remind himself to work it into the column. And sports… If anyone watched the way a pitcher sculpted the dirt on the mound with his feet until it was exactly the shape, the texture, the slope he—

"Flynn!"

"What? What?" He snapped back, rewound the tape in his mind. "And I do edit Carla when and if she needs it. Rhoda, I'm on a deadline myself here. If you want to get into this, let's schedule some time tomorrow."

Her mouth pruned. "If we don't resolve this now, I won't be coming in tomorrow."

Instead of reaching for his action figure of Luke Sky-walker and imagining the Jedi knight drawing his light saber and blasting the superior smirk off Rhoda's face, Flynn sat back.

The time had come, he decided, to do the blasting himself.

"Okay. First, I'm going to tell you I'm tired of you threatening to walk. If you're not happy here, not happy with the way I run the paper, then go."

She flushed scarlet. "Your mother never—" "I'm not my mother. Deal. I run the Dispatch . I've been running it for nearly four years now, and I intend to run it for a long time. Get used to it."

Now her eyes filled, and since Flynn considered tears fighting dirty, he struggled to ignore them. "Anything else?" he asked coolly.

"I've been working here since before you could read the damn paper."

"Which may be our problem. It suited you better when my mother was in charge. Now it suits you better to continue to think of me as a temporary annoyance, and an incompetent one at that."

Rhoda's mouth dropped open in what appeared to be sincere shock. "I don't think you're incompetent. I just think—"

“That I should stay out of your work." The genial tone was back in his voice, but his expression remained frigid. "That I should do what you tell me instead of the other way around. That's not going to happen."

"If you don't think I do good work, then—"

"Sit down," he ordered as she started to rise. He knew the drill. She would storm out, slam things around, glare at him through the glass, then make sure her next piece slid in only minutes before deadline.

"It so happens I think you do good work. Not that it matters a hell of a lot coming from me because you don't have any confidence in or respect for my skill or my authority. I guess that makes it tough for you because you're a journalist, we're the only game in town, and I'm in charge. I don't see any of those factors changing. Next time I ask for twelve inches, give me a solid twelve and we won't have a problem." He tapped the tip of his pencil against the desk while she gaped at him.

Perry White, he mused, might've handled it better, but he figured he was in the ballpark. "Anything else?"

"I'm going to take the rest of the day off."

"No, you're not." He swiveled back to his keyboard. "Have that piece on the elementary school expansion on my desk by two. Close the door on your way out."

Flynn went back to typing, pleased when he heard the door click closed instead of slam. He waited thirty seconds, then shifted in his chair enough to look through the glass wall. Rhoda was sitting at her desk as if paralyzed.

He hated confrontations like that. The woman used to sneak him gumdrops when he would come into the offices after school. It was hell, he decided, rubbing his temple and pretending to concentrate on his work. Just hell being a grown-up.

He escaped for an hour in the afternoon to meet Brad and Jordan at the Main Street Diner. It hadn't changed much since the three of them had gathered there regularly after football games or for late-night bullshit sessions that had revolved around girls and life plans.

The air was still ripe with the smell of the diner's signature chicken-fried steak, and the counter still held a four-tiered display rack of that day's pies. As Flynn looked down at the burger he'd ordered out of habit, he wondered if it was the diner that had gotten stuck in the past, or himself.

He frowned at Brad's club sandwich. "Trade me."

"You want my sandwich?"

"I want your sandwich. Trade me." To solve the matter, Flynn switched the plates himself.

"If you didn't want a burger, why'd you order one?"

"Because. I'm a victim of habit and tradition."

"And eating my sandwich is going to solve that?"

"It's a start. I also started breaking habit by reaming Rhoda out at the paper this morning. Once she comes out of shock, I'm pretty sure she'll start planning my demise."

"How come you wanted his sandwich instead of mine?" Jordan asked.

"I don't like Reubens."

Jordan considered, then switched his plate with Brad's.

"Jesus, are we finished playing musical plates now?" Brad scowled at the Reuben, then decided it actually looked pretty good.

Though he was already wishing he had his burger back, Flynn picked at the club sandwich. "Do you think staying in your hometown all your life keeps you too attached to the past, too resistant to change and growth, and thereby inhibits your ability to function as a mature adult?"

"I didn't know this was going to be a philosophical discussion." But willing to play, Jordan considered the question as he squeezed ketchup on the burger. "It could be said that staying in your hometown means you're comfortable there and have created strong roots and ties. Or that you're just too lazy and complacent to get your ass out."

"I like it here. Took me a while to come to that. Up until recently I'd been pretty complacent about how things were going. Complacency's taken a backseat since around the first of the month."

"Because of the keys?" Brad asked. "Or Malory?"

"One goes with the other. The keys, that's an adventure, right? Sir Galahad and the Holy Grail, Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark."

"Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny," Jordan put in.

"Right, same deal." You could always count on Jordan to get your drift, Flynn thought. "None of our lives are going to suffer if we don't find them. Not really."

"One year," Brad said. "That's a pretty stiff penalty clause to my way of thinking."

"Okay, yeah." Flynn plucked a potato chip from the little mound beside his sandwich. "But I'm having a hard time seeing either Rowena or Pitte punishing these women."

"They may not be the ones who do the messing," Jordan commented. "They may simply be the conduit, so to speak, to reward or punishment. Why do we assume they have a choice either?"

“Trying to think positive here," Flynn replied. "And the idea that we will find the keys, and what happens then, is compelling."