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.
Yes. There it was. The pinpoint of light. It disappeared, and he counted. One, one-hundred, two, one-hundred, three, one-hundred, four, one-hundred. There it was again. The Kiss River Lighthouse. He watched the light glow and vanish in the distance, setting its languorous, hypnotic pace. A clear white light. Annie had told him during one of the interviews that she saw no point to clear, uncolored glass. “It’s like being alive without being in love,” she’d said, and then she’d told him about her fantasy of putting stained glass in the windows of the Kiss River Lighthouse.
“Women,” she’d said, “in long, flowing gowns. Roses, mauves. Icy blues.”
He hadn’t written any of that in the Seascape article. There were many things she’d said to him that he’d kept entirely for himself.
A gust of cold air tore through his coat and stung his eyes. Annie.
An infatuation. One-sided.
Paul sat down on the cold sand and buried his head in his arms, finally allowing himself to cry, for what he’d lost, for what he’d never had.
CHAPTER THREE
June 1991
Alec O’Neill’s favorite memory of Annie was also his first. He had been standing right where he stood now, on this same beach, and it was as moonless a night then as it was now, the night air black and sticky like tar. The lighthouse high above him flashed one long glare every four and a half seconds. The wait between those light flashes seemed an eternity in the darkness, and in one of those blasts of light he saw a young woman walking toward him. At first he thought she was a figment of his imagination. It did something to your head, standing out here alone, waiting for the beacon to swing around again and ignite the sand. But it was a woman. In the next flash of light, he saw her long, wild red hair, a yellow knapsack slung over her right shoulder. She was probably a year or two younger than him, twenty or so. She started speaking as she drew near him, while he stood mesmerized. Her name was Annie Chase, she said, her husky voice a surprise. She was hitchhiking down the coast, from Massachusetts to Florida, staying close to the water all the way.
She wanted to touch the ocean in every state. She wanted to feel the water grow warmer as she moved south. He was intrigued. Speechless. In the beacon of light he watched her pull a Mexican serape from her knapsack and spread it on the ground.
“I haven’t made love in days,” she said, taking his hand in the darkness. He let her pull him down to the blanket and fought a sudden prudishness as she reached for the snap on his jeans. It was, after all, 1971, and he was twenty-two and five years beyond his first time. Still, she was a complete stranger.
He could barely concentrate on the sensations in his own body, he was so enchanted by hers. The beacon teased him with glimpses of it, delivered in four-and-one-half second intervals. In the tarry blackness between light flashes, he would never have known she was there except for the feel of her beneath his hands. It threw off their rhythm, those lambent pulses of light, made them giggle at first, then groan with the effort of matching his pace to hers, hers to his.
He took her back to the cottage he shared with three friends from Virginia Tech. They had just graduated and were spending the summer working for a construction company on the Outer Banks before going on to graduate school. For the past couple of weeks, they’d been painting the Kiss River Lighthouse and doing some repair work on the old keeper’s house. Usually they spent the evenings drinking too much and looking for women, but tonight the four of them and Annie sat together in the small, sandy living room, eating the pomegranates she had produced from her knapsack and playing games she seemed to have invented on the spot.
“Sentence completion,” she