Read Online Keeper of the Light by Diane Chamberlain - Free Book Online Page B

on his chest just visible at the neckline. His head was tilted, one hand against his temple, as though his elbow rested on his raised knee, perhaps, or on a table out of the camera’s range. There was no smile. His lips were flattened, tight, the perfect match for the cold accusation she saw in his eyes.
    She stepped away, his eyes following her as she turned the corner to come face to face with a huge black and white portrait of Annie herself. Olivia stared. Annie looked familiar in her creamy-skinned beauty, but like a stranger in the lively contours of her face. Her hair was an untamed halo of pale silk against the glossy black background.
    “They broke the mold after they made Annie.” The man had come up behind her, and Olivia turned to face him.
    “Did you take it?”
    “Yes.” He seemed to have difficulty shifting his gaze from Annie to Olivia, but he finally reached forward to shake her hand. “I’m Tom Nestor,” he said. He smelled like smoke.
    “Olivia Simon.” She looked back at the portrait. “She must have been a wonderful subject for a photographer.”
    “Oh, yeah.” He dug his hands into the pockets of his denim overalls. The sleeves of his blue-striped shirt were rolled up to his elbows, and thick blond hair covered his meaty forearms. “You know, you hear about people dying, you think, I can’t believe it, but then you start facing up to it. It took me months to believe it with Annie, though. Sometimes I still think she’s going to walk through that door and tell me it was all a gag, she just needed some time away. I love the idea that she might…” His voice drifted off and he shrugged and smiled. “Oh, well.”
    Olivia remembered the woman on the table in the Emergency Room, the flat line of the monitor, the life slipping out of her hand.
    “I should really get another artist in here,” Tom continued. “I can’t pay the rent on this place myself. Alec—Annie’s husband—he’s been helping me out. But I just can’t imagine working with someone else. I worked with Annie for fifteen years.”
    Olivia turned to face him. “My husband did a story on her in Seascape Magazine .”
    Tom looked surprised. “Paul Macelli’s your husband? I didn’t realize he was married.”
    No, she imagined he hadn’t spoken of her much. Maybe he’d never even told Annie he was married. “Well, he’s…we’re separated,” she said.
    “Oh.” Tom fixed his gaze on Annie’s picture again. “He still comes in here from time to time. Said he’s fixing up a new house. He bought a lot of her stained glass. He wanted that Victorian lady you were looking at, but I’m not parting with her.”
    Olivia glanced at the rest of the photographs and then walked back to the center of the studio. She touched the corner of a stained glass panel hanging from the ceiling. “How do you do this?” she asked, running her fingers over the dark lines between the segments of blue glass. “This is lead, right?”
    Tom sat down behind the work table. “No, actually that’s copper foil covered with solder. Come over here.”
    She sat down on the chair next to him. He was working on a panel of white irises against a blue and black background. For the next ten minutes, she watched in fascination as he melted ropes of silvery solder onto the copper-wrapped edges of the glass, while the colors from the panels in the windows played on his hands, his cheeks, his pale blond eyelashes.
    “Do you give lessons?” she asked, surprising Tom no more than herself.
    “Not usually.” He looked up at her and grinned. “You interested?”
    “Well, yes, I’d like to try. I’m not very creative, though.”
    She had never done anything like this. She’d never had the time, never taken the time, to learn a skill so thoroughly unrelated to her profession.
    “You might surprise yourself,” Tom said. He named a price and she agreed; she would have agreed to any amount.
    Tom glanced down at her sandaled feet. “Wear closed-toed