LITMIR.BIZ

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if she were melting.

      The man fell to the floor, too. He dropped the gun and lowered his face to his hands, sobbing. One of the volunteers ran into the room from the hallway. She grabbed the gun from the floor and held it on him, but the big man no longer looked like a threat, just weak and tired and wet.

      Lacey broke free from the woman holding her and ran to her mother, dropping to her knees next to her. Her mother’s eyes were closed. She was unconscious, but not dead. Surely not dead. The bullet must have only nicked her, since the amount of blood on her blouse was no more than the prick of a thorn would produce on a fingertip.

      “Mom!” Lacey tried to wake her up. “Mom!” She turned her head toward the man, who still sat crumpled up on the floor. “Why did you do that?” she yelled, but he didn’t lift his head to answer.

      Women crowded around her and her mother. One of them knelt next to Lacey, holding her mother’s wrist in her fingers.

      “She’s alive,” the woman said.

      “Of course she’s alive,” Lacey snapped, angry that the woman had implied anything else was possible. The sound of sirens mixed with the pounding of the rain. “Her body just needs rest from being so scared.” She could hear her mother’s voice in her own; that was just the sort of thing Annie O’Neill would say.

      The woman the man had meant to kill was huddled in the corner, her arms around her son. Lacey could hear her speaking, saying over and over again into the pine-scented air of the room, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” and another woman was telling her, “It’s not your fault, dear. You were right to come here to get away from him.” But it was her fault. If she and her son hadn’t come here, this crazy man wouldn’t have run in and shot her mother.

      The room suddenly filled with men and women wearing uniforms. They blurred in front of Lacey’s eyes, and their voices were loud and barking. Someone was trying to drag her away from her mother, but she remained on the floor, unwilling to be budged more than a few feet. She watched as a man tore open her mother’s blouse and cut her bra, exposing her left breast for all the world to see. There was a dimple in that breast. Just a trace of blood and a small dimple, and that gave Lacey hope. She’d had far worse injuries falling off her bike.

      She stood up to be able to see better, and the woman who had tried to pull her away wrapped her arms around her from behind, crossing them over her chest and shoulders, as though afraid she might try to run to her mother’s side again. That was exactly what she wanted to do, but she felt immobilized by shock as much as by the heavy arms across her chest. She watched as the people in uniform lifted her mother onto a stretcher and wheeled her from the room. The man was already gone, and she realized the police had taken him away and she hadn’t even noticed.

      Lacey tugged at the woman’s arms. “I want to go with her,” she said.

      “I’ll drive you,” the woman said. “We can follow the ambulance. You don’t want to be in there with her.”

      “Yes, I do!” Lacey said, but the woman held her fast.

      Giving in, she let the woman lead her out the front door of the house, and she turned to watch them load her mother into the ambulance. Something cool touched her nose and her cheeks and her lips, and she turned her face toward the dark sky. Only then did she realize it was snowing.

       1

       June 2003

      THE CHAIN AT THE END OF THE GRAVEL LANE hung loose from the post, and Lacey was grateful that Clay had remembered she’d gone out for dinner with Tom and had left the entrance open for them.

      “Will you put the chain up after you drop me off?” she asked Tom.

      “No problem.” He drove between the posts and onto the forest-flanked lane, driving too quickly over the bumps and ruts.

      Lacey pressed her palm against the dashboard for balance. Although it was only dusk, it was already dark along the tree-shrouded gravel lane leading to the Kiss River light station. “You’d better slow down,” she said. “I nearly ran over an opossum on this road last night.”

      Obediently, Tom lifted his foot from the gas pedal. “I’m glad you don’t live out here alone,” he said in the paternal tone he occasionally used with her since learning he was her biological father a decade ago. “I’d be worried about you all the time.”

      “Well,” Lacey sighed. “I won’t be living out here too much longer.” The Coast Guard had finally decided to turn the nearly restored keeper’s house into a museum, a decision she had hoped would never come.

      “You’re upset about it, huh?”

      “Oh, a bit.” She was frankly scared, although of what, she couldn’t say. The isolation the keeper’s house had offered her had been more than welcome, it had been necessary, especially this last difficult year. “They’ve restored every inch of it except the living room and the sunroom.” She shared a studio in Kill Devil Hills with Tom, but she’d turned the sunroom of the keeper’s house into a small studio, as well, so she could work on her stained glass when she was at home. “They’ll restore the sunroom after I leave, and the living room will be turned into a little shop and information area.”

      “When do they want you out?” he asked. They were nearing the end of the road. A bit of dusky daylight broke through the trees and she could clearly see the gray in Tom’s wiry blond ponytail and the glint of light from the small gold hoop in his ear.

      “Some time after the first of the year,” she said.

      “Where will you … holy shit.” Tom had driven from the gravel road into the parking lot, and the keeper’s house came into view in the evening light. The upper portions of nearly every window were aglow with her stained glass creations.

      She followed his gaze to the house. “In the year and a half I’ve lived here, you haven’t seen the keeper’s house at night?” she asked.

      Tom stopped the car in the middle of the lot and a smile came slowly to his lips. Shaking his head, he leaned over to pull Lacey toward him, wrapping her in the scent of tobacco as he kissed the top of her head. She had gotten him to stop drinking, but had failed at getting him to give up cigarettes.

      “You’re your mother, Lace,” he said. “This is just the sort of thing she would do. Turn her home into a … I don’t know. Someplace magical.”

      She felt defeated. She wanted to tell him that she was not her mother any longer, that she had worked hard this last year to rid herself of her mother’s persona. Apparently she had not succeeded. It was hard to succeed when you had no identity of your own to take the place of the one you were trying to discard.

      She was surprised to see her father’s van parked in the lot next to Clay’s Jeep. “Dad is here,” she said. “Weird.”

      “He doesn’t come to visit you much?” Tom asked, and she heard the competitive edge in his voice. Tom often displayed a quiet envy of Alec O’Neill for having had the honor of raising her.

      “He’s smitten with Rani,” she said, not really answering the question. “He likes having a grandbaby.”

      Tom laughed. “You have one hell of a complicated family, you know that?”

      “I do, indeed.” Lacey unfastened her seat belt. The tight little nuclear family she’d grown up in had added and subtracted so many people that it sometimes seemed difficult to keep track of them all. To complicate her life even further, she worked with both her fathers, spending her mornings in the animal hospital run by the father who had raised her and her afternoons in the art studio with the father who had given her life.

      “Is that a kennel?” Tom pointed toward the large fenced area near the edge of the woods. “Is Clay training dogs again?”

      “Uh-huh,” she said. “He’s been back at it a few months now.” With

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