LITMIR.BIZ

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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 shoes,” he said. “And you’ll need safety glasses, but I think I’ve got an old pair of Annie’s somewhere around here. You can use them.”

      Before she left she bought a small, oval-shaped panel Annie had made—the delicate, iridescent detail of a peacock feather. She was leaving the studio when she nearly tripped over a stack of magazines piled close to the door.

      Tom sighed. “I’ve got to do something about this mess.” He waved a hand toward the magazines and a few piles of paperback books stacked next to them. “People have been bringing in their books and magazines for years. Annie would take them to the old folks’ home in Manteo. I haven’t wanted to tell people to stop, ‘cause Annie would have had my head, but I just don’t feel like driving over there.”

      “I can take them sometime,” Olivia said. When? she wondered. Her impulsivity was beginning to worry her.

      “Hey, would you? That’d be great. You just tell me when you’re headed out that way and I’ll load you up.”

      She arrived at the studio at exactly eleven the following Saturday. Tom fitted her with Annie’s green safety glasses, Annie’s old green apron. He drew a pattern of squares and rectangles on a sheet of graph paper, laid a piece of clear glass over it, and showed her how to use the glass cutter to score the glass. Her first cut was perfect, he said, as were her second and third.

      “You have a natural feel for this.”

      She smiled, pleased. She had a steady hand; she was used to a scalpel. She only needed to adjust her pressure to the fragile glass.

      Her head was bowed low over her work when she heard someone enter the studio. “Morning, Tom.”

      She looked up to see Alec O’Neill, and her hand froze above the glass.

      “Howdy, Alec,” Tom said.

      Alec barely seemed to notice her. He was carrying a camera case, and he stepped through a side door in the studio, closing it behind him.

      “What’s in there?” Olivia asked.

      “Darkroom,” said Tom. “That’s Annie’s husband, Alec. He comes in a couple of times a week to develop film or make prints or whatever.”

      She glanced at the closed darkroom door, and returned her attention to her work. Her next cut splintered a little, and she jerked her hands quickly away from the glass. “Shouldn’t I be wearing some sort of gloves?”

      “No.” Tom looked offended. “You want to feel what you’re doing.”

      She worked a while longer, glancing at her watch from time to time, hoping she would be finished before Alec O’Neill came out of the darkroom. Her next cut was crooked. This was not as easy as she’d thought. She had hung the peacock feather in her kitchen window, and now that she had a better sense of the work that had gone into it, she was anxious to see it again, to study it from a new perspective.

      She was using pliers to break apart a scored piece of glass when the darkroom door squeaked open, and she kept her eyes riveted on her work as Alec O’Neill walked back into the studio.

      “I left the negatives in there,” he said to Tom. “Those closeups you made of the brick came out good,” Tom said.

      Alec didn’t respond, and she felt his eyes on her. She lifted her face, slipped off the glasses.

      “This is Olivia Simon,” Tom said. “Olivia, Alec O’Neill.”

      Olivia nodded, and Alec frowned. “I’ve met you somewhere.”

      She set down the pliers and lowered her hands to her lap. “Yes, you have,” she said, “but not under very good circumstances, I’m afraid. I was the physician on duty the night your wife was brought to the emergency room.” “Oh.” Alec nodded slightly. “Yes.” “You were what?” Tom leaned back to look at her. “I stopped in to take a look at your wife’s work, and I liked it so much that I asked Tom to give me lessons.”

      Alec cocked his head at her, as though he were not quite certain he believed her. “Well,” he said after a moment. “You came to the right guy.” He looked as though he wanted to say something more, and Olivia held her breath, aware of the still, colorful air surrounding

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