Key of Light (Key 1)

“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.”

Chapter Sixteen

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.”