The Blink of an Eye

The Blink of an Eye: The Girl Who Painted Rocks is the story of Marina Catherine O'Shea, who was born in Dublin, Ireland, and orphaned at five years of age following her parents' tragic deaths in a car accident. She is placed into a strict Catholic orphanage where she will spend her formative years and attend school. She is a quiet, studious girl with a unique skill: she is an exceptional artist.At age 18, she enters the convent as an acolyte and is expected to become a nun. A priest at the compound, Father Denis, becomes enamored with her and uses her talent to seduce her. She soon becomes pregnant, and the priest returns to the African mission he helped in the past. He will return a broken man after the mission is overrun by mercenaries who kill the missionary staff. He survives only because he escapes and makes a five-hundred-mile trip on foot to safety.When Marina begins to show, the mother superior takes pity on her and sends her off to an associate at a church facility in Northern Michigan. A late-term miscarriage, requiring an operation, nearly kills her.When Father Denis learns he might have a child, he trails her to the United States. When he tries to rape her, Marina batters him and leaves him for dead and flees, Unexpected strangers help Marina along the way as she flees south to get out of the brutal winters of northern Michigan. In Chicago, a stranger recognizes her talent and takes her under her wing. Louise Mayfield is a noted art restorer and conservator. Along with her boyfriend, Jacques Belard, she convinces Marina to join them in an art-forgery scheme involving long-lost paintings by notable artists. Jacques, an art historian, archivist, and provenance curator, has found rare opportunities from a list supplied by his original mentor, who has passed on. They enjoy initial success with their scheme until Cairo Greene, a rich drug queen, discovers their studio in one of her warehouses. She forces them to work for her, using their paintings to transmit cash in the shipping crates on their way to Europe to fund her drug operations there. Cairo moves Marina to California, where she meets up with a man who has seen her painting a boulder along a northern Michigan road five years before, when she was fleeing the priest who had tried to rape her, whom she believes she has murdered.Jack Davis, ten years older than Marina, falls hard for her and is her first real exposure to love. Greene again kidnaps Marina, and she is moved without notice back to Chicago, where she and Louise are forced to work for Greene with their forgeries. Jack begins a search for Marina that involves private detectives, INTERPOL, and the FBI.In the end, Jack rescues Marina, but fearing she will be arrested for killing the priest, she disappears again, until a year later, she sends Jack a cryptic message to meet at the boulder along the road on the anniversary of the first time he saw her. But Jack knows she needs to be young and free and develop her talent, and he lets her go.In the epilogue, it is ten years later. Marina is living quietly in Phuket, Thailand. Unbeknownst to her, the priest she thought she had killed did not perish, though he is unable to remember anything about the confrontation that he instigated. Marina has become wealthy along with her cohorts, and lives with her female partner on a cliff overlooking a bay of the Andaman Sea. Jack lives with his long-term girlfriend in Hollywood, and they will never see each other again. But they often think about what might have been had they stayed together.