Lake News (17 page)

“I can't. It's news. But don't assume that they're critical of you. They're refusing to talk with the press.”

“John is press. They're talking with him.” She let out a breath, looking close to tears again. “I thought I could come here and be invisible for a while. Until I see what happens in Boston. Until I decide what to do. But now he knows I'm here.”

“If he said he won't tell, he won't,” Poppy assured her.

“Why not? What's in it for him?”

“Self-respect.”

“He brought groceries.”

“A peace offering?”

“Or a Trojan horse.”

That gave Poppy pause. “You never used to be cynical.”

Lily pushed a hand through her hair. “Funny how fast things change.”

Poppy wanted to hug her sister again, but Lily seemed isolated, separate. The best Poppy could do was to say,
“Lily, you can't leave. This is the safest place there is for you right now.”

“Maybe. I'll stay near the cottage, I guess. See how things play out.”

“Stay here,” Poppy suggested, loving the idea, but Lily sighed and shook her head.

“No. The cottage is mine. Everything else has been taken away. I need that.”

“Is there
anything
I can do?”

Lily's expression was suddenly pointed. “More of what you did just now when Terry called. Let him try to locate all the people who were in shows I was in. I don't even remember their names.”

“Do you want me to call Mom?”

“No.”

When a light on the bank of phones blinked, Poppy adjusted her mouthpiece. “Lake Henry Police Department. This call is being recorded.”

“This is Harvey Ellman. I'm researching an article for
Newsweek
and need information on Lily Blake's criminal record. Can you fax me a rap sheet?”

Poppy held her sister's eyes. “Lily Blake has no criminal record.”

“There was a conviction for grand theft.”

“No. No conviction. The case was continued, then dropped.”

“That wasn't what I was told.”

“You were told wrong.”

“Who are
you?”
the man asked impatiently.

“I'm the dispatch officer, and I know what I'm talking about. You're not the first one calling about this.”

“I'd like to talk with the police chief.”

“Sorry. It's me or no one. For the record, again, you are Harvey Gellman—”

“Ellman.”

Poppy spelled it out. “With
Newsweek
. Good. I'll tell the chief why you called.” She grinned at Lily. “We have a recording of this conversation, but I'll keep your name handy so we'll know who to blame if the facts in your article are wrong. You see, Lily Blake is well liked in this town. If you print lies, we'll have to call you on it. And we have a forum to do it, what with other press people calling. I mean, we have to protect our own tails here, don't we?”

Lily left Poppy's feeling marginally better. Poppy was a powerful ally. She answered phones for the most influential residents of Lake Henry, which put her in a position to lobby on Lily's behalf. She also had insisted that Lily take her cellular phone, since there was no active line in Celia's place.

Wearing the baseball cap and sunglasses again, Lily drove the borrowed wagon back to Celia's the same way she had come—around the opposite end of the lake from the center of town. Lake Henry noticed strangers. Granted, there were other cars with Massachusetts plates passing through—leaf peepers looking for foliage, newspaper people looking for dirt—but she suspected that people in town were starting to wonder if she would return. The less she tempted them with a familiar nose and chin, the better.

She held her breath when she turned onto the road to Thissen Cove, half expecting to find a strange car parked
at the cottage. With a hand on the phone she prepared to call Poppy, who would call Willie Jake, the police chief, who would race around the lake in his all-terrain vehicle and arrest the intruder for trespassing. But trespassing was a minor offense, which meant that the offender would be free within hours and on the phone announcing Lily's whereabouts to all, which would bring a swarm of press people to Lake Henry, which was the last thing Lily wanted.

Of course, John Kipling might already have made those calls.

But there were no cars by the cottage. She looked around carefully. She even turned the car and parked it heading out, all the better for a speedy getaway. Then she climbed out and, watchful of the surrounding woods now, ran to the door.

There was no one around. She went from window to window, peering out, then made the rounds again, this time opening each window to allow for the mild midday air to enter. When she was certain that no one lurked on land, she opened the door to the lake. There was one boat in sight—a classic thing that looked like one from Marlon Dewey's prized collection—but it was distant and growing more so by the minute. No threat there. And no sign of John Kipling.

Everything in sight was crystal clear and serene. Breathing it in, she let herself relax, and once she'd done that, exhaustion hit.

Within minutes she was asleep on the big iron bed.

While Lily slept, John was busy, as much for his own peace of mind as for anything else. He never felt good when he left Gus. There was always frustration, always remorse, always guilt. It was worse than usual today, because Gus was clearly declining, and John knew he shouldn't have walked off that way. But along with all else he felt for his father, there was anger. Gus had kept him at arm's length throughout his childhood, then had sent him away. Sure, John might well have ended up like his brother if he'd stayed. Still, the hurt from that early banishment stung—not that there was anything John could do about it now. It was ancient history. But keeping busy kept his mind off the ongoing ache.

Intent on picking up gossip for
Lake News,
he returned from the Ridge through the center of town, pulled in at the plant and shrub sale, and mingled with the townsfolk. There was talk about the play that the Lake Henry Players had chosen for their winter drama, talk about the sale of two poems that the town librarian
had made to
Yankee
magazine, and from the same librarian, talk of the litter of six kittens that the library's cat had just given birth to behind the biography shelves. Approaching a large wood cart filled with pumpkins, John caught talk of the season's bumper crop, but he had little time to make notes on that or any of the rest before people turned the questions on him.

“Paper says she's hiring that lawyer,” remarked Alf Buzzell. He was the director of that winter drama, a sixty-year resident of Lake Henry and treasurer of the Historical Society. “Think there'll be a big TV trial?”

“Beats me,” John said.

“Don't know's I'd like that,” the man remarked, leaving John to wonder whether it was the focus on the town that he would mind or its competition with the Lake Henry Players.

“How'd they find out about the stutter?” asked the librarian. Leila Higgins was in her thirties. She had been a year ahead of Lily in school, a bookworm even back then. Though married now, she made no secret of having been a teenage wallflower. When she talked about those years, there was a bruised look in her eyes, just as there was as she asked about Lily.

“They must have seen medical records,” John answered.

“But how? Who would have let the public see those?”

John didn't know for sure. He planned to look into it. “There was probably mention of the stutter in the court file.”

“But who would have let the public see
those?”
Leila insisted. It was another thing John planned to look into.

From the owner of the pumpkin cart came, “I keep wondering if she'll come here.” Like the others, he felt no need to qualify the “she.” There was only one “she” the townsfolk were talking about. John didn't pretend not to follow.

But since there wasn't a question, there was no need of an answer. Grateful to be spared evasiveness, John ran his hand over a rounded pumpkin. “This is a beauty,” he said, taking an appreciative breath. Between the smells of sweet junipers, rich loam, and ripe pumpkin, fall was definitely in the air. It was worth lingering over, and he would do that, but not just now. Tucking his notebook into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, he crossed the parking lot to the general store, because he knew that Charlie would be breaking for lunch.

Charlie Owens was a contemporary of his. He had grown up in a well-heeled lake family but had been John's friend through school, which was to say that Charlie had been a bad boy, too. Their favorite place had been No Man's Island, smack in the center of the lake. At twelve they had paddled there to smoke pot; at thirteen they had gotten drunk there; at fourteen they had lost their virginity there, one right after the other, to a very willing, very buxom girl two years older.

Charlie had returned to the fold straight from college, thanks to the dual incentive of a stagnant family business and the love of a woman with the ideas, energy, and style to revive it. He served as the front man at the general store, the one who knew how to communicate with Lake Henryites, but Annette was the one responsible for bringing the store toward the new millennium.
She overhauled the grocery department, introducing a deli and a bakery, updated the home supplies department, and established a crafts department that brought browsers. She also was the brains behind the café, a bright, glass-enclosed room at the far end of the store.

John headed there now. When he crossed in front of the kitchen pass-through, he ducked his head and winked at Annette, who was back there ladling up something that smelled like a wonderfully fresh fish chowder. In the café, he slid into his favorite window booth, a spot that looked out at a stand of white birches. With the sun noon high, the curling bark was whiter and the fall leaves more yellow than ever.

He wasn't there for long before Charlie set down a tray with, yes, fish chowder, plus Western club sandwiches and coffee, all for two. After he emptied the tray, he slid in across from John and grinned. “Thought you'd never get here.”

John reached for the coffee. The taste brought immediate relief from the lingering aftertaste of beer. “Long morning?” he asked, holding the cup for its warmth.

“Busy is all,” Charlie said, but he didn't look any worse for the wear. His thinning hair had gone white, and he already had Charlie Senior's crow's-feet, but there was an ease in his eyes and his smile that attested to something working well in his life. His wife adored him, as did their five kids, three of whom worked at the store. John might tease Charlie about the kids giving him that white hair, but John did envy him the fullness of his life.

“I won't ask what they're talking about out there,”
Charlie mused, gesturing around the café with his spoon. “They're talking about it in here, too. Town's obsessed with it.”

“What do you remember about her?”

Charlie ate a big piece of fish from his chowder. That was all the time it took for him to decide. “The voice. She was singing in church by the time she was seven. Outside of church, she was invisible. A quiet thing.”

“She stuttered,” John reminded him. That would explain the quietness.

“Not when she sang. She used to sing Sundays at church, and from the time she was ten or eleven, Thursdays here. I was away when that started, but to hear my dad tell it, she kept the place packed. They used the big room in back for live music even then, though it wasn't much more'n walls of barn board, with benches round a potbelly stove and a raised platform at one end.”

“Did she sing every week?”

“Near to,” Charlie said and took another mouthful of chowder. He had barely swallowed when he pointed the spoon at John's bowl. “Eat. My kids caught the fish—white perch and bass from the lake.” He opened a bag of oyster crackers and dumped them in.

John ate. The chowder was light and buttery, not too thick, just savory enough.

Charlie said, “But there were fights aplenty about Lily singing here. George liked it, Maida didn't. Far as she was concerned, if singing in church was a sure road to salvation, singing here was a sure road to hell.”

“Then why did she allow it?”

“George insisted. So did Lily's speech therapist.
They both said she needed something to feel good about.”

John was trying to picture it. “A singing ten-year-old is precocious and adorable. What about a fourteen- or fifteen-year old? Was she provocative?”

“Omigod, no. Maida wouldn't let it go that far. No matter the weather, no matter her age, the girl was buttoned from throat to ankle.”

“That can be provocative,” John pointed out. He was trying to imagine Donny's interest.

Charlie worked at his chowder for a minute. Then he set down the spoon. “Well, Lily wasn't. She'd just stand there and sing, no swaying, no come-hither looks, just the gentlest, most unpretentious smile at the end. She'd close her eyes singing love words, like she was either in dreamland or in dire fear that her mother would show up any minute and whisk her off the stage. Only, Maida didn't. On principle alone, she wouldn't go listen. She didn't come to the store for
months
after Lily left for New York. Far as she was concerned, we were the ones who corrupted the girl.”