Lake News (18 page)

“Not Donny?” John asked.

Charlie wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “That was a nothing case. So's this. You think she had an affair with the Cardinal?”

“No.”

“Right. Anyone who knew Lily knew she wasn't capable of doing much bad. Your brother—he was another story. Not,” Charlie added, arching a brow, “that I told that to the fellow stopped in here this morning.”

John felt a twinge. “What fellow?”

Charlie took a business card from his pocket and passed it over. “Said he was a TV pro-du-sah from New Yawk. Y'ask me, he looked too young.”

According to the card, the man was with
Dateline NBC
. “They're young,” John acknowledged. “Shows like this have half a dozen producers. A lot of what they do is dirty work, like scoping out Lake Henry and trying to decide whether to run something or not.”

“I told him not,” Charlie said without a trace of an accent now. “I said there wasn't any story here, and that even if there was, he wouldn't get it from us.”

But John knew how the media worked. There had been strangers at the plant sale just now. Everyone assumed that flatlanders passing through town on a Saturday would stop, particularly during foliage season. In the absence of a camera, there was no instant way of differentiating a leaf peeper from a reporter. “What did he look like?”

“Us,” Charlie remarked, but added a knowing “I rang the ‘listen up' bell and announced to everyone here who he was, so he wouldn't have to introduce himself. Then I walked him over to the plant sale and introduced him to everyone there, so folks'd know we had someone from
Dateline NBC
in town. Then I shook his hand, wished him luck, and left him on his own.”

John knew why he liked Charlie. “That was good of you.”

“I thought so,” Charlie said. Lifting his soup mug, he downed what was left of his chowder in a single long glug. Then he set the mug down and sat back with a satisfied smile.

*  *  *

John didn't know why Charlie wasn't twice the size he was. Before John could finish what was in front of him, Charlie had downed seconds of chowder and an order of long, skinny french fries that he brought to the table with the chowder refill. Happy as a lark, he went back to work in the store, leaving John feeling stuffed.

Needing to move now to wear off what he'd eaten, John walked back through the milling crowd. He kept an eye out for strangers who might be media, warned people he saw that they might be around, even walked right up and listened in to ongoing conversations between unfamiliar faces and locals that might have been interviews. But he heard nothing untoward.

So he walked across the lot to the police station to talk with the chief, who just happened to be sitting on the front porch bench, watching the goings-on with a leg up on the rail and a toothpick sticking out of his mouth. Willie Jake was nearly seventy. He had been police chief for twenty-five years, and second in command for another twenty before that. No one complained that he had slowed down. Few even saw it. John was one who did, but only because he had been gone from town long enough to see the difference—and maybe because the demands of the police chief's job were so different in Boston.

Willie Jake always had been tall. He couldn't run far now, and he was jowly as he hadn't been when John was truant, but he still walked straight and with authority, still wore his uniform crisp enough to make an impression. What he had lost over the years in physical speed he made up for in mental agility.

“See anything interesting?” John asked.

“Some,” the chief said in a low voice and shifted the toothpick to the other side. He didn't take his eyes from the crowd. “There's a few no-names mixing in out there. I'm making a picture of them in my mind. They show up elsewhere in town, I'll remembuh.”

John didn't doubt it for a minute.

Willie Jake adjusted his foot on the railing. “Think she was involved with the Cahdnal?”

“No.”

The chief spared him a quick glance. “Why not?”

“I used to know the guy who broke the case. He makes things up. What about you?” John asked, because he had his own agenda. “Do you think she was involved with the Cardinal?”

Willie Jake was chewing on his toothpick, looking out at the town again. The toothpick went to the side. “Hahd to say. Hahd to know the woman she's become since she left.”

“Do you remember the business with my brother?”

Another glance his way, this one sharper. “I put the case togethah.”

“Donny told me she wasn't at fault. Deathbed confession.”

“He wasn't sayin' that at the time it happened. We had a good case. She was braggin' to a friend about goin' with Donny Kipling.”

“Bragging?”

“Well, telling, and when they were drivin' around in that cah, she looked to be havin' a grand old time. She coulda got up 'n' left if she didn't like what he was doing, but she didn't say boo.”

“She hadn't ever done anything wrong before that.”

“Dud'n' mean a thing,” said Willie Jake. “She was ripe to act up.”

“Why?”

“Maida.”

“What about Maida?”

“She was a stiff one. Kids rebel against stiff ones.”

“But George was around, and he wasn't stiff. Didn't Lily have a good relationship with him?” George Blake was in John's files as fourth-generation Lake Henry. From what John had gathered in interviews, he was a gentle man.

“Did'n' matter what kind of relationship Lily had with him. Maida was in charge of the kids.”

“You don't like Maida, do you?”

Willie Jake shrugged. “I like her just fine now. Did'n' like her much then. Not many in town did. She wasn't bad right aftuh she married George. Then she got uppity. Don't think she liked us much either.” He darted John a look. “Didn't tell that to the reporter from Rhode Island who came by this morning, though. Didn' tell him a
thing
. I don't like outsiders snooping around my town. Told him that. Told him I'd be watchin' him. Told him I'd take him in if he goes anywhere he's not s'posed to go. This town's got posted land. Signs say no huntin', no fishin', no trespassin'. I add no
badgerin'
. I won't have flatlanduhs tryin' to get good people to talk about their neighbuhs. We talk about each othuh, and that's fine, but we don't tell stranguhs what we learn. Don't know what's wrong with you guys. Think you can write whatever you want. You decide what's news and what isn't. Dud'n' matter if it's true.”

“Hey,” John said with a hand to his chest, “I'm not
the bad guy here. If I were you, I'd be trying to find out who leaked the business about the arrest.”

Willie Jake scowled. He yanked the toothpick from his mouth. “Emma did it.” Emma was his wife. She often answered the office phone. “Said someone called from the State House in Concahd tryin' to straighten out files. I called the State House. They didn't call us. They wasn't straightenin' out any files, but they did get a call on Lily Blake. The clerk who took it was a young thing who bought the line about the calluh bein' a shrink needin' background infuhmation on his patient. Guess is good it was press doin' this.”

Guess is good it was Terry Sullivan, John thought.

Willie Jake took his foot down and sat straighter, suddenly looking at John as he had in the old days, as if John were a worm covered with dirt. “Why do you
do
things like that?”

John held up both hands. “Hey,
I
didn't do it.”

The chief pushed himself off the bench. “Well, it's wrong. Somethin's
wrong
in this country. People don't know about respect. Take yuh small town like Lake Henry. Ain't no privacy he-uh. We all know what we're all doin', but we don't use it against each othuh. Out they-uh?” He shot a thumb toward the rest of the world. “No respect.” He aimed his finger at John. “I'm tellin' you, leave it be. It dud'n' mattuh if Lily was innocent or guilty back then. It dud'n' mattuh if Maida was too tight. That's Blake business, and no one else's.”

But it sure would make for interesting reading, John thought as he shook the chief's hand and walked off.

Lily slept until four in the afternoon. She awoke famished and made an omelet and a salad, which she ate on the porch looking out on the lake. She might not trust John Kipling, but she was surely grateful for his food. Fresh things were better than canned any day, and everything he had brought was Lake Henry fresh. Eggs from the Kreugers' poultry farm; salad fixings from the Strothermans' produce farm; milk from cows two miles up the road, pasteurized, homogenized, bottled, and on sale at Charlie's within hours—there was reason why everything tasted so good. Not that the air didn't play a part. The scent of fall was a fine seasoning.

She ate every bite, sating her hunger, but not her mind. She kept thinking about John having ammo and wondering what he meant by that. There was no sign of his boat on the lake, which brought her some relief. A second visit would be a dead giveaway that she was here.

So, did Maida know she had come? Suspect it? At the very least,
wonder?

Lily debated calling, decided not to. Again debated
calling, again decided not to. Phone in hand, she went down to the lake, tucked herself in a pine root cubby, sat very still amid the smell of rich earth, and debated some more. In the time she was there, only two boats moved on the lake, but they were far out and headed away. The only movement in the cove came from a pair of ducks swimming in and out along the shore, and the scurry of chipmunks through brush.

The sun fell steadily toward the western hills, silhouetting the evergreens that undulated along their crests, spilling shadow down the hillside, and still she sat. The earth retained more heat than she did, keeping her warm when the air began to cool. In twilight she heard the hum of a distant boat, fragments of voices from down the shore, the call of a loon.

She had no sooner located the bird in a purple reflection off Elbow Island when the call came again. It was a long, steady sound with a dip at the end that gave it a primitive air. She had fallen asleep many a night to that sound, both here and across the lake, because the loon's cry carried far. As a child sleeping over with Celia, she had been fascinated by the idea that her mother could hear the very same cry she did.

Lily wondered if Maida heard it now. She wondered if maybe Maida was sitting out on the front porch of the large stone farmhouse on the hill thinking of Lily sitting down here. From the house Maida wouldn't be able to see if lights were on in the cottage. Elbow Island was in the way, and behind it, as Lily looked now, Big Island.

In daylight Lily could see the crown of apple trees climbing the hills. Their leaves were a softer green in
summer than that of evergreen or hardwood, and they were khaki rather than fiery in fall, but impressive nonetheless. Acre after acre, several hundred in all, flowed in waves over the hillside. They were beautifully kept and smartly worked. Even the ancient cider house, with sun glinting off its tin-paneled roof and history reeking from its hardy stone sides, was a sight to see.

Maida still talked about the very first time she had viewed her husband's inheritance. She had been twenty at the time, and as awed by the land as by the man. Up until that meeting she had been a clerk at the local logging company, coming home to her mother's cramped apartment in a town where even the smallest pleasures were few and far between. A chance meeting when George Blake had come to buy old equipment from her boss had been her ticket to grace. Fifteen years her senior, he was the sole heir to his father's land. He offered her a home that was not only breathtakingly beautiful but large, spacious, even idyllic. How not to find pleasure in that? Marrying him had been the simplest choice of her life.

So the story went, as Lily the child had heard it—a fairy tale, and it went beyond the marriage itself. Maida had been in heaven that first year. She loved not working, loved spending fall days sampling cider and baking the best of her husband's apples into pies that were the very best ones at church sales. That first winter, she had loved reading by the fire or skating on the lake, often with George, who had little to do between the last of the cider making in December and the first of the tree pruning in March. She loved the spring orchards, when apple blossoms were a riot of white and the buzz of pollinating bees
filled the air. She loved sitting on the front porch in a welcome sun, looking down over the expanse of lawn open to the lake. Come May, when the ground was warm, she nursed iris and lily, morning glory, hyacinth, and roses, tending them daily, weeding, watering, and pampering them until her garden was the best one in town.

The best garden, the best apple pie, the best children. Lily had learned at a tender age that those things mattered to Maida. She could still see the smile on her face in describing the bounty of that first year. With the Garden Club her entrée to the world of prosperous women, Maida made friends among the elite. She invited them to the big stone farmhouse to see her flower arrangements, and served them dinner while they were there. She went right down the list of everyone who was anyone in Lake Henry, from the owners of the mill to the town meeting moderator to the local representative at the state legislature. She was in her glory.