Lake News (2 page)

This, however, wasn't one.

His paddle remained stowed, and the loons continued to call. Then came a pause, and John dared mimic the sound. One of the loons said something in return, and in that brief, heady instant, he felt part of the team. In the next instant, with a resumption of the birds' duet, he was excluded again, a species apart.

But not cold. He realized he was no longer cold. The fog was burning off under a brightening sun. By the time patches of blue showed through the mist, John guessed it was nearly nine. He straightened his legs and, easing back,
braced his elbows on the gunwales. Turning his face to the sun, he closed his eyes, took a contented breath, and listened to silence, water, and loon.

After a time, when the sun began to heat his eyelids and the weight of responsibility grew too heavy to ignore, he pushed himself up. For a few last minutes he continued to watch and absorb the whatever-it-was that these birds gave him. Then smoothly and silently, if reluctantly, he retrieved his paddle from the floorboards and headed home.

The beauty of a beard was that it eliminated the need to shave. John kept his cropped close, which meant occasional touch-ups, but none of the daily scrape-and-bleed agony that he used to endure. Same thing with a necktie. No need for one here. Or for a pressed shirt. Or for anything but denim down below. He didn't even have to worry about matching socks, since it was either bare feet and Birks in summer or work boots in winter, and then he could wear whatever socks he wanted and no one would see.

He still felt the novelty of showering, dressing, and hitting the road in ten minutes flat, and what a road. No traffic. No other
cars
. No horns. No cops. No
speed limit
. The road he drove now was framed by trees just shy of their peak of fall color. It wove in and out in a rough tracing of the lake and was cracked by years of frost heaves. Most other roads in town were the same. They imposed speed limits all on their own, and Lake Henry liked it that way. The town didn't cater to tourists as many of the surrounding lake towns did. There was no inn. There
were no chic little shops. Despite a perennial brouhaha in the state legislature, there was no public access to the shore. Anyone who went out on the lake was either a resident, a friend of a resident, or a trespasser.

At that particular moment in time, with summer residents gone and only year-rounders left, the town's population was 1,721. Eleven babies were due, which would raise the count. Twelve citizens were terminally old or terminally ill, which would lower it. There were twenty-eight kids currently in college. Whether they would return was a toss-up. In John's day they left and never came back, but that was starting to change.

He made what he intended to be a brief stop at the general store, but got to talking national politics with Charlie Owens, who owned the store; and then Charlie's wife, Annette, told him that Stu and Amanda Watson's college junior, Hillary, was home for a quick day after a last-minute decision to spend the semester abroad. Since Hillary had interned for John two summers before, he had a personal stake in her success, so he detoured to her house to get the story, take her picture, and wish her luck.

Back in the center of town, he turned in at the post office and continued on to the thin yellow Victorian that stood between it and the lake. Climbing from the truck—a Chevy Tahoe, one of the perks of the job—he reached across the seat for his briefcase, shouldered its strap, and scooped up the day's editions of four different newspapers, a bag of doughnuts, and his thermos. With the bag clutched in his teeth he sifted through his key ring as he crossed the dirt drive to the Victorian's side door.

He was still sifting when he shouldered open the
screen. The door behind it was mahogany, highly varnished, and carved by a local artist. Between swirls on its bottom half were a dozen slots identified by small brass plaques. The first row, politely, was devoted to the neighboring towns—
Ashcroft, Hedgeton, Cotter Cove,
and
Center Sayfield
. The lower rows were Lake Henry–specific, with slots assigned to things like
Police and Fire, Congregational Church, Textile Mill,
and
Garden Club
. Eye-high on the door, with no slot attached, was the largest plaque.
Lake News,
it read.

The door moved even before John inserted his key. As he elbowed it the rest of the way open, the phone began to ring. “Jenny?” he called.
“Jenny?”

“In the bathroom!” came the muted yell.

Nothing new there,
he thought. But at least she had come.

Tossing his keys on the kitchen table in passing, he took the stairs two at a time, past the second floor and on up to the third. There were no dividing walls up here, which made it the largest room in the house. The addition of a slew of windows and skylights also made it the brightest. Most important, it was the only one with a view of the lake. That view wasn't nearly as good as the one from John's house, but it was better than no view at all, which was what the lower rooms in the Victorian offered. Three willows, arm in arm and more fat than tall, saw to that.

The attic room had been his office since he had returned to town, three years before. It was large enough to house the newspaper's sales department, the production department, and the editorial department. Each had a desk
and a view of the lake. That view kept John focused and sane.

The phone continued to ring. Letting the papers slip to the editorial desk, he dropped the bag from Charlie's on top, stood the thermos nearby, and opened the window wide. The lake air was clear now. Sun spilled down the slopes of the east hills, setting fire to foliage in its path before running out over the water. A month before, it would have hit a dozen boats captained by summer folk who were grabbing precious last minutes on the lake before closing up camp for the year. The only boat on the water today was one of Marlon Dewey's prized Chris-Crafts. The sun bounced off its polished oak deck and glittered in the wake spreading behind.

He picked up the phone. “Morning, Armand.”

“Took you long enough,” his publisher said in a rusty voice. “Where you been?”

John followed the course of the handsome Chris-Craft. Marlon was at the helm, along with two visiting grandchildren. “Oh, out and around.”

The old man's voice softened. “ ‘Oh, out and around.' You give me that every time, John, and you know I can't argue with it. Damn lake has too many bends, so I can't see what goes on around yours. But the paper's my bottom line, and you're doing that okay. Long as it keeps up, you can sleep as late as you want. Did you get my piece? Liddie put it in the slot.”

“It's there,” John said without checking, because Armand Bayne's wife was totally reliable. She was also totally devoted to her husband. What Armand wanted done, she did.

“What else you got?” the old man asked.

John clamped the phone between shoulder and ear and pulled a handful of papers from the briefcase. He had dummied the week's pages at home the night before. Now he spread out the sheets. “The lead is a report on the education bill that's up before the state legislature. It's a thirty-inch piece, across the top and down the right-hand leg, photo lower left. I'm following it with opinion pieces, one from the local rep, one from the principal at Cooper Elementary.”

“What's your editorial say about it?”

“You know what it says.”

“The na-tives won't like it.”

“Maybe not, but we either put money into schools today or into welfare tomorrow.” The source of that money was the problem. Not wanting to argue it again with Armand, who was one of the wealthiest of the landowners and would be soaked if property taxes doubled, he pulled up the next dummy. “Page three leads with a report on Chris Diehl's trial—closing arguments, jury out, verdict in, Chris home. I have a piece on profit sharing at the mill, and one on staff cutbacks at the retirement home. The newcomer profile is on Thomas Hook.”

“Can't stand the guy,” Armand muttered.

John uncapped the thermos. “That's because he has no people skills, but he has computer skills. There's reason why his business is worth twenty million and growing.”

“He's a
kid
.” Spoken indignantly.
“What's
he gonna do with that kind of money?”

John filled his mug with coffee. “He's thirty-two, with a
wife and three kids, and in the six months he's been here, he's tripled the size of his house, regraded and graveled the approach road, built another house for an office in the place where a god-awful eyesore stood, and in doing all that, he's used local contractors, carpenters, masons, plumbers, and electricians—”

“All right, all right,” Armand's growl cut him off. “What else?”

Sipping coffee, John pulled up the next page. “There's an academy update—message from the head of the school. New year starting, one hundred twelve kids, twenty-two states, seven countries. Then there's police news, fire news, library news.” He flipped open the
Wall Street Journal
and absently scanned the headlines. “There's the week in review from papers in Boston, New York, and Washington. And ads, lots of ads this week”—he knew Armand would like that—“including a two-pager from the outlets in Conway. Fall's a good time for ads.”

“Praised be,” said Armand. “What else?”

“School news. Historical Society news. Tri-town soccer news.”

“Want some breaking news?”

John always wanted breaking news. It was one of the city things he missed most. Feeling a twinge of anticipation, he sank into his desk chair, brought up a blank screen, and prepared to type.

Armand said, “They just read Noah Thacken's will, and the family's in a stew. He left the house to daughter number two, so daughter number one is threatening to sue, and daughter number three is threatening to leave town,
and none of them is talking to the others. Look into it, John.”

But John had retracted his hands and was rocking back in his chair. “That's private stuff.”

“Private? The whole town'll know by the end of the day.”

“Right, so why put it in the paper? Besides, we print facts.”

“This is facts. That will is a matter of public record.”

“The will is. Not the personal trauma. That's speculation, and it's exploitative. I thought we agreed—”

“Well, there isn't a hell of a lot of
other
excitement up here,” the old man remarked and hung up the phone.

No,
John thought,
there isn't a hell of a lot of other excitement up here
. No fascinating book material in an education bill, a computer mogul, or a family squabble; and Christopher Diehl's bank fraud trial was a far cry from the murder trials he used to cover.

His eye went to the wall of framed photos at the far end of the room. There was one of him interviewing a source on Boston's City Hall Plaza, and another of him typing at his computer with the phone clamped to his ear in a roomful of other reporters doing the same. There were photos of him shaking hands with national politicians, and of him laughing it up with colleagues in Boston bars. There was one of a Christmas party—he and Marley in the newsroom with a crowd of their friends. And there was a blowup of his
Post
ID mug shot. His hair was short, his jaw tight, his eyes tired, his face pale. He looked like he was either about to miss the story of his career or severely constipated.

The photos were trappings of an earlier life, like the deactivated police scanner that sat on a file cabinet beneath them. Listening to police or fire reports had been a way of life once. No bona fide newsroom was without one. So he had started his tenure at
Lake News
by setting one up, but static without voices for hours on end had grown old fast. Besides, he personally knew everyone who would be involved in breaking news. If anything happened, they called him, and if he wasn't at his phone, Poppy Blake knew where he was. She was his answering service. She was the answering service for half the town. If she didn't find him one place, she found him somewhere else. In three years, he hadn't missed a local emergency. How many had there been… two… three… four?

Nope, no big best-seller would ever come from covering emergencies in Lake Henry.

With a sigh he dropped the phone into its cradle, pulled a doughnut from the bag, added more coffee to his mug, and tipped back his chair. He had barely crossed his feet on the desk when Jenny Blodgett appeared at the door. She was nineteen, pale and blond, and so thin that the big bulge of the baby in her belly looked doubly wrong. Knowing that she probably hadn't eaten breakfast, he rocked forward in the chair, came to his feet, and brought her the bag.

“It isn't milk or meat, but it's better than nothing,” he said, gesturing her around and back down the stairs. Her office was on the first floor, in the room that had once been a parlor. He followed her there, eyed the papers on the desk, thought he detected what may have been separate piles. “How's it going?”

Her voice was soft and childlike. “Okay.” She pointed to each of those vague piles in turn. “This year's letters to the editor. Last year's. The year before's. What do I do now?”

He had told her twice. But she worked sporadic hours, hadn't been in since the Wednesday before, and had probably lived a nightmare since then—or so the rationale went. She wasn't exactly competent, had barely made it through high school, and was trained for nothing. But she was carrying his cousin's child. He wanted to give her a break.

So, gently, he said, “Put them in alphabetical order and file them in the cabinet. Did you type out labels for the files?”

Her eyes went wide. They were red rimmed, which meant she had either been up all night or crying this morning. “I forgot,” she whispered.