Lake News (3 page)

“No problem. You can do it now. What say we set a goal? Labels typed and stuck on file folders, and letters filed in the appropriate folders before you leave today. Sound fair?”

She nodded quickly.

“Eat first,” he reminded her on his way out the door and went to the kitchen to collect the contents of the bins.

Up in his office again, he ate his doughnut at the window overlooking the lake. The Woody had disappeared and its wake been played out, but the water had lost its smoothness. A small breeze ruffled it in shifting patches. Beneath his window the willows whispered and swayed.

Shoving up the screen, he ducked his head and leaned out.
Corned beef hash was frying at Charlie's. The breeze brought the smell across the street and down to the water. On his left, half a dozen old men fished from the end of the town pier, which jutted from a narrow swath of sandy beach. On his right, yellow-leafed birches angled out over low shrubs that led to rocks and then water. There were houses farther on, year-round homes too stately to be called camps, but most were tucked into coves, hidden around bends, or blocked from view by islands. He could see the tips of a few docks, even a weathered raft still anchored to the floor of the lake. It would be hauled in soon, and the docks taken apart and stored. The lake would be bare.

The phone rang. Letting the screen drop, he waited to see if Jenny would answer it. After three rings, he did it himself.
“Lake News.”

“John, this is Allison Quimby,” said a bold voice. “My place is falling apart. I need a handyman. Everyone I've used before is still working up at Hook's. Is it too late to put in an ad?”

“No, but you want the sales desk. I'll transfer you.” He put her on hold, jogged across the room, and picked up the phone at the sales desk. “Okay.” He slipped into the chair there and began at the computer. “I'm pulling up classified ads. Here we go. Do you have something written?” He suspected she did. Allison Quimby owned the local realty company and was the quintessential professional. Of course she had something written.

“Of course I have something written.”

She read. He typed. He fiddled with the spacing, helped her edit it to make it work better, suggested a
heading, quoted her a price, took her credit card number. As soon as he hung up the phone, he made a call of his own.

A tired voice answered. “Yeah.”

“It's me. Allison Quimby needs a handyman. Give her a call?” When he heard a soft swearing, he said, “You're sober, Buck, and you need the work.”

“Who are you, my fuckin' guardian angel?”

John kept his voice low and tight. “I'm your fuckin' older cousin, the one who's worried about the girl you knocked up, the one who's thinking you may not be worth the effort but that girl and her baby are. Come on, Buck. You're good with your hands, you can do what Allison needs done, she pays well, and she's got a big mouth if she likes what you do.” He read the phone number once, then read it again. “Call her,” he said and hung up the phone.

Seconds later he was back at the window by the editorial desk. Seconds after that he had a grip on his patience. All it took was a good long look at the lake and the reminder that people like Buck and Jenny didn't have that. They had the Ridge, where houses were too small, too close, and too dirty to uplift anyone, much less someone battling alcoholism, physical abuse, or chronic unemployment. John knew. He had the Ridge in his blood as well. He would hear it, feel it, smell it until the day he died.

A movement on the lake caught his eye, the flash of red on a distant dock. He focused in on it; then, half smiling, took a pair of binoculars from the bottom drawer of the desk and focused through those. Shelly Cole was stretched out on a lounge chair, all sleek and oiled
in the sun. She was a well-made woman, he had to say that. But then, Cole women had been sorely tempting the men of Lake Henry for three generations. For the most part they were kind creatures who grew into fine wives and mothers. Shelly was something else. She was heading back to Florida in a week, when the weather here became too cool for her to flaunt her tan. John wouldn't miss her. He might be as tempted as any man around, but he wasn't touching her with a ten-foot pole.

With a slight shift of the binoculars, he was looking at Hunter's Island. Named after its first owners, rather than any sport there, it was another of the tiny islands that dotted the lake, and it did have a house, albeit a seasonal one. The Hunter family had summered there for more than a century, before selling it to its current owners. Those owners, the LaDucs, were teaching their third generation of children to swim from its small pebbled beach.

Strange family, the LaDucs. There were nearly as many scandals woven through its generations as there were Hunter scandals. Growing up, John had heard rumors about both families. Returning as an adult who knew how to snoop, he had done research, asked around, made notes. They were locked in his file cabinet now, along with the rest of his private stuff, but none were crying out to be a book. Maybe he hadn't read them in the right frame of mind. Maybe he needed to reread them. Or organize them. Or chronologize them. Maybe something would hit him. After three years he should have come up with something.

The phone rang. He picked it up after the first ring.
“Lake News.”

“Hi, Kip. It's Poppy.”

John grinned. How not to, when conjuring up Poppy Blake? She was a smiling pixie, always bright and upbeat. “Hi, sweetheart. How's it going?”

“Busy,” she said, making it sound wonderful. “I have someone named Terry Sullivan on the line to your house. Do you want me to patch him through?”

John's eye flew to the wall of photographs, to one of the prints in which he was partying with other reporters. Terry Sullivan was the tall, lean, dark one, the one with the mustache that hid a sneer, the one who always stood on the edge of the crowd so that he could beat the rest out if a story broke. He was competitive to the extreme, self-centered to a fault, and wouldn't know loyalty if it hit him in the face. He had personally betrayed John, and more than once.

John wondered where he found the gall to call. Terry Sullivan had been one of the first to blow him off when he decided to leave Boston.

Curious, he told Poppy to make the connection. When it happened, he said, “Kipling here.”

“Hey, Kip. It's Terry Sullivan. How goes it, bro?”

Bro?
John took his time answering. “It goes fine. And you?”

“Aaah, same old rat race here, you know how it is. Well, you used to. It must be pretty quiet up there. There are times when I think I'll retire to the sticks, then I think again. It isn't me, if you know what I mean.”

“I sure do. People up here are honest. You'd stick out like a sore thumb.”

There was a pause, then a snort. “That was blunt.”

“People up here are blunt, too. So, what do you want, Terry? I don't have long. We have deadlines here, too.”

“O-kay. Chuck the small talk. I'm calling journalist to journalist. There's a woman named Lily Blake, born there, living here. Tell me all you know.”

John slipped into his chair. Lily was Poppy's sister, the elder, but barely, which would make her thirty-fourish. She had left Lake Henry to go to college and had stayed in the city for a graduate degree. In music, he thought. He had heard she was teaching. And that she played the piano. And that she had a great body.

Folks around town still talked about her voice. She had been singing in church when she was five, but John wasn't a churchgoer, and long before she would have been old enough to sing at Charlie's back room Thursday nights, he had left town.

She had been back several times since he had returned—once for her father's funeral, other times for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but never for longer than a day or two. From what he heard, she and her mother didn't get along. John might not know Lily, but he did know Maida. She was one tough lady. For that reason and others, he was inclined to give Lily the benefit of the doubt when it came to who was at fault.

“Lily Blake?” he asked Terry, sounding vague.

“Come on, Kip. The place is tiny. Don't go dumb on me.”

“If she doesn't live here, how in the hell am I supposed to know about her?”

“Fine. Tell me about her family. Who's alive and who isn't? What do they do? What kind of people are they?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I met her. I'm thinking of dating her. I want to know what I'm getting into.”

Thinking of dating her?
Fat chance. Lily Blake was a stutterer—much improved from childhood, he understood, but Terry Sullivan didn't date women with problems. They demanded more than he wanted to give.

“Is this part of some story?” John asked, though he couldn't imagine what part Lily could play in a story that interested Terry.

“Nah. Purely personal.”

“And you're calling
me?
” They might have been colleagues, but they'd never been friends.

Terry missed the point. Chuckling, he said, “Yeah, I thought it was pretty funny, myself. I mean, here she comes from this tiny town in the middle of nowhere, and it just happens to be the same place where you're hiding out.”

“Not hiding. I'm totally visible.”

“It was a figure of speech. Are we touchy?”

“No, Terry, we're pressed for time. Tell me why you
really
want to know about Lily Blake, or hang up the goddamned phone.”

“Okay. It's not me. It's my friend. He's the one who wants to date her.”

John knew a lie when he heard one. He hung up the phone, but his hand didn't leave the receiver. Waiting only long enough to sever the connection with Terry, he snatched it back up and signaled for Poppy.

“Hey, Kip,” she said seconds later in her sassy, smiling voice. “That was fast. What can I do for you now?”

“Two things,” John said. He was on his feet, one hand holding the phone to his ear, the other cocked on his hip. “First, don't let that man speak to anyone in town. Cut him off, drop the line, do whatever you have to. He's not a good person. Second, tell me about your sister.”

“About Rose?”

“About Lily. What's she been doing with her life?”

Boston, Massachusetts

In the weeks to come, when Lily Blake was trying to understand why she had been singled out for scandal, she would remember the soggy mess she had made of the
Boston Post
that rainy Monday afternoon and wonder if an angry newspaper deity had put a curse on her as punishment for her disrespect. At the time, she simply wanted to stay dry.

She had waited as long as she could at the foot of Beacon Hill, under the high stone arch of the small private school where she taught, thinking that the rain would let up in a minute or two, but it fell steadily in cool sheets, and those minutes added up. She couldn't wait forever. She was due to play at the club at six-thirty, and had to get home and change.

“ 'Bye, Ms. Blake!” called another of the students who passed her, dashing from the shelter of the school to a waiting car. She smiled and raised a hand to wave, but the student was already gone.

“So much for Indian summer,” muttered Peter Oliver, coming up from behind. A history teacher, he was tall,
blond, and worshiped by nearly every female in the upper school. He scowled at the sky. “We're fools, is what we are, you and me. Dedicated fools. If we worked the kinds of days most teachers did, we'd have left two hours ago. It was sunny then.” He grunted and glanced at Lily. “Where ya headed?”

“Home.”

“Want to catch a drink first?”

She smiled and shook her head. “I have to work.”

“You always have to work. What fun's that?” He opened his umbrella.
“Ciao.”
Trotting down the steps, he set off down the street, looking perfectly dry and content.

Lily envied him the umbrella. It occurred to her that she should have accepted his invitation, if only to have cover for some of the walk home, not to mention the possibility that the rain might stop in the time it took for a drink. But she didn't drink, for one thing, and for another, she didn't do Peter. He might look terrific in his deep blue shirt and khaki shorts, but he knew it. Peter loved Peter. Lily had to listen to his stories in the faculty lounge. His self-absorption grew tiring.

Besides, she really didn't have time. Pulling the
Post
from her briefcase, she opened it over her head and ran down the steps into the rain. She hurried along the narrow cobblestone streets on the flat of the hill, then turned onto Beacon Street and trotted on paved sidewalk. Hugging the briefcase to her chest, she made herself as small as possible under the newspaper. Given that she was small to begin with, it should have been enough, but the
Post
was quickly a soggy mess around her ears, and the tank top and short skirt that had been perfect in the morning's
heat left far too much skin exposed to the cool rain.