Lake News (22 page)

John hadn't expected that. His mind shifted gears. “Did she know she was being taped?”

“We were told she did. But, hey, we're being cautious. That's why we haven't gone public with it. We're not stupid, Kip. This tape wouldn't be admissible in court. But it justifies our running the story. Listening to the tape, we had cause to believe the story. There was no malice involved on our part. The lady's nuts.”

Poppy had known about the apology issued to the Cardinal well before Lily called to get in touch with Cassie. She had heard about it early from three separate friends, all of whom had heard it on television and were shocked that the apology stopped short of Lily. Between calls from those friends, she fielded others coming in from the media. The callers' names were familiar, their voices urgent. They wanted to know the reaction of Lily's hometown to this latest turn of events.

She told the one who called looking for Charlie Owens, “We believed in Lily all along.”

She patched the one wanting Armand Bayne on to Armand's house, trusting that he would handle the man with ease.

To the one who called looking for Maida, she said, “We're relieved that Lily has been exonerated,” though that wasn't anywhere near the truth. But Maida was at the cider house and wasn't about to take the call, and Poppy figured that if the papers were going to print comments, those comments might as well stress Lily's innocence.

The phone rang for Willie Jake. She pressed his button and said into her headset, “Lake Henry Police Department. This call is being recorded.”

“William Jacobs, please,” said a voice she hadn't heard before. It was wonderfully deep and decidedly male.

When Willie Jake had called in, he was on his way to Charlie's for an early lunch. “He's not here. May I help you?”

“That depends,” the man said in a good-humored way. “My name is Griffin Hughes. I'm a freelance writer putting together a story on privacy for
Vanity Fair
. I'm focusing on what happens when privacy is violated—the side effects to the people involved. I thought that the Lily Blake situation would fit right in. Lake Henry is her hometown. It occurs to me that people there may have thoughts about what's happened to her.”

“Damn right we do,” Poppy said with feeling.

He chuckled and went on in the same deep-throated, easygoing way. “I thought I'd start with the chief of police, but his dispatcher sounds like she might be good. So. What do you think?”

“I think,” Poppy said, attempting to sound as easygoing as he had, “that I would be crazy to share my thoughts with you, because anything I say may be twisted and turned. If what's happened to Lily has taught us anything, it's that. You and your media colleagues are scum.”

“Hey,” he said gently, “don't group me with the others. I don't work for a newspaper. Besides, I'm on Lily's side.”

“And you're not looking to be paid for your story?”

“Of course, I am. But Lily is only one of the people I'm
researching, and she isn't the first. I started this project weeks ago. Most of my subjects have suffered when medical information was leaked, so Lily's situation is different. I'm doing the story on spec. The magazine may reject it when the article's done, but I think it's an important piece to write.”

He sounded very nice and very reasonable. There was none of the urgency or arrogance she had heard in other media people who had called. She pictured him as a man of average height and weight, with a friendly smile and a sense of decency. He had to be a phony.

“What kind of a name is Griffin Hughes?” she asked disparagingly. “It doesn't sound real.”

“Tell that to my dad,” came the answer. “And to his dad. I'm the third.”

“You're trying to trick me. You're deliberately sounding friendly and kind.”

“And honest.”

“That, too, but I don't believe you.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, sounding sincere. Curiously, he asked, “Are you a native of Lake Henry?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You don't have an accent.”

“Few people my age here do. We've spent time in the big, wide world. We're not rubes,” she said more harshly than she intended, but that deep voice conjured up an Adam's apple full of virility, and she felt defensive.

He said a gentle “Shhhhh. No need to convince me. I'm on your side—uh—what did you say your name was?”

“I didn't say my name. See, you are trying to trick me.”

“No,” he said, sounding sorry again. “I'm just trying to imagine that we're friends. You're blunt. I like people like that. I like knowing where I stand.”

“Poppy,” she said. “My name is Poppy. I'm Lily Blake's sister, and I'm angry about what happened to her. So's the rest of the town. You can print that.”

“I'm not printing anything yet. All I'm doing is gathering information. I mean, there you are in a small town where everyone knows what you're doing and when. Nothing's private there. So maybe you don't feel the need for privacy that city people do.”

“I just said we're upset.”

“Yes, but are you upset about what happened to Lily, or about people like me intruding on your life?”

“Both.”

Griffin Hughes sighed. In a voice that was low and smooth, he said, “Okay. I've exhausted my welcome. I'll try the chief another time. Take care, Poppy.”

“You, too,” Poppy said, severing the connection with a sense of relief. She might have liked to listen to that voice more—and then God only knew what she might have been charmed into saying.

John couldn't stop thinking about the tape. Its existence added a whole new twist to the story. But it was Monday, which meant that the week's
Lake News
was priority one. He had dummied the pages and scanned in photos. Now he had to add meat.

The cover story was of three families that had recently moved from big cities to Lake Henry. The Taplins—Rachel and Bill and their four-month-old daughter, Tara—had come from New York. The Smiths—Lynne and Gary and their teenagers, Allyson, Robyn, Matt, and Charley—had come from Massachusetts. The Jamisons—Addie and Joe and their two chocolate labs, plus their three grown children, who visited during vacations—were from Baltimore. The three couples ranged in age from their late twenties to their late sixties, but the search for a better quality of life was common among them.

John had conducted interviews with each family the week before and had outlined the story by hand at home on Sunday. Pulling in his chair, he began composing on
the computer. The writing was interrupted by the usual calls regarding public service announcements and classified ads. When the interruptions grew tiresome, he went down to the parlor and asked Jenny to answer the phones.

He explained to her twice what she needed to do. He made sure that the proper forms were on her desk. He highlighted in yellow the most important questions she needed to ask. When she looked terrified, he went over the procedure a third time. A third time, too, he told her that she was ready for this, that it was good training, that he knew, absolutely knew, she could do it well.

Closing the door to his office, he returned to his computer, but rather than writing about the lure of small-town life, he found himself in cyberspace, accessing the
Post
's archives. There had always been grumbling when Terry Sullivan fabricated stories. John quickly located and printed out four such questionables that had appeared during his own final years with the paper. Then he called Steve Baker, an old pal who was still a reporter there.

“Hey, you!” Steve said with pleasure when he heard John's voice. “Your ears must be burning. You're the talk of the newsroom. We're all wondering what you know about Lily Blake.”

“Not much,” John said. “She left here when she was eighteen, and I left ten years before that. Me, I'm wondering what you all know about Terry Sullivan. Is this another one of Terry's cherries? Did he make it up?”

“That depends on who you ask,” Steve said without missing a beat. “The official story is that Lily misled
Terry. Taken with all the other stuff he gathered, what she told him had the ring of truth.”

“That's the official story. What's yours?”

There was a pause, then a lower “He's been building this story for months.”

“Following Lily?”

“And Rossetti. When he was named Archbishop of Boston, everyone knew he was in line to be elevated. The only question was when. The Catholic community expected it sooner. Once rumor spread that the elevation would come on or around the third anniversary of his coming to Boston, Terry got busy. That was six months ago. It was a fishing expedition. He was looking for anything he could find. He tried focusing on other women, only nothing panned out.”

“Did Brian propose the story, or was it Terry's all the way?”

“Terry's.”

“Does he have something against the Cardinal?”

“Terry doesn't
need
something to savage a subject. He's vicious when he smells a good story. He wanted this one for the Headline Team. Brian resisted.”

That was consistent with what Brian had told John. “Okay. But the paper says Terry's work was on the up-and-up. What's the newsroom buzz?”

“Geez, Kip. I'm not exactly unbiased. Terry has stolen good assignments from me.”

“The buzz?” John coaxed, then waited out a long pause. He knew how it would end. Terry Sullivan was a powerful writer who made powerful enemies.

Steve kept his voice low, but it was vehement. “He decided
there was a story, only he couldn't find anything incriminating. He was out of time, and everything else had fallen through, so he wrote a piece that was half speculation, half imagination. Most of us have met Rossetti. If ever there was a decent, honest, upstanding guy, he's it. Hey, I'm saying that and I'm not even Catholic.”

“But Lily Blake is quoted as saying it was true.”

“Oh, yeah. We know how that works. Ask a leading question, you get a malleable answer.”

“Do you know about the tape?”

Steve's voice remained low, but its monotone was telling. There was buzz about a tape, too. “What tape? If there was a tape, you'd have read about it on page one. Did you?”

“What about if he made a tape without her knowing?”

“That's a crime. If the paper knew about it and didn't do anything, they're guilty of aiding and abetting. So the
Post
is in potential deep shit here.
And”
—Steve hurried on, talking under his breath—“the shit thickens if the
Post
ran a potentially libelous story on the say-so of an illegally gotten tape. So the paper won't mention any tape. I'd say that gives Terry Sullivan the kind of protection he likes.”

John agreed. So did two other old media friends he called. He made notes on these conversations. Then he called Ellen Henderson, a college classmate of Terry's and his. The college was a small one, where students knew one another and alumni stuck around. The entire Development Office staff had been students at one time or another. That was how John knew Ellen was there.
She had called him several months earlier looking for money. He had pleaded poverty at the time. Now he wished he hadn't.

“I'll make a deal,” he told her right off the bat. “Send me a pledge form and I'll do what I can.”

“In exchange for?” Ellen asked, sounding amused but affectionately so.

“Information on Terry Sullivan.”

“Ah.” Her voice grew less affectionate. “Our favorite classmate. Want to know what
he
did when I called to solicit for the annual fund? He said that everything he was now he had learned before or after college, so he didn't owe us a thing. Seems to me he's forgetting something.”

It seemed the same way to John.

Ellen said, “I recall a few close calls he had with plagiarism. At least, I recall
us
talking about it. Remember the Wicker Award?”

John certainly did. It was given to a member of the senior class for excellence in fiction writing.

“I recall,” Ellen went on, “some of the others who were in the running for that.”

“Not me.”

She sighed. “Well, me. I wanted that award. But I can name a handful of others who wanted it, too, and deserved it more than me. Deserved it more than Terry. There was lots of talk when he got it. He'd been sucking up to the head of the English Department for months. Rumor had it that some of the professors were as upset as the students when Terry got that award.”

“I need more than rumor,” John said.

After a moment's silence, Ellen said, sounding pleased, “I think I can accommodate you. How much did you say you wanted to pledge to the annual fund?”

John hung up with Ellen and pulled up Quicken to make sure he could afford the pledge he had made. No matter that it was a good cause, since a large portion of the annual fund went for scholarships; he wanted to stay solvent. He had spent his childhood listening to arguments over money and had made it a point in his own adult life to live within his means.