Lake News (52 page)

Tears must have come to her eyes once too often, because they were barely into the afternoon shift when Oralee shooed her off. With three hours to go until the press conference, Lily debated returning to the cottage or driving straight to the newspaper office. Maida would calm down in time. She always did.

Yes. She always did. She calmed down, the upset passed, and things were never discussed or resolved.

But things were different this time. The press conference loomed. Lily was unsettled enough about that not to want things with her mother up in the air. She had to talk with Maida. She hadn't explained her feelings as well as she might have, and wanted to try it again.

The kitchen was empty. Likewise the office. Lily guessed that Maida might be upstairs, but she couldn't go up there. It had been a long while since she had lived in this house, a long while since she'd had cause to climb those stairs. And to Maida's bedroom? It seemed an invasion of her privacy.

So Lily sat at the piano and began to play. A Chopin étude, a Liszt sonata—she moved from one to the other without finishing either. At that moment in time, loose ends seemed the story of her life.

And when hadn't they? When had she been more settled? She thought about it for a minute, before conjuring
up the image of singing in church when she was ten. Life had been simpler then. Maida had been proud.

Without conscious thought, she began playing the hymns she had sung. She played “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Faith of Our Fathers”—both to completion, because they did calm her. She was halfway through “Amazing Grace” when Maida appeared at the door. She looked tired, older than her years, defeated almost. Lily stopped playing.

“You think that I'm wrong,” Maida said in a reed-thin voice. “You don't understand why I like living my quiet life here and why this whole business with the Cardinal is so upsetting to me, but there are things you don't know.” She wrapped her arms around her waist.

Lily started to shake. It was subtle, way deep inside, but it held a foreboding. “What things?”

“Things I did before I met your father.”

Lily's heart pounded as she waited for Maida to go on.

“Did you never wonder why I never talked about my childhood?” Maida finally asked.

“All the time. I asked you about it. You would never say. There were no pictures, nothing. When I asked Celia, she smiled and said that there was nothing worth repeating.”

“There wasn't until now. But if they come here and see us and start digging again…” Her voice trailed off. She pushed a shaky hand into her hair.

Lily started to get up, then stopped herself and stayed put. The piano was a buffer between them. It made the unfamiliar less frightening.

“My father died early,” Maida said. “There was other family in Linsworth. Celia had four brothers.”

Lily had thought there were three—and that, only from pictures she had found in a drawer after Celia passed away. Growing up, she had assumed there was no one at all in Linsworth to contact. After finding those pictures, she had tried to remember who might have been standing at the back during Celia's funeral, but she had been too wrapped up in her own grief at the time to notice.

Maida spoke softly. Her eyes were distant, stricken. “The brothers were all younger than Celia, the last one by twenty years. He was more my generation than hers. He was a friend, a baby-sitter, a brother, a lover.”

Lily could barely breathe.

Maida's eyes filled with tears. “He used to sneak in at night when everyone was asleep. He taught me about my body and about love. He was handsome and sweet and smart.” She brushed at the tears with the back of her hand, and looked away. “When I was sixteen, they found out about us and sent him away.”

Sixteen was the age Lily had been when she was caught joyriding with Donny Kipling in a stolen car. Lily could only begin to imagine the sense of déjà vu Maida must have felt.

But Maida wasn't thinking about that now. The soft light of the piano lamp picked up the tears on her cheeks, but she was looking straight at Lily, daring her to be revulsed. “They said it was all his fault, that I was too young to understand, but I understood. I wanted what happened. To this day it's my only bright memory from
those years. Call me immoral or depraved, but you didn't live there. You didn't know what it was like. We all lived together in a small place. Families did that then. My father worked with Celia's brothers, and Celia had always been a mother to them, so it made even more sense. We were poor. We pooled our resources. When the men hunted, it wasn't for sport but for food. I was the only girl, so I had my own room. There was a lumpy mattress on the floor and a little place to stand. That was all. It was cold and dark. Phillip was my warmth and my light.” Her chin trembled. “I loved him. What he did felt good to me. He was the only luxury I had.”

“Wasn't
Celia
a luxury?” Lily cried, more offended by that than the other.

“You didn't know her then,” Maida scoffed. “She was different from the person you knew. She was busy all the time, and she was hard. After my father died she had the responsibility of her brothers and me. She ran the house and earned the money.”

“Didn't the brothers work?”

“They didn't earn much, and most of it went for drink. Phillip went along, but not all the way. He stashed away enough for me to have when I needed to leave. There was a note saying where it was and what it was for. It was in his hand when he died.”

Lily caught her breath.

“He killed himself,” Maida told her. “Two months after he left. Nowadays he'd have been in jail, but the law never knew about him. He had been wandering around the whole time, not knowing what to do with himself. Friends had seen him in towns as far as thirty miles away,
but his body was found in the woods less than a mile from us.”

She pressed a hand to her middle, seeming in pain. Lily was up from the piano bench in a flash, but Maida held up a hand to hold her off. Her lips were as close to pursed as they could be and still allow for talk. “There's more.” She gathered herself. “You wanted to know, you can hear it all.”

Lily felt pain and confusion. She felt shock and sorrow enough to bring tears to her eyes. But Maida wouldn't let her close. So she leaned against the piano.

“We buried Phillip in the family plot. The people of Linsworth said he shouldn't be anywhere near good folk, but Celia wouldn't have him anywhere else. She had loved him, too. She blamed herself for what happened. She still had the responsibility for all of us, and then the weight of that on top of it. She and I grew closer, because we shared the grieving and I wanted to help her. So I dropped out of school and went to work in the logging office where she worked.”

Her eyes and voice grew distant again. “It wasn't easy. Everyone in town knew what had happened. Except for Celia and me, the logging operation was all men. Whenever I walked out of the office, men stared at me. Some of them made comments. They touched me whenever they could, like it was a game to see how much they could get. They asked me out, and I refused every time, but that made it worse. If I'd paired up with one of them, there might have been protection. But I was trying to do the right thing, so I was fair game.”

She wilted a little. “It became clear to us that I couldn't
stay there. Not in that office, not in that town. We were trying to decide where to go and what to do when George showed up one day wanting to buy equipment from my boss. He spent long enough talking with me for us to know that he wasn't married, but we figured that if he stayed around long, he'd learn enough to decide he didn't want me at all. So Celia and I went out and bought me some nice clothes with the money Phillip had left”—her voice caught on the last thought—“and Celia managed to get me sent to Lake Henry with the deliveries. I went back to hand deliver a bill, and back again to deliver a receipt. It was a long trip, over more backroads than you'd drive in a month around here. Took the better part of a day.”

The memory lifted her some, pride showing its face. “I acted a part then, acted better than
you've
ever acted, because my life depended on it. I created a woman who was intelligent and poised, who knew how to keep house and balance books, and yes, please a man. She was a woman with a clean past, and she did things right.
All the time
she did things right. Your father fell in love with that woman. She's the one I've been ever since.”

Jaws tight, she fixed her eyes on Lily. “I knew what it was to be stared at, and there you were, singing in public, welcoming those leering eyes. How do you think I felt when you got caught with Donny Kipling? Don't you think a part of me worried you were getting in the same situation I'd been in? Only, you didn't find your George. You went to New York, and that was worse. But I didn't have to see it, until this. How do you think I felt when the newspapers started digging up dirty little things
from your past? How do you think I felt wondering when they'd dig a little deeper, just a little deeper, and find out about me? No one here knows. When Celia moved here, she started new, too. We never talked about the past. We just erased it from the slate.”

“No one will find out,” Lily vowed.

“I have a life here. I have a good life here. I have friends and a business. I have a name.”

“No one will find out,” Lily repeated.

“How do you
know?”

“Because this isn't about me anymore. It's about Terry Sullivan.”

Maida started to pursue the argument. She opened her mouth, closed it, then put a hand up to keep it that way. Lily's first thought was that she was paralyzed thinking about what the town might learn. But it was horror on her face, not fear. Horror.

Because her daughter now knew.

“It's all right,” Lily whispered, starting forward, but Maida stepped back with a frantic shake of her head.

Lily felt a greater need to touch than ever. Starting forward again, she said, “It doesn't change my feelings—”

But Maida had turned and, with her hand on the back of a bowed head now, was hurrying up the stairs.

Lily followed her as far as the newel post, wanting to follow farther but afraid. “It was a long time ago,” she called. “You've mm-ade up for it ten times over. You were a good wife to Dad, and a good mother to us, and look at you nn-now. You're running Dad's business almost better than
he
did.”

But Maida was gone.

*  *  *

Lily knew she would carry Maida's look of horror with her for the rest of her life. It marked the moment when parent and child changed places in the approval game, the moment when, as human beings, they became equal. It was the startling moment when she realized that her mother didn't have any more answers to some things than she did.

She stood at the banister for what had to have been twenty minutes, then she sat down on the bottom step. She wanted to go up, wanted to thank Maida for sharing what she had, because it explained so much. She wanted to thank her for trusting her, wanted to assure her that she was worthy, that no one but her would ever know, that she would make sure nothing, absolutely
nothing
came even remotely close to this at the news conference. She wanted to go up but didn't dare, and she hated herself for that. There was still that fear—always that fear of rejection.

But the clock was ticking. It was nearly four. She had to shower, change, and get to John's office.

She drove back to Celia's with her heart in her mouth, aching for Maida, frightened of what was coming—then positively
terrified
when it struck her that John might know Maida's secret. Lily hadn't seen
Lake News
. She had trusted that he would be writing about Terry. She had
trusted
him on that.

She tried to call, but Poppy picked up and didn't know where he was. So she rushed in and out of the shower, tried the office again—then realized that she didn't dare say anything on the phone. Cell phones were far from secure, and hadn't her supposedly secure line in
Boston been tapped into not so long ago? Lord knew whether John's was or not.

She hurried with her makeup and hair, pulled on that lone pantsuit of hers, and drove the old Ford wagon as fast as she dared around the lake to the center of town.

There were cars there. Cars and vans. Vans with satellite dishes on top, the names of local stations and national affiliates in large letters on the sides, and reporters flanking them testing cameras and mikes.

Lily's stomach began to churn.

Doing her best to look like a nobody, she turned in at the post office, but she had to pull up on the grass beside the yellow Victorian, because there were cars there, too—and reporters. She was barely out of the wagon when they spotted her, and suddenly the feeling of being hunted was back, as strong as it had been in Boston.

She ran toward the side door. They fell into step.

“How long have you been here?”

“Have you talked with the Cardinal?”

“Would you comment on the lawsuit?”

John opened the door when she reached it and closed it the instant she was inside. She was shaking badly. He held her, but the shaking didn't stop.

“It's starting again,” she whispered, panicky.

But John's voice was calm. “Only because they have no one else to chase. Wait fifteen minutes. It'll be a different ball game then.”

She looked up at him. “Where's the paper?”

“Across the street in the church. Willie Jake's guarding it.”

“Is there anything in it about Maida?” she asked, searching his face for signs of betrayal, but he looked more puzzled than anything.

“No. I talk about what you went through in Boston. Mostly it's about Terry.”

She was weak with relief.