Lake News (8 page)

Lily shuddered to think what her family thought. She shuddered to think that they even knew, period.

But they did. She learned it soon after she reached home and listened to the messages on her machine. There, sandwiched between calls from what, to her horror, seemed to be every major newspaper and television station in the country, was the voice of her sister Poppy.

“What's going
on,
Lily? The calls are coming in hot and heavy, even more after the noon news. I've been deflecting as many as I can, but Mom is
furious!
Phone me, will you?”

The noon news? Lily's stomach turned over. But, of course, television would pick up the story. Isn't that what the man in the outer lobby this morning had been about?

So maybe it had been naïve of her to think that the story would be contained—but did the media have to call her
mother?
Lily's relationship with Maida Blake was precarious enough. This wouldn't help.

Needing to hear a friendly voice, she sank into the chair by the phone and punched in Poppy's number. Poppy was barely two years her junior, and the sweetest, most upbeat person Lily knew, despite circumstances that might have caused her to be anything but. Poppy Blake was a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair since a snowmobile accident nearly a dozen years before. If anyone had a right to self-pity, she did, but she refused to waste energy on it. As soon after the accident as she was able, she had moved into her own place on the lake and started a telephone answering service for Lake Henry and
neighboring towns. Now she had state-of-the-art equipment, with sophisticated computer hookups and an increasingly large bank of phone buttons. The business had grown so fast that she even had a roster of part-timers who covered for her when she went out, which, bless her, she often did.

She had caller ID, which enabled her to say the instant she picked up the call, “Lily! Thank goodness! What's happening?”

“Nightmare,” Lily said. “Total nightmare. When did you hear?”

“Early today. People in town either read it in the
Post
or on the Net. Around midmorning, calls started coming in from reporters—Boston, New York, Washington, Atlanta—and then there's the tube. They're showing pictures—Lily and the Cardinal, Lily and the governor.”

“Mom saw?” Lily asked in alarm.

“Mom saw. Kip called yesterday to warn me about the
Post
guy, but he didn't say why, so how was I supposed to know about the others? I wish you'd told us.”

“How could I? I didn't
know
. I didn't see the paper until this morning, and was as shocked as anyone. It's a bogus story, Poppy.”

“I know that, but Mom doesn't,” Poppy said bluntly. “She's convinced that everything she said all along is true and that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.”

“It
wasn't
—and I don't know why it's happening now.” She fought back tears of frustration. “I thought this reporter was a friend. He came on to me, you know, asked if I'd go out with him. Sss-stupid me.
Stupid
me,” she cried in self-reproach, “but he was a pro, got me talking,
then pieced little phrases together to create something sordid. What kind of person
does
that? Okay. He doesn't know me. To him, I'm a nothing. But the Cardinal isn't. How can he do this to the Cardinal? Or is it just that there isn't much else going on in the world and the papers are starved for sleaze? What did Mom say? What were the words?”

“They don't matter,” Poppy said. “She's just in a stir. What should I tell her?”

Lily pressed shaky fingertips to her forehead. She had worked
so hard
to win her mother's confidence. The Winchester School, where she taught, had a fine reputation. The Essex Club was as upscale as a dining establishment could be. And then there was Father Fran—ah, the irony of that! Such a strong, dignified, upstanding man. She had always thought that her friendship with him would win points with Maida.

“Tell her not to look at the paper,” she told Poppy. “There's no basis to any of this. It'll play itself out in a day or two.” It had to. The alternative was unthinkable.

“Have you issued a denial?”

“I keep saying it isn't true.”

“You need a lawyer.”

“I hate lawyers.”

Poppy grew gentler. “I know, honey, but this is libel. What does the Cardinal say?”

“I haven't talked with him.” The hurt returned. “I called there and was told not to call again.”

“Who told you
that?
They aren't going to blame this whole thing on
you,
are they? Damn it, Lily, it takes two to tango. He's the one who's always touching people.”

“But it's innocent.”

“Not in the eyes of the press. You have a job—
two
jobs—to protect, and a reputation. They've all but labeled you a whore. If that isn't a violation of your rights, I don't know what is!”

“But if I hire a lawyer, that says I
need
a lawyer, which I don't, since I haven't done anything wrong. I give the story one day—stretching it, maybe two.” Lily paused, alert. “What was that?”

“What?”

“That click.”

“What click?”

She listened again, heard nothing, sighed. “I must be paranoid.”

“Maybe you should call Governor Dean.”

“And have an aide tell me not to call there, either? I don't think so. Why are reporters calling Lake Henry? What are they looking for?”

“Anything they can take and twist to increase their sales. What do you want me to tell them?”

“That the story isn't true. That Sullivan is lying. That I'm suing.” She paused and asked quietly, “What about Rose?”

Rose was the last of the “Blake blooms,” as Lake Henry called the three Blake girls. She was a year younger than Poppy, which made her thirty-one. More relevant, she had been barely pubescent when Lily's problems had peaked, too young to have a mind of her own, too young to question what her mother said and thought. Poppy had been far stronger even back then. She had been able to straddle the fence between Maida
and Lily, but Rose had been her mother's mouthpiece from the start, and life's circumstances had done nothing to discourage it.

Rose was married, with three children. She and her husband, a childhood sweetheart whose family owned the local mill, lived on the piece of land that had been her wedding gift from the senior Blakes. Always close, Rose and Maida had grown even closer in the three years since Maida's husband, the girls' father, had died.

Experience told Lily not to expect support from Rose. Still, hope lived eternal.

Apparently it lived in Poppy, too, because—as though she had tried and failed—she said an uncharacteristically cross “Rose is an old poop. She doesn't have an independent thought in her head. Don't worry yourself about Rose, and as for the rest of town, I'll tell them what to say if anyone calls. They don't take kindly to having one of their own maligned.”

“It's been years since I've been one of their own,” Lily reminded her. “They forced me out when I was barely eighteen.”

“No. You
chose
to leave.”

“Only because they made life unbearable for me.”

“Mom did that, Lily.”

Lily sighed. She wasn't up for arguing, not now. “I have to go to work.”

“Will you keep me in the loop?” Poppy asked. “I know that Blakes have burned you, Lily, but I'm on your side.”

Lily refused to turn on the television. She didn't want to see whether she was in the news, preferring to think that the story was already old. But when she reached the lobby dressed for work, the crowd of journalists outside was larger than ever. Dismayed, she took the elevator to the garage, but reporters were there, too, radioing her arrival to those in front.

Resigned, since there was no other exit and she had to get to work, she lowered her eyes and walked quickly. She ignored the questions shot at her and kept her head down, letting her hair fall forward to shield her face from cameras. Still, the questions increased in volume and frequency, along with the click-and-advance of film as the media phalanx grew. The nearer she got to the club, the more they crowded in. When she was jostled so closely that it became hard to walk, she swung around with her elbows out.

“Leave me
alone,”
she cried through the whirr of snapping cameras. She spun forward and continued on, but she might as well have saved her breath. The crowd came with her in a wave, badgering her with the same
questions, goading her into another outburst. She tried to blot them out by thinking of other things, but almost everything in her life just then led back to this moment, this trauma. She was close to tears when she finally reached the club.

Mercifully, Dan was at the door, letting her in, shutting the press out. She went straight to his office, sank into a chair, and put her face in her hands. When she heard him enter, she dropped her hands to her lap.

“Rough day?” he asked kindly.

Not trusting her voice, she nodded. She studied his face.

He smiled sadly. “No need to wonder. I know you, and I know the Cardinal. There's nothing between the two of you but the same kind of friendship he has with people all over the city, all over the country, all over the
world
.”

“Then why is this happening here, now?”

“Because he was just named Cardinal. That makes for bigger headlines and bigger sales of papers.”

“That's
sick.”

“Lately it's the way things work.”

She took a breath, still upset from having run the gauntlet of reporters and cameras. “What happens now? They got their splashy headlines. There's no more story, so it dies. Right?”

“I hope so,” he said, but without the conviction she wanted. He seemed tired, as though he'd had a rough day, too. He also looked pale, and while pallor on Lily was only a step away from her normal color, it was a far cry from Dan's.

She had the awful thought that he wasn't saying everything he knew.

“How does tonight look here?” she asked with caution, wondering if business was hurt.

“Booked solid.”

She brightened. “That's good, isn't it?”

The answer was relative. Yes, the dining room was filled with paying guests, but most of them were new faces, guests of members, and they spent an inordinate amount of time watching the pianist.

Lily tried to tune them out. She often did that when she performed—used the music as an escape—and for a while she succeeded, losing herself in the fantasy of the song—until the flash of a camera broke her concentration. Dan spoke with the offending party and Lily resumed playing, but she didn't sing. No matter that she never stuttered when she sang; she was too unsettled to risk even the most remote chance of it.

Two other flashes went off during the course of the evening, and by the end of the last set, she couldn't try to pretend things were normal. She returned to Dan's office feeling shaken and scared.

“Will this be better tomorrow?” She was desperate for things to be back to normal. She liked her life, liked it just the way it had been.

“I sure hope so,” Dan answered, but in the next breath he introduced her to a large uniformed man. “This is Jimmy Finn. BPD, private duty. He'll see you get home okay.”

Her heart sank. “They're still out there?”

“Still out there,” said the cop, without an
r
in the “there.”

Jimmy Finn was a kind man, a devout Catholic who was deeply offended by the media spreading lies about his Cardinal. So he was predisposed to keep the reporters at bay, and burly enough to do it with ease. If he was rough shouldering his way through the crowd, he was nothing but gentle with Lily. He walked her to her building and saw her right to the door of her apartment, but the minute he left, she burst into tears.

There were a slew of new telephone messages, a mixed bag. A few were from friends and were uniformly supportive, but they were overshadowed by those from the media, quickly erased, not so quickly forgotten. She slept only in fits and starts through the night and woke up to a dreary day, but she refused to let her mood match it, refused to even look out the window to see whether television vans were still there. She showered, dressed in dark slacks and a sedate blouse so that she wouldn't feel so exposed. Then she forced down a banana for breakfast, all the while telling herself that things had to get better. Either there would be a retraction in today's paper or there would be nothing at all. In any case, the story was on its way to dead.

When someone knocked on her door shortly after eight, she tensed. She waited through a second knock, then crept softly to the peephole. Relieved, she opened the door.