Lake News (25 page)

Removing the dark glasses, she approached that one and felt a chill. Here were newspapermen at work, photos taken during John's time in Boston, if the banner on the wall was any indication. Hard to believe that a photograph could capture such focus and intensity, but there were faces with the very same ardor she had seen in her nightmares. Terry Sullivan's face jumped out at her from one print, other familiar faces from others, though she couldn't place them. There was an attractive woman in one, but mostly she saw John. He looked different from how he looked now in person, and it went beyond the beard and the tan. In glossy black-and-white he was like the others—tightly wound, frightening, definitely a man to avoid.

“Scary, isn't it?” John said from the door. He could imagine what Lily was thinking, looking at that particular wall. And his mug shot? A disaster, if the goal was to win her trust. If he'd known she was coming, he might have rethought the decor.

When she shot him a nervous look, he was doubly sorry he hadn't. The big glasses were off, exposing the fear in her eyes. She was fully dressed now—no nightgown this time—but with her hair stuck under that cap and jeans encasing slim legs, there remained a fragility to her.

She glanced at the large manila envelope in his hand.

He tossed it on his desk. “Essays and poems from the
academy. I always try to print a few. I'll have to sort through later and pick.”

She eyed the other two desks. “Where's the rest of your help?”

“Jenny's it.”

“Then why three desks?”

“Different desks for different jobs.” He pointed accordingly. “Editorial, production, sales. I have a correspondent in each of the towns we cover, and freelancers drop things off, but none of them works here. They don't do enough to warrant it.”

She folded her arms on her chest, left the
Post
wall, and moved in for a closer look at his loon pictures. “Did you take these?”

“Every one,” he said with pride. He had sat hours for many of those shots, waiting for trust to build so that he could paddle closer, then waiting with the camera at his eye for just the right moment to trip the shutter. “Some are last year's, but most are new.”

“Did you print them yourself?”

“Yes. That's one of the perks of the job—a darkroom down cellar.”

Lily went from print to print. There were nearly a dozen in all, taken at various times of day in various weather. With the exception of one of a loon on its nest, they were water shots—an adult grooming itself, a pair leaving a smooth liquid trail, a family of adults and their young. One print was of an hours-old chick. Another was of two chicks riding on a parent's back.

With Lily seemingly engrossed, John went in for a closer look himself.

“Are they the same pair of loons?” she asked.

“I think so.” He pointed at the short white lines ringing the neck of one bird in each of two shots. “Two different years, but the same little break in the line right here. I imagine he has a scar that prevents the feathers there from growing smoothly.”

“He?”

“I think. He's bigger. Hard to tell otherwise. They share parenting chores, take turns sitting on the nest and fishing for food.” He amended the thought. “Actually, I know that's the male.” He pointed to one of the other pictures. “This was taken last April, my first loon sighting of the year. See that little break in the neck marking? Males typically return a week or two before females. They scout around for nesting sights. I'm not sure if the female is the same one both years, though. Loons are monogamous through an entire breeding season, but we don't know for sure whether they mate for life.”

He looked down at the top of her cap. It didn't quite reach his chin. Wisps of dark hair—shiny hair—escaped at the neck and the hole in the back. The bill prevented him from seeing her eyes, but he could easily hear her voice, soft though it was.

“When I was growing up,” she said, “there was concern about a decline in the loon population.”

When John was growing up he hadn't given a hoot about loons. He had been gone from Lake Henry by the time the concern had been voiced, but he had read about it since.

“The decline continued. The concern grew. Eventually people realized that big boats and jet skis were taking a
toll. Too much noise for loons—they were being frightened off their nests and the eggs were lost. Too much sediment stirred up—loons rely on clear water to see the fish that they eat. Too much wake—eggs were being washed right out of nests. So jet skis were outlawed and boat speed was limited. Lo and behold, the population rebounded.”

When Lily tipped her head back and looked up, something inside him flip-flopped. Her eyes were as soft as her voice. He hadn't expected that.

He swallowed. “Life's solutions should always be so easy.”

“They're magnificent creatures.”

“Yes.” He couldn't look away. Her face was exquisite.

“They're wonderful pictures,” she said.

His heart was beating faster. “Thanks.”

Her eyes grew vulnerable. “You said you had ammo. What did you mean?”

For an absurd minute, John felt like the guy with a crush on a girl who had a crush on someone else and wanted his advice. Like he'd just been shot down. It wasn't betrayal exactly. More like disappointment that business could intrude.

But business was the name of the game. So, valiantly, he said, “Terry Sullivan has a history of rigging stories. It's never been proven, because he's shrewd. He worms his way into the confidences of someone in a higher position, someone who can protect him. But there are a whole lot of someones in lower positions who know exactly what he does.”

“Do they know why?”

“Ambition. Ruthlessness. Greed.”

“Malice?”

“I'm working on malice,” John said. He knew where she was headed. “Malice” was the magic word, where legalities were concerned. “The obvious thing is that he concocted the scandal as a personal vendetta. You didn't know him from Adam, so it wasn't against you. Rossetti's personal secretary says
they
didn't know each other. So I'll have to come at it from a different angle. For now, all I have is a growing list of times when Terry Sullivan has shown a reckless disregard for the truth, as they say.”

“I'd have to prove malice in court.”

“Probably.”

“I could go through years of agony and still lose.”

“Possibly.” He sighed. “Do you know that there's a tape?”

Her startled look said she didn't.

“He taped your conversation without telling you. That's illegal. It's something to add to the arsenal.”

Lily looked crushed. “A tape will show that I did sssay those things, only I didn't say them the way he printed them.”

John was thinking that he believed her one hundred percent, when she said, “I met with Cassie Byrnes.”

That surprised him. “You did?”

“We demanded a retraction. That was yesterday. Today-yy's today”—he saw her blink with the stutter, a split second's bid for control—“and there's no retraction. Cassie says not to panic, but I'm tired of doing nnn-nothing.”

The phone rang. John might have ignored it, if it hadn't
been crunch time for the week. He picked up at the nearest desk, which just happened to be the editorial desk by the lake.

The caller was the owner of a crafts shop two towns over, wanting to do pre-Christmas advertising. John pulled up a piece of paper and took the information he needed. By the time he hung up the phone, Lily was looking at him. Again, something turned inside him.

He glanced at his watch. “Tired of doing nothing?”

“Yes.”

“Got a few minutes?”

“Slightly.”

Smiling, he reached for the envelope from Lake Henry Academy. His free hand guided Lily around the desk and into his chair. Upending the envelope, he shook out its contents. “Pick three.”

She looked at the papers, then up at him—and he felt a twist in his chest this time. He figured it was the cap. He was a sucker for the Red Sox.

When she didn't say anything, he started to blabber. “There'll be things here from all grade levels, seven through twelve, some typed, some handwritten. Sometimes I pick three that are totally different in style, form, and content—like a poem, an essay, and a letter to the editor. Other times I pick three on one theme. So you can do what you want, whatever hits you as being the most interesting.”

She looked game.

He grinned. “You're a teacher. Go to it.”

Without further ado, he took the ad information, sat himself down at the sales desk, and began to build an ad.
But his mind wasn't on it. He kept thinking about Lily showing up at his office asking about ammo, kept thinking that if he helped her out, he could be shooting himself in the foot if the point was to save things for his book. But he felt guilty for what his brother, Donny, had done, and guilty for what his own profession, in the guise of Terry Sullivan, had done; and there were those soft eyes of hers that felt good touching his.

So he said, “There's another way.”

She looked up, brows arched.

“To fight Terry without going to court,” John explained. “You could turn his own methods right back on him. Fight fire with fire.”

“How?”

“Discredit him. Go public with allegations about him that may have no weight taken one by one, but that taken as a set paint an ugly picture.”

“I don't know what those allegations are.”

“I do.”

“And you'd share them?”

Here it was. “I might.”

“In exchange for what?”

He thought about that for a minute. He didn't see why it couldn't work for them both. “Your side of the story.”

He was immediately sorry he'd said it. There was the subtlest shift of her shoulders, the faintest widening of her eyes. “You said you wouldn't.”

“I won't without your say-so.”

She looked down at the papers. Three were slightly separated from the others. She pushed them all the way
out now, and stood. “There are your three.” She put on her sunglasses.

He rose. “Nothing without your say-so.” He knew she was thinking that he might be another Terry Sullivan. Her distrust was obvious. He had come on too fast. But it was done.

Carefully she wrapped the scarf around her neck. She started for the door, pausing to look at the loon wall a final time. He could see her taking a deep breath, even calming a little. But she didn't turn back.

“Lily?”

“I'd rather prove malice,” she said and left.

Poppy's Tuesday was quiet, thanks in part to the weather. When days were cold, wet, or snowy, many of her clients stayed at home. Dense fog at the end of September, keeping temperatures in the forties at night and the fifties by day, had much the same effect.

The quiet also had to do with a slowdown in media calls, which didn't surprise Poppy one bit. Blaming the scandal on Lily had been a ridiculous move. Everyone in town knew that, with an indignant handful calling to say it to Poppy. Lily Blake unbalanced? It was the final straw, a major blow to what little credibility the case had, an offense to the sensibilities of people who knew the Blakes. Poppy guessed that the press knew it, too, and, noble to the end, was backing off from the story to spare themselves further embarrassment.

Oh, there was still the occasional halfhearted media call requesting reaction to the story's lastest twist. But no such requests came from major outlets, and by late afternoon the only calls that possibly could be related came from Lake Henry's librarian, Leila Higgins, and
its postmaster, Nathaniel Roy. Both had seen a tan Ford wagon with Massachusetts plates parked outside the
Lake News
office and wanted to know whose it was.

Poppy knew, though she had no idea why her sister was there. So she called Kip and said, “You had a visitor.”

Kip sounded cross. “How'd
you
know?”

“I got calls about the car from Leila and Nat. They didn't know whose it was. Why was she there?”

“She wanted to say hi,” he muttered.

“To you? Try again.”

“She was helping me work.”

Okay. It was Tuesday. He was hunkering down. She could almost buy that on his end, but on Lily's? “Why?”

“She was bored.”

“And she figured that was the liveliest place to be?”

“Ask
her,
Poppy.”

“I will,” Poppy said. She ended the call wondering what was stuck in
his
craw, and tried to call Lily, but the cell phone was off. She tried several more times, but by then it was evening, the fog had lifted to allow a near-peak sunset to be seen over the lake, and her friends arrived.

Sigrid Dunn was an artisan who specialized in large-loom weaving and home-baked bread; she brought a loaf of warm, fresh olive bread and a bottle of Merlot. Marianne Hersey owned a small bookstore in the next town and an insulated casserole carrier; she brought hot coq au vin and a bottle of Chablis. Heather Malone was a full-time mom who devoted herself to raising two young children and vegetables; she arrived with a huge salad dotted with kernels of local sweet corn and a nutty pinot
grigio. Cassie Byrnes—lawyer, mother, and wife—brought cookies from an Italian bakery in Concord, purchased after an appearance in federal court that afternoon. Poppy provided jugs of apple cider and a pot of coffee, along with all the paraphernalia needed to eat the rest.