Lake News (31 page)

“We've moved in the same circles for years—though Lord knows why,” Anna added under her breath, “with Phipps and, rest his soul, George so different. But Lake Henry is small, and they had the orchard and we had the mill.
Maida entertained a lot in the old days. The house was beautiful, the food was delicious. I didn't see Lily often. She was kept in the background, except in church. Singing, she had an angel's voice. But talking? Poor thing, stuttering that way. Maida was horrified.”

“Horrified for Lily, or for herself?”

Anna's full cheeks grew flushed. She whispered, “Both, I'm afraid. She was convinced people blamed her for the stutter.”

As well they might,
John was thinking when Anna said, “It's entirely physical. Did you know that?”

He didn't. He didn't know much about stuttering at all, except that the person listening often suffered as much as the stutterer himself. Herself.

“It has to do with the coordination of the muscles for speech,” Anna went on. “That isn't to say there aren't emotions involved. Tension makes it worse. It distracts the person from concentrating on controlling it. But the root of the problem is physical.”

“Did Lily always have it?”

“Always. She was a late talker, didn't say much until she was four or five, and she didn't say much even then, most likely because it was hard for her. So they didn't hear the problem at first, and then they thought it was something that would work itself out, but the more they made her talk, the worse it got. Your heart would break watching her, and when Maida snapped at her for doing it…” Anna took a sharp breath and sat back.

“She
snapped?”
John asked.

“Snapped, shook her finger, made apologies to everyone in sight.”

He cringed. “Why didn't they get help?”

“Eventually they did.” Anna looked him in the eye. “Maida didn't like that much, either.”

“Why not?”

“It confirmed the existence of a problem.”

“But if everyone already knew…”

“Therapy made it official. Therapy made it
serious
. Maida wanted the Blake blooms to be perfect, and suddenly one of them wasn't, in a very public and obvious way. It's no wonder she's been so upset by this business in Boston. The very same Blake bloom is imperfect
again
in a very public and obvious way—not,” she added with an edge, “that I said any of this to that reporter.” She looked up and produced a grin when Charlie arrived with food.

Anna had a Cobb salad piled high with goodies and topped with generous dollops of blue cheese dressing. By comparison, John's bacon cheeseburger and fries looked tame.

He offered her a fry, which she accepted with grace.

“What reporter?” he asked.

She finished the fry and fingered her napkin. “Sullivan. He's been calling nearly every day since this broke.”

“Still
calling?” John was mystified, and vaguely alarmed. Terry should have been off the story once the paper issued its apology to the Cardinal. If he was still calling, that meant he was after something.

“Still calling,” Anna confirmed. “He gets me going talking about every other little thing, like he finds me so fascinating that he just can't help getting off the subject. He brings the talk around to the mill and suggests that there's enough for
three
stories in it, but I know men like him. I've
lived with a sweet-talker for too many years not to know insincerity when I hear it. He's trying to get my guard down. He's trying to get me to betray one of my own.” She waved her fork gently. “Tries to slip in little questions.”

“About Lily?”

“And Maida. He's looking for worms under rocks, but, good Lord, there isn't a one of us doesn't have something in life he isn't proud of, some little smudge.” She let the fork dangle, set her elbows on the table, and smiled. “What's yours?”

John had lots of little smudges and more than a few big ones, but in that instant, when he pushed aside his concern about Terry, a long-forgotten one sprang to mind. “Calling my father a bastard. I was twelve. He had called me a girl, because my voice hadn't changed. There isn't much worse that a boy can be called when he's twelve. So I called him a bastard. He went all quiet and hard and stalked out of the house. He didn't come back for three days. What I didn't know then was that,
A,
he was, in fact, a bastard, and,
B,
that my mother had used the word in an argument the day before.”

“Had you heard her?”

“No. It was pure coincidence, but bad timing.” He smiled back at Anna. “What's your smudge?”

Her eyes twinkled. “I stitched the zippers in Phipps's pants shut. Every last pair in his closet. It was quite a sight watching him struggle with one after the other.”

John didn't have to ask why. “Who unstitched them?”

“Not me,” she said with pride. “I figured that if working with fabric was his stock in trade, he could just do it himself—which
he did, with some contrition. Mind you”—she pointed at John's heart with her fork—“if you tell anyone I told you that, I'll put in a bad word with Armand, who will then cut your year-end bonus. Now,
there's
a sweet-talker if ever there was one.”

“Armand?”

“You wouldn't know,” she said with the dash of her fork. “You're not a woman.” She speared a piece of ham. “But you get my point on the other. We all have smudges. If we didn't, the word ‘secret' wouldn't exist—not to
mention
the fact that even if you did tell someone, it wouldn't be all that bad. We like each other. We respect each other. That reporter?” She put the ham into her mouth and waved the empty fork in mimic of a slow headshake.

The only thing John could figure was that Terry was trying to shore up the blame-Lily angle. But he was stepping on territory that John considered his own, particularly now that he and Richard Jacobi had a deal. He was in a fighting mood when he returned to the office after lunch, but before he could decide what to do with it, Armand called.

Excitement livened his raspy voice. “Lily Blake's back in town. I think you ought to get yourself over there and do an exclusive.”

John thought quickly. “The paper's just come out. There won't be another for a week.”

“Yes, well, we put out a special supplement when this Republican town went Democratic in the last election. So we'll do a special supplement now.”

“I don't think this story is quite the same.”

“What's that matter? I'm saying I'll pay for it.”

“But I'm the one in charge of quality control,” John insisted. “What's to put in a special supplement? Do you want me to do a rehash of what everyone else has been printing for the last week? What's
new
in the story?”

“Didn't you hear me?” Armand bellowed. “She's
back
. That's news. Christ, John, this is basic journalism. People in town will want to know why, for how long, what she's doing, where's she staying.”

“Everyone in town will know most of that before the day is out,” John said quietly. “The only thing you'll accomplish in a supplement is to score points with the mainstream press.”

“And what's wrong with
that?
If you don't interview her, someone else will. Come on, John,” he whined. “What's your
prob
-lem? She's
our
girl. This is
our
story.”

“Right. She's our girl, and we protect our own. Our story should be that there is no story, because that's where it stood when last I heard.”

John hung up the phone feeling duplicitous on two counts. The first involved Armand and what might indeed have made a good story for
Lake News
. The second involved Lily and had more to do with John's future intentions than with anything immediate he might write. He liked Lily. The more he learned about her, the more he admired her. The more he admired her, the worse he felt about his book. Some would say he was exploiting her. He preferred to think he was simply studying her, but he found either case vaguely unsettling.

So he took the fighting mood that hadn't quite disappeared and focused on Terry Sullivan. On one side of his computer he put the list of tips Jack Mabbet had given him. On the other side he put his growing file. Several clicks and half a dozen typed responses later, he was connected to a database that, using Terry's current address, spewed up his Social Security number, his monthly rent, two bank account numbers, four credit card numbers, and ten other places of residence in a total of four states over a period of twenty-three years.

John studied the ten. The three most recent were in the Boston area, making it a total of four moves in the twelve years Terry had been with the paper. John didn't know if
he
would want to haul his own stuff in and out of as many apartments, but four in twelve years didn't raise any flags. Seven in the eleven previous years was a little stranger. He studied them one at a time.

The first two were college apartments. John recognized the Pennsylvania address. That took care of two years, with nine to go.

The next two apartments were in Connecticut—one in Hartford, one in a nearby suburb. They covered the four years immediately following college, when Terry had freelanced for several of the local papers.

He moved to Rhode Island when he was offered his first staff position. During the five years he was there, he lived at three different addresses, each within commuting distance of Providence.

John swiveled his chair and looked out at the lake. He sat back, rubbed a thumb over his mouth, tried to think of all the reasons why a man would move so often.
Knowing Terry, he hadn't been able to get along with landlords, neighbors, roommates. The man could shift from charming to abrasive in no time flat.

Psychotic? Possibly. Schizophrenic? Possibly. It was also possible that he was mentally fit but simply driven by private demons.

John was wondering what those demons might be, and where eleven apartments in twenty-three years, plus hatred of the Cardinal, fit in, when the telephone rang.
“Lake News
. Kipling here.”

“Kip!” It was Poppy. “I wasn't sure if you were back. Terry Sullivan's calling for you. Do you want to take it?”

For a split second, John felt guilty—like a peeping Tom caught in the act, as if Terry knew exactly what he'd just been doing and thinking. Then he realized it couldn't possibly be so, and that even if it was, Terry had been doing much the same where Lily was concerned.

With that realization, his anger returned. “I'll take it,” he told Poppy. Seconds later, more coolly, he said, “What's up, Terry?”

“I hear she's back.”

John chose his words with care. Figuring it would be transparent of him to ask who “she” was, he said, “I haven't heard that. Who's your source?”

“I have dozens of sources, little people here, little people there. Can you confirm it, yes or no?”

“I can't confirm it,” John said, because it was the truth. He would be betraying Lily if he did. “Why are you asking? The story's done. You've been proved wrong.”

“No. The paper caved in to pressure from the Church. I stand by my story.”

John was incredulous. “What's to stand by? All you had was circumstantial evidence, and it was flimsy at best. Is there a reason for this? Do you have a grudge against Rossetti?”

“Don't need it to smell something fishy. He's a lady-killer. He and Lily Blake were too close for it to be innocent.”

“Have you suddenly found an eyewitness to say it wasn't?”

“No, but I'm lookin'.”

“You're pestering people like Anna Winslow, but she won't tell you that Lily Blake was having an affair with Cardinal Rossetti.”

“Did you know she was married?”

“Of course. Her son is married to Lily's sister.”

“Not Anna,” Terry said. “
Lily
was married.”

John hadn't heard that. Neither had anyone else in town, including—he would put money on it—Lily's family. Too many other secrets had already been printed. If Lily had been married, Poppy would have told him.

He was silent a second too long.

“You didn't know,” Terry gloated. “There you are, right in her own hometown, and you didn't know. It was a quickie, done the summer after her freshman year in college. The guy was a senior, they were both studying in Mexico. A month after they got back, she had it annulled. I have proof this time, John.”

“And what,” John asked in disgust, “are you going to do with it? Is the paper running it?”

“No—”

“Because the story's done,” he cut in. “Because
you
embarrassed the paper once and they're not letting you do it again. Because a quickie marriage years ago has absolutely no relevance to anything or anyone now!”

“That remains to be seen,” Terry said, and John felt a sudden sharp loathing.

“Don't… even… try,” he warned, sitting forward in his chair. “You've done her harm enough. It was wrong the first time, arguably libel. Do it this time and I'll go after you myself.”

“You?” Terry laughed. “That's a good one. You don't have the guts to go after me or anyone else. You're jealous, is your problem. I'm a better writer than you'll
ever
be. I dig and you sit. I find and you drool. I'm here and you're there. Know something? I do believe that she could be right there in your own hometown, and you wouldn't even know it! You had it once, John, but you've lost it. Lost it good.”

John waited. “Anything else?”

“Nah. That's it.” Almost to himself, but with a hint of dismay and disgust, he muttered, “This is a waste of time. A waste of money.” He hung up.