Lake News (32 page)

John spent the night thinking about Lily. By dawn he felt a need to see her. Knowing how early she would be leaving if she was working with Maida again, he threw on the nearest clothes, grabbed a down vest, and started the Tahoe. Five minutes later he was turning down the road to Thissen Cove. He was relieved to see the tan wagon beside the cottage.

The sun hadn't yet risen high enough to provide much warmth. Pulling on the vest, he crossed over the pine
needles to the porch. He was up the steps in a single long stride and, seconds later, knocking. There was a movement at the side window, then the door opened.

For a minute, he couldn't speak. Lily looked frightened and pale—and disheveled enough,
sleepy
enough to suggest that he had woken her up. She was in her nightgown and had a hand on her chest. Well, not exactly her chest. More like her throat. There was no room for a hand on her chest what with… what with… what with those breasts.

“Has something happened?” she asked in a frightened whisper.

He cleared his throat. “Uh, no. I mean, I don't know. I haven't seen the paper.” He swallowed. “Can I come in for a minute?”

She ducked out of sight and returned wrapped in a shawl. When he was inside, she closed the door and crossed to the kitchen counter. She put an old-fashioned coffee percolator under the faucet and filled it with water, put the basket inside, and began scooping coffee.

The sight of bare feet beneath the long nightgown made her look all the more fragile.

Feeling oddly inept, John stood with his hands on the back of one of the ladder-back chairs at the kitchen table. Each of the four chairs was painted a different color. His was dark green. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you. I figured you might be going to the cider house again. I wanted to catch you before you left.”

She kept on scooping. “Oralee has to go to the dentist, so we're not starting till nine.”

“How late did you go yesterday?”

“Four.” She capped the coffee can.

“You must have been tired.”

“Yes, but in a good way.” She put the percolator on the stove and lit a flame underneath. Hugging the shawl, she finally turned. “It kept my mind busy.” Her eyes held his. “What's happened?”

“Terry Sullivan called me yesterday. He said you were married once.”

She didn't blink. The only visible reaction was a subtle tightening of the hands cinching in the shawl.

“It's really none of my business—” he began, but she cut in.

“Is he printing it?”

“I doubt it. I don't think the paper wants more, after what happened to the big story. I thought about calling his editor, but if I went to the effort of saying it wasn't true, I might have only made him curious.”

“It's true,” she said. Still holding his gaze, she slipped into the nearest chair—a pale purple one. He saw her inhale, then tip up her chin a fraction. “I was studying art in Mexico the summer after my freshman year. Brad was a senior. I thought I was in love. I'd been so lonely that first year at college that it seemed the perfect thing. We had fun those six weeks. Getting married was part of it. The fun ended the day we got back. He woke up and said he couldn't be married to me because he loved someone else.”

John saw hurt, along with a more general embarrassment.
Needing to move on, he said, “So you had it annulled.”

“I paid a lawyer to do that, but there was no need. The ceremony wasn't legal. Brad knew it all along. I felt like a fool.”

“Does anyone here know?”

She shook her head. When a wisp of hair stayed at her mouth, she moved it away. “We did it two days before the summer semester ended. He said we should keep it a secret for a while. That was fine with me. I was afraid of what my parents would say about the rush. Then it didn't matter.”

She stopped, seeming to hold her breath, waiting. It didn't take a genius to hear the question she wasn't asking.

“I won't tell,” he vowed, but she didn't look assured. So, without pride, he said, “Donny wasn't the only Kipling who stole a car—but he was the only one who did it more than once, and the only one who got caught. When I was fourteen, I wanted wheels. My dad wouldn't even let me drive his truck with him in the cab. So I stole one right from the center of town.”

Lily looked cautiously curious. “Whose?”

“Willie Jake's.” When her eyes went wide, he laughed. It was part pleasure, part relief. She looked adorable. “Yup. His pride and joy was a sporty little Mustang. He used to leave it parked in front of the office while he did his rounds in the cruiser.”

“In
front?
How did you steal it with no one seeing?”

“Remember the fire up at the academy? No, you were probably too young, but there was a big fire in one of the dorms—someone
smoking and stashing the cig out of sight when the dorm mother came sniffing. The cigarette wasn't out, the dorm was an old wood house, everyone who might have smelled smoke was either on a lower floor or playing afternoon sports. The place caught like tinder. The town center cleared out—everyone up there making sure every last boy was accounted for. So there was the Mustang with the keys right in the ignition. I drove it all the way around the lake, then up to the mill.”

“Didn't people
there
see?”

“I waited around the corner from the office until no one was around the other cars. Then I drove in the parking lot, locked the thing up, and walked off.” She looked like she thought he was crazy. “Well, where would the challenge have been if I'd left it at the end of the lake? A shrink would say that I wanted to get caught, and he'd probably be right, but I wasn't caught. Willie Jake was furious. He interviewed dozens of us, but he never did find out who drove that car. I snuck in one night and buried the keys in the old stone wall back of his house. To my knowledge he's never found them. A hundred years from now, a scavenger looking for relics will spot that rock slightly out of place and put a metal detector to it.”

Soberly Lily said, “So you stole a car and didn't get caught, and I didn't steal a car and got caught.”

“Yes,” John said. “That gives you something to tell Willie Jake.”

“The statute of limitations will have expired.”

“But it would hurt my credibility if that comes out. So
if I tell anyone about your marriage, you can toss that out as evidence that I can't be believed.”

“What about Terry? Will he tell?”

“Not so soon after the apology. He'll lie low for a while.”

“Then what?”

“That depends. If we have dirt on him, he'll be neutralized.”

“That sounds like blackmail.”

“Oh, no. He'll be able to say whatever he wants. No one will listen. That's all.”

It sounded good to John. Lily looked as though she was considering it. When the coffee began to perk, she lowered the flame and stayed at the stove with her arms around her middle and her head bowed in thought.

John didn't rush to fill the silence, what with the percolating pot doing it so well. Within minutes, the smell of coffee began filling the room. He had a modern coffee machine that he filled with beans ground fresh before each use, but his coffee never smelled like this.

It didn't taste like it either, he decided five minutes later when she poured him a cup.

Five minutes after that, he had a refill. By the time he left the cottage to head into town, he was feeling wide awake but mellow. Celia's spirit was a peaceful one, indeed.

It wasn't until he was in the truck again, driving the rest of the way around the lake, that guilt set in. Lily's early marriage spoke of a craving for love and affection—possibly the same need that made her friendship with
Cardinal Rossetti so strong, certainly the same need that had her back in Lake Henry trying to patch things up with her mother. That early marriage helped flesh out the picture of who she was.

But if he included it in a book about the invasion of privacy, he would be invading Lily's privacy even more.

Lily didn't trust John. She had made too many errors in judgment where men were concerned to do that. She liked the way he looked and liked the way he talked. She liked the fact that he told her things about himself that no one else knew. She liked his knowledge of loons and his appreciation of
her
appreciation of them, but she wasn't taking chances. When she called him thirty minutes after he left the cottage, it was just for the news.

“Nothing,” he said with what might have been frustration.

She was relieved that there was nothing about her marriage in the paper. She wouldn't have wanted to explain that to Maida, who would be angry and hurt. They had spent the whole of yesterday together without disagreement. It was a record. Granted, what little talk there had been was about work, but it was something, and Lily hated to rock the boat now.

Unfortunately, no news meant that there was no apology or retraction either. “Nowhere?” she asked John.

“Nowhere.”

“They're just dropping the story cold, leaving me as the bad guy.” After three days, it was no longer a question.

“They're trying. There were actually two letters to the editor accusing them of doing just that, so you have fans out there. The papers print letters to ease their guilt—you know, show what fair guys they are.”

Lily didn't think they were fair at all. After thanking John and saying good-bye, she considered calling Cassie. But Cassie couldn't do anything more for another few days. Besides, Lily had to get to Maida's.

So she put it aside, drove around the lake to the cider house, and let the smell of fresh apple mash, the demand of the work, and the rhythm of the machines keep it stashed in that distant mental compartment. It came to the fore with a rush, though, when Maida called a late-morning break. This time, when Lily returned to the main house, she called Dan Curry.

“Lily,” he said, sounding pleased to hear her voice, “we were just talking about you, George and I. How are you?”

She felt a wave of nostalgia. Many a time she had stopped at the club to pick up a check and had sat over coffee and scones with George and Dan. “I'm fine. How are you both?”

“We're fine,” he said brightly. “Booked every night, even with the spectacle of the scandal gone. When I see members looking wistfully at the piano, I know they're missing you. Your replacement didn't work out. We had to let him go after two nights. He just didn't know the songs. You're a hard act to follow, Lily Blake.”

That was good news. But the not-so-good lingered. “It doesn't look like the papers are going to apologize to me like they did to the Cardinal. Is he—are his people still working on that?” The Cardinal had said they would. Lord knew, they'd gotten an apology for
him
quickly enough.

“Gee,” Dan said, “I don't know.”

“Until they do, I look bad.”

“Nah,” he said in a jovial way. “Anyone who knows you never thought you looked bad.”

“Maybe not musically or physically, but what about mentally? Do all those people think I caused the scandal by saying those things?”

“I really don't talk about that with them. They know how I feel.”

They did indeed. Dan was on her side, which meant that the general membership of the club might blame him for hiring her in the first place.

Testing the waters, she said, “Each day that passes without more in the paper, I think about coming back. Will people forget?”

“The people who matter already have. Past tense. Over and out.”

Lily had always liked Dan, but she wasn't stupid. She knew that one of the reasons he was good at running the club was that he could tell members what they wanted to hear. She had a feeling he was doing that to her now. Patronizing her.

So she made the question more specific. “When do you think I'll be able to come back to work?”

“Here?” He asked with such surprise—as though the
thought had never occurred to him—that her heart sank. “Oh, it's still premature. You've only been gone a week.”

“But if the allegations are wrong.”

“It's not only those allegations. It's the others, too.”

“But they're lies.”

“We need to let it die down, Lily. It won't do any good to rush things.”

Quietly, she said, “This is mm-my job, Dan. The money pays my rent.”

Dan sighed. His voice was suddenly bare. “I know. But the truth is that, if you return here, it'll revive the whole thing. I can't do that to the membership. I've hired another replacement. This one's really quite good.”

Lily felt the blow. His words held a finality that said arguing would be wasting her breath. He owned the club. His mind was made up. “I see.”

“I sent a check to your apartment for what I owe you, but if you're not there—”

“I'll get it. Thanks.”