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  Intent on picking up gossip for Lake News, he returned from the Ridge through the center of town, pulled in at the plant and shrub sale, and mingled with the townsfolk. There was talk about the play that the Lake Henry Players had chosen for their winter drama, talk about the sale of two poems that the town librarian had made to Yankee magazine, and from the same librarian, talk of the litter of six kittens that the library’s cat had just given birth to behind the biography shelves. Approaching a large wood cart filled with pumpkins, John caught talk of the season’s bumper crop, but he had little time to make notes on that or any of the rest before people turned the questions on him.

  “Paper says she’s hiring that lawyer,” remarked Alf Buzzell. He was the director of that winter drama, a sixty-year resident of Lake Henry and treasurer of the Historical Society. “Think there’ll be a big TV trial?”

  “Beats me,” John said.

  “Don’t know’s I’d like that,” the man remarked, leaving John to wonder whether it was the focus on the town that he would mind or its competition with the Lake Henry Players.

  “How’d they find out about the stutter?” asked the librarian. Leila Higgins was in her thirties. She had been a year ahead of Lily in school, a bookworm even back then. Though married now, she made no secret of having been a teenage wallflower. When she talked about those years, there was a bruised look in her eyes, just as there was as she asked about Lily.

  “They must have seen medical records,” John answered.

  “But how? Who would have let the public see those?”

  John didn’t know for sure. He planned to look into it. “There was probably mention of the stutter in the court file.”

  “But who would have let the public see those?” Leila insisted. It was another thing John planned to look into.

  From the owner of the pumpkin cart came, “I keep wondering if she’ll come here.” Like the others, he felt no need to qualify the “she.” There was only one “she” the townsfolk were talking about. John didn’t pretend not to follow.

  But since there wasn’t a question, there was no need of an answer. Grateful to be spared evasiveness, John ran his hand over a rounded pumpkin. “This is a beauty,” he said, taking an appreciative breath. Between the smells of sweet junipers, rich loam, and ripe pumpkin, fall was definitely in the air. It was worth lingering over, and he would do that, but not just now. Tucking his notebook into the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, he crossed the parking lot to the general store, because he knew that Charlie would be breaking for lunch.

  Charlie Owens was a contemporary of his. He had grown up in a well-heeled lake family but had been John’s friend through school, which was to say that Charlie had been a bad boy, too. Their favorite place had been No Man’s Island, smack in the center of the lake. At twelve they had paddled there to smoke pot; at thirteen they had gotten drunk there; at fourteen they had lost their virginity there, one right after the other, to a very willing, very buxom girl two years older.

  Charlie had returned to the fold straight from college, thanks to the dual incentive of a stagnant family business and the love of a woman with the ideas, energy, and style to revive it. He served as the front man at the general store, the one who knew how to communicate with Lake Henryites, but Annette was the one responsible for bringing the store toward the new millennium. She overhauled the grocery department, introducing a deli and a bakery, updated the home supplies department, and established a crafts department that brought browsers. She also was the brains behind the café, a bright, glass-enclosed room at the far end of the store.

  John headed there now. When he crossed in front of the kitchen pass-through, he ducked his head and winked at Annette, who was back there ladling up something that smelled like a wonderfully fresh fish chowder. In the café, he slid into his favorite window booth, a spot that looked out at a stand of white birches. With the sun noon high, the curling bark was whiter and the fall leaves more yellow than ever.

  He wasn’t there for long before Charlie set down a tray with, yes, fish chowder, plus Western club sandwiches and coffee, all for two. After he emptied the tray, he slid in across from John and grinned. “Thought you’d never get here.”

  John reached for the coffee. The taste brought immediate relief from the lingering aftertaste of beer. “Long morning?” he asked, holding the cup for its warmth.

  “Busy is all,” Charlie said, but he didn’t look any worse for the wear. His thinning hair had gone white, and he already had Charlie Senior’s crow’s-feet, but there was an ease in his eyes and his smile that attested to something working well in his life. His wife adored him, as did their five kids, three of whom worked at the store. John might tease Charlie about the kids giving him that white hair, but John did envy him the fullness of his life.

  “I won’t ask what they’re talking about out there,” Charlie mused, gesturing around the café with his spoon. “They’re talking about it in here, too. Town’s obsessed with it.”

  “What do you remember about her?”

  Charlie ate a big piece of fish from his chowder. That was all the time it took for him to decide. “The voice. She was singing in church by the time she was seven. Outside of church, she was invisible. A quiet thing.”

  “She stuttered,” John reminded him. That would explain the quietness.

  “Not when she sang. She used to sing Sundays at church, and from the time she was ten or eleven, Thursdays here. I was away when that started, but to hear my dad tell it, she kept the place packed. They used the big room in back for live music even then, though it wasn’t much more’n walls of barn board, with benches round a potbelly stove and a raised platform at one end.”

  “Did she sing every week?”

  “Near to,” Charlie said and took another mouthful of chowder. He had barely swallowed when he pointed the spoon at John’s bowl. “Eat. My kids caught the fish—white perch and bass from the lake.” He opened a bag of oyster crackers and dumped them in.

  John ate. The chowder was light and buttery, not too thick, just savory enough.

  Charlie said, “But there were fights aplenty about Lily singing here. George liked it, Maida didn’t. Far as she was concerned, if singing in church was a sure road to salvation, singing here was a sure road to hell.”

  “Then why did she allow it?”

  “George insisted. So did Lily’s speech therapist. They both said she needed something to feel good about.”

  John was trying to picture it. “A singing ten-year-old is precocious and adorable. What about a fourteen- or fifteen-year old? Was she provocative?”

  “Omigod, no. Maida wouldn’t let it go that far. No matter the weather, no matter her age, the girl was buttoned from throat to ankle.”

  “That can be provocative,” John pointed out. He was trying to imagine Donny’s interest.

  Charlie worked at his chowder for a minute. Then he set down the spoon. “Well, Lily wasn’t. She’d just stand there and sing, no swaying, no come-hither looks, just the gentlest, most unpretentious smile at the end. She’d close her eyes singing love words, like she was either in dreamland or in dire fear that her mother would show up any minute and whisk her off the stage. Only, Maida didn’t. On principle alone, she wouldn’t go listen. She didn’t come to the store for months after Lily left for New York. Far as she was concerned, we were the ones who corrupted the girl.”

  “Not Donny?” John asked.

  Charlie wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “That was a nothing case. So’s this. You think she had an affair with the Cardinal?”

  “No.”

  “Right. Anyone who knew Lily knew she wasn’t capable of doing much bad. Your brother—he was another story. Not,” Charlie added, arching a brow, “that I told that to the fellow stopped in here this morning.”

  John felt a twinge. “What fellow?”

  Charlie took a business card from his pocket and passed it over. “Said he was a TV pro-du-sah from New Yawk. Y’ask me, he looked too young
.”

  According to the card, the man was with Dateline NBC. “They’re young,” John acknowledged. “Shows like this have half a dozen producers. A lot of what they do is dirty work, like scoping out Lake Henry and trying to decide whether to run something or not.”

  “I told him not,” Charlie said without a trace of an accent now. “I said there wasn’t any story here, and that even if there was, he wouldn’t get it from us.”

  But John knew how the media worked. There had been strangers at the plant sale just now. Everyone assumed that flatlanders passing through town on a Saturday would stop, particularly during foliage season. In the absence of a camera, there was no instant way of differentiating a leaf peeper from a reporter. “What did he look like?”

  “Us,” Charlie remarked, but added a knowing “I rang the ‘listen up’ bell and announced to everyone here who he was, so he wouldn’t have to introduce himself. Then I walked him over to the plant sale and introduced him to everyone there, so folks’d know we had someone from Dateline NBC in town. Then I shook his hand, wished him luck, and left him on his own.”

  John knew why he liked Charlie. “That was good of you.”

  “I thought so,” Charlie said. Lifting his soup mug, he downed what was left of his chowder in a single long glug. Then he set the mug down and sat back with a satisfied smile.

  * * *

  John didn’t know why Charlie wasn’t twice the size he was. Before John could finish what was in front of him, Charlie had downed seconds of chowder and an order of long, skinny french fries that he brought to the table with the chowder refill. Happy as a lark, he went back to work in the store, leaving John feeling stuffed.

  Needing to move now to wear off what he’d eaten, John walked back through the milling crowd. He kept an eye out for strangers who might be media, warned people he saw that they might be around, even walked right up and listened in to ongoing conversations between unfamiliar faces and locals that might have been interviews. But he heard nothing untoward.

  So he walked across the lot to the police station to talk with the chief, who just happened to be sitting on the front porch bench, watching the goings-on with a leg up on the rail and a toothpick sticking out of his mouth. Willie Jake was nearly seventy. He had been police chief for twenty-five years, and second in command for another twenty before that. No one complained that he had slowed down. Few even saw it. John was one who did, but only because he had been gone from town long enough to see the difference—and maybe because the demands of the police chief’s job were so different in Boston.

  Willie Jake always had been tall. He couldn’t run far now, and he was jowly as he hadn’t been when John was truant, but he still walked straight and with authority, still wore his uniform crisp enough to make an impression. What he had lost over the years in physical speed he made up for in mental agility.

  “See anything interesting?” John asked.

  “Some,” the chief said in a low voice and shifted the toothpick to the other side. He didn’t take his eyes from the crowd. “There’s a few no-names mixing in out there. I’m making a picture of them in my mind. They show up elsewhere in town, I’ll remembuh.”

  John didn’t doubt it for a minute.

  Willie Jake adjusted his foot on the railing. “Think she was involved with the Cahdnal?”

  “No.”

  The chief spared him a quick glance. “Why not?”

  “I used to know the guy who broke the case. He makes things up. What about you?” John asked, because he had his own agenda. “Do you think she was involved with the Cardinal?”

  Willie Jake was chewing on his toothpick, looking out at the town again. The toothpick went to the side. “Hahd to say. Hahd to know the woman she’s become since she left.”

  “Do you remember the business with my brother?”

  Another glance his way, this one sharper. “I put the case togethah.”

  “Donny told me she wasn’t at fault. Deathbed confession.”

  “He wasn’t sayin’ that at the time it happened. We had a good case. She was braggin’ to a friend about goin’ with Donny Kipling.”

  “Bragging?”

  “Well, telling, and when they were drivin’ around in that cah, she looked to be havin’ a grand old time. She coulda got up ’n’ left if she didn’t like what he was doing, but she didn’t say boo.”

  “She hadn’t ever done anything wrong before that.”

  “Dud’n’ mean a thing,” said Willie Jake. “She was ripe to act up.”

  “Why?”

  “Maida.”

  “What about Maida?”

  “She was a stiff one. Kids rebel against stiff ones.”

  “But George was around, and he wasn’t stiff. Didn’t Lily have a good relationship with him?” George Blake was in John’s files as fourth-generation Lake Henry. From what John had gathered in interviews, he was a gentle man.

  “Did’n’ matter what kind of relationship Lily had with him. Maida was in charge of the kids.”

  “You don’t like Maida, do you?”

  Willie Jake shrugged. “I like her just fine now. Did’n’ like her much then. Not many in town did. She wasn’t bad right aftuh she married George. Then she got uppity. Don’t think she liked us much either.” He darted John a look. “Didn’t tell that to the reporter from Rhode Island who came by this morning, though. Didn’ tell him a thing. I don’t like outsiders snooping around my town. Told him that. Told him I’d be watchin’ him. Told him I’d take him in if he goes anywhere he’s not s’posed to go. This town’s got posted land. Signs say no huntin’, no fishin’, no trespassin’. I add no badgerin’. I won’t have flatlanduhs tryin’ to get good people to talk about their neighbuhs. We talk about each othuh, and that’s fine, but we don’t tell stranguhs what we learn. Don’t know what’s wrong with you guys. Think you can write whatever you want. You decide what’s news and what isn’t. Dud’n’ matter if it’s true.”

  “Hey,” John said with a hand to his chest, “I’m not the bad guy here. If I were you, I’d be trying to find out who leaked the business about the arrest.”

  Willie Jake scowled. He yanked the toothpick from his mouth. “Emma did it.” Emma was his wife. She often answered the office phone. “Said someone called from the State House in Concahd tryin’ to straighten out files. I called the State House. They didn’t call us. They wasn’t straightenin’ out any files, but they did get a call on Lily Blake. The clerk who took it was a young thing who bought the line about the calluh bein’ a shrink needin’ background infuhmation on his patient. Guess is good it was press doin’ this.”

  Guess is good it was Terry Sullivan, John thought.

  Willie Jake took his foot down and sat straighter, suddenly looking at John as he had in the old days, as if John were a worm covered with dirt. “Why do you do things like that?”

  John held up both hands. “Hey, I didn’t do it.”

  The chief pushed himself off the bench. “Well, it’s wrong. Somethin’s wrong in this country. People don’t know about respect. Take yuh small town like Lake Henry. Ain’t no privacy he-uh. We all know what we’re all doin’, but we don’t use it against each othuh. Out they-uh?” He shot a thumb toward the rest of the world. “No respect.” He aimed his finger at John. “I’m tellin’ you, leave it be. It dud’n’ mattuh if Lily was innocent or guilty back then. It dud’n’ mattuh if Maida was too tight. That’s Blake business, and no one else’s.”

  But it sure would make for interesting reading, John thought as he shook the chief’s hand and walked off.

  CHAPTER 9

  Lily slept until four in the afternoon. She awoke famished and made an omelet and a salad, which she ate on the porch looking out on the lake. She might not trust John Kipling, but she was surely grateful for his food. Fresh things were better than canned any day, and everything he had brought was Lake Henry fresh. Eggs from the Kreugers’ poultry farm; salad fixings from the Strothermans’ produce farm; milk from cows two miles up
the road, pasteurized, homogenized, bottled, and on sale at Charlie’s within hours—there was reason why everything tasted so good. Not that the air didn’t play a part. The scent of fall was a fine seasoning.

  She ate every bite, sating her hunger, but not her mind. She kept thinking about John having ammo and wondering what he meant by that. There was no sign of his boat on the lake, which brought her some relief. A second visit would be a dead giveaway that she was here.

  So, did Maida know she had come? Suspect it? At the very least, wonder?

  Lily debated calling, decided not to. Again debated calling, again decided not to. Phone in hand, she went down to the lake, tucked herself in a pine root cubby, sat very still amid the smell of rich earth, and debated some more. In the time she was there, only two boats moved on the lake, but they were far out and headed away. The only movement in the cove came from a pair of ducks swimming in and out along the shore, and the scurry of chipmunks through brush.

  The sun fell steadily toward the western hills, silhouetting the evergreens that undulated along their crests, spilling shadow down the hillside, and still she sat. The earth retained more heat than she did, keeping her warm when the air began to cool. In twilight she heard the hum of a distant boat, fragments of voices from down the shore, the call of a loon.

  She had no sooner located the bird in a purple reflection off Elbow Island when the call came again. It was a long, steady sound with a dip at the end that gave it a primitive air. She had fallen asleep many a night to that sound, both here and across the lake, because the loon’s cry carried far. As a child sleeping over with Celia, she had been fascinated by the idea that her mother could hear the very same cry she did.

  Lily wondered if Maida heard it now. She wondered if maybe Maida was sitting out on the front porch of the large stone farmhouse on the hill thinking of Lily sitting down here. From the house Maida wouldn’t be able to see if lights were on in the cottage. Elbow Island was in the way, and behind it, as Lily looked now, Big Island.