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  Lily remained silent, her head bowed.

  “This kills me,” Dan went on, “because we all love you here.” He sighed. “But I think you should take some time off.”

  “Are you firing me?” Two firings in one hour would be a record. Maybe the papers would buy that.

  “No. I’m just telling you to stay home for a couple of days until this thing dies down.”

  But she was discouraged. “Will it?”

  “Definitely. It’s like a car. No fuel, no go.”

  “There’s never been fuel, but the car went! If they don’t find it one place, they’ll find it another.” Exhausted, she ran a hand over her eyes. “Does this have to do with the felony thing?”

  “What felony thing?”

  “You haven’t read today’s paper?”

  “No.”

  She told him so that he would know—so that he would hear her side of the story first. “The Cardinal knows all this,” she said before he could ask. “Funny how conducive a clerical collar is to confession. He’s off the hook now, but they’re closing in on me.”

  “Is there anything else they can find?”

  “Yesterday I wouldn’t have said there was anything, period!” She sank into the chair. “That was my one and only brush with the law. There’s been nothing since—not a speeding ticket, not a parking ticket, not even a late credit card payment. What’s left for them to write?”

  CHAPTER 5

  They wrote about Lily’s suspension from the Winchester School—it was front-page news on Friday morning. Terry Sullivan interviewed Michael Eddy, whose statements had enough force and indignation to restore his luster in the eyes of parents and trustees. Paul Rizzo focused on members of the board, with a long string of quotes expressing dismay at Lily’s deceit, her immorality, and her lack of judgment. Justin Barr went wild about what he called the Lily Blake problem, inciting irate parents to call in discussing the teacher as a role model, the need for teachers of the utmost moral fiber, the responsibilities schools have to their students to protect them from those of poor character.

  The Post offered a token quote from one parent who praised the work Lily had done with his child, but that quote was short and lost amid the others, as were Lily’s denials of wrongdoing. The overall tone of the piece was one of self-righteousness that had more to do with the Post patting itself on the back than with any quest for the truth.

  Both papers reported that Lily was taking time off from the Essex Club, but neither elaborated on that angle or gave related quotes. Lily suspected that Dan had refused to talk and that the print media, at least, was backing off from anything to do with the Cardinal. There was no further mention of an alleged affair, no further mention of shared smiles or late nights at the Cardinal’s residence. Nor was there mention of Governor Dean.

  The focus was on Lily, and Lily alone. She had become the story.

  Another woman, one who loved the limelight, might have been pleased. But Lily had felt victimized before—as a child ridiculed for her stutter, as a teenager put on probation for a crime she didn’t commit, as an entertainer losing a shot at the top after rebuffing the advances of the music director. Injustice happened. She should have been hardened to it. But she wasn’t. She was so angry and upset that she couldn’t play the piano, couldn’t read, couldn’t even play a CD, because nothing she owned was turbulent enough.

  She was so angry that she put aside her distaste for lawyers and called the one Dan had recommended. His name was Maxwell Funder. Articulate and experienced, he was among the most visible attorneys in the state. She had seen him on the news many times and, cynically perhaps, wondered if his promise to be at her apartment within the hour had to do primarily with the publicity attached to the case. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. Given that she could only afford to pay him for a consultation, she was grateful when he agreed to come.

  In person, he wasn’t nearly as impressive as the television cameras made him out to be. He was older. He was also shorter and broader, and without makeup, more mottled.

  But he was pleasant and patient. Sitting on the sofa, he listened while she vented. He frowned in dismay, widened his eyes in disbelief, shook his head from time to time—and she didn’t care if he was pouring it on for her benefit. The sympathy felt good.

  “How can this happen?” she asked after working herself into a fury. “How can so many lies be printed? How can my whole life be put on display? How can sealed files be unsealed? I’ve lost two jobs, the press sits outside waiting to pounce, Justin Barr is tearing me to shreds, my family is being hassled. When I think of going out, I think of being stared at by people I don’t know who know personal things about me. I feel totally helpless. How do I make it stop?”

  The lawyer sat straighter. “For starters, we can go to court, file papers, and initiate a suit. Tell me. Who’s the worst?”

  “The Post,” she said without pause. Terry Sullivan had started it all. He had used her and lied.

  “The Post it is,” Funder said. “Our suit will be the vehicle to get your side of the story out. We’ll expose all the falsehoods. We’ll get affidavits from the Cardinal and the governor corroborating your side of the issue. I’ll call a press conference and lay it all out”—his passion rose—“calling this the worst kind of shoddy journalism, the most reckless example of bad press. I’ll demand an investigation of the Post for first printing this slander and demand an immediate retraction.”

  Lily latched on to the last. “A retraction. That’s what I want. Will I get it?”

  “Now?” The rhetoric cooled. “No. They’re too far into this. They’ll fight to defend the basic integrity of the paper. Maybe years down the road…”

  Years? “How many years?”

  He thought for a minute. “Realistically? From now to the time a jury hears the case? Three years. The thing is”—he raised a cautioning hand—“in order for you to be really vindicated, you need a big verdict. Token damages won’t do. So we’ll sue for, say, four million, but I have to warn you, the Post will fight hard. They’ll fight dirty, and you’d better know right now what that means. They have on retainer some of the toughest First Amendment lawyers in the country. They’ll put your life under a microscope, and they’ll do it under oath. They’ll take depositions of your family, your friends, schoolmates, teachers, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, neighbors—and that’s nothing compared to what their private investigators will do. They’ll sift through your life with a fine-tooth comb. They’ll get phone records, credit card records, school records, motor vehicle records, medical records. They’ll interview people you didn’t know you knew, looking for anything, even the tiniest little hint of something, that can help their client show that you’re a disreputable person. That you have a history of being a disreputable person. If you think your privacy has been violated now, it’s nothing compared to what they’ll do.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Lily said. It was either sarcasm or tears.

  “Don’t think I’m kidding,” he warned, harder now. “I know these people. They’re animals. If there’s anything out there, they’ll find it. They’ll try to prove that your reputation is so bad that even if they made a mistake and libeled you, it doesn’t matter, because no damage has been done. They’ll try to prove that your life has been filled with lies.”

  Lily was beginning to panic. “What about my rights? Why do they come last?”

  “They don’t come last. But the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech.”

  “What guarantees do I have? The media has no right to do this to me.”

  “That’s why we sue.”

  “All I want is a retraction. I don’t want money.”

  “Well, you ought to. This kind of case can cost upwards of a million dollars.”

  She nearly choked. “Cost me a million dollars?”

  “Between legal fees, court costs, jury consultants, experts, private investigators.”

  She felt weak in the knees. “I don’t have that kind of money.
”

  “Few people do.” He studied her, inhaled loudly, laced his fingers. “Look. I don’t normally take cases unless the client has the full ability to pay—I mean, I have to live, too—but what’s happening to you is a disgrace. So this is what I can do. I’ll handle the case for two fifty, plus an additional fifty for expenses, plus twenty-five percent of what you recover.”

  “Two fifty.”

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand.”

  She gulped in a breath that went down the wrong way. It was a long minute of pressing her chest and trying not to cough, before she was able to say, “I don’t have that kind of mm-money.”

  “Your family does.”

  She drew back.

  “I read there was a family business,” he said.

  “It’s a working business. There isn’t cash lying around.”

  “There’s land. That would be good collateral for a loan.”

  “I can’t ask that,” Lily said. Cash, a loan—it didn’t matter. She couldn’t ask her mother for money. Nor could she imagine Maida giving it. She was the greatest disappointment of Maida’s life—the daughter who went bad, the one who played with fire and got burned. It didn’t matter that Lily led a truly honest, upstanding life. Maida saw her through a different pair of eyes.

  The lawyer sat forward, hands still laced, a little too relaxed now, a little too slick. “I understand your hesitance—”

  “No, you don’t,” she interrupted angrily. “This is my life. I haven’t taken a cent from my family since I was eighteen, and I won’t do it now.”

  “I understand your hesitance,” he repeated in a tone—and with a look—that said she would be wise to let him finish, “but if family’s good for anything, it’s for coming to the rescue in time of trouble. I did read that you don’t get along with your family, but if they have money that can get you out of this mess, my advice is to take it. Good lawyers don’t come cheap. You won’t get a better deal than the one I’m offering.”

  But Lily couldn’t ask her mother for money. And even if she had the money herself, she couldn’t conceive of spending it all on this. She hadn’t done anything wrong!

  Quietly she stood. “I need to think. Thank you for coming. I appreciate your time.” She headed for the door.

  He followed, but his face was more mottled when she turned to him next. “I won’t offer this again,” he warned. “If things heat up and get worse, I’ll have to charge you more.”

  She nodded her understanding.

  With one foot in the hall, he turned back, pleasant again. “No need to make a decision now. My offer stands for another day or two. Let me warn you, though. You’ll get calls from other lawyers who’ll offer to take the case on contingency alone, and it’ll be mighty tempting for you to do that, but you won’t get the quality. Given the out-of-pocket costs that a case like this will demand if it’s done right, no good lawyer will work on contingency.”

  “Thank you,” she said again and, as soon as he withdrew his foot, closed the door.

  Lily went to the window to see if the lawyer would stop and talk to the press on his way out, but one of the horde spotted her first, and suddenly faces and cameras were all looking up. Jolted, she stepped quickly back and stood frozen in the middle of the floor, gazing blindly out across Commonwealth Avenue—until she realized, with horror, that a telephoto lens in a window of one of the buildings there could see her anywhere in her apartment.

  She quickly closed the blinds in the living room, ran, and did the same in the bedroom. That left her in a small dark apartment, with no job, no freedom, no prospects for a speedy return of either, much less her good name. She sat in the armchair, but still she couldn’t concentrate to read. She moved to the piano and let her fingers roam the keys, but they picked out depressing tunes. So she put Beethoven on the CD player—somber perhaps, but appropriate—and she walked from bedroom to living room to bedroom and back, not knowing what to do with herself. She finally ended up at the phone.

  Lifting the receiver, she started to press in her mother’s number, hung up, and tucked her arms to her chest so that she wouldn’t try again—and it wasn’t about money. She didn’t want money, didn’t want to sue, because the process Maxwell Funder described was heinous. Three years of media speculation, of stories twisting the facts of her life—three years of feeling used and exposed. She couldn’t survive that.

  No. She wouldn’t have called Maida for money. She would have liked to call for the comfort of it. Maida was her mother. Lily was feeling the need to bury her head somewhere warm and sympathetic until the storm passed. She was feeling the need for shelter, certainly for a compassionate ear.

  But Maida wouldn’t give either. So Lily called Sara Markowitz instead. Sara was a friend from Juilliard who taught at the New England Conservatory. They met for lunch every few weeks. Sara’s had been one of the messages left on the answering machine.

  She felt instant relief when Sara picked up the phone, all the more so that despite the bad press, Sara was avid in support. “I’ve been so worried. What is this mishegaas? False charges—a total twisting of the truth—it’s way out of control. They’re even calling me, would you believe, asking intimate questions, not taking no for an answer, pushing and pushing. What’s with Terry Sullivan? Where does reporter stop and gossipmonger begin? And Justin Barr? He’s worse! Neither one has a clue about what it means to be a mensch. Did you know either of them before this began?”

  “Justin Barr, absolutely not.”

  “Good. He’s a hypocritical idiot. He was too ugly to make it on TV with his fat face and beady eyes, so he turned to radio. He just loves to hear himself talk—the Champion of Home and Hearth—but what’s with Sullivan?”

  “He’d been after me to do an interview about my work. I kept refusing him, so maybe he’s annoyed.” It hit her then. “He didn’t want to know about my work. It must have been about the Cardinal all along.” Feeling doubly used, she dragged in a breath. “My life is falling apart, I don’t know why, and I’m stuck in this apartment with nowhere to go.”

  “Meet me at Biba—uh, no.”

  Lily knew why Sara caught herself. Biba was one of the restaurants the papers had mentioned as an example of Lily living high off the hog. She and Sara often had salads there, which made it a fun, low-cost treat. But not fun anymore. Not fun ever again.

  Wisely, Sara said, “Stephanie’s in thirty minutes?”

  Stephanie’s was a restaurant on Newbury Street. Lily didn’t know anyone there. It sounded like heaven. “Thirty minutes is great.”

  She put on jeans, a blouse, and a blazer. Tucking her hair under a baseball cap, she put on dark glasses, took the elevator to the garage, and hit daylight at a brisk walk, looking as nonchalant and anonymous as she could.

  The press spotted her instantly. Reporters swarmed from behind trash cans, telephone poles, and parked cars, shoving microphones in her face, yelling to get her attention.

  “Ms. Blake! Ms. Blake! Where are you going?”

  “What did Funder say?”

  “CNN here—can you confirm that Funder is representing you?”

  “Are you suing the Winchester School?”

  Staring straight ahead, she continued on up the alley, but reporters tripped over one another in an effort to get questions in, the pack growing with each step. She could feel and smell its heat and hustle, waves of hot breath, stale body scent. Even if she hadn’t been shorter and more slight than almost every reporter there, she would have been frightened by the sheer mass.

  “Are you looking for work?”

  “What about the felony conviction?”

  “Is the Essex Club still paying you?”

  When she turned onto Fairfield, she collided with reporters coming around the block on the run from the front of her building. She couldn’t continue forward without shoving bodies and equipment out of the way, but she wasn’t physically strong enough for that, and when she looked back, they were a solid block there, too. She ima
gined them closing in and crushing her.

  “Is it true you slept with Michael Crawford—”

  “—that you were a go-go dancer in Times Square—”

  “Justin Barr said—”

  “—apologize to the Cardinal?”

  The questions came fast, overlapping and rising in pitch until she was on the verge of panic. She saw it all then, saw herself fighting her way down Newbury Street and trying to have lunch with Sara with the press hovering and interrupting and disrupting the entire restaurant. And she couldn’t do it—not to Sara, not to those others, not to herself. The whole point had been to have time alone with a friend.

  Whirling around, she swung her arms out in anger until there was a semblance of a path, and barged back down the alley. For an instant, when she used her key to open the door beside the garage, she feared they would push their way in, but she was able to slip through and close the door behind her—close it tight and then stand on tiptoe and peer through a small, dirty window on the top of it in time to see the vultures, looking deflated, back off and turn away.

  Safe now, she shook with fury. Storming through the garage, she took the elevator to her floor, ran into her apartment, lifted the phone, and called Stephanie’s. It was all she could do to keep her voice calm when she said, “My name is Lily. I’m supposed to be meeting a woman named Sara, about five-six, curly brown hair, glll-lasses. Can you tell me if she’s there yet?” According to the hostess, Sara wasn’t. “Well, she’ll be getting there any minute. Will you have her call Lily?”

  Two minutes later, the phone rang. “God, Sara, I’m sorry,” she said without introduction. “I can’t get there, they won’t let me through. They crowded me all the way down the back alley, so I turned around and came back. It’d be an obscenity leading them to that restaurant, and we wouldn’t have any privacy at all. I’m so sorry to have dragged you there.”

  “Who’s Sara?” asked a nasal male voice.

  “Who’s this?” she asked, appalled.