Lake News Page 9

  “Tom Hardwick. I been reading about you in the paper, and, y’know, it seems to me that since you can’t see the Cardinal anymore, you may be, y’know, on the prowl, y’know? That was a neat picture in Cityside. Real sexy. I been with someone but we just broke up, so, y’know, I’m thinking I’m free and you’re free. Got your number from my sister. She’s your doctor’s receptionist. I’m only twenty-three, but I love older women—”

  Lily hung up. Nauseated, she stared at the phone, praying that he wouldn’t call back, thinking that he wouldn’t have the gall to call back. But he’d had the gall to call the first time, so she didn’t know what to expect now, and besides, her sense of expectation had been shattered in the last few days. Anything could happen. Absolutely anything. She was as poor a judge of people now as she had been at sixteen, out joyriding with Donny Kipling—she’d certainly shown that.

  The phone rang once, twice, three times. The machine came on. When her own greeting was done, she heard Sara’s higher-than-usual voice. “Lily? What’s happened?”

  Relieved, Lily picked up the phone and told her. As she talked, the reality of the situation sank in. “I’m a prisoner here,” she concluded, dazed. “A prisoner.”

  “Then I’ll come over,” Sara offered. “We’ll talk there.”

  But Lily had to think about being a prisoner. She had to think about what to do next and how, and she had to do it alone. So she thanked Sara, promised to call her soon, and hung up the phone.

  She spent the rest of the day wandering around the tiny apartment, letting strains of a strident Wagner drown out the ringing of the phone, feeling alternately caged, terrified, and numb. Also utterly powerless. And angry. Very, very angry. Angry at Terry Sullivan, Paul Rizzo, and Justin Barr for playing with her life. Angry at the Post, Cityside, and WROT-AM for allowing it. Angry, even, at the Cardinal for freeing himself from the mess but leaving her in it up to her ears.

  She couldn’t stay in Boston. That much was clear. Even if the story died the next day, she would be stared at for months. She couldn’t bear that—couldn’t bear knowing that millions of strangers knew private details of her life, couldn’t bear being fodder for talk shows, couldn’t bear the humiliation or the sense of injustice. And then there was the issue of a job. Who would hire a woman with the morals of a snake? No one offering the kind of work she wanted, that was for sure.

  Her college roommate lived in San Francisco. They talked several times a year, but Debbie had a husband and three kids. Lily was afraid to call her now, much less show up on her doorstep, lest the media lunge at new bait. Same with friends in New York and Albany. Lily was afraid of tainting their lives. If she couldn’t stay with a friend, she would need an apartment, but without income? What she had in the bank was finite. It wouldn’t last long if she couldn’t get work.

  She could cut her hair short, dye it blond, and go somewhere new. She could waitress. She had put herself through college waitressing. She could do it again. But without knowing a soul? Having to use a phony name and lie to every person she met? That was no life.

  What she wanted most was justice, but she didn’t see it coming in the next day or two. Second to that, what she wanted was to dig a hole and climb in. She was tired of reporters and cameramen. She was tired of being a spectacle. She wanted silence, and privacy. She wanted to become invisible.

  But human beings didn’t dig holes and climb in. They went to places where they could hide, places like Lake Henry.

  Not Lake Henry, she protested; but the idea stuck in her mind like a burr. She had a place to live there. She owned it free and clear. It had been a bequest from her grandmother, a small place on the lake that was separated from the world by a long dirt road and acres of trees.

  Not Lake Henry, she cried; but it was as close to a hole in the ground as she was apt to find. It was familiar. Her cottage was well stocked. She paid a local woman to clean it each month, and she stayed there whenever she was home.

  Maida wouldn’t be happy. She wouldn’t want Lily there, wouldn’t want the scandal so close to home, but what choice did Lily have? Of her options, hiding out at the lake made the most sense. She could think there. She could monitor the media frenzy, and decide whether to fight it and how. She could breathe fresh air there. She could spend time with Poppy.

  The phone rang. She turned and stared at it. Feeling a startling longing, she imagined it was Maida telling her yes, to go to the cottage. She imagined Maida bringing over her specialty, a steaming pot roast that was slow cooked and savory with bay leaves and sage, along with fresh mushrooms and carrots and a slew of the tiny red potatoes that Maida’s friend Mary Joan Sweet grew in her garden. She imagined Maida feeling so terrible when she learned the truth about the scandal that she would insist Lily stay at the big house. She imagined that they would talk, cry, become friends.

  Dreams. Lily sighed. Just dreams.

  So she didn’t answer the phone, and listening to the message, she was glad. This one, like others earlier, was from no one she wanted to know.

  She had given up wondering how her phone number had spread. “Unlisted” seemed to have gone the way of “civil rights.” She could call the phone company to protest, but to what end? She could curse Mitch for giving her number to Terry, and Terry for giving it to whoever else, but that was like trying to close the door when the horse was already out of the barn.

  Besides, she was leaving. In another day she wouldn’t hear this phone. She wouldn’t shower in her beautiful glassed-in shower, walk through the Public Garden to school, or sing her heart out to people who loved her voice. She wouldn’t do any of those things, because Terry Sullivan, Paul Rizzo, and Justin Barr had taken away her life.

  Pacing the floor as the day wore on and the minutes crept by more and more slowly, she felt a raw fury toward all three. There were moments of wavering, moments when she reversed herself and vowed, on principle alone, not to leave town, but that bravado inevitably passed, leaving the stark truth. She couldn’t work, because she had no job. She couldn’t see friends, get fresh air, or buy food, because she couldn’t leave her apartment—and even if the press weren’t waiting to tail her wherever she went, going out, for her, now, in this town, meant embarrassment and acute self-consciousness. It wasn’t fair. She wanted justice. But she couldn’t initiate a lawsuit because she didn’t have the money. Nor did she have the heart to launch a three-year war. Certainly not the kind Maxwell Funder described.

  The only thing she had the heart for just then was escape. She’d had it with feeling out of control. She needed to take back her life—some life, any life. For that, she needed sleep. She needed freedom. She needed counsel, and if the spirit of her grandmother was the only counsel around, that was fine. Celia St. Marie had been a saint. She would know what to do next. She would know how to search for justice.

  When darkness fell, Lily packed up the car, locked the doors, and left the garage. She fully expected a few diehards to be left outside, even one or two following in a car, but she figured she would lose them once she hit the Pike. Indeed, figures emerged from dark shadows, hoisting equipment, shouting questions, motioning her to roll down her window, as she started down the alley; and, yes, a pair of headlights fell in behind her. What she hadn’t expected, though, were others that came on the instant she turned left onto Gloucester. Rechecking her door lock, she made a fast right onto Newbury. To her horror, a large satellite van parked at the corner revved up and joined the chase.

  She sped up in an attempt to bury herself in traffic, but the street was too narrow. Her chasers easily kept pace. Hoping to shake them, she veered right at Hereford, then right again—through a yellow light—onto Commonwealth. She thought that her tail would be stuck at the red. But the big van sailed through it. By the time another red light stopped her, when she was waiting to turn left on Fairfield and head to the Pike that way, not only was the big van on her bumper, but a motorcyclist with a press pass around his neck started knocking on her window.

 
When the light turned green, she gunned the gas and, if she hadn’t immediately slammed the brakes back on, would have hit a reporter who was rounding the front of the car to get to the driver’s side.

  Deeply shaken, she revised her plan. Driving slowly and carefully, she went all the way around the block until she reached the opposite end of the alley from the one she had left minutes before. She inched her way down the narrow stretch and turned in at her building. When she lowered her window to key open the garage door, the motorcyclist came up close and pulled off his helmet. The security light triggered by her approach gleamed off the bald head of none other than Paul Rizzo.

  “I can guarantee you safe passage,” he said, “if you give me an exclusive on where you were going and why.”

  Lily was incensed. “No exclusive. I’m going into thhhh-is garage”—she fought the stutter for all she was worth—“and it is private property. If you come in while this door’s open, I’m callll-ling the police.” She turned the key and quickly rolled up her window. As soon as the garage door was high enough, she rolled forward, but she stopped the car the instant it cleared the door and turned to see whether anyone would come inside.

  She didn’t see anyone. The door closed. She drove on to her parking space.

  For a time, she just sat. She didn’t try to leave the car, didn’t even unlock the door. She waited for someone to approach her, someone who may have slipped inside without her seeing. When no one came, she turned and looked around. Granted, cars were perfect things to hide behind, and the garage was full of them, but she didn’t see a soul.

  She got out of the car, loaded her arms with as much as she could carry, and took the elevator to the fourth floor. Rather than going to her own apartment, though, she went to Elizabeth’s. When Elizabeth didn’t answer the door, she slid down and sat on the floor with her back to the wall. It was nine. She didn’t know when Elizabeth would show up, but she could wait. She had nothing better to do.

  Nine became ten, and she actually put her head on her duffel bag and dozed off. She had barely slept for three nights and was exhausted. But she came awake at the touch of a hand.

  “Why are you out here?” Elizabeth asked.

  Immediately cogent, Lily sat up. “I need your help.” She explained what had happened with the car. “I can’t stay here, Elizabeth, and the problem isn’t just a small dark apartment. It’s the whole thing. There’s no point in my being here. The media won’t let this die. The problem is how to get out without their following.”

  Elizabeth tipped up her chin. “I know how.”

  Lily held her gaze. “So do I. Will you do it?”

  Actually, they had two different plans. Lily’s plan was for Elizabeth to smuggle her out in her luxury SUV, then take a cab back into Boston and use Lily’s BMW for the day or two it took until Lily could arrange to return the Lexus. Elizabeth’s plan started out the same way but involved dropping Lily at the nondescript Ford wagon that Elizabeth’s brother Doug had left sitting in his Cambridge garage while he was teaching in Brussels for the year.

  Since Elizabeth’s plan allowed more flexibility as to when and how Lily returned the borrowed car, they chose that one, and it went off without a hitch. Lily and her belongings successfully hid under piles of Kagan for Governor banners in the back of the Lexus, and even Lily saw the poetry in that. She wondered if Elizabeth was carrying it too far, though, when she stopped to chide the two reporters who were doing the graveyard shift in the alley.

  Did they really think Lily would be leaving this late? Elizabeth asked with audible wryness. For what? A late-night rendezvous with the Cardinal? Puleeze. Wasn’t it time they gave the poor woman a break? And where was she going? For drinks at the Lennox Lounge. Did they want to come? They ought to. It would be her treat.

  Lily nearly died at the last, but Elizabeth knew what she was doing. The reporters wouldn’t take her up on the invitation. They thought it was a setup to lure them away so that their quarry could escape.

  “You can’t fool us,” one said, and that was that.

  Elizabeth drove off down the alley and around the block, heading toward Cambridge free and clear. When they reached Doug’s house, she pulled right up to the garage and killed the lights.

  “It’s battered but trusty,” she said as they stowed Lily’s things in the wagon. “Here’s the trick. Step on the gas twice—pause—then once more, then turn the key. Works every time.”

  Lily couldn’t afford to be fussy. Sliding behind the wheel, she took a minute to see where everything was, then rolled down the window, pumped the gas twice, paused, then once more, and turned the key. Her heart tripped when the engine sputtered, but it started up in the next breath and purred a little noisily, but purred nonetheless.

  “You’re the best,” she told Elizabeth by way of thanks.

  Elizabeth was leaning down at the window. “Nah. If I was, I’d have insisted they keep you on for the Kagan event. Or I’d have let you take my Lexus.” She patted the old wagon. “This is no skin off my back. Want me to get your mail or anything?”

  “Actually, I would.” Lily took her mailbox key from her key ring and handed it over.

  “Where should I send it?”

  “Just hold it.”

  “Where’ll you be?”

  She wasn’t sure she should say. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Elizabeth—yes, actually it was, which was another thing she despised Terry Sullivan for. He had taught her that unless she knew someone very, very well, she had to be on her guard.

  So she simply smiled. “I’ll let you know.”

  She rolled up the window and waved as Elizabeth stepped away. Backing out of the driveway, she shifted into drive, put on the headlights, and set off.

  The trip took two hours. Lily spent the first hour watching her rearview mirror to see if she was being followed. Supercautious, she even left the highway once, reversed direction, went back an exit, reversed direction again, and continued on north. But no car followed.

  She had escaped. She had one-upped the press in a small victory, made large by the context in which it occurred. The pleasure of it carried her into the second hour, across the Massachusetts border into New Hampshire, and steadily north, but thirty minutes shy of Lake Henry, ebullience gave way to qualms. She wondered if she was trading one set of problems for another, jumping from the frying pan into the fire—and that totally apart from the possibility that the press might yet find her here. If that happened, she had no idea what she would do, what the townsfolk would do, what her mother would do.

  But she was committed. She checked her rearview mirror when she left the highway, and again when she drove through the center of Lake Henry, but everything was dark, closed up tight for the night, and no car followed, not then or when she turned off Main Street onto the road that circled the lake. Bumping around familiar curves, with an evergreen scent seeping into the car, she felt a mellowness that the lake always brought. Oh yes, there were qualms, but they had to do with people. Not with the lake. Never with the lake.

  She turned off the loop road onto a narrower one that led to the shore at Thissen Cove. Several hundred feet from the water, she turned again, this time onto a rutted dirt path. Following it to its end, she killed the engine, then the lights.

  At first glance, the lake was pitch black. Gradually her eyes adjusted to the absence of headlights, and she began to make out things. The cottage was a small structure of wood and stone on her left. On her right, tall trees were dark silhouettes against a sky that was only a tad less dark.

  Slipping silently from the car, she stood and inhaled. The woods smelled of pine, of dried leaves, of moss-covered rocks and logs burning in a neighbor’s woodstove. They were smells common to Lake Henry in fall, but in Lily they conjured up childhood images, good images involving her grandmother. She crossed the small clearing between cottage and lake, walking over pine needles that had been years gathering and gnarled tree roots that had been decades growing. Down a short stairway of rai
lroad ties and she reached the water’s edge.

  The lake was still. She listened to the soft slap of water against shore, the faint crinkle of fall foliage in the night breeze, the distant sound of a barn owl. She made out layers of clouds in the sky, but as she watched they broke open to patches of stars and, minutes later, a crescent moon—and then—and then came the deep, hauntingly melodic tremolo of a loon.

  She was being welcomed home. She felt it as clearly as she felt her grandmother’s presence, and suddenly the contrast between the hell she had left and the beauty of this cottage, this lake, this town was so stark and heartfelt that she knew she was right to come.

  Feeling stronger than she had at any time since before reading the Boston Post on Tuesday, she returned to the car, pulled the key to the cottage from her purse, climbed the steps to the old wood porch, and let herself in the door.

  John Kipling sat utterly still in his canoe. The same something that had kept him from sleep had drawn him here in the wee hours, to the shadow of Elbow Island, opposite Thissen Cove. Call it instinct, a hunch, or a sheer lucky guess. Lucky? Hell, no. It was common sense. If her life in the city had become the hell he imagined, where else could she go?

  Still, he didn’t know for sure until the light went on in the house, but there it was. He whispered a satisfied “Yesssss.”

  When a soft yodel came in response, he smiled. Only male loons yodeled. This one wasn’t from the pair he called his own, but, man to man, it understood the satisfaction he felt. He had read the Post story and knew firsthand how deceitful Terry Sullivan could be. He had talked with Poppy, who was dismayed at what her sister was enduring, and had talked with townsfolk, who had differing opinions on the matter. He wondered what the truth was. It was the journalist in his blood. Now that Lily Blake was back in town, right here on his turf, he could pursue it.

  Smiling in anticipation, he drew his paddle through the water and headed home.

  CHAPTER 6