Lake News

by Barbara Delinsky

  “The Post lies,” Lily muttered, keeping her arms around her briefcase, her head bowed, her eyes on the cobblestone underfoot.

  A male voice said, “Paul Rizzo, Cityside. You were seen leaving the Cardinal’s residence late Sunday night. Why were you there?”

  He was a balding man whose baby-smooth skin suggested that the hair loss was premature. His eyes were unblinking. His chin jutted forward. He reminded Lily of the hook stuck in the mouth of the very first trout she had ever caught for herself at the lake. Then and now, she was repulsed.

  I was hired to play the piano, she wanted to tell him, but her tongue was tight, and she knew she would never get the words out. So she lowered her head and kept her feet moving fast.

  “When did you break up with Governor Dean?”

  “Was the Cardinal aware of your relationship with the governor?”

  “How do you explain the late-night phone calls?”

  “Is it true that you were in the Cardinal’s arms at the Essex Club last night?”

  When Lily looked up to say an angry “No,” a cameraman snapped her picture. Ducking her head again, she hurried on, but the questions got worse.

  “Where did you do it?”

  “What kind of sex?”

  “Has the Church tried to buy your silence?”

  “What does your family think of this?”

  Lily shuddered to think what her family thought. She shuddered to think that they even knew, period.

  But they did. She learned it soon after she reached home and listened to the messages on her machine. There, sandwiched between calls from what, to her horror, seemed to be every major newspaper and television station in the country, was the voice of her sister Poppy.

  “What’s going on, Lily? The calls are coming in hot and heavy, even more after the noon news. I’ve been deflecting as many as I can, but Mom is furious! Phone me, will you?”

  The noon news? Lily’s stomach turned over. But, of course, television would pick up the story. Isn’t that what the man in the outer lobby this morning had been about?

  So maybe it had been naïve of her to think that the story would be contained—but did the media have to call her mother? Lily’s relationship with Maida Blake was precarious enough. This wouldn’t help.

  Needing to hear a friendly voice, she sank into the chair by the phone and punched in Poppy’s number. Poppy was barely two years her junior, and the sweetest, most upbeat person Lily knew, despite circumstances that might have caused her to be anything but. Poppy Blake was a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair since a snowmobile accident nearly a dozen years before. If anyone had a right to self-pity, she did, but she refused to waste energy on it. As soon after the accident as she was able, she had moved into her own place on the lake and started a telephone answering service for Lake Henry and neighboring towns. Now she had state-of-the-art equipment, with sophisticated computer hookups and an increasingly large bank of phone buttons. The business had grown so fast that she even had a roster of part-timers who covered for her when she went out, which, bless her, she often did.

  She had caller ID, which enabled her to say the instant she picked up the call, “Lily! Thank goodness! What’s happening?”

  “Nightmare,” Lily said. “Total nightmare. When did you hear?”

  “Early today. People in town either read it in the Post or on the Net. Around midmorning, calls started coming in from reporters—Boston, New York, Washington, Atlanta—and then there’s the tube. They’re showing pictures—Lily and the Cardinal, Lily and the governor.”

  “Mom saw?” Lily asked in alarm.

  “Mom saw. Kip called yesterday to warn me about the Post guy, but he didn’t say why, so how was I supposed to know about the others? I wish you’d told us.”

  “How could I? I didn’t know. I didn’t see the paper until this morning, and was as shocked as anyone. It’s a bogus story, Poppy.”

  “I know that, but Mom doesn’t,” Poppy said bluntly. “She’s convinced that everything she said all along is true and that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.”

  “It wasn’t—and I don’t know why it’s happening now.” She fought back tears of frustration. “I thought this reporter was a friend. He came on to me, you know, asked if I’d go out with him. Sss-stupid me. Stupid me,” she cried in self-reproach, “but he was a pro, got me talking, then pieced little phrases together to create something sordid. What kind of person does that? Okay. He doesn’t know me. To him, I’m a nothing. But the Cardinal isn’t. How can he do this to the Cardinal? Or is it just that there isn’t much else going on in the world and the papers are starved for sleaze? What did Mom say? What were the words?”

  “They don’t matter,” Poppy said. “She’s just in a stir. What should I tell her?”

  Lily pressed shaky fingertips to her forehead. She had worked so hard to win her mother’s confidence. The Winchester School, where she taught, had a fine reputation. The Essex Club was as upscale as a dining establishment could be. And then there was Father Fran—ah, the irony of that! Such a strong, dignified, upstanding man. She had always thought that her friendship with him would win points with Maida.

  “Tell her not to look at the paper,” she told Poppy. “There’s no basis to any of this. It’ll play itself out in a day or two.” It had to. The alternative was unthinkable.

  “Have you issued a denial?”

  “I keep saying it isn’t true.”

  “You need a lawyer.”

  “I hate lawyers.”

  Poppy grew gentler. “I know, honey, but this is libel. What does the Cardinal say?”

  “I haven’t talked with him.” The hurt returned. “I called there and was told not to call again.”

  “Who told you that? They aren’t going to blame this whole thing on you, are they? Damn it, Lily, it takes two to tango. He’s the one who’s always touching people.”

  “But it’s innocent.”

  “Not in the eyes of the press. You have a job—two jobs—to protect, and a reputation. They’ve all but labeled you a whore. If that isn’t a violation of your rights, I don’t know what is!”

  “But if I hire a lawyer, that says I need a lawyer, which I don’t, since I haven’t done anything wrong. I give the story one day—stretching it, maybe two.” Lily paused, alert. “What was that?”

  “What?”

  “That click.”

  “What click?”

  She listened again, heard nothing, sighed. “I must be paranoid.”

  “Maybe you should call Governor Dean.”

  “And have an aide tell me not to call there, either? I don’t think so. Why are reporters calling Lake Henry? What are they looking for?”

  “Anything they can take and twist to increase their sales. What do you want me to tell them?”

  “That the story isn’t true. That Sullivan is lying. That I’m suing.” She paused and asked quietly, “What about Rose?”

  Rose was the last of the “Blake blooms,” as Lake Henry called the three Blake girls. She was a year younger than Poppy, which made her thirty-one. More relevant, she had been barely pubescent when Lily’s problems had peaked, too young to have a mind of her own, too young to question what her mother said and thought. Poppy had been far stronger even back then. She had been able to straddle the fence between Maida and Lily, but Rose had been her mother’s mouthpiece from the start, and life’s circumstances had done nothing to discourage it.

  Rose was married, with three children. She and her husband, a childhood sweetheart whose family owned the local mill, lived on the piece of land that had been her wedding gift from the senior Blakes. Always close, Rose and Maida had grown even closer in the three years since Maida’s husband, the girls’ father, had died.

  Experience told Lily not to expect support from Rose. Still, hope lived eternal.

  Apparently it lived in Poppy, too, because—as though she had tried and failed—she said an uncharacteristically cross “Rose i
s an old poop. She doesn’t have an independent thought in her head. Don’t worry yourself about Rose, and as for the rest of town, I’ll tell them what to say if anyone calls. They don’t take kindly to having one of their own maligned.”

  “It’s been years since I’ve been one of their own,” Lily reminded her. “They forced me out when I was barely eighteen.”

  “No. You chose to leave.”

  “Only because they made life unbearable for me.”

  “Mom did that, Lily.”

  Lily sighed. She wasn’t up for arguing, not now. “I have to go to work.”

  “Will you keep me in the loop?” Poppy asked. “I know that Blakes have burned you, Lily, but I’m on your side.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Lily refused to turn on the television. She didn’t want to see whether she was in the news, preferring to think that the story was already old. But when she reached the lobby dressed for work, the crowd of journalists outside was larger than ever. Dismayed, she took the elevator to the garage, but reporters were there, too, radioing her arrival to those in front.

  Resigned, since there was no other exit and she had to get to work, she lowered her eyes and walked quickly. She ignored the questions shot at her and kept her head down, letting her hair fall forward to shield her face from cameras. Still, the questions increased in volume and frequency, along with the click-and-advance of film as the media phalanx grew. The nearer she got to the club, the more they crowded in. When she was jostled so closely that it became hard to walk, she swung around with her elbows out.

  “Leave me alone,” she cried through the whirr of snapping cameras. She spun forward and continued on, but she might as well have saved her breath. The crowd came with her in a wave, badgering her with the same questions, goading her into another outburst. She tried to blot them out by thinking of other things, but almost everything in her life just then led back to this moment, this trauma. She was close to tears when she finally reached the club.

  Mercifully, Dan was at the door, letting her in, shutting the press out. She went straight to his office, sank into a chair, and put her face in her hands. When she heard him enter, she dropped her hands to her lap.

  “Rough day?” he asked kindly.

  Not trusting her voice, she nodded. She studied his face.

  He smiled sadly. “No need to wonder. I know you, and I know the Cardinal. There’s nothing between the two of you but the same kind of friendship he has with people all over the city, all over the country, all over the world.”

  “Then why is this happening here, now?”

  “Because he was just named Cardinal. That makes for bigger headlines and bigger sales of papers.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “Lately it’s the way things work.”

  She took a breath, still upset from having run the gauntlet of reporters and cameras. “What happens now? They got their splashy headlines. There’s no more story, so it dies. Right?”

  “I hope so,” he said, but without the conviction she wanted. He seemed tired, as though he’d had a rough day, too. He also looked pale, and while pallor on Lily was only a step away from her normal color, it was a far cry from Dan’s.

  She had the awful thought that he wasn’t saying everything he knew.

  “How does tonight look here?” she asked with caution, wondering if business was hurt.

  “Booked solid.”

  She brightened. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  The answer was relative. Yes, the dining room was filled with paying guests, but most of them were new faces, guests of members, and they spent an inordinate amount of time watching the pianist.

  Lily tried to tune them out. She often did that when she performed—used the music as an escape—and for a while she succeeded, losing herself in the fantasy of the song—until the flash of a camera broke her concentration. Dan spoke with the offending party and Lily resumed playing, but she didn’t sing. No matter that she never stuttered when she sang; she was too unsettled to risk even the most remote chance of it.

  Two other flashes went off during the course of the evening, and by the end of the last set, she couldn’t try to pretend things were normal. She returned to Dan’s office feeling shaken and scared.

  “Will this be better tomorrow?” She was desperate for things to be back to normal. She liked her life, liked it just the way it had been.

  “I sure hope so,” Dan answered, but in the next breath he introduced her to a large uniformed man. “This is Jimmy Finn. BPD, private duty. He’ll see you get home okay.”

  Her heart sank. “They’re still out there?”

  “Still out there,” said the cop, without an r in the “there.”

  Jimmy Finn was a kind man, a devout Catholic who was deeply offended by the media spreading lies about his Cardinal. So he was predisposed to keep the reporters at bay, and burly enough to do it with ease. If he was rough shouldering his way through the crowd, he was nothing but gentle with Lily. He walked her to her building and saw her right to the door of her apartment, but the minute he left, she burst into tears.

  There were a slew of new telephone messages, a mixed bag. A few were from friends and were uniformly supportive, but they were overshadowed by those from the media, quickly erased, not so quickly forgotten. She slept only in fits and starts through the night and woke up to a dreary day, but she refused to let her mood match it, refused to even look out the window to see whether television vans were still there. She showered, dressed in dark slacks and a sedate blouse so that she wouldn’t feel so exposed. Then she forced down a banana for breakfast, all the while telling herself that things had to get better. Either there would be a retraction in today’s paper or there would be nothing at all. In any case, the story was on its way to dead.

  When someone knocked on her door shortly after eight, she tensed. She waited through a second knock, then crept softly to the peephole. Relieved, she opened the door.

  “I knew you hadn’t left,” Elizabeth Davis said straight out. She wore a T-shirt over biking shorts and had her blond hair bunched in a clip. “I wasn’t sure you’d open up, though. How’re you doing?”

  “Horrible,” Lily said with a glance at the newpapers folded under Elizabeth’s arm. “Are those today’s?”

  “Two Boston, one New York. Want to see?”

  “You tell me.” She wrapped her arms around her middle. “I’m hoping for a retraction.”

  “You didn’t get one,” Elizabeth warned. Unfolding the papers, she tossed them on the table one by one. “The Post reports that you drive a BMW and bought a slew of expensive furniture when you moved here. Cityside reports that you’re big into Victoria’s Secret shopping. New York reports that you favor upscale restaurants like Biba and Mistral, and that you spent a week last winter at a posh resort in Aruba that you couldn’t possibly have afforded on your own.”

  Lily was too stunned to be angry. “How do they know all that?”

  “Any computer buff can get the information in five minutes flat.”

  “But that’s personal stuff!”

  “Five minutes flat.”

  “But that’s me. My life. My private information. Where I shop is no one’s business!” She had a chilling thought. “What else can they get?”

  “Most anything.”

  Lily swallowed. She had to believe that some things were safe. Her mind began to spin. “I bought the BMW used, I paid off the furniture over two years’ time, I mail-order more from L. L. Bean and J. Crew than Victoria’s Secret, and I booked the place in Aruba on two days’ notice through a travel clearinghouse. I’m being misrepresented. This isn’t fair.”

  But Elizabeth wasn’t done. Holding up a hand, she crossed to the small radio on the counter by the stove. Within seconds, Justin Barr’s arrogant tenor filled the room.

  “… an insult to Catholics everywhere! Why, this woman is an insult to people of every faith. Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews—no matter the affiliation, we should all be
thinking about the values we hold most dear, the people who embody them, and the ones who try to take them down. Is there any act of disrespect more blatantly offensive than smearing the good name of a beloved leader?”

  “Me, smearing a nnn-name?” Lily cried.

  “No, my friends,” Justin Barr ranted, “the question is how a woman like Lily Blake was able to get close enough to a man of the stature of Cardinal Rossetti to spread the stain, even indirectly, and now, Lord help us, she teaches our children. Where does it end? I have Mary from Bridgeport, Connecticut, on the line. Go ahead, Mary, you’re on the air.”

  Elizabeth turned off the radio.

  Lily was stricken. “I don’t believe this.”

  “Justin Barr is right-wing.”

  “Justin Barr is syndicated. That show goes up and down the East Coast.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why?” Lily cried, referring not only to Justin Barr but to Terry Sullivan, Paul Rizzo, and all the rest who were keeping the story alive. “Why this? Why me?”

  “Because they smell weakness,” Elizabeth said. “Wolves go after a wounded deer; it’s the nature of the beast. You have to take a stand, Lily. A lawyer would be a great help.”

  “I don’t want a lawyer.”

  “Then let me give it a try. I’ll get dressed, the two of us will go down there, and I’ll be your spokesperson. What do you say to that?”

  Lily didn’t say a word. She stood silently while Elizabeth read a statement unequivocally denying her romantic involvement with either Governor Dean of New York or Cardinal Rossetti of Boston.

  The statement was simple. Elizabeth had advised her to tackle only the major allegations and leave minor misrepresentations alone for now, and much as Lily wanted to yell and scream in her own defense about the rest, she restrained herself. Public relations was Elizabeth’s field. She was an experienced image shaper. Indeed, she coaxed and cajoled the media crowd into moving back and showing a little respect, and if she looked a bit too comfortable in her roll as spokesperson, a bit too pleased while working the crowd, Lily forgave her. Her own friends, mostly book people or music people, weren’t equipped to help. Thanks to Elizabeth’s prevailing upon the press, Lily was able to walk to school unmolested, thinking that maybe, just maybe, the scandal had begun its retreat.