Lake News

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Any special reason?”

  There certainly was, but she couldn’t imagine he knew. “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s one of the trick questions we journalists use that seems simple on the surface, but can be revealing. If you wear your hair short for the ease of it, you’re probably a woman who doesn’t like to fuss, kind of loose and free, if you know what I mean. If you wear it short for style, you’re hip. If you wear it short to show off a great-shaped head, you’re vain. If you wear it short because you’re just… right out there, if you get my drift, you’re self-confident. Which is it?”

  Poppy thought for a minute. “Mostly the first.”

  “Loose and free? I wouldn’t have guessed it. You’re too tight-lipped. But maybe that’s something you caught, living up there in that town. I keep thinking about the story you told me last time. You know, about James Everell Henry? About feisty independence? I have a question about that.”

  He remembered the logging baron’s whole name. Poppy was impressed. “Yes?”

  “You said that the more outsiders push, the more the town will clam up. Does that mean the town believes Lily’s story? Or will it clam up on principle alone?”

  Poppy looked at her sister. “It means that the town believes Lily’s story.” She didn’t know it for fact, but she refused to say anything else. And it wasn’t for Lily’s sake. It was for the sake of whatever Griffin Hughes might tell a friend. “I have another story. Want to hear?”

  “You bet.”

  “Once upon a time,” Poppy began, “back when Lake Henry was Neweston—I told you we were called that, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was called Neweston after the home port of Weston from which the original British settlers came.”

  “Ahh.”

  “So, back when Lake Henry was Neweston, there was a colony of polygamists who were looking for a place to settle.”

  “Polygamists?”

  “Polygamists. They liked the looks of our lake, so they bought a few houses and started moving in. Well, it was a little while before the towns-folk realized what was going on inside those walls, but let—me—tell—you, when they finally caught on, they didn’t like it one bit. I mean, it was unanimous—rich, poor, year-round, summer, Baptist, Episcopal, Congregational—they were united as they’d never been before. They formed an association and pooled their money and tried to buy those houses back, but the colonists weren’t selling. So they stared.”

  “Stared?”

  “Stared at those settlers at the post office, the school, the general store. They were relentless. They even lined up their boats on the water and stared from there. They made the environment hostile for the settlers without saying a word.”

  “Did the settlers finally sell?”

  “You bet.”

  “And the message here for me is…”

  Poppy caught Lily’s eye. “High standards. Lake Henryites come from the kind of stock that puts certain values on a pedestal. If the townsfolk thought for one minute that Lily had truly done what your colleagues claim, my entire family would be ostracized, but that hasn’t happened.”

  “This isn’t hard on your mom?”

  Distrust reared its head again. It was an interview type of question. She was on guard. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because I read that she doesn’t get along with Lily, so it follows that she might be suffering.”

  “I’d think a mother would suffer, regardless, in a situation like this.”

  He didn’t have an immediate comeback. It was a full minute before he said a quiet “Touché.”

  He was thinking something. Poppy waited.

  Still quiet, he said, “I have one sister. Four brothers, but only one sister. So you’d think she and my mother would have been close, being the only two girls in the house, but they weren’t. They fought constantly. Cindy was headstrong and wanted to do things her own way, and after a while my mom let her. She had to. A child is only a minor for so long. Cindy moved out the day she turned eighteen and then made every mistake in the book—hooked up with lousy guys, got pregnant, had an abortion, started college, flunked out, reenrolled. My mom swore that she was on her own, but she suffered each time something went wrong. One of us would remind her of their differences, and she would nod and say we were right, but you could see that pain in her eyes.”

  “Do they get along now?”

  “My mom’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too. Life isn’t the same without her. The rest of us are strewn all over the country, but she used to make holidays worth coming home for.”

  “Is your father still alive?”

  “Uh-huh. Alive and well and living it up. He married my mom when he was twenty, so he’s sowing the wild oats now that he didn’t sow then. He’s fallen in love five times in as many years. Always a different woman. Kind of makes holidays not worth coming home for.”

  “But if he’s happy…”

  “None of them’s my mom.”

  Poppy couldn’t say anything to that, but there was no need. He hurried on, actually sounding embarrassed. “Why am I telling you this? It has nothing to do with anything.”

  “It has to do with you.”

  “Which has nothing to do with you or with your sister. You won’t tell me anything?”

  “About Lily? No.”

  “About you, then?”

  “I’ve already told you stuff.”

  “One thing more. Tell me one thing more. Anything you want.”

  She thought of telling him that she had half a degree in forestry, but she feared he would ask why she worked inside. She could tell him that she liked the outdoors, but then he might ask about sports. She considered saying that Armand Bayne, who bankrolled Lake News and knew everyone of any stature in publishing, would have Griffin Hughes black-balled if he tricked Poppy into saying something revealing. Except that name-dropping worked two ways. Griffin might have the gall to call Armand, who wouldn’t know not to mention, even in passing, that Poppy Blake couldn’t walk.

  So she told him, “My house is on the lake. I’m looking out at it now. It’s a beautiful night here—not too cold. The weekend’s supposed to be sunny and warm.”

  “I was thinking of driving up. I’m in New Jersey. I could do it easily.”

  Her heartbeat sped. “Not a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “The crowds. The traffic. Foliage is near peak. There’ll be buses all over the place. And RVs, and motorcycles. One accident and the highways are backed up for miles. It’s like a zoo here this time of year. Besides, I’m not going to be here, and no one else will talk with you, so there’s no point in your coming.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Away,” Poppy said. It was the smallest lie she could think of.

  Griffin said, “That’s too bad. It might have been nice.”

  Yes, Poppy thought moments later when he was gone, it might have been nice. But might-have-beens did her no good, so she let it go.

  Only, the fantasy lingered.

  Lily was free of fantasies that night, sitting again in the pine root cubby at the edge of the lake. Being with Poppy was fun but sobering. Listening to her talk on the phone—listening to her flirt—she had seen fleeting glimpses of a sorrow that Poppy kept out of her voice. Lily couldn’t begin to fathom that sorrow. It cast her own life in a different light.

  Or maybe it was working at the cider house. Or planning a birthday party with Hannah. Or hiring Cassie. Or dealing with John.

  Maybe it was simply the passage of time. The shock was over. The upheaval in her life wasn’t as new or abrupt. Oh, she was still angry. But she didn’t feel as lost as she had.

  Poppy was right. It was a beautiful night. A robust moon hung over the center of town, making an elegant white wand of the church steeple before shimmering gently out over the lake and its islands. The occasional window held a light along the water’s edge, but that was the on
ly sign of humanity.

  Softly, the lake brushed the shore. The earth under her fingers was rich. The air smelled of wood smoke, and was comfortably cool. Celia’s baseball jacket kept her as warm as she needed to be.

  Lily had loved Manhattan at night, especially at year’s end, when the city glittered under holiday lights. She had loved Boston nights more in summer, when the colors had to do with the crowds on Newbury Street, and the smells were old and European. Lake Henry nights were… they were primal.

  She waited and listened intently but didn’t hear a loon this night. So she began humming her own song, a chant, actually, Celtic in origin. Melodically simple, it captured the haunting quality of the lake at night, and it took on a life of its own, evolving into soft words whose meaning she didn’t know. She hugged her knees and rocked gently, feeling a deep reverence as she sang. Her thoughts flashed on childhood Sundays when she had sung in church. The feeling was much the same.

  She was connected to this place. She didn’t know whether it had to do with growing up here, having a mother and two sisters here, or having a father and countless other relatives buried out there under the moon, in the graveyard beside the church. But she felt peaceful here. Oddly content.

  Then again, maybe the peace and contentment had to do with nothing more than the song. Nine days was a long time to go without singing, but it hadn’t occurred to her to sing before. Her mind had been too filled with dissonant things to even think about it.

  Now that the thought had taken root again, it hung on.

  John spent a good part of Saturday at the office. Every so often he took breaks by walking up to the post office, over to Charlie’s, or across to the crafts fair set up at the town center. There were booths of baskets, balsam wreaths, hand-dipped candles, locally woven scarves, and booths of wood carvings, small paintings, rock creatures—much to see, but John was more interested in the people around him. He knew most. Others were foliage freaks, buying mementos of their trip.

  Then there were the questionables. He recognized a newspaper reporter from Concord and thought he recognized one from Springfield. He was willing to bet that another pair of strangers were in television. They were a little too coordinated in their L. L. Bean outfits to be real, plus they were being given cold shoulders by the locals.

  Satisfied that Lily was being protected, he returned to the office with the small bits of news he collected and added them to the file for the next week’s paper. He worked for a while on the cover story, which was the accidental shooting of a three-year-old child in Ashcroft the day before and, legislatively, the use and abuse of guns. Mostly, though, he researched Terry Sullivan. He wanted to find out why the guy moved so much.

  With the windows wide open, the office smelled of the candied apples that the Garden Club was making in a huge pot hung over a wood fire on the town beach. The weather was perfect for it—cold enough to set the candy coating, warm enough for people to linger for second helpings. He might have gone down there himself if he hadn’t been intrigued by the information coming up on his screen.

  He moved from one link to the next and made phone calls in between. Quitting at seven, he drove home with a mind to writing some of his thoughts out by hand. As the sun grew low and amber over the woods, though, he was drawn to the lake. Pulling an old sweater on over his T-shirt and shorts, he unbeached his canoe. He slipped inside, picked up the paddle, and set off.

  He had barely reached the island where his loons swam when they emerged from the shadows. The two juveniles were there, but only one parent. He guessed that the other was out visiting and would be back, standard behavior for adult loons at September’s end. No matter that the weather was milder tonight than it had been earlier in the week; fall was deepening. The adult that remained was duller in color than it or its mate had been even two days before.

  The more vibrant the leaves, the less vibrant the loons. It was one of nature’s sad quirks. Another—not so much quirk as bare fact—was that soon the leaves would wither, drop, and die, and the loons would be gone.

  Totally aside from the onset of cold, John wasn’t looking forward to winter. He loved skiing, snowshoeing, ice fishing. He loved the warmth of Charlie’s café, with snow swirling through the birches outside. He loved hot chocolate piled high with whipped cream. Still, winter was a lonely time of year.

  Moving his paddle through glassy water, he backed away, turned the canoe, and set off for Thissen Cove. By the time he reached it, the sun had dropped behind the west hills, and the shadows along the shore were more purple than blue. Thirty feet out from shore he set his paddle across the gunwales and let the canoe drift. Then he waited for a sign.

  He got three.

  First came a light in Celia’s window.

  Second came the call of a loon from the far end of the lake.

  Third came a song. At first he thought it was another loon answering the first, but this sound was sweeter and more lasting. It was a minute before he realized what it was.

  Lily had never been much of a cook. As a child she had stayed out of the kitchen to avoid Maida. As a student she hadn’t had the time. As an employed adult she hadn’t cared enough about eating to prepare much more than perfunctory meals. Besides, there was takeout around every corner in the city.

  Not so in Lake Henry, but that wasn’t a problem. For the first time in her life, Lily had the kitchen, the time, and the desire to cook. It wasn’t exactly out of boredom, either. It was more like curiosity.

  Celia had left a notebook filled with recipes. It was covered with quilting fabric, actually more a binder for small handwritten pieces of paper than a notebook, but it served the purpose. Even apart from the fact that Lily remembered Celia holding it in her wrinkled hands, when she held it in her own now, it felt rich.

  The lemony chicken that she and Poppy had made was one of Celia’s recipes. Now she made two others. One was a sweet-corn chowder that was appropriate to the season and particularly practical, since Poppy had foisted on her a dozen ears of newly picked corn, foisted on her in turn by a well-meaning friend. The second was corn bread, made with more of that corn, plus cornmeal, eggs, butter, maple syrup, and walnuts.

  Between the chowder and the bread, the smell of the cottage on Saturday evening was heavenly. Lily even had her windows open a drop so that she could hear the sounds of the outdoors, and the aromas were hardly diluted. When she heard a distant loon song, it struck her that when all was said and done, she could do a lot worse on a Saturday night. Without conscious thought, she began to sing back.

  She sang while she stirred the soup and while she took the corn bread from the oven. Humming, she set the table with a pretty woven mat, picked the soup bowl and a plate that she liked best from Celia’s eclectic collection, gathered three fat candles of different heights and shapes from other parts of the cottage, and lit them. Singing softly again, she opened a bottle of wine, another gift from Poppy. She had started to fill a fluted wineglass when she heard a knock on the door.

  Her singing stopped abruptly, and with a gasp, she held her breath. Seconds later, her heart pounding, she exhaled with a rush of dark resignation. The town knew she was here. It had to be only a matter of time before the rest of the world found out as well.

  But the voice that came through the open window, a familiar face peering at her through the screen, wasn’t the rest of the world. “It’s just me,” John said.

  Relieved enough to be giddy, she pulled open the door. “I can’t tell you what just went through my mind.”

  “I realized it would as soon as I knocked. Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  She took a deep breath. Her heart kept pounding, but she figured that was a side effect of facing someone this tall and good looking on a Saturday night. She didn’t have to trust him to be pleased that he was there. Singing wasn’t the only thing she had been without of late. The company of people was another.

  She tucked her hands in the back of her jeans. “What’s up?” she asked, but h
e was looking past her to the table that she had just set.

  “Uh-oh. I’ve come at a bad time.”

  She laughed. No point in being coy. “Not really. It’s just a party for one.”

  “Some party.” He inhaled loud and long. “Whatever you’ve cooked smells incredible.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “No. But I don’t crash parties.”

  With a chiding look, she stood back and waved him in.

  He ran a hand across his beard and down his sweater. “I look like shit.”

  Granted, his sweater was stretched, his shorts frayed, and his sneakers old, but he was clean—which was more than she could say for herself. Batting at flour smudges on her T-shirt and jeans, she said, “So do I.”

  But she couldn’t do anything about it, not with his standing there and dinner hot and ready. Leaving him to decide for himself whether to come or go, she returned to the kitchen and set a second place at the table. It was a minute before she had the corn bread cut in squares and put into a basket. By that time, John was standing in her living room, looking all around the cottage. She dished up the chowder, quite pleased with herself. It was only when she was filling the wineglasses—when he continued to look around—that she had second thoughts.

  Yes, she welcomed the company. Yes, she might call it business. Yes, she wanted John to dig up every last bit of dirt on Terry Sullivan. But she wasn’t ready to deliver on her half of the deal.

  She straightened slowly. “Are you taking notes?”

  John had been studying the loft. Now he grinned. “Birdhouses?”

  She followed his gaze. “They’re Celia’s doing. All of this is.”

  He took a step toward the spiral stairs, seeming about to climb them before catching himself. “She was a character.” Then he saw the table ready, food served, wine poured. His mouth formed a silent “wow.”

  Lily warned, “This isn’t for your book. It’s because you happened to come here at a time I happen to be eating.”

  “Not for my book,” he promised, approaching the table. His eyes were wide and appreciative. “I wouldn’t share this with anyone. Do you always eat this way?”