Lake News (36 page)

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 he 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?”

“No. I'm not a cook. That's a disclaimer. You eat at your own risk.”

John didn't look worried. “Anything that smells this good can't possibly be bad. Besides, you made this for yourself. If you'd made it for me, I might have worried you'd put something in it—a little arsenic, a dash of hemlock.” Brows arched, he pointed to the place setting nearest him. “Want me here?”

She had barely nodded when he ran around the table and pulled out her chair. She was impressed. Given his excitement, she might have wondered when he'd eaten his last square meal.

“Thank you,” she said when he pushed in her chair.

He circled to his own, settled in, and put the napkin on his lap. Then he looked from his filled soup bowl to her semifilled bowl to the stove. “I didn't ask if you had enough.”

She smiled. “I have enough for
ten
other people. I just figured you normally eat more than I do.”

“You probably figured right,” he said with a grin. The grin softened and he grew less clever, more serious and touchingly sincere. “Thank you. I didn't expect this when I headed over here.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don't know. I was just out there on the lake checking up on my loons, and before I knew it I was hearing you sing. You have a beautiful voice.”

Terry Sullivan had said the very same thing. “So do the loons.”

“Yours is better. It does more than they can.”

“It doesn't carry like theirs does.”

“Maybe not. But it's lovely.” He lifted his wineglass, proposing a toast. When she raised hers to meet it, he said, “To your voice.”

But John
didn't
sound like Terry Sullivan. Was she a fool for thinking him sincere?

The wine warmed its way down her throat. “Thank you,” she said when she set the glass down. “I've missed it.”

“Missed working at the club?”

“Missed singing. It struck me last night how long it's been. I hadn't realized.”

“You've had other things on your mind,” he said. His eyes held hers. “I can't start eating until you do, but the smell of this chowder is killing me.”

She sampled the chowder. In her totally biased opinion, it tasted as good as it smelled.

“It tastes
better
than it smells,” John said, and helped himself to a piece of corn bread when she extended the basket.

For several minutes they ate in silence. Since the loons had stopped singing, Lily slipped away from the table and put on a CD. It was a Liszt kind of night—a major-key mood for a change. She was marveling at that when she returned to the table.

“The cottage is great,” he said.

She looked around. “It could use a piano. I have one in Boston. I also have a BMW.”

“Ahh,” he breathed. “The infamous BMW.”

She smiled at the way he said it, but was instinctively defensive. “Do you know how
hard
I had to work to find one I could afford? Same with the piano. I miss both of them. Call me materialistic, but I'm not. I didn't buy that car to impress anyone. It just represented something for me.”

“What?”

She held his gaze with something of a dare. “Independence. The ability to take care of myself.” She might have been made a fool of by the press, fired from two jobs, and ostracized by her neighbors, but she was no shrinking violet. She could take care of herself. She wanted him to know that.

“And the piano?” he asked.

She smiled in spite of herself. “It's like a limb.” She sat straighter. “So, when can I have it back?” The answer, of course, had to do with restoring her name.

“Are we talking business here?”

“I guess.” She set down her spoon. “Have you found anything?”

“Yes. I just don't know what it means.” He took a bite of corn bread, chewed, swallowed. “This is wonderful,” he said and put the rest of the piece into his mouth. When he had washed it down with wine, he said, “I did another property search. It confirmed all the different apartments Terry has rented. It also gave me other information, like that he drives a Honda that is eight years
old and has a spotty registration record. That means he's either lazy, forgetful, or defiant. He lets his registration expire, then reregisters the car. He has a problem with parking tickets. Usually pays off a hunk of them at a time, most often coinciding with the car reregistration. He gets speeding tickets and appeals them.”

“Does he win?”

“Yes. Terry's glib. He can talk his way out of a paper bag.”

Lily knew that. Remembering how she had been taken in, and knowing motor vehicle problems wouldn't be worth publicizing, she was discouraged. “Is that it?”

“One more thing.” His eyes held hers. “An interesting little fact. It starts to explain why he moves so much. He's been married three times.”

“How old is he?”

“My age. Forty-three. I know what you're thinking, and you're right. There are plenty of guys my age who've been married three times.”

No. Lily was thinking—wondering—whether John had been married at all.

“The odd thing here,” he went on, his eyes a deeper brown, “is that no one knew he was married. I mean, no one. The first happened when he was in college. Terry and I were classmates, but I didn't know about a wife. I called two other people who knew him there, and neither of them were aware he had a wife. He was married the second time while he was in Providence. I know a photographer there who teamed up with him a lot, and he never met any wife, much less heard mention of one. The third marriage was in Boston. I called three guys
down there, including his editor, and they all thought I was making it up. They didn't know about one wife, let alone three.”

“He may be a very private person.”

“But that's weird, wouldn't you say? Okay, so he isn't a big partier. He keeps his personal life separate from his professional life. But wouldn't you invite friends to a wedding? Or tell friends the good news, even about an engagement? Most guys would want to introduce their wives to the people they work with. Or they'd make references to a wife, like, ‘I have to run because my wife's waiting at home.' Not Terry. Blowing three marriages is one thing. The fact of no one knowing about any of the three is another thing. I'd say that's bizarre.”

The more Lily thought about it, the more she agreed. “Do you have the names of the women?”

He nodded. “They were on rental forms. My next step is contacting them.”

“Why would he keep it a secret?”

The possibilities ranged from the innocent to the damning, but it was all speculation. By the time John had gone through seconds of chowder and corn bread, Lily was tired of speculation about Terry Sullivan and curious about John. Heating apple cider, she filled mugs and led him out to the porch, but the night was too still, the lake too peaceful to say anything at first. They sat on the steps for a time, looking out, sipping cider—and she was aware of him, aware of his hands holding the mug, his bare knees, his hair-spattered legs. She let the silence linger.

“Cold?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Tell me about you.”

“What do you want to know?”

She wanted to know if he was honest. She wanted to know, if push came to shove, whether he would put his own interests before hers. She wanted to know if she could trust him.

But there was no point in asking those questions. If she wasn't sure about trust, the answers would be meaningless. So she asked, “Terry's your age, and he's been married three times. What about you?”