Free Lake News by Barbara Delinsky Page A

chair, and put her face in her hands. When she heard him enter, she dropped her hands to her lap.
    â€œRough 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 .”
    â€œThen why is this happening here, now?”
    â€œBecause he was just named Cardinal. That makes for bigger headlines and bigger sales of papers.”
    â€œThat’s sick.”
    â€œLately 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?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œHow does tonight look here?” she asked with caution, wondering if business was hurt.
    â€œBooked 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.
    â€œWill 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.
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œStill 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