Lady in the Lake(16)

“You can’t tell me what to do.” I stamp my foot. It is a glorious sound. I stamp and I stamp and I stamp and I—





March 1966





March 1966



“Is there anything more annoying than not getting to do something you never wanted to do in the first place?”

Maddie was trying to make a joke on herself, an observation about the eternal push-and-pull between mothers and daughters.

But Judith Weinstein must have thought this a profound inquiry, worthy of a thoughtful answer, for she did not reply right away. Maddie could not see Judith’s face—they were working their way down a narrow path, with Maddie leading the way—but Judith, when she finally answered, sounded like someone who yearned to be agreeable, even if she didn’t quite agree.

“It is frustrating that we made the effort and they wouldn’t let us help. But they didn’t stop us, did they?”

Her voice was as wobbly as their footing. Judith probably thought Maddie was insane, following these old trails through the arboretum, darkness encroaching. How had they ended up here?

Because her mother had called her that morning, as she had every morning at nine since Maddie’s phone was installed, and it never occurred to Maddie not to pick up. It was the one thing that was the same about her old and new lives, the daily call from her mother.

“Maddie, have you heard about Tessie Fine?”

“Of course, Mother. I’m on Cathedral Street, not in Siberia. We get the same newspapers. I listen to WBAL.”

Maddie’s mother had made a small but distinct “Pffft.” This meant she disagreed with Maddie’s facts but couldn’t be bothered to argue. She also seemed to shudder reflexively at the mere mention of “Cathedral,” as if the street name was an affront. She’d have been more horrified if she realized that Maddie’s apartment, while on the Mulberry side of the building, actually overlooked the cathedral.

“It’s been two days. Our synagogue has been sending volunteers. You meet up at the parking lot, then go in pairs . . .”

The “you” was specific, not general. Maddie’s mother, Tattie Morgenstern—some strange childhood bastardization of Harriet that she refused to stop using—was telling Maddie that she would go to the parking lot, she would be paired up, she would walk an assigned route in the ever-expanding perimeter around the tropical fish store where Tessie Fine was last seen.

Baltimore had been aflame with the story. Tessie Fine, so pretty, so young. She had told the mother who dropped her off that she was going to buy food for her brother’s fish. But her brother had no fish. The man in the store said she had walked in but left five minutes later without buying anything. He said she had been rude to him. Family and friends said, with evident admiration, “Yes, that’s our Tessie.”

Maddie’s mother knew Tessie’s grandmother. She didn’t like her, but she knew her. They had been children together, classmates at The Park School when it was still on Auchentoroly Terrace. Park, although nonsectarian, was the preferred school for the German Jewish families, whose children had not been welcome at the city’s older private schools at the time. As the neighborhood around Druid Hill Park “changed”—the preferred euphemism for integration—the families and the school migrated to the northwest. Maddie had attended Park at its Liberty Heights location; now it was in Brooklandville, almost all the way to the Beltway, and Seth was a third-generation student. Maddie had even had a date or two with Tessie’s father, when they were young teens.

Tessie’s father, Bobby Fine, was more conservative than his parents. He chose to live within the eruv in Park Heights. According to Tattie, his mother blamed Bobby’s wife for this unseemly embrace of Orthodoxy. It was one thing to have two sets of dishes and eschew shellfish and pork. But Bobby’s wife took Judaism too far. It seemed to Maddie that there was no end to Tattie Morgenstern’s opinions about religion, about which was the correct one (Conservative Judaism), how much was the right amount. She also used “Presbyterian” as a pejorative for all things Protestant.

Over the years, Maddie had seen Tessie’s mother here and there, registering her as a mousey thing, albeit well-dressed. But the Fine and Schwartz social circles did not overlap and it seemed vulgar to encroach on the Fine family tragedy. If they had been true friends, Maddie would have gladly assisted. But they had not even attended each other’s weddings and—

Maddie didn’t want to follow her own chain of thought, about the next Fine family ritual that she would not be attending.

“So awful,” Tattie said. “I don’t know how any parent could survive this.”

“She could be alive,” Maddie said. A happy resolution to the case was still possible, wasn’t it? A little girl could wander away, get lost, maybe bump her head and not know who she was? But Ferdie had said much the same thing as Tattie just last night: Tessie Fine was almost certainly dead and the homicide detectives who had caught the case were under pressure to make some kind of progress as quickly as possible.

“When they find her—” Maddie tried again.

“If,” corrected her mother. “When I was a girl, I remember hearing about a pervert who raped little girls and then killed them. It was where you live now, which was a ghetto then. A ghetto now, really. Anyway, he attacked one little girl and her mother had a gun and shot him, so that was the end of that.”