Lady in the Lake(18)

At noon, Maddie had put away her book and poked around the icebox for something to eat. Her practice for the past few years had been to lunch on things like melba toast and cottage cheese. Yet Ferdie wanted her to put on weight, was forever urging food on her. “Someone needs to take care of you, baby,” he said, clearly having decided that her thinness was a by-product of her caring for others, not a rigidly achieved state. Maddie, who had always followed fashion, couldn’t help noticing that a girl named Twiggy was suddenly everywhere. The new styles favored thin women. Of course, she was too old for such clothes. Or was she? No matter how thin she got, her breasts never seemed to shrink. She thought of how many boys had begged, begged, to progress from OC to OB to UB, how the discovery of her breasts took their breaths away, like they were men seeing land after a long time at sea.

Cylburn Arboretum. It wasn’t that far from where Tessie Fine had last been seen, no more than a mile, a bit of wildness in the heart of the city. If one were to dump a body somewhere—

She’d checked the clock. Maybe she should go help look for Tessie Fine. Not doing something just because her mother had suggested it was sullen, the kind of behavior one would expect from an adolescent. Maddie would call that girl, the one from the jewelry store, and ask her to go along. She didn’t know why she wanted a companion, but it seemed more respectable somehow.

Judith, clearly excited to hear from Maddie, had said her brother would let her leave work given the gravity of the mission. They’d taken buses to the synagogue parking lot, arriving just as the volunteers were about to set out.

“Men only,” said the synagogue president, who had organized the search parties.

“That’s ridiculous,” Maddie said.

“This is no job for women.” He looked at their clothes, as if he could eliminate them on that basis alone, but their shoes were sensible, their coats suitable to combing alleys and vacant lots.

“Then we’ll do our own search,” Maddie said. “It’s not as if we need your permission to walk around Baltimore.”

The arboretum was farther down Northern Parkway than she recalled, the grounds larger and more heavily wooded. The day, which had started with promises of spring, had aged into something raw and punishing. They walked the trails systematically, aware that they needed to leave by five, the closing time during winter. The trails went deep, all the way down to Cylburn Avenue. With their deadline approaching, Maddie said to Judith: “Let’s walk this last one all the way to the fence.”

Later, when she was asked, How did you think to look there? Maddie would be nonplussed. She couldn’t say, I remembered parking there with all the boys I dated, much less, I tried to get my future husband to make love to me there, but he wanted to wait because he thought I was a virgin.

So she would say: Just a hunch.

On that hunch, they walked down the final trail, to the fence line along the avenue. The land dipped here, creating a gully. The fence was broken, torn open, but you couldn’t see the bottom of the gully from the street, you had to be on the hill, above it, to see what Maddie saw.

She caught a glimpse of something shiny, too shiny, in the gray-green wintry underbrush. It was a bright silver crescent on the heel of a shoe. The shoe was attached to a leg, the leg to the body, the body to a head, a face. A face that was too composed, too still. No child’s face was ever this still.

With her loden-green coat and brown tights, Tessie Fine had almost disappeared into the landscape. But her red tresses flamed like out-of-season wildflowers, and her shoes shined on, catching the last rays of light.





The Patrolman





The Patrolman



When the call comes in, my first thought is, Thank God, I don’t have to go to Burger Chef. Every night, my partner, Paul, and I argue about dinner and he won tonight. I prefer Gino’s. Maybe that sounds callous, thinking about dinner when a call comes in about a body, maybe the body that everyone’s looking for, but you have to understand I’m thinking it’s going to be a big fat nothing. In fact, somehow I get it in my head that they are teenagers, a boy and a girl, doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. They looked at the clock, realized they were supposed to be home for supper, had no shot, so they had to have a reason.

At any rate, we’re on Northern Parkway, headed west, the closest patrol to the arboretum, so we take the call. Usually, the place would be closed by now, but the staff stayed and kept the gates open.

The first thing I notice is that the couple aren’t boy-girl and they aren’t teenagers. It’s two women, one in her twenties and one in her thirties, clearly not related. And although the older one has at least ten years on me, she’s the looker of the two. The younger one is presentable, don’t get me wrong, with shiny hair and a nice face. But the older one has dark hair and light eyes and a tiny waist—she’s wearing a trench coat, belted tight—and it’s hard not to think, Wow. I’m married and I don’t whore around like some of my colleagues, but I’m not blind.

Still, I don’t believe they’ve found the girl, especially when they lead us out and around the arboretum, down to Cylburn Avenue. It’s not a busy street, but it gets enough traffic so that someone, somehow, would have spotted a body over the past two days. We leave the patrol car in the parking lot and walk, two by two, like the worst double date ever. I’m next to the dark-haired one, who’s leading the way.