Lady in the Lake(21)

She glanced at the African violet. “I’m not likely to forget.”

“Anyway, so you have these two women walking down a quiet street after dusk, far from where either one lives. I bet they asked you if you knew the girl.”

They had, in fact. But to Maddie, it was almost like a social conversation, goyim trying to understand the connectedness of the Jewish community. Oh, how she had chattered away. Her grandmother and my mother knew each other—I suppose almost any woman in Northwest Baltimore who owns a fur knows the Fines. And I went to school with her father, years ago. He took me to a dance once. She was embarrassed, in retrospect, how easily she had shared her stories with them, wondered if they had found her tiny details portentous, at least briefly. It also had not occurred to her to wonder why she and Judith were questioned separately the next day.

“Not that you would ever be a serious suspect,” Ferdie added. Somehow that was more insulting still. How had she become a bit player in a story that wouldn’t even have happened were it not for her? Obviously, she didn’t want to be in the newspaper or on television because then she would have to be defined as—what? A woman who was separated, the former wife of, the estranged (not by choice) mother of. Who was Madeline Schwartz? She could not lay claim to the discovery of Tessie Fine without having that question asked.

She realized that she should have been content with that trade-off when she came home from a walk the next day and found a portly man in a trench coat and hat perched on her stoop.

“Bob Bauer,” he said, extending his hand.

“I know who you are,” she said. He had a popular column in the Star. It ran with a winsome pen-and-ink sketch.

“And you are . . .”

“Madeline Schwartz.”

“Just the woman I’ve come to see,” he said.

“May I ask why?”

“I think you know—look, can we go inside? I walked here and it’s uphill. That’s hard on a fat man such as myself.”

“I wouldn’t call you fat,” she said.

“Well, I don’t know what else you would call it.”

Charmed, aware that she was being charmed, she let him in and offered him water. He was practically wheezing after the climb to her third-floor apartment.

“Nice place,” he said. “I almost went to the other address by mistake, but my source set me straight.”

“The other . . . ?”

“Where you lived before.”

For a moment, she thought he meant Gist Avenue. Then she realized he had almost visited the house where Milton and Seth still lived. A catastrophe averted, she thought, then wondered why she felt that way. She hadn’t done anything wrong. It would be nice if Seth at least knew his mother had found Tessie Fine.

“My husband and I are divorcing,” she said.

“Happens in the best of families. Anyway, I thought it was quite a human-interest story, you and your friend finding Tessie Fine. A story worth telling, don’t you think?”

Part of her longed to say yes. But it meant laying too much bare. Not just her current stature, but also the chain of thought that had led her to the arboretum. It suddenly seemed impossible to explain her line of thinking if she didn’t mention the fearsome necking she had done in that location. She worried if she offered even a sanitized version of that story, she would end up telling everything. Ferdie, how she had pretended to be a virgin on her wedding night, maybe even the identity of the man who had made that pretense necessary, a secret she had safeguarded all these years.

“I’m not interested in publicity,” she said.

“We could use just your first name,” he said. His manner was kind, polite, yet there was a coiled tenacity about him. He wasn’t going to move from her kitchen chair, even if he did have his hat and coat still on. “Obscure some details.”

“I’m not obligated to talk to you. I know that. My husband is a lawyer.”

He smiled. “Of course you’re not obligated. Not legally. But it’s a story people want to know and it’s yours. Don’t you want to share it?”

She allowed herself to live the moment in her imagination. All eyes on her. What would that feel like? And why was she so keen to know? But no, not this way, she decided. She remembered the patrolman’s warnings.

Yet she felt she had to give this man something. Why? She couldn’t have said. All she knew was that when a man showed up and needed something from her, she felt obligated to help him. But it was like raising children. You could divert them. You substituted the healthy food for the lolly or sweet they wanted, making them think it was their idea all along.

“I’m not the story,” she said. “The man from the pet shop—he is.”

“How do you know that? They haven’t arrested him.”

She could not say, I know because my lover told me. Instead: “There’s something about the body that the police haven’t shared yet. Something they found on it. They’re waiting to get some kind of report back. When they do, they’ll probably arrest the clerk.”

He was impressed. More important, he was, in fact, no longer interested in her. “I hate to ask—it’s not something that could ever be in the paper—but do they think it’s a sex crime?”

She didn’t know the answer, yet she felt some weird desire to protect Tessie Fine. “No,” she said. “But he’s the one. Watch.”