Lady in the Lake(28)
“He probably hid the body overnight, took it out the next day.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he realized that he slipped, telling that part, which suggests there’s an accomplice, or someone with knowledge of what he’s done. That’s why he wrote me the second letter, about his time at Fort Detrick.”
“What about it?”
“Stephen Corwin was drafted five years ago. He claimed conscientious objector status as a Seventh-Day Adventist. He was sent to Fort Detrick and was part of an experiment known as Operation Whitecoat.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Mr. Bauer said. “The army doesn’t run tests that turn men into killers of little girls.”
“It sounds ridiculous to me, too,” Maddie said. “As if he’s grasping at straws. But it’s interesting, isn’t it? Something that hasn’t been published yet. I’d like to write the account of our correspondence.”
“Won’t that expose you to all the things you feared when I first visited you? Revelations about your personal life? Embarrassment to your son?”
“Not if it’s under my name. If I’m the author.”
He needed a few seconds to process what she was requesting. “Byline,” he said. “You want a byline. You want us to hire you and then your first piece will be this page one scoop. But that’s not how it works, Lois Lane. What are you going to do, insert yourself into every big murder? Dress up like a wino and go out and find the Tic-Tac-Toe Killer who’s terrorizing Baltimore’s drunks? Find the guy on the grassy knoll? That’s not reporting. That makes you more like a stuntwoman, some second-rate Nellie Bly.”
Another mask had slipped. She had offended him. And Maddie, whose instincts for what men need were unerring, knew immediately how to make it right.
“Would it be so wrong if I wrote this, with your help, and that would be my tryout? I’m happy to start at the bottom, to work my way up. I’m not asking for special treatment.”
“Oh, Maddie, newspaper work coarsens women. You should see the battle-axe who covers labor.”
“I’d like to think that, whatever I do, I’ll always be a woman first.”
“I bet you will,” he said. “Look, this would be easier if I could have the letters, show them to my bosses—”
She slipped the one back into her purse. “I don’t actually have the second one with me. I came here first. I came to you first. But there are two other newspapers in town, the Beacon and the Light. Maybe I should visit them, see what they offer.”
Two days later—two days of sitting by Mr. Bauer’s side, sometimes typing, sometimes talking, letting him rewrite her, but also insisting, at certain moments, on having her way with the words that were forming on the copy paper in his cantankerous typewriter—Maddie’s piece appeared on the front page. a killer unburdens himself. Mr. Bauer had the byline, but her name appeared in italicized print: Based on a correspondence with Madeline Schwartz, part of the search party that discovered Tessie Fine’s body.
Her correspondence was woven into a larger story, augmented by Mr. Bauer’s reporting. An army spokesman said staunchly that the “treatments” Stephen Corwin had been subjected to would not, could not, induce psychosis. His mother said Stephen was an unhappy person and had always been a disappointment to her, that everything he said was a lie, even the story about the eggs. He had shifty friends, men of whom she did not approve.
Finally, his attorney tried to subpoena Maddie, only to be told that her notes were protected by Maryland’s shield law because she was a contractual employee at the Star. And if the newspaper’s lawyer implied that contract predated her correspondence with Corwin, as opposed to being drawn up hastily in the wake of the request, he never said as much in so many words and the inexperienced public defender gave up that line of attack, deciding to focus on the idea that Corwin wasn’t competent to stand trial.
The story was a sensation, dominating the news for several days. In part, Maddie was the story—attractive not-quite-divorcée tricks kid-killer into revealing he had an accomplice—but she never lost sight of the fact that she had made the story and, with Mr. Bauer’s help, written the story. After all, although she had the good sense not to mention it to Mr. Bauer or anyone else at the Star, she had once yearned to write poetry and fiction, had worked at the high school newspaper. Which was where she had met Allan Durst, which had indirectly almost destroyed her life.
Now, perhaps, writing would indirectly help her reinvent her life.
Maddie’s reward for her scoop was a job as an assistant to the man who ran the Star’s “Helpline” column, Don Heath, who was highly skeptical. “I’ve never had an assistant, why do they think I need an assistant all of a sudden,” Mr. Heath fretted. “I guess you can open the mail. When you get the hang of things, I’ll let you tackle some of the easier questions, the ones we don’t write up for the paper.”
Given the mundane inquiries that did make it into the paper, Maddie wondered just how fatuous the others could be. But it didn’t matter. She had a desk. She had a job. As she sliced open the envelopes that arrived daily, a Sisyphean array of petty complaints, she imagined a future self explaining to someone young, someone worshipful, how it all began. Maybe to Seth, maybe a roomful of college girls. “They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Well my journey of not even fifty steps, from the ‘Helpline’ desk to the real newsroom, began with a thousand paper cuts.”