Lady in the Lake(46)

But I’m no tattletale. I won’t go running back to the paper and tell folks that this new girl is sleeping with a cop. It’s not like she’s going to end up covering cops, not for the Star.





What did you think when you saw the body?




What did you think when you saw the body? Did I become more real to you? Or less? It was a monstrous thing, I bet, like something from a horror movie. The creature from the park lagoon. I can’t bear to call it mine. Can anyone—you, the morgue people, the detectives—still see a person in that thing? I don’t blame people for not caring. I don’t care. I can’t feel anything for that mound of flesh and bone, holding stubbornly to its secrets. Full credit to you for staring it down at all.

I know it sounds silly, but—I was naked, I assume? What happened to my clothes? Obviously, they would be the worse for wear, too, and they couldn’t leave them on my body. But are they evidence? Were they examined, then stored somewhere? Cleaned up and thrown away? Every piece told a story, if anyone cared to know it. There was a world of stories in the clothing I picked out that evening.

Because the weather was mild, I chose leopard-print slacks, a lightweight red car coat, and an emerald-green blouse beneath it, 100 percent silk. The combination bothered me because it was too Christmas-y, but there was a man waiting for me, telling me not to dawdle. Time was a-wasting. A scarf tied snug over the hair, straightened just the day before. No jewelry.

The clothes were all gifts from my man, but that doesn’t tell you the whole story. Any man can buy a woman a dress, a coat, a scarf. My man was much more cunning. He had to bide his time, then pounce on opportunities that presented themselves. Just like he had pounced on me the second he saw me. Occasionally, alterations were required. He did them himself. He knew my body that well. The idea of him bent over a sewing machine, tailoring those clothes to my frame—let’s just say that when I think of that, I know he loved me and I loved him for loving me. He was a king and I could have been his queen, a better one than the one that was forced on him, the one everyone said he had to keep if he wanted to expand his kingdom. I had read a lot of books about Henry VIII and his wives. Anne Boleyn was my favorite. I was, in a sense, trying to play her game, although the rules were a little different in 1965 than they were in 1500-whatever.

And the game was so much bigger than I knew. Bigger than me, bigger than him, bigger than all of us.





June 1966





June 1966



A woman in a pink housecoat opened the door when Maddie rang the bell at the psychic’s. Madame Claire has a cold, Maddie thought, proud of herself for the literary allusion, then annoyed that she could no longer remember the name of the psychic in The Waste Land.

The woman in the pink housecoat had a husky, almost froggy voice, but she did not appear to have so much as a sniffle. Even if she did, it was more likely to be allergies than a head cold on this balmy June day.

Maddie had waited until after work to take the bus to Madame Claire’s “studio,” an apartment carved out of the ground floor of a grand old house in Reservoir Hill. Much to her surprise and shame, she had been scolded for the two-hour trip to the morgue, although her work had been done and she had those 4.5 hours of comp time. There was a difference, Maddie was realizing, between being told that she had permission to work on a story and actually working on it. She owed the newspaper eight hours every day. She was good at what she did, efficient and smart. She could do eight hours of work in six. But the time she saved was not hers. Like the miner in the song “Sixteen Tons,” she owed, if not her soul, her time to the company store.

When she was a housewife, her speed and her efficiency had accrued to her. She had been her own boss, although she let Milton think certain decisions were his. It was odd, being made to answer to men who were not her husband. It made her feel sullen and rebellious, not unlike Seth. I did my work, she wanted to say. Whose business is it if I take a long lunch to look into the Cleo Sherwood case? She knew better than to argue, however.

And now she had ridden a bus to a part of the city she wouldn’t have dared to drive through not that long ago. If she took a taxi home, would she be allowed to expense the fare? She doubted it. Besides, there were no taxis here.

At least the days were getting longer and it would probably still be light when she left Madame Claire, whose apartment happened to be within walking distance of Milton’s synagogue. It wouldn’t be there long. Chizuk Amuno had announced that the temple would be leaving the neighborhood for the suburbs in the coming year. After all, that was where their congregants lived. Where the Jews are. In her head, on the bus, Maddie had made that into a song to the tune of “Where the Boys Are.” Where the Jews are / No one waits for me.

Not even a year ago, she had avoided downtown Baltimore, venturing there only for the occasional symphony performance, or dinner at Tio Pepe’s or the Prime Rib. She had thought it dirty and dangerous. She wasn’t wrong. Yet working at the Star, with its proximity to the raucous bars along the harbor, being able to walk to the grand department stores on Howard Street—she felt herself falling in love. Not with the city so much as the possibility of a new start, at an age when she had thought her life would basically be over.

As a child, she used to do the math: Born in 1928, she would be twenty-two at midcentury, seventy-two at the dawn of the twenty-first. She had assumed she would not change, that adulthood was static. Her younger self was not wrong: Maddie’s life had been set by the time she was twenty-five. The house they bought that year, their second in Pikesville, might as well have been a mausoleum. An elegant, well-appointed mausoleum, but still a mausoleum. Seth was the only true living thing in that house and he was about to leave. She imagined his departure like a fairy tale, or an episode of The Twilight Zone. (A program she didn’t really care for, but a favorite of Milton’s, so they watched it all the time.) The landscape of their lives would be sere, dead. The emptiness would be revealed.