Lady in the Lake(53)

“Okay.” Her pencil scratches away. She uses a pencil on the Jumble. I do the New York Times double acrostic in ink.

“Sheila, do you like me?”

She sighs. “This again. What are you, the road show of Fiddler on the Roof? How many times do I have to tell you: I love you.”

“I asked if you liked me.”

“Love is better.”

Is it? Is it? Four years ago, I met a woman at a dance. She didn’t talk much, which made her seem mysterious and alluring. She was as cagey with her body, her kisses and affections, as she was with her words. I projected so much on those silences, those resistances. Still waters run deep, et cetera et cetera. We were married within three months.

Turns out that even if still waters run deep, there’s no current, they can’t take you anywhere. All they do, eventually, is close over your head.





June 1966





June 1966



When Maddie turned on the street where Cleo Sherwood’s parents lived, she realized the block was one she knew. This strip of Auchentoroly Terrace was not only near the synagogue and the old Schwartz grocery store, it was also along the route that the Schwartzes used to take to downtown restaurants and the theater. Milton liked to go a few blocks out of his way to drive down this street. He had this odd habit, her not-yet-ex-husband, a tendency that Maddie privately dubbed Milton’s Memory Lane. He was forever checking in with his past, showing Seth its landmarks over and over again. The house, the grocery, his schoolyard. Nostalgia was not the point. Milton wanted to remind Seth, and possibly Maddie, that Milton’s young life had been one of hard work and deprivation, that he was self-made.

“Are these people poor?” Seth had asked when he was seven or eight. It would have been summertime, hot, with people hanging on their porches, kids running up and down the street, maybe even jumping in the spray of an open fire hydrant.

“Yes,” Milton would say. “But no poorer than my family was.”

This late June afternoon was not particularly hot. Not outside at least. But the air in the stairway up to the Sherwoods’ second-floor apartment was heavy and stale, the smell of grease so thick that Maddie felt grimy for ascending through it.

Or maybe the oily sensation on her skin was her own sense of shame, for coming to see the parents of a dead woman, unannounced, and for the questions that she planned to ask them.

Not that she could have called ahead even if she wanted. There was no phone listed for the Sherwood family. But Maddie was learning not to ask for permission. Permission could be denied, whereas if one acted as if one had a right to be somewhere, that very pretense of self-assurance might carry the day. Wasn’t that what Mr. Bauer had done to her, not that long ago, although it seemed like years since she had been as naive as that Maddie Schwartz?

She knocked on the door, brisk and ready: “Hello, I’m Madeline Schwartz of the Star and I’m here to ask you some questions about Cleo Sherwood.”

A younger woman—Cleo’s sister?—had answered the door. Even as she turned her head to look back at someone, Maddie simply walked in. Again, she was done waiting for permission. A man, presumably Cleo’s father, sat in an easy chair near the front windows, reading the newspaper. The Star, Maddie noticed. Her newspaper. He did not look up or acknowledge her in any way.

At his feet, two children, boys, were playing with toy trucks on the rug. They must have been Cleo’s boys, although they barely looked like brothers. The older one, perhaps four or five, was thick—not fat, but stocky and strong looking, with a capacity for immense concentration. He pushed his yellow truck across the carpet, absorbed in his own game. The younger one looked remarkably like Cleo in the one photograph Maddie had seen in the Afro’s clippings. He had her pale eyes, delicate features, and a dreamy, self-contained quality.

Mrs. Sherwood came from the kitchen, her tread heavy, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. She did not extend her hand to shake, however. “Is there news?” she asked.

“No, there’s no news,” Maddie said. “But I want to write about Cleo in hopes that my story will unearth something, jog someone’s memory and help us find her killer. It would not have been easy”—her glance shifted to the boys and back—“it would have attracted attention, I think, whatever happened at the lake that night. An article might make someone reflect on things that didn’t seem important at the time.”

That was not her real mission today, but she knew enough not to go straight to her harder questions.

“The Afro wrote plenty about Eunetta before,” Mrs. Sherwood said. “No one cared then, so why would anyone care now?”

“I think lots of people care,” Maddie said. She disliked lying, but it wasn’t that much of a lie. If the killer were found, especially if it happened because she refused to let go, then people would care, she was sure of it. “I just—is there anything I should know? I was very struck by one detail the psychic shared with me. Madame Claire?”

“Her. She didn’t help us much.”

“The colors yellow and green didn’t mean anything to you?”

“No, ma’am.”

It was odd, being called ma’am by a woman who was clearly older. But it meant that Maddie had somehow persuaded the Sherwoods that she had authority. Was it the newspaper? Or her whiteness?