Lady in the Lake(63)

“I don’t wear a lot of prints,” Judith said. “Let me think about it.”

Maddie was rebuffed. No, she felt as if she should feel rebuffed, then realized that her taste was more modern than her young friend’s. Judith was a conservative young woman in so many ways. She still wore her hair teased, with a flip at the end, whereas Maddie now wore a chignon to the office, literally letting her hair down when she was on her own time. And, no, Judith didn’t wear a lot of prints. She liked a matchy-matchy style, shoes and purse and dress all the same color. Living at home as she did, she was able to afford quite a wardrobe for a young woman. Today, she was all in yellow—yellow pumps, yellow shift, a pastel yellow linen cardigan cinched at her shoulders with a butterfly clip-chain.

“That’s pretty,” Maddie said, touching the butterfly’s golden head lightly with one finger. Its green eyes glowed.

“Korvette’s,” Judith said. “Only two ninety-eight.”

Maddie widened her eyes, as if amazed by the detail. The clip was pretty in its way and did not look as if it had come from Korvette’s. But here, among Betty Cooke’s creations, the fake gold butterfly with its green glass eyes seemed almost an affront. She decided to buy a bolt of fabric for herself, all the while glancing longingly at the jewelry. Oh, to be able to afford these lovely things. But it would be a rare man who understood how beautiful these items were. Men were so traditional in their idea of what women desired. Cleo Sherwood’s mysterious boyfriend, the one Maddie had yet to identify, had bought her clothing, not jewels. That detail still stuck out. A fur stole, not at all surprising. But the other clothes—a Chanel suit. (Well, a copy, but an excellent one.) That striking dress, something one of the Supremes might wear. The perfect little black dress from Wanamaker’s. These did not seem like typical gifts to a mistress, if Cleo Sherwood could be called that.

Not that it mattered. Maddie had wasted so much time in looking into Cleo Sherwood that no one cared what she had discovered. She had proposed a piece on the psychic, then another one on the grieving parents, only to be told, no, not now. “Maybe a year from now,” Cal had said. “On the anniversary.”

“Anniversary?” How could such a lovely word be invoked for this circumstance?

“You know, a year to the day she went missing or, better, a year to the day she was found. Rutabaga, rutabaga, rutabaga.”

June 1967, maybe January if she was lucky. It felt like a lifetime.

Over lunch at the Village Roost, she brought up her work woes to Judith. She and Judith had an odd way of relating to each other. They shared the conversation, as women are wont to do, but it was as if they were delivering unconnected monologues, cut down to socially acceptable chunks. Maddie talked about her job. Judith hinted, not for the first time, at how she wished she had a private place to “visit” with her boyfriend.

“Doesn’t Paul have a place of his own?”

“Not Paul,” Judith said. “Someone new. His father is gone, so he lives in the family house with his mother and has a much younger sister—there’s no privacy to be had there.”

“You have a new boyfriend?”

She blushed. It was possible, Maddie saw, for a woman to blush with pride. “I guess I have two! I don’t know how I got myself into this situation, Maddie. This guy, Patrick Monaghan, he totally bird-dogged me after we double-dated at the drive-in two weeks ago. I wouldn’t normally dream of going to a drive-in if it wasn’t a double date because, well, you know.”

Maddie did, although she had never attended a drive-in without Seth in the backseat. How seven-year-old Seth had thrilled to the adventure of going to the movie in his PJs, watching it through the windshield. It was funny about drive-ins. Almost everything about the moviegoing part of the experience was subpar—the sound, the film, the film’s appearance, the refreshments, for which one had to trudge such a long way. Yet for a child, novelty trumped everything. How had that little boy, so easily excited by the world around him, ended up surly and monosyllabic? Was he that way with Milton? She wished she could ask.

“Paul knew Patrick from high school and I had seen him around at the Stonewall Democrat meetings. We fixed him up with a girl I know. I swear I didn’t plan this.”

So you planned it, Maddie thought.

“Anyway, he called me the very next day and there’s just something about him. But—Monaghan! My parents would die. And he’s not much more respectable than a cop. He works for the state liquor board. But, well, he’s cute. The strong, silent type. I think I could really fall for him.”

“It sounds—premature to be meeting him somewhere privately.”

“We have to be careful! I mean, I’m still seeing Paul and it would hurt the other girl terribly if she knew that Patrick was pursuing me. We’re just thinking about others.”

Thinking about others while you cheat on them, Maddie thought. Was it cheating, though? The other girl had no claim on this Patrick; Judith had never been serious about Paul. She couldn’t be. She had explained to Maddie several times that she had to marry a Jewish man. But then—she couldn’t be serious about Patrick, either, in that case.

“Secret loves,” Maddie mused. “The world is full of secret loves.” She realized she had come too close to revealing her own secrets and added hastily, “I’m thinking of Cleo Sherwood, of course. I’m sure she had a boyfriend, or—a patron. But no one will tell me anything. I went to the Flamingo and they treated me like a leper.”