Lady in the Lake(84)

Maddie remembered Judith’s tossed-off words, They also say Shell Gordon is a Baltimore bachelor, for what it’s worth.

“He told Tommy to kill you. So who did Tommy kill? Whose body was in the fountain?”

“My roommate, Latetia. But Tommy didn’t kill her. She overdosed two days after Christmas. So we dressed her in my clothes, although not my favorites, did what had to be done, put her someplace where she wouldn’t be found for a while.”

Even in her haze, Maddie found the story not quite right. If Thomas Ludlow had been ordered by Shell Gordon to kill Cleo, why not just say he had and let her go? Why did there have to be a body at all?

“Who are you, really?”

“Why, I’m Latetia Tompkins. I eloped over the holidays, sent my roommate a telegram from Elkton. I’ve been living in Philly. Close enough so I could sneak down from time to time, just look at the people I left behind. I thought, maybe one day, that I could tell them. But, no. It’s gone too far. Now my father’s in jail, probably going to die there. Nice to know he loved me, after all, but it was a hell of a way to find out.” A pause. “I blame you.”

“All I did was write the story. Someone was going to write it.”

“That’s true. But you had already kicked up so much dust. Going to see the psychic. Talking to my parents, in front of my boys.”

Maddie still felt as if she were in a dream. But one can, at times, be sharp in a dream.

“Tommy wouldn’t know that. About your parents. And there’s no doubt that they think you’re dead. But someone else knows. Your sister, the one who lives at home?”

“You should have let me be. That’s all I ever wanted. You can’t leave anything be. Who was I to you? The Lady in the Lake? Well, I wasn’t a lady and I was never in no lake. Everything you wrote was a lie, whether you know it or not. At least you’re haunting other folks now. Leave me be, Maddie Schwartz. I’m warning you.”

“Why did you need a body? Why couldn’t Tommy just tell Shell Gordon that you were gone for good, buried somewhere you’d never be found?”

“I didn’t say we needed one. I said we had one, and we used it.”

Maddie pondered the serendipitous death of Latetia, the girl who wouldn’t be missed. Perhaps Thomas Ludlow did, in fact, have something to confess to. Maybe he had loved Cleo enough to do whatever he thought was necessary.

Or had Cleo killed Latetia without thinking things through, then called Tommy in a panic? It still seemed impossible for even two people to drag an inert body up and over the fence, across the lake, up and into the fountain. But—a double date, a seemingly spontaneous dare. Let’s row over to the fountain, climb up, look at the city lights from there. Maybe Cleo had gone out that night with the man Thomas Ludlow had described to police, but maybe she had fixed Ludlow up with Latetia. Maybe it had just been the three of them.

“But—”

“Goodbye, Maddie Schwartz.”

Maddie watched almost in wonder as the woman stood, allowed her long, lovely body to droop into the defeated posture of a janitress, and shuffle out into the hall. Maddie would have been within her rights to wonder, come the morning, if it all had been a dream. But it was true. Cleo Sherwood was alive and Maddie could never tell anyone.

As she fell back asleep, she realized that the hospital walls were a pale institutional green, while the Formica chair was yellow.





November 1966





November 1966



Maddie was home before her thirty-eighth birthday. She expected a visit from Ferdie, curious about the gift he had promised, but he didn’t show up. Perhaps he didn’t realize she had returned to the apartment.

Thanksgiving came and went, disturbingly warm, sixty-six degrees. In New York, the unseasonable temperatures created a bizarre smog event, blanketing the city with dense, blackish air until a cold front dispelled it. By the last Sunday of November, the weather had returned to normal, late-fall temperatures. But Maddie’s apartment on the third floor was always warm, so she continued to sleep with her window cracked. At least, that’s what she told herself.

She was not asleep when she heard the window being raised—it wasn’t quite ten o’clock—but she pretended to be.

Only Ferdie did not slide into bed, as was his usual practice. After a minute or two of playing possum, she opened her eyes. There he was, out of uniform. He wore slacks and a V-neck sweater with a collared shirt. His hair was getting longer—well, fuller. It grew out and up, not down. It looked good. He looked, Maddie realized, like a boxer whose photo had been in the papers earlier this month, frugging in London with a striking actress.

“I’ve told you and told you about that window, Maddie.”

“It just gets so hot up here.” She pushed away the covers, glad she’d had the foresight to wear a pretty gown.

“You’ve been a busy girl.”

“Yes, I suppose so.” Laughing, uninterested in talking. She held out her arms to him. But he stayed by the window.

“You promised me, Maddie. You promised not to write anything.”

“I promised not to write anything based on what you told me. And I didn’t.”

“Yeah, maybe people who read the papers believe you went to talk to her—what did you say, mother to mother? No one in my shop was fooled. They knew someone had to have told you. They realized right away it was me.” A pause. “That we were together.”