Lady in the Lake(86)
“Good afternoon,” she said. “And ‘finalist for the Pulitzer’ is a very grand way of saying that one lost the Pulitzer.”
Audiences like a little gentle self-deprecation, but she was always of two minds about publicizing her bridesmaid status. It bugged her that she hadn’t won that year, the first time that the prize for feature writing was given. More galling, it had gone to a colleague on the Light, the Beacon’s less mannerly sister paper. He had written about brain surgery, while her story had centered on a child with a rare heart condition. “Brains trump heart, I guess,” Bob Bauer had said when they met up for drinks later that week. The remark had been tinged with envy; Bauer had won all the state prizes and some national ones, but had never come anywhere close to a Pulitzer.
Maddie had won almost everything, too, and she still had plenty of years in her.
As a high-profile columnist, she was much in demand on the ladies’-luncheon circuit. The Beacon had a speaker’s bureau and actually paid its reporters to make these presentations; the paper considered it a good community-relations ploy. Maddie had learned how to appear to talk off the cuff, to vary her stories just enough so she couldn’t be accused of being canned or rote.
“I’m often asked”—a lie, she was never asked—“what, exactly, is human interest? What makes a person interesting? Well, I believe all people are intrinsically interesting if you know the right questions to ask, if you take time. I think a good reporter should be able to open a phone book, stab a name with a pencil, call up the person, and find a story. Sometimes, I do just that.”
(Also a lie, she had never done that.)
She told of her latest triumph, an exclusive interview with the parents of a child who was kidnapped from the Sinai Hospital maternity ward by a woman disguised as a nurse, caught several days later when she tried to con another hospital into giving her a birth certificate. The parents still expressed wonder at how easily someone had slipped into Sinai Hospital. Maddie did not tell them she knew it was, in fact, quite easy. A uniform and a defeated posture could do the trick.
“The law required the parents to take a paternity test,” she told her rapt audience. “But the judge looked from that round-cheeked baby to his father and said, ‘I think we all know what the results are going to tell us.’”
Her talk was so familiar to her that she could almost disengage, hover above the proceedings like a ghost. Even as she told the stories about the stories that had made her a local treasure—the spiky newsstand owner, the last local hatmaker, the piano prodigy—she was thinking about the stories never written, the people never profiled. Ezekiel “EZ” Taylor, for example, who sold his dry-cleaning chain abruptly in 1968, blaming the riots and the weather. He said he was asthmatic, that he had been advised to move west for his health, New Mexico to be precise, but his wife preferred to stay in Baltimore because of her church activities. Did EZ go in search of Cleo, after all? One thing was for sure: there was no listed phone number for Ezekiel Taylor anywhere in New Mexico. Maddie had checked, repeatedly.
“I got my job at the Beacon by being brash, insisting on being the reporter instead of the subject. It was a gamble on both sides, but the editor, Peter Forrester, said he saw something in me. I think it was my willingness to start at the lowest possible salary.”
There were days when Maddie was convinced that it’s all a coincidence, that EZ went west for his health and Shell Gordon, still bent with grudge over a woman he saw as a rival, found a more trustworthy assassin to finish the job Thomas Ludlow failed to do.
And there were days when she believed this mismatched couple was somewhere, maybe the Land of Enchantment, maybe not, delighted that they beat the odds. Not the odds of Cleo’s death, but the odds against finding love, a real love that can sustain you, a love that’s worth giving up everything.
“One of the biggest breaks I ever got as a reporter happened because I got terribly lost, lost in my own hometown . . .”
She had tried to find out if Cleo’s sons were still with their grandmother, but the family had moved not long after Maddie joined the Beacon. To the county, one neighbor said. To the country, another neighbor said. She couldn’t find the mother anywhere and Alice Sherwood, Cleo’s sister, had shut the door in her face the one time she tried to talk to her.
“Of course, we always remember the ones that got away. Every year, I write a certain Baltimore novelist and beg her for an interview. And every year, she sends me a polite refusal.”
Ferdie had ended up rich. Rich and fat, which amazed her. He left the police department and started his own home security business. His timing was good; crime and safety were on everyone’s mind. He made lots of money, married, had three children, and ended up having far more influence over local politics than either Shell Gordon or EZ Taylor ever had. Maddie had seen him once, across a room at a big political fund-raiser where she was shadowing the candidate. Even with an extra fifty pounds on him, he was magnetic. If he had given her so much as a glance, she would have slipped into a back room with him. But his wife kept him close, well aware of her prize. If Maddie could have glimpsed the future, seen what he would become—but no. She was right about herself. She did not want to be anyone’s wife. She loved her life. And she sensed a sadness in Ferdie, over what he never became, never could be. All he’d wanted to be was a detective and Maddie had cost him that.