Lady in the Lake(88)
Did I tell you everything? No. I wasn’t about to trust you with my secrets, Maddie Schwartz. Who could blame me? You were careless with my life and my death. Thank God you found another dead girl to pursue. I’m happy, I got what I wanted.
I saw you once, Maddie Schwartz, before any of this began. You had a man you didn’t want. I ended up wanting a man everyone said I could never have. I saw you, saw you seeing me seeing you. It’s like that joke you tell when you’re a kid: I’m painting a picture of myself painting a picture of myself painting a picture of myself. The picture goes on and on, the words go on and on, until they make no sense, until the picture is so tiny that you can’t see anything at all.
Author’s Note
When I started this book in February 2017, I had no idea that it was going to become a newspaper novel; in some ways, Maddie Schwartz surprised me as much as she surprised her longtime husband. I had no desire to write a newspaper novel, but I soon found myself caught up in trying to imagine and re-create the world my father had known when he took a job in 1965 at what was then called the Sun. Many, many colleagues, his and mine, helped me with this. They include: G. Jefferson Price III, David Michael Ettlin, and Joan Jacobson.
The book’s small details are largely factual, except when they’re not. The two murders at its center are clearly inspired
by two cases from 1969, but my versions are not steeped in fact, although I am eternally grateful to Jonathan Hayes for helping me with the theoretical postmortem on “the lady of the lake.” The gubernatorial race in Maryland in 1966 is represented accurately, down to the weather on the day after the primary, a detail gleaned from Time magazine. Two real-life people—Violet Wilson Whyte (Lady Law) and Paul Blair, the Orioles center fielder—“speak” in these pages; I read interviews with them and, in the case of Blair, watched videos, hoping to approximate their real voices. I could never establish that Whyte had, in fact, appeared on To Tell the Truth, but I heeded the age-old advice from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: print the legend.
The first draft of this book was submitted on June 27, 2018. The next day, I headed to my mother’s home on the Delaware shore with my young daughter, stopping about an hour into the trip to tell her we had eaten lunch and should be there within the next two hours. She asked me if I had run into traffic near Annapolis. No, I said, why would I? “There was a shooting.” When I learned that it was at the newspaper, I knew it was all too likely that my friend Rob Hiaasen was one of the victims. So while I usually take time here to thank everyone who helped me, I hope my friends and the people in my publishing life will understand that I want this book to end with a roll call of names of people who died that day. This one is for Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith, and Wendi Winters, and their loved ones.
About the Author
Since LAURA LIPPMAN’s debut in 1997, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and was named one of the “essential” crime
writers of the last hundred years. Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and have been translated into
more than twenty languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her family.
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