Lady in the Lake
Cylburn Arboretum. It wasn’t that far from where Tessie Fine had last been seen, no more than a mile, a bit of wildness in the heart of the city. If one were to dump a body somewhere—
She’d checked the clock. Maybe she should go help look for Tessie Fine. Not doing something just because her mother had suggested it was sullen, the kind of behavior one would expect from an adolescent. Maddie would call that girl, the one from the jewelry store, and ask her to go along. She didn’t know why she wanted a companion, but it seemed more respectable somehow.
Judith, clearly excited to hear from Maddie, had said her brother would let her leave work given the gravity of the mission. They’d taken buses to the synagogue parking lot, arriving just as the volunteers were about to set out.
“Men only,” said the synagogue president, who had organized the search parties.
“That’s ridiculous,” Maddie said.
“This is no job for women.” He looked at their clothes, as if he could eliminate them on that basis alone, but their shoes were sensible, their coats suitable to combing alleys and vacant lots.
“Then we’ll do our own search,” Maddie said. “It’s not as if we need your permission to walk around Baltimore.”
The arboretum was farther down Northern Parkway than she recalled, the grounds larger and more heavily wooded. The day, which had started with promises of spring, had aged into something raw and punishing. They walked the trails systematically, aware that they needed to leave by five, the closing time during winter. The trails went deep, all the way down to Cylburn Avenue. With their deadline approaching, Maddie said to Judith: “Let’s walk this last one all the way to the fence.”
Later, when she was asked, How did you think to look there? Maddie would be nonplussed. She couldn’t say, I remembered parking there with all the boys I dated, much less, I tried to get my future husband to make love to me there, but he wanted to wait because he thought I was a virgin.
So she would say: Just a hunch.
On that hunch, they walked down the final trail, to the fence line along the avenue. The land dipped here, creating a gully. The fence was broken, torn open, but you couldn’t see the bottom of the gully from the street, you had to be on the hill, above it, to see what Maddie saw.
She caught a glimpse of something shiny, too shiny, in the gray-green wintry underbrush. It was a bright silver crescent on the heel of a shoe. The shoe was attached to a leg, the leg to the body, the body to a head, a face. A face that was too composed, too still. No child’s face was ever this still.
With her loden-green coat and brown tights, Tessie Fine had almost disappeared into the landscape. But her red tresses flamed like out-of-season wildflowers, and her shoes shined on, catching the last rays of light.
The Patrolman
The Patrolman
When the call comes in, my first thought is, Thank God, I don’t have to go to Burger Chef. Every night, my partner, Paul, and I argue about dinner and he won tonight. I prefer Gino’s. Maybe that sounds callous, thinking about dinner when a call comes in about a body, maybe the body that everyone’s looking for, but you have to understand I’m thinking it’s going to be a big fat nothing. In fact, somehow I get it in my head that they are teenagers, a boy and a girl, doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. They looked at the clock, realized they were supposed to be home for supper, had no shot, so they had to have a reason.
At any rate, we’re on Northern Parkway, headed west, the closest patrol to the arboretum, so we take the call. Usually, the place would be closed by now, but the staff stayed and kept the gates open.
The first thing I notice is that the couple aren’t boy-girl and they aren’t teenagers. It’s two women, one in her twenties and one in her thirties, clearly not related. And although the older one has at least ten years on me, she’s the looker of the two. The younger one is presentable, don’t get me wrong, with shiny hair and a nice face. But the older one has dark hair and light eyes and a tiny waist—she’s wearing a trench coat, belted tight—and it’s hard not to think, Wow. I’m married and I don’t whore around like some of my colleagues, but I’m not blind.
Still, I don’t believe they’ve found the girl, especially when they lead us out and around the arboretum, down to Cylburn Avenue. It’s not a busy street, but it gets enough traffic so that someone, somehow, would have spotted a body over the past two days. We leave the patrol car in the parking lot and walk, two by two, like the worst double date ever. I’m next to the dark-haired one, who’s leading the way.
She’s been crying. “I have a son,” she says. “A teenager.” I tell her that I haven’t been married long enough to have any kids, which is more or less true. I’ve been married three years and we’ve had two miscarriages. The doctor says there’s no reason we won’t have healthy kids one day. Sons, I hope, to follow me into the line of duty. My father was a police and I’m a police. My grandfather arrived from Poland in 1912 and his English was never really that good, or else he might have been a police, too. People today are always talking about prejudice and stuff, like the rest of us never knew it. When my family came to America, to Baltimore, the Irish ran it and they took care of their own. Then the Italians ran it and they took care of their own. Then us bohunks finally got a turn. On and on, that’s the way things have always been and always will be. You just have to wait your turn.
I ask what her husband does and she starts as if the question surprised her, but if you have a kid, you have a husband, right? She says: “Attorney,” then adds quickly: “Not crime. Civil. Real estate law.”
“I bet he makes a good living,” I say, just to say something. The night is so quiet. You can hear the traffic noises not far away—Northern Parkway, the steady swish of cars on the new expressway, the Jones Falls, visible through the trees this time of year—yet it still feels hushed, like church. We keep our voices low out of respect.
Speaking only for myself—I don’t know what goes on in Paul’s head most of the time, if anything, other than a desire to eat at Burger Chef and chase tramps—I want these women to be wrong. Not because it will make for a late night. We’ve just come on, we have nothing better to do. But I don’t want anything to do with a dead kid. It feels like bad luck. Two miscarriages, that’s enough death for me. I wonder sometimes if the miscarriages are a punishment, but for what? I’m a good man. I had some wildness when I was younger, which is natural and right. In a man. My wife, Sophia, is six years younger than me, very pure. She deserves to have her babies. If God feels He needs to punish me for some reason, that’s one thing, but Sophia doesn’t deserve that. And if He would just give us children, we would raise such good citizens, boys who would follow me into the department and girls who would learn to make all the wonderful things Sophia can make, cabbage rolls and brisket and pierogies.
We reach Cylburn Avenue, and at first, it looks as if I’m going to get my wish. There’s no body to be seen.
“Where is—?” The dark-haired one frets. “I thought she was right here.” The younger one, she’s barely spoken up ’til now, Paul has been nattering to her all the way down the hill. He’s single, technically, has a pretty steady girl, although I guess that isn’t my business. Before marriage, whatever you do, that’s your own business.
The younger one says: “No, go a little farther.” Night has fallen, thick and fast, and we get out our flashlights. I’m trying to make them feel better: “You’d be surprised how often people make this kind of mistake”—and then Paul’s light catches a flash of something and there she is. Tessie Fine, her neck snapped like a chicken’s. You don’t need to be a coroner to figure that out.
We call it in. Paul offers to walk the women back up to the arboretum parking lot, but they say they don’t have a car up there, they walked here from the synagogue.
“We can call you a cab,” I say.
The older one protests. “No, no. I—I have to stay. I’m a mother. If something happened to my boy and another mother found him, I’d want her to stay.” I don’t get this, but I have to respect it. I bet Sophia would do the same.