Spring felt tentative that year, unsure of its welcome. But even on the coolest days, Maddie took to her fire escape to smoke. She had quit two years ago, very easily, when the surgeon general’s report came out, and she had never been a true fiend. Smoking was an ancillary activity for her, something to do with a cup of coffee, or when waiting for Milton in a public place and feeling self-conscious.
Yet recently she had found herself yearning for cigarettes. They soothed her nerves, allowed her to think. Freedom was dizzying, paralyzing. People used the phrase “like a kid in a candy store” to denote crazed pleasure-seeking, but Maddie’s hunch was that most children, after an initial dive into whatever sweet they liked best, wouldn’t know what to do next. Should they focus on quantity or quality? Eat now or commit themselves to gathering as much as possible for later? There was a newish game show, Supermarket Sweep, in which women answered questions about how much things cost, earning their husbands time to “shop,” the point being to grab the priciest things. Even if she were still with Milton, Maddie could not imagine playing such a game, and not just because Milton would refuse to grab the lobster tails on principle. Milton didn’t know what anything at the supermarket cost. For that matter, she had stopped paying attention to prices years ago. Maddie was proud that she had reached a station in life—“a station in life,” the phrase suddenly seemed new to her—where she didn’t have to cut coupons or shop specials. Such thrift had been essential in the early years of their marriage. But it was more fun to have money than not.
She studied the ads under “Help Wanted, Female.” Nurses, cashiers, waitresses, secretaries, office girls. Nothing seemed suitable. But wait—there was one job, a clerical one, at the Star. Would that nice Bob Bauer help her? She had helped him, hadn’t she? He had written a big front-page story about the man who killed Tessie Fine. In the end, the whole thing had seemed strangely anticlimactic, so cut-and-dried. A little girl walks into a store and stamps her feet, and a man simply “snaps.” Ferdie had told Maddie that the detectives didn’t believe the man, that one doesn’t snap, hit someone on the side of the head, then have the presence of mind to drag the victim to the basement to finish the job by breaking her neck. They believed the man had—what was the word Ferdie used? “Proclivities.”
Maddie smiled at the memory. Ferdie liked big words, although he didn’t always use them precisely. But in this case, he was close enough, although it sounded too genteel for such an awful thing. The police didn’t think Stephen Corwin had killed before, but they suspected he had touched other children. He had probably been luckier with his previous victims, working in what was, after all, a very tempting place for a child, and doing things that the children didn’t register as too odd. Guiding a small hand into his trousers, asking for no more than a touch or two. Tessie Fine, self-possessed and confident, probably fought back when he tried something with her. But, so far, they hadn’t been able to find any other child who had visited the pet shop basement and the evidence they had wasn’t going to allow them to pursue the death penalty.
“It’s not like you can go on TV and say, ‘Hey, mamas of Northwest Baltimore, do you think this pervert touched your kid?’ We’ve got women working the schools, making inquiries, talking to ER nurses. But if he was just a toucher—or smart enough to make sure they touched him, without him so much as undoing a hair bow—we’re not going to find anything.”
Maddie had noted the we’re. Ferdie yearned to be a homicide detective. He had charmed a few detectives, treating them as gods on an unreachable Olympus, and they confided in him.
She and Ferdie had been smoking in bed when Ferdie shared that particular confidence about Tessie Fine. Maybe it was Ferdie who had brought cigarettes back into her life, come to think of it. Married to Milton, Maddie had long been past the stage of wanting to talk and gossip when sex was over. But with Ferdie, a smoke break was a way to keep him there a little longer. She didn’t want him to stay all night. (Good thing, because he never did.) But she always wanted him to stay a little longer than he was inclined to. So she asked him questions, teased out more answers about his work. In this way, she had learned a little about his boyhood. Youngest of seven children, played baseball at Poly. But he quickly shut down almost every other line of personal inquiry.
He wanted to be a cipher, Maddie realized. He was going to disappear from her life as suddenly and immediately as he had appeared in it. Sometimes, it seemed to her as if they were like one of those math problems from Seth’s homework: A westbound train leaves Baltimore at 6 p.m., traveling 100 mph, while an eastbound train departs Chicago at 8 p.m. Chicago time, traveling 120 mph. If there are 720 miles between those two cities, when will they pass each other?
What happens if those trains park on a siding for a while? Who will notice, who will know? Will the trains be different when their journeys resume?
Ferdie wanted to move up. He wanted to be a detective, and not in narcotics, as an undercover. The department, segregated for so long, was rumored to be on the verge of changing. There would be opportunities soon.
“You’re good,” she had said. “I’m sure you’ll make it.”
He’d laughed. “It’s not just about being good. They’re going to be plugging people in, try to improve the numbers fast. Being good won’t be enough. I have to be lucky.”
So Ferdie was barreling into Baltimore’s Penn Station at the fastest speed possible, whatever that was. Whereas Maddie was moseying along, unsure of where she wanted to go. Right now, she couldn’t even decide if she wanted to buy some fabric for summer dresses, these gorgeous Marimekko prints she had seen at a boutique. Very cutting-edge for Baltimore, although Jackie Kennedy had been photographed wearing the label’s clothes years ago, early in her husband’s presidency. But the new patterns were bolder, bigger. Maddie had been studying them wistfully at a place called the Store Ltd., at Cross Keys, the new gated community on the North Side, sort of a village within Baltimore. Maddie liked Cross Keys. Maybe she would live there when she and Milton finally settled everything.
The fabric wasn’t the only thing to covet at the Store Ltd. The owner made amazing jewelry. So simple—deft curves of silver, striking shapes, gems used sparingly, if at all. And yet so expensive. This was the future, sleek and streamlined. Looking at that jewelry, Maddie wanted to cut her hair as short as possible, but Ferdie would have objected. Ah well, there would be time enough to cut her hair. And he couldn’t object to her getting her ears pierced, could he?
Sitting on her fire escape, she fingered her lobes, stretched thin from years of heavy clip-ons, some probably valuable. She had left most of her jewelry at the house, in what she believed was a show of good faith. But perhaps that had misled Milton and Seth, perhaps they were angry at her because they believed she would quickly tire of this odd experiment and return to them. She had never meant to leave Seth, of course. She had thought he would want to join this new life, too. Given her experience trying to sell her engagement ring, she wouldn’t bother to see what she could get for those old things. But she wanted to get her ears pierced. She pulled out the yellow pages and found a jeweler up in Pikesville that would do it for the price of the fourteen-karat earrings she would have to wear until her ears healed.
She went straight from Pikesville to the Store, to stare lovingly at the Betty Cooke creations she could not afford. The saleslady, recognizing her from the previous visit, brought out new bolts of Marimekko.
“I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t,” Maddie said. There was a blue floral with black tones, perfect for her coloring. And spring was coming. She took six yards, then found a pattern for a simple halter dress, so simple she probably could have run it up herself if she had a machine. But that, too, was back at Milton’s. She hated to ask him for it. She didn’t want anything from him, except money.