Maddie’s first impression of the newsroom was that it was, well, filthy. Filthy and loud. So many newspapers, piled everywhere. People shouting, typewriters clacking, a bell ringing somewhere. And so many men. But there were women working here, she reminded herself. She had read their bylines, seen their stories. Women could be reporters, too.

Mr. Bauer had a desk in the corner of the room where the Sunday staff worked. Its windows faced south, toward the water, and the view would have been bright and expansive if the windows had not been caked with dust and dirt. Someone had written in the grime: The Star, One of the World’s Newspapers. It took Maddie a moment to get the joke. The Beacon, the more sober morning newspaper, with foreign bureaus and a large staff in Washington, called itself “One of the World’s Best Newspapers.”

“I’m surprised to see you here,” he said, leaning back in his chair. He seemed different at first and Maddie realized the man she had met had been playing a part of sorts. Pretending interest in her, pretending empathy, pretending whatever he needed to pretend to get what he wanted. Now he didn’t need anything from her—or so he thought.

“I want a job here.”

He smiled. “I’m not the editor, Ms. Schwartz. I don’t do the hiring. If I did, I’m not sure I’d stump for a woman with no experience.”

“But you can help me.”

“Maybe. Only why would I? This is a serious place, for serious people. You just don’t walk in off the street and start doing it.”

“I helped you get”—she debated with herself whether to use the word, whether it would make her sound ridiculous. “I helped you get a scoop.”

Another smile. Yet it didn’t cow her. She did not feel ridiculous. She knew what she had, in her purse.

“You deflected me. You were lucky that the deflection worked.”

“I offered you something better than what you were seeking. I wouldn’t call that deflection.”

“And now you think you want to work at the newspaper? What could you possibly bring to this job?”

She pulled out a sheaf of papers, tied with string. “These are letters. From Stephen Corwin. I wrote him about the murder of Tessie Fine and he wrote me back. Twice.”

The room did not go quiet—it was a place that was never quiet, Maddie sensed. But something shifted. Other people were listening to them now, or trying to. Perhaps Mr. Bauer noticed as well because he said: “Take a walk with me.”

She assumed he meant outside, but he took her to the corridor, then down a back staircase. “May I see them?”

“I’ll show you the first one,” she said.

Mr. Bauer could read very quickly. “So what?” he said. “He doesn’t admit anything. He just repeats this cockamamie story that the girl came back and he was gone. No one believes it.”

“I don’t either,” Maddie says. “But there’s a detail that suggests he has an accomplice.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve heard of reading between the lines, but you’ve all but moved in between them and built a house. That’s a lot to infer. So he made up a story about someone else doing it. How do you get accomplice from that?”

“Not from there,” Maddie said. “Go back to the earlier part of the letter, about how he fought with his mother that day.”

“That drivel with the eggs. Not even I could make it interesting.”

“No, the part about how he walked to work.”

“Right. So?”

“Tessie Fine’s body was found almost two miles from the pet shop. How did it get there? Whose car did he use? I went back and read all the articles about him at the Enoch Pratt.” How purposeful she had felt, going to the central branch, just steps from her front door, and requesting the long wooden rods of the daily newspapers. She had seldom used the Pratt. It felt castle-like compared to the modern blandness that was the Randallstown branch where she had checked out popular novels.

“He probably hid the body overnight, took it out the next day.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he realized that he slipped, telling that part, which suggests there’s an accomplice, or someone with knowledge of what he’s done. That’s why he wrote me the second letter, about his time at Fort Detrick.”

“What about it?”

“Stephen Corwin was drafted five years ago. He claimed conscientious objector status as a Seventh-Day Adventist. He was sent to Fort Detrick and was part of an experiment known as Operation Whitecoat.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Mr. Bauer said. “The army doesn’t run tests that turn men into killers of little girls.”

“It sounds ridiculous to me, too,” Maddie said. “As if he’s grasping at straws. But it’s interesting, isn’t it? Something that hasn’t been published yet. I’d like to write the account of our correspondence.”

“Won’t that expose you to all the things you feared when I first visited you? Revelations about your personal life? Embarrassment to your son?”

“Not if it’s under my name. If I’m the author.”

He needed a few seconds to process what she was requesting. “Byline,” he said. “You want a byline. You want us to hire you and then your first piece will be this page one scoop. But that’s not how it works, Lois Lane. What are you going to do, insert yourself into every big murder? Dress up like a wino and go out and find the Tic-Tac-Toe Killer who’s terrorizing Baltimore’s drunks? Find the guy on the grassy knoll? That’s not reporting. That makes you more like a stuntwoman, some second-rate Nellie Bly.”

Another mask had slipped. She had offended him. And Maddie, whose instincts for what men need were unerring, knew immediately how to make it right.

“Would it be so wrong if I wrote this, with your help, and that would be my tryout? I’m happy to start at the bottom, to work my way up. I’m not asking for special treatment.”

“Oh, Maddie, newspaper work coarsens women. You should see the battle-axe who covers labor.”

“I’d like to think that, whatever I do, I’ll always be a woman first.”

“I bet you will,” he said. “Look, this would be easier if I could have the letters, show them to my bosses—”

She slipped the one back into her purse. “I don’t actually have the second one with me. I came here first. I came to you first. But there are two other newspapers in town, the Beacon and the Light. Maybe I should visit them, see what they offer.”

Two days later—two days of sitting by Mr. Bauer’s side, sometimes typing, sometimes talking, letting him rewrite her, but also insisting, at certain moments, on having her way with the words that were forming on the copy paper in his cantankerous typewriter—Maddie’s piece appeared on the front page. a killer unburdens himself. Mr. Bauer had the byline, but her name appeared in italicized print: Based on a correspondence with Madeline Schwartz, part of the search party that discovered Tessie Fine’s body.

Her correspondence was woven into a larger story, augmented by Mr. Bauer’s reporting. An army spokesman said staunchly that the “treatments” Stephen Corwin had been subjected to would not, could not, induce psychosis. His mother said Stephen was an unhappy person and had always been a disappointment to her, that everything he said was a lie, even the story about the eggs. He had shifty friends, men of whom she did not approve.

Finally, his attorney tried to subpoena Maddie, only to be told that her notes were protected by Maryland’s shield law because she was a contractual employee at the Star. And if the newspaper’s lawyer implied that contract predated her correspondence with Corwin, as opposed to being drawn up hastily in the wake of the request, he never said as much in so many words and the inexperienced public defender gave up that line of attack, deciding to focus on the idea that Corwin wasn’t competent to stand trial.

The story was a sensation, dominating the news for several days. In part, Maddie was the story—attractive not-quite-divorcée tricks kid-killer into revealing he had an accomplice—but she never lost sight of the fact that she had made the story and, with Mr. Bauer’s help, written the story. After all, although she had the good sense not to mention it to Mr. Bauer or anyone else at the Star, she had once yearned to write poetry and fiction, had worked at the high school newspaper. Which was where she had met Allan Durst, which had indirectly almost destroyed her life.

Now, perhaps, writing would indirectly help her reinvent her life.

Maddie’s reward for her scoop was a job as an assistant to the man who ran the Star’s “Helpline” column, Don Heath, who was highly skeptical. “I’ve never had an assistant, why do they think I need an assistant all of a sudden,” Mr. Heath fretted. “I guess you can open the mail. When you get the hang of things, I’ll let you tackle some of the easier questions, the ones we don’t write up for the paper.”