Because the weather was mild, I chose leopard-print slacks, a lightweight red car coat, and an emerald-green blouse beneath it, 100 percent silk. The combination bothered me because it was too Christmas-y, but there was a man waiting for me, telling me not to dawdle. Time was a-wasting. A scarf tied snug over the hair, straightened just the day before. No jewelry.
The clothes were all gifts from my man, but that doesn’t tell you the whole story. Any man can buy a woman a dress, a coat, a scarf. My man was much more cunning. He had to bide his time, then pounce on opportunities that presented themselves. Just like he had pounced on me the second he saw me. Occasionally, alterations were required. He did them himself. He knew my body that well. The idea of him bent over a sewing machine, tailoring those clothes to my frame—let’s just say that when I think of that, I know he loved me and I loved him for loving me. He was a king and I could have been his queen, a better one than the one that was forced on him, the one everyone said he had to keep if he wanted to expand his kingdom. I had read a lot of books about Henry VIII and his wives. Anne Boleyn was my favorite. I was, in a sense, trying to play her game, although the rules were a little different in 1965 than they were in 1500-whatever.
And the game was so much bigger than I knew. Bigger than me, bigger than him, bigger than all of us.
June 1966
June 1966
A woman in a pink housecoat opened the door when Maddie rang the bell at the psychic’s. Madame Claire has a cold, Maddie thought, proud of herself for the literary allusion, then annoyed that she could no longer remember the name of the psychic in The Waste Land.
The woman in the pink housecoat had a husky, almost froggy voice, but she did not appear to have so much as a sniffle. Even if she did, it was more likely to be allergies than a head cold on this balmy June day.
Maddie had waited until after work to take the bus to Madame Claire’s “studio,” an apartment carved out of the ground floor of a grand old house in Reservoir Hill. Much to her surprise and shame, she had been scolded for the two-hour trip to the morgue, although her work had been done and she had those 4.5 hours of comp time. There was a difference, Maddie was realizing, between being told that she had permission to work on a story and actually working on it. She owed the newspaper eight hours every day. She was good at what she did, efficient and smart. She could do eight hours of work in six. But the time she saved was not hers. Like the miner in the song “Sixteen Tons,” she owed, if not her soul, her time to the company store.
When she was a housewife, her speed and her efficiency had accrued to her. She had been her own boss, although she let Milton think certain decisions were his. It was odd, being made to answer to men who were not her husband. It made her feel sullen and rebellious, not unlike Seth. I did my work, she wanted to say. Whose business is it if I take a long lunch to look into the Cleo Sherwood case? She knew better than to argue, however.
And now she had ridden a bus to a part of the city she wouldn’t have dared to drive through not that long ago. If she took a taxi home, would she be allowed to expense the fare? She doubted it. Besides, there were no taxis here.
At least the days were getting longer and it would probably still be light when she left Madame Claire, whose apartment happened to be within walking distance of Milton’s synagogue. It wouldn’t be there long. Chizuk Amuno had announced that the temple would be leaving the neighborhood for the suburbs in the coming year. After all, that was where their congregants lived. Where the Jews are. In her head, on the bus, Maddie had made that into a song to the tune of “Where the Boys Are.” Where the Jews are / No one waits for me.
Not even a year ago, she had avoided downtown Baltimore, venturing there only for the occasional symphony performance, or dinner at Tio Pepe’s or the Prime Rib. She had thought it dirty and dangerous. She wasn’t wrong. Yet working at the Star, with its proximity to the raucous bars along the harbor, being able to walk to the grand department stores on Howard Street—she felt herself falling in love. Not with the city so much as the possibility of a new start, at an age when she had thought her life would basically be over.
As a child, she used to do the math: Born in 1928, she would be twenty-two at midcentury, seventy-two at the dawn of the twenty-first. She had assumed she would not change, that adulthood was static. Her younger self was not wrong: Maddie’s life had been set by the time she was twenty-five. The house they bought that year, their second in Pikesville, might as well have been a mausoleum. An elegant, well-appointed mausoleum, but still a mausoleum. Seth was the only true living thing in that house and he was about to leave. She imagined his departure like a fairy tale, or an episode of The Twilight Zone. (A program she didn’t really care for, but a favorite of Milton’s, so they watched it all the time.) The landscape of their lives would be sere, dead. The emptiness would be revealed.
Did Madame Claire—oh, Claire for clairvoyant, too clever by half—intuit any of this as Maddie stood on her doorstep? Maddie didn’t believe in psychic powers, but something in the woman’s fearsome gaze suggested she could read Maddie’s mind if she so desired.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“I assumed you would know I was coming,” Maddie said, and immediately regretted it. Why would she use Diller’s joke? It wasn’t going to endear her to the woman.
“My gift is not always on,” Madame Claire said. “It affords me respite as needed. It can be exhausting, my gift.” A significant pause. “When I use it, I expect to be paid.”
Maddie thought about her purse, the few bills she had with her, her wan hope of taking a taxi home.
“I’m not here as a client. I’m from the Star. I want to ask you a few questions about the reading you did when Cleo Sherwood was missing.”
“Questions inevitably engage the gift.”
“Would three dollars be enough?”
“Let me see the bills.” She took them from Maddie and literally sniffed them.
They must have been found acceptable, because she took Maddie into what had once been the house’s front parlor. The windows facing the street were draped with shiny red material that hoped to pass for satin, but Maddie could tell that it was a cheap imitation. There was a crystal ball, a deck of regular playing cards. Madame Claire ignored those, asking Maddie to sit opposite her and place her hands, palms up, on the table. She then put her own palms on top, her fingers reaching to Maddie’s wrists. She could have taken Maddie’s racing pulse if she desired. But she didn’t. She didn’t do anything.
“So Cleo Sherwood’s parents came to you?” Maddie asked, breaking the uneasy silence.
“The mother, not the father. The father believes what I do is the work of the devil.” Frowning. “He is a very ignorant man.”
“What did you see?”
“I held an object that her mother believed had great meaning to Cleo.”
“An object?” This was new.
“An ermine stole.” Her voice caressed the word, drew it out. “A very fine piece of clothing.”
“How did Cleo come to have a fur?”
The psychic’s look was disdainful. Of course. How did any young, single woman come to have a fur?
“I know what you told the Afro. It doesn’t seem to have been”—Maddie had to tread carefully—“it didn’t match up with where she was found. Maybe the green, because of the park or her blouse. But not the yellow. Was it from earlier in the evening? This color yellow that you saw?”
Madame Claire nodded. “Yes. I was seeing something from earlier. I think she must have been in a yellow room. Yellow was the last thing she saw.”
“You mean—she was killed elsewhere?” Maddie thought back to the morgue, the medical examiner’s scenarios. A dead body is heavy. It would be impossible for a man, even a strong one, to heave it up and into the fountain.
“Yellow is the last thing she saw,” Madame Claire repeated.
Maddie could not believe she had squandered time and money for so little. The detail about the stole was new, but it wasn’t enough to make an article. “Do you see anything else?”
She closed her eyes and kept them closed for so long that Maddie began to wonder if she had fallen asleep. Then her eyes flew open with what was clearly practiced flair. “A secret.”
“Cleo Sherwood had a secret?”
“No, I think it’s yours.”
Maddie had to will herself not to snatch her hands back from Madame Claire’s rough ones.
“Everyone has secrets,” she said.
“Yes, they do. But you have one that’s been causing you distress. It’s like a tiny pebble in your shoe, yet you keep walking. All you have to do is stop, shake it out, and you’ll feel better. But you don’t want to. I wonder why that is. It’s not a big secret, yet you don’t want anyone to know.”
Did Madame Claire mean Ferdie, who had just flashed through her mind? Don’t be silly, she scolded herself. The woman is a fraud. This is all hokum. “Maybe it’s not my secret to tell. Or not mine alone.”