I swear I have never done anything like that in my life. It was not a plan. Okay, yes, it was a plan to sit next to her. I have my choice of seats, after all. The theater isn’t crowded and I usually don’t like to be that close to the screen. It hurts my neck, my eyes. But I see her go in with the couple, almost like their chaperone, then leave them to the back row as she moves down front. I follow, sitting across the aisle, then moving next to her after the cartoon, just as the feature begins.

I am—I don’t want to tell you what I do. I’m respectable, trust me on that. I am a good man, a good provider. Yes, I am married, but my wife is cold to me. She has always been cold to me. I don’t think she likes me. I ask her sometimes, “Do you like me?” and she says, “I love you,” as if that’s better, as if that should be enough. But it’s not. I need her to like me, too, to laugh at my jokes, to seem less put-upon by my general existence. When I come home at the end of the day, my wife seems to find my very presence in the house an imposition. A nice house, that I pay for. It reminds me of the old myth, Cupid and Psyche, only she can’t be bothered to try to steal a look at me as I sleep. She’d be fine, being married to the monster, as long as he brought home a paycheck.

So, sometimes, I tell her I have to work late and I go to the movies or stop in somewhere for a drink. But you have to believe me: I have never, ever done anything like what I do tonight. And what I do, is it really that big a deal? I touch a leg, a knee, outside her clothes. Her skirt is short, which is why I make contact with her actual knee. I’m not planning to touch her, I’m not, but then something happens to her breathing. It slows, almost in invitation. It seems sensual to me, although the scene playing out in front of us is not particularly romantic. She smells so good, not of perfume, but of something more organic, some innate essence that is better than perfume or shampoo or soap. It’s like walking past a flowering shrub in a neighbor’s yard, just over the fence, but maybe a few blossoms are trying to escape. First, you want nothing but to smell it. You lean forward, inhale. It’s impossible not to touch it, rub your finger along one silky, velvety petal, release pollen into the air. Then, if the neighbor doesn’t come, you cross the line, you actually pluck it and take it with you. Hasn’t everyone done this?

I don’t go that far. I touch her knee. A friendly touch, a glancing touch, possibly accidental. I wait. For a moment, it seems as if she’s considering touching me back. I can feel her thoughts, the way she weighs her options. She puts my hand back in my own lap, but gently, sweetly even.

And then she begins screaming her head off.

Luckily, I know the neighborhood, know the theater. I run out of the fire exit, near the screen, which lets off into an alley. Once outside, I’m too cagey to keep running. They will be looking for someone who is trying to get away. I take out a cigarette, my hands shaking just a little, and light it, leaning against the rear of the Chinese restaurant next door, inhaling more grease than nicotine. I see a man come out, two women behind him, watch them look up and down the alley. I look straight at them, smoking as nonchalantly as possible.

They walk toward the street, but they’re less urgent now, not so much looking for the perpetrator but trying to comfort the woman, the couple bookending her, taking her arms as if she’s an invalid. I want to yell after them, All I did was touch her knee.

I go home. My wife is sitting at the kitchen table, working the Jumble. A kids’ game and it takes her almost twenty minutes to do it.

“How was work,” she says, not looking up, not even letting her tone go up. It’s not a question. It’s just something you’re supposed to say when your husband comes home. She has less affect in her voice than the robot maid on The Jetsons.

“Okay.” Her pencil scratches away. She uses a pencil on the Jumble. I do the New York Times double acrostic in ink.

“Sheila, do you like me?”

She sighs. “This again. What are you, the road show of Fiddler on the Roof? How many times do I have to tell you: I love you.”

“I asked if you liked me.”

“Love is better.”

Is it? Is it? Four years ago, I met a woman at a dance. She didn’t talk much, which made her seem mysterious and alluring. She was as cagey with her body, her kisses and affections, as she was with her words. I projected so much on those silences, those resistances. Still waters run deep, et cetera et cetera. We were married within three months.

Turns out that even if still waters run deep, there’s no current, they can’t take you anywhere. All they do, eventually, is close over your head.

June 1966

June 1966

When Maddie turned on the street where Cleo Sherwood’s parents lived, she realized the block was one she knew. This strip of Auchentoroly Terrace was not only near the synagogue and the old Schwartz grocery store, it was also along the route that the Schwartzes used to take to downtown restaurants and the theater. Milton liked to go a few blocks out of his way to drive down this street. He had this odd habit, her not-yet-ex-husband, a tendency that Maddie privately dubbed Milton’s Memory Lane. He was forever checking in with his past, showing Seth its landmarks over and over again. The house, the grocery, his schoolyard. Nostalgia was not the point. Milton wanted to remind Seth, and possibly Maddie, that Milton’s young life had been one of hard work and deprivation, that he was self-made.

“Are these people poor?” Seth had asked when he was seven or eight. It would have been summertime, hot, with people hanging on their porches, kids running up and down the street, maybe even jumping in the spray of an open fire hydrant.

“Yes,” Milton would say. “But no poorer than my family was.”

This late June afternoon was not particularly hot. Not outside at least. But the air in the stairway up to the Sherwoods’ second-floor apartment was heavy and stale, the smell of grease so thick that Maddie felt grimy for ascending through it.

Or maybe the oily sensation on her skin was her own sense of shame, for coming to see the parents of a dead woman, unannounced, and for the questions that she planned to ask them.

Not that she could have called ahead even if she wanted. There was no phone listed for the Sherwood family. But Maddie was learning not to ask for permission. Permission could be denied, whereas if one acted as if one had a right to be somewhere, that very pretense of self-assurance might carry the day. Wasn’t that what Mr. Bauer had done to her, not that long ago, although it seemed like years since she had been as naive as that Maddie Schwartz?

She knocked on the door, brisk and ready: “Hello, I’m Madeline Schwartz of the Star and I’m here to ask you some questions about Cleo Sherwood.”

A younger woman—Cleo’s sister?—had answered the door. Even as she turned her head to look back at someone, Maddie simply walked in. Again, she was done waiting for permission. A man, presumably Cleo’s father, sat in an easy chair near the front windows, reading the newspaper. The Star, Maddie noticed. Her newspaper. He did not look up or acknowledge her in any way.

At his feet, two children, boys, were playing with toy trucks on the rug. They must have been Cleo’s boys, although they barely looked like brothers. The older one, perhaps four or five, was thick—not fat, but stocky and strong looking, with a capacity for immense concentration. He pushed his yellow truck across the carpet, absorbed in his own game. The younger one looked remarkably like Cleo in the one photograph Maddie had seen in the Afro’s clippings. He had her pale eyes, delicate features, and a dreamy, self-contained quality.

Mrs. Sherwood came from the kitchen, her tread heavy, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. She did not extend her hand to shake, however. “Is there news?” she asked.

“No, there’s no news,” Maddie said. “But I want to write about Cleo in hopes that my story will unearth something, jog someone’s memory and help us find her killer. It would not have been easy”—her glance shifted to the boys and back—“it would have attracted attention, I think, whatever happened at the lake that night. An article might make someone reflect on things that didn’t seem important at the time.”

That was not her real mission today, but she knew enough not to go straight to her harder questions.

“The Afro wrote plenty about Eunetta before,” Mrs. Sherwood said. “No one cared then, so why would anyone care now?”

“I think lots of people care,” Maddie said. She disliked lying, but it wasn’t that much of a lie. If the killer were found, especially if it happened because she refused to let go, then people would care, she was sure of it. “I just—is there anything I should know? I was very struck by one detail the psychic shared with me. Madame Claire?”

“Her. She didn’t help us much.”

“The colors yellow and green didn’t mean anything to you?”

“No, ma’am.”

It was odd, being called ma’am by a woman who was clearly older. But it meant that Maddie had somehow persuaded the Sherwoods that she had authority. Was it the newspaper? Or her whiteness?

“I was struck by the fact that you brought her a fur stole. Is that correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Who gave that stole to—Eunetta?” She had not missed the mother’s use of her daughter’s given name, the implicit rebuke.

“I’m sure I don’t know.”