“It’s not the way we do business around here. It was sloppy, it was amateurish, it was—”

“What are you implying, Mr. Diller?” Maddie was investing so much willpower into not crying that her voice screeched a little.

“You don’t know what you’re doing. You got lucky this time, going with a one-source story—and that source at that. Stay away from the cop shop.”

“You knew I was trying to write about Cleo Sherwood. And you didn’t mind when I filed the story on ‘Lady Law.’ That was fine by you.”

“Because it was barely a story. It was press-release pap.”

“I’m just trying to become a reporter. Is that so wrong?”

When Diller left, muttering all the way, the city editor sighed. “It was a good story, Maddie. But I don’t want you to pin your hopes on a reporting job. It’s a young person’s game. If we were to hire a rookie, I’d want it to be someone with a long future ahead of him.”

Him.

Now, in the bathroom, she stared at her own reflection, ashen in the mirror. If Diller really did know the identity of her source, what would that mean for her, for Ferdie? Would he get in trouble? She wished she could call him, be comforted. But she could never call him. She didn’t have his number, didn’t know where he lived. If she wanted to find Ferdie, her only hope was to head up to Northwest and walk down the street, screaming her head off, which was how she had found him nine months ago. Otherwise, she waited for him to come to her.

She decided to take a walk up to the New Orleans Diner, grab a coffee before closing. She sat at the counter while the waitress she remembered from her lunch there with Bob Bauer leaned on her elbows, reading the newspaper. Reading Maddie’s story.

“I wrote that,” she said. Technically untrue; the rewrite, Ettlin, had written it from her notes. But she couldn’t help herself.

“So you’re”—the waitress looked from the byline to Maddie, back to the byline—“Madeline Schwartz?”

“Yes.”

“I knew her. Cleo. Back at Werner’s.” She seemed at once shy and excited. Maddie noticed for the first time how young she was, younger than Maddie, with freckles on her nose and the bit of chest she let show in her pink uniform.

“What was she like?”

The waitress took so long to answer that Maddie assumed she hadn’t been heard. But then: “Hungry. She wanted things. She just didn’t know what they were.”

Tell me about it, Maddie thought. Except—she knew what she wanted. She was going to be a reporter. Not just any reporter. She was going to be like Bob Bauer one day. A columnist, someone who got to pick and choose her stories.

Oh, it wouldn’t be the same. It would be harder. And while she could see the goal, shining, shimmering, she couldn’t see the path. It seemed ridiculous. She had just been told she couldn’t even be the night cop reporter, that the paper would never hire her. And yet—she was not unlike Cleo Sherwood. If she really wanted something, she got it. She had wanted Allan Durst, had seduced him as much as he had seduced her. She had wanted Milton, the cloak of respectability he promised when Durst left her, deflowered and almost ruined. She had wanted to have a child. Then she had wanted her freedom. Thirty-seven might have been old or late to do such things, but it was not impossible. After all, there was . . . well, Grandma Moses. Oh lord, there must be someone other than Grandma Moses.

When she returned to the newsroom, the fifth floor had that extra charge, unusual with the final deadline past. “What’s happening?” she asked one of the copyboys.

“Shooting at the courthouse,” he said. “At the arraignment for that guy who confessed to the Lady in the Lake killing.”

She had used that phrase this morning, in her story, and now here it was, set, immortalized. Maddie had sincerely forgotten that she had stolen it from the medical examiner.

“What happened?”

“Guy took a shot at him when they took him out of the wagon at the side entrance.”

“Is he dead?” She felt a weird throb of sympathy for the man who had walked her to her car, had compared Cleo Sherwood to a poem.

Then she remembered he had killed her.

“In surgery at Mercy. No condition report yet.”

“And who shot him?”

“Cleo Sherwood’s father.”

Maddie didn’t even bother to ask. She grabbed a notebook and went to Auchentoroly Terrace. There, a stunned Mrs. Sherwood let her inside, sobbing. In the span of less than twelve hours, she had seen her daughter’s death resolved, only to have her husband make this ill-conceived stab at vengeance. Her daughter was dead and now her husband was going to be in jail, possibly for murder.

Maddie approached Cal Weeks about eight p.m., knowing he would have eaten dinner by then.

“Has anyone talked to the mother?”

“The who?”

“Merva Sherwood. She was the mother of Cleo Sherwood.” Cal looked confused. “Her husband—Cleo’s father—was arrested for trying to shoot Cleo’s killer today.” She added: “Her parents preferred to call her by her given name, Eunetta.”

“No one was home by the time a reporter got there. They’re probably in hiding at a relative’s.”

“I talked to her. I had been to the apartment before—on my own time. I was so interested in Cleo’s death. I just kept thinking there had to be an answer. And now, I guess, there is.”

“Did you take notes?”

“Yes.”

“Feed ’em to rewrite.”

“But I’m right here and the first deadline isn’t until—”

“Feed ’em to rewrite. Don’t worry, you’ll get a trib line.”

“I’m not worried about that. I told her mother I would write the story. If you want my notes, you have to let me write it.”

While she could not put everything she knew about Cleo Sherwood in the paper, she could tell the story of her mother. Of a woman who had lost a daughter and would now lose a husband. A woman who had a closet full of beautiful clothes and had no idea how her child had come to own them. She could tell about the psychic, the still-baffling visions of green and yellow. The waitress who knew her back at Werner’s. They had to cut quite a bit—“It’s only a sidebar, for Christ’s sake”—but she fought to keep the detail about all those altered clothes, hung on the paper-shrouded wire hangers from EZ Kleeners. She wanted Ezekiel Taylor to know that someone knew his secrets.

September 1966

September 1966

No matter how hot the weather—and it was very hot in 1966—September will always be the beginning of fall and fall will always be the true start of the year. Maddie’s mother assumed her prodigal daughter would return to the Morgenstern household for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Maddie remembered, wryly, how she had struggled for years to wrest the holiday dinners from her mother, how insistent she had been on creating her own traditions, how she had scandalized her mother with her recipe for haroset at last year’s Passover, made with figs and dates. It all seemed so trivial now.

The primary fell two days before Rosh Hashanah and Maddie volunteered to take results. It was an inglorious job, but no more inglorious than the job she continued to do every day, despite her “scoop” on the Sherwood story. She typed the vote tallies in the city legislative districts, her swift fingers stopping for a second when it came time to enter the numbers for the senate seat in the Fourth District. A newcomer, Clarence Mitchell III, was the top vote-getter, but Verda Welcome was second. Ezekiel Taylor was a distant fourth.

How silly she had been to think that any of this had anything to do with Cleo. Hindsight, they called it. Well, in hindsight, Maddie saw the world for what it was, where women belonged in it. Men were entitled to have their girls on the side, as long as they were discreet. Men, some men, felt entitled to kill the women who did not return their affections. Cleo Sherwood did not matter enough; she could not have swayed this election. She had never mattered at all.

Here was Ezekiel Taylor, his reputation intact, his campaign underwritten by Shell Gordon’s dirty money. How silly Maddie had been. Cleo’s death had been more interesting as a mystery. Solved, it was dull. Her father’s crazed, desperate act outside the courthouse had drawn more attention than his daughter’s murder. It was one thing for a white man to kill a Negro woman, crazed with love for her. But for that woman’s father to start shooting outside the courthouse, in a crowd, grazing a young police officer—he was expected to spend as long in prison as his daughter’s killer, if not longer.

Maddie became aware, as she kept taking calls and updating numbers, of a sensation sweeping through the newsroom. There was a surprise, something unexpected in the results. Even jaded Edna, here to write a color story on whatever patterns emerged from the statewide races, looked caught off guard.