Lady in the Lake
“That’s really not it.”
“You know my happiest day of the past year? Going to that ball game with you. Even if I couldn’t hold your hand or put my hand at the small of your back as we moved through the crowd. Some people knew we were together. I could tell, by their looks. We fooled most people, but we couldn’t fool everyone. I was so proud to be with you. I love you, Maddie.”
She still could not say the words back, even though it would be so easy, so true. She would not be bound by them, and yet she could not say them, even in past tense. “I don’t think I want to be anyone’s wife again, Ferdie. I don’t want to lose you, but I don’t want to lose myself, either.”
“Well, I’ve lost my job,” he said.
“For using a patrol car off hours?”
“They let me resign. I could have stayed, but I wasn’t going to go anywhere. I put our business out on the street. Almost got a civilian killed.”
It took Maddie a beat to realize she was the civilian. She lifted her nightgown, showed him the bumpy loop of a scar, then lifted the gown off her head.
“Maddie—”
“I’m so sorry for everything. I’m sorry about the job. I’m sorry—” She could not tell him her other regrets. She was sorry for Thomas Ludlow and sorry for Cleo’s father. Sorry that Cleo’s mother could never know that her daughter was alive. She was even sorry for Shell Gordon, trapped inside so many identities, never allowed to express what he really yearned for, small and mean enough to want others to be denied what he could not have. She was sorry for Latetia, dead and unmourned, fixed in history as a careless girl who eloped and was never heard from again. She was sorry for Mrs. Taylor, living in her beautiful house with a man who loved another. She was sorry for Cleo’s children.
Most of all, she was sorry for herself. Because, like Ezekiel Taylor, she was so close to having a second chance at real love and she wasn’t brave enough to take it.
“We shouldn’t,” he said. “We never should have started in the first place.”
“My ring wasn’t stolen,” she said. “I did that to get the insurance money.”
“I know,” he said. “I told you about Tommy Ludlow because we thought it would make you stop. Shell told Tommy he had to confess, to make you stop.”
“I know,” she said. She hadn’t.
He came to bed. For one last time, he came to her bed, and for the first time ever he stayed until the sun rose. Maddie walked him downstairs and kissed him goodbye at the front door, in full sight of the cathedral and whoever was walking down Mulberry Street at seven a.m.
And then she went to work.
The Woman’s Club of Roland Park, October 1985
The Woman’s Club of Roland Park, October 1985
“And now, our speaker. Madeline Schwartz has worked at the Beacon since 1966, where her career began with a harrowing first-person account of her near death at the hands of Angela Corwin, who was eventually convicted of the first-degree murder of Tessie Fine, a young Jewish girl killed in the tropical fish store where Corwin’s son worked. Stephen Corwin was given the death penalty for his role in the crime, but that was changed to life after a US Supreme Court decision struck down most of the nation’s death penalty laws in 1972. Schwartz started at the Beacon as a general assignment reporter, went on to cover city hall and the legislature, but is best known for her work in the Living section, first as a reporter of human-interest stories, now as a columnist. In 1979, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.”
Maddie edited her introduction in her head. This was not the copy she had provided, she was sure of that. Close, but embellished here and there. Although, yes, she was the one who had written the Star out of her official history. She had taken her first-person near-death story about Angela Corwin, parlayed it into a job at the Beacon, and never looked back. The Beacon was a little stuffy and dull after the Star, but it was willing to give her a chance as a reporter.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “And ‘finalist for the Pulitzer’ is a very grand way of saying that one lost the Pulitzer.”
Audiences like a little gentle self-deprecation, but she was always of two minds about publicizing her bridesmaid status. It bugged her that she hadn’t won that year, the first time that the prize for feature writing was given. More galling, it had gone to a colleague on the Light, the Beacon’s less mannerly sister paper. He had written about brain surgery, while her story had centered on a child with a rare heart condition. “Brains trump heart, I guess,” Bob Bauer had said when they met up for drinks later that week. The remark had been tinged with envy; Bauer had won all the state prizes and some national ones, but had never come anywhere close to a Pulitzer.
Maddie had won almost everything, too, and she still had plenty of years in her.
As a high-profile columnist, she was much in demand on the ladies’-luncheon circuit. The Beacon had a speaker’s bureau and actually paid its reporters to make these presentations; the paper considered it a good community-relations ploy. Maddie had learned how to appear to talk off the cuff, to vary her stories just enough so she couldn’t be accused of being canned or rote.
“I’m often asked”—a lie, she was never asked—“what, exactly, is human interest? What makes a person interesting? Well, I believe all people are intrinsically interesting if you know the right questions to ask, if you take time. I think a good reporter should be able to open a phone book, stab a name with a pencil, call up the person, and find a story. Sometimes, I do just that.”
(Also a lie, she had never done that.)
She told of her latest triumph, an exclusive interview with the parents of a child who was kidnapped from the Sinai Hospital maternity ward by a woman disguised as a nurse, caught several days later when she tried to con another hospital into giving her a birth certificate. The parents still expressed wonder at how easily someone had slipped into Sinai Hospital. Maddie did not tell them she knew it was, in fact, quite easy. A uniform and a defeated posture could do the trick.
“The law required the parents to take a paternity test,” she told her rapt audience. “But the judge looked from that round-cheeked baby to his father and said, ‘I think we all know what the results are going to tell us.’”
Her talk was so familiar to her that she could almost disengage, hover above the proceedings like a ghost. Even as she told the stories about the stories that had made her a local treasure—the spiky newsstand owner, the last local hatmaker, the piano prodigy—she was thinking about the stories never written, the people never profiled. Ezekiel “EZ” Taylor, for example, who sold his dry-cleaning chain abruptly in 1968, blaming the riots and the weather. He said he was asthmatic, that he had been advised to move west for his health, New Mexico to be precise, but his wife preferred to stay in Baltimore because of her church activities. Did EZ go in search of Cleo, after all? One thing was for sure: there was no listed phone number for Ezekiel Taylor anywhere in New Mexico. Maddie had checked, repeatedly.
“I got my job at the Beacon by being brash, insisting on being the reporter instead of the subject. It was a gamble on both sides, but the editor, Peter Forrester, said he saw something in me. I think it was my willingness to start at the lowest possible salary.”
There were days when Maddie was convinced that it’s all a coincidence, that EZ went west for his health and Shell Gordon, still bent with grudge over a woman he saw as a rival, found a more trustworthy assassin to finish the job Thomas Ludlow failed to do.
And there were days when she believed this mismatched couple was somewhere, maybe the Land of Enchantment, maybe not, delighted that they beat the odds. Not the odds of Cleo’s death, but the odds against finding love, a real love that can sustain you, a love that’s worth giving up everything.
“One of the biggest breaks I ever got as a reporter happened because I got terribly lost, lost in my own hometown . . .”
She had tried to find out if Cleo’s sons were still with their grandmother, but the family had moved not long after Maddie joined the Beacon. To the county, one neighbor said. To the country, another neighbor said. She couldn’t find the mother anywhere and Alice Sherwood, Cleo’s sister, had shut the door in her face the one time she tried to talk to her.