Lady in the Lake

by Laura Lippman

  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.”

  “No, this happened long ago. But I also see yellow in your aura, although it’s slipping away, disappearing, as if the lights are going out very slowly. Is it a streetlight? I don’t know. It’s gone now.�
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  Maddie put her hands in her lap, breaking the connection, just in case. “Do you ever feel guilty about what you do?”

  “Why would I feel guilty?”

  “Your reading for Cleo Sherwood’s mother gave her hope. But she was almost certainly dead by the time she consulted you. You couldn’t give her any real answers.”

  “I did not ask for the gift and I don’t make people come to me. I did not make you come to me. And I don’t promise answers. People ask me what I see and I tell them. It’s not my fault that the otherworld is indirect, that the visions don’t come with explanations.”

  “Can you tell me anything about my future? So far, you seem to be looking only at my past.”

  Madame Claire took a deep breath and held it, staring into Maddie’s eyes, her pupils dilating. Maddie felt like a cobra facing a snake charmer. Finally, Madame Claire exhaled.

  “Danger,” she said. “I see danger.”

  “I’m in danger?” Her voice was shrill, the walk home on her mind.

  “No, you are danger. You’re going to hurt someone terribly, cause all kinds of trouble.”

  Oh, she thought, disappointed in spite of herself. That was the past again, Milton. She had hurt him. Seth, too. Sometimes, she wondered if she should have told Milton everything, if exposing her fraud at this late date would make him feel better about her leaving.

  Still—yellow, disappearing. The eclipse. That damn eclipse.

  She walked home in the June twilight, feeling like a character in Greek mythology, perhaps Orpheus going into hell to retrieve Eurydice. She held her spine straight, carried her pocketbook with the strap across her chest as women were cautioned to do now. She tried not to walk too quickly, in part because her heels were not made for a fast pace, but also because she wanted to appear as if she feared nothing. But she was such an obvious outsider that the men she passed seemed to fall back, allow her extra room. Did they see danger, too?

  That night, she left her window open, a risky thing to do, but the late-spring air was fresh and sweet, perhaps because of the gardens at the cathedral. There were so few natural scents in this part of Baltimore. It was as if the seasons bypassed downtown altogether. She slid into bed, not a stitch on. About two a.m., she heard soft footsteps on the fire escape, listened as the window was pushed wider open. A man’s body covered her, possessed her.

  “We’ve talked about this, Maddie,” Ferdie said afterward. “Don’t leave that window open. Someone other than me could get in.”

  “Maybe I left it open for someone else.”

  A pause. The room was dark; she could not see his expression. “Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, well, some stripper or some lady who goes with anybody.”

  “Like Cleo Sherwood?”

  “You still talking about that?”

  “I’m going to write about her. A woman is dead. Maybe I can make people see that they should care about that.”

  He sighed. “I doubt it.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Hell no. The Flamingo Club wasn’t part of my beat.”

  “Do you think she had a boyfriend? A secret one?”

  “More than one, no doubt.”

  He smacked her rump, but lightly, his sign for her to roll over and get on all fours. She had told him once that she had never had sex in anything but the missionary position, that Milton wouldn’t hear of it.

  That had been true, but also a lie. She and Milton had done it only one way, but Milton was not, despite what he still believed, her only lover, and her first lover had been a bold man who could, alas, convince her to do almost anything. A green silk sofa. The yellow sliver of a moon during an eclipse. Ah, but that was Madame Claire’s trick, right? Whatever colors she saw, the client filled in the story.

  The Medium

  The Medium

  It is hard for people who don’t have the gift to understand it. Yet maybe necessary, too. If you knew what I see, how I see—well, there was a time when they burned women like me, and maybe that was a kindness.

  I can tell that the woman who has come to see me today is not a believer. So I decide to throw a little scare into her. She isn’t worthy of my gift, she doesn’t want to use it for good. I tell her she has a secret, because who doesn’t? I did see the aura of yellow around her, though, almost in spite of myself. What I couldn’t tell was whether it was connected to her or something that has hung in the air since Cleo Sherwood’s mother visited me, asked me to stroke that piece of fur. At the time, I was so sure the girl was still alive. And maybe she was, who knows? Her body could have gone into the lake in late February. But if she was still alive—where was she? Why couldn’t I save her? Was the green the color of the walls in a room where she was kept? Was the yellow I saw a lone bulb in someone’s basement prison?

  I was eight when I first realized I had second sight. I had a dream. In it, my aunt, who was only a teenager, was riding in a car with a man, someone she barely knew. He was driving too fast. She begged him to slow down. The car went out of control. My aunt was injured, the man died. I woke up that morning and those very things had happened. My aunt was in the hospital with a broken leg, the man driving the car was dead. I told my mama that I had dreamed this thing. At first, she tried to talk me out of it. She said, “No, honey, you must have heard us talking in the night.” Or: “Maybe you had the dream the next night, but it’s jumbled in your head, the order of things, because things were so crazy that day after it happened, so many people coming and going, and we were so worried she was going to die.”

  I believe now that Mama feared for me. She knew the gift would exact a price, and it has. I cannot control it, I cannot summon it. People would think I was a fake if I admitted this part, so I don’t mention that. The thing is, anyone who comes to see me gets good advice. They get their money’s worth. But not everyone has a true psychic experience. That’s not in my control.

  Cleo Sherwood’s mother—she got the real thing. There was green and yellow, all around. I thought it might be the sun, I thought she was someplace where she couldn’t turn her head and was forced to look into the sun. Maybe it was a room, or a ceiling. But her last living, waking minutes were surrounded by yellow, I am confident in that.

  After the lady leaves—I don’t need my powers to realize she felt dissatisfied—I turn off my light and decide to close up for the day, although I usually do more business in the evenings. Most people, especially churchy ones, prefer to visit me when it’s dark. But I am drained. Even the smallest vibration takes a lot out of me.

  I am forty-seven years old. I have been married three times, each time a disaster, but I never talk about it because, again, people would doubt my abilities. How does a psychic pick such bad husbands? By listening to her heart. The heart knows nothing, sees nothing, but it kicks up a ruckus, throws tantrums to get what it wants. No one understands this thing I do, who I am, how my power works. It’s not a machine that can be plugged in and turned on. The gift is sensitive. It prefers dry weather to wet, cold to hot.

  Cleo’s mother came to me on a good day, cold and bright and dry. When the air has that thin, hard edge, I can feel things I can’t on other days. I could see inside Mrs. Sherwood’s soul and it was the saddest thing I have ever glimpsed. She loved that girl of hers, she wanted me to see something that would suggest she was alive; maybe that was why I thought it possible. I don’t think she loves her husband or her other children as much as she loves this girl, the one who’s been so much trouble to her. Some mothers are like that. As I stroked that stole, it almost seemed to come to life, like a cat getting its back scratched. And a scent rose from it, sweet and stale, some kind of perfume. It smelled like—yearning. She had wanted something awfully bad, that girl.

  I saw yellow, bright, blinding yellow. I saw a woman whose face was turned to the sun, maybe flew too close to it, as that old story goes. We are not meant to fly. We’re not meant to see the things I see. I’m a good woman,
a churchgoing woman, and there are Sundays when—I would never tell my preacher this—I pray to God to let me see less. But God says, Suzanne—my real name is Suzanne—I don’t give the gift to people who can’t handle it.

  That woman, the one who came asking questions about Cleo Sherwood, she was up to no good. I could smell the yearning on her, too, but there was no sweetness to it. She was like a car engine, revving, revving, revving, making noise, sending sparks out into the world. She wants to get somewhere. Trouble is, she doesn’t know where she wants to go. That’s what makes her dangerous.

  I enjoy my supper, a pork chop and string beans, let myself have a little sweet wine, which calms me down. I get ready for bed, for sleep, which I dread. My dreams are a burden because they sometimes come true, but I don’t know which ones will come true and which ones won’t. Have you ever had the sensation of being stuck in an awful dream and then you wake up, experience relief, because it’s not happening? I am denied that release until I can check to make sure that my dreams have not come true. Yes, my vision is a gift, but it’s not one I asked for and I long to return it. Take this from me, God, it’s not right. Make me ordinary, a woman who can live with a man, put her head on the pillow at night without fearing what might visit her in her dreams, what might still be waiting for her after daybreak, when the dreams and nightmares end for everyone else.

  Green and yellow, huh?

  Green and yellow, huh? You get what you pay for, Maddie Schwartz. You know what was green and yellow? The upholstery on the balcony seats in the theater where I sat, two weeks before I died.

  My man had surprised me by taking me to New York, where he had tickets to a musical, Man of La Mancha. They weren’t very good seats and we were the only Negroes in the audience, best I could tell. And the music—well, to me, it was kind of trifling, old-people stuff, but it moved him, I could tell. I watched tears slide down his cheeks, only not during the song that everyone knows, the one that’s on the radio. (Again, that’s only if you listen to old-people radio.) He out-and-out sobbed at the end, when the woman said the dead man in the bed was not the man she knew, that the man she knew and loved still lived somewhere. I thought, in that moment, that he would be mine, that he would choose to be the hero, not the man in the bed. But, no, he was crying because he knew his limitations, knew what he would choose in the end. He was weak.