Lady in the Lake Read online

  “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.

  “Of course, we always remember the ones that got away. Every year, I write a certain Baltimore novelist and beg her for an interview. And every year, she sends me a polite refusal.”

  Ferdie had ended up rich. Rich and fat, which amazed her. He left the police department and started his own home security business. His timing was good; crime and safety were on everyone’s mind. He made lots of money, married, had three children, and ended up having far more influence over local politics than either Shell Gordon or EZ Taylor ever had. Maddie had seen him once, across a room at a big political fund-raiser where she was shadowing the candidate. Even with an extra fifty pounds on him, he was magnetic. If he had given her so much as a glance, she would have slipped into a back room with him. But his wife kept him close, well aware of her prize. If Maddie could have glimpsed the future, seen what he would become—but no. She was right about herself. She did not want to be anyone’s wife. She loved her life. And she sensed a sadness in Ferdie, over what he never became, never could be. All he’d wanted to be was a detective and Maddie had cost him that.

  “. . . and that was the second time in my career I was on the receiving end of an unexpected confession. He looked up at me with these big brown eyes and said, ‘I told Jimmy not to do it.’”

  Maddie was a grandmother now, not atypical for a woman about to turn fifty-seven, but it was not vanity to think that she still looked good. Wallace Wright, of all people, recently out of marriage number two, had asked her for a date not long ago. She had turned him down, saying she was seeing someone. She was. He was forty and, lord help her, a gardener, but not her gardener, so it wasn’t totally Lady Chatterley. You couldn’t call what they did dating, not really. He came to her apartment, fucked her silly, and left. It was, in fact, very much like the arrangement she’d had with Ferdie, but with different drinks and snacks. Only now she had a daytime arrangement as well. There was a pompous old judge, almost certainly gay, who required a presentable companion at times, so that worked well for both of them.

  “When I was given the column at the Beacon, I was one of its first female columnists with license to write about the world at large. My column may be in the features section, but no topic is off-limits. One day, I might be talking about Reagan, the next day, the insanity of the Rotunda parking lot.”

  Knowing laughter, at least about the parking lot at the nearby shopping center.

  Cleo Sherwood had said that Maddie ruined lives. Did she? Ferdie may never have become a homicide detective, but he had prospered. She had rather lost track of Judith Weinstein, who had married Patrick Monaghan after all. Thomas Ludlow had been released from prison eight years ago and now ran his own bar on Franklintown Road, although with another man’s name on the liquor license, given that he was a convicted felon. Cleo Sherwood’s father had died in prison. But none of this was Maddie’s fault. Cleo was the one who had faked her death, with Ludlow’s help. Ludlow was the one who had chosen to confess after Maddie dared to confront Hazel Taylor. Ferdie was the one who had brought her that “tip,” courtesy of Shell Gordon. Men. They tried to close the circle, only to bust everything wide open.

  What about Latetia, the true Lady in the Lake? Who was she, how did she die? The likely suspect had confessed, a sentence had been meted out, justice of a sort achieved. Did it really matter whose body was in the fountain? Did it matter if the right person had gone to jail?

  Yet—Maddie imagined three people, maybe four. It’s so warm. Let’s climb the fence at the zoo, I know where they keep the boats. We can toast the New Year from the lake. Or maybe even climb the fountain. Three people, maybe four, sitting on the lip of the fountain, tossing back drinks. Two roommates, sharing each other’s clothes. How easy it would be for one to fall, to be pushed.

  How could everything be Maddie’s fault?

  When these thoughts invaded, the only thing to do was go to the computer and write a cheery seven hundred fifty words about her latest adventure in the Rotunda parking lot. Or dig into her past—that time she was fondled at the Pikes Theater was good for a laugh. A man’s hand on one’s leg seemed so innocent now. She also revisited the Tessie Fine story, her role in it, at suitable intervals. This was what she did, this was her life, a life of her choosing. She wrote about herself. She told herself it was because she had done her time, writing about others, but in her heart, she knew she was always writing about herself, that the only story she could ever know was her own.

  And maybe not even that one.

  “This erudite group will recognize that ‘Only connect’ is from E. M. Forster’s Howards End. But do you know the rest of it? ‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.’ My column embraces all aspects of life, it celebrates all people. This group will also know, no doubt, that the Ouija board was invented here in Baltimore; I wrote about the heirs to the fortune last year. I see myself as the planchette, that little plastic piece on which you balance your fingers and, perhaps subconsciously, then guide across the board toward the answers you desire. I am telling you the stories you want to hear, answering your questions. I am your instrument. Without my readers, I have no purpose.”

  She sat down to thunderous applause, took a sip of wine. That was the best thing about talking to Presbyterians. They served alcohol at lunch.

  Where am I, Maddie Schwartz?

  Where am I, Maddie Schwartz? Where are you? Why am I still talking to you in my head, all these years later? I guess it’s because you’re the last person who saw me, the actual me, Eunetta “Cleo” Sherwood, alive. Not Tommy on New Year’s Eve, although that will always remain the official story. It was you, in your hospital bed, ten months later, and you were too groggy and overwhelmed by your own dr
ama to pay close attention to mine. I was dead and you had made a good run at it. Did your life flash before your eyes? Mine played out so slowly, continues to play out every day. Where would Cleo be right now? What would her life look like? I walked out of that hospital and said goodbye to Cleo Sherwood forever. Said goodbye to my parents, my babies, to Baltimore.

  But I didn’t say goodbye to life, or to love. My life has been a rich one, a full one. A happy one. I sacrificed a lot, so I don’t feel guilty about being happy now. My boys might not have had me, but they both went to McDonogh, growing into fine men, then on to college. My sister told my mama they got scholarships and she decided to believe her because she didn’t have the luxury of looking too closely at good fortune. Knowing my fate, the way I’ve been able to care for those I love, I wouldn’t do anything differently. Can you say the same thing?

  Did I tell you everything? No. I wasn’t about to trust you with my secrets, Maddie Schwartz. Who could blame me? You were careless with my life and my death. Thank God you found another dead girl to pursue. I’m happy, I got what I wanted.

  I saw you once, Maddie Schwartz, before any of this began. You had a man you didn’t want. I ended up wanting a man everyone said I could never have. I saw you, saw you seeing me seeing you. It’s like that joke you tell when you’re a kid: I’m painting a picture of myself painting a picture of myself painting a picture of myself. The picture goes on and on, the words go on and on, until they make no sense, until the picture is so tiny that you can’t see anything at all.

  Author’s Note

  When I started this book in February 2017, I had no idea that it was going to become a newspaper novel; in some ways, Maddie Schwartz surprised me as much as she surprised her longtime husband. I had no desire to write a newspaper novel, but I soon found myself caught up in trying to imagine and re-create the world my father had known when he took a job in 1965 at what was then called the Sun. Many, many colleagues, his and mine, helped me with this. They include: G. Jefferson Price III, David Michael Ettlin, and Joan Jacobson.

  The book’s small details are largely factual, except when they’re not. The two murders at its center are clearly inspired by two cases from 1969, but my versions are not steeped in fact, although I am eternally grateful to Jonathan Hayes for helping me with the theoretical postmortem on “the lady of the lake.” The gubernatorial race in Maryland in 1966 is represented accurately, down to the weather on the day after the primary, a detail gleaned from Time magazine. Two real-life people—Violet Wilson Whyte (Lady Law) and Paul Blair, the Orioles center fielder—“speak” in these pages; I read interviews with them and, in the case of Blair, watched videos, hoping to approximate their real voices. I could never establish that Whyte had, in fact, appeared on To Tell the Truth, but I heeded the age-old advice from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: print the legend.

  The first draft of this book was submitted on June 27, 2018. The next day, I headed to my mother’s home on the Delaware shore with my young daughter, stopping about an hour into the trip to tell her we had eaten lunch and should be there within the next two hours. She asked me if I had run into traffic near Annapolis. No, I said, why would I? “There was a shooting.” When I learned that it was at the newspaper, I knew it was all too likely that my friend Rob Hiaasen was one of the victims. So while I usually take time here to thank everyone who helped me, I hope my friends and the people in my publishing life will understand that I want this book to end with a roll call of names of people who died that day. This one is for Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith, and Wendi Winters, and their loved ones.

  About the Author

  Since LAURA LIPPMAN’s debut in 1997, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and was named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last hundred years. Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and have been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her family.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Laura Lippman

  Sunburn

  Wilde Lake

  After I’m Gone

  And When She Was Good

  The Most Dangerous Thing

  I’d Know You Anywhere

  Life Sentences

  What the Dead Know

  To the Power of Three

  Every Secret Thing

  Hardly Knew Her

  Tess Monaghan Series

  Baltimore Blues

  Charm City

  Butchers Hill

  In Big Trouble

  The Sugar House

  In a Strange City

  The Last Place

  By a Spider’s Thread

  No Good Deeds

  Another Thing to Fall

  The Girl in the Green Raincoat

  Hush Hush

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  lady in the lake. Copyright © 2019 by Laura Lippman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  first edition

  Cover design by Elsie Lyons

  Cover photographs © Svetoslava Madarova/Arcangel (woman in front); © Hill Street Studios/Getty Images (woman in back)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lippman, Laura, 1959- author.

  Title: Lady in the lake : a novel / Laura Lippman.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018058807| ISBN 9780062390011 (hardback) | ISBN 0062390015 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062390028 (paperback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Historical. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3562.I586 L33 2019 | DDC 813/.54--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058807

  Digital Edition JULY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-239003-5

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-239001-1

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