Madame Claire

Madame Claire is a psychic operating from a ground-floor apartment carved out of a grand old house in Reservoir Hill, a neighborhood whose former grandeur has faded. She is a woman of contradictions: a self-described churchgoing woman who prays to see less, a three-time divorcee who married by listening to her heart, and a medium whose gift she claims she never asked for and longs to return. Her real name is Suzanne, a fact she reveals only in her private thoughts, and she is acutely aware that her profession invites skepticism—she knows that people would doubt her abilities if they knew about her disastrous marriages.

The Psychic's Studio and Methods

Maddie Schwartz first visits Madame Claire in June 1966, after work, taking the bus to the psychic's "studio" in Reservoir Hill. The apartment's front parlor serves as the consultation room, its street-facing windows draped with shiny red material that Maddie recognizes as a cheap imitation of satin. The room contains a crystal ball and a deck of regular playing cards, but Madame Claire ignores these props. Instead, she asks Maddie to sit opposite her and place her hands, palms up, on the table, then puts 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 does nothing—a deliberate stillness that seems designed to unnerve her client. Maddie, who has come prepared with cash, watches as the psychic literally sniffs the bills before accepting them.

The Reading of Cleo's Stole

When Maddie asks about Cleo Sherwood, Madame Claire reveals that Cleo's mother came to her, though not the father, who believes her work is the devil's doing—a man she dismisses as "very ignorant." The psychic held an object that Cleo's mother believed had great meaning to her daughter: an ermine stole, which Madame Claire describes as "a very fine piece of clothing." Her voice caresses the word, drawing it out, and her disdainful look at Maddie's question about how a young, single woman came to have a fur implies the obvious answer. In her private account, Madame Claire describes stroking the stole as it seemed to come to life, like a cat getting its back scratched, and a scent rising from it—sweet and stale, some kind of perfume that smelled like yearning. She saw yellow, bright, blinding yellow, and a woman whose face was turned to the sun, perhaps flying too close to it, as the old story goes.

The Gift and Its Burden

Madame Claire's gift, as she understands it, is sensitive and unpredictable. It prefers dry weather to wet, cold to hot, and she describes her visions as a burden she never asked for. She dreads sleep because her dreams sometimes come true, but she never knows which ones will, and she is denied the ordinary relief of waking from a nightmare to find it was only a dream. She prays to God to let her see less, but God says, "Suzanne—my real name is Suzanne—I don't give the gift to people who can't handle it." She reads Maddie as a woman up to no good, smelling yearning on her too, but without sweetness—a car engine revving, sending sparks out into the world, wanting to get somewhere without knowing where, which is what makes her dangerous.

The Fraud Exposed

Cleo Sherwood herself later exposes Madame Claire's reading as a fraud. The stole was not ermine but rabbit, and the psychic's pronouncement of "green and yellow" was a fabrication. Cleo wore a green blouse, but the real green was jealousy, and there was no yellow—unless one counts the cowardice of the man who decreed she had to die but would not do the job himself. The psychic buried her face in the stole's pale pink silk lining, stroked the white pelt, and pronounced it ermine, which tells everything one needs to know about the woman who claimed to see Cleo's final hours. The vision that seemed to offer a supernatural glimpse into Cleo's fate was, in fact, an invention layered over a mother's desperate hope that her daughter might still be alive.

Significance in the Investigation

Despite its fraudulence, Madame Claire's reading functions as a pivotal narrative moment. Her claim about the ermine stole gives Maddie a concrete clue about Cleo's possessions and lifestyle, pointing toward the world of borrowed finery and aspirational dressing that defined Cleo's final months. The psychic's characterization of Cleo's mother—a woman who loved her troubled daughter more than her husband or other children—adds emotional depth to the search. And the image of the yearning that rose from the stole, the sense that Cleo had wanted something awfully bad, lingers as an epitaph for a woman whose desires outpaced her circumstances. Madame Claire's unreliable vision thus becomes a mirror of the novel's central theme: the stories people tell about the missing, and the gap between what is seen and what is true.