Reservoir Hill is a Baltimore neighborhood that functions as a pivotal, transitional space in the novel, a place where the city's racial and economic boundaries grow porous and where several of the story's most consequential encounters unfold. It is the setting for Madame Claire's psychic studio, the Taylor family home, and Maddie Schwartz's new apartment on Gist Avenue, making it a geographic crossroads where the lives of the white and Black communities, the living and the dead, and the seeker and the sought converge. The neighborhood's shifting character—once grand, now in decline—mirrors the larger social transformations of 1960s Baltimore and provides the backdrop against which Maddie's investigation into Cleo Sherwood's fate takes shape.

A Neighborhood in Transition

Reservoir Hill is depicted as a neighborhood caught between its distinguished past and an uncertain future. Maddie's apartment on Gist Avenue, while charming and filled with the warm winter sunlight that reminded her of a 3-D Paul Klee painting, sits in a neighborhood that is 'decidedly mixed' and 'mixed on its way to being not so mixed.' The area is home to maids and laundresses, milkmen and streetcar conductors, and Maddie, a solitary white woman who owns a fur coat, feels conspicuously visible there. The neighborhood's decline is further emphasized in the description of the Taylor house, a 'grande dame among ruffians,' where most of the other big old houses have been subdivided, and a Zagnut wrapper lies discarded in the meticulously kept hedges. The better-off Negroes are beginning to abandon the neighborhood, just as the Jews of Milton's generation had before them, leaving behind beautiful old town houses that once stood for 'dreams and aspirations' but are now being cut up into makeshift apartments.

Maddie's New Life and Secret Liaison

For Maddie, Reservoir Hill represents both a liberation from her marriage and a source of new anxieties. After leaving Milton, she moves into the Gist Avenue apartment, which she struggles to think of as home, with no Seth, so little furniture, and neighbors who snub her. It is in this apartment that she stages a false burglary, shoving her engagement ring deep into the dirt of a potted African violet before running into the street screaming for help. The neighborhood also becomes the setting for her clandestine affair with Ferdie Platt, a Black police officer. He would call before coming so she could sneak down and leave the lower door unlocked, arriving after dark and disappearing in the early morning hours, always wearing his uniform. Maddie's next-door neighbor sees more than she should, and Maddie, who had not been loud before, finds herself wanting someone to hear, to know that she is having sex two or three times a night. The affair leads her to a stranger's home not far from the Gist Avenue apartment, where a tall, broad woman with a kerchief over her hair straightens Maddie's hair over a gingham-covered ironing board, a 'kitchen magician' who asks how Maddie heard about her.

The Psychic's Studio and the Ermine Stole

Reservoir Hill is also the location of Madame Claire's 'studio,' an apartment carved out of the ground floor of a grand old house. Maddie takes a bus to this part of the city, one she wouldn't have dared to drive through not that long ago, and is scolded for taking a two-hour trip to the morgue during work hours. At the psychic's studio, Maddie learns about Cleo Sherwood's ermine stole, a 'very fine piece of clothing' that Cleo's mother believed had great meaning to her daughter. The psychic's disdainful look when Maddie asks how Cleo came to have a fur speaks volumes about the assumptions surrounding a young, single woman owning such an item. The stole becomes a key clue, connecting Cleo's world of borrowed finery and secret aspirations to the neighborhood where she lived and the people who knew her.

The Taylor House and Confrontation

The Taylor residence in Reservoir Hill is the site of a crucial confrontation between Maddie and Hazel Taylor, the wife of Ezekiel Taylor, whom Maddie believes is the link to Cleo's death. Maddie, having decided that men keep each other's secrets and that no one cares about Cleo, marches up to the 'lovely house with the stained glass features' and rings the doorbell. Hazel, observing the white woman on her front steps through the lace curtain, initially hopes she is selling cosmetics, but knows better. The encounter is charged with unspoken tension, as Hazel reflects on her own past as a young, sweet, and slender country girl whom Ezekiel had wanted desperately, and on her decision three years earlier to draw a line and say no to taking in Douglas and Claudia. The Taylor house, a symbol of Black middle-class aspiration in a declining neighborhood, becomes the stage for a collision between two women whose lives are bound by the secrets of the men they love.

A Place of Secrets and Endings

Reservoir Hill's significance extends beyond its role as a setting for individual scenes; it is a place where the novel's central themes of visibility, class, and racial boundaries are made concrete. It is where Maddie, a white woman, becomes hyper-visible as a solitary figure in a mixed neighborhood, and where she conducts an affair that crosses racial lines. It is where the psychic's studio offers a glimpse into Cleo's world of borrowed furs and hidden longings. And it is where Maddie confronts Hazel Taylor, challenging the silence that has surrounded Cleo's disappearance. The neighborhood's decline, its grand houses being subdivided and abandoned, mirrors the fate of the characters who pass through it—women like Cleo, who are forgotten, and women like Maddie, who refuse to let them be. Reservoir Hill is thus not merely a backdrop but an active force in the narrative, a place where the past and present, the personal and the social, collide.