The Girl in the Green Raincoat (13 page)

“I’m not sure,” Tess said. “But I think the key is being a little needy. Needy and alone. No family, no friends to speak of.”

“So I walk up to him and announce, ‘I’m the woman of your dreams—no one will miss me when I’m gone.’ ”

“We need to stage another damsel-in-distress scenario, like the one you did with Jordan. He was ready to make babies with you after a cup of coffee, remember?”

“He also was a loser. Give Don Epstein credit. He’s managed to get away with three or four murders. Don’t underestimate him.”

“Don’t underestimate
me
,” Tess said.

Two-fer Tuesday,
Whitney thought as she pulled up in front of the check-cashing store in Cherry Hill. She had never been in a check-cashing store. And she only knew the edges of this sad little South Baltimore neighborhood, and that was because it bordered the boathouse from which she and Tess rowed. She had a paper sack of motley dollar bills, which she had spent the last evening crinkling and soiling, so they would look pathetic. She, too, was trying to look pathetic, but fetchingly so. Neither part—pathetic, fetching—came naturally to her. She kept trying to remember to round her shoulders, hang her head.

Once in the store, which Tess had established was the location to which Epstein reported every day, Whitney shoved her bag of money at the cashier and muttered an incoherent string of words. She had wanted to do an accent, but Tess pointed out that she would have to sustain it for hours if she managed to get a date with Epstein. She had to play stupid instead, and playing stupid was even harder than an accent for Whitney. She tried to remember her newspaper days, how people sometimes managed to get past security and wander into various offices, telling complicated, detailed stories that never quite cohered. She babbled about her mother and her BG&E bill and her car and her cat, the last being completely fictitious. Whatever help was offered, she refused, saying she needed a certified cashier’s money order check.

“Which is it?” the cashier asked. “A money order or a cashier’s check?”

Whitney accused the woman of being unhelpful, demanded to see the manager. It took about twenty minutes, but the exasperated cashier finally summoned the manager. Another twenty minutes, more faked sobbing and incoherence, until Epstein himself was forced to confront this impossible customer.

“What exactly is the problem?” he asked.

Whitney, much to her own amazement, burst into very real tears. Later, when she tried to figure out why, she couldn’t explain it, even to herself. (Actually, she was the only person to whom she attempted to explain this. She would never reveal such a weakness in front of Tess.) But there was something so sad about the man. Sad and wounded.

“I’m Baltimore bred and buttered,” Epstein said an hour later, over a round of beers. He had taken her to Nick’s, a waterside restaurant along the middle branch of the Patapsco. It was a little chilly this time of year, but the view was grand. And Epstein was surprisingly good company. Why hadn’t Tess factored that in? He must have had more than money going for him to land that string of attractive women. He was funny, well-informed about the world, interested in the arts.

But the enchanting thing about Epstein was that he seemed genuinely curious about her. Enchanting, but problematic, as Whitney really hadn’t worked that hard on her alternative identity.

“I grew up on the Shore,” Whitney said, figuring her two years at Washington College and her parents’ summer house in Oxford would allow her to fake that locality. “My dad’s a . . . farmer. Sweet corn.”

“But you said your mother was a widow, and you were trying to get a money order to pay bills that were on final notice?”

“They’re divorced. My mother’s second husband just died. That’s why I was so upset. He was like a . . . father to me. Even though I have a father, my stepdad and I are very close.” She remembered Tess’s injunction that Epstein preferred women who were somewhat isolated, lonely. “The weird thing is, my stepdad was the only person to whom I was close. I don’t speak to my father at all, and while I’m willing to help my mother out, we don’t really have much to do with one another.”

“What brought you to Cherry Hill?”

“I just moved to Baltimore this month. Cherry Hill sounded so nice. I thought there would be a hill. With, um, cherries.”

“And you don’t know who I am?”

“Should I?”

He looked down at the table. “I’ve been on television a bit, lately.”

“I had to hock my television to put a deposit down on my apartment.”

“I’ve been in the newspaper, too.”

“I read the Easton
Star-Democrat
when I was still on the Shore, but I haven’t been keeping up since I moved here. Why were you in the newspaper?”

Epstein smiled. “It’s not important. Another round? Maybe dinner? A girl as thin as you shouldn’t go too long between meals.”

“I have a freakishly high metabolism,” Whitney said. “So maybe we should go to one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, like at Pizza Hut?” Whitney was thin because she was largely indifferent to food. But she would fake her way through a big meal if that’s what it took to draw out the evening. She told herself that she was a good friend, doing this for Tess. She tried to ignore the fact that she was having a genuinely good time.

Tess was thinking about dinner, too. Not hers, but the food that Annette Epstein had eaten in the hospital. Could Don Epstein have slipped antibiotics in her food while she was there? And what about the idiopathic nausea that landed her in the hospital but hadn’t killed her? She clicked away on the Internet, reading about poison.

Crow walked in, looked over her shoulder and sighed.

“It’s fascinating,” she said. “It’s not that easy to find a poison in someone’s system unless you have some idea what it is. Yes, everyone agrees that Annette Epstein had antibiotics in her system. But what about the nausea that put her in the hospital to begin with? Of course they did a tox screen, but that only uncovers so much, and no one was arguing about the cause of Annette’s death, which was clearly a complication of the staph infection—”

“Tess, this isn’t healthy.”

She held up the spiral-bound notepad on the bedside table. “My blood pressure readings have been normal for days.”

“I’m talking about your mental health. You set out to get the police’s full attention. Mission accomplished. Let it go.”

Tess decided this was probably not the best time to tell him that she had sent Whitney out to land a date with Baltimore’s best known bachelor. She moved her feet, creating a space for Crow to sit. Of all the things she disliked about her confinement, the worst had been sleeping alone, out here. A small thing, not sleeping in the same bed. No, check that. A big thing, a huge thing. She felt estranged from him. He was loyal, but she realized now she was never truly sure of him. Over the years they had been together, he ran away from her twice. Both times she had all but forced him to leave her, but still—he was the one who ran. What if he ran again?

“Do you remember,” she asked, “how we met?”

“I worked in your aunt’s bookstore.”

“You had a crush on my aunt.”

“Everyone who worked in the store had a crush on your aunt. It’s a rite of passage.”

“When did we fall in love?”

“Isn’t that a song from
Fiorello!
?”

“Possibly the worst musical to ever win the Pulitzer, no small feat,” Tess said.

“And poor George Gershwin got no recognition when
Of Thee I Sing
won.”

The exchange of trivia cheered her. It was normal, it was what they did. “I’m just saying, this all seems so . . . accidental.”

“The pregnancy was an accident. Our life together feels purposeful to me. That’s why the baby didn’t faze me. I always assumed we would have one.”

“You did?” It had been a shock, when she first went to see the ob-gyn, to discover the cause of her nausea. The next shock was discovering that she was considered, at thirty-five, an “older” mother. She thought she had all the time in the world to start a family, if that’s what she decided she wanted, and then she was told she was a long shot.

“Yes. I just thought I was going to have to launch a campaign. By the way, I know you don’t want to make any plans about the baby, but there is one thing we have to talk about.”

“Yes?”

“We have to pick out a guardian.”

“I thought we settled on Whitney.”

“The other day, when I was out with her, I started to ask, but I had second thoughts. I don’t think she likes kids, Tess.”

“She’ll like
our
child.”

“She’s so . . . rootless. Living in that cottage on her parents’ property, working at the family foundation. And she gets bored easily.”

Crow had never criticized Whitney before and it made Tess uncomfortable. What else might he criticize? And whom?

“Do you have an alternative in mind?”

“Not really. That bothers me, too. We know a lot of people, but not many intact families, with kids. Soon that’s going to be our peer group, that’s going to shape how we live. Our life is going to change, Tess.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

This had been a refrain since her pregnancy first became public.
Oh boy, is your life going to change.
Usually, it was said with joy and anticipation. But just as often there was a flicker of malice in it, a misery-loves-company vibe that Tess found disturbing.
No more restaurants,
her friend Jackie, the single mother of a little girl, had pronounced.
That is, no more
real
restaurants. You’re not going to see a cloth napkin for another ten, fifteen years.
Others had predicted the end of sleep, sex, travel, reading, a clean house, and clean clothes. Apparently, she and Crow had been having far too much fun and it was now time to pay the piper, to surrender to this invading army of one. Why was this information withheld until it was too late?

“I’ve heard all the lectures,” she told Crow now. “I still think that we can take her to restaurants we like. And we don’t travel that much, so that’s not a big deal, and—”

“Tess, I’m talking about your job. A job that, at times, has been dangerous.”

“Just the once,” she said.

“You were almost killed ‘just the once.’ And there have been other close calls.”

“I’m much more cautious than I used to be.”

“That’s true,” Crow said. “But what about the mundane details? Take, for example, surveillance. What if you’re watching someone but I need to go to work and we don’t have backup babysitting? Are you going to go on jobs with the baby in the car seat, strap her into a Snugli and go about your day?”

“A baby in a Snugli would be an excellent cover,” she said.

“Tess
.
”
Crow was as angry and agitated as Tess had ever seen him. “I’ve never tried to tell you how to conduct your life. But your life isn’t strictly yours anymore. I’m not saying you can’t continue to work as an investigator. But you could go full-time for an insurance company, or a big law firm.”

“What about you, then?” she countered. “Do you think managing a club is a suitable job for a man with a young child? On a typical workday, you head out at five p.m. and come home at four in the morning. You work most of the weekend. What changes are you prepared to make?”

“Fact is, I’m thinking of going back to school, part-time, get one of those weekend MBAs.”

Tess almost burst into tears, and for once it wasn’t the hormones. Six years ago she had fallen in love with a man who was a musician and an artist, and now he was talking about MBAs?

“No,” she said. “That’s not you. But what you’re talking about—that’s not me. An office, working for other people. That’s the one thing I can’t go back to. Once you’ve been your own boss, it’s impossible to go back.”

Her iPhone rang, the jangly tone assigned to Whitney. Crow recognized it, too. After all, he had programmed it.

“Go ahead, take it,” he said. “Whatever Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden are cooking up is far more important than the small matter of our future.”

W
hitney Talbot had always spoken her mind. Not because she was indifferent to the feelings of others—although, to be honest, that was a big factor—but because it was too much trouble keeping track of lies. Tell the truth and bear the consequences was Whitney’s motto. But now she found herself juggling two big lies. She was going on “dates” with Don Epstein, pretending to be a naïve Eastern Shore girl, estranged from her parents and with few financial resources.

And she was lying about those dates to her oldest friend, Tess Monaghan, who had no idea how much she was enjoying her assignment. Don Epstein was surprisingly good company, who suggested almost teenage activities for their evening together. Duckpin bowling, ice skating, even a ceili at a North Baltimore church. Whitney had always thought she would rather drive nails into her eyes then attempt Irish dancing, but Epstein made her feel utterly unself-conscious. Having come into this world exceedingly self-conscious, that was no small thing.