The Girl in the Green Raincoat (4 page)

“I got so flustered, I ran to the other side of the street. This nice young man—I didn’t know his name yet—said to me, ‘Why don’t you just stay here for a minute or two, and let those two gentlemen work out their problem?’ So I did and the next thing I knew, his bus had come and gone, and my bus had come and gone, and we walked down to Cold Spring, where there used to be an old-fashioned soda fountain, and we talked and we talked and, well, we never really stopped.”

“Really? You were married for more than fifty years and you never ran out of things to say to each other?”

“Oh, we learned to be quiet with each other, too. But it was always a good quiet. We were never cross with each other.”

“Never?” That seemed unfathomable to Tess. Crow was the most easygoing man in the world, and he drove her to distraction several times a week. A long marriage, raising children with someone—it simply wasn’t possible not to get angry or irritable at times. “How did you manage that?”

“Whenever I got cross with him, I would think about that girl at the bus stop, how unhappy she was, how she thought no one could ever want to take her on a date, much less love her. It may sound silly, but I figured out that being happy made me happier than being unhappy ever did.”

Tess replayed these words in her head:
Being happy made me happier than being unhappy.
The statement was so nonsensical it was profound.

“Do you realize,” she said, “that your romance with Mr. Blossom was literally a shaggy dog story?”

Mrs. Blossom looked confused. “But that dog wasn’t shaggy at all. He was a terrier, clipped very close.”

“I meant—oh, never mind. Thanks for all your help today.”

Left alone with her laptop, Tess glanced out the window at Stony Run Park and sighed. Technology had come so far, so quickly, but it wasn’t far enough. Here, with her laptop balanced on an old-fashioned wicker breakfast tray, she could roam the Internet, finding information that once took hours, even days. Here was the assessment and purchase information on Don Epstein’s Blythewood home, and the old addresses on his vehicle registration allowed her to look up his previous house, which had been even more expensive, a $4 million house on Gibson Island. But even as her wireless connection allowed her to collapse time and space, it could never provide the
serendipity
of legwork she had known—first as a reporter, roaming the hallways of courthouses and government buildings, then as an investigator. She couldn’t help wondering if this was part of some conspiracy, if this excess of access was a form of sleight of hand.
Look over here, look how much you can find. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
H. L. Mencken had despised those who never left the newsroom, calling them the castrati of the craft.

Then again, Mencken had boasted about making things up, so he was a problematic role model.

Still, her confinement—Lord, how old-fashioned—unnerved her. She trusted Mrs. Blossom, but no one’s eyes saw exactly what she saw. And while her instincts were far from unerring, they were
her
instincts. If she had visited Don Epstein, she would have a better sense of the man. She was quick to recognize a liar even when she couldn’t pinpoint the lie. But she was stuck here, with an Italian greyhound who moaned incessantly and a taskmaster in amniotic fluid. Lately, she and Crow had taken to calling the baby “Fifi La Pew,” one of those stupid couples jokes that come out of nowhere, only to stick. In fact, Crow was becoming enamored with “Fifi” as a possible name. Tess imagined trying to explain this to her parents.
Here’s your granddaughter, Fifi Monaghan.
It was a toss-up which name would make her conventional mother crazier.

The baby would be a Monaghan. Crow, who was almost
too
evolved, had decided that the child, as a girl, should have Tess’s surname. She could not deny that she was happy about this. Of course, her name was her father’s name. They could use her mother’s “maiden” name—Fifi Weinstein had quite the ring to it—but that was a man’s name, too, in the end. To find a true maiden name, one would have to go back to Lilith, Tess supposed. Poor Lilith, the original first wife, doomed to be forgotten.

She glanced again at the copy of the marriage license that Mrs. Blossom had left behind. Carole Epstein had been Carole Massinger. She plugged the latter into Google, finally scoring a hit on a Web site maintained by a freelance photographer. There was Carole Massinger, in a photograph taken at a wedding. The photo seemed a little fake, stagy, as photos in such settings often do, but it was definitely the woman Tess had seen through her binoculars. The hair was different, but she wore a dress of celery green, and brandished—did this woman coordinate
everything
?—a pale green cocktail. Her smile was broad, genuine. She was toasting the beaming groom and his bride, whom the photographer had helpfully identified as Don and Annette Epstein.

O
f course he married someone else he already knew, Tess,” Dorie Starnes said. “That’s what men
do
. Most men can’t function alone.”

“Still, it’s eerie, especially now that his second wife has disappeared—”

“Ah, but you’re wrong on that.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’ll explain in all in due time. You don’t rush a master. You’ve made nice progress, with your laptop and your phone, but it’s nothing compared to what I can do with a couple of hours of computer time.”

When had Dorie Starnes, once an ignored and scorned IT grunt at the local newspaper, learned to speak with such emphatic authority—and on all subjects, yet, not just computers? But Tess knew, for she had been a part of Dorie’s transformation. When they met five years ago, Dorie had no sense of her own power. Tess had shown her how much she knew, how much potential she had, giving her the confidence to open her own research firm, now a thriving concern. Despite that, Tess didn’t even get a discount on Dorie’s not inconsiderable hourly rate. All she got were “bumping rights”—priority over Dorie’s other customers, without having to pay rush rates. Normally, that was all Tess needed, given that she could pass the cost on to her clients. But who was her client in this matter, who would reimburse her? The insane Italian greyhound was clearly indigent; Carole Massinger Esptein was missing—only not according to her husband. She would have to pay for Dorie’s services out of her own pocket.
Sorry, Fifi. That’s a few dollars less for the college fund
.

“Annette Epstein had been married to Don Epstein for almost five years when she died,” Dorie began, reading from her laptop. She would have preferred a PowerPoint presentation, no doubt, but Tess’s sun porch wasn’t set up for that.

“What was the cause?”

“Pneumonia was listed as the official cause, although that was actually a complication that resulted after her hospitalization. She died in an Anne Arundel hospital about eighteen months ago. Her husband sued, charging wrongful death. Hospital settled out of court.”

“For how much?”

Dorie shook her head. A short, top-heavy woman, she always reminded Tess of a robin, with her rounded front and tousled hair. In fact, just looking at her made Tess want to burst into the opening of “My Funny Valentine,” the prologue that so few people knew, in which the gentleman’s blank countenance was compared to a bird’s. But there was nothing vacant about Dorie’s brow. Like Mrs. Blossom, Dorie was another person the world tended to underestimate. Tess was surrounded by such people, she realized. She was one, in fact, a broad-shouldered jockette. Strangers would have trusted her with a lacrosse stick, but not much else.

“I’m not
that
good,” Dorrie said. “Out-of-court settlements are sealed, and this one included a gag order. If Esptein shared the details, the hospital could reclaim its payment. But let’s play connect the dots. Epstein filed the lawsuit just before the deadline ran out. Settlement was reached in April of this year and he closed on the house on Blythewood in July. For cash—$1.2 million.”

“Couldn’t part of the payment come from equity in his previous home? That house was appraised at four million.”

“He owned the previous house only four years, and the sale price was only slightly above the price he paid. Figure in closing costs, and it was a zero-sum game for him. And according to documents he filed in the lawsuit, in which he was trying to demonstrate actual costs related to his wife’s death, he said he tapped into equity to cover her hospital bills.”

“No insurance?”

Dorie smiled. “No
health
insurance. He neglected to add her to the plan he carries through his job, and the insurance company was fighting him every step of the way over that bureaucratic oversight. Yet he didn’t overlook the life insurance. The hospital’s lawyers included that in their findings. His lawyer countered by putting in a claim for the wife’s personal property, including a $20,000 engagement ring they say was stolen in the hospital. He eventually got $500,000, so part of that could have gone to pay for the house on Blythewood.”

Tess clicked back to the photo of the happy couple on their wedding day, studied the ring, an Art Deco monstrosity bordered by a darker stone.

“It’s big,” she said. “Does that make it worth twenty thousand?”

“If the hospital didn’t challenge him, he can claim any amount he wanted.”

Tess yearned to study these files herself, to pore over every detail. It would be dull, tedious work, but she might see something that Dorie had missed. Dorie was essentially a human search engine. She worked from known parameters, finding only what she was asked to find.

“You said the pneumonia was a complication subsequent to her admission. Why was she in the hospital?”

“She had been in and out of the hospital for idiopathic fever and nausea for much of the previous year. The last time around, she developed a staph infection and pneumonia.”

“Idiot fever?”

“
Idiopathic
. No known cause. She was a bit of a medical mystery, as the hospital freely admits. Don Epstein’s lawyer argued that it was the hospital’s fault, because she must have contacted staph while hospitalized, and that made her more vulnerable to pneumonia. There’s a lot of stuff in the filings about her use of antibiotics. He swore she didn’t, the hospital contends she did and concealed it. In the end, they settled.”

The fact of a settlement proved nothing. The hospital might have settled because it was cheaper, in the long run. Don Epstein might have settled because he knew he didn’t have a good case. Whatever grief he felt over his wife, he seemed to have assuaged it quickly, with a new house and a new wife.

But then—widowers were considered desirable, and Carole Massinger had been a friend, close enough to attend his wedding. Tess had known other widowers who found new loves within a year of their wives’ deaths. Dorie was right: Most men sucked at being alone.

Then again, Tess didn’t know a single widower whose new wife had gone into the woods one day and never been seen again. And, thanks to Mrs. Blossom, she knew that Carole Epstein had yet to put in an appearance at the house on Blythe-wood Lane. She herself had called the home number several times, using a cell phone whose number was shielded from caller ID. She either got the machine, with a young woman’s voice—light and silvery as Gatsby’s Daisy—promising to get back to her, or the real-life Don Epstein who said Carole was out of town and, no, he didn’t know when she would be back, and just who was calling, anyway? So far, Tess had called as a member of Carole Epstein’s book club, curious to find out if she had read
The Kite Runner
yet. (No, she didn’t know if Carole Epstein was even in a book club, but she wagered that Don Epstein didn’t, either.) She had called as a saleswoman, eager to tell Carole about new arrivals at a local boutique; a woman who bought matching raincoats for herself and her Italian greyhound clearly cared about the latest shipment of Marc Jacobs. And she had called as the breeder, checking up on little—well, what did you name the dog, Mr. Epstein?

“She calls it Dempsey,” he had said.

“After the boxer?” she’d asked him.

“After the actor, the one on that doctor show, that all the women think is so cute.”

“And is Dempsey settling in—”

“It’s my wife’s dog. You’ll have to talk to her.”

“Certainly. When will she be in?”

“She’s away on business. I expect her next week.”

He was unwavering on this fact: Carole was away on business. He expected her next week. The thing was, he had been saying this for two weeks now.

Now, Tess asked Dorie: “Did you find out anything else about the first Mrs. Epstein?”

Her smile was triumphant. “Oh, indeed. You would have, too, if the
Beacon-Light
online archives went back just a little further. You see, Annette wasn’t the first Mrs. Epstein, she was the second. You’re actually looking for the third Mrs. Epstein. And the first Mrs. Epstein was a straight-up homicide victim.”

Now that was quite a rabbit to pull from one’s hat. No wonder Dorie had been preening so.

The photocopied newspaper clippings that Dorie produced reminded Tess just how many times the
Beacon-Light
had redesigned itself over the past fifteen years, paying more attention to its fonts and columns than it ever did to its local reporting. These clips were evidence of its more sober, serious past, when the front page held up to eight stories. In 1994, the date on the photocopied clip, most of the articles were national and international, as befit a newspaper that took itself oh-so-seriously.