The Girl in the Green Raincoat (9 page)

The world was full of loners, as Whitney well knew, being one herself. But it was hard for even a loner to get through life without acquiring a friend or two. Proximity was an interesting phenomenon. Put two people close together, over time, and they would form a bond. She and Tess had become lifelong friends through the random lottery of the housing system at Washington College. Carole Epstein must have held a real job at some point. Her sister had died a decade ago; Carole was married to Don Epstein for less than eighteen months. She hadn’t been supporting herself as a handbag designer for all that time.

As it turned out, she had spent at least part of the time selling handbags at Nordstrom, according to Marjorie, quitting only a few months before she married Epstein.

“I’m going to the mall,” Whitney announced. “Foundation business.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” Marjorie groused. “Bring me a smoothie, if you remember. After all, I don’t get to bolting out on a whim.”

Whitney was the kind of person who attracted sales ladies. Funny, as she was actually rather cheap, in the WASP tradition, and would never dream of paying the prices demanded by today’s handbags. Three hundred dollars, five hundred dollars. A thousand dollars! In Baltimore, yet. She got her handbags for free, raiding her mother’s closet and grabbing the least froufrou items. On her last foray, she had taken a Hermès Bolide, and the sharp-eyed saleswomen in Nordstrom circled her hungrily, sure that a woman who carried such a purse was juicy quarry indeed.

Whitney allowed their advances, letting first this one and that one approach. After sizing them up for the better part of an hour, she settled on the most determined clerk, a plump-cheeked little beauty who didn’t seem to hear the word “No.” Although young, she was quite the breezy pro.

“How long have you worked here?” she asked, examining a Marc Jacobs bag known as the “Patchwork Gennifer.” The “Gennifer” was unforgivable, the $1,500 price tag unfathomable.

“Three years,” the saleswoman said, substituting a slightly less flamboyant Burberry bag, which Whitney could
almost
imagine carrying—if the decimal point moved one column to the left. Give the woman props: She was like the mother of a young child, quick to distract her charge from an unpleasant sensation by substituting another.
Don’t want the lolly? Here’s a binky.

“So you knew Carole Epstein?” A blank look, another quick bag substitution. Kate Spade this time. Warmer, Whitney thought. Warmer.

“Perhaps you knew her as Carole Massinger?”

“Oh, yeah,” the woman said, and there was some kind of emotion to it, but Whitney wasn’t sure she could identify it. “Kiki. Did she use to wait on you? Because she is
gone
.”

It was unclear if the woman knew just how gone Carole was. But she must. Although the story had lost its momentum, it dominated the local media for a week or so.

“How does Carole become Kiki?”

A shrug, another bag sliding down Whitney’s arm, another bag sliding up. Dooney & Bourke. “I don’t know. She asked to be called Kiki one day. No skin off my—do you like metallics?”

“No,” Whitney said. “Was she a friend?”

“I liked her, but, you know.”

Whitney chose to translate this sentiment as:
We worked together, we were friendly, I wasn’t her bridesmaid.
Bridesmaids! Carole might have been Don Epstein’s third wife, but he was her first husband. Had she gone whole hog on the wedding? That could lead to friends, distant family. Whitney made a note to ask Tess if the marriage license indicated a proper church wedding or a courthouse quickie.

“Have you been in touch with her since she left—” Whitney stole a look at the woman’s name tag. “—Denise?”

“She came in once.” Denise held up a Gucci bag, covered with the signature design of interlocking G’s. Whitney shook her head. If a designer wanted to advertise on her body, he could pay for the privilege. “After she got married. She looked at a lot of bags, but she didn’t buy anything. I think she was enjoying being on the other side of the counter.”

“Did she ever talk about her fiancé before they got married, when you were still working together?”

“Yeah.” Denise surrendered, stopped pulling out things to show Whitney. “She said—wait, it was funny what she said, I remember that much. She said . . . ‘I’ve had my sights on him for a long time.’ ”

“What did she mean by that?”

Denise shrugged. “I thought she meant he was rich, her ticket out.”

“She didn’t mention that she had known him a long time, or that he had once dated her sister?”

“No, I would have remembered
that
. Or at least the sister part. When she came back in here that one time, she was kinda depressed. Really well dressed, in this amazing coat—”

“A green raincoat?” Whitney had heard Tess describe Carole Esptein often enough to imagine the woman herself, although she had never seen her, except in that one odd photo captured from the Internet. She thought it must be the only photo of Carole, for it was the one all the television shows used when they interviewed Epstein.

“Yes, exactly. She was trying to match a purse to it, in fact. A big purse, which surprised me, because this was last spring—remember how cool and rainy it was—and the trend was going toward small. Carole was usually on top of that kind of stuff, you know? But she didn’t buy anything, anyway. She seemed really down. And when I asked her how married life was, she said it wasn’t what she expected.”

“How so?”

“I don’t remember specifics. I just thought it was the usual letdown. All my girlfriends go through it.”

It was a good explanation, as good as any for a young bride’s down mood on a rainy spring day, and Denise did seem to have a feel for people. Or women. Unlike Freud, she wasn’t puzzled about what women wanted. They wanted handbags, and maybe shoes to match. If Whitney were a real shopper, Denise probably could have found the right bag for her. She had been getting closer, stylewise, with each guess.

Whitney put the timeline together in her head. Carole Massinger had known Don Epstein for at least fifteen years, and stayed close enough to him to attend his second wedding. But their romantic relationship had been relatively brief—assuming it hadn’t begun as an affair. Who had set their sights on whom? Could it be that Carole Massinger was the first person to glimpse the Bluebeard in Don Epstein, that she had always suspected him in her sister’s death and resolved to avenge it somehow? Could she have married him just to get the goods on him? A wife can’t be
forced
to testify against her husband, but she can volunteer to do so. Had Carole Massinger rummaged through the rooms of Don Epstein’s house, literally and figuratively, defied his orders and found the equivalent of a locked room, in which all his secrets were revealed? Had her foray into Stony Run Park that day been the modern-day equivalent of a call to Sister Ann, summoning help?

“Thank you for your time today,” she told Denise.

“You’re not going to buy anything, are you?” She sighed. “Frankly, if I had a Hermès like that one, I don’t think I’d buy anything, either. If I had a Hermès like that, I think I’d just walk around naked in my house with it, take it to bed with me.”

Whitney wondered if purse fetishism was yet another new sexual perversion gaining ground through the power of the Internet.

“I do have a friend who’s going to need a diaper bag,” she said. “Problem is, she’s not the diaper bag sort. In fact, she needs kind of a combination diaper bag/briefcase, with pockets for two cell phones, her gun, and maybe a set of lock picks.”

“I have just the thing,” Denise said, not the least bit fazed by the mention of a gun. She truly was a pro.

A
pink diaper bag?” Tess asked in bewilderment, lifting the item from the silver Nordstrom box.

“Pink
and
brown.” Whitney took the bag from Tess and began showing her the various pockets. Her over-the-top gestures were uncannily like those used by
The
Price Is Right
models, only Whitney got to do all the talking on her game show. “Your cell can go here, and in a pinch I think you could wrap your Beretta in the portable changing pad. Check out the antique brass tone stroller clips. And it converts to a knapsack.”

She demonstrated, marching up and down, pretending to push a stroller and walk a dog.

“Okay, I like the last feature, but it’s still pink and”—Tess looked at the label—“made by someone called Petunia Pickle Bottom. Also, did I mention? It’s
pink
.” She couldn’t bear to go into the harangue about the evil eye, and how she didn’t want any baby gifts until there was, in fact, a baby. The concept of a baby was still strangely abstract to Tess. She was eight weeks away from the delivery date, and despite the constant signs of life within her—Fifi La Pew was a big kicker, go figure—seemed to have zero maternal instincts. She wasn’t even sure she believed there was a child in her. She would not be surprised to discover that the object in her belly was an enormous . . . radish. That was, in fact, a recent dream. She’d given birth to a radish, and everyone said it looked just like her.

“I wasn’t being a sexist,” Whitney said. “It just has the best configuration of pockets. I also like that combination of pink and brown. Makes me think of Baskin-Robbins. Besides, it’s not for you, it’s for the baby.”

“I don’t know much about motherhood,” Tess admitted. “But I’m pretty sure the diaper bag is, in fact, for me. For me and Crow, who will probably
like
changing diapers. Who will probably be such a good parent that I will be largely irrelevant.”

“Are you going to be competitive about parenting, too?” Whitney asked.

“I’m not.” But Tess didn’t have the energy to deny something that was so clearly true. “I’m just feeling inadequate. Crow bustles around, happy and confident, without a single care in the world, whereas I’m stuck in chronic worry mode.”

“Well, I have another gift that might cheer you up.”

“Is it alcohol? Her brain must be more or less developed by now. Besides, IQ is highly overrated. Look at you. Near genius IQ, but your taste is crap.”

“This is better than alcohol.” Whitney, who had continued to pace the room, modeling the diaper bag, stopped and posed dramatically, arms akimbo. “Ethel Zimmerman!”

Tess waited, thinking there must be more, but Whitney just stood there, pleased to the point of smugness.

“I’m afraid I already know Ethel Merman’s real name, but thanks for the trivia. Did you know that Jacqueline Susann was the one who told her what to say, when people asked why she changed it? Something about how people would pass out from the heat if ‘Zimmerman’ were up in lights.”

“And she was married to Ernest Borgnine for thirty-two days, a fact immortalized by a chapter in her autobiography—a single blank page,” Whitney said.

Sheesh
, Tess thought,
who’s the competitive one here?

“However, this is a different Ethel Zimmerman. Lives in Severna Park, a longtime neighbor of the Massingers. She was Carole’s in-case-of-emergency person at Nordstrom. What do you want to bet she’s also the person Carole called the weekend she couldn’t raise her sister on the phone?”

“Hence, my diaper bag?” Tess was torn between admiration and envy. It was galling, being trapped here, while Whitney was free to follow up hunches, roam the world, make things happen.

“You can’t imagine the half of it,” Whitney said. “Do you know anyone who wants a Marc Jacobs wallet?”

“Have you visited Ethel yet? Chatted her up?”

Whitney shook her head. “I thought about it. But I really think she needs to come see you, have you explain what you think happened, and why. Even if you only saw Carole through your window, you have a connection to her that I can’t quite match. She’s
real
to you. To me, she’s just a puzzle.”

“How are we going to get some woman from Severna Park to come up here and talk to me?”

“Well, there’s light rail, if she doesn’t drive—”

“No, I mean, what can I say that would persuade her that this can’t be done over the phone, that I need to meet her face-to-face?”

Whitney was nonplussed. In that most unusual silence, the sounds of Dempsey’s chewing filled the room. He had progressed from trying to eat his own leg to gnawing on the bars on his crate. The dog’s behavior had improved, but only with Tess. He was still generally hateful to everyone else, and had to be crated when anyone but Crow was in the house. And Lloyd refused to walk him with the other dogs, as it always ended in a melee.

So, during the day, when Dempsey needed to take bathroom breaks, Tess used an antique cane—another bizarre gift from her aunt, who seemed to confuse her pregnancy with some sort of Victorian-era malady—to lift the crate’s lock and swing the door open. He trotted outside, did his business, went mano a mano with the invisible fencing for a few rounds, then returned docilely to his crate. He wouldn’t go out in the dark, however; released in the middle of the night, he still used her chamber pot. He was scared of the dark. It was the only sign of weakness in the dog, who seemed to be girding himself for some epic battle. Now, as his teeth grated against the metal, Tess couldn’t help wondering if he was sharpening them in preparation for his next meeting with Don Epstein, or whatever hired gun had taken away the dog’s beloved mistress.