The Girl in the Green Raincoat Page 9

  “You and your land of counterpane, playing games,” Crow had said. Tess didn’t know that a reference to Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses could be so bitter and accusatory.

  “I think of myself as Boo Radley, watching quietly, at the ready to avenge.”

  “You look more like Scout, trapped in her ham costume.”

  Crow had never said anything so cruel before, but his words were the least of her worries. For while Crow insisted that Lloyd take the ring back from May, it had been placed in a safe deposit box. There was no talk of a ring for Tess, no discussion of marriage. She moped on her chaise longue, thinking about all the deadbeat dads she had followed over the years, all the divorces. When she was flush, and could pick and choose her jobs, divorce work was always the first thing she jettisoned. She preferred Dumpster diving in corporate espionage cases over divorce cases. The slime from the Dumpster came off in the shower.

  “How do you envision our future?” she asked Crow now.

  “You know I try not to,” he said. “People are happier if they live in the moment.”

  “But you have to plan some things. Look at your job. You book bands months in advance. It’s not quite November and you’re already planning your Mardi Gras lineup.”

  “True, but the competition for authentic New Orleans music is fierce that time of year—”

  “So you can’t go through life without planning.”

  “Excuse me, aren’t you the woman who won’t let anyone buy her a crib, or paint a room, until the baby is actually here?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “But?”

  If a newscaster were in the room with them, the moment probably would have been described as a pregnant pause. An ironically pregnant pause.

  Crow’s cell phone began buzzing and he glanced at the caller ID. “Lloyd,” he said. “Remember we’re having him, May, and May’s moms over tomorrow, to talk about this whole engagement thing.”

  “But he gave the ring back,” Tess said. And you put it in a safe deposit box because you clearly don’t think you have any use for it.

  “Getting the ring back was the easy part,” Crow said. “The feelings don’t just slide off.”

  “I wonder if Don Epstein always used the same ring? It would have been morbid, I suppose, but what else would you do with them? What’s the etiquette? Maybe the ring is cursed. I’m surprised that Don Epstein hasn’t floated that theory.”

  Tess opened her computer, began clicking away again. She looked for photos of Mary Epstein, several of which had run with the Beacon-Light’s recent overview of Epstein’s checkered marital history. “Look, I think it’s the same. Art Deco, some darker stone worked into the setting. Of course that ring was taken at the hospital. Unless Epstein was brazen enough to lie about that? I mean, if he’s killing them, he wouldn’t be above stealing—”

  Crow sighed and carried her tray away.

  Tess had been given permission to take an extra shower to prepare for the brunch with Beth and Liz. There wasn’t much she could do with her appearance at this point, but she attempted to style her hair, Dempsey growling at the blow dryer throughout the process.

  Beth, Liz, and May arrived exactly on time. Lloyd, bless him, was late as usual. Way to impress your mothers-in-law, Tess thought. May, bracketed by her mothers, met his eyes only briefly, then returned to staring at her lap. She was an undeniably beautiful girl, with straight hair that hung halfway down her back and a willowy frame. She was quiet, at least in Tess’s presence, and it had been hard to imagine how she managed as a tutor, especially with someone as obdurate and contrary as Lloyd. At least, it was difficult to imagine until one saw the way Lloyd looked at her.

  After some awkward and superficial conversation about Crow’s food—How could blueberry macadamia nut muffins be low-fat?—Beth finally got down to cases.

  “Lloyd, we’re not going to forbid you to see May, because I think that would be counterproductive,” she said. “But the idea of being engaged at your age is simply ridiculous.”

  Tess worried that Lloyd would get angry, revert to the posturing swagger he had used when she first knew him. But Lloyd was remarkably composed.

  “Why?” he asked.

  The question seemed to catch Beth off-guard, perhaps because she considered the reasons so obvious. Tess had, too—until Lloyd asked that they be enumerated. Why shouldn’t people get engaged at eighteen? They were too young. It wouldn’t work out. They might compromise their futures. They couldn’t possibly know what they wanted. What was the rush? Tess knew all these things were true, yet they sounded a little hollow, racing through her head. Her parents hadn’t been that much older.

  “You’re too young,” Beth began.

  “Romeo and Juliet were teenagers,” Lloyd said.

  “Yes—in a play,” Beth said. “A play about people whose life expectancy was about half yours, in an era where people made early marriages, in part, because—” She broke off, clearly not wanting to finish her thought. Tess wondered if she had caught herself before suggesting that people used to get married in order to have sex. Funny, how they continued to tiptoe around that topic.

  “Would you and Liz get married, if you could?” Lloyd asked.

  “That’s not relevant to this discussion,” Beth said, even as Liz said, “We might, if some people would consider going to California.”

  “I’m not spending the money to go all the way to California to go through some patriarchal ceremony that doesn’t, in the end, mean anything.”

  “It would mean something to me,” Liz said.

  May sat between them, eyes downcast. Tess tried to imagine the world as this girl saw it. Did she remember the orphanage where she had lived until she was almost three? Did she dream about the parents who had abandoned her, wonder about a world where the mere fact of gender could make a child unwanted? What had she thought about going from no mother to two? When had it registered that her life was not like most children’s? What had drawn her to Lloyd? Did they talk about their lives, their childhoods? Did she feel luckier by contrast, knowing that Lloyd’s biological mother had essentially abandoned him at his stepfather’s request?

  “What about you, May?” Tess asked.

  “I love Lloyd,” she said. “Beth and Liz say I can’t know that. But I do.”

  “Actually, I was wondering where you stood on their marriage?”

  Beth flushed, angry. Tess knew she had overstepped, but she didn’t care.

  “I want them to be happy,” May said.

  “We are happy,” Beth and Liz chorused.

  “You were,” their daughter said. “Before this summer, when Liz started to talk about getting married. Then you started to fight. A lot.”

  “But we’re not fighting about our commitment to one another,” Beth said. “We’re fighting about a principle. To me, marriage is an institution from which I was barred for most of my adult life. Like . . . a country club that didn’t take blacks or Jews. Sorry, Lloyd.”

  “No problem,” he said. “I know I’m black.”

  That sparked some weak chuckles, undercutting the tension in the room. Beth continued: “The thing is, when a place that has banned you changes the rules because of external pressure, that doesn’t mean you rush to join.”

  “You just didn’t want to sign a prenup,” Liz said.

  “Liz! That’s not fair, not fair at all.”

  Tess, who had watched far more daytime television in the past month than she had seen in her previous thirty-five years, began to feel as if she were in the middle of her own bizarre talk show.

  “We’re not here to talk about our relationship,” Beth said.

  “Why not?” May asked. “You’ve been telling me what I can do. Why can’t I have an opinion about what you do?”

  “Do you?” Crow asked. “What do you want, May?”

  The question seemed to catch her off-guard. Had no one ever asked her this? Her two mothers waited, as if May were an oracle,
as if she had the power to control their future. She did, Tess realized, and not just in the matter of marriage. She was their child, their lives were in thrall to her.

  “I want you to be happy,” she said. “But you’re both so determined to win that it’s become impossible. It’s the same with Lloyd and me, only you agree on that. You’re so fixated on winning the argument that you’ve never bothered to think about why I took the ring, why I might want to marry Lloyd.”

  “You’re too young,” Beth began again.

  May rolled her eyes and sighed exaggeratedly, which didn’t exactly refute Beth’s point.

  “Your brain isn’t even fully formed,” Liz put in. “Teenagers don’t have the same brain chemistry as adults. You’re not using your frontal lobe to make decisions. I heard it on NPR!”

  Crow caught Tess’s eye at that moment, which was disastrous. She began to laugh, then cough, then laugh and cough. It was the combination of “frontal lobe” with the PC battle cry, “I heard it on NPR!” She laughed so hard that Dempsey began barking, almost as if joining in. It was infectious, catching May, then Lloyd and Crow, Beth, and finally, reluctantly, Liz.

  “Okay, okay,” Beth said at last. “Why do you want to marry Lloyd?”

  “I’m not sure I do,” May said, and the look on Lloyd’s face almost shattered Tess’s heart. “But that’s part of being engaged, right? You make a commitment to get married, but you have time to think about it.”

  “May?” Crow said. “At the risk of piling on more advice, I have to say that engagement isn’t something you do as a trial. You get engaged when you’re sure of what you want.” Tess’s heart lurched on her own behalf. Was this why Crow no longer spoke of marrying her? “I believe you love Lloyd and he loves you. But he proposed precisely because he knows you’re not one hundred percent sure of him. He was trying to bind you to him prematurely. Just be in love, don’t worry about putting names to it.”

  “That’s part of it,” May admitted. “But the thing I can’t forget is that Beth and Liz met when they weren’t much older than we are now, back in college. They let ten years go by before they were together.”

  “In part,” Beth said dryly, “because Liz married a man first.”

  “I didn’t get a wedding then, either. Is it so wrong to want one wedding in a lifetime?”

  “But don’t you wish you had those ten years?” May asked. “Don’t you regret doubting yourselves, being skeptical of what you felt?”

  The two women exchanged a glance.

  “I do,” Liz said.

  “I do, too,” Beth said.

  “Well,” Lloyd said. “That’s a kind of wedding right there, ain’t it?”

  Beth and Liz had no problem laughing at themselves this time. They weren’t humorless, as Tess had first thought. Just worried about their daughter.

  Beth plucked a carrot curl from the salad and placed it on Liz’s finger.

  “Marriage in Massachusetts, not California,” she said. “Party here. Friends and family, nothing too crazy.”

  Tess looked at the carrot curl and thought about the Art Deco behemoth that Epstein had used for two wives. Where was it now? What if Carole had found it in his effects? What would that signify? The ring mattered, she was sure of it. No, not that ring. Carole had found something else in Don Epstein’s house, the importance of which only she understood.

  Then Tess realized she had confused the plot of Rear Window with her own life.

  Chapter 12

  Tess kept clicking back and forth, back and forth, looking at the ring on first Mary Epstein’s hand, then Annette’s. It had to be the same ring. Then again, maybe it was cheaper than it looked, and he had a whole drawer full of them, encased in plastic globes, gumball machine ready. She found the voluminous photocopy of all the back-and-forth filings in the wrongful death suit. Epstein had submitted a list of property taken: diamond studs, a tennis bracelet, and an engagement ring. The latter was described as an “antique Art Deco ring, a three-carat diamond set in platinum, with a border of diamonds and emeralds, with an estimated value of $20,000.” Perhaps he had inflated the cost? She e-mailed the description to her mother and asked if that sounded right to her. Her mother’s older brother was a jeweler, he should be able to help.

  As she clicked back and forth, she noticed two more look-alikes. Mary Epstein had put on about thirty pounds during her marriage, but she looked eerily like Annette in the earlier photos—tall, thin, blond. Don Epstein had a type. A type that wasn’t a far cry from Whitney Talbot. Granted, Whitney’s eyes had a foxlike slyness, her jaw was sharper. Whitney’s jaw was sharper than most kitchen knives. Still, she was a good match.

  Not as Whitney Talbot, though. Whitney Talbot was too confident, too rooted. Don Epstein preferred his women a little lost. Like a wolf, he cut the weak ones from the herd. The real Whitney would never appeal to him. But a good cover story could take care of that.

  Whitney needed approximately forty seconds to be persuaded.

  “I’m in!” she cried happily. “But there’s so much competition. How do I break through the crowd?”

  “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.