The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [17]
“Maybe you should consider medical school.”
He snorted as if this were a joke on Tess’s part, as if he didn’t realize that he had come so far that medical school would not be that much of a reach. He wrote down her pressure in the pad that Crow kept by the bed, then went to the kitchen to get her a glass of water.
“Corner kid,” Lenhardt said, in the same diagnostic tone in which Lloyd had pronounced him police.
“Was,” Tess said. “Not anymore.”
“It’s hard,” Lenhardt said, “for people to change.”
“Yet they do, sometimes. Maybe Don Epstein changed, and Carole really is on a business trip. Maybe he’s just a really unlucky guy.”
“Maybe,” Lenhardt said.
“Maybe he’s just snakebit.”
“Maybe,” Lenhardt said, “and maybe, if I eat enough barbecued spare ribs at the Corner Stable, a pig will fly out of my butt.”
Chapter 6
How can I miss you if you won’t go away, Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks once asked. Similarly, Tess was finding out that it’s hard to be a missing person if no one will admit to missing you. Yet, try as she might, she couldn’t find anyone—a friend, a relative, a co-worker—who could make a credible complaint about the disappearance of Carole Epstein. There appeared to be no one in her life except Don Epstein. Oh, Tess had enough drag to get the cops to make a duty call, to question Epstein without revealing the source of the inquiry. But Epstein produced e-mails from his wife and even text messages. Easily faked, as far as Tess was concerned—if he had done away with Carole Epstein, he would have her phone and could send the text messages himself. And many spouses had access to each other’s e-mail.
But unless someone close to Carole insisted she had been the victim of foul play, there was little else that police could do. She was on a business trip. Her husband said she was a handbag designer, just getting started, and she was visiting small stores that she hoped would carry her designs. Dempsey appeared to be the only one to notice her absence—how else to explain his strange behavior? Otherwise, no one cared.
“It’s all very existential,” Whitney agreed. “If a wife falls down in the forest, does she make a sound? I wonder how many days I could be gone without anyone noticing.”
“You live with your parents.”
“On their property, not in their house,” Whitney said. “I could fall in the bathtub and be there for days. Days! Squirrels would come down the fireplace and start nibbling at my body. Did you tell the police about Mr. Epstein’s incredibly bad luck with the fair sex?”
“Yes, and they didn’t write me off as a complete kook. That’s why they were willing to talk to him at all. But that’s as far as they’ll go right now. There’s no public pressure, no media attention whatsoever.”
“Why would someone marry her sister’s older boyfriend? That’s kind of icky.”
Tess had a theory. But then, at this point there was little about the Epsteins that she had not thought through. The girl in the green raincoat filled her imagination. In a sense, she now spent more time in the company of Carole Epstein than with anyone else. Unless one counted Dempsey.
“It does happen—a loved one is lost, and a new relationship forms between the two people who grieved over that person. After all, it’s been almost fifteen years ago Danielle Messinger died, and Carole was only twenty at the time. He even had another wife in between, and Carole apparently socialized with them as a couple. As a friend, she might have offered him moral support after Annette’s death, and that turned to love.”
“Romantic,” Whitney said. “Perfectly innocuous. Do you happen to believe it?”
“I might—if it weren’t for this dog.”
Whitney stretched out on the floor, and Dempsey, who had taken to sleeping at Tess’s feet, jumped down and inspected her, then began to growl. Tess remembered Lenhardt’s crash