The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [25]
The director—portrayed in the local media as a saint who cared nothing for herself—cursed Whitney with admirable creativity, managing to invoke her mother, skin tone, and even the contours of her rear end, which did run to flatness. Ah well, one nice thing about cell phones was that they couldn’t be slammed down, merely closed with a click.
Truth was, this was a better day than most. The real problem was that she was bored. And she wasn’t a very good sport about being bored, which might explain why she had attended two colleges, then raced through three jobs before settling in at the foundation, barely in her thirties at the time. She had so loved being Lady Largesse. She didn’t think such things ever got old. But they did. Everything did.
Hmmmm, perhaps that was Don Epstein’s problem as well. Beautiful woman after beautiful woman. Only his wives didn’t get old, come to think of it. Not a one had made it past forty so far.
She had to admit, Tess seemed to be onto something, even if the rest of the world had moved on, unable to sustain interest when the other celery-green shoe failed to drop. As Sherlock Holmes had said to Watson, to lose one wife was tragic, two was careless, and three—well, Holmes hadn’t had a word for that, as Whitney recalled. Of course, she was Watson to Tess’s Holmes, if not as fatuously admiring of her friend. Besides, this Watson had a little more mobility than her Holmes just now, and a few ideas of her own about how to track down someone who might kick up a fuss over the missing Carole Epstein. That was what they needed, right? Someone who was willing to make some noise.
She dialed the foundation’s sole full-time employee, the much put-upon Marjorie.
“Marjorie—” she began in a wheedling tone.
“Don’t give me anything else, I can barely keep up with what I’ve got,” Marjorie snapped. At the foundation for twenty years, she had come to think of its funds as her money, with Whitney a cheeky interloper.
“Just one little thing. I’d like a quick background check on one of the women who visited me today, Carole Epstein.”
“I know your calendar and I watch the news. This isn’t foundation business.”
“It could be. We’ve worked with abused women, have we not?”
Marjorie sighed. “Do you have her Social?”
“No, but I have her last two addresses.” Quickly, she plugged Don Epstein into Switchboard.com, where his information still carried the Gibson Island address. She read that aloud, adding the Blythewood one from memory. “It’s her work history I really want. Try the name Carole Massinger as well. That’s her maiden name.”
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