The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [27]
“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.
Chapter 9
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,