The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [39]
“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.
Tess was thinking about dinner, too. Not hers, but the food that Annette Epstein had eaten in the hospital. Could Don Epstein have slipped antibiotics in her food while she was there? And what about the idiopathic nausea that landed her in the hospital but hadn’t killed her? She clicked away on the Internet, reading about poison.
Crow walked in, looked over her shoulder and sighed.
“It’s fascinating,” she said. “It’s not that easy to find a poison in someone’s system unless you have some idea what it is. Yes, everyone agrees that Annette Epstein had antibiotics in her system. But what about the nausea that put her in the hospital to begin with? Of course they did a tox screen, but that only uncovers so much, and no one was arguing about the cause of Annette’s death, which was clearly a complication of the staph infection—”
“Tess, this isn’t healthy.”
She held up the spiral-bound notepad on the bedside table. “My blood pressure readings have been normal for days.”
“I’m talking about your mental health. You set out to get the police’s full attention. Mission