The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [43]
Flashlights? She knew he liked out of the way places, but this was ridiculous. She didn’t feel so silly now, slipping her handgun into her purse. He turned on a roughly paved road, then a gravel one, then a dirt lane. She had mocked Tess’s iPhone, but it had a GPS function, something she would dearly love to have right now. Where was she? Somewhere in Carroll County, north of Union Mills. The last street sign she had noticed was Humbert School House Road, a nice Nabokovian touch in the middle of nowhere. She had tried to call Epstein’s attention to it, but he didn’t know the reference and didn’t find it funny when she explained it.
“Child molesters,” he said, “should be killed. I was disappointed when the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for rape.” It was the first little splinter of dissatisfaction she had experienced in his company. A man who believed in the death penalty—ugh. Then: Does he believe in applying it on his own?
“Are we there yet?” she asked, trying for a joking tone.
“Almost,” he said.
“You know, this has the feel of a horror film. Two people, out in the middle of the country on a dark night.”
“Not a horror film,” Don Epstein said. “This is a love story. A very sad one.”
Tess checked her e-mail for perhaps the quadrillionth time. The eBay seller never replied, and now the items had been removed. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should have bid on one of the cheaper items, seen what information could be gleaned. Somehow, she had alerted Epstein that she was on to him—and now he was out with Whitney. How had he made the connection? He didn’t know her name. Shoot—the photograph with Dempsey, the one used on the Today show. If he had plugged “Monaghan” into an image search . . . Stupid, stupid, stupid.
She had thought such mistakes were behind her. Her learning curve as a private detective had been a steep one, but it was a long time since she’d done something truly boneheaded. She loved her job. True, she hadn’t dreamed about being a private investigator when she was a child. What child ever did? But once she found this vocation, she realized she was made for it. Much as she had realized she was made for Crow once she found him. Now it seemed she must choose between the two.
She had meant what she told Crow. The one thing she could never do was work for someone else again. Except—never was a big word. If it came down to putting food on the table, one would do just about anything. And Crow had already compromised quite a bit, shelving his own dreams. What was she going to do? What were they going to do? Stymied, she refreshed the eBay page. Empty.
Don Epstein stopped near a small wire fence, thick with rust. “I bought the land twenty years ago, thinking to build a house out here for Mary and me. Then I found out about this.”
“A garden?”
“An old cemetery. All my wives are buried here.”
“All?” Whitney’s voice squeaked a little. “I mean, um, both?”
“Mary and Annette. It’s not exactly legal to do that, you know, so please don’t tell anyone. They didn’t have anyone but me, so I didn’t think it mattered.”
So there was a body to be exhumed, Whitney thought. Tess would be thrilled.
“Only one other person even knows about this place, and that was Carole.” He seemed on the verge of tearing up. “I’m sorry now, but you see—it started with Annette.”
Oh dear. What, exactly, had started with Annette? Thank God she had her handgun in her purse. Which was in the car. Damn, damn, damn.
“I met Annette at a meeting for people who were grieving. Carole was the one who persuaded me to go. Annette had lost her husband to cancer. We started dating. And when I decided to marry her, I brought her out here and asked her, right here, at Mary’s grave site. You know Mary was my high school sweetheart, right?”
Whitney nodded. God, her throat was suddenly so dry, her lips almost stuck together. Perhaps she could ask to get her purse, in order to apply some Carmex?
“I admit, I never loved Annette quite as much as I loved Mary. Annette was great.