The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [45]
“It won’t look like a heart attack,” she told Carole. “There will be bruising, maybe even a burn mark. You won’t fool a good medical examiner.”
“Who cares? You’re the one who’s been harp, harp, harping that I’m the victim of foul play. People will think the real killer did you in because you wouldn’t shut up.”
“But they won’t blame Don Epstein. I happen to know he has a pretty good alibi for tonight.”
“Really?”
“He’s on a date.”
Carole paced, glancing at the items in Tess’s room. “I’ll turn over some furniture, take a few things, make it look like a robbery. I’ll be in Mozambique long before anyone thinks to look for me.”
“Mozambique?”
“It’s a good place to disappear,” Carole said. “If you have enough money. No extradition treaty with the U.S. And Don was pretty generous when I told him I wanted out. True, he didn’t know that I was taking even more than he agreed to give me, but Don was always generous, except when Annette got her hooks into him. Oh, the sweet little widow. She wasn’t so grief-struck that she didn’t do her best to get Don to cut me off, which was not part of the plan.”
“You killed Annette.”
“I would have, if the staph infection hadn’t beat me to it. She had a sweet tooth, so I started bringing her muffins loaded with antibiotics.” She wanted to start a gift-basket business, Mrs. Zimmerman had said. She made a good muffin. “I was going to give her a potassium spike while she was in the hospital, but I didn’t have to. I’m lucky that way.”
“Lucky?”
“I get what I want, just by thinking about it. When I was thirteen, I got in a big fight with my mother. I wanted to buy a designer skirt and she said I couldn’t use my savings. My own savings. I screamed at her, I said, ‘I wish you were dead.’ Two days later, she was. After that, I always knew I was special, that I could get whatever I wanted.”
“And you wanted Don Epstein?”
Carole made a face. “Don’t be silly. I wanted him to marry my sister.” She looked at the taser. “I think this would be less painful. If I go with the burglary scenario, I’ll have to use a kitchen knife.”
Tess had a feeling that Carole was more concerned about what blood would do to her coat than about easing Tess mercifully into the next world. The thing was to stall, to try to stay alive until her dinner arrived.
“The burglary is too much like the carjacking,” she said. “And you’ve always been so careful not to repeat yourself, Carole.”
As a little girl Whitney had owned a music box, which played a song that began “In the gloaming, oh my darling.” What was a gloaming? Was it a place or a quality of light? She remembered only that the trees were sobbing there. And now Don Epstein, cradling her hands in a grip that she couldn’t imagine breaking, was sobbing.
“It’s not uncommon,” she said, “to blame oneself. But it was just bum luck. Right? You stopped for someone in distress—”
“No,” he choked out, “no. It was my fault because I didn’t take her seriously. But who would? Who would think that an eighteen-year-old girl would do such a thing? Yes, I told her that I wanted to marry Danielle, but that I couldn’t afford to divorce Mary. Her father willed the stores to her, so they weren’t marital property under Maryland law. But I never expected . . . I never intended . . .”
It took Whitney a second to remember just who Danielle was. But once she did, she had no trouble filling in the missing bits of Epstein’s disjointed tale.
“But you didn’t tell police who shot you and Mary. That made you an accomplice.”
“They were treating me like a suspect the moment I came out of surgery. Who would ever believe that I didn’t ask her to do it? She told me she’d cut a deal, hang me out to dry. So we reached an agreement. I’d marry Danielle, take care of both of them. And even when Danielle died, I did what I could for her . . . for a while.”
Tess knew Carole wasn’t stupid. The woman recognized that she was stalling, if not the reason why. Carole was advancing on her, taser drawn, when Tess’s iPhone rang.