The Girl in the Green Raincoat_ A Novel - Laura Lippman [9]
“You don’t have to be seventeen to think that way,” Tess assured her.
“Anyway, I was at the bus stop on Charles Street. And this stray dog tried to cross the street, which was about the busiest street in Baltimore before all the highways came through. I didn’t think, I just ran into the street after it. This one man, he threw on his brakes, but the man behind him didn’t react fast enough and he hit the man in front of him. And that man was so angry, and he got out of his car and the two drivers started yelling at each other, then yelling at me—”
“And the man who braked, that was Mr. Blossom?”
“No, no.”
“The man who hit him?”
“No, not him, either. Mr. Blossom was standing on the other side of the street, waiting for the northbound bus.”
“What does that have to do with the dog or the accident?”
“I got so flustered, I ran to the other side of the street. This nice young man—I didn’t know his name yet—said to me, ‘Why don’t you just stay here for a minute or two, and let those two gentlemen work out their problem?’ So I did and the next thing I knew, his bus had come and gone, and my bus had come and gone, and we walked down to Cold Spring, where there used to be an old-fashioned soda fountain, and we talked and we talked and, well, we never really stopped.”
“Really? You were married for more than fifty years and you never ran out of things to say to each other?”
“Oh, we learned to be quiet with each other, too. But it was always a good quiet. We were never cross with each other.”
“Never?” That seemed unfathomable to Tess. Crow was the most easygoing man in the world, and he drove her to distraction several times a week. A long marriage, raising children with someone—it simply wasn’t possible not to get angry or irritable at times. “How did you manage that?”
“Whenever I got cross with him, I would think about that girl at the bus stop, how unhappy she was, how she thought no one could ever want to take her on a date, much less love her. It may sound silly, but I figured out that being happy made me happier than being unhappy ever did.”
Tess replayed these words in her head: Being happy made me happier than being unhappy. The statement was so nonsensical it was profound.
“Do you realize,” she said, “that your romance with Mr. Blossom was literally a shaggy dog story?”
Mrs. Blossom looked confused. “But that dog wasn’t shaggy at all. He was a terrier, clipped very close.”
“I meant—oh, never mind. Thanks for all your help today.”
Left alone with her laptop, Tess glanced out the window at Stony Run Park and sighed. Technology had come so far, so quickly, but it wasn’t far enough. Here, with her laptop balanced on an old-fashioned wicker breakfast tray, she could roam the Internet, finding information that once took hours, even days. Here was the assessment and purchase information on Don Epstein’s Blythewood home, and the old addresses on his vehicle registration allowed her to look up his previous house, which had been even more expensive, a $4 million house on Gibson Island. But even as her wireless connection allowed her to collapse time and space, it could never provide the serendipity of legwork she had known—first as a reporter, roaming the hallways of courthouses and government buildings, then as an investigator. She couldn’t help wondering if this was part of some conspiracy, if this excess of access was a form of sleight of hand. Look over here, look how much you can find. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. H. L. Mencken had despised those who never left the newsroom, calling them the castrati of the craft.
Then again, Mencken had boasted about making things up, so he was a problematic role model.
Still, her confinement