The Girl in the Green Raincoat by Laura Lippman

at the time. She put her own dreams on hold, got a decent job, made sure that Carole wanted for little. Put her social life on hold, too, until Carole was in high school. That’s when Don Epstein first started coming around.”
    “Wasn’t he married then?”
    Mrs. Zimmerman nodded, lips pursed.
    “I tried not to judge,” she said. Tess found that hard to believe. “He was her boss, she said they had to work overtime some nights, and I turned a blind eye. The thing is, Danielle was younger and older than her years. Responsible about money. Stupid about men.”
    “You didn’t like Don Epstein?”
    Ethel Zimmerman considered this. “No, no—I can’t say that. He was courteous, did nice things for Danielle, treated her well. Oh, the presents he started to give her once they started dating officially. Jewelry, fancy clothes. She was dazzled. Too dazzled. I was worried he was toying with her, that he would move on to somebody else more . . . like him.”
    “More like him?”
    “Rich, well-to-do. They tend to stick to their own, rich people.” Mrs. Zimmerman studied Tess. “Your husband ”—she managed to make it sound as if she didn’t believe there was one, but perhaps, Tess thought, that was her own hormone-fueled paranoia—“does he have a similar background to yours?”
    Tess had never even considered this “We’re both only children . . .” But that was the only overlap she could see. Crow’s parents had ancestors , the kind of families who had arrived in the colonies from England—not on the Mayflower, but not far behind. His father was an academic, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia, his mother a sculptor. He had grown up in a bookish, indulgent household, encouraged to speak his mind and follow his bliss.
    Her parents, smart as they were, didn’t even have college diplomas, and “bliss” was not part of their vocabulary.
    “A man can’t be happy if he marries below his station,” Mrs. Zimmerman warned darkly, as if she could read Tess’s mind. “Ralph and I may not have gone the distance, but we made a good run at it. But if you start off unequal, it never balances out. That’s what I told Danielle, all those years ago. He was rich, he lived high. She’d never be a good fit.”
    Tess wondered if Danielle had sought Mrs. Zimmerman’s counsel on love and marriage. It probably didn’t matter. Tess hadn’t, and yet here she was, getting her ear chewed off a mere ten minutes after meeting the woman.
    “But Don Epstein’s money came mainly from his first wife,” Tess said. “The check-cashing businesses belonged to her late father, although Epstein built them up.”
    “And you see how that ended.”
    Tess was beginning to see why Ralph might have bolted.
    “There were conflicting reports, around the time of Danielle’s death, that she and Don were engaged. He said no, but her sister seemed to believe he had proposed.”
    “I think Danielle might have told Carole that to save face, given how long they had been dating by then.”
    “Did you find her death suspicious?”
    “Suspicious? Goodness, no. Sad, yes, but not suspicious. Some families are just a magnet for tragedy. I should have noticed that her car hadn’t moved for days, but it was Easter time and I was running around.”
    “Were you surprised when Carole married him?”
    “Actually I didn’t know anything about it until I turned on the six o’clock news and found out she had left him, taking most of his money. That was quite the shock.”
    “You weren’t in touch then? When did you last speak?”
    Mrs. Zimmerman’s face clouded over. “We had a little falling out, I’m sorry to say. You see, she didn’t finish school, dropped out a month shy of graduation. True, she had lost Danielle the year before and it was a vicious shock. But I told her Danielle would have wanted her to finish, that she had made sacrifices so Carole would have a college degree.”
    “She stopped speaking to you because