The Girl in the Green Raincoat by Laura Lippman Page A

you said she should stay in college?” Lifelong quarrels had been based on smaller things, as Tess knew, but it still seemed sad to her. Mrs. Zimmerman might be a know-it-all busybody, but Carole Massinger could have used a buttinsky in her life. That seemed to be another part of Don Epstein’s pattern: He preferred women who were alone in the world. She had yet to find anything about his second wife, Annette, and Mary had only her father, who died soon after her marriage.
    “Carole could be quite . . . willful. She said she needed to start over, with new memories. She sold the house—got a nice sum for it, too, although she didn’t sell anywhere near the height of the market. She sold everything in it. She said the memories were choking her. She was going to use the capital to start a gift-basket business. She did make a good muffin, I have to say. But I’m not sure that’s enough to make it in the gift-basket business. Carole was a little impractical.”
    “She was choking on memories, yet she took up with her sister’s ex-boyfriend.”
    “Not straight off,” Mrs. Zimmerman pointed out. “I think she fell into the habit of leaning on Don. They went to a grief counseling group together—that’s where Carole met Annette, and the three of them began palling around. She didn’t have anyone else. And he, unlike me, didn’t try to tell Carole not to do what she had her heart set on doing.”
    “She told you that?”
    “Just an assumption. As I said, we quarreled. It’s not so odd, that she would want to marry him, or he would want to marry her. She looks like Danielle. Prettier actually, because she has a real spunky quality. Danielle never got in the habit of standing up for herself.”
    “So she marries this man whose first wife gets murdered, whose second wife dies in a hospital, whose girlfriend has a freak fall—”
    “You shouldn’t have such morbid thoughts,” Mrs. Zimmerman said. “Your baby will be born warped.”
    It was hard, just then, not to order the woman out of the house. She was like some creepy old soothsayer, the very evil eye that Tess had been trying to ward off, and she had actually invited Mrs. Zimmerman into her home. But Tess stopped and thought before she spoke, a habit that she had spent a long time cultivating.
    “Yet you believe that Carole took his money and ran away, just because he says so?”
    Mrs. Zimmerman hesitated. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to believe that. But computers don’t lie, do they?”
    “They could be manipulated—especially by someone who owns a chain of check-cashing stores. What do you think, Mrs. Zimmerman, in your gut? Would the girl you knew have done this?”
    Mrs. Zimmerman thought. Thinking was not particularly kind to her face, grooved with age as it was. Cigarettes had not been kind to her. One could argue that life hadn’t been that kind to her, either. Her husband had left, she had been through surgery and probably chemo and speech therapy. The Massingers weren’t the only tragedy magnet on their block in Severna Park.
    “Carole never ran away from a fight in her life,” she said at last. “Like I said, she had spunk. Danielle was the weak one, rest her soul. She never stood up to anyone.”
    “And if she came to believe that Don hurt her sister?”
    “She would do whatever it took to bring him to justice.”
    “You should tell the police that. And the newspaper.”
    “The Beacon-Light ? Why would they care what some old lady from Severna Park had to say?”
    “I think they’d like to talk to anyone who knew Carole, who can sketch a more human portrait of her. After all, her side of the story has never been told.”
    Tess didn’t wait for Mrs. Zimmerman to think about this, but quickly dialed the city editor at the Beacon-Light , her sole contact at the newspaper. The “Blight” had been roiled by economic pressures, reducing its staff by more than a third. But Kevin Feeney was a solid journalist, and