The Girl in the Green Raincoat (10 page)

“Dempsey!” she said. “We can ask Mrs. Zimmerman if she’ll come up here to see Dempsey, consider taking him in as a favor to Carole.”

“She won’t,” Whitney said. “Unless she’s crazy.”

“And I wouldn’t wish him on her. But that would be enough to get her here, and let me lay out my ideas about what really happened to Carole. We’ll call her, say that Carole left something in our care and that we have instructions to turn it over to her. But what do you think we’ll gain by talking to Ethel face-to-face?”

“You are really getting slow. Are you sure
your
brain function is okay? She’s Carole’s in-case-of-emergency person. Here’s our emergency.”

“I think that applies more to workplace accidents,” Tess said. “But, okay, I get it. She can turn up the heat, put forward a sympathetic version of Carole in opposition to the bitch-stole-my-money portrait that Epstein has painted. You are pretty smart. Taste in diaper bags aside.”

“Trust me, I picked the best one.”

* * *

Ethel Zimmerman sounded extremely frail on the phone, an elderly woman with a hoarse, wispy voice that Tess could barely hear. Still, she didn’t hesitate when asked if she would come to Baltimore to talk about Carole; Tess didn’t even need to dangle the bait of Dempsey. Mrs. Zimmerman did ask if their meeting could wait until the next afternoon—she confessed that she found traffic terrifying after four o’clock—and Tess, her heart full of sympathy for the older woman, said that it could.

The next day, Crow cleaned up the house before leaving for work, then made sure the door was unlocked so Tess wouldn’t make an unnecessary trip to the door. At noon—a full hour before Mrs. Zimmerman was expected—a sharp knock sounded, and Tess yelled, “Come in, I’m in the back.”

But could this be Mrs. Zimmerman? Tess’s guest—
guests
—were two forty-something woman with hard athletic builds and almost identical chin-length bobs. At first glance they appeared to be sisters. At second, Tess realized they simply had remarkably similar taste.

“Mrs. Zimmerman?”

The two women exchanged a look. “No, we’re—I’m Beth Angleton—”

“And I’m Liz Matthias.”

They looked at Tess expectantly, as if their names should explain everything.

“Um—”

“We’re May’s parents? Lloyd’s girlfriend?” Their level gazes, while not exactly judgmental, managed to convey that they would know
instantly
who Tess Monaghan was, if she had shown up, unannounced, at their home
. I have preeclampsia
, Tess wanted to say
. I’m in the middle of a possible murder investigation, I’m a little distracted.

“Of course. Did Lloyd say you would be coming by? We’ve been—well, life—as you can see—” She indicated her bed, the dog, the room, her mound of a belly in hopes that these things would sum up the insanity that was her life. Thank God, Crow had cleaned the house and the chamber pot was empty.

“No, we didn’t tell Lloyd we were coming to meet with you,” said Beth. Or was it Liz? Were they both actually Elizabeth? Had they been forced to differentiate their nicknames to avoid confusion? “This is awkward, but—we’re really not happy with Lloyd as a companion for May.”

On her best day, Tess could come up with a dozen reasons why Lloyd wasn’t a fit companion for anyone. But that was her prerogative. How dare these oh-so-perfect, put-together mommies—they also wore complementary silver earrings and stunning designer glasses—imply that Lloyd wasn’t the right boyfriend for their precious May? She decided to put them on the defensive.

“Are we talking about race?”

“Of course not!” Beth and Liz chorused. Then Beth—or was it Liz?—added: “You can’t possibly think
we’re
bigoted.”

“Why not?” Tess challenged.

“We adopted a girl from China. Our own lives, our choices, have exposed us to—I won’t say as much prejudice as someone like Lloyd might have known, but it’s certainly made us sensitive to judging people according to external standards. We
love
Lloyd. He’s bright, curious. In the beginning, we thought he was a good influence on May.”

“So what’s your problem?” Tess asked. She didn’t mean it to sound quite so peevish and hostile, but—she was pregnant and stuck in this room. People had to grant her a little latitude, and not just on mood. She had to take sponge baths, for example. The highlight of her week was the shower she was allowed to have while sitting on a plastic stool. She got pretty stinky by day six, and this was day five. She dared anyone to be cheerful under such circumstances.

“Surely you know?” asked Beth, who appeared to be the spokeswoman. It wasn’t so hard to tell them apart, after all. Beth’s eyes were blue, while Liz’s tended toward green. “We just assumed—I mean, he said he had gotten it from your, um, partner, so we thought he had been consulted.”

Tess liked the fact that one of May’s two mommies had to grope for the proper term to describe Crow. She fought down the urge to scream out, Cloris Leachmanlike, “He
vuz
my boyfriend!” But even if they got the
Young Frankenstein
reference, these terribly earnest women probably wouldn’t be amused by it.

“What did he get from Crow? Some inappropriate film?” In a flash, Tess knew what had happened. “Did he screen
In the Realm of the Senses
for May? Or something by Peter Greenaway? You have to understand, to Lloyd, film is film, it’s all about technique, not content. I’ve tried to explain that other people have different sensibilities, but—”

“This isn’t about a movie,” Beth said.

“Would that it were,” Liz muttered.

“Well,
what
then?” Tess snapped. “I don’t mean to be impatient, but I am expecting someone this afternoon, and if you could just get down to cases—”

“This past weekend was May’s birthday,” Beth said. “Lloyd gave her a ring and asked her to marry him.”

Tess reached Crow at work, but he was innocent of Lloyd’s intentions, as it turned out. He had shown Lloyd the ring, an heirloom from his mother’s family, and told him that it would be his one day, when he found the woman he wanted to marry. Crow just hadn’t expected “one day” to come so soon.

“You can’t even call it stealing,” Crow said. “I told him that he could have it when he decided to get married. I’m not glad he took it without asking, but he took it for its rightful purpose, didn’t hock it. It’s not that long ago that Lloyd might have done just that. That’s progress.”

“Why would he want to get married?”

“He’s in love,” Crow said.

“Eighteen-year-old boys fall in love every day. They also fall
out
. However, they don’t go out and propose every day. Sort of the opposite.”

“We did screen Zeffirelli’s
Romeo and Juliet
, alongside Baz Luhrmann’s version. I saw it as an opportunity to see how a classic text was interpreted in two different eras, but Lloyd—well, I guess Lloyd was focusing on something else.”

“You don’t seem as upset about this as you might,” Tess said.

“It’s not
tragic
,” Crow said. “I mean, I don’t think it’s the best idea he’s ever had, but it’s hard for me to get upset because a teenage boy, deeply in love with a teenage girl, decided he wanted to marry her.”

“Actually, it could turn out to be absolutely tragic,” Tess argued. “They could ruin their lives. What if they have a baby? Oh my God, is that it? Is she pregnant?”

Crow laughed. “Truthfully, I’m not even sure they’ve had sex yet. I let Lloyd have as much privacy as possible on that score. But you’ve met May, Tess, and heard her ten-year plan for her life—Teach for America, followed by graduate school. She’s not going to get knocked up. Look, we’ll deal with this, but your anger is really all out of proportion.”

A rap on the door, followed by a quavering “Hello?” alerted Tess to the arrival of the guest she had been expecting, Mrs. Zimmerman. She said a hasty goodbye. Why was she so upset? A family heirloom, an engagement ring—didn’t
Crow
have any use for it? Were they not to be married then, at some point? Crow was the one who used to press for marriage; she had told him it made no sense unless they had children, thinking all the while—we will
never
have children. But now they were having a child, and she couldn’t remember the last time Crow had mentioned marriage. Was he really going to be there for her? Could she rely on him?

She called out to Ethel “not the Merm” Zimmerman, her mind fixated on the ring she had never seen. It was probably ornate, not to her taste. Or small, better suited to someone petite. That was it, right? The
ring
didn’t suit her, but she still suited the man. Right? Right?

P
erhaps it was inevitable that Tess Monaghan’s favorite girlhood book was
Harriet the Spy
. As a grown-up Harriet, she had not been able to avail herself of many of Harriet’s techniques—there were few dumbwaiters in Baltimore into which she could crawl, and a utility belt simply called too much attention to the wearer—but it was Harriet who taught her to love black-and-white composition books. And she had liked Harriet’s practice of trying to figure out what people looked like based on simply hearing their voices. After speaking to Ethel Zimmerman on the phone, she decided the wispy-voiced lady would be quite frail, perhaps dependent on a walker, and given to an old-fashioned sense of propriety in dress. A hat, even gloves.

Ah, well—not even Harriet batted 1.000 in this particular game. Ethel Zimmerman, a very peppy seventy-something, all but bounded into Tess’s sickroom, arrayed in a bright blue tracksuit and white Pumas. She
was
wearing a hat of sorts—a powder-blue visor stamped with the name of an Atlantic City casino.

“Do you gamble?” Tess asked this vision in peacock blue, stalling while she tried to find her mental footing. She had prepared for a meeting with someone who would need to be coddled. This woman looked like she could arm wrestle Tess and win, even back in her pre-pregnancy days.

“Do I . . . ?” She touched the brim of her visor. “Oh, no. Yard sale. Fifty cents. They wanted a
dollar
.” She plucked the sleeve of her tracksuit. “This still had the tags on it. Fifty-five dollars, if you can believe it. I got it for seven on eBay.”

“And the shoes?”

“Shoes are tough,” Mrs. Zimmerman admitted in her thin whisper. “I go to DSW, places like that. I won’t wear used shoes. Or underwear. I’m fussy that way.”

She said this with pride, as if this principle made her unusual, even finicky.

“Is there something wrong?” Mrs. Zimmerman asked.

“Oh, no, it’s just that—you’re so much . . .
bouncier
than I expected. On the phone you sounded . . .” There was simply no euphemism for
old and frail
, so Tess let the sentence go.

“Cancer of the larynx,” she said with amazing cheer. “My husband left while I was still in the hospital. Best thing that ever happened to me, that partial laryngectomy, because otherwise I might not have had a Ralphectomy, and that’s what needed cut out of my life.”

Wow
, Tess thought. And people think oversharing is a phenomenon limited to the young.

“So you knew Carole,” Ethel said, drawing up a chair. “And she asked you to get in touch with me?”

“Sort of,” Tess said. “It’s complicated. First—if you don’t mind—could you tell me how well you knew her, if you kept in touch with her through the years?”

“I’ve known her all her life. Her sister, too. Our neighborhood may not be a fancy one, but it was stable. Her older sister was good friends with my sons. Carole was younger, one of those change-of-life babies, we called them then, back when people didn’t wait, and start trying to have babies at forty.” She gave Tess’s belly a significant look.

“I’m thirty-five,” Tess said faintly, wondering if she should add:
And it was an accident! My boyfriend has super sperm!
It defeated a diaphragm and spermicide. This is a zygote of destiny.

“Carole’s sister, she was like a daughter to me, and my sons felt the same way about the Massingers. They wore a path between the two houses, coming and going. Carole was so much younger, she was more like a grandchild. We all doted on her, but it only made her sweeter. In fact, she was the best behaved of the lot. People talk about spoiling children as if they are plants that get overwatered and rot at the root. It’s actually hard to pay too much attention to a child. A lot of what people call spoiling is ignoring, substituting things for time. These Game Boys, these iPods, all these computers and gadgets—they let the parents off the hook, don’t they? There’s a difference between buying a child everything under the sun and spending time with them. I stayed home with my boys, and you couldn’t ask for nicer kids.”

Tess couldn’t help inferring a judgment. “My husband and I have the kind of jobs that will allow us to share child care.”

Husband? Had she called Crow her husband just to avoid more unsolicited advice from Mrs. Zimmerman? She felt a little stab of what she decided to call heartburn.