The Girl in the Green Raincoat (2 page)

Her eye was drawn to a miniature version of Esskay, a prancing greyhound, a true gray one, whereas Esskay was black with a patch of white at her breast. The little dog wore a green jacket belted around its middle and moved with the cocky self-confidence of someone used to being noticed. As did its human companion, in a tightly cinched celery-green raincoat that was a twin to the greyhound’s. Hard to tell the woman’s age at this distance, but Tess could make out sleek blond hair, a wasp-waisted figure. She was the kind of pretty-pretty woman who would be called a girl into her forties. She ignored the other dog owners, cradling what appeared to be a cell phone against her ear. Tess frowned. She believed that dog owners, like their dogs, should experience the walk on a Zen level of being. She wished she could see the woman more clearly, make out the expression on her face.

“Is there anything else you need to make your haven perfect?” Crow asked.

“Binoculars,” Tess said.

That had been Sunday; she had the binoculars by Monday. And for the rest of the week, Tess did, in fact, read quite a bit and began to catch up with the films that Crow thought essential to cultural literacy. But each afternoon, she picked up her new binoculars and watched the dogs converge on the park, then studied the girl in the green raincoat as she stalked past them, her prancing little greyhound leading the way. The girl was always on the phone, it seemed, but perhaps she was shy and using that as a cover. The dog walkers of Stony Run could be a cliquey bunch. Even seen through high-powered binoculars, the woman’s face betrayed little emotion. Her walks lasted longer than most; at least she was giving her high-strung dog plenty of exercise. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, the pattern was the same. Only the footwear changed, her chic version of Wellies switched out for brown suede boots as the ground dried.
Still, so impractical
, Tess thought, watching Friday afternoon as the girl in the green raincoat glided into the park. Didn’t her dog ever leap up, leave muddy paw prints?

“You’re getting weird,” Crow said, bringing in her supper tray, their own dogs following like troubled handmaidens. They were upset by Tess’s displacement from the master bedroom, even if Esskay did enjoy having more of the bed. But Esskay seemed to sense a bigger change was coming, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.

Join the club, sister.

Tess had abandoned her binoculars and begun to eat her supper when she noticed Esskay, a sight hound at heart, perk up her ears and run to the window. Probably a squirrel or even a leaf. The sight hound’s sight wasn’t particularly reliable.

But what had drawn Esskay’s eye, in this instance, was her own tiny doppelganger, running through the park. Running through the park, quite alone, celery-green leash lashing. Running like a thing pursued, except—it wasn’t. For no matter how long Tess watched that evening—and she kept her vigil well into the night, turning out her lights the better to see into the gloom—the girl in the green raincoat never reappeared.

I
f you’re going to play
Rear Window
, then I think Crow needs to swan around in a green peignoir set,” Whitney said the next day, as Tess continued her vigil on the sun porch. Neither girl nor dog had shown up for their usual sunset walk.

“I thought you for Grace Kelly, bony WASP that you are,” Tess said, frowning at the supper that Crow had fixed. It was perfectly healthy—a spinach salad, risotto made with shiitake mushrooms and butternut squash from the farmer’s market. It was delicious, too. But the lack of choice, the closing off of options, made her crazy. Occasionally she liked to have a Goldenberg Peanut Chew for lunch, or a bag of Utz crab chips.

“The Talbots and the Kellys are distantly related,” Whitney said. It was plausible, although with Whitney’s sharp jaw and athletic posture, the Kelly she most resembled was Jack, the rower for whom Kelly Drive in Philadelphia was named. Both Whitney and Tess had rowed in college, but Whitney had been better. That was pretty much the story of their long friendship—whatever they did, Whitney was better. Whitney got better grades. Whitney was faster, a more competitive rower who had transferred to Yale and been the stroke on a women’s lightweight four. She excelled in the newspaper business, too, a field where Tess had failed. Whitney then chucked it all to work at her family’s foundation. Because, yes, on top of everything else, she was rich, someone who had never known a single care about money. Whitney Talbot excelled at everything—except relationships. She lived in a guest cottage on the grounds of her parents’ house out in the valley and proclaimed herself a spinster. It was easier than admitting she was lonely, Tess suspected.

“I’m so clearly the Thelma Ritter in this scenario,” Whitney said now. “Only taller. Remember the first time you see Grace Kelly in
Rear Window
, popping into the frame as Jimmy Stewart awakes from his nap. She was so beautiful I literally gasped.”

“I remember it more as an asthmatic wheeze, in which your knees jerked up, spilling a tub of buttered popcorn all over the man in front of you.”

“No, that was a horror film,” Whitney said. “
Aliens
?
Re-animator
? We were at the Charles, back in the day when it was one big theater, and we would go to late movies, then to the Club Charles and drink until two a.m.” She addressed Tess’s stomach. “I knew your mother when she was
fun
, you little parasite.”

Tess frowned, and Whitney, in a rare burst of sensitivity, recognized she had overstepped. “Have you thought about names?”

“Not really,” Tess lied. She and Crow had learned quickly this was dangerous territory. “We’re going to honor the Jewish tradition of choosing the name of someone no longer alive. Actually, we’re going whole hog on the Jewish traditions. No baby shower, no fixing up the room ahead of time. Don’t want the evil eye to fasten its gaze on us.”

Her tone was light, self-mocking, but Whitney wasn’t fooled. “It will be okay, Tess.”

Tess tried to make a casual motion of assent, part shrug and wave. Unfortunately, she had a forkful of risotto halfway to her mouth and succeeded only in flinging it at the window.

“Postcard from your future,” Whitney said, removing the clump of rice and dividing it between the two dogs, vigilant sentries whenever food was consumed.

“Why hasn’t she come back?” Tess fretted, incapable of keeping her eyes away from the park, much less keeping her mind from this topic.

“If the dog ran away, she doesn’t have a dog to walk.”

“But she would have come through, looking for the dog, right? And if the dog ended up running home, as Crow insists, then they would be out walking again, right? Something happened, Whitney. Has there been anything on the news about a missing woman, about some strange incident in North Baltimore?”

“For the tenth time—no, Tess.”

“I haven’t asked you ten times.”

“But you’ve been bugging Crow all day. He told me. Read a book.” Whitney looked through the stack. “Your Aunt Kitty’s as eclectic as ever, I see. The only commonality I divine here is that most of the books are big and fat.”

“Like me,” Tess said, bitter at her body’s betrayal. It wasn’t just her blood pressure and the baby mound that seemed designed to give her permanent indigestion. Her feet were so swollen she couldn’t wear anything but slippers or an old pair of Uggs, and she fit into those only after Crow sliced open the seams.

“Here’s a skinny one—
The Daughter of Time
, by Josephine Tey.”

“A comfort read, I’ve read it a dozen times.” And, like its main character, she was determined to solve a mystery from her sickbed. “Look, why can’t you and Crow just go around, canvass the neighborhood, see if anyone knows the dog or the woman?”

“Tess—”

“I’m worried,” she said, putting on a pout, although she knew she didn’t do it well. “When I worry, my blood pressure starts to rise.”

Whitney wasn’t fooled, Tess could tell that much. But she was a loyal person, one inclined to indulge the whims of a confined friend.

“We’ll do that tomorrow,” Whitney said. “It’s Sunday, people will be home. Maybe we’ll find ‘missing’ posters for the dog, which would ease your mind. But, really, Tess, why can’t you become obsessed with online poker or Scrabulous, like a normal person?”

“As if you would be friends with a normal person.”

True to Whitney’s word, Whitney and Crow set off the next afternoon to see if anyone in the neighborhood had lost an Italian greyhound. It was the kind of late fall day that Whitney loved—not crisp and golden. That was predictable, banal. No, this day was overcast, with the scent of fires in the air, the leaves beginning to thin. Winter was coming, and Whitney liked winter, along with its attendant sports, although it was rare now to have a cold snap long enough to freeze the stock pond where she had learned to skate. Last year had been completely snow-free, without a single day to go cross-country skiing. Whitney had a well-trained mind and she knew her anecdotal experiences were proof of nothing, but she believed in climate change and worried that things might be far more dire than anyone realized. How did someone bring a child onto this fragile planet, when it might not even exist in a few decades? She could not decide if Tess was incredibly brave or incredibly stupid.

Of course, some people do go both ways, as the scarecrow liked to say.

Crow said: “I thought we would start about three blocks north of here, working up Woodlawn, down Hawthorne, then up Keswick, going to every other house, doing evens up and odds down.”

“Why every other?”

“People are going to know if they have a neighbor on the block with a miniature greyhound. We’ll cover more houses this way.”

“We’d cover more still if we split up.”

“I considered that,” Crow said. “But you know what, Whitney? We never talk, you and me. It’s never just the two of us.”

“True.”
And that’s the natural order of things
, Whitney wanted to say. She liked Crow, approved of him as Tess’s partner. She was always happy to be in the company of both. But Crow wasn’t her friend, he was her friend’s . . . boyfriend? Baby daddy? God, she hoped they would get married, if only to simplify the issue of nomenclature.

“Besides I have something kind of serious I want to talk to you about.”

Whitney thought that the primary advantage of not being in a relationship was never hearing those dreaded words. “Let’s start here,” she said. “On this block of Hawthorne.”

They threaded their way through some of the nicer blocks of Roland Park, very nice blocks indeed. This, Whitney thought, was the model that the suburbs should imitate. The houses were large, but not overly so, and there was a careless, rambling quality to many of them, as if they had grown over the years to accommodate growing families. Most were shingled, a maintenance headache to be sure, but they blended with the landscape instead of fighting it. A Sunday afternoon walk in Roland Park, with glimpses into foyers where boots and shoes were lined up at the foot of gleaming oak stairs, could almost make one yearn for a family. Almost.

But of those people they found at home, no one knew of a greyhound and its green-coated owner. It was almost five and the light was fading when they began moving south.

“Executive decision,” Crow said. “Let’s amend Tess’s plan and work toward the business district, where people are more likely to post signs for missing dogs.”

Whitney hadn’t realized that Crow ever ignored Tess’s orders. She liked him better for it. “Let’s.”

The houses here were smaller, the places where the workers had lived while building the grander homes of Roland Park. At a modest duplex on Schenley Road, a harried-looking woman opened her door a crack, just enough for Whitney to see a house in chaos, with three small children running around in the small living room, not one of them fully clothed.

“You’re looking for a greyhound?” she repeated. “A little one? Wait here.”

Within minutes she was back at the door with a dog that fit Tess’s description—silvery gray, green collar and leash still attached. The coat was clearly custom-made. Doggie couture, how decadent. Whitney’s family might have been wealthy, but they weren’t given to
flash
.

“I found this one rooting in my garbage yesterday. I was going to advertise, but you can take her, seeing as how you know who the owner is and all.”

“We don’t—” Crow began.

“You take her,” the woman repeated, placing the dog in Crow’s arms, where it writhed and snapped. “My children wanted to keep her, but I know that’s not right, even if she doesn’t have a tag on that fancy collar, or an ID on the little coat. You take her. ’Bye!”

“No, Mommy!” a girl’s voice shrieked. “Don’t give Scooby away!” Other voices joined in and the scene quickly escalated to a three-ring tantrum, with children throwing their bodies around the living room in heaving despair.

“Please,” the woman hissed, “take the dog.”

Whitney thought she heard the woman mutter “And God help you.” The poor thing definitely seemed overwhelmed. But surely that was because of her children?

“Mission accomplished!” she said to Crow. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”

“Maybe later,” he said, with a backward glance at the house. The children’s piteous screams were still quite audible. “Let’s go settle the matter of Tess’s ’satiable curiosity.”