The Girl in the Green Raincoat Read Online Free PDF Page 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—Lord, how old-fashioned—unnerved her. She trusted Mrs. Blossom, but no one’s eyes saw exactly what she saw. And while her instincts were far from unerring, they were her instincts. If she had visited Don Epstein, she would have a better sense of the man. She was quick to recognize a liar even when she couldn’t pinpoint the lie. But she was stuck here, with an Italian greyhound who moaned incessantly and a taskmaster in amniotic fluid. Lately, she and Crow had taken to calling the baby “Fifi La Pew,” one of those stupid couples jokes that come out of nowhere, only to stick. In fact, Crow was becoming enamored with “Fifi” as a possible name. Tess imagined trying to explain this to her parents. Here’s your granddaughter, Fifi Monaghan. It was a toss-up which name would make her conventional mother crazier.
    The baby would be a Monaghan. Crow, who was almost too evolved, had decided that the child, as a girl, should have Tess’s surname. She could not deny that she was happy about this. Of course, her name was her father’s name. They could use her mother’s “maiden” name—Fifi Weinstein had quite the ring to it—but that was a man’s name, too, in the end. To find a true maiden name, one would have to go back to Lilith, Tess supposed. Poor Lilith, the original first wife, doomed to be forgotten.
    She glanced again at the copy of the marriage license that Mrs. Blossom had left behind. Carole Epstein had been Carole Massinger. She plugged the latter into Google, finally scoring a hit on a Web site maintained by a freelance photographer. There was Carole Massinger, in a photograph taken at a wedding. The photo seemed a little fake, stagy, as photos in such settings often do, but it was definitely the woman Tess had seen through her binoculars. The hair was different, but she wore a dress of celery green, and brandished—did this woman coordinate everything ?—a pale green cocktail. Her smile was broad, genuine. She was toasting the beaming groom and his bride, whom the photographer had helpfully identified as Don and Annette Epstein.

Chapter 4
    O f course he married someone else he already knew, Tess,” Dorie Starnes said. “That’s