The Girl in the Green Raincoat Read Free Page A

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