Read Online The Girl in the Green Raincoat by Laura Lippman - Free Book Online

happy bonus of sharpening Tess’s wits, teaching her to be a much more sophisticated sneak.
    As for her father, Patrick Monaghan, the world’s most taciturn Irishman, Tess had once yearned for him to be everything he was not—voluble, dashing, a literary bon vivant who held forth on the work of James Joyce. If she wasn’t such a snob then, she might have noticed she’d been graced with Wonder Dad, who could fix or build anything. Instead, she had taken it all as her due—the sturdy, safe tire swing that drew the neighborhood children to her house, the gleaming bicycles on Christmas morning, which her father put together swiftly and quietly, without any profanity-laden outbursts to waken a sleeping girl from dreams of Santa. He had, in fact, contributed much of the work to this sun porch where she now spent her days. Now Tess was thrilled to have a father who could wield a hammer. She didn’t need to talk about Joyce. The fact was, she really didn’t have a lot to say about Joyce, and there were always things that required fixing.
    Today, her father was installing a dog door on the lower level, while one of his old cronies finished securing the perimeter with invisible fencing. These additions were for the unwalkable Dempsey, who had taken to relieving himself almost exclusively in the porcelain chamber pot, which meant that Tess was often trapped for hours in a room that smelled of dog urine. The hope was that Dempsey could be trained quickly to understand how far he could roam in the yard without receiving a mild shock, via the radio transmitter.
    He did catch on quickly. But to everyone’s dismay, Dempsey seemed to enjoy the sensation. He threw himself at the boundary again and again, yelping in outrage and pain, yet never trying to leave.
    “Dog’s a little strange,” said Tess’s father, watching the scene through her window. He was not only taciturn, but given to understatement.
    “He’s testing himself,” Tess said. “Notice that he doesn’t try to leave. I thought he’d made a run for it, head back to Blythewood. He’s letting us know that he’s here on his own recognizance.”
    Dempsey, satisfied that he had shown the fence line who was boss, trotted through his new door and clacked upstairs to the sun porch—where he promptly squatted over the chamber pot and relieved himself.
    “I brought you a gift, by the way,” her father said.
    “Something for the baby?” Tess asked warily. Her father was having a hard time with her decision not to prepare in advance. He wanted to buy a crib and a stroller, build a toy chest and a changing table, paint the spare bedroom. And, in time, she wanted him to do all those things. But not yet.
    “No, this is for you.” He went to the living room and returned with a large flat package, wrapped in newspaper and string.
    “The sign from the Stonewall Democratic Club!” Tess’s delight was quite genuine. Stonewall, now shuttered, was a storied place in the history of Baltimore—and the Monaghan family. She remembered riding her tricycle there. More correctly, she remembered being told that she had ridden her tricycle there. In her memory, it was a land of knees and cigarette smoke and impenetrable grown-up talk, which she tolerated because Harry “Soft Shoes” McGuirk himself, the b’hoy of b’hoys—a b’hoy being the man who gave muldoons their marching orders—would take pity on the restless child and buy her a Coke.
    “How did you come to own this?” she asked, as amazed as if her father had procured a Picasso. Tess collected Baltimorebilia, although she was in denial about it. Her office held the neon “It’s Time for a Haircut” clock from a Woodlawn barbershop, and she kept her spare change in a miniature model of a Baltimore Gas & Electric truck. She had even begun to acquire old grease tins from the sausage company, Esskay, that had lent its name to her racing greyhound. The sane one , as she now thought of Esskay. The greyhound had once