“Beverly says you’re retired?”
“Two years ago yesterday, not that I’m keeping track.”
“You’re allowed to take files home?”
“No original documents. Just photocopies. Your own notes.”
“Well, I appreciate your taking the time to see me,” Lincoln said.
“Time’s my long suit,” he replied, seemingly aware of the statement’s irony. The guy’s days might be numbered, but that didn’t make the hours of those same days any easier to fill. It occurred to Lincoln that Beverly might’ve urged him to visit in hopes it would take the man’s mind off tomorrow’s operation, maybe even give him a sense of purpose. If so, it meant that he was probably wasting his time. “If it wasn’t for my daughter-in-law,” he said, as if he were a mind reader, “I’d probably never leave the apartment. She takes me grocery shopping. We go for coffee every now and then. To church on Sunday. You a religious man, Mr. Moser?”
“Lincoln, please. And no, not really.” He was glad Dub-Yay wasn’t hearing him say this.
“Me neither. I like going to church, though. The feel of it, I guess.”
“You don’t drive?”
“Not often these days. I still have a vehicle, but my blood pressure’s all over the place. Mostly high, but every now and then it falls off the cliff and I black out. I’d hate like hell to be behind the wheel when that happens. Run over some kid, with my luck. You want a cup of coffee?”
“No, I’m good.”
“It’s no trouble. Beverly bought me one of those Keurigs.”
Lincoln nodded. “We got my father one last year.”
“How old is he?”
“Early nineties.”
“Good for him. And what’d he do?”
“He was part owner of a small copper mine in Arizona.”
“You sure you don’t want a cup?” he said. “I think better when I’m fully caffeinated.”
“Okay, why not?” Lincoln said.
“I like the one cup at a time,” Coffin said from the kitchen. “I just wish there was something you could do with the pods besides toss ’em in the trash. Must be millions of these things in the dump.”
“I’m not sure I even know where the landfill is.”
“That’s because there isn’t one,” Coffin said. “There used to be, years ago. Now all our trash gets hauled off to the mainland. Somebody else’s problem. The older I get, the more I think about things like that. People who don’t even know us have to deal with our shit.”
“I doubt they do it for free,” Lincoln said, for the sake of argument. Listening to the Keurig hiss and gurgle in the kitchen, he was tempted to sneak a peek at what was in the suspiciously thin folder, but he resisted.
“No, I’m sure they don’t, but still. I read somewhere that out in the middle of the Pacific there’s this vortex of trash. Ocean currents bring it all right there. You toss one of these plastic pods overboard off the coast of Oregon and another into the Sea of Japan and they both end up in the same spot. A hundred miles of Keurig pods and plastic bags and all manner of crap bobbing there in the waves, and not a human in sight. Nothing to connect you and me to the crime. Your old man ever worry about stuff like that—the world we’re leaving behind for our children to deal with?”
Lincoln had to smile at this. “I’m not sure my father fully believes the world will continue to exist after he leaves it.” Then once Coffin returned to the living room with two steaming coffee mugs, Lincoln said, “I hear you’re having an operation tomorrow.”
“That’s the plan. They’re gonna Roto-Rooter a couple clogged arteries. Put in a stent. I’m told the whole deal should come in at under a million dollars. I’d tell ’em to go fuck themselves if it was me.”
“Ummm,” Lincoln said. “It is you.”
“Yeah, but not just me. It’s never just about us, Lincoln.”
This was, unless he was mistaken, another reference to his daughter-in-law, who seemed to play an outsize role in his life. He clearly lived here alone, so no wife. Had she died or were they divorced? And where was the son who’d married Beverly? Why was there no loving photographic evidence of any of them?
Donning a pair of drugstore reading glasses, Coffin picked up and opened the folder, which Lincoln now saw contained only two items—the article from the Vineyard Gazette he’d just read and some handwritten notes that were stapled together. Was it his imagination or was Troyer scrawled there? “Okay, give me a minute to refresh my memory,” Coffin said. He shifted slightly, so Lincoln couldn’t see what was on the pages.
Lincoln sipped his coffee while the man read, his expression darkening as he did. When he finally closed the folder, he tapped its edge against his knee and said, “Justine Calloway. That the girl we’re talkin’ about?”
“Jacy. Yes.”
Coffin turned his gimlet gaze on Lincoln, holding him with it uncomfortably. “So you’re telling me this Jacy never turned up?”
Lincoln nodded.
“Never called her folks?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
When the other man said nothing, Lincoln felt compelled to continue. “They divorced not long after she went missing. Her father had some legal difficulties about then.”
“What sort of difficulties?”
“White-collar crime of some kind. I want to say insider trading. I think he might’ve ended up in jail.”
Coffin stared out the window now, apparently deep in thought. “Says here there was a fiancé. She never got back in touch with him, either?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Coffin rubbed his stubbled chin thoughtfully, and Lincoln saw a thought scroll across his gray brow, plain as day: Dead, then. “Well, you being here begs a fairly obvious question, Lincoln. What’s your interest after all these years?”
“She and my pals Teddy and Mick, we were all best friends in college.”
“Where was that?”
“Minerva College. In Connecticut.”
“Oh, I know where Minerva’s at, Lincoln. What I’m asking is, why now?”
“I guess we never forgot her, how she just…disappeared. I mean, we were all going our separate ways now that college was over. It wasn’t like we expected to see each other anytime soon. But I think we imagined we’d always be part of each other’s lives.”
“Have you been?”
“Us guys? Yeah. Maybe not as much as we planned on. I moved out West. Mick’s the only one who stayed in New England.” Or returned here after the amnesty, but there was no reason to bring that up. “We’ll lose touch for a while—a year or two at a stretch—but then one of us will call out of the blue. And now there’s e-mail.”
“She come up in conversation, does she? This Jacy?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Not often. Being here on the island brings it all back, I guess.”
Coffin seemed to consider all this as you would a math problem involving both numbers and letters. His expression had become less friendly. “You married, Lincoln?”
“Yes.”
“Happily?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you love your wife? Simple question.”
“Yes,” Lincoln told him, not that it was any of his business.
“You rich?”
“In what respect?”
“Money, Lincoln. What most people mean by rich.”
Lincoln squirmed, surprised by how easily the old cop had put him on the defensive. “We had more before 2008,” he said, hoping to elicit at least a smile, and failing utterly. “Why do you ask?”
“I had a friend went to Minerva. Not a cheap ticket.”
“I was there on scholarship. So were my friends.”
“Not the girl?”
“Nope, she was from Greenwich.” He almost added Con
necticut, but didn’t want to raise the man’s class hackles again.
“You got kids?”
“Yes.”
“Grandkids?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So. Things have worked out, wouldn’t you say? Minerva College paid some dividends, did it?”
“I guess you could say that.” Though probably not in the sense that Coffin meant. They hadn’t learned any secret handshakes there, or joined any secret societies. For the most part their classes had been good. Their teachers were mostly knowledgeable and pretty friendly. A few, like Professor Ford, whom he’d just been talking about with Teddy, had really challenged them, altering their trajectory by teaching them how to think more critically. Indeed, it could be argued that those were the true dividends of a liberal arts education, though he doubted that’s what Coffin was getting at. He was still dwelling on money, what most people thought of when they heard the word rich.
“Okay if I ask you something?” Lincoln said.
“Go ahead.”
“Did I manage to piss you off somehow, Mr. Coffin?”
“Not you, Lincoln. This.” He was still tapping the edge of the folder against his knee. “This right here really does piss me off. Girl goes missing? Never turns up? Seems to me somebody dropped the damn ball. Which makes me wonder if that somebody was me. What? I say something funny?”
It was true. Lincoln was grinning. “No, it’s just…you really were a cop, weren’t you.”
“That’s right, Lincoln, I really was.” But he was grinning now, too, if a little sheepishly. “Damn doctors don’t let me smoke anymore. I’m not supposed to drink or eat red meat, either. And now that I’m retired I go three, four weeks at a time without anybody to interrogate. Then you come along, reminding me of my failures.”
“That was hardly my intention.”
“I know it,” he conceded. “All those files in there?” he said, waving his thumb back at the wall of metal cabinets. “Beverly wants me to sit down with her and go through them. Annotate the more interesting cases. ‘Put flesh on the bones’ is how she puts it. But what she doesn’t understand, Lincoln, is that most of what’s in those folders is bruised flesh on broken bones.”
“Yeah?”
“And here’s the thing. If you could get to the bottom of this, find the truth about what happened forty-four years ago, that’s what you’d likely find. Bruised flesh. Broken bones.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Mr. Coffin?”
“I’m telling you to go home, Lincoln. Bounce those grandkids on your knee. Things worked out. Be happy.”
Lincoln nodded at the folder that Coffin had put on the coffee table. “There’s really nothing you can tell me? Besides what was in the paper?”
Coffin reluctantly took up the folder again. “Okay, here’s what I remember. I went out there to your place. State guys asked me to check it out. Course by then you’d all left. The place was locked up tight.”
“We usually didn’t have renters much before the Fourth of July.”
Coffin was studying him intently now. “No neighbors close by.”
“Just the Troyers down the hill. They were away at the time, but their son was there. Mason.”
“Yeah, I spoke to him.”
So Lincoln had been right. He had glimpsed the name Troyer in the file. “You did?”
Coffin took off his glasses and set them and the folder on the table. “I gather there was some trouble that weekend?”
“He dropped by, uninvited.”
“And what happened?”
“We drank some beer on the deck.”
“That’s all? Just beer?”
Lincoln shrugged. “It was 1971. There might’ve been some weed passed around.”
“No coke?”
“Of course not. Anyhow, at some point Troyer and Jacy were alone in the kitchen and he tried to get too friendly with her. My friend Mickey walked in on them. Took exception to what he saw.”
Coffin nodded. “Took one hell of an exception, I’d say. When I talked to him he still had two black eyes and his jaw was wired shut. He said your friend sucker punched him.”
“I was out on the deck with the others when it happened, but knowing Mickey, there probably wasn’t much of a conversation.”
“Got a temper, then, this friend of yours? Zero to sixty in three point two seconds? That kind of guy?”
“Actually, he’s pretty gentle most of the time.”
“Most of the time.”
“He never would’ve hurt Jacy, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Coffin shrugged. “You’re the one that knows him.”
“Anyway,” Lincoln said, “all that happened on Sunday. I don’t see the relevance, given that we all left the island on Tuesday.”
Putting his glasses back on, he picked up the folder again. “Says here you didn’t all leave at the same time, though. How come?”
“Jacy woke up early and snuck out when we were still asleep. Left us a note saying she hated goodbyes. Anyway, the point is she left the island, right? Somebody who worked for the Steamship Authority identified her?”
“I wouldn’t call it a positive ID. More like Yeah, maybe. When I spoke to the lady, she didn’t seem any too sure.”
“Are you suggesting Jacy never left here?”
“No, I’m saying it can’t be completely ruled out.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“Well, for what it’s worth, the staties were pretty convinced she was on one of those morning ferries. I don’t know how they could be, based on that one witness, but they could’ve had some additional information they didn’t share with us locals.”
“So it’s possible something could have happened to her here?”
“It’s also possible she was abducted by aliens,” Coffin said. “Look at it this way, Lincoln. Either she’s alive or she’s dead. If she’s dead, if somebody killed her, what happened to the body? Because for me that’s a problem.”
Also for the dead girl, Lincoln thought.
“Okay, here’s a scenario. You’re the killer.”
“Me?” Because Lincoln’s distinct impression was that his host didn’t consider this proposition to be completely outlandish.
“Hypothetical, Lincoln. We’re using our imaginations here. You’re on the ferry and you spot this good-looking hippie chick. It’s the early seventies, so she’s going braless. You watch her the whole time, till the ferry docks in Woods Hole. She goes ashore with the other foot passengers, while you go down into the boat to retrieve your vehicle, telling yourself to forget about her. She’s just a girl. Except when you drive off the boat, there she is on the Falmouth road with her thumb out. You pull over. Offer her a ride. She gets in. You talk. Maybe you ask her what hippie chicks have got against bras. What’s all that about? You think you’re being witty, but she takes your question seriously. Tells you it’s all about freedom, and that pisses you off. Freedom. Maybe you’re just back from ’Nam. You got married young. Had a couple kids before you could turn around. Who the fuck’s free? Not you. You work on the island, landscaping or maybe cleaning rich people’s pools. Anyway, you work there, but you sure as hell can’t afford to live there. No, you live in New Bedford, because that’s where people like you live. Summers you make pretty decent money, but it’s not cheap bringing your pickup over on the ferry. You work eight, ten days in a row, flop on somebody’s couch when you can. You go home for two or three days to look in on the wife and kids, so they can tell you about all the shit they want that you can’t afford. If somebody asked you to describe your life, the first word that popped into your head sure as hell wouldn’t be free. Only a privileged, burn-your-bra hippie chick would use such a stupid word.”
Lincoln thought about telling the man he was way off base, that he had no idea who Jacy was
. He was just making her up as he went, his scenario probably born of all the hippie chicks he himself never got to have sex with. And yet there was something compelling about the tale he was weaving, its gritty specificity. And some of the details were spot-on. Jacy definitely wouldn’t have been wearing a bra.
“For a while,” Coffin continued, “you behave yourself. You got no choice. Traffic’s bumper to bumper till you get over the damn bridge. It’s the end of the long holiday weekend, so everybody’s trying to get off the Cape at once. Eventually, though, the traffic thins out. You say something, suggest something. Or maybe you reach over and touch her. Anyhow, she spooks. Tells you to pull over, let her the hell out. Like suddenly you smell bad, or she got a better look at you and decided she doesn’t like what she sees. Maybe she uses that word again, freedom, and now she’s demanding her own. Like she’s the one in charge. Like she can just choose and you have to do what she says. After you were nice enough to offer her a lift and didn’t even ask her for gas money, like you could’ve done, gas not being free, either. Anyway, if she thinks she’s the one giving the orders here, you got news for her. That ain’t how it works. When you explain this to her, things go bad, then worse. It all happens real quick. Maybe she tries to get out of the truck. Back then, she’s probably not wearing a seat belt, so when you jam on the brakes she goes headfirst into the dash or the windshield. Or maybe you hit her with something. Doesn’t matter. All of a sudden you’ve got a dead girl in your cab. Now you’ve really done it. You’ve gone and done it. Your mind’s on fire, but you put your thoughts in order, or try to. First thing is to get off the busy highway. Find some old country road, then a dirt one you can pull off onto. Find a secluded spot. Drag her into the trees.”
“That’s one dark imagination you’ve got, Mr. Coffin,” Lincoln said, though in fact his narrative bore some remarkable similarities to the one he himself had entertained earlier in the offices of the Vineyard Gazette, with Mason Troyer in the villain’s role.
“Yeah, maybe I do, but here’s my point, Lincoln. That girl’s body gets discovered. If she’s just laying there in the trees, some hiker comes across her. You had a shovel in the back of your pickup? You buried her in the soft ground? Doesn’t matter, same result. Animals find her after the first heavy rain. Either way, it takes about two minutes for the cops to connect that body to the girl who went missing over Memorial Day weekend.”
Chances Are . . . Page 14