Chances Are Page 11

  Where the path merged with the beach was crowded with families, everyone clad in swimsuits. Jacy, slipping off her sandals, was clearly disappointed. “I thought you said—”

  “Over that way,” he pointed.

  They moved down the beach, the clay cliffs rising on their right. Though the air was almost hot, the late-May water was still icy, and just a few brave souls ventured in, most of them only to their knees. As they progressed, more people had opted out of swimwear. Most, in Teddy’s view, probably shouldn’t have, but he decided that if being grossly overweight and out of shape didn’t embarrass them, why should it trouble him? Others, despite signs strictly prohibiting this, had coated their naked bodies with moist clay from the cliffs to ghoulish effect. Finally, rounding the point, where the cliffs angled off toward Menemsha, he and Jacy found themselves alone, and it took her about two breathtaking seconds to shuck her clothes and dart, whooping, into the frigid water, calling, “Come on, Teddy!” over her shoulder.

  Disobeying the commands of beautiful naked girls was something Teddy had zero experience of, so he disrobed clumsily, dropping his clothes in a pile next to hers. Pausing at the water’s edge to gauge the temperature, he heard Jacy, already thirty yards out into the surf, yell, “No, you coward! You have to get in all at once!”

  So again he did as instructed, dashing straight into the water, stumbling and nearly falling when the drop-off he was expecting didn’t materialize. As the first of a series of waves bore down on him, he almost lost his nerve, but then at the last second, instead of turning his back and going up on his tiptoes, he dove into it head first, as he’d seen Jacy do. Never before had he felt such cold, the chill of a thousand stinging needles. Regaining his feet on the other side of the wave, he discovered he was still only thigh deep, the undertow so fierce that he immediately lost his balance and toppled over. Before he could get to his feet again, the next wave was on him, knocking him back toward the shore. He expected to hear Jacy’s laughter at his comic incompetence but saw that she was heading straight out to sea, as if she meant to swim to Spain. “Wait up!” he called, diving under the next wave and the one after that. By the time he caught sight of her again, she’d made it out beyond where the waves were breaking. There the water swelled more gently, and he watched her rise on each crest and then lower gracefully into its trough. Feeling himself begin to harden, he feared he might weep for pure joy.

  When he, too, finally made it out beyond the waves, he wondered if she might allow him to take her in his arms; and if so, what sort of betrayal would that be? Of her fiancé? Of the two friends they’d left back at the house in Chilmark? Of God, for anyone considering divinity school? But he found he was simply too happy to care, and before he could resolve the initial question, Jacy drew him to her, her body somehow warm against his icy skin. How was this possible? Two people, nearly frozen solid, yet conveying warmth to each other?

  “Have you ever been so cold in your life?!” Jacy squealed, delighted, as if freezing were a grand thing that no sensible person could ever get enough of.

  “No!” he said, his teeth actually clacking. He’d heard about people being so cold their teeth chattered but assumed it must be a figure of speech. “G-G-God, no!”

  Her teeth were chattering, too.

  “Jacy?” he said. His happiness, complete a moment before, was now assailed by a terrible doubt.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Nothing. Everything. “It’s just … I don’t know what this means,” he said, his teeth rattling so badly that he marveled when she seemed to understand.

  “What what means?”

  “This!” That she’d wanted to come here with him in the first place, just the two of them. That she was naked and joyous and nestled comfortably in his arms. That she seemed to be about to kiss him. No, that she was kissing him, kisses even more deliriously thrilling than the one she’d given him the night they’d returned from the dog track. But that night she’d kissed Lincoln and Mickey, too. Since then each of them had been wondering the same thing: which one she’d choose in the unlikely event it ever came to that. Was that what this moment, this embrace, this sweetly salty kiss meant? Could she actually have chosen him?

  “This right here?” she said, pulling him to her even tighter as they rose and then descended on every new swell. “I think this means I might not be getting married after all.”

  Lincoln

  And there she was. Beyond beautiful, even on grainy black-and-white microfilm. Lincoln had forgotten the slight asymmetry of her face, her right eye slightly lower than the left, the smile just a tad lopsided. So different from what passed for beauty nowadays. That Britney Spears girl, the left side of her face identical to the right, as if beauty were about perfection and symmetry. And right on top of this, another jolt. Her name. Justine Calloway. To Lincoln she’d always been just “Jacy.” She had no more need of a surname than Madonna or Cher. Two names identified a person as a mere mortal.

  The story in the Gazette had run in mid-June, two full weeks after Jacy’s disappearance, and it included the same appeal her parents had placed in the Cape Cod and coastal Connecticut newspapers: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? No, Lincoln thought, not in forty-four years.

  Aware that neither her parents nor her fiancé would approve of her going off to Martha’s Vineyard with Lincoln and Teddy and Mickey, she’d told them all she was spending the weekend in New York with her maid of honor and some other Thetas. There was no such thing as bachelorette parties back then, but something along those lines must’ve been her pitch: one last girls’ night out before the wedding. She’d be back in Connecticut in plenty of time to meet her fiancé when he returned from North Carolina, where law school was letting out for the summer. When she didn’t return as planned, her parents had telephoned the maid of honor, who informed them that, no, Jacy hadn’t come to the city and, no, she had no idea where she might be. Next they called Minerva on the off chance that she’d gone there, but of course the Theta house was closed up tight and the campus was mostly deserted. Now alarmed, they called the maid of honor again to see if Jacy’d been in touch, and this time the girl, whom Jacy had sworn to secrecy, caved, telling them she’d spent the Memorial Day weekend on Martha’s Vineyard. She’d been having second thoughts about the wedding, the girl claimed, and just wanted to get away and think. She was staying at a house in Chilmark with some boys who worked as hashers at the Theta house. The weather had been unseasonably warm and they’d probably just decided to stay a couple extra days. Did the maid of honor know the exact address of the Chilmark house? She did not. Had Jacy left her the phone number there? No. Reluctantly, however, she surrendered the names of the boys she’d been staying with, though of course by then Lincoln and Teddy and Mickey had all returned to the mainland.

  When the end of the week came and there was still no sign of her, the Calloways went to the police, who at first were not terribly helpful. The girl hadn’t been gone that long, for one thing, and for another, if the maid of honor was correct and Jacy was getting cold feet about the wedding, well, a runaway bride was hardly of concern to the cops. She’d turn up when she was ready. They did, however, contact Minerva and were given the address of the off-campus apartment Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey had shared. Their landlord let the local police in to search the place, but there was no evidence of anyone having been there since the boys turned in their keys. What kind of tenants had they been? Well, they were college boys. They drank beer and played their music too loud, but other than that they’d been okay. Paid their rent on time and left the place in better condition than you’d expect, given their youth and gender.

  Though Lincoln wouldn’t hear about Jacy’s disappearance until he and Anita arrived in Arizona, the Greenwich police called Dunbar—Minerva had provided the home phone numbers for all three boys—and spoke to his mother, who informed them her son was driving back to Arizona with the girl he planned to marry (no, her name wasn’t Jacy) and was for the time being unreachable. Yes,
she’d known that her son and his friends were at the Chilmark house over the holiday weekend. Yes, they had permission. No, she hadn’t been aware that there was a girl with them, but it didn’t surprise her. They’d all been best friends at college. Jacy, she understood, was marrying another boy entirely. Yes, she would have her son phone them as soon as he arrived in Dunbar.

  Teddy’s parents had been even less helpful. Their son had a summer internship at one of the Boston newspapers, they seemed to remember, and after that he’d be attending divinity school, to what end they couldn’t imagine, since they hadn’t raised him to be superstitious. Nor could they locate the new phone number he’d recently given them. And no, they couldn’t drop everything and go look for it. College classes might be over, but they were high-school teachers who had two more weeks of instruction and stacks of exams to grade.

  The home number the cops had for Mickey turned out to be an old one listed in his deceased father’s name; the current one, which the college didn’t have, was in his mother’s. By the time they finally cleared up this confusion, Mickey had lit out for Canada. (Years later, when he finally returned to the States after the amnesty, Mickey would explain that when the cops called, his mother had assumed they wanted to know why he hadn’t shown up for his induction into the army. And when they said they were calling about a missing girl, she hadn’t believed them.)

  Somewhere on this time line the Massachusetts State Police had interviewed several Steamship Authority employees, both in Woods Hole on the mainland and in Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs on the island, to ask if anybody remembered seeing Jacy on the ferry that Tuesday morning. A woman working in the ferry’s snack bar thought she recognized her from the photograph she was shown, but she’d been busy and couldn’t be certain. In all likelihood Jacy had paid cash for a round-trip ticket in Woods Hole, and there was no way of determining if she’d actually used the return. Woods Hole and nearby Falmouth were serviced by several bus lines, but there was no record of Jacy having purchased a ticket back to Connecticut, and no one at the bus station recognized her from her photograph.

  In retrospect, Lincoln wondered why the police hadn’t pursued him and his friends more tenaciously. After all, they were the last people to see Jacy, and if there’d been any hint of foul play, they logically would’ve been the first people to interview. Instead, when he’d called the Greenwich police from Dunbar, the conversation couldn’t have been more pro forma. Basically, he told them that Jacy had been anxious to get on the road that Tuesday morning and left them a note saying she meant to catch an early ferry. No, nothing out of the ordinary had happened on the island. (He’d seen no reason to mention the incident with Troyer.) If Jacy seemed upset about anything, it was the fact that Mickey was headed to Vietnam soon. He told them they could probably reach Teddy at the Globe, but they’d never followed up.

  One reason the authorities weren’t terribly interested in them was that they seemed to be focused on Jacy’s fiancé, whom they interviewed shortly after he returned home from Durham. Had he spoken with Jacy at all that weekend? No, he hadn’t. Was that unusual? Not really. Had she recently changed her mind about marrying him? Of course not. Because they’d heard from her maid of honor that maybe she had. Only when thus confronted had the man reluctantly produced the Gay Head postcard that had arrived the day after he returned home. Postmarked Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, it said, simply, I’m sorry. I thought maybe I could, but I can’t. Try and be happy. How had that made him feel? He hadn’t felt anything, because he didn’t believe it was true. Brides sometimes got the jitters. He and Jacy loved each other, he was certain of that. In due course she would come to her senses. Why hadn’t he told them about the postcard up front? Same reason. It didn’t mean anything. Could he prove he was in North Carolina all weekend? He could, definitely.

  Lincoln, his eyes suddenly full, reached forward and touched Jacy’s face on the microfilm machine. Hey, Jace. Guess what? We’re all here. Teddy. Mick. Me. On the island. Remember the Chilmark house? Our last night together on the deck? How we all linked arms and sang? You’d laugh if you could see us now. Old men, the three of us. Old men haunted by you.

  Feeling like an idiot, he wiped his eyes on the back of his sleeve and switched off the machine and just that quickly she was gone. Again.

  “FIND WHAT YOU WERE looking for?” the woman asked when he emerged from the microfilm room. Beverly. Lincoln suddenly recalled—with a small measure of pride—the name she’d told him earlier. He’d always been bad with names and was getting worse, which made traveling without Anita perilous. Aware that he sometimes forgot the names of people he’d just been introduced to, Anita would work those names into the conversation, and by the third or fourth mention he’d be up to speed. She claimed that he was better at remembering men’s names than women’s, and better at attractive women’s names than plain ones’. Lincoln would’ve objected to this unflattering assessment had it not been so accurate.

  “No luck, Beverly,” he admitted. (Okay, she was an attractive woman.) He was surprised to hear in his own voice something akin to relief. After switching the microfilm machine off and sitting in the dark for a few moments to compose himself, he’d turned it back on again and scanned another two months’ worth of Gazettes on the off chance there’d been some kind of response to the original story, but didn’t find a single item. Clearly the police had concluded that Jacy left the island that morning as planned, and why not? Hadn’t the snack-bar woman seen a girl who looked like her on the ferry? If there was no record of her buying a bus ticket in Woods Hole, that meant only that she’d paid cash. Back then you didn’t have to show your ID for most travel. Or maybe she’d met somebody on the ferry who was headed to New York City and didn’t mind dropping her off in Greenwich. It was even possible she’d decided to hitchhike.

  The important thing was that if she had left the island, then her disappearance didn’t involve Mason Troyer. Which, admit it, was where his mind had gone—or rather leaped, the narrative already fully formed. Still chafing over the humiliation of having Mickey coldcock him the day before, Troyer had been watching the house that morning, just as he would years later, when he “dropped in” on Anita, giving her the creeps. Seeing Jacy leave by herself, he’d followed and offered her a lift to the ferry. And once he had her alone, he’d …

  Okay, the narrative wasn’t fully formed, and right here, Lincoln had to admit, was where it broke down. Yes, Troyer was a lout who according to Google had a history of harassing women, but that didn’t make him a murderer, which was what Lincoln’s half-baked narrative needed him to be. No matter how hard he squinted, however, the story refused to track. In the first place, Jacy never would’ve gotten into a car with him, not after he’d groped her. And even supposing she had done such a foolish thing, and supposing Troyer actually meant to harm her, exactly how would his intention have played out? Sure, a young woman hitchhiking alone was always vulnerable, but Troyer couldn’t have been sure that she’d be either alone or hitchhiking. In fact, he naturally would’ve assumed she and Lincoln and Teddy and Mickey would all be leaving the island together. Which meant that if he’d somehow managed to abduct her, he’d acted on impulse. Which in turn made no sense. State Road, where Jacy would’ve been hitching, was, if not exactly busy that early in the season, at least well traveled, and you could never be certain another driver or walker or jogger wouldn’t appear at exactly the wrong moment. And even if Troyer, fueled by rage, had been willing to roll the dice, to what logical end? He was a big guy, so sure, if he somehow got Jacy into the car, he could overpower her, but then what? If he meant to rape her, he’d have to take her someplace where there wouldn’t be any witnesses, but again, then what? How would he keep her from going to the cops afterward? Well, he could threaten her. That often worked on terrified young women who felt not just fear but shame. But often wasn’t always, so how could he count on it? And what if, instead of going to the cops, she returned to Chilmark and told her friends? Mickey had alread
y laid the asshole out cold for—compared to rape, at least—a relatively minor transgression. What sort of punishment would he mete out for the greater offense? No, to keep his victim quiet, he’d have to kill her, but kill her how? Dispose of her body how? And later, when she was reported missing, the cops would question Lincoln and Teddy and Mickey, who’d be quick to tell them about the incident in the kitchen, after which he’d be the prime suspect.

  No, it was a fever dream. Loathing Troyer, he’d turned a lout into a monster so as to explain the inexplicable.

  “Turns out I was looking for a ghost,” he reluctantly admitted to Beverly.

  “Oooh, tell me,” she said, motioning for him to take a seat. “I love ghost stories.”

  No, he told himself. Just leave.

  “Unfortunately, this one lacks an ending,” he said, taking the offered chair.

  “That’s okay, I’m excellent at endings.”

  And so, keeping Troyer out of the narrative, he gave Beverly the short version of that long-ago holiday weekend and Jacy’s disappearance. As he spoke, she made notes on her blotter, as if there might be a quiz later. When at last he finished talking, she said, without hesitation, “She’s here on the island.”

  Lincoln swallowed hard, feeling his face go white. For a moment he was unable to locate his voice.

  “In a story, I mean. You and your friends look for her all over the world, only to discover that she’s been right here the whole time. That’s how I’d write it.” Then, having apparently registered his expression, she winced. “Ouch. I forgot we were talking about an actual person. Somebody you—”

  “It’s okay,” Lincoln assured her, though what she’d said had given him the bends, as if she’d recognized Jacy today from his description of her in 1971 and knew right where she lived on the island. As if her name and phone number were waiting there on Beverly’s Rolodex. As if they could all meet for lunch. “It was a long time ago. Who was it who said to let the dead bury the dead?”