Chances Are Page 13

  But on second thought, no. This wasn’t a comforting story to share with Vance. In order to tell it honestly, he’d have had to explain how they’d all been sitting out on the deck, Creedence on the stereo, drinking beer, lazily passing a joint around. Okay, sure, the story would illustrate that, far from harming her, they’d served as her protectors. But it certainly wouldn’t have put straight-arrow Vance’s mind at ease to picture his fiancée out on that deck, drinking beer and listening to protest music and smoking weed with a pack of fucking hippies. Plus, if she hadn’t gone with them to the island in the first place, she wouldn’t have needed them to defend her against the ghastly neighbor.

  Probably better to have explained why Jacy had decided to join them for the weekend. She wasn’t looking to party before the wedding, far from it. Teddy had talked her into coming along in hopes of tag-teaming Mickey over those three long days, convincing him to head to Canada instead of reporting for duty. She’d been pleading with him pretty much nonstop since the night they all got their draft numbers. (You wouldn’t actually go, though, right? Tell me you wouldn’t be that stupid.) In the months leading up to graduation, Teddy had also been pressuring Mickey to rethink his options, for all the good that had done. How could you argue with somebody who conceded the validity of every single point you made? Yes, Mickey agreed, the war was both stupid and immoral. No, he had no desire to either kill or be killed, certainly not in a steaming jungle on the far side of the world in a cause no one had bothered to really articulate. Yes, heading to Canada would be the smart move. No, he didn’t worry about people calling him a coward.

  “Then why, Mick?” Teddy had implored him. “Explain why you’d do the wrong, dumb thing when you could do the right, smart one?”

  “Because I said I would.”

  That’s what it came down to. His father, Michael Sr., a veteran of the Second World War, had hated every minute he’d spent in the service, but was proud, as he put it to Mickey, to have done his bit. When they call, you answer. You don’t get to ask why. That’s not how it works. Not how it’s ever worked. Your country calls, you answer. A pipe-fitter by trade, he was by all accounts a squared-away, no-bullshit kind of guy. Gruff and uneducated to be sure, but salt of the earth, too. He worked his forty-hour-a-week union job and then, most weekends, worked off the books to make his large family’s ends meet. Growing up, Mickey had been raised as much by his older sisters as their worn-out parents, so it was only later, after he went off to Minerva, that he and his old man had become close, which was strange, if you thought about it. At a time when so many fathers and sons were increasingly at odds, the two of them had forged a bond so deep and durable that it took them both by surprise.

  Which was why his father’s sudden death the summer of Mickey’s junior year had hit him like a sledgehammer to the base of the skull. A big guy like his son, Michael Sr. had been eating with his crew at a local lunch counter, and when it came time to go back to work, the other guys all rose from their stools and he didn’t, his heart having detonated five seconds earlier. Turned out he’d known for some time that something like this would likely happen, but never said a word. Not to his wife, not to his grown daughters, not to his son. No, the last thing he’d said to Mickey was Your country calls, you answer.

  But again, nope. None of this would’ve impressed gung-ho, love-it-or-leave-it Vance. He couldn’t imagine, much less approve of, his fiancée going to the island to turn Mickey into a draft dodger. Nor would Teddy’s portrait of Michael Sr. have moved Vance to admiration. If anything, it would’ve provided further evidence, were any needed, that this working stiff’s son had no business falling in love with a girl like Jacy.

  At the diner, when Vance came unglued and asked if Teddy and his friends had murdered his fiancée, he’d been shocked that anybody could dream up such a ludicrous possibility. And that he might’ve done so simply because they were hashers made the suggestion even more offensive. Yet as Teddy lay in his hospital bed pondering how little he’d done to alleviate the suffering of a fellow human being, he had to admit that some of Vance’s other suspicions hit closer to home. Because when it came right down to it—when the opportunity presented itself—Teddy hadn’t cared that Jacy was engaged, that she was somebody else’s girl. The fact that she’d chosen him, that she conceivably might end up his girl, had readily vanquished all ethical considerations. Had Mickey been given the same opportunity, would he have acted any differently? Or Lincoln? Even more disconcerting than his own moral failings was that his justification, had he been asked for one, wouldn’t have been dissimilar from Vance’s own. At Gay Head, when Jacy said that being there with him meant that maybe she wouldn’t be marrying her fiancé after all, what Teddy had felt was not just joy but also—why not admit it?—triumph. By choosing him, Jacy was rejecting not just Vance but others of his ilk. Teddy wasn’t so much stealing another guy’s girl as saving her from somebody who didn’t deserve her. It was actually a noble thing he was doing, because Vance was a privileged, prep-school, Greenwich Connecticut asshole, who, on account of all that, deserved to suffer.

  So, yes, a summer of losses. Minerva. Lincoln. Mickey. Jacy. His ever-more-aloof parents. And had those losses ended there, Teddy might’ve still felt the urge to claw his way back out of the dark rabbit hole. But it came to him that he’d suffered another loss as well, this one even more profound. The Teddy Novak who’d followed Jacy out into the freezing waves had been an innocent, propelled not only by love and almost unbearable desire but also by a desperate need to know. That person had been a boy, really, a boy Teddy couldn’t find it in his heart to blame too much. How quickly everything had pivoted, though, innocence morphing into pride, and pride into crushing disappointment, into despair, into bitterness and finally into resignation and self-loathing. If he, like Vance, was suffering, it was because they both deserved to be.

  Lincoln

  Lincoln was halfway back to Chilmark when his cell buzzed, probably Teddy or Mickey wondering what had become of him. Except the number was local, and when he answered, it was a woman’s voice on the line.

  “Mr.Moser? It’s Beverly. Listen, after you left, I got to thinking. You should talk to Joe Coffin.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “My father-in-law, actually, but also the former chief of police in Oak Bluffs. Back in the seventies, though, he worked up island. Anyway, I phoned him, and he said he’d be willing to speak to you.”

  “He remembers Jacy going missing?”

  “I don’t know, but after he retired, he kept a lot of old files. I’ve been after him to put them in order. They could be the basis for a pretty interesting memoir. You know, the silly things people who live here do? Or maybe a cozy detective series? Like Alexander McCall Smith?”

  She seemed to be waiting for him to weigh in on this idea. Apparently this McCall Smith guy was somebody he was supposed to recognize. What on earth was a cozy detective series?

  “Anyway, if nothing else, he might be able to provide some insight. He’s been a policeman here his whole life. He’s got some great stories.”

  Lincoln couldn’t help smiling. Perhaps because she worked for a paper, the woman couldn’t seem to get it out of her head that it was a story he’d told her: beautiful young woman disappears without a trace and is never heard from again.

  “He lives in a senior-housing complex in Vineyard Haven, if you’d like to drop by.”

  “Maybe I will tomorrow,” he said, though he had no such intention. Despite arriving at the Vineyard Gazette as a man on a mission, he’d left feeling unexpectedly relieved not to have found anything. Telling Beverly about Jacy actually made him feel a bit silly, like at age sixty-six he was still carrying a torch for a girl he’d never even dated. Him. Lincoln Moser. A happily married man with six children and a growing passel of grandkids. Also chronic lower-back pain. He needed to stick to the original plan. Figure out what needed to be done to the Chilmark house and get the place listed. Enjoy his friends. Return home.

/>   “That’s the thing,” Beverly said. “He’s going off island tomorrow for major surgery in Boston. You’re only here for a few days, right?”

  “You really think he might have some information?”

  “It’s possible?”

  Hanging up, Lincoln wondered why so many women did that—turned statements into questions. He’d have to remember to ask Anita. She, like their daughters, always enjoyed explaining how what was wrong with women was really men’s fault.

  LIKE MOST OTHER BUILDINGS on the island, the ones that constituted Tisbury Village were gray shingled. Set back from the road and nestled among some scrub pines, the complex looked nicer and better maintained than most low-income, government-subsidized housing Lincoln had run across, but there was no disguising the function of such places. You didn’t end up here if things had gone like you’d hoped.

  Joe Coffin’s apartment was on the second floor, and he must’ve seen him pull into the lot below, because he answered the door before Lincoln could complete his three-rap knock. A big barrel-chested man, he had a full head of gunmetal-gray hair that he kept extremely short on the sides. White sidewalls, Lincoln thought, recalling an old Dunbar expression. But did those tires even exist anymore? He and Coffin had to be roughly the same age, but the old cop’s face was an unhealthy gray and deeply lined from what Lincoln suspected was a lifetime of smoking and drinking, so he looked easily a decade older. Despite the season, he was dressed in a long-sleeved flannel shirt. “You must be Mr.Moser,” he said, stepping aside so Lincoln could come in. His obvious ill health notwithstanding, he looked like a man who could still hold his own in a bar fight, provided it didn’t go more than one round.

  His apartment—a small, generic one-bedroom—wasn’t what Lincoln had been expecting. When it came time to downsize, most elderly people had a difficult time surrendering their hard-won possessions. They shoehorned everything from their larger, former home into a new much-smaller crib, making it impossible to navigate without banging into stuff. Whereas Coffin’s apartment was more like a monk’s cell, as if he’d taken a vow of poverty early in life and stuck to it. An off-brand flat-screen TV sat in the far corner of the room on a cheap fiberboard stand that also contained a DVD player, but no cable box for movie channels or on-demand. Nor were any other electronic gizmos in evidence. A rickety four-shelf bookcase contained a couple dozen volumes, most of which looked like he checked them out of the library. Forming an L in front of the TV was a sofa, end table and recliner. The walls were decorated with black-and-white photos of island wildlife: plovers on the beach, a gull roosting atop a wood piling, a gaggle of wild turkeys crossing the bike path, an elongated V of black geese against a gray sky.

  “My daughter-in-law Beverly’s the photographer,” he said when he saw Lincoln studying them.

  “She’s good.”

  “That fella there’s out in Katama,” he said, pointing to a picture of a hawk perched majestically on a telephone line that drooped visibly under its weight. “I’ve seen as many as two hundred birds crowd onto that same telephone line, sitting there wing to wing like birds do. But when he’s there? Not another bird as far as the eye can see.”

  “You’re an animal lover?”

  He nodded. “Like most cops, I prefer them to people. I’ve never known one to lie to me. Please, have a seat while I look for that file.”

  Sit where, exactly? Clearly the recliner was Coffin’s usual spot, so not there. On the other hand, the couch—a sleeper sofa, by the look of it—bore the shape of a heavy man, and a pillow, not a decorative one, resting on one arm. Unable to resolve the conundrum, Lincoln perched on the sofa’s other arm, from which he had an unobstructed view of the bedroom, which his host had converted into an office. Against the far wall was a metal desk, on top of which sat an ancient computer that had, unless Lincoln was mistaken, an external disk drive. Did they even make floppy disks anymore? Along another wall stood a row of filing cabinets, beneath framed photographs of uniformed policemen. Not a single civilian.

  “Nineteen seventy-one, you said?” Coffin called over his shoulder.

  “Right,” Lincoln told him, though of course he hadn’t ever said anything to him.

  “May of nineteen and seventy-one,” he heard the man mutter. “Here we go.” Leaving the file drawer open, he returned to the front room and tossed a manila folder onto the coffee table. Its tab read MISSING GIRL. No other information, not even Jacy’s name, which struck Lincoln as odd until he thought about it. In big cities, girls went missing every week. For all he knew, Jacy might be one of only a handful to disappear from here in the last century.

  “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 e
xist 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.