Chances Are Page 17
When Teddy climbed off the bike and put it back in the shed, Mickey’s Harley was lying right where it tipped over that morning. He half expected to find him still snoring on the sofa, but instead he was outside on the deck talking on his cell. The sliding glass door was shut, but not completely. “I haven’t forgotten,” Teddy heard him say. “I know you need the money.” Catching sight of him inside, Mickey waved, then turned his back and continued, his voice lowered.
Not wanting to eavesdrop, Teddy sat down at the kitchen table and took out his own phone. He’d noticed a Trump sign in Troyer’s front yard when he rode by and wondered if Lincoln had seen it. Probably not, since it wasn’t visible from the deck. Care to guess, he texted, which (need I say) Republican candidate your friendly neighbor supports?
Mickey’s voice, louder now, was audible again. “I don’t know what to tell you, Delia, except I’ll be back on Monday and we can talk about it then. Okay?”
Delia? Teddy thought. They hadn’t heard about any Delia, had they? Was it possible Mickey had married again and never told them? Well, it’d be just like him. He’d gotten married twice before in spur-of-the-moment civil ceremonies, though Teddy and Lincoln hadn’t heard about either union until the divorces were final. “I need to stop meeting girls in bars” was the only explanation he’d offered. To which Lincoln replied, “Where else do you go?”
Mickey’d conceded, “See, that’s the thing.”
When Teddy joined him out on the deck, Mickey was glaring at his phone as if he was considering giving it a good, long toss, then said, “Do you have any reception out here?”
“One bar.”
Disgusted, Mickey stuffed the cell in his pocket. “That’s what I had until I lost it.”
“Everything okay?”
“More or less,” he said. “You know, I figured by the time I was sixty-six I’d have my own dedicated barstool somewhere and be paying for my beer with social security.”
“You’re not on social security?”
“I am, but it’s a funny thing. If you don’t put much of anything in, you can’t take much of anything out. Who knew?”
“Everybody?”
Mickey shrugged, looked around. “Where’s Lincoln? I woke up and everybody was gone.”
“He drove into town for some reason. I took a bike ride.”
“I was thinking about running into town myself. Some guy in Oak Bluffs has a Beatles-era Rickenbacker for sale. Cherry condition. Thought I’d check it out. Want to come along?”
“Nah, I need a shower, and after that I’ve got some stuff to do.”
“You guys both work way too hard,” Mickey said. “It’s unnatural. Unhealthy. Un-American.”
“In fact,” Teddy said, “studies have shown Americans put in longer hours than anybody and take fewer vacations.”
“I don’t see how that can be true,” Mickey replied. “Half the people I know are on disability and don’t work at all. The other half are musicians. Anyway, no work this evening, either one of you. Tonight we eat barbecue, drink beer and listen to rock and roll played at a very high volume.”
After he left, Teddy had a long shower, then put on fresh jeans and a T-shirt and took his manuscript back out onto the deck. He realized after marking up a few pages that they’d actually captured his interest, and rereading the ones he’d edited on the ferry yesterday he found that they, too, were better than he remembered. Which maybe shouldn’t have come as a surprise. He knew from experience that in the run-up to his spells, his judgment was dubious. Food he normally enjoyed tasted off. Movies seemed vacuous, music grating. Was it possible that confiding in Theresa had somehow forestalled the attack he’d assumed was right around the corner? Had the truth set him free? Could a truism really be true?
His phone vibrated, Lincoln texting back: Make America White Again? See you soon. Teddy smiled. Though Lincoln was a lifelong Republican, their politics probably aligned more closely now than ever before, though in the voting booth they’d likely tick their preferred boxes.
At some point, working on the manuscript with renewed interest, he became aware of loud voices down at Troyer’s place. An argument between him and the perpetually naked girlfriend was his first thought, but no, unless he was mistaken, both voices were male. An old gray pickup truck that hadn’t been there before now sat in the drive.
THROUGHOUT THE WOOLLY, disjointed narrative there was a flapping sound, like wings, that Teddy couldn’t account for. Identifying its source seemed urgent, though he couldn’t imagine why it should be. Hearing heavy, actual footfalls on the stairs, he swam toward consciousness, grateful it was only a dream and he could stop trying to figure out what was flapping. Rotating in his deck chair, he started to apologize to Lincoln for napping in the middle of the afternoon when he saw that the man lumbering up the steps was instead a beefy, red-faced guy wearing cargo shorts, flip-flops and no shirt. From the top step, Troyer cocked his head and squinted at him for a long, insolent beat and then, pleased with himself, said, “I remember you,” as if by doing so he’d qualified for a prize.
The gentle breeze that had sprung up before Teddy drifted off had apparently strengthened while he dozed, and a sheet of manuscript magically leaped out of its cardboard box and took flight—the sound of it identical to the one in his dream. Troyer, who could’ve snatched the page floating by, watched it sail past, unconcerned. And Teddy, rising from his chair, saw to his horror that the deck was littered with sheets of manuscript. So, less densely, was the sloping lawn below. The box, nearly full when he’d fallen asleep, was now half empty.
“I’d help you chase those all over Chilmark,” Troyer told him, “if I wanted to look like an idiot.”
Because he had another copy of the manuscript back home, Teddy himself was momentarily inclined to let those pages go. Chasing them around the yard, as Troyer looked on, would be humiliating. Unfortunately, many of them had been edited, and to do it all over again would take more hours than Teddy wanted to count up, so off he raced. On the lawn below he found himself in a Charlie Chaplin movie. Every time he bent over to pick up a page, it danced away on a fresh gust. “This is wonderful!” Troyer called from the deck. He was, Teddy saw, filming the whole thing with his phone.
Give the man this much credit, though. By the time Teddy returned to the deck, having recaptured maybe seventy-five pages of text, Troyer had picked up the ones lying on the floor and put them back in the cardboard box and secured them with a stone. He was now stretched out on the chaise lounge, reading a page Teddy had just edited and chortling nastily. “You wrote this?”
“No,” Teddy said, holding out his hand for it.
“Thank Christ,” Troyer said, passing him the page. “I mean, how bored would a man have to be to commit thoughts like this to paper?”
Teddy put the page on top of the others in the box. Later, he’d have to put them all back in order, see how many were missing and re-edit those. “It’s a book I’m going to publish later this year, actually.”
Troyer studied him for a long beat, his brow knit. “Why?” Since this was a question Teddy had been asking himself, he couldn’t help smiling.
“Okay,” Troyer said, scratching his hairy, sunburned chest, “then answer me this. Because I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around it. You’re the same three guys from before, right? You and Moser and the big guy?”
“If by before you mean 1971, then yeah.”
“What, you’ve been, like, roommates this whole fucking time?”
“Hardly,” Teddy said.
“Because that would be truly pathetic.”
Indeed, the notion, even after Teddy had disabused him of it, seemed to fill him with profound disgust, as if enduring friendship were both unnatural and vile. What unsettled Teddy even more was that this man, though he bore little resemblance to the person Teddy remembered from ’71, inspired the same visceral loathing. “Lincoln’s not here,” he said. “I assume he’s the one you’re looking for.”
Troyer leaned back on the chaise and locked his fingers behind his head, as if settling in for what remained of the afternoon. “Lincoln,” he repeated. “Why would a white man name his kid Lincoln?”
Teddy resisted the impulse to tell him that the white man who’d done it was himself named Wolfgang Amadeus. “Maybe because he hoped his son was destined for greatness? That he might even grow up to be president?”
Troyer snorted. “And get shot in the head?”
“This being America, there’s a decent chance he’ll get shot no matter what he’s called.”
Troyer groaned, looking skyward. “It must be summer,” he said. “The libs are returning. And speaking of liberals, remind me. What’s the name of that college all you guys went to?”
“Minerva.”
“That’s right, Minerva. Jesus.”
Evidently, for him Minerva College ranked right up there with enduring friendship.
“Is there something I can do for you?” Teddy said.
The man scowled. “Yeah. You can tell President Lincoln that he can take this place of his”—he threw his arms out wide open—“and shove it right the fuck up his ass. Tell him I don’t need him or it. Can you remember all that?”
Teddy nodded. “Got it. You’re no longer interested in purchasing his property. You wish him luck finding another buyer.”
Troyer, sitting up now, ignored this. “This next part is even more important. Tell him I had nothing to do with that hippie chick going missing.”
Teddy felt his head jerk back, as if from a good, stiff jab, and he swallowed hard. “Are you talking about Jacy?”
“Whatever the fuck her name was. The last time I saw her was the day the big galoot sucker punched me. You know I had to go to Boston to get my fucking jaw wired shut?”
“Gee,” Teddy said, “that must’ve been unpleasant.”
“Yeah, you could say that. For a month I ate my meals through a straw.”
“Well, you had it coming,” Teddy reminded him. “Also, it happened over forty years ago.”
“Okay, but here’s the thing. You know where I’ve been that whole time? Right here. See, I don’t visit this island, I fucking live here. And I don’t need some Vegas dickweed spreading rumors about me.”
“What rumors?”
“The fucking guy Googles me? Digs up some twenty-year-old court appearance? Finds out that some Beacon Hill twat took out a restraining order against me after I slapped her big fat mouth for her outside the Edgartown Yacht Club? And decides he knows me? Like that gives him the right to wonder out loud if this Jacy girl from the fucking seventies maybe’s buried somewhere out here?”
“Question,” Teddy said. “Is Lincoln going to have any idea what you’re talking about?”
If Troyer heard this question, he gave no sign. “Okay, so I copped a feel that day. She had great tits, that I do remember. But we were all what? Twenty? Twenty-one? And you come here in twenty fucking fifteen and accuse me?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Teddy said. “And I doubt Lincoln is, either.”
Troyer got to his feet now and came over to where Teddy sat, looming over him. “Then why the fuck is Joey Coffin knocking on my door and asking me a bunch of bullshit questions?”
“Who’s Joey Coffin?”
“You know what?” Troyer said, his face flushing now. “Fuck you. Fuck all three of you.”
“Troyer. Who is Joey Coffin?”
“A cop’s who he is. A retired ex-cop with time on his hands that thanks to your pal is now trying to decide if I’m his new hobby.”
“I don’t think—”
“I don’t give even a tiny little shit what you think,” Troyer snapped. “Or Lincoln, either. Just tell him the next time he opens his mouth, my name better not come out of it. He doesn’t fuckin’ know me. Google doesn’t know me. Chilmark doesn’t know me. The summer people think I’m an asshole? Good. I love that. I’m not politically correct and that rubs them the wrong way? I fucking live for that. With enemies like them, who needs friends? But tell your pal Lincoln I do have friends. In fact, tell him Joey Coffin and I go back even farther than you three assholes.”
“Are we done here?” Teddy said.
Troyer had moved over to the stairs and was about to leave, but now spun back around.
“No, come to think of it, there’s one more fucking thing. Tell your friend if he really wants to know what happened to that girl, he should be asking the big guy, not me.”
Teddy blinked. “You mean Mickey? You’re out of your mind. He was in love with her.” He was about to add We all were when Troyer again broke into his nasty chortle.
“Right,” he said. “Like nobody in the history of the fucking world ever killed a girl he was in love with.”
Then he lumbered noisily down the steps and across the sloping lawn, his stiff, awkward gait that of a man approaching old age at a gallop, his body breaking down all at once. Stepping over the low stone wall that marked his boundary, he spotted something and bent over to pick it up—a manuscript page that had escaped Teddy’s notice. “Minerva College?” he called up to him, wadding the paper into a ball. “What a fucking joke.”
Lincoln
So,” said Lincoln, trying hard to process what Teddy had just finished telling him, the gist being that (1) Mason Troyer was no longer interested in purchasing his house and (2) he’d had nothing to do with Jacy’s disappearance. Lincoln couldn’t decide which of these pronouncements was more unexpected. After all, twenty minutes ago Marty had informed him that the man needed to buy the property. Was it possible he was wrong and Troyer knew nothing of the easement issue? Even more mind-boggling was that he’d denied involvement in a crime Lincoln hadn’t actually accused him of. “He just appeared on the deck? No warning?”
“He might’ve thought I was you,” Teddy said.
Lincoln shook his head. “He knows me on sight.”
“Yeah, but my back was to him as he came up the lawn. You should’ve seen the look on his face when he recognized me from 1971.”
“And he just started in on you?”
“Yep. He seemed to think I’d know what he was talking about.”
Lincoln went over to the sliding screen door but didn’t go outside. If Troyer saw he’d returned, he might come charging back up the hill. “Did he threaten you?”
“Not really,” Teddy said. “He was seriously pissed off, but more than anything he seemed to be blowing off steam. For some reason, the fact that we all went to Minerva really set him off. Like he applied there and didn’t get in, so we were looking down on him.”
Lincoln nodded, recalling that Coffin had exhibited a similar class resentment.
“He strikes me as one of those people who’s always ginned up about something,” Teddy continued. “He’s also got it in for the summer people who apparently shun him for not sharing their lordly liberalism.”
The late-model Mercedes that usually sat in the driveway—Troyer’s, Lincoln assumed—was now the only vehicle there. “This visitor? You say he was driving an old pickup?”
“There was some sort of argument, I think. Too far away for me to make out what they were saying.”
So, Lincoln thought, his earlier intuition at the rotary had been right. “And Troyer actually brought up Jacy? By name?”
Teddy shook his head. “No, he called her ‘that hippie chick,’ but it was definitely Jacy he was talking about. Where in the world did he get the idea you thought he was involved?”
Lincoln collapsed onto the sofa, stared up at the ceiling and said, “Shit.” Feeling he had little choice, he gave Teddy a condensed version of how Marty had gotten the ball rolling by suggesting that Troyer might be trouble. How yesterday evening, Google had revealed that he had a history of harassing women. How all that had sent him to the Vineyard Gazette to look for details about the investigation in ’71. And finally how Beverly, at the mention of Troyer’s name, had recommended he talk with this retired cop named Joe Coffin.
Which wasn’t, Lincoln thought, how Coffin himself had described it. Yes, after Troyer got in trouble in Wellesley, the Coffins had taken him in for his senior year—information that Lincoln had to pull out of him—but he didn’t have the impression that the boys had become friends, despite living under the same roof. “They were apparently teammates back in the day,” he told Teddy. “Won something called the Island Cup that I’m told is a big deal locally.”
“So you think this guy Coffin came out here to warn Troyer that you were nosing around?”
“Either that,” Lincoln said, trying to think it through, “or after our conversation he got to thinking.”
“About Troyer’s history with women.”
Lincoln nodded. “That, but also about the three of us. Coffin said that if he’d been in charge of the investigation back in seventy-one, we would’ve been his chief suspects. As he put it, we had motive, means and opportunity.”
“What motive?”
“He figured maybe we lured her here thinking she’d put out for us and were disappointed when she refused.”
Teddy looked ill. “Does he still believe that?”
“He claims not to. If we’d done something to Jacy back then, why would I be snooping around now? And what kind of sense would it make for all three of us to return to the scene of the crime forty-four years later? No, here’s what I think happened. Our conversation triggered something. It can’t be a coincidence that a few minutes after we said goodbye, Coffin drove right out here and started interrogating the guy, can it?”
“So,” Teddy said, “you do think Troyer was involved?”
Lincoln massaged his temples. “I did yesterday, after learning about his issues with women. I mean, a lot of people here seem to think he’s dangerous. It felt like all of the pieces of the puzzle were coming together. And it explained some things.”