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