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