“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.
Lincoln sipped his coffee while the man read, his expression darkening as he did. When he finally closed the folder, he tapped its edge against his knee and said, “Justine Calloway. That the girl we’re talkin’ about?”
“Jacy. Yes.”
Coffin turned his gimlet gaze on Lincoln, holding him with it uncomfortably. “So you’re telling me this Jacy never turned up?”
Lincoln nodded.
“Never called her folks?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
When the other man said nothing, Lincoln felt compelled to continue. “They divorced not long after she went missing. Her father had some legal difficulties about then.”
“What sort of difficulties?”
“White-collar crime of some kind. I want to say insider trading. I think he might’ve ended up in jail.”
Coffin stared out the window now, apparently deep in thought. “Says here there was a fiancé. She never got back in touch with him, either?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Coffin rubbed his stubbled chin thoughtfully, and Lincoln saw a thought scroll across his gray brow, plain as day: Dead, then. “Well, you being here begs a fairly obvious question, Lincoln. What’s your interest after all these years?”
“She and my pals Teddy and Mick, we were all best friends in college.”
“Where was that?”
“Minerva College. In Connecticut.”
“Oh, I know where Minerva’s at, Lincoln. What I’m asking is, why now?”
“I guess we never forgot her, how she just…disappeared. I mean, we were all going our separate ways now that college was over. It wasn’t like we expected to see each other anytime soon. But I think we imagined we’d always be part of each other’s lives.”
“Have you been?”
“Us guys? Yeah. Maybe not as much as we planned on. I moved out West. Mick’s the only one who stayed in New England.” Or returned here after the amnesty, but there was no reason to bring that up. “We’ll lose touch for a while—a year or two at a stretch—but then one of us will call out of the blue. And now there’s e-mail.”
“She come up in conversation, does she? This Jacy?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Not often. Being here on the island brings it all back, I guess.”
Coffin seemed to consider all this as you would a math problem involving both numbers and letters. His expression had become less friendly. “You married, Lincoln?”
“Yes.”
“Happily?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you love your wife? Simple question.”
“Yes,” Lincoln told him, not that it was any of his business.
“You rich?”
“In what respect?”
“Money, Lincoln. What most people mean by rich.”
Lincoln squirmed, surprised by how easily the old cop had put him on the defensive. “We had more before 2008,” he said, hoping to elicit at least a smile, and failing utterly. “Why do you ask?”
“I had a friend went to Minerva. Not a cheap ticket.”
“I was there on scholarship. So were my friends.”
“Not the girl?”
“Nope, she was from Greenwich.” He almost added Connecticut, but didn’t want to raise the man’s class hackles again.
“You got kids?”
“Yes.”
“Grandkids?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So. Things have worked out, wouldn’t you say? Minerva College paid some dividends, did it?”
“I guess you could say that.” Though probably not in the sense that Coffin meant. They hadn’t learned any secret handshakes there, or joined any secret societies. For the most part their classes had been good. Their teachers were mostly knowledgeable and pretty friendly. A few, like Professor Ford, whom he’d just been talking about with Teddy, had really challenged them, altering their trajectory by teaching them how to think more critically. Indeed, it could be argued that those were the true dividends of a liberal arts education, though he doubted that’s what Coffin was getting at. He was still dwelling on money, what most people thought of when they heard the word rich.