ask you something?” Lincoln said.
“Go ahead.”
“Did I manage to piss you off somehow, Mr. Coffin?”
“Not you, Lincoln. This.” He was still tapping the edge of the folder against his knee. “This right here really does piss me off. Girl goes missing? Never turns up? Seems to me somebody dropped the damn ball. Which makes me wonder if that somebody was me. What? I say something funny?”
It was true. Lincoln was grinning. “No, it’s just…you really were a cop, weren’t you.”
“That’s right, Lincoln, I really was.” But he was grinning now, too, if a little sheepishly. “Damn doctors don’t let me smoke anymore. I’m not supposed to drink or eat red meat, either. And now that I’m retired I go three, four weeks at a time without anybody to interrogate. Then you come along, reminding me of my failures.”
“That was hardly my intention.”
“I know it,” he conceded. “All those files in there?” he said, waving his thumb back at the wall of metal cabinets. “Beverly wants me to sit down with her and go through them. Annotate the more interesting cases. ‘Put flesh on the bones’ is how she puts it. But what she doesn’t understand, Lincoln, is that most of what’s in those folders is bruised flesh on broken bones.”
“Yeah?”
“And here’s the thing. If you could get to the bottom of this, find the truth about what happened forty-four years ago, that’s what you’d likely find. Bruised flesh. Broken bones.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Mr. Coffin?”
“I’m telling you to go home, Lincoln. Bounce those grandkids on your knee. Things worked out. Be happy.”
Lincoln nodded at the folder that Coffin had put on the coffee table. “There’s really nothing you can tell me? Besides what was in the paper?”
Coffin reluctantly took up the folder again. “Okay, here’s what I remember. I went out there to your place. State guys asked me to check it out. Course by then you’d all left. The place was locked up tight.”
“We usually didn’t have renters much before the Fourth of July.”
Coffin was studying him intently now. “No neighbors close by.”
“Just the Troyers down the hill. They were away at the time, but their son was there. Mason.”
“Yeah, I spoke to him.”
So Lincoln had been right. He had glimpsed the name Troyer in the file. “You did?”
Coffin took off his glasses and set them and the folder on the table. “I gather there was some trouble that weekend?”
“He dropped by, uninvited.”
“And what happened?”
“We drank some beer on the deck.”
“That’s all? Just beer?”
Lincoln shrugged. “It was 1971. There might’ve been some weed passed around.”
“No coke?”
“Of course not. Anyhow, at some point Troyer and Jacy were alone in the kitchen and he tried to get too friendly with her. My friend Mickey walked in on them. Took exception to what he saw.”
Coffin nodded. “Took one hell of an exception, I’d say. When I talked to him he still had two black eyes and his jaw was wired shut. He said your friend sucker punched him.”
“I was out on the deck with the others when it happened, but knowing Mickey, there probably wasn’t much of a conversation.”
“Got a temper, then, this friend of yours? Zero to sixty in three point two seconds? That kind of guy?”
“Actually, he’s pretty gentle most of the time.”
“Most of the time.”
“He never would’ve hurt Jacy, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Coffin shrugged. “You’re the one that knows him.”
“Anyway,” Lincoln said, “all that happened on Sunday. I don’t see the relevance, given that we all left the island on Tuesday.”
Putting his glasses back on, he picked up the folder again. “Says here you didn’t all leave at the same time, though. How come?”
“Jacy woke up early and snuck out when we were still asleep. Left us a note saying she hated goodbyes. Anyway, the point is she left the island, right? Somebody who worked for the Steamship Authority identified her?”
“I wouldn’t call it a positive ID. More like Yeah, maybe. When I spoke to the lady, she didn’t seem any too sure.”
“Are you suggesting Jacy never left here?”
“No, I’m saying it can’t be completely ruled out.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“Well, for what it’s worth, the staties were pretty convinced she was on one of those morning ferries. I don’t know how they could be, based on that one witness, but they could’ve had some additional information they didn’t share with us locals.”
“So it’s possible something could have happened to her here?”
“It’s also possible she was abducted by aliens,” Coffin said. “Look at