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