she managed this suggested it wasn’t the first occasion she’d had to. For his part, Coffin seemed emptied out, not just of energy but even of a pulse, as if talking to Lincoln had drained him completely. Lincoln hoped that wasn’t the case, because there was something he needed to ask. “Before you go?” he said.
“Yes, Lincoln?”
“That incident you told me about earlier? Involving my friend Mickey? You wouldn’t happen to remember when that took place?”
Coffin stared into the middle distance. “I want to say 1974, but like I said, you can look it up.”
“Okay, thanks. Can I give you a hand outside?”
It was really Beverly he was asking, but Coffin answered, “No, I think the evening has been humiliating enough without that.”
Nineteen seventy-four, Lincoln thought when the door finally swung shut behind them. If memory served, that fall was when Gerald Ford declared amnesty for draft resisters, and when Mickey, like so many others, returned home. While he was in Canada, except for a single postcard, they hadn’t been in touch. The card had arrived care of his parents in Dunbar in October of ’71, by which time Mickey had been gone several months. It pictured the magnificent Château Frontenac in Quebec City, and on the back Mickey had scrawled: Thought you might like to see my new digs. He’d signed it Big Mick on Pots. Excited, Lincoln had called Teddy, only to learn that his parents had received the identical card and message. “I guess he must not have heard about Jacy,” Teddy speculated, “or he would have asked if she’d been in touch.” Only later did it occur to Lincoln that his friend’s logic was flawed. If Mickey’d wanted to know about that, he would’ve needed to provide a return address, which of course he wouldn’t have, lest the information fall into the wrong hands.
It wasn’t until early ’75, after the amnesty, that Lincoln heard from him again, this in the form of a belated Christmas card letting him know that he was back and would contact them all again once he was settled. For now he was in West Haven, living with his mother while he looked for work and an apartment. He knew a couple guys who were looking to form a band, so he might do that. This time he did mention her: I guess nobody’s heard from Jacy? A month or two after that they spoke on the phone and he explained that his mother, with whom he’d been in touch while he was in Canada, had told him Jacy had evidently run off rather than get married, which Mickey accepted as the most likely reason for her disappearance. When Lincoln expressed his own doubts on this score, Mickey waved them away. “Mark my words,” he said. “She’ll turn up one of these days with a European husband and brag about being a foreign correspondent based in Singapore or some fucking place.” When asked how he was doing, he claimed things were coming together, but Lincoln heard something in his voice that made him wonder if he might be struggling more than he was admitting. Now that he was back home, did he regret having gone to Canada? Was he being treated like a pariah? You should come see us in Arizona, Lincoln told him, and Mickey said he definitely would, once he got settled, but that visit never happened.
So if what Coffin was telling him now was true, most of this had been at best an evasion and at worst outright deception. His friend’s first order of business hadn’t been to find a job or an apartment or to form a new band. Nor had he really been sanguine about Jacy’s disappearance. No, Job One had apparently been to locate her father. But why? Did he think Donald Calloway would know his daughter’s whereabouts? Most of the time Mickey was in Canada the man had been in jail. The person more likely to have heard from Jacy during this period was her mother. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to track her down? Lincoln tried to understand all this, but it was like coming across an old jigsaw puzzle in the back of a closet, with half its pieces missing.
Taking out his cell, he considered trying Mickey again. If he’d hauled this Delia person home by water taxi, he’d surely have arrived on the mainland by now and would have reception. But if he answered, Lincoln would need to decide