whether he was calling as friend or inquisitor, as a member of the We Don’t Do Right by Girls Club, urging him to flee while he had the chance, or as Jacy’s avenger, determined to know the truth regardless of the cost. He hated to admit it, but Coffin was right. Belief and knowledge were different animals. It was the latter he’d been after when he first Googled Troyer and again when he visited the Vineyard Gazette. When he went to see Coffin in Vineyard Haven, it was still information, answers, he’d been looking for. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that asking questions about the past might disturb the present, that in the end he might want to unlearn what he’d found out?
Son? came the hitch-pitched voice of Wolfgang Amadeus, piping up all the way from Dunbar, Arizona, no trace of a stroke in his voice. I fear you’ve forgotten your Genesis. Yes, it was the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden. But Adam’s sin was pride.
Put a sock in it, Dad, Lincoln told him. I’m trying to think, here.
The old buzzard did have a point, though. He had been prideful. Perhaps even vainglorious, another of his father’s favorite words. Solving the mystery of Jacy’s disappearance was a task he’d let himself believe he was equal to. But his quest for knowledge, for understanding, hadn’t really been about her. Or about truth, or justice. It’d been about himself. How ridiculous was that? Sixty-six years old and still trying to prove to a girl four decades dead that he was the one she should’ve chosen.
So you admit it, his father said. I’m right.
Mind your own damn business, Dad, Lincoln told him. Go talk Spanglish to your new girlfriend.
Now, Son, replied Dub-Yay, that right there was a low blow.
* * *
—
LINCOLN EXPECTED COFFIN and his daughter-in-law to be gone, as in long, when he emerged from Rockers, but there they were, just up the dark, deserted street, Beverly trying her best to wedge his carcass into her VW’s passenger seat. Had he fallen crossing the street? Was that why they’d made so little progress? Or did she have to argue him out of driving himself back to Vineyard Haven? Since neither seemed to notice him, Lincoln slipped quietly behind the wheel of his rental car and scrunched down so he could surveil the tableau playing out. When Beverly tried to belt him in, Coffin swatted her hand away, and she rested her forehead on the door’s frame. Then, giving up, she closed the door and moved around to the driver’s side.
There’s your serpent right there, Dub-Yay chimed in.
No, Dad. That’s just a sick old man. Like you.
Though again, he did have a point. The serpent in Genesis had been a cunning, insidious whisperer of half-truths and innuendo, his pitch to Adam not unlike Coffin’s rabbit-hole soliloquy about men not doing right by girls, which—why not admit it?—had entered Lincoln’s bloodstream like venom. The narrative’s myriad details had been vivid and had the ring of truth, but could the same be said for the whole? Lincoln wasn’t sure. Its main thrust seemed to be that male misbehavior existed on a spectrum, like autism. Sure, some men were better behaved than others, but in the end they were all complicit because they closed ranks, as he’d put it, whenever it became truly necessary. As if to prove his point he’d offered Lincoln the opportunity to join that club himself. What made Lincoln suspicious was the man’s most plausible intention—to convince him that his belief in his lifelong friend was divorced from real, cop-worthy knowledge. Coffin’s circuitous monologue also trailed an unmistakable warning: that the knowledge Lincoln had been chasing earlier might now be chasing him. Resistance was futile. Ultimately, his faith in his friend would crumble before the relentless assault of fact, like those who had tried so hard to believe that the Vietnam War was just and necessary.
But hadn’t Coffin also overplayed his hand? Not content to cheapen Lincoln’s faith in Mickey, he’d also slandered Jacy. Even if you granted his assertion that men didn’t do right by girls, what was his assault on Jacy’s character besides another instance of victim blaming? Yes, Jacy had been as wild as the times they were then living through, but she’d also possessed an innocence that Coffin, who’d never met her, had utterly no knowledge of. She’d been both loyal and true. Their all-for-one and one-for-all friendship at Minerva had never once been