need to finish this sentence. “We have no idea where he went. I still have all his things. I think Joe regrets driving him away, but he’d never admit it. We don’t talk about him.”
“I’m sorry,” Lincoln told her, which was true. He’d never seen a man so at war with himself as Joe Coffin.
“He’s hard on people,” she continued, as if reading his mind. “Especially himself. Did you know he went to Dartmouth?”
“No,” Lincoln said, though he wasn’t that surprised, given how offended he’d been when Lincoln mentioned where Minerva was located.
“One semester. But his mother got sick and he came home to help out. He never went back. What money there was went to her doctors instead.”
“That’s a tough break, all right,” Lincoln said, trying to imagine what it would’ve been like for him if he’d had to go back to Dunbar after a semester at Minerva. “Would you let him know I dropped by? I have some news that might interest him.”
“I’m so embarrassed,” she said when he turned to leave. “I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Lincoln,” he reminded her, feeling some of the wind go out of his sails. Which no doubt served him right.
On a hunch he drove out to Katama, and there, a couple hundred yards from the beach, was the old pickup, parked on the strip of grass between the road and the bike path. Coffin registered his presence in the rearview mirror when Lincoln pulled in behind him.
“Even if I believed in coincidences, I wouldn’t buy into this one,” he said, having rolled down his window as Lincoln walked up.
Lincoln nodded. “I had an idea you might want to see your hawk again.”
“Turns out that not everything you want to see feels like seeing you.”
It occurred to Lincoln that he might not be talking about the bird. “I won’t bother you for long.”
“I apologize for last night,” Coffin said. “Did I frighten you?”
“A little,” Lincoln admitted.
“That wasn’t my intention. It was Kevin I was hoping to scare. He pushes steroids to local kids dumb enough to think they could be pro athletes if they could just bulk up. Did he look scared to you?”
“Not particularly.”
“Yeah, he definitely took my attempts at menace in stride. Anyway, you’re too late. I’ve already talked to my friend the police chief. I expect he’ll pay you a visit soon.”
“He’ll be wasting his time,” Lincoln said. “I found out last night that Jacy died back in the seventies.”
“You know this?”
Lincoln couldn’t help smiling. “No, but I believe it. Turns out she was on that ferry after all. She and Mickey secretly met up in Woods Hole. She convinced him to go to Canada with her instead of reporting for induction.”
He was prepared for Coffin to find fault with this narrative, but he just nodded thoughtfully. “A girl that good-looking? He’s lucky she didn’t want him to rob banks. Doesn’t explain why she never told her parents, though.”
“Long story, there.”
“You say she died?”
“Of the same neurological disease that killed her biological father.”
Lincoln could see the man’s mind working. “In other words, not the same guy your friend Mickey beat the shit out of?”
“Nope.”
“I guess I can fill in the blank there.”
“See, Mr. Coffin, that’s the reason I’m telling you all this. Because filling in the blanks, as you put it, is exactly what you and your friend Troyer have been doing, except you’ve been filling them in wrong.”
Here, too, he expected pushback that didn’t come. Coffin only shrugged, as if he’d been shown an arithmetic error in his checkbook. “It happens, Lincoln.”
“Yeah, but when it does, aren’t you supposed to rethink things? Pause to consider all the other things you might be wrong about?”
“Like what?”
“Well, in your shoes what I’d rethink is my decision not to have that operation. You get that right and maybe you’ve bought yourself some time to consider all the other stuff.”
“More time to contemplate everything I’ve done wrong and all the people I’ve misjudged? You don’t make it sound all that attractive, Lincoln, especially when the alternative is dying peacefully in my sleep while believing I did my best.”
“You sleep peacefully?”
He sighed mightily. “Well, you got me there, Lincoln. No, I do not sleep peacefully.”
“Mr. Coffin?”
“Yeah?”
“Beverly really does care about you.”
His expression darkened. “I’m aware of that. You have a point?”
“Well, you’re always saying we ought to do better by girls? Why not do better by her? For your own good, let her win this one.”
Coffin studied him for a long beat,