himself had entertained earlier in the offices of the Vineyard Gazette, with Mason Troyer in the villain’s role.
“Yeah, maybe I do, but here’s my point, Lincoln. That girl’s body gets discovered. If she’s just laying there in the trees, some hiker comes across her. You had a shovel in the back of your pickup? You buried her in the soft ground? Doesn’t matter, same result. Animals find her after the first heavy rain. Either way, it takes about two minutes for the cops to connect that body to the girl who went missing over Memorial Day weekend.”
“So what you’re actually saying is that we can rule your scenario out?” After all that grim, granular realism? Really?
“No, but it’s got problems. Close to insurmountable, seems to me.”
“So…she’s alive?”
Coffin shook his head sadly. “Problems there, too, Lincoln. If she’s alive, you have to wonder why in all these years she never once called her folks or her fiancé or any of her friends. If she’s out there in the world, didn’t she ever run into anybody she knew? How come she never applied for credit cards or a passport or a home loan? How come she didn’t fall in love and get married, have some kids, or get divorced. Enter the public record like living people do.”
Lincoln sighed deeply. “First you say she can’t be dead, now you say she can’t be alive.”
“I’m not saying she can’t be either one. I’m saying that no matter what, something doesn’t add up. I don’t know what happened to her, Lincoln. But I do know this: you guys lucked out.”
“We lucked out?”
“Motive. Means. Opportunity. Except for when that neighbor stopped by, she was alone with you and your friends that whole weekend. Back then? If I’m leading the investigation, I’m thinking it’s one of you. One of you did it, and the other two are helping cover it up. Or all three of you did it. If it’s me, I’m thinking you spent the weekend trying to talk her out of marrying her fiancé—and getting nowhere. Could be she explains the facts of life, the stuff they didn’t teach you at Minerva College in Connecticut. This guy she’s gonna marry has money and prospects. You don’t. Which isn’t what you want to hear. It’s not at all how you figured things would go, which was more along the lines of any girl who goes off for a long weekend with three guys must be looking to have a little fun before she gets hitched. Or maybe your friend Mickey decides he deserves a reward for rescuing her in the kitchen. Or it could be he plays the pity card, reminding her he’s going off to war and could come home dead. She should at least send him off happy, right? What kind of girl says no to such a request? But no is what she says, and there’s that quick temper of his.”
“Except that’s not what happened,” Lincoln said.
Coffin ignored this as if Lincoln hadn’t spoken. “At first you panic, because…dead girl. But gradually you calm down and start thinking straight. You all decide to stick together. You wait till dark to bury her. You talk through what you’ll tell the cops. You’ve got some time before she’s reported missing. You? You head west like you planned to with some other girl. Your friends—”
Lincoln had to stop him. “Mr. Coffin,” he said. “Please, listen. None of that happened.”
“I’m not saying it did, Lincoln. I’m saying that’s what I would’ve been thinking in 1971. And I’ll tell you something else. I’d’ve rented a backhoe and dug up every square inch of that place of yours out in Chilmark. I’d’ve dug until I knew for a fact that it was the one place on the planet that girl wasn’t at.”
He finally tossed the folder back on the coffee table, as if he’d been using it as a prop this whole time, and for a minute they both sat there staring at it. Finally Lincoln ventured, “You sound like maybe you still believe that’s what happened.”
“No, Lincoln, I don’t.”
Though relieved to hear this, he said, “How come?”
“Because if you did have something to do with that girl’s disappearance forty-four years ago, you wouldn’t be snooping around the Gazette this afternoon. You wouldn’t have told Beverly that story. And you sure wouldn’t have come out here asking a retired cop questions you already knew the answers to. No, I’d say you’re mostly in the clear.”
Mostly. Lincoln took