Chances Are

by Richard Russo

  Lincoln sipped his coffee while the man read, his expression darkening as he did. When he finally closed the folder, he tapped its edge against his knee and said, “Justine Calloway. That the girl we’re talkin’ about?”

  “Jacy. Yes.”

  Coffin turned his gimlet gaze on Lincoln, holding him with it uncomfortably. “So you’re telling me this Jacy never turned up?”

  Lincoln nodded.

  “Never called her folks?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  When the other man said nothing, Lincoln felt compelled to continue. “They divorced not long after she went missing. Her father had some legal difficulties about then.”

  “What sort of difficulties?”

  “White-collar crime of some kind. I want to say insider trading. I think he might’ve ended up in jail.”

  Coffin stared out the window now, apparently deep in thought. “Says here there was a fiancé. She never got back in touch with him, either?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Coffin rubbed his stubbled chin thoughtfully, and Lincoln saw a thought scroll across his gray brow, plain as day: Dead, then. “Well, you being here begs a fairly obvious question, Lincoln. What’s your interest after all these years?”

  “She and my pals Teddy and Mick, we were all best friends in college.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Minerva College. In Connecticut.”

  “Oh, I know where Minerva’s at, Lincoln. What I’m asking is, why now?”

  “I guess we never forgot her, how she just … disappeared. I mean, we were all going our separate ways now that college was over. It wasn’t like we expected to see each other anytime soon. But I think we imagined we’d always be part of each other’s lives.”

  “Have you been?”

  “Us guys? Yeah. Maybe not as much as we planned on. I moved out West. Mick’s the only one who stayed in New England.” Or returned here after the amnesty, but there was no reason to bring that up. “We’ll lose touch for a while—a year or two at a stretch—but then one of us will call out of the blue. And now there’s e-mail.”

  “She come up in conversation, does she? This Jacy?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Not often. Being here on the island brings it all back, I guess.”

  Coffin seemed to consider all this as you would a math problem involving both numbers and letters. His expression had become less friendly. “You married, Lincoln?”

  “Yes.”

  “Happily?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Do you love your wife? Simple question.”

  “Yes,” Lincoln told him, not that it was any of his business.

  “You rich?”

  “In what respect?”

  “Money, Lincoln. What most people mean by rich.”

  Lincoln squirmed, surprised by how easily the old cop had put him on the defensive. “We had more before 2008,” he said, hoping to elicit at least a smile, and failing utterly. “Why do you ask?”

  “I had a friend went to Minerva. Not a cheap ticket.”

  “I was there on scholarship. So were my friends.”

  “Not the girl?”

  “Nope, she was from Greenwich.” He almost added Connecticut, but didn’t want to raise the man’s class hackles again.

  “You got kids?”

  “Yes.”

  “Grandkids?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So. Things have worked out, wouldn’t you say? Minerva College paid some dividends, did it?”

  “I guess you could say that.” Though probably not in the sense that Coffin meant. They hadn’t learned any secret handshakes there, or joined any secret societies. For the most part their classes had been good. Their teachers were mostly knowledgeable and pretty friendly. A few, like Professor Ford, whom he’d just been talking about with Teddy, had really challenged them, altering their trajectory by teaching them how to think more critically. Indeed, it could be argued that those were the true dividends of a liberal arts education, though he doubted that’s what Coffin was getting at. He was still dwelling on money, what most people thought of when they heard the word rich.

  “Okay if I ask you something?” Lincoln said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did I manage to piss you off somehow, Mr.Coffin?”

  “Not you, Lincoln. This.” He was still tapping the edge of the folder against his knee. “This right here really does piss me off. Girl goes missing? Never turns up? Seems to me somebody dropped the damn ball. Which makes me wonder if that somebody was me. What? I say something funny?”

  It was true. Lincoln was grinning. “No, it’s just … you really were a cop, weren’t you.”

  “That’s right, Lincoln, I really was.” But he was grinning now, too, if a little sheepishly. “Damn doctors don’t let me smoke anymore. I’m not supposed to drink or eat red meat, either. And now that I’m retired I go three, four weeks at a time without anybody to interrogate. Then you come along, reminding me of my failures.”

  “That was hardly my intention.”

  “I know it,” he conceded. “All those files in there?” he said, waving his thumb back at the wall of metal cabinets. “Beverly wants me to sit down with her and go through them. Annotate the more interesting cases. ‘Put flesh on the bones’ is how she puts it. But what she doesn’t understand, Lincoln, is that most of what’s in those folders is bruised flesh on broken bones.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And here’s the thing. If you could get to the bottom of this, find the truth about what happened forty-four years ago, that’s what you’d likely find. Bruised flesh. Broken bones.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Mr.Coffin?”

  “I’m telling you to go home, Lincoln. Bounce those grandkids on your knee. Things worked out. Be happy.”

  Lincoln nodded at the folder that Coffin had put on the coffee table. “There’s really nothing you can tell me? Besides what was in the paper?”

  Coffin reluctantly took up the folder again. “Okay, here’s what I remember. I went out there to your place. State guys asked me to check it out. Course by then you’d all left. The place was locked up tight.”

  “We usually didn’t have renters much before the Fourth of July.”

  Coffin was studying him intently now. “No neighbors close by.”

  “Just the Troyers down the hill. They were away at the time, but their son was there. Mason.”

  “Yeah, I spoke to him.”

  So Lincoln had been right. He had glimpsed the name Troyer in the file. “You did?”

  Coffin took off his glasses and set them and the folder on the table. “I gather there was some trouble that weekend?”

  “He dropped by, uninvited.”

  “And what happened?”

  “We drank some beer on the deck.”

  “That’s all? Just beer?”

  Lincoln shrugged. “It was 1971. There might’ve been some weed passed around.”

  “No coke?”

  “Of course not. Anyhow, at some point Troyer and Jacy were alone in the kitchen and he tried to get too friendly with her. My friend Mickey walked in on them. Took exception to what he saw.”

  Coffin nodded. “Took one hell of an exception, I’d say. When I talked to him he still had two black eyes and his jaw was wired shut. He said your friend sucker punched him.”

  “I was out on the deck with the others when it happened, but knowing Mickey, there probably wasn’t much of a conversation.”

  “Got a temper, then, this friend of yours? Zero to sixty in three point two seconds? That kind of guy?”

  “Actually, he’s pretty gentle most of the time.”

  “Most of the time.”

  “He never would’ve hurt Jacy, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  Coffin shrugged. “You’re the one that knows him.”

  “Anyway,” Lincoln said, “all that happened on Sunday. I don’t see the relevance, given that we all le
ft the island on Tuesday.”

  Putting his glasses back on, he picked up the folder again. “Says here you didn’t all leave at the same time, though. How come?”

  “Jacy woke up early and snuck out when we were still asleep. Left us a note saying she hated goodbyes. Anyway, the point is she left the island, right? Somebody who worked for the Steamship Authority identified her?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a positive ID. More like Yeah, maybe. When I spoke to the lady, she didn’t seem any too sure.”

  “Are you suggesting Jacy never left here?”

  “No, I’m saying it can’t be completely ruled out.”

  “What’s your best guess?”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, the staties were pretty convinced she was on one of those morning ferries. I don’t know how they could be, based on that one witness, but they could’ve had some additional information they didn’t share with us locals.”

  “So it’s possible something could have happened to her here?”

  “It’s also possible she was abducted by aliens,” Coffin said. “Look at it this way, Lincoln. Either she’s alive or she’s dead. If she’s dead, if somebody killed her, what happened to the body? Because for me that’s a problem.”

  Also for the dead girl, Lincoln thought.

  “Okay, here’s a scenario. You’re the killer.”

  “Me?” Because Lincoln’s distinct impression was that his host didn’t consider this proposition to be completely outlandish.

  “Hypothetical, Lincoln. We’re using our imaginations here. You’re on the ferry and you spot this good-looking hippie chick. It’s the early seventies, so she’s going braless. You watch her the whole time, till the ferry docks in Woods Hole. She goes ashore with the other foot passengers, while you go down into the boat to retrieve your vehicle, telling yourself to forget about her. She’s just a girl. Except when you drive off the boat, there she is on the Falmouth road with her thumb out. You pull over. Offer her a ride. She gets in. You talk. Maybe you ask her what hippie chicks have got against bras. What’s all that about? You think you’re being witty, but she takes your question seriously. Tells you it’s all about freedom, and that pisses you off. Freedom. Maybe you’re just back from ’Nam. You got married young. Had a couple kids before you could turn around. Who the fuck’s free? Not you. You work on the island, landscaping or maybe cleaning rich people’s pools. Anyway, you work there, but you sure as hell can’t afford to live there. No, you live in New Bedford, because that’s where people like you live. Summers you make pretty decent money, but it’s not cheap bringing your pickup over on the ferry. You work eight, ten days in a row, flop on somebody’s couch when you can. You go home for two or three days to look in on the wife and kids, so they can tell you about all the shit they want that you can’t afford. If somebody asked you to describe your life, the first word that popped into your head sure as hell wouldn’t be free. Only a privileged, burn-your-bra hippie chick would use such a stupid word.”

  Lincoln thought about telling the man he was way off base, that he had no idea who Jacy was. He was just making her up as he went, his scenario probably born of all the hippie chicks he himself never got to have sex with. And yet there was something compelling about the tale he was weaving, its gritty specificity. And some of the details were spot-on. Jacy definitely wouldn’t have been wearing a bra.

  “For a while,” Coffin continued, “you behave yourself. You got no choice. Traffic’s bumper to bumper till you get over the damn bridge. It’s the end of the long holiday weekend, so everybody’s trying to get off the Cape at once. Eventually, though, the traffic thins out. You say something, suggest something. Or maybe you reach over and touch her. Anyhow, she spooks. Tells you to pull over, let her the hell out. Like suddenly you smell bad, or she got a better look at you and decided she doesn’t like what she sees. Maybe she uses that word again, freedom, and now she’s demanding her own. Like she’s the one in charge. Like she can just choose and you have to do what she says. After you were nice enough to offer her a lift and didn’t even ask her for gas money, like you could’ve done, gas not being free, either. Anyway, if she thinks she’s the one giving the orders here, you got news for her. That ain’t how it works. When you explain this to her, things go bad, then worse. It all happens real quick. Maybe she tries to get out of the truck. Back then, she’s probably not wearing a seat belt, so when you jam on the brakes she goes headfirst into the dash or the windshield. Or maybe you hit her with something. Doesn’t matter. All of a sudden you’ve got a dead girl in your cab. Now you’ve really done it. You’ve gone and done it. Your mind’s on fire, but you put your thoughts in order, or try to. First thing is to get off the busy highway. Find some old country road, then a dirt one you can pull off onto. Find a secluded spot. Drag her into the trees.”

  “That’s one dark imagination you’ve got, Mr.Coffin,” Lincoln said, though in fact his narrative bore some remarkable similarities to the one he 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 wit
h 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 a deep breath and got stiffly to his feet, feeling like he’d been interrogated with a rubber hose. No wonder people confessed to crimes they didn’t commit.

  At the door, when they shook hands, it occurred to Lincoln to ask one final thing. “So, did Troyer say anything else when you interviewed him?”

  “In fact, he suggested I arrest your friend Mickey for assault. At least that’s what I think he was trying to say. With his jaw wired shut, he was kind of hard to understand.”

  “That was the first time you met him? I ask because I know he’s had some run-ins with the law over the years.”

  “No, Mason and I go way back. We won the Island Cup together, actually.”

  “The Island Cup?”

  “Football. The Vineyard versus Nantucket.”

  “You were teammates?”