I photographed him before the autopsy, accourse, you have to remember that, and if you stared at the finished portrait for more’n a second or two, he still looked deader than hell (at least to me he did), but yes, there was something kinda handsome about him just the same, with his ashy cheeks and pale lips and that little touch of lavender on his eyelids.”
“Brrr,” Stephanie said, but she sort of knew what Vince was saying, and yes, it was a poem by Poe it called to mind. The one about the lost Lenore.
“Ayuh, sounds like true love t’me,” Dave said, and got up to pour the coffee.
14
Vince Teague dumped what looked to Stephanie like half a carton of Half ’N Half into his, then went on. He did so with a rather rueful smile.
“All I’m trying to say is that I sort expected a pale and darkhaired beauty. What I got was a chubby redhead with a lot of freckles. I never doubted her grief and worry for a minute, but I sh’d guess she was one of those who eats rather than fasts when the rats gnaw at her nerves. Her folks had come from Omaha or Des Moines or somewhere to watch out for the baby, and I’ll never forget how lost n somehow alone she looked when she came out of the jetway, holdin her little carryon bag not by her side but up to her pouterpigeon bosom. She wasn’t a bit what I expected, not the lost Lenore—”
Stephanie jumped and thought,Maybe now thetelepathy goes three ways.
“—but I knew who she was, right away. I waved and she came to me and said, ‘Mr. Teague?’ And when I said yes, that’s who I was, she put down her bag and hugged me and said, ‘Thank you for coming to meet me. Thank you for everything. I can’t believe it’s him, but when I look at the picture, I know it is.’
“It’s a good long drive down here—no one knows that better than you, Steff—and we had lots of time to talk. The first thing she asked me was if I had any idea what Jim was doing on the coast of Maine. I told her I did not. Then she asked if he’d registered at a local motel on the Wednesday night—” He broke off and looked at Dave. “Am I right? Wednesday night?”
Dave nodded. “It would have been a Wednesday night she asked about, because it was a Thursday mornin Johnny and Nancy found him on. The 24th of April, 1980.”
“You justknow that,” Stephanie marveled.
Dave shrugged. “Stuff like that sticks in my head,” he told her, “and then I’ll forget the loaf of bread I meant to bring home and have to go out in the rain and get it.”
Stephanie turned back to Vince. “Surely hedidn’t register at a motel the night before he was found, or you guys wouldn’t have spent so long calling him John Doe. You might have known him by some other alias, but no one registers at a motel underthat name.”
He was nodding long before she finished. “Dave and I spent three or four weeks after the Colorado Kid was found—in our spare time, accourse—canvassin motels in what Mr. Yeats would have called ‘a widenin gyre’ with MooseLookit Island at the center. It would’ve been damn near impossible during the summer season, when there’s four hundred motels, inns, cabins, bedandbreakfasts, and assorted rooms to rent all competing for trade within half a day’s drive of the Tinnock Ferry, but it wasn’t anything but a parttime job in April, because seventy percent of em are shut down from Thanksgiving to Memorial Day. We showed that picture everywhere, Steffi.”
“No joy?”
“Not a bit of it,” Dave confirmed.
She turned to Vince. “What did she say when you told her that?”
“Nothing. She was flummoxed.” He paused. “Cried a little.”
“Accourse she did, poor thing,” Dave said.
“And what did you do?” Stephanie asked, all of her attention still fixed on Vince.
“My job,” he said, with no hesitation.
“Because you’re the one who always has to know,” she said.
His bushy, tangled eyebrows went up. “Do you think so?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do.” And she looked at Dave for confirmation.
“I think she nailed you there, pard,” Dave said.
“Question is, is ityour job, Steffi?” Vince asked with a crooked smile. “I think it is.”
“Sure,” she said, almost carelessly. She had known this for weeks now, although if anyone had asked her before coming to theIslander, she would have laughed at the idea of deciding for sure on a life’s work based on such an obscure posting. The Stephanie McCann who had almost decided on going to New Jersey instead of to MooseLookit off the coast of Maine now seemed like another person to her. A flatlander. “What did she tell you? What did she know?”
Vince said, “Just enough to make a strange story even stranger.”
“Tell me.”
“All right, but fair warning—this is where the throughline ends.”
Stephanie didn’t hesitate. “Tell me anyway.”
15
“Jim Cogan went to work at Mountain Outlook Advertising in Denver on Wednesday, April the 23rd, 1980, just like any other Wednesday,” Vince said. “That’s what she told me. He had a portfolio of drawings he’d been working on for Sunset Chevrolet, one of the big local car companies that did a ton of print advertising with Mountain Outlook—a very valuable client. Cogan had been one of four artists on the Sunset Chevrolet account for the last three years, she said, and she was positive the company was happy with Jim’s work, and the feeling was mutual—Jim liked working on the account. She said his specialty was what he called ‘holyshit women.’ When I asked what that was, she smiled and said they were pretty ladies with wide eyes and open mouths, and usually with their hands clapped to their cheeks. The drawings were supposed to say, ‘Holy shit, what a buy I got at Sunset Chevrolet!’ ”
Stephanie laughed. She had seen such drawings, usually in free advertising circulars at the Shop ’N Save across the reach, in Tinnock.
Vince was nodding. “Arla was a fair shake of an artist herself, only with words. What she showed me was a very decent man who loved his wife, his baby, and his work.”
“Sometimes loving eyes don’t see what they don’t want to see,” Stephanie remarked.
“Young but cynical!” Dave cried, not without relish.
“Well, ayuh, but she’s got a point,” Vince said. “Only thing is, sixteen months is usually long enough to put aside the rosecolored glasses. If there’d been something going on—discontent with the job or maybe a little honey on the side would seem the most likely—I think she would have found sign of it, or at least caught a whiff of it, unless the man was almighty, almighty careful, because during that sixteen months she talked to everyone he knew, most of em twice, and they all told her the same thing: he liked his job, he loved his wife, and he absolutely idolized his baby son. She kept coming back to that. ‘He never would’ve left Michael,’ she said. ‘I know that, Mr. Teague.