“I don’t suppose they have actual coffee in this place,” he said. “You know, no caramel, no whipped cream, no chocolate sprinkles. Why do people drink this stuff, anyway? It isn’t coffee. It’s a milk shake. Milk shakes. Whatever.”
“You just sit and I’ll find you something,” Tony Bolero said. “You care if it’s fair trade or not?”
“There’s a politics of coffee?”
Tony shook his head and went off over to the counter where he was third in line. The two people ahead of him were both women in their forties with their hair pulled back off their faces and Coach bags.
Gregor opened up and turned the laptop on. He was much more comfortable with the computer now than he used to be, and the more he got used to doing searches, the better he liked using the thing. He opened Internet Explorer and got online. Then he went to Google and typed in “Chester Morton.” The first link that came up was “Justice for Chester,” the Morton family’s official Web site on Chester and what might have happened to him.
Gregor looked at the big picture of Chester that was the first thing under the site’s title. It was the same picture that appeared on the billboard near Mattatuck–Harvey Community College. He scrolled down a little and found a page of more pictures: Chester with Charlene Morton and a little crowd of other people that Gregor thought must be the Morton family; Chester on a lifeguard’s chair at a beach somewhere; Chester with a jacket and tie at somebody’s wedding. Gregor moved around from page to page. There were no other pictures. The first picture, the one from the billboard, kept appearing over and over again.
Gregor found a link that said, “About Chester,” and tried that. It turned out to lead to a page with long paragraphs of type, all presented on a slightly beige background with pictures of leaves scattered across it, red and orange leaves, the kind that fell in the fall. Gregor had no idea why somebody would choose to use a background like this for a page like this. He wondered who had designed the site. He wondered when it had been designed.
He read down the page about Chester, but found out very little. There was a line or two about Chester Morton’s fascination with the state of Wyoming, and with Montana, and with living near really tall mountains. This was a fascination he was supposed to have picked up when the family went on vacation to Wyoming when he was eight. There were references to other things Chester was supposed to have liked. Some were the names of bands Gregor had never heard of. Some were obvious things for a young man of that age: Harley-Davidson motorcycles; pumpkin pie with whipped cream; the World Wrestling Federation; NASCAR.
Gregor went back to the Google search page. There was a link to the episode of Disappeared that was going to tell his story—that wasn’t going to air for another month. There were links to a couple of amateur sites that used the Chester Morton case as an item of interest for conspiracy nuts of various kinds.
Tony came back with two coffees and put a big one down next to Gregor’s laptop. Gregor opened the inevitable plastic top—why they did that when they knew you were going to drink the stuff in the car, he didn’t know—and stared down into what looked like plain black coffee.
“Not bad,” he said.
Tony settled himself across the table. He had a tall pink-looking thing with a straw in it. Gregor didn’t ask.
“So,” Tony said, “have you found anything out?”
“Not really,” Gregor said. “The case has been a minor item on a couple of the true crime shows, but there hasn’t been anything major. Until just about now. There’s going to be an episode of Disappeared about it. But maybe not, now that he’s been found.”
“Yeah, well,” Tony said. “There’s going to be some interest now from some of those shows, don’t you think?”
“Probably, but hardly to the point.” Gregor tried the coffee. It wasn’t bad. In fact, it was better than not bad. “It’s frustrating, though. I can’t get any real sense of this man. Darvelle Haymes says he wanted her to help him buy a baby. His brother Kenny says he remembers Chester as someone who did drugs and drank alcohol at least some of the time. That MOM tattoo on his chest was put on after death, but he had other tattoos, on his arms, that had been there for years. There was a snake, I think. And there were piercings. The holes for that nipple ring. The penis ring. I’d think anybody willing to get a penis ring would have to be fairly hard-core something. Hard-core crazy, if nothing else.”
“What’re you getting at?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I guess that it just doesn’t sound, to me, like the description of a guy who was enthralled by the outdoors, a guy who wanted to go live in a state with nearly nobody in it and spend his time looking at mountains. First he went away, and then he came back. Why?”