A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel

by Sara J. Henry

  “I know you did.” And the next moment she was crying, full-body crying, the retching, gasping kind when it seems part of you is dying. She curled into herself and cried hard for what must have been five minutes straight, then got up and went into my bathroom for a long time. I heard water running.

  When she came out, her eyes were red. “Tobin didn’t kill himself,” she said, as if I’d suggested it.

  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t think so.” And I didn’t, not really. Tobin’s existence here had been on the marginal side, with the borrowed cabin, a battered truck, and odd jobs here and there. But this wasn’t his real life. It wasn’t like the people who lived here, who had families to support, who had nowhere else to go. Who weren’t playing at this.

  She spoke again. “Everyone’s going to think I had something to do with this—that I had him killed or somehow made him kill himself.”

  “I don’t think so, Jessamyn. It was a dumb article, and badly written—nobody sane or not perpetually drunk will believe it. And not many people will have seen it—it wasn’t up long. Those guys today were being stupid. This will be nothing.”

  I may have been more wrong before, but I don’t remember when.

  CHAPTER 11

  We had about ten minutes of quiet before the phone started ringing. The first call was from someone Jessamyn knew who had heard about the deleted article but hadn’t seen it. Then it rang again, and again. All these callers had seen the article that had been on the Internet less than half an hour. Some were friends; some weren’t. Some were reporters, from television and radio and newspapers; some looking for Jessamyn, some looking for me. Before long, we learned that some enterprising soul had e-mailed a copy to a bunch of locals, plus pretty much every news outlet in the area. Then people forwarded it, because spreading bad news apparently is the great American pastime. You’d think points were awarded for disseminating this stuff.

  I called Baker. Pulling the article likely would have worked, I told her, if someone hadn’t grabbed a screen shot and decided to send it around—no one seemed to know who. She said she’d ask some people.

  George called to tell me he had fired the reporter, the second time in his life he’d let someone go. The kid, he said, wouldn’t admit he’d done anything wrong—he seemed to think he was a modern-day Woodward or Bernstein. More like Matt Drudge, I thought, but didn’t say it.

  “Did he actually talk to someone, or just make that stuff up?” I asked.

  “He claims his sources were ‘privileged.’ ” George made a sound like a snort. “Probably someone in the bar, probably drunk, and likely he didn’t actually get a name.”

  The paper had been getting calls too. George had heard about the article being sent around, and he’d try to get a copy of the e-mail. He cleared his throat. “People are saying that you got the piece pulled, Troy, because you’re friends with Jessamyn.”

  He went on to tell me the wire had picked up the news story on Tobin, along with my two photos, and they’d be running nationally. So I’d have the clip I hadn’t really wanted, and some extra income because of it. It wasn’t any comfort—it was the opposite of comfort.

  That evening I called Philippe and told him about my roommate’s boyfriend being found in the lake and all the rest of it.

  He listened and made commiserative sounds. “Do you want to come up for a visit?” he asked. “Your friend could come up too.”

  I was tempted, but it would have felt like running away when we hadn’t done anything to run away from. “It should die down soon,” I told him. “If we just don’t respond, people will stop calling.”

  But it was early winter and a slow news cycle. One reporter dubbed Tobin the Ice Man of Saranac Lake, which caught people’s attention. The story made the TV news; it made every paper within a two-hundred-mile radius and some farther afield. My inbox was flooded with Google Alerts with Tobin’s name.

  Going viral is great if you’re a cute sixth-grade boy with singing talent who ends up on Ellen and gets a record deal. It’s not so great if what’s going viral is an article suggesting you were involved in the death of your boyfriend found frozen in a lake. None of the articles mentioned Jessamyn and none approached the kid’s bad writing and clumsy innuendo, but in the hands of skilled writers, it was worse—implying a giant cover-up raging in this tiny town, where rich boys could be bumped off and salted away under the ice without anyone knowing about it. Sort of a North Country Deliverance.

  When Jessamyn went to work, her boss told her it was best if she didn’t come in for a while. Business was slow, he said. But this was a snowy January—business wasn’t slow. Slow is April, when the snow turns into a trickle of melting sludge and places close for the month. She knew it, and he knew she knew it.

  George got an editor friend to forward a copy of the e-mail with the screen shot, which was of course anonymous. But no one does something as vindictive as this without a reason, real or imagined, and I wanted to find out why.

  We ended up unplugging the house phone. After the first reporter showed up, we stopped answering the door. For the first time since I’d lived here we locked it, and everyone had to search out their house key. I thumbtacked a towel over the front door window as a makeshift curtain. By midmorning the next day I’d retrieved a batch of reporters’ business cards stuck in the door.

  Enough was enough. I climbed the stairs to Jessamyn’s room and knocked.

  “What?” said a faint voice.

  “What do you think about getting out of town?” I noticed her door could use a coat of paint. I heard the springs of her mattress shift. The door opened a few inches.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “A road trip.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “When?”

  “Now. As soon as we can pack. You have a passport or enhanced driver’s license?” I remembered her having taken a day trip to Montreal, so she must have something to get across the border.

  She nodded.

  “Bring it,” I said. She didn’t ask any questions.

  Back in my room I called Philippe. “Come on up,” he said. “I’ll call Elise to let her know you’re coming, and I’ll try to get home early.”

  I sent Baker a note that I was going out of town for a few days. Then I e-mailed Jameson: Things went nuts here after an article about Tobin’s death. Coming to Ottawa with my roommate—will be at Philippe’s. It would be good to see Jameson, good to tell him about this. In the back of my mind did I realize that leaving town with Jessamyn might not be the smartest move, that it might appear suspicious? Maybe I did. But no one had told her she was a suspect, or had even hinted she needed to stick around. And I desperately needed to get away, and it would, I thought, do her good too. So if that little voice was trying to tell me anything, I didn’t listen. I slid my laptop in a bag, crammed clothes in a day pack, and dug out my passport and Tiger’s rabies certificate. Jessamyn was waiting at the kitchen table, a filled duffel bag beside her.

  I shook out one of my canvas grocery bags and shoved food in it. I don’t like traveling without food, especially in winter. I scribbled a note to Brent and Patrick, then locked door.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and we were off.

  Neither of us looked over as we passed through Saranac Lake, but unless you closed your eyes you couldn’t avoid seeing the growing stack of ice blocks. We were nearly through the town of Gabriels before Jessamyn spoke. “We’re going to Canada, I presume?”

  “Ottawa,” I said. “I have friends there we can stay with.” I told her about Philippe and his son, Paul, nearly seven now, and the nanny-slash-housekeeper, Elise. I told her that Philippe’s wife, Paul’s mother, had died last year, but I didn’t tell her how or why. She didn’t need to know, and I didn’t need to tell it.

  As I drove, Jessamyn assembled ham-and-cheese sandwiches, and by the time we hit the border I’d finished two. Apparently fleeing town makes you hungry. We stopped for coffee at a Tim Hortons in Cornwall, and just over an hour
and a half later were pulling into Philippe’s driveway.

  “Wow,” Jessamyn said, looking up at the house. She’d been wide-eyed since we’d reached this neighborhood with its expensive, stately homes. I grinned at her as I pressed the button at the gate, and Elise let us in.

  CHAPTER 12

  Elise was sixtyish and French-Canadian, pretty much the storybook devoted housekeeper. To her I could do no wrong, because I’d rescued Paul last summer. She gave me a hard hug, and then Jessamyn. Not many people would venture to hug Jessamyn, but Elise did, and Jessamyn let her. We put our bags in our rooms, and took Tiger and Paul’s half-grown puppy out in the fenced backyard for a romp. Then Elise fed us homemade brownies and milk in the kitchen, telling us how well Paul was doing. She was leaving soon to collect him from school, she said, and Philippe would be home before too long.

  Jessamyn looked a little shell-shocked, but ate the warm brownies and drank the milk and took it all in, like a kid sitting in Grandma’s kitchen.

  “And now I must go pick up Paul,” Elise said, beaming. “He will be so happy to know you are here.” She took off her apron and hung it on a hook, and she was off.

  Jessamyn looked around the immaculate kitchen, with its marble countertops and hanging array of shiny pots and pans.

  “Are we in Disneyland?” she asked. I chuckled, and she did too, and then both of us were laughing so hard we were nearly crying.

  We were still sitting there when Elise returned, and Paul launched himself at me in a hug. He paused politely to be introduced to Jessamyn and shake her hand, and in nearly perfect English began chattering about his dog and school and his new friends. He sat on my lap—he was growing so fast he’d soon be too big. I watched his bright face and smooth perfect skin and, not for the first time, marveled that he seemed to have so well adjusted after his kidnapping and the death of his mother. To the move to Ottawa, to a new school, a new language, a new life.

  And then Philippe was there, and gave me a hug that felt so good I didn’t want to let go. He was charming to Jessamyn, and, well, he’s phenomenally good-looking, with thick dark hair like his son’s, and from the look on her face I could almost hear her thinking, Why the heck did you ever leave this? Which in a way I’d been wondering too. Reasons that are perfectly logical don’t always ring true to the heart.

  After one of Elise’s marvelous dinners, Paul went off for his bath and then his bedtime story from his father.

  “I’m going to bed. I’m all in,” Jessamyn told me. She looked ready to drop.

  “That’s fine. Do you need anything?”

  She shook her head and went off. When Philippe came back, I told him everything that had happened.

  “It just went crazy,” I said. “All because of a stupid little piece on the paper’s website that the wrong person saw and decided to spread.”

  “That’s all it takes sometimes,” Philippe said, nodding. He owned a marketing firm that specialized in reviving or reinventing companies’ images after public-relations disasters, so he knew this stuff. “But people know Jessamyn, right? It’s not like she just moved to town. They’ll know she wasn’t involved.”

  “She’s been there at least a couple of years, longer than Tobin. But he knew a lot of people—he had a lot of drinking buddies who thought he was great. And Jessamyn can rub people the wrong way.” The old Jessamyn, at least, could be outspoken, and didn’t suffer fools well. And while her string of rejected suitors had all seemed fine with her moving on, it wasn’t impossible that at least one hadn’t taken it as well as he’d seemed.

  “It’ll be all right, Troy,” Philippe said.

  And maybe it would. For him, this was how it had worked after Paul’s kidnapping and his wife’s death. Of course it had hit him hard emotionally, and on some levels he was still reeling, but socially and professionally there’d hardly been a blip. But Philippe had picked up and moved to a new city in a new province, and wasn’t an underemployed girl in a small town whose boyfriend from a well-off family had been found frozen into a lake. There was a world of difference here I didn’t think Philippe was getting—maybe because he’d always had money, maybe because he didn’t want to see this side of things. He had a tendency to see the world as he wanted it to be. Which may have been partly why his marriage had gone as wrong as it had.

  I thought about trying to say some of this, but I was tired, and it was late, and maybe it wasn’t that important. Maybe I spend too much time looking at the dark side of things. I moved closer to Philippe on the sofa and leaned up against him, and his arm went around me like it belonged there. We sat in silence a long while, and I could feel the heat of his body next to mine. My pulse quickened. Maybe something would have happened, but a loud cough came from Paul’s room, and then another, and Philippe disengaged himself.

  “I have to check on Paul,” he said apologetically.

  “Of course,” I said. “And it’s been a long day—I should go on to bed.” He gave me a quick hug and a kiss atop the head, and off I went. In the night I reached out to Tiger, by my side. Sometimes it’s very hard to do what you think is the right thing. And sometimes it’s very hard to be alone.

  CHAPTER 13

  It had been a good decision to come here, I thought at breakfast the next morning, looking at Paul and Philippe’s smiling faces, Elise scurrying to refill coffee cups, Jessamyn looking relaxed and the closest to happy I’d seen her in a long time. We both needed this. Heck, everybody could use this once in a while.

  After breakfast I went off to call Jameson, and he suggested meeting for lunch, as I expected he would.

  “Bring along your friend,” he offered.

  I found Jessamyn in the kitchen, perched on a stool watching Elise prepare something that involved a lot of chopping.

  “I’m going to meet my friend the policeman for lunch,” I told her. “You’re welcome to come.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll stay here. Elise is going to show me how to make an apple pie.”

  I wouldn’t have expected pie making to be on a list of skills Jessamyn wanted to acquire, but she seemed to be reveling in this whole homey atmosphere. She did go with me for a walk with the dogs around the neighborhood before I left, admiring the houses we passed as I worked at convincing Paul’s puppy to walk politely on a lead. Neither of us brought up Lake Placid or Tobin, or anything else we’d left behind.

  • • •

  It was, of course, too cold to meet at the park bench on the Rideau Canal, where Jameson and I had met for takeout lunch last summer, so we chose a Harvey’s restaurant midway between us. He got out of his car when he saw me pull up, and we exchanged the clumsy, well-insulated hug you do when wearing heavy parkas, somewhat like hugging a sofa. Then we both ordered the Great Canadian burger. He got the onion rings; I got fries. I tried to pull out some Canadian money to pay, but he covered it.

  “So what’s happening?” he asked when we sat down with our food.

  I told him all of it: the newspaper story that got pulled not quite soon enough and had been e-mailed around, the deluge of phone calls, the knocks on the door, the hints of killing and cover-up.

  “A woman scorned?” he asked.

  “Maybe. I haven’t found out yet.”

  “Have the police been back in touch?”

  “No, not with either of us. And they never asked for the photos I took.”

  Jameson ate an onion ring. “Family?”

  “Parents and a sister; the articles all said they weren’t available for comment. The editor told me his family was on their way to Saranac Lake. We haven’t heard from them.”

  “Jessamyn didn’t know them?”

  I shook my head.

  After a moment he asked: “Could Tobin have killed himself?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” I said. I’d thought more about this after Jessamyn had brought it up. “But he lost his brother when he was nineteen, in a boating accident—maybe he’d never gotten over it.” Maybe something had reminded him
of his brother. Maybe Tobin had gotten tired of North Country living, tired of Jessamyn, tired of the cold. Maybe, after a night of carousing in a Saranac Lake bar and with Christmas not far off, he had made an impromptu decision to pack it in.

  Jameson nodded, and wiped his lips with a paper napkin. “Could your roommate know anything about his death?”

  I considered this. I thought about Jessamyn’s face as I’d told her the news, how hard she’d cried when she found out Tobin was dead. I was shaking my head even before I spoke. “No, she was really shocked when she found out.”

  Jameson nodded again, pushing his plate away. “Something will happen soon. After the autopsy, after the police finish interviews, after his parents weigh in.” He didn’t say he thought things would be fine; he didn’t assure me the hubbub would die down soon. He wasn’t one for platitudes. In many ways, his view of the world was even bleaker than mine.

  He told me work had been busy; I told him about some of the magazine pieces I’d done. In the parking lot we exchanged another overstuffed-sofa hug, maybe the only sort we would ever be comfortable with.

  When I got back to the house and Elise opened the door for me, I felt a wave of affection and warmth and nostalgia for the people who lived in this house, so powerful it made me ache. It seemed too much, too intense a set of feelings to fit into one being.

  But maybe it just took some getting used to.

  Jessamyn was flushed from the success of having made the apple pie, her first ever, she told us, more than once. I admired its somewhat wandering lattice top, more than once. Elise beamed proudly. Elise’s School of Homemaking. She’d tried to show me how to iron neatly last summer, but I’d failed miserably. Jessamyn seemed a more willing and apt pupil.

  I volunteered to go get Paul from school—I was still on the approved list to pick him up, and Jessamyn decided to go along.

  The confident, cheery Paul who jumped into my back seat was a different child from the one I’d picked up from school last June. I had to admit that part of me missed the little boy who had needed me so much. I suppose parents go through this, watching their children grow more independent. Just when you’d gotten good at one phase, they were off to another. Philippe was doing a good job with Paul, I thought, and having the bedrock that was Elise didn’t hurt.