A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel

by Sara J. Henry

  At home I made myself tea, then went up and changed out of my coffee-splattered jeans and sat on my sofa, hands around the hot mug, Tiger at my feet. There was a message on my phone, a woman talking fast, and I didn’t at first recognize that it was the wife of the Couchsurfing couple I’d stayed with. I had to play the message twice to get it all. She’d mentioned me to someone who had known about the drowning of the first Winslow son, and they’d suggested I talk to a Victor somebody, a policeman who’d been involved somehow with the incident, but they couldn’t remember his last name.

  It took a bit of Googling to track down one Victor Moreno. It took a little more searching to learn that he was now the assistant chief of police in a small Oregon town. I glanced at the clock: Oregon, three hours earlier. I picked up the phone. He wasn’t in, so I left a message with the woman who answered that I’d like to speak to Chief Moreno about a drowning accident back East six years ago involving Bertram Winslow the Third.

  I e-mailed Jameson: Article done. Nearly sideswiped today. Going to sleep.

  I thought about doing laundry, about cleaning my room or trying to cook, and finally realized I simply had to go to bed. I had nearly dropped off when the phone rang.

  “Thought I said to call if something happened.” Jameson.

  “Mmmm. Oh, the car. Yeah, but this didn’t seem to be something, not like a break-in. I mean, just a normal bad driver.”

  He waited.

  “It was on the way back from the paper—someone cut me off, passed too close, and I went into a skid. Went into a ditch, but I’m fine; the car’s fine.”

  “You don’t know who?”

  “No, and he probably never even saw me skid out behind him.”

  He didn’t say anything, so I went on. “I’m sure it was an accident. I mean, it’s not like someone would sideswipe me to … to not write these articles? Stuff like this happens all the time here. With the snow, you know.”

  I think Jameson realized I was too tired to converse coherently. “Get some sleep, Troy. Just be careful. And keep me in the loop.”

  I promised, and fell back asleep.

  I slept for eleven hours. When I woke I desperately needed to do something to clear the cobwebs from my brain. I pulled on ski clothes, made cheese toast, loaded Tiger in the car, and drove to the cross-country ski trail behind Ho-Jo’s. I skied hard, for me almost recklessly, and skidded out in a mild turn I normally took much slower. No one was around, so I lay in the soft snow and stared up at the sky. Tiger trotted over and licked my face.

  Writing this piece had made me feel odd in a way I didn’t quite understand. It was like discovering a talent you didn’t know you had.

  But part of me felt uncomfortably like a voyeur. I could have angled the piece however I liked: with Tobin’s father as the male equivalent of Mommie Dearest, or Tobin as a dangerous and disturbed child who tried to slice up his parents’ belongings. I’d tried to walk a middle line, but this was hard.

  I wondered how Tobin’s parents would react. I know that some people feel justified in what they do no matter what, and this father might simply think the article showed him as a no-nonsense parent.

  And of course I wondered how Win was going to take it.

  CHAPTER 28

  It was probably good that I had an interview scheduled this afternoon with Marilyn, the mystery woman who had sent around the newspaper article. I was meeting her at one, before her shift at Price Chopper.

  We were meeting at The Cowboy, a noisy place to talk, but it was what she wanted. She’d also insisted that Dean be there, not an optimal way to do an interview. And she didn’t want me to use a recorder—maybe she thought if I didn’t, I couldn’t use what she said.

  I got home and showered and ate a quick lunch. The phone rang just as I was starting to head downstairs to leave—Dean was running late, I thought, or Marilyn had changed her mind. But it was Philippe. I told him I’d call him back.

  It’s just a few miles from my house to The Cowboy, on Saranac Avenue on the way out of town. I sat at the bar to wait, and Dean came in a minute or two later and sat beside me. He ordered a beer and looked at me questioningly. I shook my head. I didn’t want alcohol, and I wasn’t going to pay three bucks for a soda I didn’t particularly want. Or let someone else pay it.

  “So did they find out who broke into Win’s cabin?” Dean asked.

  I shook my head. “No, and there was nothing to follow up on, since nothing really got stolen and no one exactly left a calling card.”

  “But it was bad, eh?”

  “It was pretty well trashed, but we got it cleaned up, and put a new lock in.”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t get her call that night—I was in town and didn’t hear my cell.”

  “You ever been broken into, out there?”

  “No, it’s not hardly worth the trouble, breaking into those cabins. Not like anyone’s going to have a lot of expensive stuff, fancy TVs or anything. Sometimes high school kids break in to party or something, but this didn’t seem like that, from what Win said.”

  “So you can’t think of anything Tobin would have worth stealing.”

  He shrugged. “Not worth taking a cabin apart, that’s for sure.”

  “You guys were pretty tight?”

  “We worked a job or two together, and he’d come over for a beer or a smoke now and then. He was sort of private—I mean, he was friendly, but not the kind of guy you dropped in on. I’d never actually been inside his place. He seemed to like to be alone.” He took a sip of his beer. “So I’ll bet you’ll be glad to get these articles done.”

  This surprised me. Maybe this was just idle conversation, but maybe Dean was more insightful than I’d given him credit for. Mostly I overestimated people, but once in a while I underestimated them.

  “Yes, I’ll be glad,” I said. “I don’t really like poking around, asking questions, not for something like this.”

  “Like this, talking to Marilyn.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “She had to know that sending that article around would stir things up. Have you known her long?”

  He shook his head. “No. She’s originally from Tupper Lake. She hangs out in the bars here a lot. She sort of liked Tobin, I expect.”

  “I expect she did,” I said, mimicking his tone, and he grinned. “But she sure stirred up a lot of trouble.”

  “Yeah, I’m guessing it was one of those things, sort of knee-jerk crazy. The news hit everybody hard. Like that guy Stevo, on the street, you know.”

  I nodded. It was the first time he’d acknowledged the confrontation with Jessamyn on Main Street.

  He went on. “But we’d all just thought Tobin had gone out of town and then he would come back, all full of himself. He just didn’t seem the type who would die—you know what I mean?”

  Somehow I did. Tobin had seemed the type of person who would have managed to walk away from the wrong place at just the right time. Decided to take a stroll before a nightclub caught fire, move from where he was sitting before lightning struck, choose not to take the train that would end up crashing. Maybe Tobin had had a sixth sense, a special talent at surviving, one that had run out on one early winter day in the Adirondacks.

  Dean finished his beer and looked at his watch. It was ten minutes past when Marilyn had said she’d be here.

  “Thanks for setting this up,” I said.

  “If she shows.”

  In ten minutes more, she did. She was pretty much what I would have predicted, if I’d had to make a prediction. She probably wasn’t yet thirty, but looked like she’d passed it. A slight puffiness to her face, belly straining the fabric of the blouse over her too-snug jeans. A decade ago, right out of high school, she’d likely been cute as a button, but she’d left cute behind some time ago. Too many late hours, too many cigarettes, too much booze. It’s a bad combination, and she wasn’t wearing it well.

  Dean stood up when she came in, and introduced me. She took the stool he vacated, and he sat be
side her. She ordered a drink, and the bartender delivered it quickly. They were used to working fast here. She took a sip. It was something dark.

  “So,” she said, belligerence thick in just that one word. “What do you want to talk to me about?”

  Probably better that her animosity was out in the open. “You were a friend of Tobin Winslow’s?”

  “Yeah, we were good friends.” She emphasized the last two words.

  I had a pretty good idea that in this case good friends meant she hung around the guys in the bar and tried to latch onto Tobin when she could. But I was trying to not be guilty of prejudging. I’d already done enough prejudging for a lifetime.

  “You know I’m writing a series of articles for the newspaper on Tobin,” I said, so it was clear we weren’t just having a chat.

  She nodded. I caught Dean’s eye over her shoulder. I wasn’t sure whether to tread lightly or go for broke. I decided on go for broke.

  “You don’t like Jessamyn, do you?”

  She snorted. “That bitch—she thinks she’s better than everyone else.”

  Behind her, Dean tensed. She may have wanted him here to keep her from doing something like this, but I’d lobbed the question so low and fast she hadn’t seen it coming. And how we were sitting, in a row, made it almost impossible for Dean to intervene.

  “So, did Jessamyn treat you badly?” Meaning, What did she ever do to you?

  She twisted her lips, in a caricature of derision. “She treated me like I didn’t exist, like she owned Tobin Winslow, and she sure didn’t.”

  Behind her, Dean shifted uneasily. I hadn’t missed the venom in her tone. “What do you mean, she didn’t own him?”

  She picked up her drink. “Just that Tobin was a grown man, and he wasn’t married. He was free to do what he wanted.”

  “So you thought Jessamyn, what, kept him on a tight leash?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “and she thought she was so great.”

  I leaned in closer. “Is that why you sent that article around to people, to newspapers and radio stations?”

  She flushed. “Yeah, well, if she had something to do with Tobin dying, then everybody needed to know.”

  I paused for a two-count. “Yes, but do you believe Jessamyn had anything to do with what happened to Tobin?”

  She set her glass down on the bar surface, harder than necessary. “No,” she said, almost sullenly. “I guess not.”

  “Do you have any idea who might?” I didn’t take my eyes off her. A tingly Spidey sense told me there was something here I needed to pay close attention to.

  “Who might what?”

  “Who might have had anything to do with Tobin’s death.”

  At this Dean moved on his stool. Marilyn looked uncomfortable. “He drowned,” she said, seeming confused. “He fell through the ice. It was an accident, right?” She twisted around and looked toward Dean, as if for confirmation.

  “No one knows for sure,” I said gently. “That’s what the police are trying to find out. What do you think?”

  Dean was trying not to look startled, at my bluntness, I suppose. But this is the North Country, and people often don’t tell you things unless you ask. They might know perfectly well that X is sleeping with Y’s wife, but unless Y asks about it, they’re going to assume he doesn’t want to know.

  I was rolling a pen back and forth in my fingers, and it fell to the floor. I leaned over to get it, and on the way back up caught a glance between Marilyn and Dean.

  “I don’t know,” she muttered. I looked at Dean, and he shrugged.

  It seemed she knew something she wasn’t telling me, but I wasn’t going to get much more here. I asked one more question. “Do either of you have any idea what happened to Tobin’s truck?”

  They shook their heads, and their denials seemed genuine.

  “Sometimes Tobin hitched a ride to Saranac Lake if he knew he was going to drink a lot,” Dean said. “I don’t know if he drove over that night or not. I wasn’t there.”

  I hated it that suddenly I was watching Dean, analyzing what he said and how he said it. He’d been helpful since that first night he’d showed up at Tobin’s cabin, and even in the street confrontation he had eased the angry drunk down the street away from us. Now I was wondering if there was something he didn’t want me to know. Maybe he was protecting Tobin; maybe he was protecting someone else.

  As I was driving home, I thought the whole thing over. Try as I might, I couldn’t envision this woman doing this on her own. I couldn’t see her with the acumen to pull it off: capturing a screen shot, saving it as a JPG, inserting it in e-mails, looking up media addresses to send it around. Someone had to have helped her. I hoped it wasn’t Dean.

  At home I started an e-mail to my brother: Found woman who sent around article—seems to be motivated by spite, but maybe more was involved.

  Then my fingers typed: It is entirely possible that someone held Tobin under the ice, or knocked him unconscious and dumped him in the lake. I just have no idea who or why.

  But Simon had been adamant that I needed to be seriously considering Jessamyn’s involvement, and I didn’t want to go into that again. I was used to running things by him, but now I didn’t want to. I erased his name from the address line, changed it to Jameson’s, and hit Send.

  To my surprise, because Jameson almost never e-mailed, a minute later I had a reply: Just try not to work too hard.

  Jameson knew I had a tendency to fling myself into projects. But I couldn’t see any other way to do this. I knew only one way. I remembered something Baker had told me yesterday: Remember you’re writing about Tobin’s life, not his death.

  The problem was, it was hard to separate them.

  CHAPTER 29

  I didn’t hear Win arrive, but Zach did. I heard his and Win’s voices in the kitchen, and went down. She had a stack of newspapers under her arm—she must have picked them up from the newspaper office, because it wouldn’t be on sale on the street until later.

  Her cheeks were red with cold. She set down the papers and pulled off her hat and mittens without looking at me. My gut twisted. I was afraid I’d gone too far—afraid I’d written an article too intimate, too intense; afraid it would cost the friendship that had been building between us. No matter that Win had helped set up interviews; no matter that I warned her I might write things she didn’t like—that can all go out the window once people see things on the page. But then she spoke.

  “This article’s amazing, Troy. You didn’t make him look perfect, but you captured him, the way he was before the accident, what it was like growing up.”

  Zach picked up one of the papers. George had put a box on the front page, with the first paragraph from the story and a photo of a young Tobin with his brother and sister, posing on a big wooden play structure.

  “Wow,” Zach said as he opened the paper. I could see that the article took up more than half a page.

  “Has Jessamyn seen it?” Win asked. “Is she in?”

  “I think she’s here, and no, I don’t think she’s seen it. I haven’t even seen it in print.”

  She handed me a copy and took another, and headed toward the stairs that led to Jessamyn’s room. I carried my copy up to my room. I didn’t look at it. Instead I flicked on my e-mail: Alyssa, up in Burlington, had already seen it online and written: Congrats—well done. This is going to get a lot of attention.

  I wasn’t ready for a lot of attention.

  My phone rang: George. He wasted no time on a greeting. “Early feedback is good. When can you have the next one?”

  A week would be optimal, but I didn’t think I could do the research and the writing in the next six days, and I told him so.

  “Try for ten days,” he said. “If you can’t, you can’t. Two weeks would be fine. Don’t rush it. But if you need help, if someone can do research, do it. I can find money in the budget.”

  I was used to doing everything alone, and I liked it that way. I didn’t always know what I
was looking for, or what details I might want to include. But I’d never done articles this involved.

  I sent links to the article to Jameson and to Philippe, and, after thinking about it, to my brother as well. And to the nanny and Tobin’s grade-school teacher.

  Then I called Dean, and thanked him for setting up the meeting with Marilyn.

  He sounded apologetic. “I know she wasn’t that helpful. She’s kind of prickly with people, and she really didn’t like Jessamyn.” I didn’t tell him that Jessamyn didn’t even remember meeting the woman.

  “Listen, Dean, I need to ask you—do you know who would have helped Marilyn?”

  “Helped her?”

  “Helped her set up what she did, sending around that newspaper article.”

  He sounded surprised. “No, I figured she just did it herself. She’s the one who gave that printout to my friend.”

  I thanked him again. It had been foolish, I thought, to have had those vague suspicions about Dean. What I’d seen yesterday must have just been his discomfort at being stuck in an uncomfortable situation.

  I heard a knock on the open door at the bottom of my stairwell. I looked over my railing, and waved Win up.

  Without saying anything she handed me a brown binder envelope with an elastic cord around it, the one I’d seen once in the back seat of her car. I opened it and saw a sheaf of papers and a stack of postcards. On top was a timeline with dates, names, places: a compilation of where Tobin had been after he’d left home, with addresses and places of work and names of coworkers.

  I whistled. “Holy cow, Win.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been working on this a while. I found his postcards at home and printed some of his e-mails. I wasn’t sure I wanted this much of Tobin out there, but I put it together just in case.”

  Meaning, I thought, she’d waited to see how I’d handled the first article before turning all this over to me. Ordinarily you’d be suspicious of someone handing you a neat timeline like this. But I could check out everything—and I never would have been able to compile this on my own.