A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel

by Sara J. Henry

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” I whispered. David directed me to a bathroom off the kitchen, and I was sick, quickly and thoroughly, into an immaculate off-white toilet. Then I sat on the bathroom floor and I cried, for Win, for Trey-who-had-been-Martin, for Tobin. I cried for the bad thoughts I’d had about Tobin without having any idea of who he was and what he had endured, and I cried for David, who had done his mourning in private. Then I washed my face in the sink and blotted it dry on a beautiful white towel.

  When I came out of the bathroom I was shaking a little. “You need to eat,” David said decisively, and made me a sandwich without asking. He put it in front of me, cut neatly in half, with a glass of milk, and I ate it and I drank the milk. The sandwich was ham and cheddar on wheat, and it was very good, and the milk made my stomach feel that just maybe the food would stay there peacefully.

  “So their father never told anyone he was with them, or that he crashed the boat,” I said again.

  “Apparently not.”

  “He just went home.”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone must have noticed his clothes were wet.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe Mrs. Winslow did. Maybe he dropped them in the laundry room and the maid took care of it. Maids don’t talk about the dirty laundry they find.”

  “He let people think Tobin was responsible for his brother’s death!” I was nearly screaming.

  David sipped his coffee. He was calm, but he’d had six years of living with this. “I’ve always wondered if he managed to convince himself that he never went out on the boat, that the boys took the boat out. Just blocked it all out.”

  “Tobin didn’t tell anyone?”

  He shrugged. “Other than me? Other than asking about his father when they picked him up? I doubt it. His sister was paralyzed with grief; how could he tell her? She was closer to her father than her brothers—was Tobin going to tell her their father was a drunk, a liar, a coward, responsible for her brother’s death? He couldn’t do it. But he wanted me to know what Martin had done, how he had died. He knew what Martin and I meant to each other.” He saw the way I was looking at him. He brushed a hand over his eyes. “You don’t get over it,” he said. “Some people you love while they’re there, and some people you love forever, whether they’re there or not. Me, I figure I was lucky to have that sort of love once.”

  When my cell phone rang, I jumped. I pulled it out of my pocket and glanced at the caller ID—Win.

  “Tobin’s sister,” I told David, in a near panic. It almost seemed that if I answered my phone, Win would know where I was, know I was with this man, know what awful thing Tobin had said happened that night their brother drowned. But I felt compelled to stop it ringing, to not leave Win on the other end reaching no one, so I thumbed the Answer button, and answered as brightly and cheerfully as I could.

  “Troy, Jessamyn told me about the strange note you left. Is everything all right?”

  “It’s fine, all good.”

  “You don’t sound all right,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Win, I can’t tell you over the phone, but I’m fine. I’ll come out to see you tomorrow and we can talk then.”

  “Tell me,” she said, and her voice was steel. “Tell me, or I’ll call the police and tell them you need help.”

  I looked at David. This was not something to be said over the phone. “Win, I’m fine. Really.”

  The voice from the phone was loud enough that David could hear it, and to make it clear I hadn’t convinced her. David nodded at me. “Tell her,” he said.

  I took a deep breath. “Win, this is something very difficult that I just found out. But I met a man who knew your brothers, who was close to Trey, and he says … he says Tobin came to him after the accident and told him it was your father who took the boat out that night, the night they went overboard.”

  Silence. “And he left them there?” she asked, just as I had.

  I started to explain, to tell her that someone had seen the three of them, but my voice broke. David took the phone from my hand, possibly the most considerate thing anyone had done for me in a long time. He told Win who he was, and then he told her the story of that night, just as he’d told me.

  When he was finished, he answered some questions, and handed the phone back to me.

  “Can you use this?” Win asked. Her voice was cold and hard.

  “The old man wouldn’t be considered a reliable witness, Win. And this is just one person, saying what Tobin told him, and nothing to back it up. There’s no proof.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Maybe someone else saw him go meet the boys, saw him in the boat alone. Or saw him come home that night.”

  “Win, if this comes out, your father could be held liable in your brother’s death, for leaving them out there, for not reporting it.”

  She made a sound like a snort. “No one will charge him with anything. He knows too many people.”

  “Look, we can talk about it when I get home. We have to think this through. Promise me you won’t call your parents, you won’t talk to them, you won’t tell anyone, not tonight. Not until you’ve thought about it and we’ve talked about all the ramifications.”

  We talked on until she promised, and she seemed to mean it. When I hung up I was drained. It must have showed.

  “I don’t think you should drive home tonight,” David said, turning from the window. “It’s snowing, and you’re tired. There’s an extra bedroom here; I’m leaving very early in the morning and you can just lock up behind yourself.”

  “But I have my dog.”

  He shrugged. “She won’t rip up the furniture, right? She doesn’t look like a furniture ripper to me.” We both looked at Tiger, lying there watching us. She’d never ripped up anything, not even as a puppy.

  “No, she won’t, but she’ll probably sleep in the bed with me.”

  He smiled, and I saw what an attractive man he was. “Dog hairs come off in the wash.”

  I called the house and got Zach. I told him I wouldn’t be home until morning and asked him to toss the note from the fridge. He gave me a lot of hassle about having to convince him I hadn’t been kidnapped, and I told him I’d have him kidnapped if he didn’t do what I wanted. David pulled two of what I would best describe as designer meals out of the freezer, not like any frozen dinners I’d ever had. He asked me if I had a recorder and had me get it out and turn it on, and repeated the story he’d told me earlier, in calm and measured tones, then told me more about Tobin and about the man he called Martin. Maybe he needed to talk. Like Win, like Jessamyn. Like the old man who had seen three men go out on a boat, six years ago.

  “You never told anyone,” I said.

  He shook his head. “It was Tobin’s secret. He wanted to keep it that way.”

  “But now …”

  “Now you found a witness. Now you’re writing about all this. And now Tobin is gone.” He smiled wryly, sadly. “Maybe this secret’s been kept long enough.”

  Before he went off to bed he told me, “Don’t ever stop writing.”

  I promised I wouldn’t.

  CHAPTER 37

  I called Win on the way home and stopped at her cabin. I hated that she’d ended up hearing about her father over the phone, but probably it was better with David explaining it to her. That she had believed it instantly told me more about her father than I wanted to know. And she wanted me to run it as fact in the article.

  “We can’t,” I told her again. “It’s thirdhand; it can’t be verified. The paper would be sued for every penny it has. Even if I mention it as a possible scenario, we’re on thin ice.” It was a horrible metaphor, and I realized it the moment the words were out of my mouth.

  “But couldn’t you just present it as one person’s account of what Tobin said, and quote the old man? Newspapers do that all the time.”

  “Yes, but your father could still sue the paper and even if he didn’t win, the cost of a lawsuit would ruin the paper.” I think that
’s what’s called a Pyrrhic victory—you win the battle, but your losses are so great you lose the war.

  “What if we have backup, more facts? More things supporting Tobin’s story. When they first rescued Tobin … he would have asked them where our father was, what happened to the boat.”

  “It would still just be hearsay. Was it someone out on a boat who found Tobin or the Coast Guard?”

  “I think someone passing by reported that they thought they’d seen someone, and the Coast Guard found and rescued him. I guess they have an official record, official notes.”

  I started to say that she shouldn’t get involved in this, but she was involved. This wasn’t something she was going to drop.

  “Would a maid remember the day Trey died?” I asked. “Would she remember finding wet clothes, that night or the next morning?”

  Win’s lips pursed. “She might. I remember one of the maids didn’t stay on long after Tobin left. I think she was gone by the time I went back to college that fall. The other one has retired, but I can find her.”

  “Win, you really have to think about this—think if you want to get involved, if you want this stirred up.”

  She looked at me as if I’d said something really stupid. “My brother died. My other brother took the blame when our father was responsible. It’s not a question of stirring it up. It’s a question of how.”

  George needed to know about this, and it would be better told in person. I called to see if we could come in—we could. Win followed me to my house, where we dropped Tiger off, and then we drove on to Saranac Lake in my car.

  “I knew there was something,” Win said, as she stared out the window at the snow-covered landscape. “Tobin wouldn’t tell me. He stayed for the funeral and then left and never went back.”

  In George’s office we laid it out for him, succinctly, as if reciting a movie plot. The maids needed to be located and questioned; the Coast Guard interviewed and copies of reports obtained; more questions asked of the police—and Tobin’s father interviewed, or comments from his lawyer if he wouldn’t talk.

  George was weighing the costs of letting Win help, but it was clear that without her we wouldn’t get this done. I didn’t have the resources to find two former Winslow family maids who were, Win admitted, almost certainly illegals and not eager to talk to a reporter. And whose native language was Spanish, which I didn’t speak, and Win did.

  “So you think they’ll talk to you?” George said to Win.

  She nodded.

  “Get it recorded,” he said. “Be sure you have permission on the recording or video itself. If you get a written statement, have it notarized. And, Miss Winslow,” he said as she started to rise. “Realize there’s no going back here. You have only one set of parents.”

  “And I had only two brothers,” she said. Which pretty much put an end to that discussion.

  What have we started? But we hadn’t started it, I thought as we drove back to Lake Placid. It had started half a dozen years ago, on a boat. No, it had started a lot earlier. It had started with parents who were distant and disapproving, a father who wanted to destroy a child’s puppy because it chewed on something, a mother who drank so much she couldn’t attend her children’s events. Maybe what we were doing was finishing it.

  We wouldn’t tell Jessamyn about this, we decided, but I’d warn her before this article came out.

  There was a message on my phone from Philippe when I got home: Troy, call me when you get in, no matter how late. I realized I hadn’t checked messages since I’d left to go meet David the day before. I picked up the phone and called Philippe at the office.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I went out of town unexpectedly and didn’t think to check messages.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I was just a little worried. I haven’t heard from you for days.”

  Had it been days? “Gosh, I’m sorry. I lost track of time. I’ve been working on this series like crazy. I have to turn in the next article soon, and there’s some new developments.”

  There was a pause. I knew he wanted to ask if I’d bitten off more than I could chew. I didn’t want to explain what we’d found out, didn’t want to tell him about finding out Tobin’s father’s involvement in the first son’s death, that I’d soon be writing what might be the most powerful and potentially libelous article of my career. I told him to give Paul a big hug and kiss from me, and that I’d try to stay in touch more.

  And then I spent the next several hours researching, tracking down reports on the boat incident, from the police, from the Coast Guard; calling and e-mailing people. I dashed off an e-mail to Jameson, short and precise, catching him up.

  There’d been no reporters at the door for quite a while, so when I heard the knock I assumed it was Zach, who kept forgetting his house key. So I opened it without looking. But it wasn’t Zach.

  The man on the doorstep didn’t appear to be local, but neither did his clothes suggest he was an out-of-area reporter. He was tall and slight, and seemed nervous. He brightened when I opened the door, but when he looked at me more closely confusion passed over his face.

  “Yes?” I said bluntly, ready to be rude if I needed to.

  “Are … are you Jessamyn?”

  “No, I’m not. What did you need?”

  He pulled off his cap and a mass of black hair escaped, and I saw that his eyes were green. “Is it possible to speak to her?” he asked.

  Something caught in my throat, and it took a moment to answer. I don’t know how I knew it, and I don’t know why I spoke before he told me his name. “You’re Jessamyn’s father,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I think you’d better wait here,” I told him, and went upstairs to find Jessamyn.

  PART THREE

  A LOADED ICE SHEET WILL CREEP, OR DEFORM,

  WITHOUT ANY ADDITIONAL LOAD.

  CHAPTER 38

  I tapped on Jessamyn’s door. I’d made more trips over to this side of the house in the last month than I had the entire time she’d been living here. She called out for me to come in.

  “Jessamyn, there’s a man at the door …” She looked at me blankly. I tried again. “Jessamyn, your father is here.”

  Blank stare.

  I said again: “Your father is at the door. Your father—your real father.”

  It took a moment, and then she managed to form words, moving her mouth as if her lips belonged to someone else. “It can’t be.”

  “Maybe not, but there’s a man on the front porch who looks a lot like you, who says he’s your father.”

  She looked around the room wildly, as if looking for answers or somewhere to hide. But this room was so small it didn’t even have a closet. “What do I do?”

  “What do you do? We go let him in, I guess, and I don’t know, make him tea, and then ask him how he found you and where he’s been the last twenty years. But I don’t think we should leave him standing out there.”

  For a minute I think she considered it, thought about asking me to tell him to go away. And maybe that would have been the smart thing to do. But then she got up, her face pale, and followed me downstairs. She stood back as I opened the door and then she stared at the man who said he was her father. He stared back at her.

  “Jessamyn,” he said, and he said the name like it was music, like it was a song he hadn’t sung for a long time.

  She let out a noise that was more of a squeak than anything, and he took a half step toward her and she took a half step toward him and then they both moved forward and he grabbed her up in his arms, lifting her off the ground like she was a little girl.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy,” and she was crying, there in the open doorway, mindless of the cold.

  I stepped back, and fisted tears from my eyes, and went to the kitchen and put a kettle of water on the stove, and got out mugs and tea bags, the good kind, the fancy ones you set out when a long-lost father appears. I waited a minute more and then went back to the open door.


  “Hey, you guys, come on in,” I said, and they unlocked their grip and looked at me as if I were the stranger. “Come on in,” I repeated. “I’m making tea.” They came in then, and I shut the door behind them, closing out the cold. They followed me to the kitchen, where they sat on opposite sides of the table, staring at each other. All you could hear was the hiss of the flame on the gas stove, the creak of the kettle heating up and, faintly, the sounds of their breathing, in unison, as if to a metronome.

  Seeing them together, you couldn’t doubt they were father and daughter, from the shape of their faces, their coloring, even the way they moved.

  “I remembered you,” Jessamyn said to the man, this near-stranger who sat across from her. “I didn’t think I did. I couldn’t see your face in my head anymore, but I did remember you, I just didn’t know it.”

  His face twisted. “God, Jessamyn, I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

  “I didn’t know … I didn’t know you wanted to find me.”

  This was too much for me, and it was a scene I had no right to be a part of. I stood up and muttered something about taking Tiger out. I pointed to the kettle. Jessamyn nodded, and I grabbed my coat and called to my dog and went out for a long walk, long enough, I thought, for them to find out at least the basics of how they had lost each other and found each other again.

  They were still sitting there when I got back. Jessamyn looked younger, brighter. She happily introduced me to her father. His name was Daniel Harris, she told me, and he’d been looking for her since her mother moved and changed their last name and cut off contact—the CliffsNotes version of the last two decades. I never would have thought I’d use the word “beam” to describe an expression on Jessamyn’s face, but that’s what she was doing, beaming, beaming like a kid on Christmas Day who had found an impossible gift under the tree, a dreamed-about pony.