A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel

by Sara J. Henry

  He was good-looking and trim, looking younger than he certainly was despite the lines in his face, with black hair like Jessamyn’s, his thick and unruly. His clothing looked comfortable, not new, but well made. I hoped this man was worthy of being her father. Jessamyn had been let down so many times that she’d built the framework of her life around it, and I didn’t know if she could handle another letdown. Not one of this magnitude.

  “He lives in Boston,” she told me, as if she’d known him forever instead of mostly just the last half hour. “He’s an architect.”

  I shook his hand, and his grip was firm. I told him I was glad to meet him.

  “Jessamyn tells me you’ve been a good friend to her,” he said.

  This took me aback. Had I been a good friend? I’d given her a place to stay when she was looking for a room. I’d whisked her out of town when the newspaper article brought reporters to our door, but in a way I’d been the cause of that in the first place. And I’d discovered her unhappy past and pretty well forced her to tell me about it—probably the single best thing I’d done for her, and I’d done that by accident. I’m not sure how all that stacked up in the giant scheme of things, if good results canceled out the dubiousness of the actions that got you there.

  What I had done, I supposed, was believe in her.

  They had finished their tea, their empty mugs sitting before them. I turned the kettle back on; I needed a hot drink.

  “He found me just like Win did,” Jessamyn said. “By asking around town.”

  I was wondering how he knew to look for her here in the first place. My face must have asked the question.

  “I’ve always done searches for her name, and kept Google Alerts running,” Daniel said. “One with just the first name, and one with other spellings. Then that article in the paper popped up, the one that disappeared. The last name was close to my mother’s maiden name, so I called a PI in Plattsburgh to check it out. He came down here but wasn’t able to see her or get a photo of her, but at least found out the right spelling of her name. Then I decided to come up. I knew if I saw her, I’d know.”

  I thought of that moment at the door when the eagerness on his face had turned to confusion, when he could tell I was the wrong woman, that I wasn’t his daughter. I remembered the business cards that had been stuffed in our door. I picked up the stack on the end of a pantry shelf, flipped through them, and showed him the PI one.

  “That’s him,” he said.

  Plenty of parents abscond with their children, whisking them away and starting a new life. Sometimes with good reason, sometimes not. I’d have done it myself with Paul last summer if I’d thought he was in danger, if I thought his father wasn’t to be trusted. I wondered if Jessamyn’s father had any idea what had happened to his daughter during the lost years, knew why she’d hit the road, where she’d been since she’d run away. I had a feeling these two would be talking long into the night.

  I caught Jessamyn’s eye and inclined my head toward the downstairs bedroom and raised an eyebrow. She made her face into a question mark and I nodded. This was me saying, Your father can stay in the downstairs room if you want and her asking, Are you sure? and me responding, Yep, it’s fine.

  Now I was an extraneous character, someone who had wandered onstage. Time to exit. I poured the boiling water over the tea bag in my mug and headed toward my stairs. As I went up I heard Jessamyn say to her father, “Listen, we have an empty room downstairs and you can stay there if you want. Troy says it’s fine.”

  In my room I sipped my tea and ate a granola bar I had stashed away. I glanced over at my computer. But I didn’t go look up Daniel Harris, architect, Boston. I had no doubt he was her father—you couldn’t look at him and not know he was related to her—but I didn’t want to find out anything I’d have to debate whether to tell her. At least not now. Let her have her Christmas-pony evening.

  But I had to tell this to someone; this was too big, too emotional a turnstile to keep to myself. I turned on my computer, and wrote Jameson:

  Turns out Tobin’s father was responsible for the other son’s death and let Tobin take the blame.

  Today Jessamyn’s long-lost father showed up.

  One wild ride.

  I tried to think how to tell Win this news. I didn’t know when she was returning from Connecticut, or how long Daniel would be staying, and I didn’t want her showing up and meeting Jessamyn’s apparent Prince Charming of a father without warning, not so soon after Win had found out what her own father had done.

  I ended up texting her: Hope all is well. Big surprise—Jessamyn’s father she hasn’t seen since she was three is here. Seems nice.

  When Zach and Brent and Patrick arrived, from their jobs and their ski outings, I told them Jessamyn’s father was here and staying in the downstairs room. They showed mild surprise, but no one asked questions. I imagined they were privately thinking that female roommates were a lot of bother. Male roommates might have buddies who crashed on the sofa or in the spare room, but none of them had long-lost parents or sisters of boyfriends arriving to stay. At least, not so far.

  Jessamyn tapped on my door and told me she and her father were going out to dinner, and asked if I wanted to come. I thanked her and said no. This was their evening. Later I heard them come back, and I could hear the buzz of their voices in the kitchen beneath me.

  It gave me an odd feeling, an empty feeling. I’d never talked to my own father as much as they’d talked today. And I couldn’t for the life of me imagine him searching for me for two decades, had I gone missing.

  CHAPTER 39

  Me being me, first thing in the morning I did check out one Daniel Harris, architect, Boston. No arrests, no criminal records, no donations to extremists, nothing dubious. And the bio and photo of him at his architectural firm matched, so he seemed to be just who he said.

  I clattered down my stairs and found Jessamyn and her father in the kitchen. There were steaming cups of tea on the table and she was at the stove stirring something. I imagined Daniel had offered to take her out, but she must have wanted to make her father breakfast. For the first time ever. I wondered if I should excuse myself so she could have this event, this first, to herself.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, ready to wave and walk past.

  “Hey, Troy,” Jessamyn said from the stove. “Look, I made a lot of oatmeal here if you want some.” She frowned at it. I went over and looked.

  “It’s sort of runny,” she said under her breath.

  She must have followed the instructions on the box, which call for more water than you need. “Just turn up the heat and keep stirring,” I told her. “It’ll cook down. You can shake in some wheat bran or something if you need to.”

  I went over and pulled raisins and brown sugar from my shelf, and got milk from the fridge. Daniel smiled at me. I couldn’t imagine where he’d thought he might find his daughter, if he’d ever let himself envision it—but other than finding her in a high-powered job or Phi Beta Kappa at a university somewhere, this wasn’t bad. She had a job; she was living with friends. She was his daughter, and she was making him breakfast. This was, I thought, possibly the best day of his life.

  “Hey, Troy, tell my dad about the pie I made in Ottawa,” Jessamyn said, turning to him. “Dad, I made an apple pie from scratch, with a top and everything.”

  “It was good,” I allowed. “Really good. We finished it that night.”

  Daniel smiled.

  “Troy has friends in Ottawa; we went up there for a few days. It was a really cool neighborhood and her friends are great, with this really nice housekeeper, Elise, and we went downtown and saw the skaters on the canal and everything.” Jessamyn went on to tell him every detail of everything we’d done in Ottawa, down to the walk around the block and the drive to Paul’s school.

  Finally she declared the oatmeal ready, and dished it out. Patrick came in, dressed in ski clothes, and she introduced him and pointed toward the oatmeal. Patrick said hello, thanked her,
grabbed a bowl, filled it, and disappeared. He never passed up free food.

  “Your roommates?” Daniel asked, and Jessamyn gave him the rundown. I wondered if she’d told him about Tobin’s sister being in town; I figured she had.

  For the second time since I’d known her, Jessamyn took the day off work. From the kitchen we could hear her on the phone in the hallway announcing to her boss that her father was in town and she wanted to spend time with him.

  Across the kitchen table, I caught Daniel’s eye.

  “She’s had a tough time,” he said. Not a question.

  I nodded. “Yeah, she has. But now she has you.” The message was loud and clear: Don’t let her down.

  He nodded. I think he knew exactly what I meant. Somehow I trusted him, as I’d trusted David Zimmer. Maybe suffering brings a person’s essence closer to the surface.

  On impulse, I said, “You’ve had a tough time too. You lost your daughter, for a long time.”

  Something glinted in his eyes. He blinked. “Yes, I did. But I just kept looking. She had to be somewhere.”

  Jessamyn came back from her phone call. She wanted to take her father for a walk through town, and show him where she worked, and maybe to Pete’s for lunch. Of course she wanted to show him off—half the fun of getting a Christmas pony would be showing it to people. Daniel didn’t seem to mind. I figured when Jessamyn went to visit him in Boston, he’d be doing the same thing with her. The thought made something twist in my chest.

  This was like a puzzle whose pieces fit together in a way they probably shouldn’t have. Daniel had found his daughter from the sidebar that never should have been in the paper, which had sent us fleeing town, so the PI he sent hadn’t found us—but he’d ended up here anyway.

  I gave up on trying to figure out cause and effect in this. Maybe it was karma, the universe striving to right itself. Maybe life was just random and I was nuts for trying to figure out any of it.

  Now I had work to do. I’d spoken to the Coast Guard and gotten the reports faxed, and had left messages at the police department. When I heard from Win what she’d found out from the maids, I’d start trying to interview her father. I spent the next few hours roughing out the new article, what I could write of it now.

  As I worked I could hear normal house noises of people going out and in, and then a rat-a-tat-tat on my stairwell door. Only Zach did this little knock to get my attention, I think because the distinctive knock let me know it was him, erasing a little pressure and lessening the chance of his stuttering.

  “Troy! Hey, Troy, come down here a minute.”

  Now what? I went down.

  “Come outside.” Zach was wearing a coat on top of his ski suit.

  I rolled my eyes at Zach for being mysterious. But I pulled on my parka and my boots without lacing them, and followed him out. He walked me around to the far side of my car, and pointed. The tires on the street side were flat. Not just spongy or soft—pancake flat. Completely, impossible-to-drive-on flat.

  “Cripes, one was a little low the other day, but not like this,” I said. I squatted by the wheel well of one tire and then the other, but couldn’t see any damage. But then Zach pointed the same moment I saw it—the little caps over the tire valves were missing.

  “Someone let the air out,” I said, and he nodded.

  Some drunk on his way home must have decided it would be fun to give someone two flat tires. It takes only moments to unscrew that little cap and push down the spring in the middle. Way better than having two damaged tires, but still a pain. It did cross my mind to wonder if this could be connected to the break-in at Win’s—but that was serious. This was a prank, a petty one.

  “You have a floor pump, right?” Zach asked.

  I nodded.

  “I have to go meet some guys at Mount Van Hoevenberg,” he said, gesturing to his car, rumbling away. I waved him off and went inside and dug out my old floor pump, one with a Schrader valve that would work on a car tire.

  It takes a long time to pump up a car tire by hand—it holds a lot less pressure than a bicycle tire, but a lot more volume. I wasn’t trying to get them to full pressure, just enough to get up to Stewart’s to use the air hose. I had the first one up to twenty pounds and had decided that would do when Jessamyn and her father returned from their jaunt through town.

  “Flat tires,” I said, unnecessarily. “Someone … let the … air out.”

  I was panting—tire pumping is intensely aerobic. I’m surprised they don’t have little pumping machines in gyms. Actually I’m surprised no one has figured out how to harness all that energy being expended in gyms, on treadmills and bicycles, stair machines and those strange elliptical contraptions, all going nowhere. You ought to be able to hook them up and use the power to generate electricity.

  Daniel took the pump from me, attached it to the second tire, and started pumping. He was in pretty good shape. By the time he was breathing hard, it was done.

  “Thanks,” I told him, and opened the car door and tossed the pump in. “I’m going to go get more air.”

  At Stewart’s it took only seconds to blast the tires to full pressure. Back at the house, I rummaged in my toolbox for extra valve caps and went out and screwed them on. They kept out dust and crud, and I suppose slowed down someone who might be inclined to let the air out of your tires.

  Now I was hungry—somehow I’d forgotten to eat lunch—and cross.

  CHAPTER 40

  Win called soon after—she was nearly back to Lake Placid. She’d gotten my text about Jessamyn’s father.

  “Her dad showed up?” she asked. “I didn’t know she kept up with her father.”

  “She didn’t; she hasn’t seen him for twenty years. Apparently after a bad divorce her mom disappeared with Jessamyn.”

  “Well, good, if he’s a good guy, I mean.”

  “I think he is.” I didn’t want to say more, to a woman who’d pretty much just lost the father she might have thought she had.

  “Listen, Troy, I got what we need.”

  “You talked to the maid?”

  “Yes, and more. I’ll tell you when I get there—I’ll be there soon.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was eager to know what she’d found out, if there was enough to go to her father with. But it could wait until she got here.

  “Is Jessamyn’s father staying? I’d like to meet him.”

  “He stayed here last night; I’d guess he’s staying tonight as well. She’ll definitely want you to meet him; she’d probably drag him out there to meet you if you didn’t come in—she’s pretty excited …” My voice trailed off.

  Win knew what I was thinking. “Troy, it’s okay. I haven’t been close to my father since Trey died. And he wasn’t that great a father before that.”

  I was in my office when Win arrived. She looked exhausted. She opened a bag and set a stack of papers and a DVD on the corner of my desk.

  “I filmed the interview with the maids, in English and in Spanish; they’re on the DVD.”

  I picked up the papers. On top was a notarized statement, typed, in English, from the maid who had found a soggy set of Mr. Winslow’s clothes in the hamper of the downstairs bathroom the day after Trey Winslow had drowned. And there was more, notarized statements from two nurses on duty in the hospital where Tobin had been.

  “What’s this?” I asked, surprised.

  Win shrugged. “I thought it wouldn’t hurt to talk to them. And the last ones are being faxed straight to the newspaper, from the lawyer’s office.”

  “The last ones?”

  “Notarized statements from my mother and father.”

  My jaw dropped. “Your mother and father,” I repeated. “Win, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, I had to do it, Troy. I had to face them.” Her voice broke. She sat on my sofa. “I went to them and I laid it all out, all the statements. At first my father denied all of it, said he’d never been out that night. And then my mother looked at him, just looked at him, and said, ‘Ber
t, why would Gloria have said she found your wet clothes?’ and he broke—not all the way, but he broke. And he said, yes, he’d taken the boat out, with the boys, but he didn’t remember anything else. That’s all he would admit to.”

  Win smiled then, a mirthless smile that was more of a grimace. “My mother said it. I didn’t think she would, but she said it. She said, ‘And you let Tobin take the blame for this all this time.’ And she got up and went upstairs.”

  I couldn’t speak. I was astounded Win had done this, confronted her father. This wasn’t what we’d agreed on—she’d jumped ranks, so to speak. Suddenly I remembered her saying what seemed long ago: Maybe it’s time to air the linen. Maybe she’d suspected something all along, had a notion of her father’s involvement, realized the nanny may have known something. Maybe I’d been the tool here, following the path Win had laid out, interviewing the people she’d aimed me at, using the photos and tidy timeline she provided. For a moment I felt ill, as if I’d been a dupe this whole time.

  But this was her father, and they were her brothers. She was deeply fatigued; I was exhausted. I had an article to write. We could sort the personal side of this out later.

  I took a deep breath. “Will your mother be all right?” I asked.

  “I think so. In a way it answers a lot of questions for her, why Tobin left. She blamed Tobin too, you know, even though she never said anything, and he knew it. Trey was everyone’s favorite. She’ll have some guilt to deal with, and anger. A lot of anger.”

  She stood up. “You may want to call the paper, to see if the faxes have arrived. Once you have those, and once George has the newspaper’s lawyer look them over, I imagine you’ll be good to go.”

  I looked at her. “Win, I haven’t decided yet what I’ll use in the article.”

  She blinked in surprise and started to speak, and I held my hand up. “Just write down the maid’s name and contact information for me,” I said, and pushed my pad of paper toward her.