We sipped our tea, and having tea and cookies did seem to help us relax.
Mrs. Winslow set her teacup down tidily. For a moment it seemed that the next words out of her mouth would be We are gathered here together, but of course they weren’t. She surprised me by speaking to me first.
“I read your articles, Miss Chance. You did a fine job of telling about Tobin’s life after he left here. I thank you for that. It was lovely reading where he had been, and the comments from his friends.”
I nodded, and murmured a thank-you. She didn’t mention that I did a fine job of telling the story of her first son’s death, but I hadn’t expected her to. It didn’t seem she hated it, and she apparently wasn’t suing me, and that’s about the best you could hope for in this situation.
Then she looked at David, a long look, and then at Win, as if she were memorizing this moment before she spoke. And when she did, it was to the room, not directly to either of them.
“I was never aware that my husband was in the boat that evening. He was out, but he was often out, at his club and elsewhere. I never asked where he went.” Her tone was brittle. I pictured a bombastic man, doing what he pleased, in charge at work, in charge at home, trampling people along the way.
“If I had known …” She stopped, and then started again, articulating carefully. “If I had known that my husband, that their father had been with them, had taken them out, left them …” Her voice choked, and I didn’t think this was deliberate. My throat tightened in turn. I didn’t dare look at Win or David.
“If I had known, I would have turned him in to the police myself.” She said it flatly, emotionlessly. The air resonated, her words almost echoing.
David was the one who moved, almost before the words were out of her mouth. He went to her side, took her hand.
“I am sure you would have, Mrs. Winslow. But of course you had no way of knowing.” Whether he believed this or not, I don’t know, and I suppose it didn’t matter. Of course she wanted to think she would have turned in her husband. Whether she would have or not was another thing, but this was the mother of a man David had loved, still loved, and this was what he needed to say to her, and what she needed to hear.
She grasped his hand and when he moved to hug her, she wrapped her thin arms loosely around him, her hands on his back looking incongruously old. I looked away, not wanting to intrude, not wanting to witness something so emotional. She held tight for a long moment, and then David moved back to his chair.
Win sat, not moving. She might have been seething, seeing this all turned so graceful, something that had been raw and ugly and awful; having her father’s act acknowledged in such a genteel way. She had lived out the nightmare of one brother drowning and the other being blamed, and she’d had that awful confrontation with her parents.
But while this might not be the apology or acknowledgment Win needed from her mother, it was a lot for a proud woman who had lost two sons and now, in a way, her husband. The act of saying it, of calling us there, was significant. And there was no doubt she was suffering. When Win did move, it was all of a flurry, and then she and her mother were wrapped up in each other, two sets of shoulders shaking.
I met David’s eye and without saying a word we got up and wandered off. He’d been here before, he said, to Winslow parties, and knew the way to the kitchen. There was a plate of extra sandwiches on the countertop; he pulled off the cover and took one, and I did the same. We leaned up against the counter and ate.
“Good sandwiches,” he said.
“Yep.”
“Whew,” he added lightly, after a moment. “Guess that’s all I was really here for.”
“You did good,” I told him, and then we were hugging, tightly. We separated, with pats on the back, then smiled at each other and took another sandwich section each.
“Think we should go back in now?” I asked when we’d finished our little sandwiches.
“We’ll wait another few minutes or so.” So we did. By the time we reentered, Win and her mother had separated, red-eyed, acting as if it wasn’t obvious they had been crying. The woman in the black dress appeared as if responding to an invisible button, and replaced the pot of tea with a fresh one. Mrs. Winslow turned toward David.
“David, we have some books of Trey’s here, in his old room. If you’d like to have some of them, we could go up and take a look.”
This startled him. Emotion ran across his face, and then it was gone, and he said smoothly, “That would be lovely, Mrs. Winslow,” and off they went.
Win looked at me. “Thanks for coming,” she said.
“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” I grinned at her, and after a moment she grinned back. “Have some more sandwiches,” I told her. “They’re really good.”
David and Mrs. Winslow were gone at least twenty minutes, and when they came back he had a handful of books under his arm. I don’t know if he wanted them or just took them because she wanted him to. Either way, I was glad he did. He told us he’d better be getting home, and Mrs. Winslow went to the door to see him out.
I turned to Win. “Want me to go for a walk or something so you can visit with your mother some more?”
She shook her head. “I think that’s enough for one day. We’ll stay just a bit longer, if it’s okay with you, and then head home. I know you have work to do.”
When her mother came back, we chatted a bit, and told her we needed to drive back. She made the offer for us to stay there, but I think she knew we weren’t going to. She hugged Win tightly at the door and shook my hand. Then she leaned in toward me and said, close to my ear, “I wish I’d let him keep the dog.”
It rattled me, painfully. She was astute, to have picked out the thing that had hurt me particularly about Tobin’s life, the scene that had embedded itself in me. This could have been emotional grandstanding, but her body radiated hurt. I wanted to say, I wish you had too, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’d follow David’s lead, take the graceful route. I said softly, “You would have if you could have.” I didn’t know if this was true, but I wasn’t going to deny her the comfort she wanted. If she was emotionally manipulating me it would be deplorable, but more deplorable for me to assume that was the case. There had been too many assumptions. Too much death, too much pain.
Win and I didn’t talk much on the ride back to Lake Placid. Sometimes you need to let your feelings sort themselves out. And sometimes you don’t need to talk. I took out my laptop and tried to work, but I was tired, my brain overfull and my emotional reserves drained, so I gave up and packed my computer away.
It was late and dark by the time we reached my house. Win said she needed to go on to her cabin. She needed to be alone. And so did I.
CHAPTER 50
I e-mailed Jameson. I didn’t quite tell him that I’d followed the truck all the way to Keene and in essence confronted the driver, but I don’t think it would have surprised him. The police told Win that the fellow’s story checked out—he’d withdrawn cash from his bank the day before Tobin’s disappearance, and had been in Rouses Point much of the time since.
The first time I thought I’d seen the truck had been my imagination, as neither the man nor his truck had been anywhere near here, and the second time was unlikely. So I’d been haunted by a truck that hadn’t been there, but the one time I’d been in a situation where I could follow the truck I thought was Tobin’s, it was. Go figure.
The final toxicology results on Tobin showed no drugs. Alcohol, yes, but not stone-dead drunk. I hadn’t tried to contact the man involved in the shoving incident in the bar, and neither had I told the police about it. I’d decided it would cause more pain, needless pain, and raise more questions than it answered. I’d hint at it in the story, but not in detail. I was tired of finding out things, of turning over rocks and seeing what lay beneath.
I wrote the bulk of the last piece, and told George I’d finish it after Tobin’s memorial. Win was having Tobin cremated and would take his ashes to Connecticu
t, but she wanted to have an informal service for him, just a few of us, out on the ice in Saranac Lake, near where he was found, and then a gathering at the bar for everyone afterward. She asked David Zimmer, and he came up. Her mother didn’t; I didn’t know if that was Win’s decision or her mother’s.
There were eight of us out on the ice: Win and Jessamyn, David and me, Patrick, Brent, and Zach, and Dean. The ice palace was nearly finished. Win and Jessamyn held hands. David held my arm, Dean on my other side. Word had gotten out and there were a couple dozen people on the shore: the men who had helped get the body out from the ice, Tobin’s friends from the bars, people he’d worked with, Matt Boudoin, George. They stood silently. The ice creaked as we stood there, seeming almost to moan.
Win spoke, her voice melodic in the cold air, carrying across the ice. “My brother Tobin loved living here,” she said. “I will miss my brother forever, with all my heart, but I am glad he had his time here and I am glad he had friends here. And I thank everyone who cared about him.”
Jessamyn was crying. She spoke some words, but the wind whipped most of them away. I think she said something about loving Tobin, and I know she said goodbye. Dean said something, and then I did, just three words: Thank you, Tobin, and maybe only Win heard me, and maybe only she knew what I meant. And then Win sang. I hadn’t known she was going to, but she sang “Amazing Grace” in a clear and beautiful voice that floated out across the ice, and by the end I doubt there was a dry eye anywhere within the range of her voice. As she sang I looked over at the walls of the ice palace, reaching toward the heavens.
We turned and walked back toward the shoreline, and I was grateful for David’s arm steadying me. The people on the shore had started moving, mingling, some turning to walk toward the bar. I noticed one girl standing apart, eyes red, face pale. I thought I recognized her, and then I did: she was the girl I’d seen briefly in the Saranac Lake bar with the man who’d gotten my car out of the ditch, the girl who had been in the pickup truck that had stopped to help me back onto the road. She saw me looking at her, saw me recognize her, and smiled, a heartbreakingly sad smile.
Something made me turn to David and tell him I needed to go speak to her, and he nodded and went on. I walked toward the girl, my boots crunching on the ice. She turned her head toward me, and waited.
She was beautiful, thin, and blond, an ethereal beauty, with a face that could have been in a painting by one of the masters. The man I’d seen her with before must have been her brother—you could see faint traces of him in her features, but in her they were refined, delicate, almost breathtaking.
“You were a friend of Tobin’s,” I said, and after she nodded I added, “I’m Troy.”
“Cadey,” she said. “Cadey Phillips. You met my brother Wade, sort of. The one they call Crick.”
She shifted on her feet and her hand moved toward her middle, just the suggestion of a movement, but it led my eyes there as if she had an arrow pointing toward her abdomen. And I saw, through the billowiness of her long coat, a slight mound of a rounded belly.
She opened her mouth to speak, but tears came into her eyes. She turned away slightly, and at that moment I realized who this was. She was the girl whose photo I’d seen in Tobin’s safe deposit box.
And things fell into place for me, with a giant clanging roar that seemed it should shatter the ice beneath my feet.
I thought, counted. “Four months, plus?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Tobin’s?” I asked, and she nodded again, and her tears began to fall steadily. For a moment I couldn’t breathe.
We started walking, the two of us. Someone saw us, a man who was a younger version of the brother I’d met, and moved toward us, but she waved him away and he retreated. As we walked she told me the story, almost whispering at times.
She lived in Saranac Lake, she said, and was still in high school. Her parents had died five years back in a car crash and she lived with her three older brothers, Wade and the one we’d just seen and one in between. She’d met Tobin when she’d been hitchhiking over to Lake Placid to a friend’s house; she’d told him she was eighteen, a student at North Country Community College. She had thought he was gorgeous and charming and funny in a way unlike the other men and boys she knew.
“I know it was wrong to lie,” she said, “but I liked him and I didn’t want him to know I wasn’t even seventeen.”
She’d seen him twice more and they’d been together only the once, the last time, at a friend’s house, but then somehow he’d found out her age, had looked at her driver’s license, and told her he couldn’t see her anymore, even though she’d cried and told him age didn’t matter. Then she’d missed her period and missed another and hadn’t been going to tell him, but he’d run into her and asked how she was, and then she had.
“Did you know about his girlfriend, about Jessamyn?” I asked.
She nodded, crying more. “I just liked him so much,” she said. “I know that was wrong.”
“He gave you money,” I said, thinking of the wad of cash, the money from the sale of the truck.
“I didn’t want to take it, but he said it was important, it was important that I saw a doctor right away, that I had prenatal care, vitamins and things, that I had a warm coat and took care of myself, and he gave me money that night, that last night I saw him. And he said he was going to make sure the baby was taken care of.”
“Do you know what he meant by that, ‘taken care of’?”
She shook her head. “I think he meant money, that he was going to set up a fund or something.”
We walked on. My brain was whirling.
“What happened to Tobin that night?” I asked at last. My mouth was dry. She stopped and turned her face toward me, those exquisite features filled with pain beyond her years.
“You need to talk to my brother,” she said.
• • •
We turned back. We could see some stragglers crossing the street, heading home or toward the bar, but the boy she’d waved off was leaning against a signpost. Her youngest brother, Jake, she told me. He looked at us as we approached, weariness and strain etched on his face.
“Tell her,” Cadey said. “Tell her all of it.” She moved off toward the others, and we watched her go.
The boy turned toward me. He wasn’t beautiful like his sister, but he was good-looking, and something about him said he’d had to grow up too fast. I guessed he wasn’t yet twenty. He stared out across the ice and started talking. He seemed to know who I was.
“We were pretty upset when we found out Cadey was pregnant,” he said. “Especially Wade. He’s the oldest, the legal guardian, the one who kept us all together when Mom and Dad died. Cadey didn’t tell us, but she was getting sick in the mornings, and he guessed. She wanted to have the baby, whatever it took. She wouldn’t tell us who the father was. We thought it was Jimmy, the kid she hangs out with in school, but she said it wasn’t. Wade asked around, he found out that Tobin had given her a ride once, and then he went to Cadey and acted like he knew who it was and she gave Tobin up without realizing it.”
He kicked at the snow under his boots. “I think Wade was angrier because it was him, an out-of-towner, you know, someone not from here. Someone older, someone he thought was using her. Wade went looking for him and found him outside the bar that night, and we followed him. Wade wanted to have it out with him, show him he couldn’t come here and treat our sister that way.”
“You were there?”
He nodded. “Me and my brothers. We followed Tobin, across the street and then out onto the ice a ways. He was just standing there, looking out across the ice. We said stuff, we threatened him, we called him names. He didn’t say anything. He just sort of smiled at us and turned his back and walked away. Wade was furious, he wanted to go after him and fight him, beat him up, but we pulled him back. Told him it wasn’t worth it, it was too late, it was too cold. We’d deal with it later.” He looked at me and his face twisted. “I wished
we’d let him, if he’d beaten him up Tobin would be alive, but Wade was really mad and we were afraid he’d lose control, break his jaw or something, maybe get arrested, and then Cadey would go to foster care and we wouldn’t be together.”
I walked a few paces away from him, out onto the ice, staring across the lake.
“And then what?” My voice was emotionless. All my feelings had drained out of me, as if through my feet and through the ice and into the water below, into the lake where Tobin Winslow had died, died the day before he’d planned to visit a lawyer to have his will changed to provide for a child not yet born.
“And then nothing,” he said. It was almost precisely what David Zimmer had said to me had happened when Tobin and his brother had been left by their father. Then nothing.
“What do you mean?” My voice was sharp.
“We saw Tobin walk out a ways, and then we left. We figured he’d wait until he saw we were gone and then he’d come back. No one thought he’d go out too far, that he’d go into the ice, that he’d fall through, that he’d drown. We only found out later he’d banged his head in the bar that night, that maybe he wasn’t feeling good from it, that maybe he was woozy. We didn’t know, we didn’t know. We didn’t.”
I turned and he was crying. I don’t know if he needed absolution or if I was the one to give it to him, but I moved toward him and wrapped my arms around him, this nearly grown man who was crying like he was six years old.
“I know you didn’t,” I said. “I know you didn’t.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked, stepping back, scrubbing the tears from his face, gulping for air.
“I don’t know.”
• • •
And I didn’t.
What I did was get him calmed down and walk him back to the bar, check on Cadey, exchange a few words with Win and David and Jessamyn, chat with George, and then plead tiredness and tell them I was heading home. I walked to my car, my feet heavy and cold. I turned on the ignition and my seat heater and sat there and shook in my cold, dark car.
A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel Page 25