A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel

by Sara J. Henry

  “Hey, Troy,” she said, surprised. “Did you want to eat?” She knows I don’t often eat out, and if I do, it’s Desperados, where the food is cheap and the service fast, or The Cowboy if someone’s visiting from out of town.

  I shook my head. “Can you take five minutes?” I asked.

  She narrowed her eyes. She knew I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. She set down the coffeepot, told the cashier she’d be right back, and grabbed her jacket.

  Outside she crammed her gloveless hands into her pockets and looked at me. There was no easy way to say this. I would rather have told her at home, but word travels fast. Somewhere in town somebody probably was already telling the story.

  I took a deep breath, and spoke. “I was over in Saranac Lake today—they started building the ice palace. They found a body in the ice.”

  Now her eyes shifted. I’d learned with her this didn’t always mean she wasn’t telling the truth; sometimes it just meant she was uncomfortable.

  I made myself say the next words. “It was Tobin, Jessamyn.”

  She seemed to stop breathing. She stared at me, eyes wide, and swayed on her feet. I took a step toward her, but she righted herself. Her face was chalk.

  “You’re sure?” she whispered.

  I nodded. She didn’t ask any questions. She just stood there and breathed: in, out, in, out.

  When Tobin had disappeared this last time, she had held out hope for a long time that he would return as usual. But as weeks turned into months, even she had given up. I think both of us had assumed he’d gotten tired of playing Adirondacker. I’d pictured him back at whatever posh home he had come from, living off family money or making the motions of going into Daddy’s business, and frequenting bars more expensive and sophisticated than here. I’d imagined he’d dropped the Carhartts and flannel shirts into a Goodwill bin, or given them to the hired help.

  Our breath formed little clouds.

  “I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else,” I said. The words were thin in the cold air.

  “I need a drink,” she said.

  She told her boss she was taking the evening off, and after one look at our faces he knew not to protest. If Jessamyn was passing up a prime winter Saturday evening slot, there was good reason. He’d call in someone who’d be happy to take her shift and the fat tips that came with it.

  We walked down the street wordlessly, our feet crunching on the packed snow. When we reached ZigZags, she opened the door, and I followed her in. She nodded at the bartender; I’d seen him around town but didn’t know his name. He served us efficiently, refilling her glass when she gestured to it, and topped up my Diet Coke without asking.

  She didn’t cry; she just drank. She asked the bartender if he had any cigarettes, and he handed her an open pack and didn’t say anything about smoking not being allowed. There were no other customers. She smoked four in fast succession, lighting one from the butt of the other. I didn’t complain about the smoke. I didn’t remind her how hard she’d told me it had been to quit. I just sat there.

  She spoke only once, and I had to lean in to hear her. “Damn him,” she whispered. I didn’t know if she meant damn him for dying, or damn him for things he’d done when he was alive. I didn’t ask.

  Eventually I went off to the bathroom, and on the way back asked the bartender if he had any food—I figured that liquor and shock weren’t a good combination on an empty stomach. I thought he might find some pretzels or nuts, but he came back with two thick sandwiches on sturdy plates and sat them on the bar in front of us. Maybe he’d heard about Tobin, or maybe he could just tell when someone needed to have food set in front of them. Jessamyn picked her sandwich up almost unseeingly and ate most of it, then put it down and emptied her glass.

  “Let’s go,” she said, and stood. She pulled some bills from her pocket and dropped them on the bar. I caught the bartender’s eye with a look that said If it’s not enough, let us know, and he nodded. I grabbed my jacket and followed her outside.

  It was snowing softly, the flakes falling on our faces and sticking in our hair. Dusk was settling. We walked to the house in silence. As Jessamyn turned to climb the stairs to her room, I saw a tear trail down her cheek. Maybe she’d cry up there, or maybe she’d just go to sleep. But I knew she needed to be alone.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was past Tiger’s dinnertime, so I filled her bowl and left her in the kitchen while I climbed the steep stairs that led to my rooms. I have an outer room I use as an office, a tiny bathroom, and a small bedroom, all nicely separate from the rest of the house. I turned on my computer and clicked on my portable radiator. This is the only heat up here, plus whatever makes its way up through the stairwell and vents in the floor. But at night I have a down comforter and the warm weight of Tiger in the crook of my knees, so I do all right.

  I sat at my desk. I could feel the heat from the radiator, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to feel numb. I wanted to forget the grinding sound the block of ice with Tobin’s body had made as it had slid past me, the grunts of the men struggling to move it into the truck, the look on Jessamyn’s face when I’d told her the news. And I wanted to forget that glimpse of Tobin Winslow’s face, frozen into the ice.

  But I couldn’t.

  I pushed my camera’s memory card into my computer, let Photoshop start uploading the photos, and turned away as they began flashing past. I rummaged in my dresser for some thick wool socks, pulled them on, and went down to the kitchen to brew some tea. Then I climbed under my covers to warm up.

  There, while I sipped my tea, I realized I needed to talk to someone. This still doesn’t come naturally to me. But I do have people I can call: my brother, Simon, in Orlando, with his cool, logical policeman’s brain. My friend Baker, in Saranac Lake, with her kids and more routine life, always calm and pragmatic. Alyssa, a reporter in Burlington who’d been there for the worse parts of last summer. And Philippe, in Ottawa, whom I’d come oh-so-close to falling for.

  But it was Jameson I wanted to talk to.

  He was a police detective in Ottawa I’d met after I’d dived from a Lake Champlain ferry to rescue a small boy who turned out to have been kidnapped, a small boy whose father was Philippe. Jameson had seemed to consider me a prime suspect in the child’s abduction, or at least an accomplice. He could be insufferably rude; he was brusque and direct.

  I trusted him absolutely.

  Something was tickling the back of my mind, a memory of the week Tobin disappeared, of seeing Jessamyn coming in the kitchen with a fat lip and a stiff way of moving. Walked into a door, she’d said. I hadn’t believed her. I’d once worked with a woman who would come in with heavy makeup that didn’t quite cover the bruises on her face—I fell off the porch, she’d say, or something similar, and we would nod and pretend to believe her. But in the afternoon roses would arrive from her husband, and I knew that husbands don’t routinely send flowers whenever you’re careless enough to fall off a porch.

  The phone rang three times before he answered.

  “Jameson,” he said, as he would at work.

  “Hey, it’s Troy.”

  Something changed on his end, as if he had shifted in his chair. “Troy. How are you?”

  “Something happened today,” I said. He knew I wouldn’t be calling about something mundane, and I knew he’d want to hear it from the beginning. So I told him about my roommate and the guy she had dated, a guy who had disappeared regularly, who may have mistreated her, whose body had just been found frozen in Lake Flower.

  He listened without a word. “Fully dressed?” he asked when I stopped.

  I closed my eyes, and I could see the contorted figure in the block of ice. One arm, off to the side, fingers splayed. A shiver ran through me. “Yes. Coat. No hat. No gloves, at least on the hand I saw.”

  “He was a drinker?”

  “Oh, yeah. And he smoked weed, I think. He never seemed entirely sober.”

  I’ve never seen the logic in drinking to excess
—it makes people act stupid and feel bad later. But plenty of locals drink hard and regularly, and many vacationers seem to think it’s a requirement for stepping foot in town. More than once I’ve hollered out my bedroom window at two a.m. at firemen here for a convention and so drunk they couldn’t find their way back to their motel. Maybe visiting horse-show people got plastered as well, but didn’t wander the streets being loud about it. Maybe they sat around in their trim riding jodhpurs and neat buttoned shirts and got quietly, desperately, privately drunk.

  Even I knew if someone had imbibed enough they might think it a great idea to amble across a half-frozen lake. Alcohol seems to go a long way toward convincing people they’re immortal.

  “They’ll do an autopsy,” Jameson said. “Even the basics will take a few days; tox screens take longer. Then they’ll likely know if it’s anything besides him just falling through the ice. But tell your roommate not to talk about this. To anyone. Not even casually.”

  “What about the police?”

  Silence for a moment as he negotiated between his sense of duty and what was best for Jessamyn. “She doesn’t want to impede the investigation,” he said finally. “She should tell them what’s relevant: when she saw him last, who his friends were, but nothing that’s not facts—nothing they can misinterpret. Not without a lawyer.”

  “Okay,” I said, and suddenly it was. Without me having to spell it out he knew I was worried, and he knew why. If I had noticed Jessamyn’s fat lip and pained way of walking, other people would have too. It wouldn’t be a giant leap for someone to assume that Tobin had been the one to hurt her, and that she might have decided to do something about it. Because the Jessamyn before Tobin came along wouldn’t have put up with anyone raising a hand to her.

  “Let me know what they find out,” he said.

  “I will,” I said, and hung up.

  I did realize that on some level there was a thread of something deeper between Jameson and me, but neither of us seemed to want or need to acknowledge it. Jameson was single, and that was the extent of what I knew about his personal life. And of course he knew how intertwined my life had been with Philippe’s last summer after I’d rescued his son.

  It was getting late, and had gotten colder. But I needed a walk, and Tiger could use one. It’s one of the great things about dogs—they’re always ready for an outing. I pulled on my wool-lined Sorel boots, zipped up my parka, and wedged my neck warmer under my hat so only my eyes and nose were exposed. This is my secret to beating the cold: blocking the little crevices that let the cold creep in. This, plus my puffy insulated gloves.

  I didn’t bother with a leash, because Tiger always walks or runs beside me. No credit to me; she was born that way, pre-trained. I let her know what I wanted, and she’d do it. We headed out past Town Hall and the police station and turned onto Mirror Lake Drive for the three-mile loop around the lake.

  I love this walk at night, especially in the winter. Almost no one is out; the air is still; the snow and ice crunch underfoot. As you move along you can forget the bad stuff that happened during the day.

  Or almost, anyway.

  I don’t often have female roommates, because usually it’s guys who show up looking for rooms. And guys are easier to live with. They don’t care if you don’t feel like talking and they don’t get involved with your life, except around the edges. They never want to make the house rules or take over running things, and they don’t complain about the décor or much of anything.

  But Jessamyn hadn’t been the typical female roommate. She didn’t want to take over anything. She didn’t want to always be doing things with me. She didn’t want to tell me her problems or hear about mine, and she was tidier than most of the guys. Tobin I’d seen a lot of, because he was often at the house, and nothing had given me a reason to change my impression of him. Not that I’d told Jessamyn. She hadn’t gotten where she was in life by listening to good advice. Few of us have.

  As I walked I pictured Tobin, drunk or foolish or both, crunching across the early winter ice of Lake Flower until he fell through, or passing out or falling asleep, then sliding under as the ice gave way. At least then, I thought, he would have been spared the shock of plunging into the frigid water and that final awful moment when he knew he wasn’t going to be able to save himself, that today had been his last tomorrow.

  Or he could have been ice diving. It’s crazy, but people do it. I’d seen it during Winter Carnival—unofficial, of course. Someone dives through a circular hole cut into the ice, a rope tied to one leg, and comes up through a second hole nearby, presumably after drinking enough to decide it’s a good idea. Maybe Tobin had missed the second hole and had no one to haul him out. Or tried it without a rope, or the rope came loose, or his friends lost hold of it. It would be a terrible secret to keep through the winter, waiting for the body to be found. But because of Winter Carnival and the vagaries of the lake, it had appeared sooner rather than later.

  It didn’t yet cross my mind that someone might actually have a reason for wanting Tobin gone.

  My eyelashes were beginning to freeze. I broke into a jog, taking choppy, short steps, all you can do in clunky boots on icy ground. Tiger kept pace without missing a beat. I switched to a brisk walk when I reached town, passing restaurants and gift shops, the Olympic Center and then the speed-skating oval with its skaters in tights and long blades, bent low, gliding around the track.

  In the kitchen, Brent glanced up and nodded. He was working his way through a plateful of spaghetti and a paperback copy of Of Human Bondage, a book I’ve never been able to make myself finish. Brent, like most of my athlete roommates, was quiet and dedicated—a biathlete who spent long hours skiing, lifting weights, and dry-firing his rifle at a tiny target taped on his bedroom wall. He’d lived in the Olympic training center a while, but I suspected there’d been too many boisterous bobsledders and snowboarders for him.

  I wondered if I should tell him Jessamyn’s boyfriend had been found frozen in the ice of Lake Flower. But it’s a hard thing to work into conversation: How’s your book? Say, did you hear Tobin Winslow was found dead today? I nodded back at him and climbed the stairs to my room.

  I pulled on the sweatpants and old pullover I sleep in, and thought about e-mailing or calling Philippe. But I didn’t feel like talking, and this wasn’t something you could rattle off in an e-mail. I’d tell him about it, but not now. I grabbed my favorite Josephine Tey novel, and forced my eyes to follow the words until I could go to sleep. It took a while.

  CHAPTER 6

  I awoke abruptly, with that disquieting feeling you have when the world has shifted on its axis. I pulled on boots, parka, hat, scarf, gloves in quick and practiced succession. Some mornings I just let Tiger out the back door, but this morning I needed movement, brisk movement. I went up the hill behind the house and down Parkside Drive, then circled down Main Street. As we neared the house I saw a Saranac Lake police car pull up. And my brain, without pause, went straight to: The police must think Tobin’s death wasn’t an accident.

  The policeman got out of his car as I approached. He was young, probably not long out of high school, and wore his uniform like a suit of armor.

  “Does Jessamyn Field live here?” he asked. Something, his tone or how he stood, made me think he’d become a policeman for all the wrong reasons. I imagined he’d been a gawky kid, bullied, never taken seriously.

  I nodded.

  “She dated Tobin Winslow?” he asked.

  I nodded again. “Off and on,” I said, as if this made it less significant. Never mind that the “off” parts had been Tobin’s choice.

  “I need to talk to her,” he said.

  “I’ll go see if she’s here,” I told him. I wished I’d been able to warn Jessamyn, to pass along what Jameson had said. The policeman followed me into the front hallway, as if I’d invited him in. At the base of the stairs I turned and said, “I’ll be right back,” so he wouldn’t try to follow. Jessamyn didn’t need to wake up to se
e a cop at her door. Policemen seldom arrive with good news—they don’t come knocking to tell you you’ve won a sweepstakes or a home makeover.

  I tapped on her bedroom door. No answer. I tapped again and called out her name. I pushed the door open a few inches and peered in. The room was empty, covers pulled up tidily. Normally Jessamyn wasn’t an early riser, but the day after your boyfriend was found frozen to death wasn’t a normal day. Not even here in the Adirondacks.

  “She’s not here,” I told the policeman as I came down the stairs.

  “Not here?” he echoed. “Doesn’t she live here?”

  I tried not to sound sarcastic, but I hadn’t had breakfast and wasn’t in the best of moods. “Yes, she lives here,” I said. “But at the moment she—is—not—here.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  I suppressed the urge to tell him I didn’t have my roommates sign in and out. I shook my head. “She works at a restaurant up on Main Street, but it’s not open yet. Maybe she went for a walk.” Not that I’d ever known Jessamyn to walk anywhere unless she had to.

  At that moment the front doorknob clicked, and we turned. The door opened and Jessamyn entered, carrying two steaming cups and a paper bag giving off a rich, buttery smell. She smiled at us.

  “I thought you might like some coffee,” she said, handing me a cup. “Cream, right?”

  I nodded. I was surprised she knew I ever drank coffee, let alone how I took it. She turned to the policeman. “Would you like a croissant?” she asked, holding the bag out. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were here or I would have gotten you a coffee.”