A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel

by Sara J. Henry

  I tried not to laugh; she was acting as if this were an early-morning date. The policeman’s ears turned red, and he shook his head. I had no idea why Jessamyn was suddenly playing Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but I reached into the bag when she held it out to me. It was from the bakery next to the movie theater, too pricey for my budget, and usually for Jessamyn’s. The croissant was warm, the crust flaky. I bit into it.

  “Are you Jessamyn Field?” the policeman asked.

  She nodded, setting down the bag and shrugging off her jacket.

  “You knew Tobin Winslow?”

  She nodded again.

  “You know he’s dead.”

  I thought, You idiot; if she didn’t, that would be a heck of a way to tell her.

  Jessamyn took a sip of coffee. “Yes,” she said. “Troy told me.”

  The policeman looked at me, almost accusingly.

  “I was there when he was found,” I said.

  He frowned, and turned to Jessamyn. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

  Jessamyn didn’t respond, and something uneasy flickered through her eyes. Suddenly this didn’t seem like a game.

  “What sort of questions?” I asked, to buy her some time.

  He glanced at me. “Where he’s from, full name, date of birth, all that.”

  Jessamyn took a deep breath and her eyes shifted. I doubted she knew much of this, and for her and Tobin this was perfectly normal. Jessamyn didn’t tell anyone about her past and she didn’t ask any questions about anyone else’s. But to this policeman it was going to sound odd that she didn’t know these details about someone she’d dated for months. And Jessamyn being Jessamyn, she might make up stuff that would come back to bite her in the ass.

  I spoke up. “His name was Tobin Walter Winslow.” They both looked at me as if the kitchen table had spoken. “I saw it on his driver’s license. He was showing us his photo.” It had been one of those comparing-awful-driver’s-license-picture things. And it wasn’t as if Walter was a common name: I could think only of one of Anne of Green Gables’ sons, after she’d grown up and married, which had seemed strange to my eleven-year-old self. Children in books aren’t supposed to grow up and turn into married ladies with kids. They’re supposed to stay children forever.

  “Birth day or year?” the cop asked.

  “Didn’t see it.”

  He looked at Jessamyn, and she shook her head.

  “How long did you know him?” he asked her.

  “Since June,” she said. “I met him at Mud Puddles. Across the street.” That bar’s called Wiseguys now, but it was Mud Puddles for a very long time.

  “Do you know where he was from?”

  She shook her head.

  “It was a New York license,” I said.

  “Family?” he asked.

  Jessamyn looked blank.

  “I think he had a sister,” I said. Now they both looked at me as if I were the annoying kid in class who kept supplying answers. I shrugged. “He once said someone was like his older sister nagging him.”

  “Friends?” said the policeman, frowning. This Jessamyn knew. She rattled off names, although she didn’t know full names for some of them. Now she looked unsteady, and the policeman noticed it.

  “I’m sure this was a shock to you,” he said belatedly, and she nodded. I don’t think she was acting.

  “Why don’t you call if you have more questions?” I said, moving toward the front door to urge him out. He seemed none too happy, but he must have realized he wasn’t going to get much more out of Jessamyn at the moment.

  As the door closed behind him I turned to Jessamyn. “My gosh, coffee and croissants. What’s next, you start cleaning house?”

  She gave a crooked smile, and the last of her façade of functionality disappeared. Whatever impulse or energy had sent her out that morning was gone, and she looked thin and tired. I followed her to the kitchen, where she sat and put her head on her arms. I sat down across from her.

  When she lifted her head, she opened the pastry bag and took out the last croissant. “How did you know that stuff about Tobin?” she asked.

  I shrugged again. I can’t help noticing things, and I can’t help remembering them. Which is probably why I started writing as a kid, journals and stories I never showed to anyone. You have to do something with all that stuff in your head.

  She pulled off a bit of the croissant and put it in her mouth. “You didn’t like Tobin, did you?”

  No one wants to speak ill of the dead, as if dying gives them a grace they lacked in life. I chose my words carefully. “I wasn’t sure he was good for you.”

  She gave a short bark of a laugh. “You know what’s funny? What’s funny is that when I met Tobin, I thought my whole world was going to change. He seemed like someone who could make anything happen, that anything was possible. That I could be anybody I wanted to be.”

  She looked up. Her eyes were shiny with unfallen tears, with grief and pain and confusion. I could have told her this was a knack Tobin had, a skill set he used to get what he wanted when he wanted it. I could have told her that had he put his mind to it, Tobin probably could have made anything happen and could have accomplished whatever he wanted. But what he had wanted was to live here, to mingle like a disreputable royal among commoners, where people thought he was great because he could crack jokes and drink hard and attract whatever woman he wanted, and get by with doing as little work as possible.

  I wasn’t going to say any of that.

  Besides, she knew it all.

  CHAPTER 7

  My phone rang, and I ran up to answer it. It was my friend Baker in Saranac Lake—she’d just heard about Tobin. Then another call came in, from the editor of the paper, and I clicked over to him.

  George cleared his throat. “You saw them find Winslow.”

  “Yep.”

  “You got pictures.”

  “Yep.”

  He got right to the point—one of the things I liked about George. “Can you do a first-person piece?”

  I thought about it as I listened to Jessamyn moving about in the kitchen below, speaking to my dog. I could write a piece that would capture being there on the lake, the air so cold you couldn’t stand still for long; the sound of the saw blades chewing through the ice, the men’s breath rasping as they worked, the slide of the ice coffin across the lake. George didn’t need to tell me this story would almost certainly hit the wires, that it would run nationwide, that this would help me break into bigger magazines than I wrote for now.

  I shook my head before realizing I was doing it. “I can’t,” I said.

  Churning out a first-person piece about being there when Tobin was found would seem a betrayal in a way I didn’t begin to understand. Maybe I could write about it later, maybe in a magazine piece, but not now. Not when it had just happened and Jessamyn was still reeling from it. And maybe I was too.

  “Have you got someone on it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, and told me who, a kid named Dirk who had been at the paper a few months, whose writing hadn’t impressed me. My silence told George what I thought of this. “He really wants to do it,” he added. “And everyone else is tied up or on vacation.”

  Long pause.

  “Can you work with his piece?” he asked. “Review it, add some stuff? Dual byline.”

  This I could do. “Sure. Send it over.”

  “Photos?”

  “I’ll let you have a couple. Nothing real specific. You don’t want a body on your front page, George.” Even if he did, I didn’t. “Are you clear to run it? Have they notified next of kin?”

  “Yep. I heard someone’s on their way here.”

  I was surprised. “They didn’t have trouble tracking down the family?”

  “No, Barry at the police station said the wallet was still in his pocket. I’ll send the story to you when it comes in. Won’t be for a while yet.”

  I thought as I hung up. So the police knew perfectly well where Tobin was fr
om and who his family was, and the officer at the house had asked Jessamyn questions the police already knew the answers to. Maybe that particular policeman had been uninformed—or was shrewder than he’d seemed. Maybe he had been the one playing games.

  I went down and told Jessamyn the newspaper editor had called, that I was going to look over the article they were doing on Tobin. Then we heard the door open, and steps coming down the hall. We looked at each other, both of us maybe wondering if the policeman had returned and waltzed in the front door we never locked.

  But it was Brent, carrying a plastic bag from Stewart’s up the street. He raised one eyebrow but didn’t say anything. He pulled a box of oatmeal from the bag, and we watched him dump some in a pot, mix in water, and turn on the stove.

  Jessamyn looked at me. “Tell him,” she said. So I did, succinctly, while Brent was stirring his breakfast.

  He listened, then ladled his oatmeal into a huge bowl, topped it with raisins and cinnamon, and sat down with us. There was something comforting about the smell of that oatmeal.

  “So what happened to Tobin’s truck?” he asked.

  We gaped at him. I hadn’t thought of this; apparently Jessamyn hadn’t either. Of course we’d assumed Tobin had driven his truck out of town—but he’d never left. So where was his truck?

  Brent misunderstood our confusion. “Didn’t Tobin have a pickup truck?” he asked.

  “Yeah, he did,” I said. “Maybe it’s still out at his cabin.” Tobin had stayed in a cabin outside of town, where he’d had some kind of deal with the owner who lived downstate and used it only rarely.

  Jessamyn was shaking her head. “No, I went out there a couple of times, to see if he’d come back. No truck.”

  “Maybe it was impounded,” Brent said. “Did he own it?”

  “I guess so,” said Jessamyn, frowning. “But if he’d left it anywhere around here, someone who knew him would have seen it and mentioned it.”

  I think the thought came to her the same time it did to me: Maybe Tobin had tried to drive across the lake and crashed through—and maybe his truck was on the bottom of Lake Flower.

  We sat there a long moment.

  I cleared my throat. “No,” I said, shaking my head, sounding more confident than I felt. “No way he would have tried to drive across the lake, even drunk, not that early in winter. Walk maybe, never drive. And if he had, a truck going through the ice would have left a hole someone would have noticed.”

  Brent said nothing. He was probably calculating how thick the ice had been and how fast a hole would ice over, but was smart enough not to say any of this.

  “Then where’s his truck?” Jessamyn almost whispered.

  “He must have parked it somewhere, or it broke down and got snowed in, and no one’s noticed it,” I said. “Then he hitched a ride.”

  Around here a vehicle could get completely buried by snow on a back road and not reappear until spring. But it seemed an odd and unlikely coincidence that a truck would disappear at the same time its owner drowned. From the look on Brent’s face, I guessed his brain was going the same direction.

  The fact was, there were plenty of reasons that could lead to someone ending up dead around here. Tobin could have smarted off to the wrong person, dabbled in the North Country drug trade, gotten involved with someone whose spouse didn’t take kindly to being cuckolded. He could have been in a fistfight that went bad—you could break your skull on a rock in a bad fall; a blow to the wrong part of your chest can stop your heart. I’d once read in a John D. MacDonald novel that hitting someone’s nose at a certain angle could send fatal shards of bone into the brain—one of those tidbits that sticks in your mind when you’re thirteen, whether true or not.

  Jessamyn nodded. She stood. “I’m going to go work a shift for the girl who filled in for me last night.”

  “Listen,” I said, talking fast to get it out. “I talked to a friend who’s a policeman. He said you shouldn’t talk about this to people, and if anyone asks you questions, don’t answer.”

  She gave me an odd look.

  I’d rather have tried to explain this when Brent wasn’t around, but it wouldn’t have been easy even then. I didn’t want to tell her that her lippy repartee wouldn’t look good in print. I could hardly say Someone could start a rumor that you had something to do with Tobin’s death or Hey, the police may think you were involved. I tried again: “This could be a story that other papers want to cover, Jessamyn. It’s better if you just don’t say anything—then no one can misquote you.”

  From the look on Brent’s face, I saw he got it. I hoped she did too.

  CHAPTER 8

  It would take a while for the article to arrive, and I didn’t want to sit around waiting, so I loaded up skis and dog and headed for the trails behind Howard Johnson’s.

  It was in the low twenties, pretty much perfect for cross-country skiing if you knew not to overdress. It was a bright clear day, and the glide of my skis and the motion of my muscles let my brain start to unwind. I only had to stop once to clear out snow from between Tiger’s paws where it had melted and refrozen. You can buy dog booties, but dogs mostly don’t like them—I think they consider them an insult.

  In the snowy woods with sun bright overhead, it seemed absurd to think that anyone had caused Tobin’s death. This was an unlucky confluence of a late night, poor judgment, cold weather. Tobin had run out of gas or had a breakdown; his truck would be found, cemented in place by snow. He’d hitched a ride to town, decided to walk across the lake, and fallen in. He had died, grotesquely and accidentally. It happens all too often around here. You could fill a book with grim and sometimes mysterious Adirondack deaths—actually, someone had, a book called At the Mercy of the Mountains. Jessamyn would recover; she’d regain her old personality or form a new one. Everyone would talk about Tobin for a while, and then move on. Like they always did.

  I slid my skis into the back of my car, and then decided to drive on to Price Chopper—this was a day that called out for a hot dinner. Back at the house I chopped vegetables and tossed them in a big pot with stew meat and diced tomatoes, left it simmering, and went upstairs. After a quick shower, I turned on my computer and saw that George had sent the article. I opened it and started reading.

  When Matt Boudoin and his workers went to work on the Ice Palace Saturday, none of them had any idea what horrible discovery they would find under the ice.

  I winced. Maybe George had left it this bad to goad me into doing a complete rewrite. He knows I loathe incompetence, and that competitiveness runs deep within me.

  I read on. Near the end of the piece I found a sentence that made me cringe:

  Before Tobin Winslow disappeared, he had been dating Jessamine Fields of Lake Placid.

  The kid had not only misspelled Jessamyn, but had gotten her last name wrong. I highlighted the sentence and hit Delete without a qualm. Who Tobin had been dating wasn’t relevant—it wasn’t as if they’d lived together or been engaged—and the last thing Jessamyn needed was to be forever linked to this guy.

  I called Matt Boudoin, who told me they were continuing the ice harvest from a different area. I tracked down the number of the guy who owned Tobin’s cabin, and left him a message. I called the Saranac Lake police and found out precisely nothing about Tobin’s truck, Tobin’s family, or much of anything. I didn’t push it. I wasn’t the primary reporter on this, and I’d already annoyed one local cop.

  Then I Googled “Tobin Walter Winslow”—something the reporter apparently hadn’t bothered to do—and within minutes turned up Tobin’s hometown, the name of his prep school, and a photo of him at a lacrosse game at, yes, Princeton, during his freshman year. It was unsettling to see this younger, happier person with Tobin’s face, hair shorter and face brighter.

  A few more clicks, and I found his parents: Mary Martha and Bertram Martin Winslow II. I learned the name of the insurance company Tobin’s father owned, his private club, the hefty donations he’d made; the groups his moth
er belonged to, events she’d attended. Then I saw a link for a Bertram Winslow III and clicked, and started reading. When the words penetrated, I pushed back from my desk.

  Tobin had had one brother, four years his senior, who had died in a boating accident while Tobin was with him, the summer after graduating from Princeton. The Tobin I’d so disliked had seen his big brother drown; this set of parents had just lost their second son.

  I got up and walked around. Then I sat down and read more. There was one sister, Jessica, neatly spaced between the brothers, a tidy two years apart. It did occur to me that it was odd that Tobin’s sister had a name so similar to Jessamyn’s—I think it was Freud who said there are no coincidences.

  But I had an article to rewrite.

  Before moving to the Adirondacks, I’d worked part time at a paper out West, writing features, which I’d liked, and engagement and wedding announcements, which I’d hated. I’d applied for the sports editor job here partly because I was desperate, and partly because it was a long way from home. It took a while to figure out how to cover so many sports I knew next to nothing about, but once I did, I’d loved it. Athletes had passion for what they did—whether Olympic kayaker or sled-dog racer or the five boys on a tiny high school basketball team that didn’t win a game until the last one of the season. And I loved translating that passion onto the page.

  A benefit of having written so many articles on deadline is that you learn to work fast—very fast. In less than twenty minutes, I was done.

  I proofed, printed it to read again, and made a few more tweaks. I chose a photo with the crowd on the shore and the ambulance, and one of the ice cutters with their saws, working on the ice but not quite showing what was under it. I sent it all off to George, along with links to the Princeton photo and one of last year’s ice palace. I knew if he wanted to use them he’d get permission. That was another thing I liked about George—he wouldn’t cut corners. To him journalism was journalism, no matter how small your circulation numbers.