A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel

by Sara J. Henry

  Suddenly I was deeply fatigued. I went into my bedroom and plopped on my bed. When I opened my eyes it was dark, and I could hear voices downstairs. I could smell my stew, and something baking. Something chocolate.

  I went down, still groggy. I saw Jessamyn at the stove, stirring my stew. I blinked. This was as unlikely as her bringing me coffee and croissants that morning, maybe more so. Brent turned from the sink. “Hey,” he said. “Do you want to share? We made rice and a salad, and Patrick’s baking a cake.”

  This seemed an odd dream, conjured from fatigue and shock. We’d never all eaten together—the extent of our togetherness had been running into one another in the kitchen or happening to watch a TV show in the living room.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  Brent grinned. He had an open face, straight blond hair he kept short, and an athlete’s lithe body that was no mystery to any of us—cross-country ski suits don’t leave much to the imagination. Jessamyn had never shown a glimmer of interest in him, partly because he hadn’t been her type, I thought, and partly because he was a roommate. Home was where you relaxed, not where you picked up the next man in your life. But maybe it would be good for her to get to know a guy who didn’t spend every spare minute and spare dollar in the local bars, someone with a brain and goals and a passion for something.

  Maybe, I thought, she deserved more than she’d been settling for.

  Maybe many of us do.

  Patrick, our youngest roommate, wandered in. He had finished high school in California a year early, and at eighteen was planning to travel the world. First stop: Lake Placid, where he was scrounging free lift tickets and skiing his brains out. He pulled the cake from the oven and set it aside to cool while we ate bowls of stew and rice with salad and garlic bread. We talked about weather and skiing and made fun of tourists, which is what you do when you live in a resort town. The guys tossed bits of bread for Tiger, and Jessamyn ate more than I’d ever seen her eat. No one spoke of Tobin.

  It was strange in a way, but in a way it felt right. When we finished, we spooned all the leftover ice cream in the freezer over the still-warm cake and devoured it. It was one of the best evenings I’d had in a long time.

  Sometimes home is where you’re at, and family is who you’re with.

  CHAPTER 9

  The next morning my phone was ringing as I was coming in from taking Tiger out. It was Baker.

  “Look at the online edition of the newspaper,” she said without preamble.

  “What?”

  “Look at the newspaper online.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just read it,” she said, and hung up.

  I moved to my computer and to the paper’s website. I winced at the headline: BODY HAUNTS ICE PALACE. At a glance the story seemed as it was when I’d turned it in, except the bylines were reversed, with mine first.

  But there was a sidebar, a box with just the kid’s byline. And as I started reading it my throat went dry.

  WAS THERE FOUL PLAY?

  Did Tobin Winslow die a natural death in Lake Flower when he disappeared in December, or did someone hasten his demise?

  Saranac Lake police will say only that an autopsy has been scheduled, but refuse to divulge any other information.

  “No way could Tobin just have drowned,” said one of Winslow’s friends. “He was too smart for that. He wouldn’t have gone way out on that ice. Someone must have dumped his body.”

  Friends say that Winslow had been buying drinks for them at the Waterhole the last time they saw him, and he had had a large wad of cash. Some suggested the money was for drugs.

  I was reaching for the phone when I saw the last few lines: “A source says that Winslow and his girlfriend Jessamine Fields of Lake Placid had been fighting the week he disappeared and that she had been complaining about him. Fields was unavailable for comment.”

  My heart seemed to skip a beat. What had the kid been thinking? He might as well have headlined this LOCAL GIRL SUSPECT IN DRUGGIE BOYFRIEND’S DEATH. What had George been thinking? Tobin’s family would pitch a fit, the local cops would be ticked off, and Jessamyn—well, the word “pilloried” sprang to mind. I speed-dialed the paper; George wasn’t in. He liked to come in early and set the front section, then go home for a leisurely brunch. I called his home and told his wife it was urgent. George was on the phone in seconds. I imagined an omelet getting cold, toast growing soggy.

  “Did you okay this sidebar?” I asked.

  “What?”

  My voice got louder. “Did you okay this sidebar? On Tobin?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, puzzled.

  For a moment I couldn’t speak. “George, are you crazy? This is horrible—it’s lurid, it’s probably actionable.”

  Silence. “Let me get to my computer.”

  I listened to his footsteps, the creak of his desk chair, the clicking as he navigated to the story. I could hear his breath suck in when he saw the article. Then I knew what must have happened: this reporter, annoyed by having his story edited so extensively, had done something very stupid.

  “This isn’t what he turned in,” George said. “The sidebar I saw was a collection of quotes from Winslow’s friends. Somehow he went behind me and switched them. And changed the headline.”

  “Could he have changed the print version too?”

  George said a word I’d never heard from him. “I’m calling the press room now,” he said. I could hear him punching buttons on his cell phone. “Call Sheena for me and tell her I said to kill this story on the website. Take the whole site down if she has to.”

  We hung up. As I dialed the paper I saved a copy of the web page, and hit Print. This would disappear soon, and I wanted a record of it.

  Sheena answered, and I filled her in. “It’s urgent,” I told her.

  “The site’s down,” she said a moment later. “I’ll pull the story and we’ll redo the page. For now, people will just see a message that says ‘Down for Repairs.’ ”

  “Great. Are the presses running?”

  “I think so, the front section anyway,” she said. “Is the same story in the paper?”

  “I hope not, but probably. George is on the phone with them now.”

  “So they’re going to have to reprint it.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  She said a word that was an interesting variation of the one George had used.

  “Look, I’ll come over to help,” I said.

  “Great.” She hung up. I grabbed my parka, pulling it on as I headed for the door, and reached the paper in record time. The presses were ominously silent. George was at his desk, pounding away at his keyboard. The kid, Dirk, was nowhere in sight.

  “Can you finish this, Troy?” George asked as he stood. “I changed the headline and pulled the sidebar, but I don’t want his name on this, not anywhere. If there’s anything left from his piece, change it. And when you’re done, get Sheena to put the new story on the website.”

  George didn’t often get his back up, but when he did, he meant business. I slid into his chair as he headed back to the press room, probably to calm the press room guys and the women waiting to slide in inserts and bundle the paper. If he was smart, he’d send out for doughnuts and pass out cash bonuses at the end of the day. It was going to take a lot of work to get the paper out anywhere close to on time.

  I went through the piece. There wasn’t much left from the kid’s original copy, and it didn’t take long to redo those parts and add some background on the ice palace. I enlarged the photos to fill the rest of the gap, proofread, and clicked Save. The press room foreman was watching through the door, and I gave a thumbs-up. Within minutes the presses were rolling.

  I stayed a few hours, helping where I could—I can stuff inserts in papers as well as the next person, but it’s hot, dirty work. I tried to call home to let Jessamyn know what was happening, but no one answered. After the papers were loaded for distribution, I helped pull the front pages from the dis
carded ones headed for recycling. George worked alongside me, grimly.

  He set a few copies aside and let me take one. “Lock it away,” he said. He didn’t need to tell me.

  “What are you going to do with them?” I asked.

  “Burn them. I’ve got a barrel behind my house.”

  I helped him carry them out and put them in the trunk of his car.

  As I left, I saw the kid arriving. Probably Sheena had tracked him down. George was easygoing for the most part. You could make mistakes in stories, especially when you were new. You could turn a story in late and you could get away with showing up hungover to work a few times. But this George wouldn’t let slide.

  I’d never known him to fire anyone, but I had a feeling it was about to happen.

  CHAPTER 10

  The parking lot was icy, so I stepped carefully. Once I’d fallen flat here and cracked an elbow that still ached whenever a storm was coming in.

  I’m not particularly tuned in to the sound of cars and trucks, although of course dogs can tell when their owner’s car is approaching. But something about the vehicle driving past caught my attention—the sound of the engine, a bounce of springs, or something more subtle. I turned in time to see a truck go past.

  It was Tobin’s truck, or its twin.

  I stood there a moment, staring after it, my breath making billows of steam in the cold air. For one crazy, time-shifting moment, part of me thought the shadowy figure behind the wheel was Tobin.

  But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t Tobin’s truck. No one would be merrily driving it through town, where locals could identify it at a glance. It was just one that resembled his—not even, I thought, quite the same color.

  I’ve done this with people, ones no longer living: my grandfather, a soldier friend killed in Afghanistan. You see someone in a store or out working in the yard and you do a double take, because for an instant it is that person, with their height, their appearance, their mannerisms. Then when you look again, you see the resemblance is only slight.

  I started my car and flipped on the seat heater, one of the greatest inventions in the history of the automobile. I tried calling the house again, but the line was busy. I’d never spent the extra to get voice mail on the house phone—it’s a pain with a group of ever-changing roommates, and most people had cell phones. Jessamyn didn’t, and Tobin hadn’t either. I’d figured he didn’t want people to be able to find him.

  I pulled out onto Broadway and made the turn on Route 86 toward home.

  Something really ugly had just happened—for the newspaper and for anyone who had cared about Tobin. Something I’d played a role in. I suppose I could have e-mailed the reporter, letting him know how much I’d changed his piece, but one, it never occurred to me, and two, it would have seemed patronizing. This was how I’d learned to write on a newspaper, without any hand-holding or babysitting. You turned in your work; you paid attention to what was done to it. You did it better the next time.

  But part of me had reveled in fixing that article, in slashing out the kid’s bad writing, showing him how it was done. And I hadn’t given a thought to how he would react when he saw what had been done to the article. This is one of my flaws, a blind tunnel vision, where I concentrate so much on getting a job done that I don’t consider other people. There’s a reason my list of friends is short.

  And there are no true do-overs on the Internet. It takes only seconds to take a screen shot or for a web page to be cached. I just hoped that few people had seen this piece, and that fewer had taken note.

  Sometimes when I drive home I take the shortcut by St. Agnes that bypasses most of town and goes past the Crowne Plaza—what used to be the Holiday Inn—and reconnects with Main Street at the Olympic Center. But that route has a lot of stop signs, with figure skaters traipsing up and down the hill to the rinks, so today I decided to skip it.

  I was partway through town when something caught my eye: a woman, her stance fierce, her face contorted, facing two men, locals from the look of them. It took a moment to realize it was Jessamyn. I’d never interfered with her life, not even when maybe I should have, but she’d never just had a boyfriend found dead. And this looked ugly.

  I pulled over, and closed my car door loudly to get their attention. “Hey,” I said as I walked toward them, trying to sound casual. “What’s up?”

  One guy turned. He’d long passed the stage of needing a haircut and shave, and his clothes looked like he’d slept in them for a week. I knew before I got close what he would smell like—long-unwashed clothing mixed with that boozy aroma that seems to emanate from the pores. Every village had one of these: not quite the town drunk, not far from it.

  “What’s up is that this bitch had Toby killed,” he sputtered, waving a clutched piece of paper. Even from where I was I could see that it was a printout of the article from the Internet. My heart sank.

  People across the street glanced over, and the second of the two men looked as if he wished he were somewhere else. Jessamyn’s mouth opened and closed. This was worse than I’d feared.

  I said the first thing I could think of: “No, she didn’t.”

  “Yeah, he got tired of her and dumped her and she had him taken out.” His voice was louder, spittle spraying.

  I glanced at Jessamyn. Her eyes had a look I never could have imagined in her, like a cornered fox I’d once come across. The guy took a step toward her and without thinking, I moved between them and grabbed the paper from his hand.

  “You need to go home,” I said, enunciating clearly, staring straight at him. “You need to go home and you need to do it now.” I was calm, oddly calm. Something had kicked in, the opposite of adrenaline.

  He bristled and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. But the other guy, one who looked like he had slept in his clothes only one night rather than a week of nights, tugged at his friend’s arm.

  “Hey, Stevo, it’s not worth it, let’s go. C’mon. Let’s go to Al’s.”

  After a moment the guy let his friend pull him along up Main Street.

  I turned. Jessamyn was staring at me.

  “Troy, you’re shaking,” she said.

  I crammed the piece of paper in my pocket and looked down at my hands. “Guess I am.” Common sense should have told me to have eased Jessamyn away, to not have stepped into the fray. But my brain had disengaged and I’d moved without volition. Like when I was nine and saw a man beating a dog with a stick, and had run between him and the dog and ended up with the dog following me home and adopting me. Like when I’d dived into the lake last summer to rescue a small boy and had changed my life forever.

  Jessamyn looked over my shoulder toward my car, and then back at me. She gestured toward the café across the street. “How about some coffee?”

  “No, I’m fine, I just need to eat, and I’m tired. I’ve been at the paper for hours.” I moved toward the car. She followed and got in, and we rode to the house in silence. I went straight to the kitchen, sliced a banana into a container of yogurt, and devoured it. Jessamyn waited until I had a steaming mug of tea in front of me.

  “So what was that about?” she asked. “What was that piece of paper?”

  How do you tell someone Oh, just an article suggesting your boyfriend was killed and that you had something to do with it? You can’t—at least, I couldn’t. I reached into my pocket for the page I’d pulled from the guy’s hand and held it out to her.

  “It was just in the online version, and not for long—the editor took it down,” I said.

  She straightened it out and read it, slowly, then read it again. It took her a moment to speak. “What the— Where did he get this stuff?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe he heard guys in the bar talking or just made it up. You don’t know him?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, I guess I could have run into him somewhere, but I’d remember the name Dirk. What else did the paper say?”

  I pulled a newspaper from my bag and handed it to her
, pointing at the main article. I hadn’t wanted to be here while she read this, but maybe this was the honest way to do it. Maybe all journalists would be more careful if they imagined being in the room as the people involved read their articles. I watched her eyes move down the page.

  “Did you know—about Tobin’s brother?” I asked. She shook her head. I wasn’t surprised, not really. People who ended up here often had something they wanted to leave behind, something they didn’t talk about. Jessamyn never talked about her past either. And, well, neither do I.

  She pointed at the photo of the ice cutters on the page. “Do you have more pictures?”

  I wanted to say no. I didn’t want Jessamyn to see those photos. I didn’t want anyone to see them. That was one reason I hadn’t copied them onto a flash drive and taken them over to the Saranac Lake Police Station. But if anyone had a right to see them, she did.

  She followed me upstairs and I showed her how to scroll through the photos. She went through them, one by one, while I sat on my sofa, Tiger at my feet. This was harder than watching her read the article. Her gaze lingered on some of the long shots, then she pushed back from the desk.

  “What was Tobin doing out on the ice?” Her voice was so low I barely heard her.

  There were no easy answers here, and none, I thought, that would bring her any peace. I shook my head. “Drunk, maybe. Or maybe someone from the bar dared him to see how far out he would go.”

  “And no one noticed he didn’t come back?” She sounded incredulous.

  “They might not—you know how those guys are. They’d just assume he went home.” I didn’t want to tell her I’d wondered if someone had been with Tobin, if they’d seen him fall through thin ice and panicked; if an ice-diving attempt had gone very wrong. Or worse. Neither did I want to point out that we might never know what happened, that this might be one of the Adirondack deaths for which answers were never found.

  I looked at her. Her face twisted.

  “I loved him,” she said, her voice thick and odd.