A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel

by Sara J. Henry

  “Call me Win,” she said. Maybe she realized an already awkward conversation would be even more awkward with one person named Jessamyn and another named Jessica. “That’s what my sorority sisters called me.” It was a measure of how much I instinctively liked her that I didn’t hold the sorority-sister thing against her.

  She started talking, in that flat tone you have when all the energy has drained out of you. The police had notified her parents when Tobin had been found, she said, but she’d been out of the country and couldn’t get here until now. Someone had mentioned the online article with Jessamyn’s name, but she hadn’t seen it. She’d asked around and had found her way to the restaurant, and had been directed here. She wasn’t quite sure why she was here, in our house, she said, but she’d needed to come here. It made sense, I supposed. If my brother had died, I might be doing the same thing, visiting his friends, retracing his last steps.

  “You were his girlfriend?” she asked Jessamyn.

  Jessamyn nodded, her face blank.

  Win turned to me. “And you knew him too, right? You wrote the newspaper article, about Tobin.”

  I nodded. I think her next question took us both by surprise.

  “Was he happy here?”

  Jessamyn’s face clenched. She opened her mouth, and closed it again.

  “I think he was,” I said, when I saw Jessamyn wasn’t going to be able to answer. “He had Jessamyn. He had friends. He did some construction work. He was healthy.”

  It wasn’t much of an epitaph, but it seemed to be what Tobin’s sister needed, at least for now. She nodded. She set down her tea and looked around.

  “Are you two hungry?” she asked. “Would you like to get something to eat?”

  So we bundled up and walked up to town, like three friends out on a cold Adirondack afternoon. We went to Pete’s, across from the movie theater, and took a table in the far back.

  It should have seemed odd, sitting there with this woman who was Tobin’s sister, but it didn’t. After we ordered, Win started talking again, like a toy wound too tightly. She told us about being the only girl between two brothers, about growing up with them, Tobin dropping out of college after their brother died. “Tobin took it hard,” she said. “Up until then he’d tried to please our parents, tried to do everything Trey did, and after the accident he just stopped trying, and pretty much left the family.” At first I heard Tray, and it took a moment to remember this was what rich families called sons whose names were Thirds—trey, for three.

  “This was the first place he’d seemed to settle down.” She blinked hard, the way you do when you’re trying to convince yourself not to cry. “What about you two? Are you from here?”

  We shook our heads. Our food arrived, and I told her about growing up in Nashville and taking the job here after university out West, how I’d loved working as a small-town sports editor but because of the nonstop schedule had quit to freelance. Jessamyn volunteered that she was from the Midwest and had lived here a year and a half, and had never been to college. She said it with a touch of defiance, but Tobin’s sister wasn’t in a judging mood. And maybe she wasn’t a judging sort of person.

  “So are your … did your parents come up too?” I asked.

  She shook her head, her expression bland. “They’re leaving it up to me,” she said.

  I didn’t know what this meant, leaving it up to her … to identify the body, manage Tobin’s affairs, close out his cabin, I supposed. We sat in silence a long moment.

  “Are you staying out at Tobin’s cabin?” I asked finally.

  “No. The police mentioned it, out past town, right? I don’t know exactly where it is. I just have his PO box number, here in Lake Placid.”

  Jessamyn and I looked at each other. “I found the owner’s phone number,” I said. “You can call him and ask if you could go out there.”

  Win blinked. “But I wouldn’t know how to get in.”

  Jessamyn spoke up. “I know where there’s a key.”

  We took my car—Win’s rental didn’t have four-wheel drive, and the road to the cabin wouldn’t be as well plowed as the main road. Jessamyn sat up front and directed me. There were no other tracks, car or human, as we neared the cabin, but it had snowed heavily. As we got out, the sound of our car doors closing was crisp in the stillness.

  It felt odd to be approaching Tobin’s cabin, in a row, silently, as if in a funeral procession. On the front porch Jessamyn tipped over a dead potted plant, pried off a key iced to the base, and handed it to Tobin’s sister. She pushed it into the door, hesitated a moment, and turned the key.

  It was dark. Win fumbled beside the door and found the switches, and the room flooded with light. From the doorway you could see the entire place: iron bed frame, bed covered in a quilt and neatly made, clothes hanging on wooden pegs, woodstove in the middle of the room, a small kitchen, a sofa and a rocking chair, a small battered wooden desk and chair, a door opening into a bathroom. All tidy, all waiting for a man who was never coming back. Win took a deep breath and stepped inside. I looked at Jessamyn. Her face was pale.

  The cabin had small baseboard electric heaters that likely put out just enough to keep the pipes from freezing. It was cold, very cold. The woodstove had a box of kindling and newspapers and a small stack of logs beside it.

  “Do you want a fire?” I asked.

  Win nodded, and I knelt and set to building one. The wood was dry and the stove drew well, so it took only minutes to get a crackling fire going. The stovepipes creaked as they expanded with the heat.

  The place smelled vaguely of wood smoke, with a thin layer of dust on the furniture, but without that musty smell some shut-up old places have. There seemed to be nothing out of place, no powder from dusting for fingerprints, if that’s really how they did it. Maybe the police hadn’t even come out here. Maybe they’d already decided this was an accident, and were just going through the motions to keep the family happy.

  Tobin’s sister moved around the room, looking at the hanging clothes, the books aligned on the desk. She sat on the bed, smoothing the quilt with one hand. She looked up, tears trailing down her face. “I gave him this quilt when he came up here,” she said. “I told him it would be perfect for the Adirondacks.”

  Jessamyn moved to her, gracefully, easily, in a way I wouldn’t have thought her capable of, and the two of them sat there clinging to each other. I felt an interloper, there in that small space with their pain. I hadn’t liked Tobin, and now I was in a room with two people who had loved him and were grieving him. I sat down in the rocking chair. I thought of the moment when Tobin had slid past me in his ice coffin, and damned if I wasn’t crying too.

  When the knock came on the door we all jumped. Jessamyn and Win looked at the door and then at me. The knock came again, louder. I don’t know who we thought it was, but we were all scared. I looked around—no phone. My cell phone was in my pocket, but I didn’t know if it would get a signal out here.

  “Who is it?” I called, pulling out my cell and fumbling it open.

  The voice on the other side of the door was deep, male. “It’s Dean—a friend of Tobin’s.”

  I glanced at the others and moved to open the door. I hoped this wasn’t someone who hadn’t heard about Tobin’s death. Breaking that news to one person had been bad enough; I didn’t want to be doing it again.

  The man at the door was tall, wearing a heavy coat with a hood over a watch cap. As he pulled his hood back I saw he was one of the two men who had accosted Jessamyn on the street—not the semi-drunk one, but the other one. His gaze moved past me to Win and Jessamyn.

  “My place is across the way and I saw the lights here.” He looked around. “I know—”

  “This is Tobin’s sister, Win,” I interrupted, gesturing to her. “And I think you know Jessamyn.” I kept my tone bland.

  “Dean Whitaker,” he said. “I’m, um, very sorry about your brother,” he said to Win. He nodded at Jessamyn, his face a touch red.

  As
soon as he said his last name, I realized who he was. I’d spent much of the Saranac Lake football season my last year at the paper focusing on a square jaw much like this one. “You’re Eddie’s brother,” I said.

  He looked at me, startled.

  “I was the sports editor at the Enterprise when Eddie was quarterback,” I told him.

  He nodded, then moved his feet uncomfortably and looked at Win. “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay. And that nobody was messing with Tobin’s stuff.”

  Win stood, graciously, smiling at him. “Everything is fine. Thank you for coming out.”

  He cleared his throat. “Tobin was a good guy,” he said gruffly. He nodded again at Jessamyn, as close to an apology as she was going to get, and turned to go. “You did some good articles,” he said to me on his way out the door. For around here, this was high praise.

  After Dean’s visit we simultaneously decided it was time to head back into town. We locked up and put the key back where we’d found it.

  “Look,” Jessamyn said, pointing to a trail of large oblong indentations in the snow.

  “Snowshoes,” I said, recognizing the shape. “Dean came on snowshoes.” I hadn’t thought there was another house or cabin close enough to see this one, so maybe he’d been out snowshoeing and happened to see the lights. He hadn’t seemed the type to hike around in the woods on a cold evening, but who knew?

  We got into the car, Win in front this time. It was her turn, Jessamyn said, to get the benefit of the seat heater.

  “So you have other roommates?” Win asked as my car crunched down the road.

  “Yes, Patrick and Brent, he’s a biathlete, and Zach, but he’s out of town now,” I told her.

  “Did they know Tobin?”

  “They’d met him but didn’t know him well,” I said. Heck, I hadn’t known him. I wasn’t sure Jessamyn had known him. I couldn’t imagine the Tobin I thought I’d known having a sister like this, one who cared so much about him that she was traipsing around the frozen countryside with two strangers, retracing his last steps.

  CHAPTER 16

  On the trip back to town we formulated a plan: Win wasn’t looking forward to another evening in a soulless hotel, and we had that huge box of food Elise had sent. Win would have dinner with us.

  “You’re sure it’s okay with your other roommates?” she asked. We assured her it would be. We didn’t try to explain that we didn’t need to clear things with them, that it wasn’t like, well, a sorority house. Win said she wanted to stop at her hotel and could walk down to our house, so we dropped her off.

  “She’s nice,” Jessamyn said as we pulled away.

  “Yep. Tobin never talked about her?”

  She shook her head.

  This didn’t surprise me. Nor did it surprise me that Win hadn’t asked us anything about how we thought Tobin had died. Maybe the why didn’t matter to her, at least not now. Maybe all that mattered was seeing some of his life here, the closest she could come to visiting him.

  I brought my bags in and the box of food from Elise, and slid a partially thawed casserole into the oven. I put togther a salad, and set out Elise’s home-baked bread and leftover brownies. I ran upstairs to e-mail Philippe and Jameson that we’d gotten home and that Tobin’s sister had showed up.

  I didn’t hear the knock on the front door, but as I came down Jessamyn was showing Win into the kitchen. She had brought wine, which we poured into juice glasses and had with bread and cheese while we waited for the casserole to finish cooking. It was delicious, chicken and cheese blended with broccoli and noodles, with a spice I couldn’t identify. We told Win about Ottawa and Paul and Philippe, and she told us stories of the summers she and her brothers had spent with their grandfather. When she’d gotten news of Tobin’s death she had been on a cruise, and it had taken a while to get a flight to Albany. She had owned half a small real-estate firm in New Haven, she said, and had sold out her share last year, partly to spend more time with her grandfather, who had been in a nursing home nearby. But after he’d passed away, she’d decided to take a vacation and head somewhere sunny.

  I winced. “I’m sorry,” I said. I was sorry her grandfather and her brother had died, but sorry too she’d left her warm vacation to come here to subfreezing temperatures.

  “I’d like to see more of Tobin’s friends here,” she said. “Do you know how I could meet them?”

  Jessamyn glanced at me, and up at the clock on the wall. “I could take you out,” she said. “A bunch of them will be out before long.”

  “Oh, I’d like that,” Win said brightly.

  I gave Jessamyn a look. She looked back, wide-eyed and innocent. I could have throttled her.

  “Jessamyn, you can’t let her walk into this cold.”

  Win looked at us, confused. Jessamyn gave me a whatever-do-you-mean? look. Maybe this was her way of paying me back for the newspaper debacle. I hadn’t thought she’d blamed me for it, but maybe she had. Or maybe this was just how she dealt with stuff: stir things up, and sit back and see what happened.

  “That newspaper piece online that mentioned Jessamyn, the one that got pulled,” I told Win. “Someone sent it around to a bunch of people and people started harassing Jessamyn, saying she had something to do with Tobin’s death.”

  Win’s face was blank. “I don’t understand.”

  This would be easier to show her than to explain. I held up a finger in the universal just-a-sec gesture, ran up to my room, and got the printout I’d made. Back downstairs, Jessamyn was looking anywhere but at me; I think she was regretting how she’d played this. Like a kid, I don’t think she’d thought it through.

  “The reporter substituted this for another piece,” I said as I handed the paper to Win. “It was never in the actual paper, but someone saved a copy and sent it to everyone they knew and just about every news outlet around. Things went nuts—reporters calling and coming by. That’s why we went out of town for a few days.”

  Win read the piece and looked up, frowning.

  “This is ridiculous. So what if Jessamyn had a tiff with Tobin? I had plenty of them, and I never shoved him into a lake. And maybe Tobin had cash on him that night—what, the reporter’s suggesting Tobin was killed for his money? So was it an angry girlfriend or mugger or drug dealer?”

  Her voice was almost imperious, and at that moment it was very clear that Win had grown up with money, that she was used to making things happen. I no longer wondered how she’d managed to build up and sell a real-estate firm before she was out of her twenties.

  Jessamyn grinned. “I like this woman,” she said. I grinned too, and after a moment Win relaxed.

  “Of course it’s ridiculous,” I said. “But the media jumped all over it. And you need to know that if you go out tonight, things may get ugly.”

  She straightened. “Dangerous?”

  “No, not dangerous, but maybe unpleasant. Tobin had a lot of friends, and they seem to want to blame someone. And it’s possible the person who sent this piece around will be there, a woman named Marilyn, we think.”

  “This was my brother,” she said, jaw set. “I’m not letting an idiotic article by a bad writer keep me from talking to people who knew my brother.”

  So she and Jessamyn bundled up to go out. I begged off. I’m never entirely comfortable in bars, where it seems a language is spoken I don’t understand. They’re dark and noisy, so you can barely hear anyone, and the purpose of being there night after night, I don’t get. But I don’t drink much or see the point in that, either, so I’m not likely ever to get it. Maybe it’s just someplace to go when you don’t want to go home.

  And for now, I thought, it was best to leave me, the reporter, out of the mix.

  I did the dishes. Patrick came in and cooked a vat of spaghetti; Brent ventured down to the living room to watch TV. I told them Tobin’s sister was here and that she and Jessamyn had gone out. I took Tiger for a walk, partway around the lake and back rather than all the way around—I wasn’t
in the mood to face the lights and people on Main Street.

  I went on to bed. I didn’t hear the others come in. My phone rang once, but when I fumbled it to my ear, there was nothing but a dial tone. Wrong number. Or maybe, I thought, as I curled back under the covers, I’d only imagined hearing it ring. I’ve done this before, been jolted out of sleep by what I thought was a phone ringing or alarm clock buzzing, only to realize I’d dreamed it.

  CHAPTER 17

  As soon as I rolled out of bed in the morning I checked e-mail: only a few new Google Alerts about Tobin. But there was a cryptic message from George that he needed to talk to me. This made me uneasy. Maybe he, like Jessamyn’s boss, was going to tell me he couldn’t use me anymore. Maybe this whole thing was going to make both of us persona non grata.

  I was surprised to see Win at the table when I went downstairs, sipping a cup of coffee from Stewart’s up the street. She smiled when she saw me—her smile was Tobin’s, and suddenly it seemed his ghost was in the room.

  “Hi,” she said. “It was late when we came in and I’d been drinking and didn’t want to drive or walk back to the hotel, so I borrowed your guest room. I hope that was okay? Jessamyn said it would be.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s what it’s there for.”

  Their outing had been fine, she said. Someone told them the woman who sent around that article was out of town. Dean, who we’d met at the cabin, had been there, and Brent had come up. I blinked. I’d never known Brent to go to the bars.

  “Some people were a little strange at first,” Win said. “But I told them it was absurd to think that Jessamyn had anything to do with Tobin’s death, and that the person who wrote that article needed his head examined.”