A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel

by Sara J. Henry

  Win showed up at six thirty on the dot. It was starting to snow, so we took my car. When I first moved here I didn’t have four-wheel drive, but before the end of that first winter I sold my old Datsun and used a chunk of savings to buy a used Subaru. Every snowfall since, I’d been glad I did.

  These Saranac Lake bars I’d been in occasionally for work, snapping photos of the winner of a darts tournament, interviewing players after a softball championship, attending a celebration for someone at the paper. And many of these guys knew me—I’d taken photos at their ball games, covered the sporting events of their kids or younger siblings. They seemed happy to meet Win, to like talking to her about Tobin, to tell her how sorry they were. No one treated me any differently than they ever had, so any rumors the fired reporter had tried to start up had fallen flat. I should have know he hadn’t been here long enough to have any traction.

  After a while Win and I veered apart, chatting with people on different sides of the room. The guys had warmed up to her easily. She was listening intently to one man, then laughing at something another one said. Her smile was Tobin’s, I noticed again, and I wondered if I was the only one who felt that Tobin’s ghost was in the room.

  In a corner I saw Eddie, Dean’s younger brother, grin flashing, looking much as he had on the Saranac Lake football team a few years ago. I didn’t think he was twenty-one yet, but around here getting a fake ID was a rite of passage, like hanging your first deer in your yard. I chatted with some of the guys who had been on the ice-cutting crew that day, and then sat down by an older fellow named Armand. He tipped his head to acknowledge me. We sat in silence for a bit.

  “You were taking pictures, weren’t you?” he asked. “The day Tobin was found.”

  I nodded.

  “It was damn cold out there.”

  “Yes, it was,” I agreed. Something told me he wanted to say more. He ordered another beer and raised his eyebrows to see if I wanted one. I shook my head.

  “Not a good sight,” he said, after taking a long drink. “You knew Tobin?”

  “Yeah, he dated my roommate.”

  “Mmm. Tough on her.”

  I agreed. When he spoke next I had to lean in to hear him.

  “No one should die that way.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant. “You mean drowning? Freezing?”

  “Cold,” he said. “Cold and alone.” A long pause. Sometimes, he said at last, looking into his beer, he saw Tobin’s face under the ice, at night when he tried to go to sleep. I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there while he finished his beer. Maybe that’s every Adirondacker’s secret fear, dying cold and alone.

  By now more people had arrived; more beers had slid down throats, and people were becoming more garrulous. I saw Moose, who worked in the press room at the paper, and others I recognized. Most of the guys in Saranac Lake have nicknames, some so long-standing that few people remembered their real names or where the nickname had come from. When I was reporting local softball stats, I’d given up on listing real names of locals, and just used the names everyone called them.

  I asked if anyone had been around that night Tobin was last seen, and if they’d seen the supposed wad of cash.

  “Nope,” a guy called Major told me. “Sure, he bought some drinks, but Tobin did that now and then. He was a good guy.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two men to our right get up and move to the back of the bar. They resembled each other more than a little and moved the same way—brothers, I thought. Not everyone, it seemed, wanted to talk about Tobin.

  None of them knew the woman who had sent around the e-mails, which wasn’t surprising—these guys hung out at Saranac Lake bars, not ones in Lake Placid. Some of them had known Tobin had been seeing someone from Lake Placid, and Major had met Jessamyn once. He scoffed at the notion she might have been involved.

  “That tiny thing? Not likely. And if she’d had someone do something to Tobin, everyone would know about it.”

  He was right about that, but that didn’t mean they would tell anyone. This was Saranac Lake, not Lake Placid, and Adirondackers could keep things to themselves if they wanted to. Drunk or not.

  I didn’t know if Win was asking any questions, asking if anyone knew what had sent Tobin out onto that ice. Maybe all she needed was to visit this place, walk where Tobin had walked, chat with his friends, drink a beer or two in his honor.

  But I could ask, and I did. Most people shrugged. But a dark-haired guy called Chowder told me he’d seen Tobin go out and hadn’t seen him come back. “He said his head hurt a little. He said he wanted some air.”

  No wonder, I thought. The air in here was dense, and between the buzz of conversation and the background music, my own head wasn’t feeling great. “So you think he left? Just took a walk?”

  “Must have.”

  That could have been all it was—a headache from the noise, the booze, the late night; a walk onto the lake and onto thin ice. The police would close this, I thought, once the missing truck was found and the tox results were back. I’d write my series about Tobin, his life and his death, and Win would head home.

  We made our farewells, and we were quiet in the car on the way back. “That was good,” Win said when she got out. I nodded, and waited to make sure her car started before I went inside.

  Jessamyn was at the kitchen table, with a bowl of cereal she was more playing with than eating. She glanced up.

  “So you’ve been out with Win,” she said. She must have seen Win’s car, or saw us drive up. There was an edge to her voice that took me aback. No one here paid much attention to anyone’s comings and goings, and Jessamyn had never commented about anything I did.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. “I helped her get her woodstove going, and we went to this thing in Saranac Lake.”

  “Oh, you guys are best buds now.”

  This was a tone I’d never heard from Jessamyn. Even I could tell it was jealousy, although I didn’t understand it, not in this context. But this had been one heck of a week, and Jessamyn did sometimes lack the filter most people have.

  “Jessamyn, she needed help with the woodstove. I needed to see the guys in Saranac Lake, and they wanted to meet her. What’s the matter?”

  She shrugged. She’d set the business cards we’d collected from the door on the table, and was pushing them around. “Do you think any of these guys would pay me for an interview?”

  I stared at her. Now she was trying to make me angry. I kept my tone even. “I have no idea. You can call them and find out.”

  “Just joking. Hey, look at this one.” She pushed one card toward me. “Maybe Win sent him.”

  I picked it up. It was the card from a private investigator. “I doubt it; I think Win came here as soon as she got back from her cruise. I guess it could be her parents.” I watched her shuffling the business cards. I’d never seen her like this. “Jessamyn, what’s wrong?”

  She dropped the cards, and her mouth twisted. “It’s just that we had a lot of fun in Ottawa, and then you go off with Win. And I found out she’s the reason I got my job back—Miss Rich Do-Gooder fixing things up for her brother’s poor girlfriend.”

  I took a deep breath and sat down. This was one reason I didn’t usually have female roommates—you had to worry about hurting their feelings.

  “Jessamyn, Win didn’t think it was fair you lost your job. And look, obviously Win has money. So does Philippe. That doesn’t make them bad people. No one is putting you down.”

  She rubbed at the plastic tablecloth with one finger. “I know. It’s just … I’m not used to having friends like you guys.”

  “Well, then, don’t be a jerk.”

  This was apparently the right thing to say. She grinned, poured her soggy cereal into Tiger’s food bowl, and went down the hall.

  I let Tiger out, trudged upstairs, and fell into bed. I was nearly asleep when the phone rang—maybe Baker, I thought groggily, but she wouldn’t call this late, and suddenly I was afraid something had happened t
o Paul. I grabbed up the receiver. “Hello?” I said. There was no answer, and for a moment I thought it was a hang-up like the one I may have dreamed a few nights back. “Hello?” I said again, louder. This time someone answered, and I didn’t immediately recognize the voice.

  “What?” I said, in the tone that means I didn’t understand anything you said.

  This time the words were slower, and I could tell it was Win.

  “Troy, somebody broke into the cabin.”

  PART TWO

  ICE CAN FORM IN FIFTEEN SEPARATE KNOWN PHASES, DIFFERENTIATED BY THEIR CRYSTALLINE STRUCTURE, ORDERING, AND DENSITY.

  CHAPTER 20

  Win had retreated to her car and was calling me from there. She’d called 911, and had tried Dean but reached his voice mail. I told her I’d ring the Lake Placid police—the 911 folks are way downstate, in Albany, I think. I’d feel better calling directly.

  “You don’t have to come out,” she said, but of course I was going to.

  She was in her car when I got there, engine running. The police hadn’t arrived. She unlocked her passenger door to let me in. It was snowing lightly.

  “How bad is it?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s been trashed,” she said. “I didn’t go all the way in, but I could see from the doorway. Things are dumped out and turned over, and dishes broken.”

  “Your computer?” I asked.

  She gestured toward her back seat, where I could see her computer bag and a fat brown binder envelope. “I carry it with me, plus a file of things I’ve been working on. That’s all my important stuff.”

  “Did you call the owner?”

  She nodded. “I left him a message.”

  We heard the police car approaching before we saw its headlights. There was one officer behind the wheel. For a moment I feared it would be the one who had come to the house, the one I’d annoyed, but I remembered he’d been on the Saranac Lake force, not Lake Placid’s.

  We got out and he shone a flashlight on us, and I knew how a deer felt in the headlights. Win told him who she was and who I was, and he told us to wait while he went through the cabin. He scrutinized the snow near the porch before entering, but to me and probably to him, one blob of trampled-snow-melted-and-refrozen-into-ice looked like another. He was inside maybe five minutes, long enough for us to reach that almost-shaking-with-cold phase. But neither of us made a move to get back in the car, as if standing there shivering was somehow helping. Finally he came out and beckoned us to the open doorway, and we stepped inside.

  “Does anything seem to be missing, anything that you can see?” he asked Win. “Television, microwave, anything like that, things that might have serial numbers?”

  It looked like a cartoon scene, every drawer opened and emptied, every kitchen cupboard cleared out, and all of it on the floor. The oven stood open. The lining of the box springs was ripped loose, the sofa cushions pulled off and sliced open, the sofa overturned. Win’s suitcases were opened and the contents dumped in a pile.

  Win looked around, surveying it all, then shook her head. “I can’t see that anything is gone. I had my laptop with me, and my purse.”

  “You’ve been up here just a few days, right?” he asked Win.

  She nodded—I don’t think she’d realized quite what a small town this was. People pretty much knew who did what with whom and where. Now I recognized the policeman was the father of twins who had been on the Lake Placid High School hockey team. I’d seen him at games several times, once in uniform. I’d gotten a great shot of the twins, intent on chasing the puck down the ice, and had given them a print. His nod told me he’d recognized me as well.

  “This cabin’s owned by a fellow downstate, right?” he asked Win. “You know his name?”

  She nodded. “I called and left him a message.”

  He pulled out a pad and took down the owner’s info. “Your brother used to live here?” he asked. “Your, er, deceased brother.” He looked uncomfortable, and I liked him for that.

  “Yes, he did. I came up here after his body was found, and the owner let me stay here.”

  “Would your brother have had anything valuable here? Anything in particular someone would want to steal?”

  Win shook her head. “He had an old watch of our grandfather’s, but I don’t think much else.”

  He waited, as if expecting her to say more, but she didn’t. “The door wasn’t damaged. You left it locked?”

  When Win nodded, he asked, “Do you know who else has a key?”

  I thought, not for the first time, of the key that had been stored under the flowerpot—which anyone could have had copied at any time.

  “The owner, and of course my brother did, and there used to be one kept on the porch. Otherwise, I have no idea.”

  He wrote more in his notebook. “You’ll want to get that lock changed. And you shouldn’t stay here tonight,” he told Win, and then looked at me, in a sort of turbo-charged hint.

  “Of course, she can stay with us,” I said. Which I would have assumed she would. I wasn’t leaving her in this mess.

  Win hesitated. “I don’t really want to leave the place like this—and with someone having a key.”

  I was shaking my head without realizing it. “Win, you can’t stay here. And you don’t really think they’re going to come back tonight?”

  She looked around. “There are papers and things here I don’t want to lose.”

  “Well, you can’t stay here until you get a new lock and we get it cleaned up. Not even if I left Tiger with you. Look, try Dean again and ask him to keep an eye out, and we can leave your car or mine here so it’ll look like someone’s here. If there’s anything you’re really worried about, bring it with you.”

  The policeman was watching us. Win looked around the room again, and I think she realized that she couldn’t stay here, not now. She stepped toward the mattress and pulled at something, and when she turned she had the quilt she’d given her brother in her arms. She handed it to me, then moved toward an opened suitcase, pushing inside whatever fit in one brisk motion, grabbed up papers from the floor and dumped them on top, then snapped it shut and stood. “It’s okay to go in your car?” she asked me, her fingers gripping her bag tightly.

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  We locked the door of the cabin behind us, however pointless that might have been. She retrieved her things from her car, and got into mine. We followed the police car down the road to the highway. We didn’t talk on the drive.

  No one was downstairs, and the house was quiet. I showed Win into the downstairs bedroom. I’d realized she’d need clothes and toiletries, and had brought in my emergency bag from the car for her. “There’s sweats and stuff in there,” I said. “In case you don’t have what you need.” I nodded at her suitcase.

  She grimaced. “Thanks. I won’t be wearing any of those until they’re laundered, anyway.”

  I nodded, and heard her close her door and snick the lock shut as I walked down the hall. Not a bad idea, I supposed. As I went upstairs I closed and locked my door.

  It was cold when I got into bed. As I lay there waiting to warm up, I began to think that there had perhaps, after all, been more to Tobin’s death than a tipsy late-night ramble across a lake, on ice too thin, in weather too cold.

  CHAPTER 21

  By the time I got downstairs in the morning, Win had wheeled the portable washing machine to the sink, figured out how to hook it up, and had a load of wash going. She was wearing some of my old clothes from the emergency bag, jeans I didn’t like and a ratty sweatshirt. Somehow they looked elegant on her. Somehow very little seemed to look elegant on me, or stay that way for long.

  I asked if she’d like to try cornmeal pancakes, and she thought that would be fine. I melted butter in my cast-iron skillet and within five minutes slid a plateful of corncakes on the table, and set out my blackberry preserves from Nashville and the crunchy natural peanut butter I bring back from Ottawa. This I never would have done with my own sister
s—they would have been highly disapproving of the picnic table used as a dining table, never mind the plastic-coated tablecloth. Not that they ever would have visited me.

  “I don’t have syrup, sorry,” I said, but Win spread the crispy corncakes thinly with jam and even tried one with peanut butter, and said they were delicious. The trick is using butter instead of oil, and not using a packaged mix—it’s not as if mixing flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder takes a lot of skill. Patrick ambled in, and I convinced him to help me out by taking one of the too-brown corncakes.

  Win asked if I knew a locksmith.

  “I imagine there’s one in the phone book. Or you could buy a new lock or take the cylinder in yours to be rekeyed. Either would be cheaper and faster than getting a locksmith out there. They’re easy to install. I could do it.”

  She thought about it, and decided a new lock would be best—the owner had told her she could do what she wanted.

  “So you heard back from him?” I asked.

  “Yes, he called back. He says that key’s been under that flowerpot for ages, and anyone could have made a copy. Of course, I didn’t leave it there when I moved in, but I didn’t think about getting the lock changed.”

  “Do you know … were Tobin’s keys found with him?”

  She was quiet for a moment. “They told me his wallet was in his pocket. But no, no keys.”

  I could see the keys in Tobin’s hand, see him jingling them, sliding them into his pants pocket. “He carried a ring of them, maybe four or five. In his right front pocket.”

  “That sounds about right. He would have had a key to the cabin, one to his truck, his post office box, one to my place. You’re thinking someone could have used his keys to get in.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe,” I said. Of course, then that person would now have a key to Win’s home. Her brain was trekking along the same path.

  “I had a deadbolt installed on my door at home,” she said. “Tobin didn’t have that one yet.”