A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel

by Sara J. Henry

  I thought about the fellow Armand, who had told me he still saw Tobin’s face whenever he shut his eyes. I should include his and others’ reactions in the last article: how Tobin’s life and death had affected the people who had known him, who had been there when his body was found, who lived here and would be kayaking or swimming in that lake come summer.

  Suddenly I needed to be around someone who hadn’t recently had someone close to them die. I called Baker, who said without hesitation that lunch sounded like a great idea and no, I didn’t need to bring anything.

  “Come on over,” she said. “I’ll make tuna sandwiches.”

  She would know many of the people in those photos, so I grabbed my laptop and whistled for Tiger.

  Baker had the sandwiches waiting, with fresh-brewed iced tea for me and a Coke for her. Yes, I drink iced tea even in the winter.

  I bit into my sandwich.

  “People really liked the article,” Baker said. “It wasn’t what they expected. But they liked it.”

  I nodded, and picked up the second half of my sandwich. I was hungrier than I’d realized.

  “You’re working on the next article now?” she asked.

  “Yeah. It’s going to start with Tobin’s brother’s death—he died when Tobin was nineteen.” I was avoiding saying drowned; part of me didn’t want to acknowledge it, that two brothers in this family had drowned, in different seasons, different states, half a dozen years apart.

  “So it’ll be hard to do.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “How’s Win holding up?”

  “Pretty well. She’s estranged from her parents, but she does talk to her mother some.”

  “And Jessamyn’s doing all right?”

  “Yeah, she seems to be.” I wished I could tell her about Jessamyn, about what I’d found out, but I couldn’t.

  I asked Baker if she could help ID some people in my photos, and she agreed. I opened my laptop and pulled up a photo of men working on the ice. I jotted down names as she recited them. Then I opened the clearest of the shots that showed people on the shore, standing shoulder to shoulder, and zoomed in on their faces. As she told me names, I wrote them down, left to right. I pointed out the fellow I thought I’d recognized.

  “That’s the oldest of the Phillips brothers,” Baker said. “I don’t remember his real name—they call him Crick. There’s three boys, I think, and a sister—their parents died in a car crash, and he’s raising them.”

  “Yikes,” I said. “That’s tough.”

  “Better now; they’re all out of high school and working, except the girl.”

  We went through the rest of the lineup, and she told me who she thought might be willing to talk.

  Baker knew my tendency to work too hard. As I left she thanked me for coming over. She knew that part of the reason for this visit was me trying not to be obsessed with what I was writing about, me trying to think of the other people in my life. The ones who were alive.

  On impulse I stopped by the newspaper office on my way out of town and stuck my head in the newsroom. George was talking to a reporter but waved me over.

  “We sold a lot of papers with your article,” he said. “I guessed we would, and we’d printed extra. You got some, right? I sent a batch over to the News for you.”

  I nodded. It felt good that he’d had that kind of faith in the article—or faith that the story itself would pull in readers. Or both.

  “Hey, come back in my office for a minute,” he said.

  I followed him out of the newsroom. He rummaged on his desk and tossed a handful of papers and envelopes toward me.

  “Take them,” he said. “They’re either for you or about you.”

  I tucked them under my arm and turned to leave.

  “Troy, you’re doing good,” he said. “This is a good series, and it will help provide closure for some people.”

  I wasn’t sure, at this point, and I didn’t think there’d be much peace for anyone until we knew how or why Tobin had died. But there was no turning back. In my car in the parking lot I looked at the things he’d handed me, a collection of e-mails from editors of other papers and a magazine. I read the one from the magazine editor: If the rest of the articles in this series are this strong, we may be interested in buying them and running it as one long piece.

  Then I opened the last item, a card, addressed to me. From the Winslows’ nanny.

  Dear Troy: You wrote a moving and lovely story—I cried when I read it. Thank you for capturing Tobin, and for caring about him. Please give my best regards to his sister.

  A wave of emotions ran over me. This was more than I could handle: lunch with someone who cared about me, accolades from unknown editors, a heartfelt note from the nanny. Maybe I hadn’t cared for adult Tobin, but it turned out I’d cared for the younger one, one I’d never known.

  This was partly why I kept people at a distance. I could handle the pain life threw at you—that I had experience with. It was this, the good stuff, the praise, the warm fuzzy stuff that I had a hard time coping with. Sometimes I felt like Spock, from Star Trek, puzzled by human emotions. Or like the robot on the 1960s TV show Lost in Space that beeped out, “It does not compute.” Right now, none of this was computing.

  Box away these feelings, I thought. It was the only way I knew to keep going. I sat there a moment longer before pulling out of the parking lot, blinking hard so I didn’t cry.

  CHAPTER 32

  All this had taken my mind off Jessamyn, had let me mentally file away what I had found on the Internet, had allowed me to try to pretend that the person in that high school photo wasn’t her. But when I got home, I couldn’t pretend any longer. Her jacket was there, on its peg. I climbed the stairs to her room and tapped on the door.

  “Can I come in?” I asked. When she answered I went in and closed the door behind me. “I have to talk to you about something.” My throat was tight.

  She looked at me, a flicker of concern on her face. “Okay,” she said cautiously.

  There was no chair in her room, so I knelt on my haunches, leaning back against the wall. She was sitting on her mattress on the floor. I took a deep breath and told her that I’d been researching and fact-checking for my articles, had Googled her name, and found a trail of virtual bread crumbs that led me to a story of a girl named Jessamyn Wallace in Ohio who had fractured her brother’s skull with a baseball bat, who sounded a whole lot like the person we knew as Jessamyn Field.

  She didn’t deny it, and she didn’t hesitate. “Field was my grandmother’s maiden name. Wallace wasn’t my real name anyway. That was the guy my mother married.” Then she told me all of it. I think she’d been needing to tell it for a long time. Either no one had asked, or hadn’t asked the right questions. I sank back and sat, cross-legged, on the floor as she recited it, as if she was telling someone else’s story or something that had happened in another lifetime. In a way, I guess, she was.

  Her father had left when she was very small, and soon after her mother had moved in with a man. But when Jessamyn was seven, his ten-year-old son had come to live with them. I think I could have told the essence of the rest of it, but she needed to do it. At first, things seemed good, and she loved having a big brother. But when she was nearly ten, it started, little by little. She was afraid to tell her mother what was happening, and, especially at first, she thought she was partly to blame and hesitated to implicate the boy she thought of as her brother. But when she was twelve, bolstered by school announcements and placards that urged her to tell an adult if someone was doing something she didn’t like, she did. At least, she tried. Her mother didn’t believe her, or pretended not to, and told her to never dare say such things again. Jessamyn went to the hardware store and pocketed two little sliding locks and installed one of them on her bedroom door and the other on the inside of her closet door, for a bolt hole, a line of last defense. And when she was alone in the house with the boy she used to call her brother, she went into her bolt hole and
slid the lock shut, dragging a blanket and pillow in with her to sleep. And no one ever asked why she’d installed the lock on her bedroom door, and no one seemed to notice there was a lock on the inside of her closet. One evening when their parents were out the boy caught her unawares because she hadn’t noticed he’d loosened the screws in the lock on her door, but the scant moments it took for it to pop loose from the wall were enough for her to yank out the baseball bat she’d stashed under her bed and swing it at his head as hard as she could.

  “I thought I’d killed him at first,” she said. “And I didn’t care. I wanted him to be dead. I wanted him dead for ever touching me, for making me afraid all the time, for making me sorry I ever trusted him.” She considered trying to drag him to his room, leaving him on the floor as if he’d fallen out of bed, and pretending she had no idea what happened. But her mother and his father arrived home before she’d had time to decide if that would work.

  She knew no one would believe her; her mother hadn’t, and that was before she popped the beloved son of the house in the head with a baseball bat. She was the one with poor grades and behavior problems; he was the popular kid on the football team. So she shifted her story before she even spoke. She’d had a bad dream, she told them, letting herself cry, and her brother must have come in her room because she screamed and she had woken and panicked and swung the bat at him, thinking he was part of her nightmare. Everyone swallowed the tale, because they wanted to, and later the policeman at the hospital told her, “Young lady, if you’re going to have bad dreams, don’t keep a bat in your room.” She smiled sweetly at him, thinking she’d like to take a bat upside his head because he wasn’t smart enough to consider there could be another reason a young girl might poleax her older stepbrother in her bedroom when neither parent was home. And a few nights later, after dinner with the kid she’d called her brother whose skull now had a hairline fracture, and his father and her mother who’d allowed it all to happen, she’d smiled at all of them, and late that night she filled her backpack and her duffel bag, took the stash of money she’d saved and some food from the fridge, rumpled her bed as if she’d slept in it, and left a note that her father had asked her to come live with him. She’d slipped out, hiked across town to the local Greyhound station, and got on the first bus that went anywhere. She hadn’t yet turned fifteen.

  She found a waitressing job in the first town she thought was far enough away, spent a week of nights hiding out in the public library after it closed until she had enough cash to rent a room. She got a fake ID in a new name, and moved on every year or so, and didn’t relax until the day she turned eighteen.

  “That’s what Tobin did too,” she told me, her face brightening. “When he left home, he took the first Greyhound bus that went cross-country.”

  Maybe I was being gullible, but I believed every word of it. It fit. It fit everything: how Jessamyn wouldn’t talk about her family. How she was with men, how she went from job to job. How she kept everyone at a distance.

  “Did you try to find your father?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “If he’d wanted me, he’d have gotten in touch with me long before then. But it was a good story. Even if they bothered to look for him it would take a while, and it would give me time to get away. And time to get old enough that they couldn’t make me go back.”

  “You changed your last name.”

  “I liked Field—it was my dad’s mom’s last name before she got married. But I didn’t want to lose Jessamyn, although I probably should have. My mother told me she named me after an author.”

  I gave a short laugh, and she gave me an odd look.

  “It’s just that I’m named after a character in a book, and so is my brother,” I told her. “But not after the author. Which is good, because her name was Ngaio. A New Zealand name: NY-oh.”

  She nodded.

  We sat there for a few minutes, me on the floor, her on the edge of her bed. I didn’t tell her I was sorry for what happened to her. She didn’t want or need pity. What she needed was to know that I could know her story and not treat her any differently.

  “Jessamyn, I’ll have to tell George that you use a different last name, and some of why,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I don’t care anymore.”

  “It’s just …” I started. “Jessamyn, do the state police know any of this?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t tell them. They didn’t ask if I ever had a different name.”

  “That’s why you were so nervous about talking to them.”

  She nodded.

  “But you did it anyway.”

  “I had to.” Her voice dropped, and she nearly whispered the rest. “Because I didn’t believe in him, Troy. I thought Tobin had left me, and he didn’t. So I couldn’t run away, even if it meant the other stuff came out.”

  I felt a sense of pain, so deep it made my throat seize. I was awed by her courage, humbled by what she’d endured, and I wished I could tell her this. I was glad I’d never let myself believe she’d been involved in Tobin’s death, glad I hadn’t paid attention to my brother’s suspicions. We sat there a while, and then I wedged myself up. I was stiff from sitting on the floor.

  “You aren’t going to tell, are you,” Jessamyn said. It wasn’t a question. Maybe she was manipulating me, but at the moment I didn’t care.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t sure when I’d made my decision, but I’d made it. “It has nothing to do with my story. And the police could find out. I did. You may want to tell them you used to have another name, because if they find out on their own, it wouldn’t look good.” She might do it, I knew, blithely call the state police and announce that she used to have a different last name because she’d run away from an abusive home a decade ago. Or she might decide to ignore it all.

  I had one more thing I needed to ask. “Jessamyn, did Tobin ever shove or hit you?”

  She looked at me, almost in disbelief. “You think I’d get involved with someone who would hurt me? After what I grew up with?”

  “But that last week Tobin was here, the week before he disappeared. You had a split lip, Jessamyn. You were clearly hurting.”

  She stared at me a moment, and then she flushed.

  “I got drunk that night,” she said. “We were at a party in Paul Smiths and the bathroom was at the bottom of narrow stairs. I tripped and fell, twisting my knee and smacking my face against the door. Tobin got mad at me because I’d drunk too much and hurt myself. But no, he never hurt me.” Her voice dropped lower, almost a whisper. “He always treated me like a lady, like I could break. Like I was special. It was one of the things I loved about him.”

  If she was acting, this was an Academy Award performance. I didn’t think she was. “I’m sorry I had to ask,” I said.

  “I know you had to. The articles.”

  I nodded and moved toward the door.

  “Troy,” she said. “I’m glad you’re writing these articles. I really am.”

  But I wasn’t sure I was glad. I seemed to have a knack for finding out things, but I didn’t have a clue about to handle the emotional fallout.

  CHAPTER 33

  When you don’t know what to do, just get busy. Not the best solution, maybe, but it takes your mind off things.

  I called George and told him briefly about Jessamyn changing her last name, and why. He asked a few questions, and I answered, and that was that. Then I laid out the material Win had given me. I printed a map and marked the towns where Tobin had lived, and found contact information for some of the people he’d worked for. On Google Maps I looked down on the places he had lived, the apartments and rented rooms and long-stay motels. I could envision Tobin walking down the street, running errands, on his way to his job of the moment. It was fascinating in a ghostly way—stalking someone’s past life, piecing it together, virtually visiting towns I’d never seen.

  Then I clicked over to my first article online and read through it again to get a feel for how it had flowed
. I noticed comments had been left, and clicked to read them.

  Five minutes later I pushed back from my desk. I wished I hadn’t seen the comments. I wished the newspaper didn’t accept anonymous comments, or at least monitored them. Some were fine. But others weren’t. Two came close to saying that Tobin was a stupid drunk who got what he deserved, and one castigated me for writing the piece. Another one said Love and miss you forever, which made me uneasy. Neither Win nor Jessamyn seemed the type to leave love notes as an epitaph on a news story.

  I printed out the page of comments and took a screen shot. Then I copied the more offensive ones in an e-mail to George, saying, “Possibly time to consider some comment screening?”

  And then the phone rang, with an area code I didn’t recognize.

  “This is Victor Moreno,” a man said. When I didn’t respond, he said it again. “Victor Moreno, with the police department in Clatskanie, Oregon. You e-mailed me.”

  I’d been leaving him messages for so long that when I actually heard his voice, it rattled me. “Oh, yes, I did,” I stammered.

  “And why is it you want to talk to me?” His clipped tone sent me into flustered mode.

  “I just—I’m doing this series of articles on Tobin, the brother who died here, and the next one starts with, well, the death of his brother, the boat incident, and someone told me to talk to you.”

  “Someone told you to talk to me.” This was sarcasm, no doubt about it. “Did this someone have a name?”

  I had to tell him I had no idea—that it was thirdhand, from a couple I’d stayed with one night near Greenwich, Connecticut.

  “And what, you think that because one brother drowned there and another one did in your town, there’s a connection?” The sarcasm was biting now.

  “No, no,” I said. “That’s a coincidence, I know, unless, well, unless Tobin … no, I mean, I’m sure it’s a coincidence.” I was blowing this.

  He didn’t speak for a long moment. “And you got involved in this how?”