A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel

by Sara J. Henry

“No one I talked to seemed to think he was dealing.”

  “And he had the trust fund income every quarter. But really, with the break-in and the note on my car, I figured we’d find bags of money from a bank robbery or horrible blackmail videos, or worse.” She let out a dry laugh.

  “Now what?”

  We sat and looked at it. We could call the Lake Placid police and tell them we’d found a stash of marijuana. That would be reported and talked over; Tobin’s past would be rewritten as drug-dealing ne’er-do-well. Which didn’t seem right, particularly since we didn’t know if this was his. But at least whoever knew the weed was there would stop hassling Win.

  Or Win could keep it, or give it away, but this was a lot, and I imagine being caught with it would carry more penalties than a slap on the wrist. Or we could, well, just go drop it somewhere. Before we could think about it more, Win opened the door to the woodstove, picked up the bags, and tossed them in, in one swift motion.

  I watched the plastic begin to pucker and smolder, and then made a face. “Win, you shouldn’t burn plastic.”

  She started laughing and couldn’t stop. I guess she’d expected me to say, Win, you can’t burn that, but I wasn’t going to tell her what to do. It wasn’t mine; this wasn’t my cabin; Tobin wasn’t my brother. And there didn’t seem to be any happy option. I didn’t want it; she didn’t want it. She wasn’t going to try to find out the rightful owner of a large quantity of an illegal substance. If we turned it over to the police, it would be logged in and sit around gathering dust until it got “lost” or destroyed. She was just cutting out several steps in between.

  But with this much in the stove, I imagine anyone within a mile or two radius would be smelling it.

  I opened the door of the woodstove and used the poker to break up the mass. The plastic bags had mostly melted, and the tightly packed marijuana was smoldering. Fire needs air, so I moved the clumps apart until they were burning merrily, and closed up the stove.

  It was aromatic to say the least, in a not-unpleasant way. I pictured birds and squirrels in the tree above the cabin getting stoned from the air wafting out of the chimney. I breathed deeply. I’d never smoked the stuff, never wanted to. I don’t see the sense in going out of your way to do something that’s against the law, especially with a substance that you have no idea where it was grown or handled or how it will affect your body chemistry. So this was as close as I was ever going to get.

  CHAPTER 47

  This was when I mentioned that when I’d dropped Dean off at his cabin last night, I’d seen a coffee maker on his countertop that looked a whole lot like Tobin’s.

  Maybe I was under the influence of those fumes I was breathing, because this was not the best timing—Win was in no mood to sit on information like that, or to react calmly. She pulled out her cell phone and called Dean before I could protest. She spoke into her phone, and when she closed it up turned to me. “He’s at Strack’s; his brother gave him a ride to take his car in and they’re working on it now. Do you think we can get into his place?”

  I stared at her. “You want to just go in?”

  “Why not?” she asked. “If it’s not Tobin’s coffee maker, end of story. We don’t have to bother him.”

  I thought of the night before, seeing Dean opening his door without a key. “I don’t think he locks his door.”

  We walked over to his cabin, me following her. My gut was churning. I kept trying to think how to talk Win out of this, but maybe this was the easiest way to resolve it. When we walked up onto the porch, it felt like a step toward something there was no turning back from. But I took that step, and I watched as Win knocked crisply on the door. No answer, and she put her hand on the knob.

  Now I did speak. “Win, Win. Are you sure? You don’t want to wait and ask him?” I wished I’d never seen that coffee maker; wished I’d been able to convince myself it just happened to resemble Tobin’s. Like the truck I thought I’d seen.

  At that moment you would have thought Win was a prosecuting attorney. She looked at me, looked through me, and then turned back to the door. She opened it and stepped inside. I followed, and stopped just inside the doorway.

  Dean’s cabin was much like Tobin’s, not quite as tidy. But you couldn’t miss seeing the coffee maker on the kitchen countertop. Win went over to it, pulled it toward her, opened it, inspected it. She set it down.

  “It’s Tobin’s,” she said definitively.

  “You’re sure? You only used it that once, right?”

  “Absolutely. It had a scratch on the top and that little dent on that one side.”

  We stared at each other. “It doesn’t make sense to steal a coffee maker from the next cabin,” I said weakly.

  “Yes, but it’s Tobin’s,” she said, in the steely tone I’d heard from her before. She pulled her phone back out.

  “Win, wait. Don’t call the police. Ask Dean. Ask him where he got it. Maybe the thieves threw it out; maybe he found it.”

  “Troy, what, are you sweet on this guy?”

  “I just think we need to give him a chance. He’s really been helpful. I don’t …” My voice trailed off.

  She snapped her phone shut. “Fine, you call him and deal with this.”

  I didn’t think this was fair, but it had been me who had mentioned the coffee maker, me who had come over there with her. By any reckoning, that made me pretty culpable. I pulled out my phone and went out on the porch. It didn’t feel right calling Dean from his house. Not that his porch was much better.

  “Troy,” he said when he answered. “What’s up?”

  “Listen, do you think your car will be fixed soon?”

  “Yeah, he’s just finished and he’s writing up the bill. Why? Do you need a ride somewhere?”

  “No, I’m out … I came out to Win’s. Listen, Dean, when I was at your place last night, I noticed … well, something’s come up that we want to ask you about.”

  “What?”

  I could hear voices in the background and banging sounds, presumably from the garage area. “We’d rather talk to you in person. Can we come meet you?”

  “You’re out at Win’s, right?”

  “Um, yeah,” I said. I didn’t tell him I was standing on his front porch.

  “I’ll just come there.”

  “No,” I said rapidly. “We’ll meet you at your place.” And I hung up.

  Win was back on the front porch by then.

  “He’s on his way back here,” I told her.

  “And you want to ask him about it when he gets here?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I do.” Maybe Dean had been behind the tossing of Win’s cabin, but I wasn’t going to assume it because of a coffee maker on his countertop. If Dean hadn’t done anything, he didn’t need to get hauled into the Lake Placid police station for questioning. This town had a fast and merciless grapevine. Next thing you know, rumors would start that Dean was involved with Tobin’s death.

  I sat there, on the front porch, until Dean drove up. It was cold, but I didn’t want to move. Win leaned up against the porch post.

  Dean got out of his car and looked at us, puzzled, but didn’t say anything. He went into his cabin, and gestured us to follow him in. He opened the door on his woodstove, poked it and added wood, and then turned to us, his face seeming open and guileless. And puzzled.

  I gestured toward his kitchen. “Could you tell us where you got your coffee maker, Dean?”

  “My coffee maker? Why?”

  I started to speak, but Win interrupted.

  “Where did you get the coffee maker?” she asked, abruptly.

  A touch of anger flickered across his face, but it was gone in an instant. “What’s all this about?” He looked from her to me and back again.

  “Where did you get it?” she repeated.

  He paused half a beat, and then decided to answer. “From my brother, why?”

  “Eddie?” I said. Eddie, the high school quarterback, the local football star, Eddie wi
th the easy manner and fast grin. Eddie, who should have been off playing football at least at a junior college somewhere. Eddie, who I’d seen in the Saranac Lake bars both times I’d been in them lately.

  “Where did your brother get it?” That steely tone again.

  The way Dean looked at Win, I don’t think he was caring much for her right then, but he kept his cool. Barely, but he kept it. “What the … he got it in a garage sale, over in Saranac Lake, for my mom, but he said she didn’t like it, so he gave it to me.”

  Win walked over to the coffee maker and turned to Dean. “This is Tobin’s coffee maker.”

  He looked at her blankly. “What?”

  “This is Tobin’s, and it was taken from his cabin.”

  He looked at me as if to say What the heck? I remembered him saying that Tobin had been a private guy, that he’d never been at Tobin’s cabin. I remembered I’d never told him the coffee maker had been stolen.

  Win spoke again, not as harshly. “That was the one thing taken in the break-in, Dean. Tobin’s coffee maker.”

  He shook his head, as if trying to clear cobwebs from his brain. “You’re sure it’s his?”

  She pointed to the top. “Scratch on the top; dent on the side. It’s his.”

  Dean looked at me. “Then I’ll call Eddie and find out where that garage sale was, where he bought it, and that’ll be the person who broke in.”

  He pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open, and then stopped. Maybe it was the expressions on our faces—Win looking skeptical, me looking sad. Then he started working it out: Who has a garage sale in the middle of winter? Right after a break-in where this particular coffee maker was stolen? I watched his face as he argued it out with himself.

  He closed his phone and put his head in his hands, and when he looked up, he looked older. “Eddie,” he said, and his tone was bleak. “What has he done?”

  He sat for a long minute, and then picked up his phone and called his brother.

  While we waited, Win made coffee, which seemed to give her comfort. I think we were all hoping that Eddie would have some explanation we could all live with. That one of his buddies had tossed the cabin, taken the coffee maker, and given it to Eddie, not knowing his brother lived just a long stone’s throw away. That Eddie saw it stashed in someone’s garage and offered to buy it. Stranger things have happened.

  But when Eddie showed up, it took only a moment for those hopes to dissolve. He stepped inside and took one look around, saw me and saw Win, looked confused—then saw the mugs of coffee, saw the coffee maker in the middle of the counter, and he knew. He opened his mouth, as if to say something jovial, to try to talk his way out of this, but stopped. He closed the door and leaned back against it.

  “I’m sorry, Dean,” he said. “But I was really desperate.”

  Dean’s jaw worked, but he didn’t say anything, and Eddie started talking.

  He’d been dealing weed, just for friends, getting it from suppliers in Plattsburgh. But then he’d decided he wanted to earn more, wanted a better car, wanted to buy stuff for his girl, and he started selling more, and working with dealers from Montreal. “There’s a big market here,” he said. “Not just the locals and the kids working in the hotels, but the tourists—they want to kick back while they’re on vacation, and they’ll pay big bucks for good weed. There’s a whole network set up for them, and I wanted to break into that. I took a pretty big delivery, and I got to take it with just a down payment. I didn’t want to store it at my mom’s house, so I asked Tobin to keep it. He’d done it for me before, just not as much, in exchange for keeping him stocked. He said he had a really safe place. But then he disappeared. I thought he’d taken it and left town, so I didn’t even think about searching his place.” He looked from one of us to the other. “I mean, his truck was gone, he was gone, I figured the weed was gone. I was pretty mad. The guys didn’t expect payment right away, and I kept trying to pull it together, but I couldn’t do it, not even close. I just kept telling them it was taking me a while to sell it. Then when Tobin was found I figured the weed could still be here; I saw his sister out that night, and I had a copy of the key, so I went in and searched. I’m sorry I left a mess, but I really needed to find it. I went out of town for a while, but now they’re really putting pressure on me. These guys mean business.” His voice was high pitched.

  “You took Tobin’s coffee maker,” Win said. Her voice was ice.

  He blinked. “Yeah, I thought it was cool. I thought my mom would like it.”

  I thought of Eddie his last year of high school: the star quarterback, good-looking and popular, cheered whenever he’d walked onto the field. Probably he’d sailed through school. Probably he’d had any girl he’d wanted. And then high school was over, and he hadn’t gotten any college scholarships, couldn’t afford to pay tuition somewhere and play walk-on, and had gone to work at a gas station. He’d been used to being a star, having things go his way. And then they hadn’t.

  Dean put his head in his hands.

  “What? That’s the only thing I took,” Eddie protested.

  “You were going to give our mother a stolen coffee maker. From my dead friend. Whose cabin you trashed.” Dean’s tone was flat.

  Eddie looked down at the floor. He started to speak, and Win interrupted.

  “How much do you owe?”

  “What?”

  She repeated it, enunciating every word. “How much do you owe?”

  He winced. “Four grand,” he said. “I paid them a thousand. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I saved a couple of hundred more, but that’s it. I was gonna use it to leave town.”

  Win opened her purse. Dean looked up. Maybe he thought she had a gun stashed in there and was going to pull it out and shoot his brother, and at that moment I don’t know that he would have stopped her. But it was a pen she pulled out, then a checkbook. She uncapped the pen and she opened the checkbook.

  “Is your name Edward or Edmund?” she asked.

  “What? It’s Edward.”

  “Your last name is Whitaker, right, W-H-I-T-A-K-E-R?”

  He nodded, confused. Win wrote quickly, concisely, decisively. She tore out a check and handed it to him.

  He looked at it, and looked up at her, more confused. “Four thousand dollars.”

  She nodded. “The product was in Tobin’s possession. I burned it; it’s gone. I’m responsible for its destruction, so I’m paying for it.”

  Eddie blinked.

  “I assume you’re the one who left the note on my car.”

  He flushed, and nodded. I wanted to ask if he was the one who had done the hang-up calls or let the air out of my tires, but I’d find out later, or I wouldn’t. Right now I didn’t care.

  “You can cash the check anytime; I assure you it’s good,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said, hardly believing this was happening, that she hadn’t called the police, that she was bailing him out. “I’m really sorry about the mess …” His voice trailed off when he saw the look on her face.

  Dean stood. “Eddie, get out.”

  “Dean, I just wanted to get ahead, to—”

  “Eddie, you trashed my friend’s cabin; you stole from his sister. How do you think Mom would feel if you got sent away? If you got your arm broken by some dealer you stiffed, or worse? You took that risk, just for money, just for stuff. You … I can’t believe it.” He slammed his fist on the table. “If you wanted a new car, you work for it. Or you ask me for a loan. You don’t risk everything. You don’t deal drugs. You don’t steal.” He spat out the last words and glared at his brother a long moment before turning his back, facing the wall.

  Eddie stood, his face white. He was smart enough not to say anything. He left, closing the door quietly behind him.

  Dean was shaking with rage. After a moment he turned and faced Win.

  “I am very sorry for what my brother did,” he said. “I know I can’t make this right, but I can pay you back, bit by bit.”

  H
er face was drawn, but the tension was gone. “It isn’t your debt to pay, Dean, and I wouldn’t accept it from you. Either your brother realizes that it is his debt, and takes care of it, or he doesn’t. I’ll inherit more than that from Tobin, so you can think of it as Tobin’s payment, for his role in this, for storing it for Eddie in the first place.”

  She reached out, and it took Dean a moment to realize she was reaching to shake his hand. He shook it, and didn’t speak.

  Win drained the leftover coffee, unplugged the coffee maker, and picked it up. Dean knew not to offer to help.

  I walked with her back to Tobin’s cabin and watched her put the coffee maker in place, moving the new cheap one aside. Then I watched her fill her suitcase. She didn’t tell me she didn’t want to be at the cabin tonight or that she didn’t want to drive. She just got into my passenger seat, and I drove to the house in Lake Placid and she went into the guest bedroom, all without speaking.

  CHAPTER 48

  How do you apologize to a man for having helped crush his vision of who he thought his brother was? I’d been the one who told Win about the coffee maker and I’d let her walk into Dean’s cabin and pick it up. Maybe I should have asked Dean privately about it. But I’d hoped we’d find out it hadn’t been Tobin’s, and Win and I could laugh about my silliness, and that would have been that.

  I e-mailed it all to Jameson, letting it spill out on the page. It would be easier, I thought, to be a policeman, to have a set of rules that governed what you did. Of course there were times when you made difficult decisions, walked fine lines. Jameson had walked them last summer, when he’d treated me like a suspect when I think he’d known at heart I wasn’t involved. But as a policeman I imagine you get used to seeing people doing things you wouldn’t have thought they would.

  I sent Dean a text message: Sorry, very sorry. There wasn’t much else to say. He didn’t answer. I’d try to talk to him later. But I’d be on my own for the rest of my poking around. Dean wouldn’t be escorting me to any more interviews, taking me around to bars to talk to people.