A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (17 page)

On impulse, I called back. It rang a long time before someone picked it up. No one spoke. “Hello?” I said. “Hello?” I heard breathing, breathing that to me sounded angry, sounded male, and something told me I had Tobin’s father on the phone, standing there holding the phone, saying nothing.

Maybe I was imaging the malevolence coming through to me; maybe I was only imagining this was the father who hadn’t been there for his children, who had somehow driven Tobin and Win away after their brother’s death. But what I didn’t imagine was the receiver being slammed down.

And that was that. For now.

Time to write.

I reread my notes, looked over photos one more time. And then I began to put together the portrait of a rich little boy, a second son: a boy who adored his big brother, who lost his beloved dog, who played pranks, who had stepped in to stop the bullying of another boy.

I’d never written a piece like this. I won’t say it consumed me, but it came close.

Around eight thirty I became dimly aware my message light was blinking—I’d hit the Do Not Disturb button on my phone system to send calls to voice mail. I checked my messages; it was Philippe. I stretched, and realized I was ravenous. I ran down to make a PB&J and then ate half of it as I punched the buttons to call him.

“Sorry I missed your call,” I told him. “I was writing.”

He asked how things were going, and I had to think before I realized he was referring to the media crush. “Oh, good. I think the media sort of gave up, moved on to something else. I’m writing the first article now.” I remembered I’d e-mailed about Win being in town and the articles I was writing. I didn’t mention the break-in; no need for him to worry. I spoke briefly to Paul and then went back to work.

•   •   •

I wrote until nearly midnight. The next morning I did more of the same, printing drafts and reviewing them, revising, checking them against my notes, occasionally remembering to eat something. This was hard, very hard. Maybe worse because I had been there, had seen Tobin’s body in the block of ice as it had slid past.

Mid-afternoon I e-mailed George that I was close to finishing. He told me he’d stay late if I thought I’d get it in today.

I printed a copy and saved the file on a flash drive, then drove to Baker’s house in Saranac Lake. She wasn’t a writer, but she was a mother, and I trusted her as much as I trusted Jameson, maybe more. I handed her the printout and drank the tea she made me while her youngest son played in the next room. I hadn’t been this fatigued in a very long time. It seemed that the air hummed, the walls of the room shimmered slightly.

She read slowly, deliberately, turning the pages facedown one by one. She looked at me when she finished.

“Holy cow, Troy,” she said. “Has anyone else read this?”

I shook my head.

She picked up the pages and neatly stacked them, aligning the edges. “You’ve never written anything this good.”

My head was spinning a little, and I didn’t think it was just from fatigue. “I kind of thought so.”

“Are you going to show it to Tobin’s sister?”

“No.”

Baker picked it up again. “You turning it in today?”

I nodded. “Just wanted to get your feedback.”

She glanced over the pages, and set them down. “Send it,” she said. And I did, plugging my flash drive into her computer and e-mailing it to George, along with the photos.

I was still there half an hour later when my cell phone rang. “Troy.” It was George.

“Mmm-hmm,” I said.

“Does any of this need fact-checking?”

“Nope. Just proofing. I triple-checked facts.” He knew I kept a neat file of sources, notes, transcribed interviews.

“I’m going to lay this out now. Can you come over and check it?”

I told him I’d be over. I gave Baker a little salute on the way out the door. She nodded back. I think she knew this piece was going to change some things in my life, and that it might be time for some changes. Sometimes Baker knew me better than I knew myself.

The front office was dark, but George had left the back door unlocked. I looked over his layout, suggested resizing one of the photos and swapping one for another. Then he had me doublecheck the cutlines, and saved it.

George didn’t tell me this article made Tobin come alive, or it was the best piece I’d ever written. I think he knew I knew it. And maybe he sensed that, in a way, this was my apology to Tobin for never having tried to know him.

“It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper—page one,” was all he said.

By the time I’d left Saranac Lake and turned onto Route 86, a soft snow was falling. I felt a sense of peace as I watched the flakes coming down. In the rearview mirror I caught sight of a car approaching, and it took a moment to realize it wasn’t going to slow.

I had nowhere to go but straight ahead. My brain was sending the frantic signal to my foot to press the accelerator when the car zoomed close to my rear bumper, swerved around, and cut in so sharply that I jerked my foot to the brake. And then time jolted into a different dimension as my car went into a glide and then into a swirling, horrible Swan Dance, pirouetting across the road.

There’s something oddly liberating when your car stops going the direction you’ve pointed it, when fate or gravity or centrifugal force takes control and all you can do is ride it out and hope these aren’t your last moments on earth. Before I closed my eyes I had time to be thankful Tiger wasn’t in the car with me.

Today the stars were aligned in my favor. When the spinning stopped my car was off the road, half in a ditch, but I hadn’t hit anything. Something hot and wet had splashed against my legs, and at first I didn’t realize it was the coffee that had been in my console, coffee I’d picked up in the newspaper’s break room. I reached down and shut off the ignition, and sat, listening to the sound of my breathing.

A tap on the door. I jumped, heart thudding. A man in a dark coat was standing there. He stepped back when I looked up. I flicked the ignition key back on so I could lower the window.

“You okay?” he asked. “I saw you got cut off.” We both glanced up the road, but the other car was long gone.

“Yeah, I think I’m fine,” I looked around the car, glanced at my coffee-splattered jeans. “My coffee spilled, but that seems to be it.”

He walked around the car, looking it over, and came back to the window. I could see his truck pulled off the road, a woman in the passenger seat.

“Don’t see any damage,” he said. “Think you can drive it out?”

The car was at a crazy angle, but this is what Subarus are made for. I turned the engine on, pressed the accelerator, toggled the clutch. The tires gripped and I thought I was going to make it, and then the wheels started whirring, spinning up slush and digging into the snow. I stopped trying.

The man came back to the window. There was something faintly familiar about him, but I couldn’t place him.

“Look, I might be able to get it, by rocking back and forth, but I’m a little shaky,” I told him. “Do you mind trying?”

He nodded, and took my place in the car, while I stood off to the side. The snow was still falling steadily, settling on my blue parka. The woman in his truck turned to watch; I saw she had long hair, light in color. He rocked my car a couple of times and gunned the engine at just the right moment, and came roaring neatly out of the ditch. Men either practiced this when no one was looking or had an innate talent for it.

I thanked him and shook his hand, which seemed to make
him uncomfortable. I drove off, and in my rearview mirror I saw him pull out and drive back the way I’d come.

I drove very carefully the rest of the way, with that tingly feeling you have after a near miss. All your senses are heightened and you’re absurdly aware of everything: the feel of the steering wheel in your hands, the brightness of the sky, the crunch of your tires on the road. You’re very aware of being alive.

At home I made myself tea, then went up and changed out of my coffee-splattered jeans and sat on my sofa, hands around the hot mug, Tiger at my feet. There was a message on my phone, a woman talking fast, and I didn’t at first recognize that it was the wife of the Couchsurfing couple I’d stayed with. I had to play the message twice to get it all. She’d mentioned me to someone who had known about the drowning of the first Winslow son, and they’d suggested I talk to a Victor somebody, a policeman who’d been involved somehow with the incident, but they couldn’t remember his last name.

It took a bit of Googling to track down one Victor Moreno. It took a little more searching to learn that he was now the assistant chief of police in a small Oregon town. I glanced at the clock: Oregon, three hours earlier. I picked up the phone. He wasn’t in, so I left a message with the woman who answered that I’d like to speak to Chief Moreno about a drowning accident back East six years ago involving Bertram Winslow the Third.

I e-mailed Jameson:
Article done. Nearly sideswiped today. Going to sleep
.

I thought about doing laundry, about cleaning my room or trying to cook, and finally realized I simply had to go to bed. I had nearly dropped off when the phone rang.

“Thought I said to call if something happened.” Jameson.

“Mmmm. Oh, the car. Yeah, but this didn’t seem to be something, not like a break-in. I mean, just a normal bad driver.”

He waited.

“It was on the way back from the paper—someone cut me off, passed too close, and I went into a skid. Went into a ditch, but I’m fine; the car’s fine.”

“You don’t know who?”

“No, and he probably never even saw me skid out behind him.”

He didn’t say anything, so I went on. “I’m sure it was an accident. I mean, it’s not like someone would sideswipe me to … to not write these articles? Stuff like this happens all the time here. With the snow, you know.”

I think Jameson realized I was too tired to converse coherently. “Get some sleep, Troy. Just be careful. And keep me in the loop.”

I promised, and fell back asleep.

I slept for eleven hours. When I woke I desperately needed to do something to clear the cobwebs from my brain. I pulled on ski clothes, made cheese toast, loaded Tiger in the car, and drove to the cross-country ski trail behind Ho-Jo’s. I skied hard, for me almost recklessly, and skidded out in a mild turn I normally took much slower. No one was around, so I lay in the soft snow and stared up at the sky. Tiger trotted over and licked my face.

Writing this piece had made me feel odd in a way I didn’t quite understand. It was like discovering a talent you didn’t know you had.

But part of me felt uncomfortably like a voyeur. I could have angled the piece however I liked: with Tobin’s father as the male equivalent of Mommie Dearest, or Tobin as a dangerous and disturbed child who tried to slice up his parents’ belongings. I’d tried to walk a middle line, but this was hard.

I wondered how Tobin’s parents would react. I know that some people feel justified in what they do no matter what, and this father might simply think the article showed him as a no-nonsense parent.

And of course I wondered how Win was going to take it.

It was probably good that I had an interview scheduled this afternoon with Marilyn, the mystery woman who had sent around the newspaper article. I was meeting her at one, before her shift at Price Chopper.

We were meeting at The Cowboy, a noisy place to talk, but it was what she wanted. She’d also insisted that Dean be there, not an optimal way to do an interview. And she didn’t want me to use a recorder—maybe she thought if I didn’t, I couldn’t use what she said.

I got home and showered and ate a quick lunch. The phone rang just as I was starting to head downstairs to leave—Dean was running late, I thought, or Marilyn had changed her mind. But it was Philippe. I told him I’d call him back.

It’s just a few miles from my house to The Cowboy, on Saranac Avenue on the way out of town. I sat at the bar to wait, and Dean came in a minute or two later and sat beside me. He ordered a beer and looked at me questioningly. I shook my head. I didn’t want alcohol, and I wasn’t going to pay three bucks for a soda I didn’t particularly want. Or let someone else pay it.

“So did they find out who broke into Win’s cabin?” Dean asked.

I shook my head. “No, and there was nothing to follow up on,
since nothing really got stolen and no one exactly left a calling card.”

“But it was bad, eh?”

“It was pretty well trashed, but we got it cleaned up, and put a new lock in.”

He nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t get her call that night—I was in town and didn’t hear my cell.”

“You ever been broken into, out there?”

“No, it’s not hardly worth the trouble, breaking into those cabins. Not like anyone’s going to have a lot of expensive stuff, fancy TVs or anything. Sometimes high school kids break in to party or something, but this didn’t seem like that, from what Win said.”

“So you can’t think of anything Tobin would have worth stealing.”

He shrugged. “Not worth taking a cabin apart, that’s for sure.”

“You guys were pretty tight?”

“We worked a job or two together, and he’d come over for a beer or a smoke now and then. He was sort of private—I mean, he was friendly, but not the kind of guy you dropped in on. I’d never actually been inside his place. He seemed to like to be alone.” He took a sip of his beer. “So I’ll bet you’ll be glad to get these articles done.”

This surprised me. Maybe this was just idle conversation, but maybe Dean was more insightful than I’d given him credit for. Mostly I overestimated people, but once in a while I underestimated them.

“Yes, I’ll be glad,” I said. “I don’t really like poking around, asking questions, not for something like this.”

“Like this, talking to Marilyn.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “She had to know that sending that article around would stir things up. Have you known her long?”

He shook his head. “No. She’s originally from Tupper Lake. She hangs out in the bars here a lot. She sort of liked Tobin, I expect.”

“I expect she did,” I said, mimicking his tone, and he grinned. “But she sure stirred up a lot of trouble.”