A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (18 page)

“Yeah, I’m guessing it was one of those things, sort of knee-jerk crazy. The news hit everybody hard. Like that guy Stevo, on the street, you know.”

I nodded. It was the first time he’d acknowledged the confrontation with Jessamyn on Main Street.

He went on. “But we’d all just thought Tobin had gone out of town and then he would come back, all full of himself. He just didn’t seem the type who would die—you know what I mean?”

Somehow I did. Tobin had seemed the type of person who would have managed to walk away from the wrong place at just the right time. Decided to take a stroll before a nightclub caught fire, move from where he was sitting before lightning struck, choose not to take the train that would end up crashing. Maybe Tobin had had a sixth sense, a special talent at surviving, one that had run out on one early winter day in the Adirondacks.

Dean finished his beer and looked at his watch. It was ten minutes past when Marilyn had said she’d be here.

“Thanks for setting this up,” I said.

“If she shows.”

In ten minutes more, she did. She was pretty much what I would have predicted, if I’d had to make a prediction. She probably wasn’t yet thirty, but looked like she’d passed it. A slight puffiness to her face, belly straining the fabric of the blouse over her too-snug jeans. A decade ago, right out of high school, she’d likely been cute as a button, but she’d left cute behind some time ago. Too many late hours, too many cigarettes, too much booze. It’s a bad combination, and she wasn’t wearing it well.

Dean stood up when she came in, and introduced me. She took the stool he vacated, and he sat beside her. She ordered a drink, and the bartender delivered it quickly. They were used to working fast here. She took a sip. It was something dark.

“So,” she said, belligerence thick in just that one word. “What do you want to talk to me about?”

Probably better that her animosity was out in the open. “You were a friend of Tobin Winslow’s?”

“Yeah, we were good friends.” She emphasized the last two words.

I had a pretty good idea that in this case
good friends
meant she hung around the guys in the bar and tried to latch onto Tobin when she could. But I was trying to not be guilty of prejudging. I’d already done enough prejudging for a lifetime.

“You know I’m writing a series of articles for the newspaper on Tobin,” I said, so it was clear we weren’t just having a chat.

She nodded. I caught Dean’s eye over her shoulder. I wasn’t sure whether to tread lightly or go for broke. I decided on
go for broke
.

“You don’t like Jessamyn, do you?”

She snorted. “That bitch—she thinks she’s better than everyone else.”

Behind her, Dean tensed. She may have wanted him here to keep her from doing something like this, but I’d lobbed the question so low and fast she hadn’t seen it coming. And how we were sitting, in a row, made it almost impossible for Dean to intervene.

“So, did Jessamyn treat you badly?” Meaning,
What did she ever do to you?

She twisted her lips, in a caricature of derision. “She treated me like I didn’t exist, like she owned Tobin Winslow, and she sure didn’t.”

Behind her, Dean shifted uneasily. I hadn’t missed the venom in her tone. “What do you mean, she didn’t own him?”

She picked up her drink. “Just that Tobin was a grown man, and he wasn’t married. He was free to do what he wanted.”

“So you thought Jessamyn, what, kept him on a tight leash?”

“Yeah,” she said, “and she thought she was so great.”

I leaned in closer. “Is that why you sent that article around to people, to newspapers and radio stations?”

She flushed. “Yeah, well, if she had something to do with Tobin dying, then everybody needed to know.”

I paused for a two-count. “Yes, but do you believe Jessamyn had anything to do with what happened to Tobin?”

She set her glass down on the bar surface, harder than necessary. “No,” she said, almost sullenly. “I guess not.”

“Do you have any idea who might?” I didn’t take my eyes off her. A tingly Spidey sense told me there was something here I needed to pay close attention to.

“Who might what?”

“Who might have had anything to do with Tobin’s death.”

At this Dean moved on his stool. Marilyn looked uncomfortable. “He drowned,” she said, seeming confused. “He fell through the ice. It was an accident, right?” She twisted around and looked toward Dean, as if for confirmation.

“No one knows for sure,” I said gently. “That’s what the police are trying to find out. What do you think?”

Dean was trying not to look startled, at my bluntness, I suppose. But this is the North Country, and people often don’t tell you things unless you ask. They might know perfectly well that X is sleeping with Y’s wife, but unless Y asks about it, they’re going to assume he doesn’t want to know.

I was rolling a pen back and forth in my fingers, and it fell to the floor. I leaned over to get it, and on the way back up caught a glance between Marilyn and Dean.

“I don’t know,” she muttered. I looked at Dean, and he shrugged.

It seemed she knew something she wasn’t telling me, but I wasn’t going to get much more here. I asked one more question. “Do either of you have any idea what happened to Tobin’s truck?”

They shook their heads, and their denials seemed genuine.

“Sometimes Tobin hitched a ride to Saranac Lake if he knew he was going to drink a lot,” Dean said. “I don’t know if he drove over that night or not. I wasn’t there.”

I hated it that suddenly I was watching Dean, analyzing what he said and how he said it. He’d been helpful since that first night he’d showed up at Tobin’s cabin, and even in the street confrontation
he had eased the angry drunk down the street away from us. Now I was wondering if there was something he didn’t want me to know. Maybe he was protecting Tobin; maybe he was protecting someone else.

As I was driving home, I thought the whole thing over. Try as I might, I couldn’t envision this woman doing this on her own. I couldn’t see her with the acumen to pull it off: capturing a screen shot, saving it as a JPG, inserting it in e-mails, looking up media addresses to send it around. Someone had to have helped her. I hoped it wasn’t Dean.

At home I started an e-mail to my brother:
Found woman who sent around article—seems to be motivated by spite, but maybe more was involved
.

Then my fingers typed:
It is entirely possible that someone held Tobin under the ice, or knocked him unconscious and dumped him in the lake. I just have no idea who or why
.

But Simon had been adamant that I needed to be seriously considering Jessamyn’s involvement, and I didn’t want to go into that again. I was used to running things by him, but now I didn’t want to. I erased his name from the address line, changed it to Jameson’s, and hit Send.

To my surprise, because Jameson almost never e-mailed, a minute later I had a reply:
Just try not to work too hard
.

Jameson knew I had a tendency to fling myself into projects. But I couldn’t see any other way to do this. I knew only one way. I remembered something Baker had told me yesterday:
Remember you’re writing about Tobin’s life, not his death
.

The problem was, it was hard to separate them.

I didn’t hear Win arrive, but Zach did. I heard his and Win’s voices in the kitchen, and went down. She had a stack of newspapers under her arm—she must have picked them up from the newspaper office, because it wouldn’t be on sale on the street until later.

Her cheeks were red with cold. She set down the papers and pulled off her hat and mittens without looking at me. My gut twisted. I was afraid I’d gone too far—afraid I’d written an article too intimate, too intense; afraid it would cost the friendship that had been building between us. No matter that Win had helped set up interviews; no matter that I warned her I might write things she didn’t like—that can all go out the window once people see things on the page. But then she spoke.

“This article’s amazing, Troy. You didn’t make him look perfect, but you captured him, the way he was before the accident, what it was like growing up.”

Zach picked up one of the papers. George had put a box on the front page, with the first paragraph from the story and a photo of a young Tobin with his brother and sister, posing on a big wooden play structure.

“Wow,” Zach said as he opened the paper. I could see that the article took up more than half a page.

“Has Jessamyn seen it?” Win asked. “Is she in?”

“I think she’s here, and no, I don’t think she’s seen it. I haven’t even seen it in print.”

She handed me a copy and took another, and headed toward the stairs that led to Jessamyn’s room. I carried my copy up to my room. I didn’t look at it. Instead I flicked on my e-mail: Alyssa, up in Burlington, had already seen it online and written:
Congrats—well done. This is going to get a lot of attention
.

I wasn’t ready for a lot of attention.

My phone rang: George. He wasted no time on a greeting. “Early feedback is good. When can you have the next one?”

A week would be optimal, but I didn’t think I could do the research and the writing in the next six days, and I told him so.

“Try for ten days,” he said. “If you can’t, you can’t. Two weeks would be fine. Don’t rush it. But if you need help, if someone can do research, do it. I can find money in the budget.”

I was used to doing everything alone, and I liked it that way. I didn’t always know what I was looking for, or what details I might want to include. But I’d never done articles this involved.

I sent links to the article to Jameson and to Philippe, and, after thinking about it, to my brother as well. And to the nanny and Tobin’s grade-school teacher.

Then I called Dean, and thanked him for setting up the meeting with Marilyn.

He sounded apologetic. “I know she wasn’t that helpful. She’s kind of prickly with people, and she really didn’t like Jessamyn.” I didn’t tell him that Jessamyn didn’t even remember meeting the woman.

“Listen, Dean, I need to ask you—do you know who would have helped Marilyn?”

“Helped her?”

“Helped her set up what she did, sending around that newspaper article.”

He sounded surprised. “No, I figured she just did it herself. She’s the one who gave that printout to my friend.”

I thanked him again. It had been foolish, I thought, to have had those vague suspicions about Dean. What I’d seen yesterday must have just been his discomfort at being stuck in an uncomfortable situation.

I heard a knock on the open door at the bottom of my stairwell. I looked over my railing, and waved Win up.

Without saying anything she handed me a brown binder envelope with an elastic cord around it, the one I’d seen once in the back seat of her car. I opened it and saw a sheaf of papers and a stack of postcards. On top was a timeline with dates, names, places: a compilation of where Tobin had been after he’d left home, with addresses and places of work and names of coworkers.

I whistled. “Holy cow, Win.”

“Yeah, I’ve been working on this a while. I found his postcards at home and printed some of his e-mails. I wasn’t sure I wanted this much of Tobin out there, but I put it together just in case.”

Meaning, I thought, she’d waited to see how I’d handled the first article before turning all this over to me. Ordinarily you’d be suspicious of someone handing you a neat timeline like this. But I could check out everything—and I never would have been able to compile this on my own.

“Thanks,” I said and meant it. “This is great. You’re doing an awful lot for this, Win.”

She shrugged. “It’s my brother. I want his story told.”

They were going out to Desperados for dinner, she and Jessamyn and Brent and Zach, and then on to Rumors. Part of me wanted to go, but part of me didn’t. Maybe it would have seemed a little too much like celebrating this article, which I couldn’t handle for several reasons.

I didn’t think there was any way to sort this odd mesh of feelings.
Work
, that was the answer. At least for me. At least for now.

So that’s what I did. I started going through the material Win had given me. I wrote another carefully worded e-mail to her parents.
I left another message for the policeman in Oregon. I made a list of questions for Win—we were going to meet at her place in the morning for another interview. I picked up my article and looked it over. In a perfect world maybe I would have tried to find more of Tobin’s friends, some Win hadn’t sent me to, but this was a feature on a boy growing up, and I thought I’d done a good job with the resources I had.

But everything was jumbled in my head: the articles to write, the missing truck, the trashed cabin, Marilyn and her motivations, the story from the policeman out in Oregon. Questions not answered, and at the core of it a giant ball of doubt about whether writing these articles was a good thing or a selfish and intrusive one. Or both.

On impulse I picked up the phone and called Jameson. Like he had done last summer in Ottawa, he let me talk. “It’s going to be a story with no ending,” I said when I ran down.

“Sometimes that’s life, Troy,” he said. “Or sometimes you get an ending you don’t want.”

Sometimes I wished Jameson could offer platitudes. But then he wouldn’t be Jameson.

Now it was late. If I’d been sensible and turned off my computer and read a book or watched television like an ordinary person, that would have been the end to the day. But I was still restless, and what I did was start checking details of people I’d interviewed and ones I would interview soon. Next I did some concentrated Googling on Tobin and Trey, and then I looked up Jessamyn.

I tried her name alone and then combined with “Ohio,” where I thought she’d once mentioned she lived, and got hits for the writer Jessamyn West, who’d apparently set one of her novels in Ohio. I tried the name with Jessamyn’s year of birth and a few other combinations.

Had it been earlier in the evening, I likely wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. But when it’s late and I’m tired, any cutoff valve I
have ceases to exist. Overtired, I just keep going, and I tried some unlikely search combinations and went deeper into results than I would normally. And I found a string of interconnecting bits: a blog entry reflecting on high school days; an excerpt from an old school newspaper; a page from a high school annual with a picture of a freshman with the first name of Jessamyn—one who looked like a young version of the woman living in my house, with unbecomingly short hair, incongruously bleached near-white blond.