A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (21 page)

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.

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?”

I tried to explain, about Tobin and Jessamyn and Win, but it came out more muddled than I’d have liked. He interrupted me.

“The sister will verify this?”

“Sure,” I said. “But she’s not at home; she’s up here now.”

“Give me the contact info for your editor at the paper.”

I rattled off George’s name and number, and Win’s as well.

“I’ll get back to you,” he said abruptly.

More than a little shaken, I went downstairs.

Jessamyn was making a sandwich in the kitchen, and looked up. “What’s up?” she asked.

My face must have been showing how I felt. I tried to readjust it. “Ah, just writing this stuff, and researching it. It’s hard.”

“I bet. I couldn’t do it. It’s like, well, Tobin’s gone but not gone.”

“Is it bothering you, the articles, all this stuff?” I realized I hadn’t given a lot of thought to how this was affecting her.

“It’s hard to say. It’s a little weird, but it feels like it needs to be done—it’s sort of a way to say goodbye. Maybe it’ll help Win. She seems pretty down lately.”

I took some yogurt out of the fridge. “Well, it’s all hard on her, plus it’s frustrating trying to track down Tobin’s will and stuff.”

“What about his lock box? Did she look in there?” Jessamyn asked, unpeeling a banana. I don’t think I’d actually ever seen her eat fruit before. Brent was being a good influence.

“A lock box? You mean one of those fireproof boxes?” If there’d been one at Tobin’s cabin, it was long gone or so well hidden we hadn’t seen it.

“No, like at a bank, a box where you keep things.”

“Tobin had a safe deposit box at a bank?” I said slowly.

Jessamyn looked at me as if I were stupid. “Yes, that’s what I said. He said he had all his important stuff locked away in a bank, once when I said something about having the key there under the flowerpot.”

I looked at her. I don’t know why it had never occurred to us to ask Jessamyn things like this. Maybe we’d assumed that Tobin wouldn’t have shared these things; maybe we’d just been idiots. “Do you know what bank?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think he had a checking account, because I went with him once to the post office to buy a money order for something.”

But when I called Win, she wasn’t as elated as I’d expected. “I
don’t think that would help,” she said. “Even if we locate the box, without a court order, I couldn’t get into it without a key.”

And she was right. Back to square one. Before I hung up I told her there was a chance she might hear from a policeman named Moreno. I didn’t tell her any details.

What I did next was think about keys. I tried to picture Tobin’s key ring, to recall if there had been a small key on it. But no one I knew carried a safe deposit box key around with them—they kept it stashed somewhere in their house. Maybe that’s what someone had been looking for in Tobin’s cabin, and maybe, just maybe, in the clumsiness of slashing couch cushion linings and emptying kitchen cabinets, they’d overlooked the small places a bank key might be stashed. Unless that key had been fastened to the bottom of a certain coffee maker that was now missing.

I called Win back, and told her what I’d been thinking.

“It’s worth looking around the cabin,” she said. “You want to come over? Maybe grab us a pizza from Mr. Mike’s? I can call and order it. Bring Jessamyn if she’s home, but I think she has to work.”

I took Tiger for a quick walk, and when I went across the street to pick up the pizza found out Win had already paid for it. It didn’t really bother me, but it wouldn’t have killed me to spring for a pizza, even a supreme one.

At the cabin, Win and I ate pizza; she had a soda from her small fridge and I had water. To me beverages with taste interfere with the taste of the food—except cookies and milk, of course.

And then we set to searching.

We looked for more than an hour, in every tiny spot we thought someone might put a key: dark corners of cabinets, the toilet tank, along ledges, in the bottom of the container of coffee beans. I emptied the ice-cube trays and peered at each cube. I didn’t let myself think of the irony if the key to Tobin’s secrets had been frozen into a piece of ice.

Finally we sat back. It had seemed a good idea, but good ideas don’t always pan out. It had started getting colder. I opened the
stove door to shove a new log in and then stopped, chunk of wood in my hand.

“What’s the matter, Troy?” Win asked.

I sat back on my heels and put the log down on the hearth. “Where’s maybe the perfect place to hide a small piece of metal?”

She looked where I was looking, into the stove.

“No-o-o-o,” she said.

“It’s a little crazy. But think about it: you could stash a key under the ashes and no one would know it’s there. And there’s no risk of losing it if you don’t let anyone else clean out your stove.”

“It wouldn’t melt?”

“I don’t think the fire would get hot enough, and the ashes would insulate it.”

Win looked at the stove and looked at me. “Well, why not?” she said.

She knelt beside me as I pushed apart the fire, setting pieces of partly burnt log on the hearth, then moving embers and ash into the metal ash bucket. When I got within half an inch or so from the bottom of the stove, I asked Win if she could find a big metal spoon or spatula, and she brought one from the kitchen. Scoop by scoop, I shook ashes into the bucket. Win pulled on her jacket; with the fire out the room was getting chillier by the minute.

I’d just about concluded this had been nothing but a messy exercise—because of course I hadn’t been able to avoid spilling some ash—when something dropped into the bucket: something heavier and denser than a piece of wood. I poked through the ashes with the spoon, stirring them up enough to make me cough, and then I had it. Win reached toward it and I shook my head—it could still be hot. She went to the kitchen and filled a bowl with water, and I dropped the contents of the spoon into the bowl. The ashes sizzled slightly as they hit the water, and you could hear something clink on the bottom. I waited a moment and then reached in and pulled it out: a key, a small one. A safe deposit box key.

Win was nearly twitching with excitement.

“You did it,” she said. “You found it.”

“Yeah, but I almost didn’t. If I hadn’t been about to put wood in the stove …”

Now I was getting cold. Heat seeped out of these cabins pretty fast. I crumpled newspaper, put some twigs on top and lit it, then fed back in the bits of half-burnt wood and a bigger log as the fire began to catch.

Win had pulled out a phone book and was looking up banks in Lake Placid and Saranac Lake. “Tobin must have had a savings account,” she said. “He got those quarterly checks from the trust fund, and he’d need somewhere to deposit or cash them.”

“So you call the banks and ask if Tobin had a box there, and Bob’s your uncle. If it’s there, you go in and open it.”

“Wouldn’t I need to know the box number?”

I thought for a moment. “Not sure. But remember that card Tobin had in his wallet, the one with the lawyer’s phone number on one side? The number on the other side could be his box number.”

She pulled out her copy and looked at the number, and agreed it was worth a try. If she couldn’t locate the box locally, she could try Keene or Tupper Lake, but it would make more sense for Tobin to have a box closer to home. Unless he hadn’t wanted anyone seeing him go into the bank.

To celebrate, we finished off the pizza.

Back home, back at my computer, I looked up information on bank safe deposit boxes, and found that getting into Tobin’s box might not be as easy as we’d hoped.

I sent Philippe a note, telling him I’d been swamped with work and would call soon, and to give Paul a big hug. And an e-mail had arrived from Jameson. Which said only:
Good article
. I’d wondered why I hadn’t heard from him, but I supposed he’d been busy. I e-mailed back
THANK YOU
. In all caps.

The next morning, I was at work early, sorting notes, roughing out the second article, waiting to hear from Win. Finally she called.

“I found part of an old envelope from a bank in Tobin’s things and called, and that was it—it’s the bank on the far end of Main Street, heading out of town,” she said. “I’m going there now. It opens at nine. Should I stop and pick you up?”

“Sure,” I said. “But listen, I looked this up. In New York State, unless you’ve been added as someone who can access a box or are a cosigner, you can’t get into it. Not without a will or a court order.”

Silence on the other end of the phone.

“Or,” I added, “you can just show them the key and Tobin’s ID and the article on his death, and hope they let it slide.” This was
a small town—sometimes you didn’t have to jump through the hoops you did in larger places.

Win sighed. “I didn’t sign the card, that I know, and I have no idea if Tobin would have listed me on the box. So we’ll have to go with option C.”

We didn’t talk much in the car. When we entered the bank, I could tell Win was nervous only because she held herself more erectly than usual. She told the pleasant woman in the front lobby she was there to get into a safe deposit box, and showed the key. Of course the woman asked,
Is the box in your name?
And Win, with a smile that didn’t even hint at how crucial this was, said, “My brother Tobin opened the box, but I believe I’m listed on it,” and pulled out her driver’s license and a copy of Tobin’s.

The next moment would determine a lot—I knew it, and Win knew it. She kept her smile steady as the woman glanced at the driver’s licenses and then looked up something on her computer. I think we were both ready for her to say, “I’m so sorry, your name doesn’t appear to be on this,” followed by a regretful spiel about court orders and wills and death certificates. But the woman just stood up and said, “Yes, your name is on the box. Follow me, please,” and we numbly followed her, through the vault doors and into the room with the boxes. The woman unlocked the drawer the box was in, took the box out and set it on the table, and left.