A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (22 page)

Win looked at me. We were both so tense I think if someone had said boo we’d have leapt a foot into the air. She sat and pulled the box toward her, and opened it with fingers that shook a little.

I imagine odd things are found in safe deposit boxes. I thought of the shoebox I’d kept in my room as a kid and what it had held: a diary, a piece of sassafras, a photo of my dog, a smooth piece of whittled wood, a birthday card, a little man on a parachute you tossed up in the air and watch flutter to the ground. Trash to my mother; treasures to me.

This was Tobin’s treasure box. Win pulled the items out, one by one. On top was an old watch on a chain. “Our grandfather’s,” she said. Then a passport. A lone hundred-dollar bill. A newspaper clipping of the obituary of Bertram Martin Winslow III. A
photo of three well-dressed children, a carefully spaced two years apart, wide grins, a puppy at their feet. One of Trey, in a football uniform, helmet in hand. One of an elderly man with his arm around a teenage Tobin, and another of a young girl, head half turned, caught in motion, slightly blurred in an artistic way. Their grandfather, I assumed, and maybe a girlfriend from high school. And one last photo, of Win and Tobin, on a sofa, wrapping their arms around each other, grinning at the camera.

Win stopped at that one and looked at it a long time. “We took that in my place, with a timer, the last time he came to see me.”

Next was a thick batch of pages, folded, in a dense envelope. Win lifted it out, opened the envelope, and pulled out the pages. Then she turned it so I could read the top:
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF TOBIN WALTER WINSLOW
. She skimmed the pages—“It’s from two years ago,” she said. “Power of attorney and everything to me.” She refolded it and put it back in the envelope, eyes glistening.

The last thing in the box was a sheet of paper, folded, filled with neat handwriting and numbers. Win blinked as she looked down at it, and tears ran down her cheeks. She showed me the page, a white lined piece of paper from a pad, filled with information, line after line: a credit card account number, bank account number, post office box number, Win’s name, address, and phone number, e-mail account password. At the bottom it said, in scrawled handwriting:
Jess, you are a great sister and I love you always—Tobin
.

It was what you put together for someone who would find your things after you died.
Who in their twenties does this?
Someone whose own brother had died way too young? Or someone who may be considering suicide?

She sat there a moment, then brushed tears from her face. At a glance the box looked empty, but I could see something glinting in the corner. Win reached in and pulled out a key, one with a distinctive shape.

“A post office box key,” I said, recognizing it. “They give you two here when you open a box.”

Win nodded. She put the passport and obituary and watch back in the box, slid everything else into her bag, closed the box, and stood. After the bank woman came in and locked the box back in its compartment, I followed Win out.

In the sunshine we blinked at the brightness. Win looked toward the coffee shop down the street, and I nodded. Inside, we ordered giant mugs of steaming coffee.

“First things first,” she said as we sipped our coffees. “I want to copy all of these—on your scanner if that’s all right. Then I’ll request the death certificates and take the will to the lawyer in town that my lawyer recommended. Once the body is released I can plan everything. We’ll have a service here, after all this is over, not at a church but somewhere informal, with all his friends.”

It was clear she was planning this all out as she spoke. I figured if she let herself feel all she was feeling right now, she’d crumple into a small ball. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who had trouble processing feelings. Or maybe Win just preferred to fall apart in private.

“I guess you should let the police know about the will,” I said.

She nodded.

We headed to the post office, and I watched her insert the key into the mailbox that had been Tobin’s. It was crammed so full it didn’t open at first. She tried again and forced it open, and pulled out everything. I saw one of the yellow cards that tells you there’s something that won’t fit in your box. When she took it to the counter, the woman handed her a neat stack of mail, tidily rubber-banded. Win put it in her bag without looking.

At the house I ran the legal papers through my scanner for Win, printing copies and saving digital ones as well.

“I’ll go call the state police and my lawyer to let them know about the will, and do what needs doing to get a death certificate,” she said. “Then I’ll sort through the mail and everything this afternoon.”

The house was quiet after she left. And then the phone rang, and it was the policeman, Moreno, from Oregon.

“Are you taping this?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Did you want me to?”

“Absolutely not. And this is off the record.”

“Okay.” I probably sounded as dubious as I felt.

“Write this down: Orville Peterson. He lives in Rye, New York, last I heard. He says he saw the Winslow boat go out that night with three people in it.”

“
Three
people,” I repeated.

“Three men, according to him.”

“But …”

“He’s an old man; he’s eccentric, and he likes a scotch or two every evening. He lived in a boathouse down the beach from the Winslows’ summer place—it likely wasn’t legal, but the owners were distant relations and let him stay there. No one took him seriously.”

“But you believed him.”

Silence for a long moment. “Yes, I did. He’s eccentric and old, but he’s not stupid and he’s not senile. But the higher-ups didn’t, and the parents didn’t. And no one wanted the surviving son grilled. He was too traumatized by the accident, and
of course
there were only two people in the boat. So that was the end of it.”

“Did … did anyone go missing that night?”

He gave a bark of a laugh. “I like how your mind works, Miss Chance. No, no one was reported missing from the area that evening. That’s all I can give you. Find Orville, if he’s still alive; talk to him. And find anyone Tobin might have talked to about the accident. And you didn’t hear this from me.”

“You can’t tell me anything else?”

He laughed again. It was a harsh laugh, not pleasant. “What?” he said. “I didn’t tell you anything.”

“Right,” I said. “Of course not.”

He hung up. I sat there a while. And then I set to tracking down an old man named Orville Peterson, who may or may not have seen the Winslow boat go out with three people on board a half dozen years ago.

It took some focused computer research and a series of phone calls to find him. He’d moved to a guesthouse of a great-nephew, someone clearly fond of his elderly relative, near the beach. I found the great-nephew at his office, a fellow named Ian, who was ready, willing, and able to talk.

“He can’t really live alone, and he wants to be near the water, he has to have his long walks on the beach morning and night. So he’s in our little guesthouse; it used to be a playhouse for the kids,” he told me. “We take dinner over to him and have someone come in to keep the place up, but he likes feeling he’s on his own.”

“Could I call him? Do you think he’d talk to me about this?”

I could almost hear the man shaking his head. “He doesn’t have a phone. I could get him over to my house, but he hates talking on the phone. You’d be better off trying in person, if you really need to talk to him.”

I thanked him, and hung up and called George.

“You think you need to go?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t try to explain, didn’t say that this might be chasing a chimera, but I felt I had to do it.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll cover your gas again, and a cheap motel. Can you get down there now?”

“Yep,” I said.

I called the great-nephew back and got directions. I texted Win to ask her if she could pick up Tiger or if I could drop her off. She answered she’d get Tiger within the hour. I looked up the nearest Motel 6 to where I was going, packed a small bag, left a note on the fridge, and off I went.

I found the man the next morning, just where Great-nephew Ian had told me he would be, walking the shoreline near the guesthouse. He peered at me suspiciously, but he’d been told to expect me, and I’d brought the current
U.S. News & World Report
and a bag of crullers his nephew said he would like. He tucked the magazine under his arm and opened the bag.

“Mmm,” he said. “Ian just wants me to eat healthy stuff, but sometimes a man needs a good cruller, you know.”

I nodded, not telling him that it was Ian who’d suggested I bring them.

“You want to talk about the accident, the Winslow boat accident,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “What can you tell me?”

He took me through it: him out walking on the beach that day, toward the private dock where the Winslows kept their boat, seeing the boat, seeing two people board, and as he neared, seeing a third get on, the one he thought must have been the younger son, one with long and floppy dark hair, and watching the boat leave the dock.

“Don’t know why they wear their hair like that,” he said. “Seems it would make it hard to see.” We walked on another minute before he spoke again. “Wasn’t a great day for it—looked like it was going to get choppy. But they looked like they knew what they were doing.”

“You told the police you saw three people on the boat?”

He nodded, kicking at the sand and dislodging a candy-bar wrapper. He pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket and put the wrapper inside.

“Shameful how much trash people throw on the ground,” he
said. “Some days I get nearly half a bag full or more, depending how far I go.”

“The boat … the police?”

“I heard about the drowning and then saw the report in the paper, the one that said the two boys were out in the boat. I thought maybe it was just a mistake, you know papers get things wrong all the time, but that’s what all the papers said. And then I thought about it some more and I called the police and told them. One young fellow came and talked to me, someone with a Mexican name, but he looked more Indian, American Indian, you know, and I told him what I saw and he thanked me, and that was that.”

“You didn’t hear from anyone else?”

“No.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “They don’t know who the third person was, so they said it was just two people, right?”

I picked up a bottle cap, and he held his bag out for it. “That’s the official version, yes.”

“And the other boy, the young one, he died too, you said.”

“Yes.”

“And he never told anyone who the third person was?” He squinted at me, his wrinkled face showing consternation.

“I don’t think he did. But I’m going to ask around.”

“Could be they came back after I left, let off the third person, and went back out again,” he offered.

“Could be,” I said.

I walked all the way down the beach with him and back—it must have been two miles, and he did indeed half fill the trash bag, which I ended up carrying to make it easier for him to drop trash in it without breaking stride. Along the way I asked him if I could take some photos and he agreed, and I snapped some of him from the back, from low, angled across the sand and slanting toward the water.

Back in the car, I called Win. No answer, so I pecked out a text message on my not-smart phone:
Can you think of anyone Tobin might have talked to about the accident?
A few minutes later she
texted back:
Not unless it was our grandfather. Or his girlfriend then or his friend Brad
.

Grandfather, dead. Brad—that was the accountant, still mysteriously missing. Former girlfriend—her I could try again, but I hadn’t gotten the impression there were any secrets she was going to be willing to share.

Then I looked up the nanny’s phone number, and dialed it.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said when she answered. “But I’m working on the next article on Tobin, the one that starts with the boat accident, and I’m trying to find someone Tobin may have talked to afterward. Anyone he may have trusted, or confided in.”

She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and I was wondering if I needed to tell her about my talk with Orville, to tell her that someone, a thirdhand someone, had suggested there was more to this than the official version. But then she cleared her throat.

“Is it important?” she asked.

“Yes, I think so,” I said. My voice nearly cracked. I was close to crying and had no idea why. There was something here I was close to, something I had very nearly missed, would have missed but for that phone call from the Couchsurfing couple.

“Talk to David Zimmer,” she said. “He knew both boys.” She spelled the name for me and told me the name of the company she thought he worked at. I didn’t ask more.

I drove to a Panera’s, which I knew had wi-fi, bought a soup and a half sandwich, and pulled out my laptop and logged on. And I tracked down David Zimmer, at the company the nanny had mentioned, and called him at work. I fumbled through the mail system, and after a few rings his voice mail told me he was out of the office for the day. I spoke slowly, choosing my words carefully, because I didn’t know if this man knew that Tobin was dead. I told his voice mail who I was, that I knew Tobin, that I worked for a small paper in the Adirondacks, that I was writing an article about Tobin and wondered if I could interview him. I left my
e-mail address and my phone numbers, and clicked off. Then I ate my soup and my sandwich, and sent a congenial e-mail to Tobin’s college girlfriend, on the off chance he had talked to her about the boat accident that had left his brother dead.

And then I drove home, my brain churning hard.

I got a return e-mail from Tobin’s old girlfriend, who knew nothing. I left Zimmer a second message, and a third, and a fourth, and began to wonder if I wasn’t going to get anywhere and if I should drop it. I reminded myself I wasn’t investigating a drowning from years ago—but I
was
writing about Tobin’s life, and that did include his brother’s death.