A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (23 page)

Win called late that afternoon to tell me she’d ordered the temporary death certificates and started going through her brother’s mail. Among them, she said, were two letters from her, and on this her voice broke.

“I’m sorry he didn’t get them, Win.”

She changed the subject. “How is it going? The article.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t tell her about a mysterious policeman and an old man I’d walked the beach with and someone named David Zimmer I couldn’t get to call me back. I needed to keep journalistic separation where I could, and the fact was I never liked talking about things I was working on.

I took Tiger out for a brief walk. When I got back, there were no messages, but I checked incoming calls. I had missed one call—from the number I had for David Zimmer

I called back. “Troy Chance calling for David Zimmer,” I said,
when a man answered. A pause. I added, “From Lake Placid. I left a message before.”

“You left a lot of messages.” His voice was dry: neither angry nor friendly. “Just why is it you’re calling me?”

“I’m writing an article on Tobin Winslow, and someone suggested I talk to you, and said you knew him and his brother, Trey.”

Another pause. “And who are you writing for?”

I told him. “I’m doing a series …” I said, then paused. “Have you … I didn’t know if you knew, but Tobin died here, and his body was recently found.”

“Yes,” he said. “I knew.”

“The paper’s doing a series on Tobin, including his life before he moved up here. I’ve talked to their sister a lot.”

“Jessica Winslow?”

“Yes, Win. I mean, she goes by Win now, at least here.”

“So she gave you my name.”

“No, actually it was the Winslows’ nanny.”

“The nanny?” He seemed surprised.

“Yes, I interviewed her for the article. And when I asked if there was anyone Tobin might have talked to about the accident, she gave me your name.”

“Why do you need to talk to me, me specifically? Why do you even need to discuss the accident?” he asked.

He was sounding annoyed. I sensed he was near that moment where he would hang up—that this was when I had to risk telling him more. I took a deep breath. “This next article starts with the accident, the boat wreck, when Trey died. And I’ve been led to believe, from someone who saw them that night, that there was someone else on board.”

An intake of breath, and a pause, a long one. I could hear him breathing. Maybe it had been a mistake to tell him this.

“Send me the link to the first article, and I’ll call you back,” he said briefly, decisively. So I did.

Thirty minutes later my phone rang.

“That’s a hell of an article, Miss Chance,” David Zimmer said. His voice was different, deeper. Less terse.

“Troy. My name is Troy.”

“You’re in Lake Placid? Do you have a car?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a diner at Exit 22 from the Northway in Lake George, about eighty miles from you. Can you meet me there in two hours?”

I blinked. “Well, yes, but we could just talk on the phone.”

“No, I’d rather meet.” He told me what he would be driving—a two-year-old gray Saab—and I told him I had a blue Subaru wagon. We exchanged cell phone numbers. I hung up the phone and stared at it. And then went to get ready for a road trip.

Before I left, I wrote a note:
Just in case I’m going off to meet a homicidal maniac, here’s who I’m going to meet—I’ll be home or call before dark
. I added name, phone numbers, car make, destination, and taped it to the fridge.

That would give the roommates a laugh, but I was covering my bases. I e-mailed Jameson. And took Tiger with me. Just in case.

I was glad the roads were clear—I was jittery, not knowing what I was heading into. But Win’s nanny would have, I thought, warned me if there was any reason to beware of this man. When I arrived he was already there. He stepped out of his car when I pulled up, and followed me into the restaurant. He was slight, with light brown hair, sharply dressed, but didn’t carry himself with that sense of entitlement that many attractive, well-dressed people do.

“You’re a good writer,” he said. “You work for a very small paper.”

There seemed to be an implied question in that, so I answered what he hadn’t asked. “I freelance for them, and some magazines.”

“You knew Tobin?”

“Yes, but not well. He dated one of my roommates, and I met his sister when she came up recently. She’s staying in Lake Placid a while.”

We nodded yes to the waitress when she came by with a coffeepot, and waited while she filled our mugs.

“And you know the Winslows’ nanny?” he asked.

Just to interview her, I told him, but I’d liked her. Then I looked at him and asked the question I probably wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask on the phone. “Were you on the boat?”

“On the boat?”

“Were you on the boat that night? Were you the third person?”

He set down his coffee cup. He laughed oddly, a laugh that was painful to hear. “Oh, no. I wasn’t on the boat. We wouldn’t be sitting here if I had been the third person on that boat.”

“But you know about it? You were friends with Tobin and Trey?” He looked at me, full on, and I caught my breath. His face was filled with grief, deep and awful. His eyes held more hurt than I’d ever seen, like falling down an endless dark hole. He coughed, a sharp bark of a cough, the sound you make when you’re choking back pain, and I realized this man was still grieving Trey Winslow, who had died six years ago.

“I knew Tobin, but it was Tobin’s brother I knew well,” he said simply. He saw it dawning on me, saw in my face that I was starting to understand that the person who had died that night was more than a friend to him.

He took a sip of coffee and grimaced. “This stuff is awful. Look, my friend has a condo here he lets me use, with a machine that will make a much better brew than this. Then we can talk privately, if you’re comfortable with that.”

Sometimes in life you decide to take chances, and this was one of those times. I got in my car and followed him, and parked where he indicated. As I was getting out he nodded at Tiger in my back seat. “Bring your dog up if you like.” So I did. I don’t know if he was considering Tiger’s comfort or mine.

The condo was spotless, with a bright kitchen and a long, tiled countertop with padded stools. I sat on one while he started the fancy espresso machine. It made rumbling brewing noises, and then he filled two cups, and added steamed milk from the spigot on the side. He sat down across from me and started talking.

“I didn’t call him Trey,” he said. “He’d been Trey all his life—what is that, really, bastardized Italian for
third
? He didn’t want to be a third anything—he wanted to be himself. I called him Martin, his middle name.” He sipped his coffee; I sipped mine. He was right, it was infinitely better than the stuff in the restaurant. It took him a moment to start again.

“I’d known Martin for four years, and we’d been together for two. He hadn’t told his family. They had his whole life planned out, where he would go to college, when he would come into the family business, who he was going to marry, how many children he would have. And he wanted to make them happy. If he could have done it, he would have. He’d ended things with the girl, but his family acted like it was just a temporary tiff, that they’d get back together. He’d decided he couldn’t go through the rest of it, he couldn’t work in the family business, live in the same town, see his father every day and his mother every Sunday for dinner, living a lie, pretending the whole time. We were going to move to Colorado.”

He smiled sadly. “He had just told his father he was going to leave.” He sat silent for a moment, and I wondered if this was all he was going to tell me. But he went on. “They were all in the boat, you know.”

I looked at him, not sure what he meant, or who.

“All three of them were in the boat: Tobin, Martin, their father.”

He watched me take this in. Their father had been the third man.

I hadn’t even begun working this out in my head when he started talking again. Usually it had been just Tobin and Martin on the boat, he said, sometimes a friend or two, but most often just the two brothers. It was something they loved to do together, spending hours out on the water. That day their father insisted on going—he had paid for the boat, he said, and he was going to take the wheel. He’d been drinking, and he drank more while they were out on the water. “He started driving like a madman,” David
said, “and they couldn’t get the controls from him. And when he whipped the boat around, Tobin went over. Martin grabbed life jackets and jumped in after him.”

He stopped, and sipped his coffee. He said nothing for a long, long moment.

“And then?” I prompted. He had, I thought, imagined this scene so many times that by now it was like a movie he had seen, over and over.

“And then, nothing. Martin found Tobin; they put the jackets on; they found something in the water, a log or broken mast or something, and hung on to it. And their father never came back.”

I stared at him.

“He crashed the boat—they found it the next day—but somehow got himself to shore and home.” David got up and refilled his coffee cup. “Did you know life jackets can go bad?” he said, conversationally. “They can. They can leak, they can get waterlogged. If you don’t store them properly, the material inside can harden, and then they just don’t work anymore. Who checks life jackets regularly? Almost no one.”

“The life jackets were bad?” I whispered.

He turned his eyes to me, those dark, sad eyes that made me wish I were an artist so I could capture them in a painting, or that I knew the secret to making that sadness go away. “Only one.”

“Martin’s.” I whispered the word.

“No, Tobin’s, actually. It was pulling him down. Martin wrestled him out of it; took his off and made him put it on. He knew what he was doing. He was the older brother; he wanted Tobin to live. He knew they couldn’t hang on to that chunk of wood all night in that cold water; he knew what would happen if no one rescued them. He chose to die so Tobin could live. That was Martin; that’s what Martin would do.”

We sat there a while.

“Their father—did he hit his head in the crash, pass out?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Tobin didn’t know. Maybe their father was so drunk he didn’t notice the boys had gone overboard.
Maybe he crashed the boat and didn’t remember what happened.”

“So he just went home—like nothing happened? And never said anything?”

He took a drink of coffee before speaking. “Apparently not. Everyone assumed it was just the boys on the boat as usual; people thought Tobin asking about his father was delirious rambling. He was pretty hypothermic by the time they found him, and hysterical about Martin. And once he realized his father wasn’t going to admit he was on the boat, Tobin let people assume what they would.”

“How …”

“Tobin came to see me as soon as he got out of the hospital and told me all of it, every moment he could remember. He told me he kept his hand twisted around Martin’s shirt to try to help hold him up, that Martin was hanging on to that piece of wood they’d found, but Tobin kept dozing off in the night, and the last time, when he woke, his brother was gone. He told me he thought about taking off the life jacket, throwing it away, letting the water take him. But he knew that wasn’t what his brother would have wanted, that it would have negated what Martin had done to save him. Tobin didn’t cry when he told me, just sat and told me every detail, every single thing Martin said to him and what they said to each other, and then he hugged me. And then, the next day, he left. He got on a bus and never came back.”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” I whispered. David directed me to a bathroom off the kitchen, and I was sick, quickly and thoroughly, into an immaculate off-white toilet. Then I sat on the bathroom floor and I cried, for Win, for Trey-who-had-been-Martin, for Tobin. I cried for the bad thoughts I’d had about Tobin without having any idea of who he was and what he had endured, and I cried for David, who had done his mourning in private. Then I washed my face in the sink and blotted it dry on a beautiful white towel.

When I came out of the bathroom I was shaking a little. “You
need to eat,” David said decisively, and made me a sandwich without asking. He put it in front of me, cut neatly in half, with a glass of milk, and I ate it and I drank the milk. The sandwich was ham and cheddar on wheat, and it was very good, and the milk made my stomach feel that just maybe the food would stay there peacefully.

“So their father never told anyone he was with them, or that he crashed the boat,” I said again.

“Apparently not.”

“He just went home.”

“Yes.”

“Someone must have noticed his clothes were wet.”

He shrugged. “Maybe Mrs. Winslow did. Maybe he dropped them in the laundry room and the maid took care of it. Maids don’t talk about the dirty laundry they find.”

“He let people think Tobin was responsible for his brother’s death!”
I was nearly screaming.

David sipped his coffee. He was calm, but he’d had six years of living with this. “I’ve always wondered if he managed to convince himself that he never went out on the boat, that the boys took the boat out. Just blocked it all out.”

“Tobin didn’t tell anyone?”

He shrugged. “Other than me? Other than asking about his father when they picked him up? I doubt it. His sister was paralyzed with grief; how could he tell her? She was closer to her father than her brothers—was Tobin going to tell her their father was a drunk, a liar, a coward, responsible for her brother’s death? He couldn’t do it. But he wanted me to know what Martin had done, how he had died. He knew what Martin and I meant to each other.” He saw the way I was looking at him. He brushed a hand over his eyes. “You don’t get over it,” he said. “Some people you love while they’re there, and some people you love forever, whether they’re there or not. Me, I figure I was lucky to have that sort of love once.”

When my cell phone rang, I jumped. I pulled it out of my pocket and glanced at the caller ID—Win.