A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (27 page)

“I think the police knew. I think they knew all along that my father was the one piloting the boat,” she said, her voice small.

“Maybe they did,” I said.

“They didn’t push it, because of who my dad was. They just let everyone think Tobin did it.”

“And Tobin let them think it,” I said gently. “That was his choice then. But now people know.”

There wasn’t much more I could say. Sometimes letting the truth out lets people heal, and sometimes it makes things worse. And you couldn’t really know which, until you did it, and sometimes only later.

The next morning, a buzzing awakened me. I thought at first it was my cell phone, but realized it was coming from my outer room, and remembered Win was out there. A moment later I heard the beep that signified a call going to voice mail, and then the faint sound of phone buttons being pushed, as I drifted back into a doze.

When I did get up, Win was already gone.

I felt like I’d been run over by a dump truck. I was exhausted, achy, mildly headachy, and ravenous.

The house was quiet, no one downstairs. I cooked oatmeal and eggs, and drank several glasses of water and then tea, hot and strong. I took a long shower and then and only then did I turn on my computer.

E-mail messages rolled onto the screen. I rubbed my eyes and started sorting them.

Some were messages forwarded from the newspaper, but some were from friends.

Baker wrote:
Looks great, Troy
. Simon wrote:
Hey, Troy, you sure you don’t want to go back to writing engagements and weddings
? Alyssa sent one word:
Congrats
. David Zimmer wrote:
You did good, girl
. Nothing from Philippe. Or Jameson.

There was a collection of phone messages I hadn’t listened to last night. I turned to the phone and hit the Play button.

George—sounding almost giddy.

Six from other reporters, asking about the story.

And one from Paul.
Crap
. He’d be in school and I wouldn’t be able to talk to him until tonight. For now I’d send an e-mail that he’d see when he got home.

Jessamyn’s father was packed up to leave. I shook his hand and told him goodbye and took Tiger for a walk so Jessamyn could say goodbye in private. It was oddly reassuring to walk the streets of this small town and nod at the people I knew.

When I got back, Jessamyn was pulling the sheets off the bed her father had used. It surprised me she’d thought of this, but this wasn’t the Jessamyn I’d met last year. This was Jessamyn-with-a-father, Jessamyn no longer hiding from her past. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that people reinvented themselves overnight or that she didn’t have plenty left to work out. But she had a father now; she wasn’t alone. Now she knew her father hadn’t abandoned her, had never intended to lose her.

She was going to go visit her dad the weekend after next, she told me as she stuffed the sheets in our little washer and turned on the water, and he’d already bought her a train ticket. He’d taken her shopping that morning—he wanted to get her a better winter coat, he’d said that’s what a father would do—and she’d let him. He wanted to buy her more things, she said, but she only let him get her the coat, and a sweater they’d seen in a window.

She pulled at the hem of the sweater to show it to me. It was lavender, a striking contrast with her black hair.

“It makes him happy to get things for you, Jessamyn,” I said. “I mean, he hasn’t been able to.”

“I know, but if he gets me too much stuff, he might think that’s why I like him.” She scrunched up her face. “And I like him, I really do.”

It wasn’t every day a long-lost father appears, and I could tell she needed to talk. So I stifled that little voice in my head that was urging me to get back to work. I made tea and sat down, and Jessamyn let the story spill out. When she was young, her mother had told her that her father had left, that he had a new family, that he didn’t want to have anything to do with them and didn’t send any money. It was true that he hadn’t sent money after the first six months, but that was because he hadn’t had anywhere to send it. His ex-wife had moved, left no forwarding address, moved his daughter out of his life. One day he was a father with a child, and the next day he wasn’t.

“Do you know why … why your mother did that?” I asked.

“I think just to be mean.” She pushed her hair back from her forehead, behind her ear. “My mother held grudges. If she didn’t like someone, that was it. My dad must have pissed her off somehow and that was that.”

She laughed. “I bet when I left my note it scared their socks off, where I’d said I’d gotten in touch with my father. They didn’t dare do a thing, because my mother would be charged with parental kidnapping, all that. That worked even better than I planned.”

She stirred sugar in her tea and sipped it. “I just wish … I just wish I
had
found my dad then, that I had gone to look for him.” Her voice broke and she put her head down on her arms, like she had the day she’d found out Tobin had died.

We sat there a bit. I thought of things I could say, to tell her that, at fourteen, after a decade of being told her father didn’t want her, of course she wasn’t going to go try to find him. At fourteen, even if she had been able to find him, she might not have been able to cope if he’d sent her back to her mother. But I didn’t think it would help. She needed to grieve, for the years she’d lost and the life she might have had.

After a bit she sat up, finished her tea, went to wash her face,
and then left for work. She wanted to cram in as many shifts as possible, she said, to make up for the ones she’d missed the last few days and the ones she’d miss when she went down to visit her father. She’d never been to Boston. A whole new world was about to open up for her.

Upstairs, I went back to work. It felt like a clock was ticking, with too many unanswered questions: the truck, Marilyn, why Tobin had wandered out on the ice, if anyone else had been involved. For this article, I decided, I’d ask Win if I could use that recent photo of her with her brother, maybe even the one of him with their grandfather. I pulled up the photo of people standing at the edge of the lake, the day Tobin’s body had been found, and the list of names I’d gotten from Baker. I was going out to the bars in Saranac Lake again tonight with Dean, to get some quotes for my last article, and might see some of these guys. Again I saw the fellow who looked vaguely familiar, so I pulled the photo up and zoomed in on the face. This was the man named Phillips, I remembered, the one with a funny nickname—Crick. I studied it a moment, wondering if he just had one of those faces that seem familiar, and then I had it: this was the fellow who’d stopped to help me after my car had spun out, the one who’d driven it out of the ditch for me.

I was thinking about trying again to follow up with Marilyn, to see if I could get more out of her, when the phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID, which showed an 897 prefix, Saranac Lake or nearby. I answered. It was Ray Brook—the state police investigator.

For a moment I thought maybe the tox results on Tobin had come back—but the police wouldn’t be calling me to report; they’d call Win. The man was asking me a question, and it took a moment or two to mentally switch gears and hear what he was saying:
Did I have any idea who could have left the threatening note on Miss Winslow’s car?

Maybe I should have said,
What threatening note?
Because I sure didn’t know what he meant. But I went for short and simple: “No.”

“Have you received any threatening notes?”

“No. There were some comments online on the first article I wrote on Tobin, and probably there will be on this new one too.”

A pause. I felt stupid.

“That’s it?” he asked.

“Well, some hang-ups at night, but they were blocked numbers that I could set my phone system to reject.”

Another pause.

“And well, the other day I had two flat tires on my car, not slashed or anything, just the air let out. But I live on Main Street, it could be anyone passing by.”

Then in a too-patient tone, the one that lets you know the person thinks you’re an idiot, he asked, “Do you have any idea who might be doing these things?”

I shrugged. “A friend of Tobin’s. Someone who doesn’t like Win being here. The reporter who got fired. I don’t know.”

Pause.

“What reporter?”

Oh, yikes, I didn’t mean him to take me seriously. “I don’t really think he had anything to do with it, I don’t think he’s still around—but the reporter, Dirk somebody, who did that first article, the one that was deleted. He got fired that day. He’s not from here; I imagine he moved away already.”

“Then why did you mention him?”

Because I’m thinking on my feet and because I always manage to say the wrong thing to the police
. “Just popped in my head.” No
way was I going to mention that I’d thought I’d seen Tobin’s truck a time or two. This man already thought I was a flake.

Some more back and forth, and I managed to get off the phone. Then I called Win.

“Miss Winslow,” I said, “is there anything you neglected to tell me?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, did I interrupt you? Just wondering if there’s something you neglected to tell me
—before the police called me about it
.”

“Oh, he called you already,” she said. “I’m sorry. Troy, I wasn’t sure I was going to tell anyone—I found it on my car this morning, outside your house. I just crammed it in the side pocket, but then I started thinking about it. Dean stopped by to split some firewood for me and I showed it to him, and he thought I should tell the police. Just in case.”

“What exactly was it?”

“It’s stupid, like out of the movies, a warning note. Oh, heck, I’m coming back into town to take it to the police; I’ll stop by first to show it to you.”

Twenty minutes later, Win handed me a sealed clear plastic bag. On the cardboard inside were letters in black marker: we know what you have and we want it back. I laughed, without meaning to. Win looked startled.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But this looks like a prank, like that story you hear about the kid who called people at random, saying, ‘I know what you did,’ and it turns out they all had some terrible secret they thought the caller was referring to.”

“So you think it’s a prank.”

“I’m not saying that—it’s just that this is so dramatic and so vague. Why doesn’t it say ‘We know you have some stolen diamonds and you’d better return them’ or ‘We know you have those nude photos and we want them back’?”

Now Win laughed.

“You know,” I told her, “I want to call my friend. He’s a policeman, and he’s good at thinking these things through.”

I didn’t like to call Jameson at work, but he’d told me to call if anything happened, and this seemed to qualify. As soon as Win left, I picked up the phone. He answered on the second ring, and I told him about the note. His reaction was much the same as mine: someone sadly unsophisticated, or a coincidental prank.

“You’ve asked Tobin’s friends about it?” he asked.

“Win asked Dean, who lived near Tobin. He’s the one who told her she ought to tell the police.”

“Is she staying alone out there?”

“Mmm, off and on. Sometimes Tiger stays out there with her.”

“Don’t have a good feeling about this, Troy. There are too many odd little incidents. Can you get her to stay at your house for a while?”

“I can try.”

“Oh, and Troy—good article.” He cleared his throat. “Just be careful.”

I promised, and called Win and told her voice mail that my policeman friend suggested that she stay in town here for a few days, and that her suite downstairs was ready for her.

Dean was coming by at six for our outing, so I went to shower and put on decent jeans. It was early, but on a weeknight people would be in the bars early. I’d talked him into letting me buy him dinner at Casa del Sol in Saranac Lake first—it wasn’t expensive, and he had helped me out. And I felt slightly guilty over having had those tendrils of doubt about him.

We’d just placed our order when I felt my phone vibrate in my jeans pocket. I pulled it out—Win. I nodded at Dean in apology, mouthed “Win,” and put it to my ear. I repeated my invitation to stay at the house. She didn’t want to, but I got her to agree to pick up Tiger and keep her overnight. “I’ll be out all evening anyway,” I told her. “You’ll be doing me a favor. Tiger gets lonely.”

I didn’t fool her, but she promised.

I clicked off. Dean had been politely pretending he didn’t hear every word.

“I’m not comfortable with Win out there alone, especially after that note left on her car, and with you not there,” I told him.

“But she’s taking your dog.”

“Yes,” I said, and he nodded.

“Has anything else happened?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably it was random, but someone let the air out of two of my tires.”

He raised his eyebrows, and I explained.

“Just pushed in the valves, or pulled them out?” he asked.

“Pushed them in. Why?”

“Then it’s spur of the moment, not planned. If someone planned it and was serious, they’d pull out the valve core with needle-nose pliers.”

I gave him a look, and he grinned.

“Hey, I’m not saying I’ve ever done it, but that’s what someone would do if they really wanted to mess with you.”

Our food came—I do love Mexican food. We had a slight tussle over the bill when it arrived, and I compromised by letting him leave the tip. Men seem to like to tip, which I always find awkward. You’re basically telling someone how much you approve of them by how much you leave. And I’ve never understood how restaurants get away with not paying staff a decent wage.

At the bar in Saranac Lake, the guys seemed pleased to see me. They’d seen my articles and liked them. This time I asked more specific questions, and asked a few of his friends if they had any idea why someone would have broken into Tobin’s cabin. One admitted that Tobin might have had a little weed, but certainly not enough to tear up a cabin for.