A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (31 page)

A half hour later, Win and I were in her car, heading to Greenwich. I wasn’t sure at what point it had become apparent this wasn’t something she wanted to do alone. Win was nervous about seeing her mother, and about seeing David, and she wasn’t the type of woman who got nervous. My work could wait a day. I wasn’t looking forward to writing a story with no resolution, and I wasn’t at all sure what I was going to do about the whole shoving incident. Which I hadn’t told anyone about.

We met David at a McDonald’s not far from his office. The good thing about McDonald’s is that there’s one everywhere, and those big golden arches are easy to find. I introduced him to Win in the parking lot, and she gave him a hug. It wasn’t the best place for meeting, but we hadn’t had much time to plan this.

I got into his Saab; we’d follow Win to her mother’s house. It seemed polite to keep David company, and Win had told me she could use the alone time.

David and I drove in silence at first, a not uncomfortable one.

“Do you know Jessica’s—Win’s mother?” he asked.

“No, not at all. I spoke to her once, very briefly. I left them
messages, of course, when I was writing those first two articles, but they never got back to me.”

He smiled a little. I looked at him questioningly.

“It’s not really anything,” he said, “I was just thinking—Tobin’s the only one of the three who kept his name. People close to Trey called him Martin, and Jessica goes by Win now.”

But Tobin’s the one who left
, I thought, so maybe he didn’t need to change his name. And Tobin was a cool name. Jessamyn also had clung to her unique first name, which had let her father find her. Another thing she and Tobin had in common.

David turned to look at me. “That was brilliant how you did that second article, how you set it up, how you put it together.”

I felt my face get warm. “Ah, yeah, well, it wasn’t an easy article to write—and it was tricky doing it from bits and pieces.”

“You did it well,” he said. “You made it work. It’s a powerful piece.”

We drove several more miles before he spoke again. “Do the Winslows expect legal ramifications?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If the police send someone to talk to Mr. Winslow, I think he’ll just say he passed out after the boys went overboard and doesn’t remember going home, didn’t remember being in the boat until just now—that it all just came back to him. Or that he still doesn’t remember, but that the things that have come up have convinced him. Something like that.”

He glanced at me. “Sure you haven’t met him?”

“No, why?”

“You’ve got him pegged. Or did Tobin or Win talk about him?”

I shook my head. “No, Tobin never talked about family. Win did, a little. But sometimes you can tell what someone is like by the space they leave.”

He looked at me.

I tried to explain. “Not a space so much as how their presence affected people. How he affected Win and Tobin, and how it affected them when they left home.” I shook my head. “I’m not making sense.”

“No, no, you are. I get it.”

“And the nanny,” I said. “The nanny sort of told me stuff.” Or didn’t tell me, but it amounted to the same thing.

We were in a fancy neighborhood now, the homes stately and on large lots, some with driveways so long the houses were barely visible. David slid the Saab neatly around a corner. “You don’t have any idea why Mrs. Winslow wants to see Win or me?”

“No,” I said. “And I don’t think Win does either. It was a surprise to her.”

“So her mother asked to see you, too?”

“Me? No, I’m here for moral support. I may end up just waiting in the car.”

But I didn’t.

The house made Philippe’s home in Ottawa look like a summer cottage. It was enormous, elegant without quite being ostentatious, as if a designer had been instructed to come as close as possible to the edge without going over it. The furniture and décor were exquisite. The woman who let us in was wearing a neat black dress that wasn’t a uniform, but left no doubt she was a servant. We were led into a pristine room, sunnier and deliberately more casual than a living room. There a woman was awaiting us, seated in a tall, slimly stuffed chair.

Win, beside me, seemed composed, but I could feel anxiety radiating from her. David was calmer, but this wasn’t his family, and he’d known these secrets for a long time. And he could walk out and leave this all behind. Part of Win was still here, might always be here, in the rooms she’d grown up in with her brothers.

The woman was slight: medium height, slim. Not a gray hair in evidence, hair immaculately coiffed. Her clothing was simple, but the simple that meant impressive price tags, not simple like “came from Target.” She nodded at the woman who’d showed us in, which presumably meant
Leave us now
or
We are ready for tea
. Apparently very rich people communicated with their underlings through nods.

We sat down, neatly, primly, on the edges of our seats. Win
introduced us, first me and then David, and Mrs. Winslow nodded at us in turn. She asked politely about our drive and asked David where he lived and worked. Then the tea arrived. It was good tea, with an enticing aroma, served in a lovely pot, with little cookies and tiny crustless sandwich thingies. We hadn’t had lunch, and I wondered how many of these little sandwich thingies I could eat without seeming rude.

We sipped our tea, and having tea and cookies did seem to help us relax.

Mrs. Winslow set her teacup down tidily. For a moment it seemed that the next words out of her mouth would be
We are gathered here together
, but of course they weren’t. She surprised me by speaking to me first.

“I read your articles, Miss Chance. You did a fine job of telling about Tobin’s life after he left here. I thank you for that. It was lovely reading where he had been, and the comments from his friends.”

I nodded, and murmured a thank-you. She didn’t mention that I did a fine job of telling the story of her first son’s death, but I hadn’t expected her to. It didn’t seem she hated it, and she apparently wasn’t suing me, and that’s about the best you could hope for in this situation.

Then she looked at David, a long look, and then at Win, as if she were memorizing this moment before she spoke. And when she did, it was to the room, not directly to either of them.

“I was never aware that my husband was in the boat that evening. He was out, but he was often out, at his club and elsewhere. I never asked where he went.” Her tone was brittle. I pictured a bombastic man, doing what he pleased, in charge at work, in charge at home, trampling people along the way.

“If I had known …” She stopped, and then started again, articulating carefully. “If I had known that my husband, that their father had been with them, had taken them out, left them …” Her voice choked, and I didn’t think this was deliberate. My throat tightened in turn. I didn’t dare look at Win or David.

“If I had known, I would have turned him in to the police myself.” She said it flatly, emotionlessly. The air resonated, her words almost echoing.

David was the one who moved, almost before the words were out of her mouth. He went to her side, took her hand.

“I am sure you would have, Mrs. Winslow. But of course you had no way of knowing.” Whether he believed this or not, I don’t know, and I suppose it didn’t matter. Of course she wanted to think she would have turned in her husband. Whether she would have or not was another thing, but this was the mother of a man David had loved, still loved, and this was what he needed to say to her, and what she needed to hear.

She grasped his hand and when he moved to hug her, she wrapped her thin arms loosely around him, her hands on his back looking incongruously old. I looked away, not wanting to intrude, not wanting to witness something so emotional. She held tight for a long moment, and then David moved back to his chair.

Win sat, not moving. She might have been seething, seeing this all turned so graceful, something that had been raw and ugly and awful; having her father’s act acknowledged in such a genteel way. She had lived out the nightmare of one brother drowning and the other being blamed, and she’d had that awful confrontation with her parents.

But while this might not be the apology or acknowledgment Win needed from her mother, it was a lot for a proud woman who had lost two sons and now, in a way, her husband. The act of saying it, of calling us there, was significant. And there was no doubt she was suffering. When Win did move, it was all of a flurry, and then she and her mother were wrapped up in each other, two sets of shoulders shaking.

I met David’s eye and without saying a word we got up and wandered off. He’d been here before, he said, to Winslow parties, and knew the way to the kitchen. There was a plate of extra sandwiches on the countertop; he pulled off the cover and took one, and I did the same. We leaned up against the counter and ate.

“Good sandwiches,” he said.

“Yep.”

“Whew,” he added lightly, after a moment. “Guess that’s all I was really here for.”

“You did good,” I told him, and then we were hugging, tightly. We separated, with pats on the back, then smiled at each other and took another sandwich section each.

“Think we should go back in now?” I asked when we’d finished our little sandwiches.

“We’ll wait another few minutes or so.” So we did. By the time we reentered, Win and her mother had separated, red-eyed, acting as if it wasn’t obvious they had been crying. The woman in the black dress appeared as if responding to an invisible button, and replaced the pot of tea with a fresh one. Mrs. Winslow turned toward David.

“David, we have some books of Trey’s here, in his old room. If you’d like to have some of them, we could go up and take a look.”

This startled him. Emotion ran across his face, and then it was gone, and he said smoothly, “That would be lovely, Mrs. Winslow,” and off they went.

Win looked at me. “Thanks for coming,” she said.

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” I grinned at her, and after a moment she grinned back. “Have some more sandwiches,” I told her. “They’re really good.”

David and Mrs. Winslow were gone at least twenty minutes, and when they came back he had a handful of books under his arm. I don’t know if he wanted them or just took them because she wanted him to. Either way, I was glad he did. He told us he’d better be getting home, and Mrs. Winslow went to the door to see him out.

I turned to Win. “Want me to go for a walk or something so you can visit with your mother some more?”

She shook her head. “I think that’s enough for one day. We’ll stay just a bit longer, if it’s okay with you, and then head home. I know you have work to do.”

When her mother came back, we chatted a bit, and told her we needed to drive back. She made the offer for us to stay there, but I think she knew we weren’t going to. She hugged Win tightly at the door and shook my hand. Then she leaned in toward me and said, close to my ear, “I wish I’d let him keep the dog.”

It rattled me, painfully. She was astute, to have picked out the thing that had hurt me particularly about Tobin’s life, the scene that had embedded itself in me. This could have been emotional grandstanding, but her body radiated hurt. I wanted to say,
I wish you had too
, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’d follow David’s lead, take the graceful route. I said softly, “You would have if you could have.” I didn’t know if this was true, but I wasn’t going to deny her the comfort she wanted. If she was emotionally manipulating me it would be deplorable, but more deplorable for me to assume that was the case. There had been too many assumptions. Too much death, too much pain.

Win and I didn’t talk much on the ride back to Lake Placid. Sometimes you need to let your feelings sort themselves out. And sometimes you don’t need to talk. I took out my laptop and tried to work, but I was tired, my brain overfull and my emotional reserves drained, so I gave up and packed my computer away.

It was late and dark by the time we reached my house. Win said she needed to go on to her cabin. She needed to be alone. And so did I.

I e-mailed Jameson. I didn’t quite tell him that I’d followed the truck all the way to Keene and in essence confronted the driver, but I don’t think it would have surprised him. The police told Win that the fellow’s story checked out—he’d withdrawn cash from his bank the day before Tobin’s disappearance, and had been in Rouses Point much of the time since.

The first time I thought I’d seen the truck had been my imagination, as neither the man nor his truck had been anywhere near here, and the second time was unlikely. So I’d been haunted by a truck that hadn’t been there, but the one time I’d been in a situation where I could follow the truck I thought was Tobin’s, it was. Go figure.

The final toxicology results on Tobin showed no drugs. Alcohol, yes, but not stone-dead drunk. I hadn’t tried to contact the man involved in the shoving incident in the bar, and neither had I told the police about it. I’d decided it would cause more pain, needless pain, and raise more questions than it answered. I’d hint at it in the story, but not in detail. I was tired of finding out things, of turning over rocks and seeing what lay beneath.

I wrote the bulk of the last piece, and told George I’d finish it after Tobin’s memorial. Win was having Tobin cremated and
would take his ashes to Connecticut, but she wanted to have an informal service for him, just a few of us, out on the ice in Saranac Lake, near where he was found, and then a gathering at the bar for everyone afterward. She asked David Zimmer, and he came up. Her mother didn’t; I didn’t know if that was Win’s decision or her mother’s.

There were eight of us out on the ice: Win and Jessamyn, David and me, Patrick, Brent, and Zach, and Dean. The ice palace was nearly finished. Win and Jessamyn held hands. David held my arm, Dean on my other side. Word had gotten out and there were a couple dozen people on the shore: the men who had helped get the body out from the ice, Tobin’s friends from the bars, people he’d worked with, Matt Boudoin, George. They stood silently. The ice creaked as we stood there, seeming almost to moan.