A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY SARA J. HENRY

  LEARNING TO SWIM

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Sara J. Henry

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Henry, Sara J.

  A cold and lonely place : a novel / Sara J. Henry

  p. cm.

  1. Women journalists—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction.

  3. Adirondack Mountains (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Saranac Lake (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.E5796C65 2013

  813′.6—dc23 2012032575

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71843-3

  JACKET DESIGN BY ALEX MERTO

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPHS: (WOMAN) DAVE O. TUTTLE/FLICKR/GETTY IMAGES; (CABIN) RYAN MCVAY/GETTY IMAGES

  v3.1

  TO REED FARREL COLEMAN

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Two

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Part Three

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  ICE CAN ASSUME A LARGE NUMBER OF DIFFERENT CRYSTALLINE STRUCTURES, MORE THAN ANY OTHER KNOWN MATERIAL.

  CHAPTER 1

  We could feel the reverberation of the ice-cutting machine through the frozen lake beneath our feet. Matt Boudoin was telling me this would be the best ice palace ever, and I was nodding, because of course every year the palace seems better than the one the year before. At the same moment, he stopped talking and I stopped nodding, because the machine had halted and the crew of men was staring down at the ice. Then, in unison, like marionettes with their strings being pulled, they turned their heads to look at Matt. Their faces were blank, but we knew something was wrong, very wrong.

  We started moving forward. Because this is an Adirondack mountain town and Matt has an ingrained sense of chivalry, he held his arm out in that protective gesture you make toward a passenger in your car when you have to slam on the brakes. But it didn’t stop me.

  Later, I would wish it had.

  For the first few months of winter, this lake is an expanse of frozen nothingness. Then, seemingly overnight, an enormous palace of ice appears, blocks melded together with a mortar of frozen slush, infused by colored lights that turn it into a fairy-tale castle. You can wander through it, footsteps crunching, breath forming icy clouds, and feel a sense of wonder you haven’t felt since you were a child.

  It’s part of the fabric of this town, and the flow of winter is based around it. Never mind the huge expenditure of time and energy. This is Saranac Lake; this is Winter Carnival. Up goes the ice palace, every year with a different design, a different form of magic. This year I was going to track its progress for the local paper, with a photo and vignette every day—I thought I’d write about the homemade ice-cutting contraption, interview one of the ice cutters, talk to the designer. There was a lot you could write about palaces built of ice cut from the lake.

  As we reached the circle of men, they stepped back, and Matt and I looked down. What I saw looked at first like a shadow under the ice—a dark mass, debris somehow caught up in cast-off clothing and trapped underneath as the ice had formed. I was wondering why the crew didn’t simply move on to clean ice when I realized the mass had a shape, a human shape. You could see something that looked like eyes and a mouth that seemed open. Right about then Matt grabbed my arm and walked me away from the thing under the ice. We stopped about ten feet away and I sank to my heels, trying to process what I thought I’d seen. Matt whipped out a walkie-talkie and began barking orders as he gestured the men farther back.

  For once my journalistic instincts had shut down, and I had no urge to record any of this. I could still envision that face under the ice, as if it were looking at me through a rain-distorted window.

  And it was a face I knew.

  CHAPTER 2

  I live in Lake Placid, ten miles away, in a house so big I rent out rooms, usually to athletes in town to train for bobsledding or kayaking or skiing. But sometimes a local turns up, and one day late last summer a girl named Jessamyn knocked at the door. She was thin with long black hair and green eyes that shifted as she looked at you. I wasn’t sure I trusted her. But she didn’t smoke—I’ve had people stare me in the eye and swear they didn’t smoke when they reeked of it—and something about her made me like her. She was happy to take the smallest upstairs room, the one with just a twin mattress on the floor, a child-sized dresser, and a rod to hang clothes on.

  She moved from job to job, but that’s not rare here. Lake Placid is a touristy sports town with plenty of low-paying jobs, and people come and go, moving on to Boulder or Salt Lake City or giving up on their particular dream and heading back home to the unexciting job they never thought they’d have to take. Jessamyn had a quick wit and a sardonic manner, and men flocked to her. She’d date them for a few weeks, then discard them as if they were an article of clothing that didn’t quite fit—apparently with no hard feelings on either side. She partied hard in the local bars but didn’t bring it home with her. I never encountered a drunken paramour stumbling down the stairs; her employer never called because she missed a shift. And, like me, she never got involved with any of our roommates. You don’t fish in your own pond; you don’t hunt in your own backyard.

  Then she met Tobin Winslow.

  I would have pegged him for trouble from the start, with his frat-boy good looks, floppy hair, sleepy brown eyes, and diffident manner. It was written all over him that he was the sort of person who assumes life should go his way, no matter what. He didn’t have a job to speak of, nothing steady, and drove a rattletrap pickup that seemed as much a prop as his Carhartt pants and flannel shirts. I suspected he’d grown up in a world of crisp khakis and button-downs and gone to an elit
e prep school, then partied himself right out of Harvard or Princeton before drifting up here, where no one ever asked where or if you’d gone to university.

  It surprised me that Jessamyn fell for him—actually it surprised me she fell for anyone, because I hadn’t seen her let anyone get too close. But Tobin seemed to appeal to something in her in a way the local guys hadn’t. Maybe she was looking for someone who might take her away from here. Maybe she was yearning for conversation about more than ice fishing or carburetors or whatever game had been on television the night before. She’d been steadily working her way through the shelves of the Lake Placid library, and most of the guys she dated probably hadn’t cracked a book since high school. And while Tobin may have been playing the role of good old boy, I suspected there was a lot going on behind that sleepy-lidded look.

  But it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Tobin Winslow likely wouldn’t be leading Jessamyn down a path to anything new and improved. Falling for him meant giving up a big chunk of herself—although maybe that would have happened no matter who she fell for. Maybe she didn’t know how to love without giving up herself. I’d figured that Jessamyn’s flippant manner, hard drinking, and serial dating had been the veneer she’d adopted to cope with things life had thrown at her, things I could only guess at. But it had worked, in its way. Sure, she dated guys who were completely unaware of her intellect and she hadn’t been able to settle down, but that happens to a lot of us. She had a life she could handle and at least pretend to be happy.

  But Tobin had changed all that. Around him she dropped her sardonic edge and became close to meek. It didn’t seem a change for the better. I didn’t expect it was going to end well—I couldn’t see Tobin settling down here, or whisking Jessamyn off to the bosom of his family, wherever they might be.

  Tobin would periodically disappear for a week or two—no one knew where—and while he was gone Jessamyn would show glimmers of her old self. But once he came back she’d take right back up with him again as if he’d never left, an Adirondack version of a Stepford wife.

  And the face beneath the ice was his.

  CHAPTER 3

  The ice harvesters had begun to talk in low tones. I heard Tobin’s name, so they’d recognized him too. Tobin had spent a lot of time in the Saranac Lake bars, which were in general grittier than the ones in Lake Placid, and without the cluster of shiny-faced tourists trying a little too hard to have a good time.

  Someone appeared from the Lakeview Deli across the street, carrying a cardboard carton of steaming drinks. One of the men handed me a cup. It was cocoa, hot and sweet, not the black coffee the guys almost certainly were drinking. This was their concession to my being a woman, one who had just seen a dead man, someone she knew, under the ice. Fine by me, because in all the ways that mattered, the guys treated me as an equal. I’d covered their softball games and dart tournaments and ice-fishing contests, taken their photos and spelled their names right, so to them I was okay. And maybe cocoa was just what I needed now.

  I took another sip and walked over to the guys. I nodded at them. They nodded back.

  “It’s Tobin, right? Tobin Winslow?” I said.

  They nodded again.

  “How …” I began.

  They shrugged in unison. “Takes a while for that much ice to form,” said one.

  I’m from the South, where a dusting of snow means that schools close, life comes to a standstill, and everyone stays home until the white stuff disappears. It had been a rude adjustment to live somewhere so cold that lakes freeze into solid masses that people walk on, cut holes in for ice fishing, and drive sled-dog teams across. It took my first long winter here to learn to gauge the weather and dress in layers so I wasn’t cold to the bone most of the time.

  We stood there, no one saying anything. It wasn’t all that rare in the Adirondacks for vacationers to get stranded in a sudden snowstorm on what they had thought would be a pleasant afternoon hike and freeze to death before anyone could find them. Far too often a local would drink too much on a Saturday night and drive off the road and die in a deep ravine. And sometimes, in the middle of a jobless, loveless winter, someone would write a note, put his mouth around a shotgun barrel, and thumb down the trigger. Or go out for a long walk and never be found. Someone cried for them, or no one did. Someone cleaned up the mess, and life went on.

  And with all the lakes here, people find plenty of ways to drown. In winter they’ll take a Ski-Doo out when the ice isn’t thick enough and go under. Maybe they have the time and presence of mind to toss a child or grandchild to firmer ice before they sink, maybe not. Or in spring someone will go boating without a life jacket and drown under a bright shining sun, in water so cold it saps your will to keep moving until you give up and slide under, maybe on the way down thinking of the rest of your life you’ll never have.

  Last summer I’d nearly drowned in Lake Champlain, and sometimes in my dreams I’m back in that water, cold and alone, wondering if I’ll ever take a breath of air again.

  Matt came over and nodded at us, shaking his gloved fingers hard to warm them. A police car drove up and a policeman got out, walked over, and peered down at the ice for what seemed like a long time. Then he looked up and beckoned to Matt. Another policeman arrived, then a rescue squad. They all walked over, looked down at the ice, retreated to talk it over. Finally Matt came and asked me if I would take photos of the body before they started trying to remove it.

  When I’d been the sports editor here, I’d covered everything from kayaking to boxing to luge to snowshoe races. But I’d never photographed anything under ice, and it was tricky with the sun reflecting off the surface. I concentrated on exposure and tried not to think about this being the body of a man I’d known.

  After I’d taken multiples of every shot I could think of, I nodded at Matt. The men moved in with saws and began to cut the ice around the body. I kept shooting. It was something to do, and I needed to do something. Someone brought me another steaming cup from the deli, and I gulped it down. This time it was coffee. I kept clicking.

  It seemed to take a very long time to free the block of ice, lever it out, and wrestle thick flat canvas bands under it to slide it toward shore. By now a crowd had gathered at the edge of the lake. I kept pressing the shutter button as the body slid along in its ice coffin. I saw it but didn’t see it. I let the camera see it for me.

  If I had simply heard that Tobin had died in a car crash downstate somewhere, I don’t think I would have mourned him. But that dark shape in the chunk of ice sliding past hit me in a way I wouldn’t have expected. Jessamyn had cared for Tobin, and somewhere were friends he’d grown up with, gone to school with, shared his rich-boy escapades with. Somewhere there was a family who would mourn his death and the extensions of him that would never exist: wife, children, grandchildren. And no mother is ever ready for a phone call telling her that her child has been found frozen into a lake.

  The good thing about weather this cold is that tears freeze before they fall, so you can brush them away without anyone noticing.

  On the shore, paramedics were having a discussion with the police, apparently adamant that this giant chunk of ice was not going into their ambulance. Finally someone drove an oversized pickup out onto the lake, which always makes me nervous. It seems to break one of the immutable laws of nature—water isn’t meant to be driven on, and there’s water on the other side of that ice, cold and dark.

  Every man on the crew went to help hoist the slab of ice and slide it into the pickup bed. Probably they weren’t all needed, but wanted to feel they were doing something. Off drove the truck, to a heated municipal garage, I imagined, where they’d wait for the ice to melt from around Tobin’s body. Or maybe someone would chip away at it. There were people around here skilled in ice sculpting, and I supposed this would use the same basic skills, sort of in reverse.

  Matt appeared at my side, and I was cold enough that I could almost sense the heat coming from his body. “We’re going to g
o to the tavern, Troy,” he said. “Do you want to come?”

  I shook my head. I knew the guys needed to unwind before they went home, where their wives and children would want to hear the story. This would be told and retold in years to come, an almost apocryphal tale to keep kids from venturing too far on thin ice. It would be an easier story to tell, I thought, if you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t seen Tobin’s body being sawn out of the lake. If you hadn’t known him when he was alive.

  There would be a lot of beers downed this afternoon. The guys would talk about Tobin, how much he liked to drink, the crazy things he’d done, how he had ended up under the ice. Maybe it would be good to hear all this, but I couldn’t handle it. I needed to get home.

  Most of all, I needed to tell Jessamyn before she heard it on the street.

  CHAPTER 4

  It’s about twenty minutes to Lake Placid, if you don’t get stuck behind tourists. With my car heater blasting on high I had just about stopped shivering by the time I got home. But I was still cold, too cold to go looking for Jessamyn. I ran water in my tub, as hot as I could stand it, and crawled in and lay there, all of me submerged but my face, steam coming off the water, and thought about Tobin, under the ice. My dog, Tiger, lay in the doorway watching. She’s half German shepherd and half golden retriever, and just about the best dog on the planet.

  It seemed to take forever to warm up.

  I toweled off and dressed as fast as I could, but I was moving slowly, like in one of those dreams where you just can’t get anywhere. The walk up to town took longer than usual.

  Jessamyn was working at a restaurant up on Main Street, where she regularly had the weekend shift. Tourists come into town determined to spend money, and they’re happy to drop it on tips for a smiling waitress. And Jessamyn could play charm-the-tourists as well as anyone.

  This was your standard steak and seafood restaurant, with the requisite Olympic kitsch: hanging ice skates and hockey sticks, photos of ski jumpers and bobsledders. I kicked snow off my boots at the door and stamped more off in the foyer. It was the afternoon lull before the dinner rush, and I saw Jessamyn refilling coffee cups for a table of tourists and laughing as if they’d said something incredibly witty. I waited until she headed back my direction.