A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel Page 21

  “It’s all there, all in the tape, in the transcript.” Her tone was taut.

  “Win, please. Just write it down for me.” My voice caught. Now she was starting to see that all wasn’t right with me. She didn’t argue. She took the pad and wrote down the information.

  “I’m going to the cabin to crash,” she said, suddenly toneless.

  I nodded. “Eat,” I said. “Eat, sleep, and a hot bath. Maybe not in that order.”

  She smiled wanly and left.

  I sat and thought, and thought hard. I didn’t know what of this I could use in the article. It had been one thing to have Win interview the maid, but interviewing her parents was something else altogether. It would be sensationalism to run an interview done by a daughter of a man admitting something like this, unless that was the focus of the article. And this was about Tobin, not about Win, not even about Trey or his death.

  I called George. I told him I wasn’t comfortable with using the material Win had gotten from her parents, and maybe not from the maid, either.

  George listened and then said, “Okay. The stuff that was faxed here we’ll turn over to the newspaper’s lawyer. I’ll walk it over myself. It can just sit there.”

  Not for the first time, I was grateful George was George. He wasn’t going to push me; he would trust me to make a sound decision.

  He paused a moment. “Troy, is your friend okay with this? No matter what, there’s going to be a huge response when this comes out. It’s going to stir up a lot.”

  “I think she will be,” I said. “I hope she will.”

  I made phone calls, talking and listening and typing notes on my computer. And then I stayed up writing long into the night.

  CHAPTER 41

  The article opened with the two brothers in the water, the elder forcing the life jacket onto the younger. It told of the father piloting the boat, crashing, managing to swim to shore and drag himself to the house and pull off his wet clothes, of the maid who put his drenched clothes in the wash; about Tobin being found midmorning, semiconscious, and rushed to the hospital; about his brother’s body being found the next day.

  And that while no one ever, ever said that Tobin had been responsible for the accident, the rumor had taken on the weight of fact.

  David, I said, was a friend of the brothers Tobin had confided in after the drowning; David had told me he neither wanted nor needed to have his relationship spelled out, and very much doubted that Martin would have. At my request Tobin’s father’s lawyer had faxed me a brief statement from Mr. Winslow, stating that he now believed he had been on the boat with his sons but he remembered nothing of the night of the accident. And that was that.

  I wrote about Tobin’s bus trip across America as if I’d been on that bus with the nineteen-year-old mourning his brother, hating his father, numb that his mother hadn’t bothered to ask who had piloted the boat. I wrote of his years of odd jobs: the gas station, the construction work, the job on a ranch in Wyoming; a couple of DUIs, a drunk and disorderly that earned him a few nights in jail. I interspersed quotes from people he’d worked with, factoids about the towns he’d lived in, bits of the e-mails he’d sent to his sister, and scanned images of the postcards, cheerful images of places he’d been. I wrote of his exchanges with the man who owned the cabin in Lake Placid, and how Tobin made the decision to move there. It’s time to come back East and be closer to my sister and grandfather, Tobin had written. I’ve been gone long enough.

  And that’s where I ended it, with that e-mail.

  Writing it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

  I edited and proofed, and edited and proofed, and did it a third and a fourth time. I e-mailed it to Baker and asked her to review it, and she did, promptly. Then I sent it off to George, with JPGs of the photos. This one George would fact-check, and run by a lawyer before publishing. I’d have at least a day before it would hit the newspaper and the blowback would start.

  As soon as I hit Send, I realized I was hungry, seriously hungry. I went down to raid the refrigerator for anything edible. I hadn’t heard from or seen Win. I was dimly aware that Zach had taken Tiger for a walk. Or two.

  As I started up my stairs, my phone rang. George.

  “Good, really good, Troy. This will come out tomorrow or the next day. Listen, I’m expecting a lot of response. You may want to batten down the hatches. You and that sister of Tobin’s are going to be hearing from news media all over New York and Connecticut. I’ve doubled the press run and expect we’ll sell out.”

  I told him I’d contact Win. I’d warn Jessamyn as well, but I thought Win would be bearing the brunt of this one.

  Win didn’t answer her phone; I left a message.

  I e-mailed Philippe: Finished second article—whew. Big stuff. He’d sent me an e-mail with a link to Snapfish photos of Paul and his puppy I’d just glanced at, so I pulled that up and spent some time going through the photos. It seemed that Paul had grown even in the days since I’d seen him—kids changed way too fast. I’d have to take some photos to send him, maybe the next time I visited Baker and her kids. I wanted to call Jameson; I didn’t want to try to e-mail all this, but I was too tired.

  Then I went downstairs to check that the door was locked. We’d become lax about locking it since the media crush had died down.

  CHAPTER 42

  In the morning I went for a ski, and by the time I got back and showered, the article was online. I sent the link to Philippe and to Jameson and my brother, to Win and David Zimmer, to the nanny. I’d mail some actual newsprint copies as well.

  I sorted my notes, listed people I needed to talk to for the last article, sent a few e-mails. Mostly, I was keeping busy until the paper would be out.

  When I figured it was time, I bundled up and walked down the street to our local sister weekly, the Lake Placid News, and picked up the stack George had sent over for me. I glanced at the front page. There was a photo Tobin had sent his sister from Wyoming, grinning, leaning back up against a fence, a horse in the background. I turned to the article, there in the front hallway of the News, and without intending to, started reading. It had been painful to write and it was painful to read: two sons on a boat with their father, one coming home alive, one coming home dead. It was a different approach to a difficult subject, and I hadn’t been sure I’d pulled it off until I saw it on the newsprint in front of me. I finished reading, blinked back a tear and drew a deep long, shuddering breath, and folded up the paper. The only person in the office, a woman across the room at a cluttered desk, was watching me.

  “It’s a great article, Troy,” she said. I think she was one of the ad women—I didn’t know her name. I thanked her, tucked the papers under my arm, and left.

  That evening, Jessamyn’s father wanted to take everyone out for dinner—he’d be heading back to Boston tomorrow—but we convinced him to order pizzas from Mr. Mike’s across the street instead. With the newspaper article out today, it wouldn’t be the best time to be celebrating in public, especially not with Win, who was coming to join us. She arrived just as the guys got back with the pizzas, and she was her usual gracious and charming self. Jessamyn was beaming once again, proud to show her father that the sister of her dead boyfriend was a lovely and accomplished woman.

  I thought about pulling Win aside, about telling her why I couldn’t use her interview with her parents. But she caught my eye across the room, and I knew I didn’t need to. I understood that she’d had to confront her father—whether she’d had some suspicions of him all along didn’t matter. She’d done what she had to do, and I’d done what I had to do. This might be a blip in our relationship, but only that. We’d been navigating a tricky road from the start.

  This, I realized suddenly, was friendship. You didn’t always agree, and you both might do things the other person wished you didn’t, but it didn’t mean things came to a grinding halt. It didn’t mean you stopped being friends. You got over it, and you moved on. Maybe most people worked this out earlier in lif
e, but this was a revelation for me. In my family, there had been no room for error.

  After we ate, Patrick excused himself, but Brent and Zach hung out for a Pictionary match and then we emptied out all the ice cream in the fridge. It was after ten when I turned to Win.

  “Hey, if you don’t feel like driving out to the cabin, you can have my sofa for the night. I’ve slept on it, and it’s not bad.”

  The light snow coming down was nothing for a Subaru. But it didn’t seem like a night Win should be alone, and she agreed she didn’t feel like driving.

  I asked her if she had a copy of the newspaper. She shook her head, and I handed her one. I gave her a T-shirt and sweats to sleep in, and made up a bed for her on the sofa. She curled up there, unfolded the paper, and began to read. Like me, she’d seen it online earlier, and like me, I don’t think the full impact hit her until she saw it on paper. I left her there, but left my door open in case she wanted to talk.

  When she did speak, her voice was low. “I think they knew, Troy.”

  “What?” I got up and went to my doorway. She was sitting up on the sofa.

  “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.

  CHAPTER 43

  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.

  CHAPTER 44

  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 pr
efix, 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?”