A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER 45

  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.

  I saw Armand, the fellow who had told me he couldn’t stop seeing Tobin’s face, and something in the way he greeted me told me that he wanted to talk. We found a relatively quiet corner, and it took him a couple of beers to get going. And then he told me, his voice low, that he had heard there had been a scuffle over the pool table the night Tobin disappeared—that someone thought Tobin had butted in when it wasn’t his turn or had gotten mad over something, and some shoving had occurred. Nothing serious, and Tobin had bought the guy a beer, and then beaten him at pool. But Tobin may have bumped his head against the wall.

  “ ‘May have bumped his head,’ ” I repeated. Chowder had told me Tobin had complained of a headache. “But you didn’t see it? You don’t know who it was who may have shoved him?”

  He shook his head, but a moment later pulled my reporter’s pad toward him and scribbled down some names. “These guys will know,” he said. It looked like code, names that weren’t really names, but Baker, I knew, could help me figure out who they were.

  I looked at him, wondering if he knew how significant this might be. “No one told the police?”

  He shook his head. This was the Adirondacker code of silence: what went down in the bar stayed in the bar. He looked at me, his eyes half-lidded from the beers he’d been downing. He must have seen the question in my face.

  His voice was hoarse. “I need to stop seeing Tobin’s face.”

  I sat with him for a while longer, not saying anything, and then I excused myself and went off to the bathroom.

  So now I had something. I didn’t know what, but it was something. I needed to find out who these guys were and get them to talk to me. It could be that the altercation wasn’t as peaceful as it had seemed, that the man or one of his friends had followed Tobin out of the bar that night. Sure, I could turn over the info to the police, but if that state police guy came knocking on doors, no one would remember anything and no one would have seen anything.

  When I came out, a man passed, someone familiar looking, and I realized he was the fellow I’d noticed in the photo, the one who had driven my car out of the ditch. He didn’t recognize me at first, but then he did, and nodded at me.

  But all at once, which happens in crowded places for me, it became too much: too many people, too noisy, too hot, too dark. I needed air. I made my way to the door. As I went out, pulling on my coat, a girl, bundled up, passed me on her way inside. I stood there a few minutes, gulping in cold air to
clear my head, then walking around so I wouldn’t get too cold.

  As I turned to go back in, the girl I’d seen minutes before came out, followed by the drive-me-out-of-the-ditch guy. Crick. That was his name.

  “Hey,” I said. “Thanks for getting my car out of that ditch the other day.”

  “Oh, yeah, right,” he said, glancing at the girl and then at me, in that uncomfortable way men sometimes have around women if they think one might get the wrong idea. When I’d been the sports editor, coaches’ wives had been uneasy until they realized I was interested in the sports their husbands coached, not their husbands. I turned a smile toward the girl, and she glanced my direction me. Her face was muffled in a scarf, but even so I could tell she was striking-looking, far more than most women around here. She was, I thought, the girl I’d seen in the truck with him. He tugged her arm, and they trudged off. By now I was good and cold. I went back in and asked for some coffee for the drive home, then went to see if Dean was ready to go.

  We’d driven over in my car, because Dean had said his had been temperamental. Which turned out to be a good thing, because when we reached my house, his car was as dead as a doornail. The engine turned over once, with a sluggish ker-thunk, and then nothing.

  Dean muttered a word I couldn’t quite make out, and then said, “Excuse me.” And opened his hood and peered in.

  I figured he couldn’t see a whole lot by moonlight, but I didn’t feel like digging out my flashlight and standing there holding it while he investigated the innards of his car and I froze my ass off. “We could jump it, I guess,” I said. “But look, it’s really cold. What if I just run you home and then you can take care of it tomorrow? Probably Win could bring you into town.”

  He glanced at me, and for a moment I wondered if he thought this was me making a pass instead of me being tired and cold and not wanting to dig out jumper cables and go through the shenanigans of maneuvering cars and attaching cables when it was almost certainly less than ten degrees. My eyelashes were freezing, and that’s a good indicator.

  “Sure,” he said.

  His turnoff from the highway was the same road that led to Tobin’s, and he directed me to the side road to his cabin. A thin trail of smoke was coming from his chimney—he’d done a good job of banking his fire when he’d left. He’d be coming home to a warm cabin.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said, turning to him. He nodded. I probably should have asked him long before, but up until now I hadn’t been sure he’d give me a straight answer. “Do you have any idea if anyone might have wanted to hurt Tobin?”

  His eyes widened slightly. He shook his head. “I don’t think so, but look, you want to come in for a minute? I’ve got to go to the john.”

  He led the way inside and excused himself. When he came back he pulled off his hat, opened the damper on the woodstove and opened it, stuck a log in, and stirred it with a poker. Then he sat back, beside the stove, the fire making his skin seem to glow, lighting the line of his jaw. He was, I thought, better-looking than his younger brother, who had seemed to rely a lot on his ready grin and easy manner.

  “I thought about it, Troy,” he said. “After his body was found. Of course I did. I was probably his best friend here. I mean, maybe some guys were a little jealous of him—Tobin didn’t have kids, he didn’t have expenses, he didn’t seem to have to work a whole lot. He, well, women liked him.”

  “He was good-looking,” I said helpfully.

  “Yeah, and he sort of had that air about him, that anytime he wanted he could pick up and leave here, move on to something better, and that really pulls in some women.”

  I knew what he meant. Attractive people sometimes didn’t realize how much of their day-to-day life was shaped by people reacting to their looks. “Did he, er …”

  Dean grinned. “He could have. I think pretty much any woman in the bar would have gone home with him, but as far as I saw, he never seemed interested. He was nice to them and all, but women like Marilyn weren’t his type, and I think he did have a thing for Jessamyn.”

  He pushed the poker in the stove to adjust the logs. “But Tobin getting someone pissed off enough to knock him off? I don’t think so.”

  “What about accidentally?”

  He blinked at this. “Like he died in a fight and they dumped him? Or someone was out with him on the ice and he fell in and they left him? Didn’t tell anyone? That would eat someone up, I’d think, to leave someone to die.” He winced. “That’s what Tobin’s father did, right?”

  So he’d read my last article. I nodded.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know anyone who would do that.” His tone was decisive.

  Me, I knew people who might not risk their lives, but they’d at least run for help, even if they knew it would be too late. But they’d go through the motions so they could tell themselves they did all they could. Few people are coldhearted or desperate enough to just walk away.

  Dean closed the woodstove door. I realized it was time to leave—if I loitered, he truly might get the wrong idea. As he stood I said something about needing to get back home, and he walked me to the door.

  It seemed stupid to shake his hand, so I made the quick decision to go for the brief hug. I did like him; he had been helpful, and he was making an effort to help out.

  But in the split second before I ended the hug, I saw over his shoulder, on his countertop, a coffee maker that looked a whole lot like Tobin’s.

  CHAPTER 46

  Maybe at another moment—not so late, not so cold, not on my way out the door—I could have said casually, Say, Dean, that looks an awful lot like Tobin’s coffee maker. Then he could have said something like Yes, I saw his and liked it so much I got one just like it.

  But maybe not.

  As I started my car, I mentally shook myself. No one would steal a coffee maker from a dead friend’s cabin a short walk away and set it out on their countertop. But then again, who could recognize it? Me, Win, and Jessamyn. Only three people he’d have to keep out of his cabin to avoid seeing it, and me he’d invited in without hesitation. But he’d had quite a few beers and maybe wasn’t thinking clearly.

  Sometimes I hated my logical brain.

  Surely, I thought, he’d just seen Tobin’s coffee maker, admired it, then gone and bought one. It likely was pricey, but you can find bargains.

  But what if he did break into Tobin’s cabin? What if he saw me see the coffee maker? What if? …

  It was late. I wasn’t thinking straight. Win was staying in Tobin’s cabin, but I wasn’t going to show up on her doorstep babbling about a coffee maker. But I was uneasy. I pulled over and texted her: Are you awake? The answer came quickly: Yes.

  So I punched the button to call her and said I’d just driven Dean home because his car broke down, but now realized I was too tired to drive back to Placid and wondered if I could sleep on her sofa. She might have thought I’d orchestrated this so she wouldn’t be out there alone, but wasn’t going to say no. So I drove over and carried my sleeping bag in with me, greeted my exuberant dog, and curled up on the tiny sofa. And fell asleep immediately.

  In the morning, a coffee maker that seemed to resemble Tobin’s seemed like nothing. I’d only caught a glimpse of it, and wasn’t all that sure what Tobin’s had looked like.

  Win told me the police had logged in her report about the note on her car, but didn’t seem all that concerned. I don’t know which one of us suggested it first—searching the cabin again. Sure, we’d been through it once, but that was looking for something tiny, a safe deposit box key. Maybe we’d missed something. Something bigger.

  We looked around. No attic, no heating vents. We tapped on walls and checked under sinks and in cabinets, as if we were Nancy Drew looking for secret cupboards. Then we did what the first searcher must not have done—went over the floorboards on our hands and knees.

  And found what maybe in the back of my mind I remembered from washing that floor by hand: one floorboard that was a bit lower th
an the others. When you looked closely you could see it was set with small screws, not nailed down. I got some tools from my car and spun out the screws. They came out easily, as if they’d been loosened not too long ago. I slid a flat screwdriver under the edge of the board and levered it up. It was dark beneath, but by the diode light on my keychain we could see a wad of crumpled newspaper. Win pulled it away. Underneath was a package, wrapped in what looked like butcher paper. We looked at each other, and she reached in and took it out, and pulled away the paper. What was left was two packages, tightly bagged, air sucked out of them, something that had once been green and growing but was now dry and grayish and densely packed. Win opened one bag, pulled out the bag inside, poked a hole in it, and pulled out a pinch of something and smelled it. It wasn’t oregano.

  She sat back on her heels.

  “So that’s all this was,” she said. “Weed. Marijuana. What a letdown—all this for a couple of bags of weed.”

  I looked at it. I’d seen people smoke the stuff and smelled its distinctive aroma, but I’d never seen it up close, and certainly not this quantity. It looked innocuous, a collection of dusty crushed leaves. “Is that a lot?” I asked. “I mean, is that worth a lot of money?”

  “It’s not an insignificant amount. Even I can tell this is more than a few thousand dollars, especially if it’s high grade.”

  “Worth trashing a cabin for.”

  “I suppose. Especially if it’s not your cabin.”

  We looked at each other again. If Tobin had been dealing dope and people knew it, surely they would have searched his cabin weeks ago, long before Win arrived on the scene.

  “Do you think it was Tobin’s?” I asked. “Or maybe someone left it here later, after Tobin was gone—used the cabin as a place to store it.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I know he smoked, but I wouldn’t have thought he was selling, especially not on this scale. He would have been more likely to have given it away than to have sold it to people.”