A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (11 page)

I sent Win a text from my computer, which you can do if you know the person’s cell phone provider:
Can you stop at the house before you go to the cabin?

Sure thing
, she texted back.

•   •   •

Win was in good spirits when she showed up. She and Jessamyn had made the rounds of the town shops, getting new sheets, groceries, warmer clothes. She showed me her thick mittens and insulated boots, more suited to the weather here than the ones she’d arrived with.

“The guys in Saranac Lake are having a thing at the bar tonight,” I told her. “Sort of a get-together in Tobin’s honor. Nothing formal, just guys getting together. They told my friend Baker they’d like to meet you.”

“Sure,” she said without hesitation.

“It would be around seven. I could take you over there and introduce you.”

“That would be great,” she said. “I’ll run out to the cabin and set things up, and then come back here—say, six thirty?”

I nodded. “Listen,” I said as she rose to go, “do you know how to use a woodstove?”

She stopped. I could see her thinking, realizing it wasn’t like a gas fire where you just turned it on.

“I’ll come out and show you,” I said. You can’t explain a woodstove to someone; you pretty much have to show them. I led the way to the cabin, Win’s rental fishtailing slightly in the tracks my car made.

It didn’t take long to get a fire going. I showed Win how to open the damper and vent, how to lay a fire and feed it, how to monitor the temperature gauge.

“When you get too many ashes, you scoop them into the bucket.” I pointed to the metal can beside the stove. “But that takes a while.” I didn’t figure she’d be staying that long.

“It heats up fast,” Win said as she moved away from the stove. She opened the small fridge and frowned at the contents. I could see it held little besides a bottle of ketchup. I suppose she expected to find curdled milk, withered fruit, dried-out containers of takeout. “I would have thought Tobin would have had some food here. I guess someone cleaned it out.”

“I imagine so—maybe Jessamyn emptied it when she came out here a while back. Or Tobin’s friend Dean.”

She nodded. “I’d like some coffee,” she said. “How about you?”

“Sure,” I said. I could see a gleaming coffee maker in the corner, a fancy one, and Win rooted around in the cupboard before triumphantly pulling out a canister of coffee beans and a grinder. She smiled. “Tobin was insistent about fresh-ground coffee. I gambled that he’d have things here—I didn’t even buy coffee.” She buzzed the beans through the grinder and set the coffee to brewing, then served it in Tobin’s heavy white mugs, with half-and-half, and some thin Pepperidge Farm cookies on a plate.

“Roughing it in style,” I said, raising the mug in a toast.

She clinked mugs with me, and made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “That was Tobin. He loved his coffee. I used to tease him about it. It was one thing he would never economize on.”

She buried her face in her mug, and it was a moment before she spoke again. “Troy, I want these articles to show Tobin’s life, good, bad, whatever. I want them to show who he was and what he could have been.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. I tried not to show that this rattled me—she was taking an enormous amount on faith. As far as I knew she’d never read any of my articles, just that one report on Tobin’s death. I spoke up: “Win, this may turn up stuff you don’t like. I’m going to have to ask a lot of personal questions. This isn’t going to be easy.”

She gave a half laugh. “I know,” she said. I hoped she did.

It was warm now in the cabin. I showed Win how to add wood to the stove, how to poke the logs and keep the fire going.

“You’ll be okay here now?” I said. She nodded, and I left for home. I wasn’t entirely sure her staying out there was a good idea, but she seemed determined.

Win showed up at six thirty on the dot. It was starting to snow, so we took my car. When I first moved here I didn’t have four-wheel drive, but before the end of that first winter I sold my old Datsun and used a chunk of savings to buy a used Subaru. Every snowfall since, I’d been glad I did.

These Saranac Lake bars I’d been in occasionally for work, snapping photos of the winner of a darts tournament, interviewing players after a softball championship, attending a celebration for someone at the paper. And many of these guys knew me—I’d taken photos at their ball games, covered the sporting events of their kids or younger siblings. They seemed happy to meet Win, to like talking to her about Tobin, to tell her how sorry they were. No one treated me any differently than they ever had, so any rumors the fired reporter had tried to start up had fallen flat. I should have know he hadn’t been here long enough to have any traction.

After a while Win and I veered apart, chatting with people on different sides of the room. The guys had warmed up to her easily. She was listening intently to one man, then laughing at something another one said. Her smile was Tobin’s, I noticed again, and I wondered if I was the only one who felt that Tobin’s ghost was in the room.

In a corner I saw Eddie, Dean’s younger brother, grin flashing, looking much as he had on the Saranac Lake football team a few years ago. I didn’t think he was twenty-one yet, but around here getting a fake ID was a rite of passage, like hanging your first deer in your yard. I chatted with some of the guys who had been on the ice-cutting crew that day, and then sat down by an older fellow named Armand. He tipped his head to acknowledge me. We sat in silence for a bit.

“You were taking pictures, weren’t you?” he asked. “The day Tobin was found.”

I nodded.

“It was damn cold out there.”

“Yes, it was,” I agreed. Something told me he wanted to say more. He ordered another beer and raised his eyebrows to see if I wanted one. I shook my head.

“Not a good sight,” he said, after taking a long drink. “You knew Tobin?”

“Yeah, he dated my roommate.”

“Mmm. Tough on her.”

I agreed. When he spoke next I had to lean in to hear him.

“No one should die that way.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. “You mean drowning? Freezing?”

“Cold,” he said. “Cold and alone.” A long pause. Sometimes, he said at last, looking into his beer, he saw Tobin’s face under the ice, at night when he tried to go to sleep. I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there while he finished his beer. Maybe that’s every Adirondacker’s secret fear, dying cold and alone.

By now more people had arrived; more beers had slid down throats, and people were becoming more garrulous. I saw Moose, who worked in the press room at the paper, and others I recognized. Most of the guys in Saranac Lake have nicknames, some so long-standing that few people remembered their real names or where the nickname had come from. When I was reporting local softball stats, I’d given up on listing real names of locals, and just used the names everyone called them.

I asked if anyone had been around that night Tobin was last seen, and if they’d seen the supposed wad of cash.

“Nope,” a guy called Major told me. “Sure, he bought some drinks, but Tobin did that now and then. He was a good guy.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two men to our right get up and move to the back of the bar. They resembled each other more than a little and moved the same way—brothers, I thought. Not everyone, it seemed, wanted to talk about Tobin.

None of them knew the woman who had sent around the e-mails, which wasn’t surprising—these guys hung out at Saranac Lake bars, not ones in Lake Placid. Some of them had known Tobin had been seeing someone from Lake Placid, and Major had met Jessamyn once. He scoffed at the notion she might have been involved.

“That tiny thing? Not likely. And if she’d had someone do something to Tobin, everyone would know about it.”

He was right about that, but that didn’t mean they would tell anyone. This was Saranac Lake, not Lake Placid, and Adirondackers could keep things to themselves if they wanted to. Drunk or not.

I didn’t know if Win was asking any questions, asking if anyone knew what had sent Tobin out onto that ice. Maybe all she needed was to visit this place, walk where Tobin had walked, chat with his friends, drink a beer or two in his honor.

But I could ask, and I did. Most people shrugged. But a dark-haired guy called Chowder told me he’d seen Tobin go out and hadn’t seen him come back. “He said his head hurt a little. He said he wanted some air.”

No wonder, I thought. The air in here was dense, and between the buzz of conversation and the background music, my own head wasn’t feeling great. “So you think he left? Just took a walk?”

“Must have.”

That could have been all it was—a headache from the noise, the booze, the late night; a walk onto the lake and onto thin ice. The police would close this, I thought, once the missing truck was
found and the tox results were back. I’d write my series about Tobin, his life and his death, and Win would head home.

We made our farewells, and we were quiet in the car on the way back. “That was good,” Win said when she got out. I nodded, and waited to make sure her car started before I went inside.

Jessamyn was at the kitchen table, with a bowl of cereal she was more playing with than eating. She glanced up.

“So you’ve been out with Win,” she said. She must have seen Win’s car, or saw us drive up. There was an edge to her voice that took me aback. No one here paid much attention to anyone’s comings and goings, and Jessamyn had never commented about anything I did.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I helped her get her woodstove going, and we went to this thing in Saranac Lake.”

“Oh, you guys are best buds now.”

This was a tone I’d never heard from Jessamyn. Even I could tell it was jealousy, although I didn’t understand it, not in this context. But this had been one heck of a week, and Jessamyn did sometimes lack the filter most people have.

“Jessamyn, she needed help with the woodstove. I needed to see the guys in Saranac Lake, and they wanted to meet her. What’s the matter?”

She shrugged. She’d set the business cards we’d collected from the door on the table, and was pushing them around. “Do you think any of these guys would pay me for an interview?”

I stared at her. Now she was trying to make me angry. I kept my tone even. “I have no idea. You can call them and find out.”

“Just joking. Hey, look at this one.” She pushed one card toward me. “Maybe Win sent him.”

I picked it up. It was the card from a private investigator. “I doubt it; I think Win came here as soon as she got back from her cruise. I guess it could be her parents.” I watched her shuffling the business cards. I’d never seen her like this. “Jessamyn, what’s wrong?”

She dropped the cards, and her mouth twisted. “It’s just that
we had a lot of fun in Ottawa, and then you go off with Win. And I found out she’s the reason I got my job back—Miss Rich Do-Gooder fixing things up for her brother’s poor girlfriend.”

I took a deep breath and sat down. This was one reason I didn’t usually have female roommates—you had to worry about hurting their feelings.

“Jessamyn, Win didn’t think it was fair you lost your job. And look, obviously Win has money. So does Philippe. That doesn’t make them bad people. No one is putting you down.”

She rubbed at the plastic tablecloth with one finger. “I know. It’s just … I’m not used to having friends like you guys.”

“Well, then, don’t be a jerk.”

This was apparently the right thing to say. She grinned, poured her soggy cereal into Tiger’s food bowl, and went down the hall.

I let Tiger out, trudged upstairs, and fell into bed. I was nearly asleep when the phone rang—maybe Baker, I thought groggily, but she wouldn’t call this late, and suddenly I was afraid something had happened to Paul. I grabbed up the receiver. “Hello?” I said. There was no answer, and for a moment I thought it was a hang-up like the one I may have dreamed a few nights back. “Hello?” I said again, louder. This time someone answered, and I didn’t immediately recognize the voice.

“What?” I said, in the tone that means
I didn’t understand anything you said
.

This time the words were slower, and I could tell it was Win.

“Troy, somebody broke into the cabin.”

Win had retreated to her car and was calling me from there. She’d called 911, and had tried Dean but reached his voice mail. I told her I’d ring the Lake Placid police—the 911 folks are way downstate, in Albany, I think. I’d feel better calling directly.

“You don’t have to come out,” she said, but of course I was going to.

She was in her car when I got there, engine running. The police hadn’t arrived. She unlocked her passenger door to let me in. It was snowing lightly.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s been trashed,” she said. “I didn’t go all the way in, but I could see from the doorway. Things are dumped out and turned over, and dishes broken.”

“Your computer?” I asked.

She gestured toward her back seat, where I could see her computer bag and a fat brown binder envelope. “I carry it with me, plus a file of things I’ve been working on. That’s all my important stuff.”

“Did you call the owner?”

She nodded. “I left him a message.”

We heard the police car approaching before we saw its headlights.
There was one officer behind the wheel. For a moment I feared it would be the one who had come to the house, the one I’d annoyed, but I remembered he’d been on the Saranac Lake force, not Lake Placid’s.

We got out and he shone a flashlight on us, and I knew how a deer felt in the headlights. Win told him who she was and who I was, and he told us to wait while he went through the cabin. He scrutinized the snow near the porch before entering, but to me and probably to him, one blob of trampled-snow-melted-and-refrozen-into-ice looked like another. He was inside maybe five minutes, long enough for us to reach that almost-shaking-with-cold phase. But neither of us made a move to get back in the car, as if standing there shivering was somehow helping. Finally he came out and beckoned us to the open doorway, and we stepped inside.