A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (14 page)

“Johnstone Law Offices,” said a woman’s voice.

I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this. I told her I was calling on behalf of Jessica Winslow, whose brother Tobin had recently been found dead, and we’d found this number among his personal papers.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman said automatically. “Was Mr. Winslow a client here?”

“I’m not sure—that’s sort of what we’re trying to find out.”

She asked me to hold, and when she came back told me Mr. Johnstone wasn’t available, and could I leave my name and number. Of course I could, and did, but didn’t have high hopes I’d hear back. Win, as next of kin, might have to follow up on this.

I also wanted to check out something on Tobin’s truck: Win had found an outdated copy of its registration in the debris at the cabin, so I had the VIN, the vehicle number. I looked up the Department of Motor Vehicles in Elizabethtown, and called. I told the woman my friend had sold his truck, but we didn’t think the buyer had transferred the title yet and wanted to see if it was still in his name. I was only a little surprised when she looked it up for me. Yes, the vehicle was still registered to Tobin W. Winslow, and the registration and tags were valid through March. Which didn’t tell me a lot, I realized. Just that Tobin hadn’t sold the truck, and that no one had reregistered it.

And I was still wondering about the woman who was responsible for e-mailing that article around. If Tobin’s Lake Placid bar buddies had known about her, then his friend Dean likely would. So I put in a call to him, and he said he’d try to track her down for me. Then I heard slow footsteps coming into the kitchen and went down—it was Jessamyn, walking tentatively.

“Hey,” I said. “How was it? The skiing yesterday.”

“Oh, yikes, it’s hard,” she said. “I sort of got the hang of it and I only fell twice, but it’s really hard going uphill. My legs are killing me.”

She looked outraged. I grinned. “Well, that’s the disadvantage of skiing in the woods—they can’t exactly put in little chairlifts.”

She sat down. “Troy, you don’t care that I’m doing stuff with Brent, do you?”

The question surprised me. “Gosh, no, Brent is great. And anyone who can get you doing something outdoors has amazing talents.”

“I just thought … you seemed funny this morning, when you came in.”

“No, that was just … you didn’t see Patrick or Win, did you?”

“No,” she said, puzzled.

“Tobin’s cabin was broken into last night and we were about to head out there to clean it up. I didn’t feel like talking about it then. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize no one had told you.”

Her eyes went wide. “Someone broke into the cabin?”

“Yep.” I told her about the place being trashed, nothing really stolen.

“Did they break in the door?” Jessamyn was indignant.

I shook my head. “No, they must have had a key. Win put in a new lock.”

“That sucks, that someone did that. Maybe someone thought she had a bunch of money there.”

“I suppose so.” Most people I knew with money didn’t leave it lying around in a cabin in the woods. Although I knew of one fellow who built a stash into the walls of his bedroom closet and forgot about it until after selling the house and moving. Me, I couldn’t imagine forgetting a wad of cash stashed behind the Sheetrock.

I told her Win had gone home for a few days. I didn’t say that I doubted she would come back.

Then my phone was ringing, and I went up to answer it: Simon, my brother, the policeman.

“So you’ve got a lot going on,” he said.

“Um, yeah.” Sort of an understatement.

He had me go through it: Jessamyn and Tobin and Win, the break-in and all the rest. He didn’t like my notion that Tobin had simply taken a walk on a late cold night and drowned. “With the truck missing, it’s not nothing, Troy. This guy didn’t just wander out on the ice and fall in. What about the sister?”

“Um, I kind of doubt she has anything to do with it—I don’t think she’s ever been up here before.” I couldn’t envision Win surprising her brother on a visit and then deciding to bump him off by luring him onto the thin ice of Lake Flower, and said so. And if she had, I doubted she’d be up here now, waltzing around, meeting everyone.

Simon paused a half beat. “Troy, you know the main suspect has to be the girlfriend.”

“No,” I was saying almost before he finished. “Simon, Jessamyn was crazy about Tobin, and I saw her when she found out. She was devastated.”

“Yeah, we’ve all seen people on TV devastated that their spouse or significant other was missing or killed, and then we find out they hacked that person into little bits and buried them behind the garage—but they certainly seem heartbroken.”

His vehemence surprised me and for a moment I couldn’t respond. I think he realized he’d gone too far.

“I’m sorry, Troy. But don’t fool yourself here. You know your loyalty can be your blind spot.”

This stung, but I didn’t say so. No one likes being reminded of their blind spots. We ended the conversation congenially, if awkwardly, but it left me unsettled. Usually Simon was deliberately neutral; even last summer he hadn’t told me what to do. I hadn’t asked him to dissect this—his big-brotherness and his cop instincts had kicked in, right where I hadn’t wanted.

But I could not envision Jessamyn involved in this. Sure, she had jerked me around a little, making me tell Win about the article that night, and had gotten into a fit of pique later. But her
moods were ephemeral and slight—very different from plotting to kill a boyfriend and stash his body under the ice.

And if she had mentioned to someone that her boyfriend had roughed her up, someone who might have confronted Tobin over it, it would be preying on her mind, and that I didn’t sense at all.

But for now I had to put this out of my head, forget about Tobin’s death and concentrate on his life—his childhood in particular. I had an article to do.

I had my notes, with names of schools and people to contact. And by the time I’d gone down to get something to eat and taken Tiger for a quick walk, Win had gotten back to me with a comprehensive list of people and contact information, all of whom she’d called or e-mailed to tell them I was writing an article on Tobin’s life.

It was odd to be essentially preapproved to interview these folks, but not, I told myself, that much different from a PR person arranging an interview or a friend of a friend passing on a contact. It would save a lot of awkward cold calls, and people possibly refusing to talk to me.

I took a deep breath, and started calling.

I’d been waiting in this office a quarter of an hour, but it felt longer. My clothes had been neat and fresh this morning when I’d left Placid, but they’d gotten crumpled and tired during the nearly five-hour drive. I should have brought my nice clothes and found a place to change. Maybe I should have done a lot of things.

I hadn’t planned to do any of these interviews in person, but a batch of them were clustered near Greenwich, and George had thought it worth the time and gas money. My time, his money.

So here I was. Sick at my stomach, about to do my first interview with one of Tobin’s friends. I’d interviewed famous sports figures, but that was for feature articles and profiles. Talking to someone about a friend who had died was going to be different, very different.

This man, a former high school classmate of Tobin’s, worked in an investment firm where, judging from the waiting room and its furnishings, the usual clientele had plenty to invest. I imagined genteel meetings between Very Rich Clients and the Guys Who Managed Their Money. Maybe they served tea, in thin china cups, with exquisite butter cookies on a tray. Or maybe I’d seen too many BBC programs.

Finally the receptionist spoke. “Miss Chance, Mr. Butler is ready to see you.”

The man in the office I was led to wasn’t quite what I expected. He was impeccably dressed and well-groomed, but on the chubby side, and not just that layer of flab men get when they’re working in an office. He was heavy, like he’d always been that way. When he shook my hand his grip was firm, and if he noticed I wasn’t anywhere near as well dressed as his usual breed of visitors, he didn’t show it. He looked me full in the face, and the friendliness of his greeting seemed real.

“You were a friend of Tobin’s family?” he asked pleasantly.

“Oh, no. I knew Tobin in Lake Placid—he dated my roommate—and I know his sister now, that’s all.”

This didn’t seem to dim his friendliness. I repeated what I’d told him on the phone, that I was doing a series of articles on Tobin, the first one on his growing-up years.

He sat back in his leather chair. “I didn’t know where Tobin had ended up.”

“You knew him from prep school, right?”

He nodded. I pulled out my notepad and little recorder. I raised my eyebrows to ask
Is it okay to record this?
and he nodded again. Recorded backup can come in handy; you never want someone coming forward later and insisting they hadn’t said what they did. Some people apparently either have no idea what comes out of their mouths or regret it so thoroughly they erase the memory of having said it. I’ve learned that people can lie to themselves even better than they do to others.

Usually I start with mundane questions to start things rolling, but something made me decide to jump right in. “What was Tobin like?” I asked.

He answered without hesitation. “He was a funny one. He looked like everyone else. He dressed like everyone else. He partied like everyone else. But he was different.”

All my senses went on high alert. You almost never get this degree of frankness this early in an interview. Almost always it
comes right at the end—that hand-on-the-doorknob moment—and the person talks fast and you write like mad and hope your recorder is working so it gets what you can’t. I kept my eyes on his face, pen poised.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t think he would start this and not continue. I was right.

“I was the fat kid. In a place like that—maybe in any school—being different is like wearing a brand. The in-group, the popular kids, they have to have someone to torment. If my parents had been rich enough I might have been able to carry off being overweight, but they weren’t—they just barely managed to send me there. So I was the target.”

The words were stark in this elegant office. He said it simply, but I guessed it had been brutal. I imagined he’d thought about running away or begging his parents to let him transfer.

He looked straight at me. “My parents were so happy and proud I’d gotten into that school, I couldn’t tell them how bad it was. I didn’t know what I was going to do. But Tobin put an end to it. He’d seen it go on, the day-to-day stuff, and hadn’t said anything. Then, one day in the locker room, he stopped it. He just walked over and looked at the group of them like they were scum and said, ‘Don’t you assholes have anything better to do?’ and that was it. It was over. It wasn’t like I suddenly got popular, but from then on they left me alone. They left me alone, and I survived the next three and a half years.”

It took me a moment to process this. “Did something happen, something that triggered his reaction?”

“No, and what they were doing wasn’t the worst they’d done. It was as if he suddenly had enough and just spoke up. Reached his tipping point.”

“Did you ever ask him about it?”

He shook his head. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this interview. I never thanked him. I thought about it, especially once I went away to college, but I never got around to looking him up. He saved me that afternoon, and I want people to know it, to know that side of him.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Tobin on the surface was one of them,” he said. “Popular, good at sports, smart enough to get by in class without doing much work.”

He talked another ten minutes while I took notes: anecdotes about Tobin, clubs he’d been in, sports he had played. I don’t look down when I write, because a break in eye contact can mean a break in conversation. When the person you’re interviewing talks, you write fast, and try not to blink. As he started to run down, his phone buzzed, and the receptionist told him his next appointment had arrived. I clicked off my recorder, shook his hand, and turned to go.

“Good luck with your series,” he said. “Just … just remember that everything has more than one side.”

I turned back to look at him. He straightened the items on his desk, and when he looked up I could see what he hadn’t let me see before, the agony of the fat boy who had been tormented: shame and rage and hopelessness intermingled. You never completely escape things like this; you just try to never let people know about it. Maybe in a way it fuels you, helps you succeed. Because you need to prove that your tormenters didn’t win.

He cleared his throat. “After his brother died and Tobin dropped out of college, dropped out of the whole way of life, it was as if he’d broken their rules and suddenly he was the odd man out, on the outside. Once he wasn’t competition, once he wasn’t someone who could have the cutest girl or own the company they might be working for someday, they turned on him. Tobin didn’t do anything in school they all didn’t do—girls, drinking, getting high, skipping classes. Maybe he did it better than them and got away with it more often, but they admired him for it. Now they talk about him like he was a derelict.”

He opened the door for me to leave. The conversation was over. He’d spilled as much as he was going to. In my car in the parking lot I wrote down as much of what he’d said at the end as close to verbatim as I could—I wouldn’t quote him, but I needed to get it down.

Then I sat there. Something crucial had just happened. Even if it had been only a fleeting moment of conscience that had driven Tobin to intervene, intervene he had. I’d thought Tobin was manipulative and lazy, and in a way I had disliked him for the wealthy background I’d guessed he’d had. I’d expected Tobin’s classmate to be either a supercilious rich jerk or at best distant, reserved, and superior, and to confirm that Tobin had been a poster boy for privilege. But he hadn’t been. Neither of them had.

None of this, of course, meant that Tobin had been an angel or hadn’t become someone who slid through life and smacked around his girlfriend. But I’d broken the cardinal rule of journalism, bringing my preconceptions with me. Without this encounter, I might have skewed all the rest of the interviews, heard only what I expected or wanted to. Which would have been an enormous disservice to the newspaper, to Win, to me—and to Tobin.