A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (16 page)

But at least she has them
. At least she has those families for a time, I thought, those children to rear and influence and love.

On Google Maps I’d zoomed in on the street where Tobin had grown up, the park where the nanny had taken them to play, the grounds of his private school, the club where his senior prom had been held. I’d told myself this was enough, that I didn’t actually need to go look at these places. And maybe I didn’t, but here I was, with time to spare. I pulled out the maps I’d printed from Streets & Trips—the poor person’s GPS—and found my way to the park where Tobin had played with his sister and brother. I walked around, envisioning the young nanny with the three children she’d loved, the ones she’d taken care of instead of returning
to college. It almost seemed that I could see them, see their ghosts at play. Then I sat there a while, my coat open, sun on my face. It’s surprisingly warmer even a few hours south, once you get out of the mountains.

When I’d started this I’d been excited about writing something this big, this momentous, and it seemed it would help set things right. But it had morphed into more. I’d discovered I’d made a lot of assumptions about Tobin I’d had no business making. And now I wondered what else I’d be finding out.

I got on the road just in time to evade rush hour, eating the apple and carrots I’d brought along and then a rest-stop dinner of Fritos and a Snickers bar. All the basic food groups, plus chocolate.

It was a long drive back. I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, and I ended up pulling over at a rest stop and taking out the sleeping bag I kept behind my seat, wrapping it around me and waking an hour later, cold, and for a moment not knowing where I was.

The house was dark. It was odd to have to fumble for a key and unlock the door instead of just walking in, and odder still not to have Tiger running to meet me. I flicked on my computer long enough to send
I’ve gotten home
messages to Win and to Jameson.

Maybe I should have tried to force myself to go through my notes before my impressions had dulled, but I couldn’t. The best thing I could do was sleep. Sometimes I knew when to quit. Not often, but sometimes.

I woke from a dead sleep to what I thought was the ringing of my phone, but again there was nothing but a dial tone. This time I turned on the light and looked at the caller ID: number blocked. So I wasn’t dreaming. Someone was harassing me, maybe the fired reporter—this I could deal with. I got up and turned on my computer, signed into my phone service’s website, and clicked the box to refuse calls with blocked numbers.

But now I was awake, and hungry. This was what I got for not having eaten anything when I’d arrived home. I looked at my clock—half past midnight. I eased down my steep stairs to the kitchen. I’d nearly finished a bowl of granola when I thought I heard something, and set down my spoon and listened. And heard it again.

It was from the front hallway, someone fumbling at the door.
Brent or Patrick weren’t likely to be out this late, but Jessamyn might, and could have forgotten her key. I began to walk down the hall toward the front door, and got close enough to see the doorknob turn, and then turn again. The hair on the back of my neck rose. Then I heard a muffled exclamation, and a thump against the door.

I inched closer and peeked around the cloth over the window. Then I reached down and opened the door to Zach, our fifth roommate. Home from his trip visiting his girlfriend.

“Troy,” he said. “W-w-what’s going on?” For him, coming home to find our front door locked with a curtain over it would be like coming back to an altered universe, a Bizarro World.

I put my finger to my mouth in a
shhh
gesture. He picked up his bag and came in; I reached past him to close and lock the door, and gestured for him to follow me to the kitchen.

“What’s going on?” he whispered.

In the chilly kitchen, my voice low, I told him all that had happened. Even condensed, it took a while.

“Where’s Tiger?” he asked. Zach was fond of my dog.

“Staying with Win tonight. I got back late from a trip doing interviews.”

“But everything’s okay now?”

I knew Zach wasn’t actually thinking everything was fine; he wasn’t as simple as he sometimes pretended to be. He just wanted to know how this was going to affect his day-to-day life and what was expected of him.

“Seems to be,” I said. “But it’s probably best we keep the door locked for a while. So you’ll have to find your key, or I can make you a new one.”

He nodded, and went down the hall. I could hear him pausing to pick up his bag and head up the stairs to his room. I rinsed my dishes and went back up to bed, locking my door behind me.

I was surprised to see Jessamyn sitting at the kitchen table when I went down the next morning. It was late for me, early for her.

“You’re back,” she said around a mouthful of toast smeared
with jam. It looked a lot like my blackberry preserves, but I didn’t point that out. Maybe I needed to learn to share.

I nodded. “Hey, Zach got back late last night,” I said. “So how’s everything? Is work okay?”

“Work’s been fine. No one’s been hassling me. Brent’s been walking me up there, just in case. And Win had me out to the cabin yesterday.” She took a bite of toast. “I thought it might be weird to be out there again, but it wasn’t. It was good to have someone staying there, not have it dusty and empty, like it was waiting for Tobin.”

As it had been
. “Have you had any trouble with reporters?”

She shook her head. “No, nothing. Hey, did you know Win has a new car?”

“She changed her rental, right? Or did she pick up her car when she went home?”

“No, she said that’s a little sports car and no way could she drive it up here. She turned in her rental and had them drop her at a Subaru place in Albany and just bought one, before she even went home. Like yours, only smaller.”

I stared at her. “A Forester?”

“Yeah, that’s it. She said she wanted something with four-wheel drive, and she didn’t like dealing with a rental, especially when she didn’t know how long she’d need it.” She laughed at the expression on my face.

“Wow,” I said, trying to wrap my head around this. I guess it made sense, if you had enough cash to buy an extra new car on a whim. “So it sounds like she’s staying a while.”

“Yeah, she said probably until the ice palace is finished. Or at least until the articles are done.”

That was a grim thought: staying until the blocks of ice cut from the lake where her brother was found frozen were transformed into a whimsical building. But maybe that would provide some closure. Or my articles would.

And now I was starting to feel the pressure to get to work. I made myself some tea and peanut butter toast with sliced banana, and went back up to my rooms.

I tried the accountant again—no answer. He seemed to have disappeared.

Next I called the three people on the nanny’s list and left messages for two. The third was home: a former grade-school teacher, now retired. I stumbled a little over my explanation, thinking she might not know of Tobin’s death, but she did. Everyone knew, she said, and she had spoken to Tobin’s nanny.

“So you know her?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, she was very involved with activities at the school—she came to the children’s events; she made sure they did their homework.”

“She came to their events? During the school day, you mean?”

“No, everything. Clarinet recitals, plays, sport events, she almost never missed them. She was more reliable than most parents about attending. She was like a mother, really.”

“Their parents?” I asked, letting my voice trail off.

Silence for a moment. “I’m retired, so I can say what I please,” she said dryly. “The father wasn’t involved at all; you never saw him at school. The mother, sometimes, for daytime events. But evening events, no.”

“She didn’t like to go out in the evening?”

“She wasn’t, well, particularly alert in the evenings.” My silence must have told her I wasn’t catching on. She cleared her throat and said succinctly, “Mrs. Winslow was fond of cocktails.”

“Ah,” I said, finally getting it. “But … that would mean the nanny was, well, pretty much full time, twenty-four hours a day.”

“Yes,” she said simply. And if I had wondered why the vital, intelligent woman who had been the Winslows’ nanny had never gone back to college, I had my answer.

I asked about Tobin, about her fifth-grade class he’d been in. English, she told me, had been his favorite subject—he loved reading and devoured adventure novels, classics as well as current ones. He’d read beyond his years, she said, and he’d loved the Narnia books. Just as I had.

“I thought he would be a writer,” she said. “He wrote some lovely compositions and stories.”

“Maybe he would have been,” I said. “If …”

She finished the sentence. “If his brother hadn’t died. Or maybe later, if he’d had more time.”

Now I heard the pain in her voice, behind the briskness of a career grade-school teacher.

“Send me a copy of your article, please,” she said, and gave me her address. I promised I would.

I sat for a moment after I hung up. I’d never expected to find parallels in Tobin’s life to mine, but here they were. Distant parents. Loved books, loved writing. Next I’d find out he’d been a Boy Scout who helped little old ladies across the street. Now I’d have to be careful not to start overlooking less savory parts of Tobin’s life because I was falling for the little boy he’d once been.

I’d gotten a message from Dean that he had gotten in touch with Marilyn, who was back in town, and was trying to inveigle her into talking to me. And yes, her last name really was Munro—parents should think hard before naming their children. I heard sounds from downstairs, and then Tiger running down the hallway and bounding up my stairs. A moment later Win poked her head up.

“Hey, how’s my dog?” I asked. Which was my way of asking,
How are you doing?

“Great—she’s really good company,” she said.

“You’re okay staying out there?”

She nodded. “Dean put up a motion-activated outdoor light for me. So your interviews went well?”

As she came up the final few stairs I could see she had something in her hands, a fat album. “I brought this back from home,” she said as she handed it to me. “I thought it might help with your articles, and you can use whatever you want.”

I opened the bulging album. It was crammed with pictures, her and her brothers’ childhood.

“Thanks,” I said, surprised. This was a bonanza I hadn’t expected—it would help me find the heart of this article, see the child Tobin had been. “Win, is your family going to be able to handle this?”

“They know you’re doing it,” she said. She looked at a photo on the page I had opened: the three children, lined up on a front-porch step. “That was at our grandfather’s.”

“You …” I started, then said simply, “You had a dog once.”

Win sat on my sofa. “Ah, Nanny told you about that. I wondered if she would.” She pushed her hair away from her face. “Yes, our parents weren’t the sort of people who could tolerate messes. Did she tell you what Tobin did?”

“She said he cried, a lot, that he begged to keep the dog.”

“The day after Bunny was taken away he went into their room with a pair of scissors and tried to cut up some of their clothes. Nanny caught him. I don’t know whether she stopped him before he damaged much and she could fix them, or if she just got rid of the clothes and never told our parents. But she would have done whatever she had to, to protect him.”

She saw my face. She smiled softly. “I think maybe Tobin thought if he tore up things like the dog, they’d send him to where Bunny was, and he could live with her.”

I jumped up. “I’m gonna make some tea.” If I sat there, I would have started crying.

So we went down and had a pot of Earl Grey, like two friends having a pleasant afternoon tea break.

After Win left, I went through the album, page by page. To me it’s a little uncomfortable, almost intrusive, to look at other people’s pictures on Facebook or Flickr. And this seemed worse. Someone had selected these photos, painstakingly put them into place. Tobin was a charming little boy, with a sweet grin and full dark hair; his brother was thinner, a little more reserved, but in every picture of the two of them Trey had his arm thrown around his younger brother in a way that seemed genuinely affectionate, not in that just-for-the-camera way. There were no photos of the dog.

I was getting that slightly sick feeling I do before tackling something I’m not sure I can pull off. And I was well aware that the one significant thing I hadn’t done was talk to Tobin’s parents. I’d written, e-mailed, and left phone messages, all with no response, which was what Win had told me to expect. So I could, with good conscience, put a note at the end of the story:
Tobin’s parents declined to comment
.

But the fact was I was afraid to talk to them, afraid to ask these parents about their dead son. Before I could talk myself out of it, I dialed the Winslows’ number one more time.

And to my great surprise, someone picked up.

“Hello,” said a voice. A woman’s voice, faint and distant.

“Hello,” I said, rattled. I made myself plunge ahead. “I’m Troy Chance, from Lake Placid, and I knew Tobin … I’m writing an article about him, about his childhood, and I was wondering …”

The voice on the other end of the phone made a sound. It wasn’t a cough and it wasn’t a gasp, but something between the two, and if I had to describe it I’d say it was the sound of grief. I waited, and then the woman said, in a reedy voice, “Just say … just say that we loved Tobin and miss him.”

“Mrs. Winslow?” Now I thought I heard a voice in the background, a man’s voice.

“Yes,” the woman said, a little firmer, still with the thin edge of grief. “Yes, this is Tobin’s mother. Please say that we loved Tobin and we miss him.”

And as I heard the man’s voice again, louder, the connection went dead.

I sat there, phone in my hand. So I had reached Tobin’s mother.
Win’s mother. Trey’s mother
. It seemed I could feel the waves of pain emanating from her, through the phone line.