A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (26 page)

“Thanks,” I told him, and opened the car door and tossed the pump in. “I’m going to go get more air.”

At Stewart’s it took only seconds to blast the tires to full pressure. Back at the house, I rummaged in my toolbox for extra valve caps and went out and screwed them on. They kept out dust and crud, and I suppose slowed down someone who might be inclined to let the air out of your tires.

Now I was hungry—somehow I’d forgotten to eat lunch—and cross.

Win called soon after—she was nearly back to Lake Placid. She’d gotten my text about Jessamyn’s father.

“Her dad showed up?” she asked. “I didn’t know she kept up with her father.”

“She didn’t; she hasn’t seen him for twenty years. Apparently after a bad divorce her mom disappeared with Jessamyn.”

“Well, good, if he’s a good guy, I mean.”

“I think he is.” I didn’t want to say more, to a woman who’d pretty much just lost the father she might have thought she had.

“Listen, Troy, I got what we need.”

“You talked to the maid?”

“Yes, and more. I’ll tell you when I get there—I’ll be there soon.”

“Okay,” I said. I was eager to know what she’d found out, if there was enough to go to her father with. But it could wait until she got here.

“Is Jessamyn’s father staying? I’d like to meet him.”

“He stayed here last night; I’d guess he’s staying tonight as well. She’ll definitely want you to meet him; she’d probably drag him out there to meet you if you didn’t come in—she’s pretty excited …” My voice trailed off.

Win knew what I was thinking. “Troy, it’s okay. I haven’t
been close to my father since Trey died. And he wasn’t that great a father before that.”

I was in my office when Win arrived. She looked exhausted. She opened a bag and set a stack of papers and a DVD on the corner of my desk.

“I filmed the interview with the maids, in English and in Spanish; they’re on the DVD.”

I picked up the papers. On top was a notarized statement, typed, in English, from the maid who had found a soggy set of Mr. Winslow’s clothes in the hamper of the downstairs bathroom the day after Trey Winslow had drowned. And there was more, notarized statements from two nurses on duty in the hospital where Tobin had been.

“What’s this?” I asked, surprised.

Win shrugged. “I thought it wouldn’t hurt to talk to them. And the last ones are being faxed straight to the newspaper, from the lawyer’s office.”

“The last ones?”

“Notarized statements from my mother and father.”

My jaw dropped.
“Your mother and father,”
I repeated. “Win, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I had to do it, Troy. I had to face them.” Her voice broke. She sat on my sofa. “I went to them and I laid it all out, all the statements. At first my father denied all of it, said he’d never been out that night. And then my mother looked at him, just looked at him, and said, ‘Bert, why would Gloria have said she found your wet clothes?’ and he broke—not all the way, but he broke. And he said, yes, he’d taken the boat out, with the boys, but he didn’t remember anything else. That’s all he would admit to.”

Win smiled then, a mirthless smile that was more of a grimace. “My mother said it. I didn’t think she would, but she said it. She said,
‘And you let Tobin take the blame for this all this time.’
And she got up and went upstairs.”

I couldn’t speak. I was astounded Win had done this, confronted
her father. This wasn’t what we’d agreed on—she’d jumped ranks, so to speak. Suddenly I remembered her saying what seemed long ago:
Maybe it’s time to air the linen
. Maybe she’d suspected something all along, had a notion of her father’s involvement, realized the nanny may have known something. Maybe I’d been the tool here, following the path Win had laid out, interviewing the people she’d aimed me at, using the photos and tidy timeline she provided. For a moment I felt ill, as if I’d been a dupe this whole time.

But this was her father, and they were her brothers. She was deeply fatigued; I was exhausted. I had an article to write. We could sort the personal side of this out later.

I took a deep breath. “Will your mother be all right?” I asked.

“I think so. In a way it answers a lot of questions for her, why Tobin left. She blamed Tobin too, you know, even though she never said anything, and he knew it. Trey was everyone’s favorite. She’ll have some guilt to deal with, and anger. A lot of anger.”

She stood up. “You may want to call the paper, to see if the faxes have arrived. Once you have those, and once George has the newspaper’s lawyer look them over, I imagine you’ll be good to go.”

I looked at her. “Win, I haven’t decided yet what I’ll use in the article.”

She blinked in surprise and started to speak, and I held my hand up. “Just write down the maid’s name and contact information for me,” I said, and pushed my pad of paper toward her.

“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.

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.

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 life, 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.