A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (32 page)

Win spoke, her voice melodic in the cold air, carrying across the ice. “My brother Tobin loved living here,” she said. “I will miss my brother forever, with all my heart, but I am glad he had his time here and I am glad he had friends here. And I thank everyone who cared about him.”

Jessamyn was crying. She spoke some words, but the wind whipped most of them away. I think she said something about loving Tobin, and I know she said goodbye. Dean said something, and then I did, just three words:
Thank you, Tobin
, and maybe only Win heard me, and maybe only she knew what I meant. And then Win sang. I hadn’t known she was going to, but she sang “Amazing Grace” in a clear and beautiful voice that floated out across the ice, and by the end I doubt there was a dry eye anywhere within the range of her voice. As she sang I looked over at the walls of the ice palace, reaching toward the heavens.

We turned and walked back toward the shoreline, and I was grateful for David’s arm steadying me. The people on the shore had started moving, mingling, some turning to walk toward the bar. I noticed one girl standing apart, eyes red, face pale. I thought I recognized her, and then I did: she was the girl I’d seen briefly in the Saranac Lake bar with the man who’d gotten my car out of the
ditch, the girl who had been in the pickup truck that had stopped to help me back onto the road. She saw me looking at her, saw me recognize her, and smiled, a heartbreakingly sad smile.

Something made me turn to David and tell him I needed to go speak to her, and he nodded and went on. I walked toward the girl, my boots crunching on the ice. She turned her head toward me, and waited.

She was beautiful, thin, and blond, an ethereal beauty, with a face that could have been in a painting by one of the masters. The man I’d seen her with before must have been her brother—you could see faint traces of him in her features, but in her they were refined, delicate, almost breathtaking.

“You were a friend of Tobin’s,” I said, and after she nodded I added, “I’m Troy.”

“Cadey,” she said. “Cadey Phillips. You met my brother Wade, sort of. The one they call Crick.”

She shifted on her feet and her hand moved toward her middle, just the suggestion of a movement, but it led my eyes there as if she had an arrow pointing toward her abdomen. And I saw, through the billowiness of her long coat, a slight mound of a rounded belly.

She opened her mouth to speak, but tears came into her eyes. She turned away slightly, and at that moment I realized who this was. She was the girl whose photo I’d seen in Tobin’s safe deposit box.

And things fell into place for me, with a giant clanging roar that seemed it should shatter the ice beneath my feet.

I thought, counted. “Four months, plus?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Tobin’s?” I asked, and she nodded again, and her tears began to fall steadily. For a moment I couldn’t breathe.

We started walking, the two of us. Someone saw us, a man who was a younger version of the brother I’d met, and moved toward us, but she waved him away and he retreated. As we walked she told me the story, almost whispering at times.

She lived in Saranac Lake, she said, and was still in high school. Her parents had died five years back in a car crash and she lived with her three older brothers, Wade and the one we’d just seen and one in between. She’d met Tobin when she’d been hitchhiking over to Lake Placid to a friend’s house; she’d told him she was eighteen, a student at North Country Community College. She had thought he was gorgeous and charming and funny in a way unlike the other men and boys she knew.

“I know it was wrong to lie,” she said, “but I liked him and I didn’t want him to know I wasn’t even seventeen.”

She’d seen him twice more and they’d been together only the once, the last time, at a friend’s house, but then somehow he’d found out her age, had looked at her driver’s license, and told her he couldn’t see her anymore, even though she’d cried and told him age didn’t matter. Then she’d missed her period and missed another and hadn’t been going to tell him, but he’d run into her and asked how she was, and then she had.

“Did you know about his girlfriend, about Jessamyn?” I asked.

She nodded, crying more. “I just liked him so much,” she said. “I know that was wrong.”

“He gave you money,” I said, thinking of the wad of cash, the money from the sale of the truck.

“I didn’t want to take it, but he said it was important, it was important that I saw a doctor right away, that I had prenatal care, vitamins and things, that I had a warm coat and took care of myself, and he gave me money that night, that last night I saw him. And he said he was going to make sure the baby was taken care of.”

“Do you know what he meant by that, ‘taken care of’?”

She shook her head. “I think he meant money, that he was going to set up a fund or something.”

We walked on. My brain was whirling.

“What happened to Tobin that night?” I asked at last. My mouth was dry. She stopped and turned her face toward me, those exquisite features filled with pain beyond her years.

“You need to talk to my brother,” she said.

•   •   •

We turned back. We could see some stragglers crossing the street, heading home or toward the bar, but the boy she’d waved off was leaning against a signpost. Her youngest brother, Jake, she told me. He looked at us as we approached, weariness and strain etched on his face.

“Tell her,” Cadey said. “Tell her all of it.” She moved off toward the others, and we watched her go.

The boy turned toward me. He wasn’t beautiful like his sister, but he was good-looking, and something about him said he’d had to grow up too fast. I guessed he wasn’t yet twenty. He stared out across the ice and started talking. He seemed to know who I was.

“We were pretty upset when we found out Cadey was pregnant,” he said. “Especially Wade. He’s the oldest, the legal guardian, the one who kept us all together when Mom and Dad died. Cadey didn’t tell us, but she was getting sick in the mornings, and he guessed. She wanted to have the baby, whatever it took. She wouldn’t tell us who the father was. We thought it was Jimmy, the kid she hangs out with in school, but she said it wasn’t. Wade asked around, he found out that Tobin had given her a ride once, and then he went to Cadey and acted like he knew who it was and she gave Tobin up without realizing it.”

He kicked at the snow under his boots. “I think Wade was angrier because it was him, an out-of-towner, you know, someone not from here. Someone older, someone he thought was using her. Wade went looking for him and found him outside the bar that night, and we followed him. Wade wanted to have it out with him, show him he couldn’t come here and treat our sister that way.”

“You were there?”

He nodded. “Me and my brothers. We followed Tobin, across the street and then out onto the ice a ways. He was just standing there, looking out across the ice. We said stuff, we threatened him, we called him names. He didn’t say anything. He just sort of smiled at us and turned his back and walked away. Wade was
furious, he wanted to go after him and fight him, beat him up, but we pulled him back. Told him it wasn’t worth it, it was too late, it was too cold. We’d deal with it later.” He looked at me and his face twisted. “I wished we’d let him, if he’d beaten him up Tobin would be alive, but Wade was really mad and we were afraid he’d lose control, break his jaw or something, maybe get arrested, and then Cadey would go to foster care and we wouldn’t be together.”

I walked a few paces away from him, out onto the ice, staring across the lake.

“And then what?” My voice was emotionless. All my feelings had drained out of me, as if through my feet and through the ice and into the water below, into the lake where Tobin Winslow had died, died the day before he’d planned to visit a lawyer to have his will changed to provide for a child not yet born.

“And then nothing,” he said. It was almost precisely what David Zimmer had said to me had happened when Tobin and his brother had been left by their father.
Then nothing
.

“What do you mean?” My voice was sharp.

“We saw Tobin walk out a ways, and then we left. We figured he’d wait until he saw we were gone and then he’d come back. No one thought he’d go out too far, that he’d go into the ice, that he’d fall through, that he’d drown. We only found out later he’d banged his head in the bar that night, that maybe he wasn’t feeling good from it, that maybe he was woozy. We didn’t know, we didn’t know. We didn’t.”

I turned and he was crying. I don’t know if he needed absolution or if I was the one to give it to him, but I moved toward him and wrapped my arms around him, this nearly grown man who was crying like he was six years old.

“I know you didn’t,” I said. “I know you didn’t.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked, stepping back, scrubbing the tears from his face, gulping for air.

“I don’t know.”

•   •   •

And I didn’t.

What I did was get him calmed down and walk him back to the bar, check on Cadey, exchange a few words with Win and David and Jessamyn, chat with George, and then plead tiredness and tell them I was heading home. I walked to my car, my feet heavy and cold. I turned on the ignition and my seat heater and sat there and shook in my cold, dark car.

I could picture it: the moonlight on the ice lighting the scene to a blue dimness. I could envision them, moving toward Tobin, standing there, a wall of disapproval. I could see him deciding to walk away, that he didn’t want an altercation. That he didn’t want to try to explain that he’d had no idea she was a minor, that he was going to do the right thing by the child, do whatever was right for Cadey. I could see him, turning his back on the cold eyes of the men staring at him and walking across the ice, a long last walk by moonlight, the ice crunching beneath his feet.

So he’d gone too far, walked until the ice grew thin, and in the darkness got confused which way was back to shore. Or maybe, just maybe—and this was my worst fear—he had decided to keep walking, decided he was tired of living. Didn’t want to deal with the child, with Cadey, with Jessamyn. Maybe he just gave up on that cold winter day and walked on until he sank beneath the ice.

I picked up my cell phone and called Philippe. He was out, Elise told me, at a play. I called his cell, but it went straight to voice mail. I hung up and cried a while, and then I called Jameson. I couldn’t get any words out at first, just noises.

“English, please,” he said, and I made a sound that was half laugh and half crying. “Are you safe, Troy?” he asked.

I managed to say yes.

“Are you home?”

“No, I’m in my car, in Saranac Lake.”

“You’re not injured.”

“No,” I whispered.

“Can it wait three or so hours?”

“Yes,” I said. He told me he was going to drive down, that this
didn’t sound like something I should tell him over the phone, that maybe I needed to talk this out in person. I cried more, and again managed to say yes.

“Are you okay to drive to your house?”

I nodded, and then remembered I needed to speak, and told him yes, I could drive, I was stone-cold sober, and he told me he’d call me when he got close, to go home and get something to eat and drink, and hug my dog and get some rest if I could. I told him I would, and hung up, and wiped the tears from my face and then the thin layer of icy condensation that had formed on the inside of the windshield. And I drove home, slowly, carefully.

Jameson made it in just over three hours. I’d had chamomile tea and crackers and cheese; I’d taken a very hot shower and put on my sweats and curled up in bed with my dog. But I hadn’t slept. After he called that he was close, I went down and waited in the living room until I saw the lights of his car, then opened the door for him. His face was tense, tired, but something in him relaxed when he saw me. He came in and then I was in his arms, holding tight under his open coat, my face against his chest. He held me, tightly, and then pulled back.

“You’re okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “Do you need something to eat, to drink?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Just tell me what you need to tell me, Troy.”

He followed me up to my room, pulling a chair over to sit across from me as I curled up under the covers, and I told him. I told him Tobin hadn’t been a great person, but hadn’t been the awful person I’d thought he was. And I told him everything that had happened, about Cadey and the rest, and about the brothers, following him, watching him start the walk across the lake to his death.

“What do I do?” I asked him. “They didn’t kill him. I don’t think they laid a hand on him. I think they were just there, standing there.”

“But they didn’t go after him.”

“No,” I said.

“They let him walk off, across the ice they must have known would break.”

“Her brother said they never thought he’d keep going, that they thought he would stop and come back when they left. But Tobin had hit his head in the bar, in that scuffle over the pool table. Maybe he passed out. Maybe he stopped and got confused and walked the wrong way. Or maybe … maybe he did it on purpose.”

I cried then, hard and wrenchingly, and he reached out and held my hand as he had in the Burlington hospital last summer, and I clung hard, as I had then. “His family, would it help his family to know, to know that the people in this town may have helped cause his death?” I said, when I could speak, “What good would it do? And the baby, I don’t think he wanted them to know about the baby. And Jessamyn, this would all hurt her so much.”

He didn’t tell me what to do. I didn’t expect him to.

He sat there and let me talk and then moved over and sat on the bed beside me so I could lean up against him. He stayed there until I was nearly asleep, and in the morning I found him on my sofa, his shirt hanging neatly from my desk chair and shoes and belt on the floor, with one of my pillows and a blanket from my closet. I didn’t remember getting the blanket out. Maybe I hadn’t.

We went to breakfast at Ho-Jo’s, and it felt good to be with him. Afterward we took Tiger for a walk. I thanked him, and we exchanged one of our overstuffed-sofa parka hugs, and he headed back to Ottawa, and I went upstairs to make some phone calls.