A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (7 page)

“That’s all it takes sometimes,” Philippe said, nodding. He owned a marketing firm that specialized in reviving or reinventing companies’ images after public-relations disasters, so he knew this stuff. “But people know Jessamyn, right? It’s not like she just moved to town. They’ll know she wasn’t involved.”

“She’s been there at least a couple of years, longer than Tobin. But he knew a lot of people—he had a lot of drinking buddies who thought he was great. And Jessamyn can rub people the wrong way.” The old Jessamyn, at least, could be outspoken, and didn’t
suffer fools well. And while her string of rejected suitors had all seemed fine with her moving on, it wasn’t impossible that at least one hadn’t taken it as well as he’d seemed.

“It’ll be all right, Troy,” Philippe said.

And maybe it would. For him, this was how it had worked after Paul’s kidnapping and his wife’s death. Of course it had hit him hard emotionally, and on some levels he was still reeling, but socially and professionally there’d hardly been a blip. But Philippe had picked up and moved to a new city in a new province, and wasn’t an underemployed girl in a small town whose boyfriend from a well-off family had been found frozen into a lake. There was a world of difference here I didn’t think Philippe was getting—maybe because he’d always had money, maybe because he didn’t want to see this side of things. He had a tendency to see the world as he wanted it to be. Which may have been partly why his marriage had gone as wrong as it had.

I thought about trying to say some of this, but I was tired, and it was late, and maybe it wasn’t that important. Maybe I spend too much time looking at the dark side of things. I moved closer to Philippe on the sofa and leaned up against him, and his arm went around me like it belonged there. We sat in silence a long while, and I could feel the heat of his body next to mine. My pulse quickened. Maybe something would have happened, but a loud cough came from Paul’s room, and then another, and Philippe disengaged himself.

“I have to check on Paul,” he said apologetically.

“Of course,” I said. “And it’s been a long day—I should go on to bed.” He gave me a quick hug and a kiss atop the head, and off I went. In the night I reached out to Tiger, by my side. Sometimes it’s very hard to do what you think is the right thing. And sometimes it’s very hard to be alone.

It had been a good decision to come here, I thought at breakfast the next morning, looking at Paul and Philippe’s smiling faces, Elise scurrying to refill coffee cups, Jessamyn looking relaxed and the closest to happy I’d seen her in a long time. We both needed this. Heck, everybody could use this once in a while.

After breakfast I went off to call Jameson, and he suggested meeting for lunch, as I expected he would.

“Bring along your friend,” he offered.

I found Jessamyn in the kitchen, perched on a stool watching Elise prepare something that involved a lot of chopping.

“I’m going to meet my friend the policeman for lunch,” I told her. “You’re welcome to come.”

She shook her head. “I’ll stay here. Elise is going to show me how to make an apple pie.”

I wouldn’t have expected pie making to be on a list of skills Jessamyn wanted to acquire, but she seemed to be reveling in this whole homey atmosphere. She did go with me for a walk with the dogs around the neighborhood before I left, admiring the houses we passed as I worked at convincing Paul’s puppy to walk politely on a lead. Neither of us brought up Lake Placid or Tobin, or anything else we’d left behind.

•   •   •

It was, of course, too cold to meet at the park bench on the Rideau Canal, where Jameson and I had met for takeout lunch last summer, so we chose a Harvey’s restaurant midway between us. He got out of his car when he saw me pull up, and we exchanged the clumsy, well-insulated hug you do when wearing heavy parkas, somewhat like hugging a sofa. Then we both ordered the Great Canadian burger. He got the onion rings; I got fries. I tried to pull out some Canadian money to pay, but he covered it.

“So what’s happening?” he asked when we sat down with our food.

I told him all of it: the newspaper story that got pulled not quite soon enough and had been e-mailed around, the deluge of phone calls, the knocks on the door, the hints of killing and cover-up.

“A woman scorned?” he asked.

“Maybe. I haven’t found out yet.”

“Have the police been back in touch?”

“No, not with either of us. And they never asked for the photos I took.”

Jameson ate an onion ring. “Family?”

“Parents and a sister; the articles all said they weren’t available for comment. The editor told me his family was on their way to Saranac Lake. We haven’t heard from them.”

“Jessamyn didn’t know them?”

I shook my head.

After a moment he asked: “Could Tobin have killed himself?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so,” I said. I’d thought more about this after Jessamyn had brought it up. “But he lost his brother when he was nineteen, in a boating accident—maybe he’d never gotten over it.” Maybe something had reminded him of his brother. Maybe Tobin had gotten tired of North Country living, tired of Jessamyn, tired of the cold. Maybe, after a night of carousing in a Saranac Lake bar and with Christmas not far off, he had made an impromptu decision to pack it in.

Jameson nodded, and wiped his lips with a paper napkin. “Could your roommate know anything about his death?”

I considered this. I thought about Jessamyn’s face as I’d told her the news, how hard she’d cried when she found out Tobin was dead. I was shaking my head even before I spoke. “No, she was really shocked when she found out.”

Jameson nodded again, pushing his plate away. “Something will happen soon. After the autopsy, after the police finish interviews, after his parents weigh in.” He didn’t say he thought things would be fine; he didn’t assure me the hubbub would die down soon. He wasn’t one for platitudes. In many ways, his view of the world was even bleaker than mine.

He told me work had been busy; I told him about some of the magazine pieces I’d done. In the parking lot we exchanged another overstuffed-sofa hug, maybe the only sort we would ever be comfortable with.

When I got back to the house and Elise opened the door for me, I felt a wave of affection and warmth and nostalgia for the people who lived in this house, so powerful it made me ache. It seemed too much, too intense a set of feelings to fit into one being.

But maybe it just took some getting used to.

Jessamyn was flushed from the success of having made the apple pie, her first ever, she told us, more than once. I admired its somewhat wandering lattice top, more than once. Elise beamed proudly.
Elise’s School of Homemaking
. She’d tried to show me how to iron neatly last summer, but I’d failed miserably. Jessamyn seemed a more willing and apt pupil.

I volunteered to go get Paul from school—I was still on the approved list to pick him up, and Jessamyn decided to go along.

The confident, cheery Paul who jumped into my back seat was a different child from the one I’d picked up from school last June. I had to admit that part of me missed the little boy who had needed me so much. I suppose parents go through this, watching their children grow more independent. Just when you’d gotten good at one phase, they were off to another. Philippe was doing a good
job with Paul, I thought, and having the bedrock that was Elise didn’t hurt.

That night after dinner, after apple pie for dessert, and after Paul was tucked into bed, the three of us retired to the library and a crackling fire. We relaxed and sipped a superb pinot noir and sampled different cheeses. Philippe chatted about Paul’s school and his marketing business. I talked about my brother, Simon, my friend Baker, my roommate Zach who was in Boulder visiting a girlfriend—all people Philippe had met. Jessamyn told funny stories about tourists visiting the restaurant.

And then Philippe asked her, “Where are you from originally?”

It was a simple question, and up until that moment I hadn’t really considered that in Lake Placid you don’t usually ask people where they’re from. Sometimes they tell you, and sometimes you figure it out from where they disappear to on holidays, if they do. But you don’t ask.

There’s a line in the movie
Insomnia
, something like
There’s two types of people in Alaska, the ones who were born here and the ones who came here to get away from something
. You could say much the same about the Adirondacks.

But Jessamyn replied easily, though vaguely. “The Midwest, but I don’t keep up with anyone.”

And Philippe, bless him, just poured more wine and smiled with the right mix of sympathy and understanding, and launched into a story about one of his clients who owned a small winery. This was one of the things he excelled at, putting people at ease. And after a while he excused himself, saying he had some paperwork to do. After he was out of earshot Jessamyn leaned toward me and whispered, “What’s the deal with Philippe?” I nodded toward my room—this wasn’t a discussion I wanted to have in the open. She followed me, and we sat cross-legged on the bed as if we were in junior high.

“So what’s the deal with Philippe?” she repeated.

I didn’t pretend not to know what she meant. I told her about finding Paul last summer and staying in Ottawa to help him adjust
to his new life here, without a mother, with the father he hadn’t seen for months; that Philippe and I had gotten close, partly because of Paul, but had backed off for many reasons. The timing wasn’t right; I was deeply attached to his son, and he was recovering from the loss of his wife. Not the best time to start something.

Jessamyn drained her wineglass. “I dunno, maybe you should just go for it, Troy. He seems to be a great guy. You like the kid, and this place is amazing.”

Yeah, I know
. I wasn’t going to open my veins here and tell her how much I’d struggled with my attraction to Philippe and to Paul and the whole setup, and explain why I couldn’t have stayed here. “I know. Maybe if there wasn’t a child involved. But I didn’t want to try something that was too soon or not right, and then not be a part of Paul’s life. He’d already lost his mother; I didn’t want him to lose me, too.” It was late enough and this was enough of the truth that my voice caught.

Jessamyn thought for a moment. Her next question took me off guard. “Are your mother and father together?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I don’t think it ever occurred to them not to be. They seem okay. Neither of them have much use for me, but that’s just how it is.”

“Mmm, kind of the same here. But no father. He took off when I was about three. I saw him again once, I think, and that was it. I don’t even remember what he looked like.” She shrugged. “Paul’s lucky. He’s lucky to have his father, and Elise, and you, and all this.” She waved a hand to encompass
all this
. The puppy, the delectable meals, the fine furnishings, the house filled with love.

My throat tightened. “Yes, he is.”

“I think we need more wine,” she said.

“I think you’re right.”

We tiptoed off to the kitchen and polished off the bottle and the last of the apple pie while we were at it. We rinsed our dishes and went off to bed, comfortably full, and feeling, I think, more like friends than we had before.

At breakfast Philippe excused himself to go to work early, but we’d be meeting him downtown later. Jessamyn said she was tired, and found a book and went off to her room to read. I fired up my laptop and sent an e-mail to my brother, telling him what had happened, because at some point in all this I might need Simon’s cool logical brain.

And then I started some Googling to see if I could track down the person who had sent that article around. I had the e-mail address from George, and it didn’t take long to trace it to a little-used Facebook page with a cartooned Marilyn Monroe for an avatar. Lives in:
Lake Placid, New York
. Worked at:
Price Chopper
. User name:
Marilyn Munro
. It was likely a fake name but if not, how unfortunate. I asked Jessamyn if she knew anyone named Marilyn, and she said she didn’t.

Then we drove downtown to meet Philippe for a bundled-up walk and an early lunch at a bistro. Because, as he told Jessamyn, you shouldn’t come to Ottawa and not at least see the Parliament buildings and Rideau Canal. It was iced over so thoroughly that some people commuted on skates to work, and little huts were set up to sell hot chocolate and beaver tails, a particularly large and sticky pastry.

When we got back I went through the voice mail messages that had downloaded into my inbox as mp3 files. Most were reporters, but not the last two, and they left me feeling queasy.

I found Jessamyn in the kitchen.

“The state police called me at home,” I told her. “They were trying to get in touch with you—they want to interview you.”

All the animation drained from her face. I hadn’t realized until then just how much Jessamyn had relaxed here, how different she looked.

“The state police?” she asked. “Not the local police?”

I nodded. “I guess they’re following up on Tobin’s death.”

“Do we have to go now?” Her voice was plaintive, like a small child’s.

I looked up at the wall clock, and at Elise, carefully busy with something she’d taken from the fridge. “Even if we left now we’d have trouble making it by five. We can wait until morning.”

The state police investigator, when I called, was none too happy, and I felt more than a trifle guilty. I hoped I hadn’t made things worse for Jessamyn by whisking her out of town. I told him we were visiting in Ottawa, I’d just gotten the messages, and we’d come straight to the state police headquarters in Ray Brook in the morning. I gave him my cell phone number, and put Jessamyn on the phone to confirm what I’d said. He didn’t push it—it wasn’t as if they were going to extradite Jessamyn to interview her half a day earlier.

I called Jameson, who agreed that someone could be exerting pressure to bump this up a notch. “Or it’s possible that all non-conventional deaths there are referred to your state police,” he said. “I’d remind Jessamyn not to say anything that’s not a fact, and if she gets uncomfortable, to ask to leave. Or consider getting an attorney before she goes in. And if you need me, call me.”