A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel (6 page)

Jessamyn looked over my shoulder toward my car, and then back at me. She gestured toward the café across the street. “How about some coffee?”

“No, I’m fine, I just need to eat, and I’m tired. I’ve been at the paper for hours.” I moved toward the car. She followed and got in, and we rode to the house in silence. I went straight to the kitchen, sliced a banana into a container of yogurt, and devoured it. Jessamyn waited until I had a steaming mug of tea in front of me.

“So what was that about?” she asked. “What was that piece of paper?”

How do you tell someone
Oh, just an article suggesting your boyfriend was killed and that you had something to do with it
? You can’t—at least, I couldn’t. I reached into my pocket for the page I’d pulled from the guy’s hand and held it out to her.

“It was just in the online version, and not for long—the editor took it down,” I said.

She straightened it out and read it, slowly, then read it again. It took her a moment to speak. “What the— Where did he get this stuff?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe he heard guys in the bar talking or just made it up. You don’t know him?”

“No,” she said. “I mean, I guess I could have run into him somewhere, but I’d remember the name Dirk. What else did the paper say?”

I pulled a newspaper from my bag and handed it to her, pointing at the main article. I hadn’t wanted to be here while she read this, but maybe this was the honest way to do it. Maybe all journalists would be more careful if they imagined being in the room as the people involved read their articles. I watched her eyes move down the page.

“Did you know—about Tobin’s brother?” I asked. She shook her head. I wasn’t surprised, not really. People who ended up here often had something they wanted to leave behind, something they didn’t talk about. Jessamyn never talked about her past either. And, well, neither do I.

She pointed at the photo of the ice cutters on the page. “Do you have more pictures?”

I wanted to say no. I didn’t want Jessamyn to see those photos. I didn’t want anyone to see them. That was one reason I hadn’t copied them onto a flash drive and taken them over to the Saranac Lake Police Station. But if anyone had a right to see them, she did.

She followed me upstairs and I showed her how to scroll through the photos. She went through them, one by one, while I sat on my sofa, Tiger at my feet. This was harder than watching her read the article. Her gaze lingered on some of the long shots, then she pushed back from the desk.

“What was Tobin doing out on the ice?” Her voice was so low I barely heard her.

There were no easy answers here, and none, I thought, that would bring her any peace. I shook my head. “Drunk, maybe. Or maybe someone from the bar dared him to see how far out he would go.”

“And no one noticed he didn’t come back?” She sounded incredulous.

“They might not—you know how those guys are. They’d just assume he went home.” I didn’t want to tell her I’d wondered if someone had been with Tobin, if they’d seen him fall through thin ice and panicked; if an ice-diving attempt had gone very wrong. Or worse. Neither did I want to point out that we might never know what happened, that this might be one of the Adirondack deaths for which answers were never found.

I looked at her. Her face twisted.

“I loved him,” she said, her voice thick and odd.

“I know you did.” And the next moment she was crying, full-body crying, the retching, gasping kind when it seems part of you is dying. She curled into herself and cried hard for what must have been five minutes straight, then got up and went into my bathroom for a long time. I heard water running.

When she came out, her eyes were red. “Tobin didn’t kill himself,” she said, as if I’d suggested it.

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t think so.” And I didn’t, not really. Tobin’s existence here had been on the marginal side, with the borrowed cabin, a battered truck, and odd jobs here and there. But this wasn’t his real life. It wasn’t like the people who lived here, who had families to support, who had nowhere else to go. Who weren’t playing at this.

She spoke again. “Everyone’s going to think I had something to do with this—that I had him killed or somehow made him kill himself.”

“I don’t think so, Jessamyn. It was a dumb article, and badly written—nobody sane or not perpetually drunk will believe it. And not many people will have seen it—it wasn’t up long. Those guys today were being stupid. This will be nothing.”

I may have been more wrong before, but I don’t remember when.

We had about ten minutes of quiet before the phone started ringing. The first call was from someone Jessamyn knew who had heard about the deleted article but hadn’t seen it. Then it rang again, and again. All these callers had seen the article that had been on the Internet less than half an hour. Some were friends; some weren’t. Some were reporters, from television and radio and newspapers; some looking for Jessamyn, some looking for me. Before long, we learned that some enterprising soul had e-mailed a copy to a bunch of locals, plus pretty much every news outlet in the area. Then people forwarded it, because spreading bad news apparently is the great American pastime. You’d think points were awarded for disseminating this stuff.

I called Baker. Pulling the article likely would have worked, I told her, if someone hadn’t grabbed a screen shot and decided to send it around—no one seemed to know who. She said she’d ask some people.

George called to tell me he had fired the reporter, the second time in his life he’d let someone go. The kid, he said, wouldn’t admit he’d done anything wrong—he seemed to think he was a modern-day Woodward or Bernstein. More like Matt Drudge, I thought, but didn’t say it.

“Did he actually talk to someone, or just make that stuff up?” I asked.

“He claims his sources were ‘privileged.’ ” George made a sound like a snort. “Probably someone in the bar, probably drunk, and likely he didn’t actually get a name.”

The paper had been getting calls too. George had heard about the article being sent around, and he’d try to get a copy of the e-mail. He cleared his throat. “People are saying that you got the piece pulled, Troy, because you’re friends with Jessamyn.”

He went on to tell me the wire had picked up the news story on Tobin, along with my two photos, and they’d be running nationally. So I’d have the clip I hadn’t really wanted, and some extra income because of it. It wasn’t any comfort—it was the opposite of comfort.

That evening I called Philippe and told him about my roommate’s boyfriend being found in the lake and all the rest of it.

He listened and made commiserative sounds. “Do you want to come up for a visit?” he asked. “Your friend could come up too.”

I was tempted, but it would have felt like running away when we hadn’t done anything to run away from. “It should die down soon,” I told him. “If we just don’t respond, people will stop calling.”

But it was early winter and a slow news cycle. One reporter dubbed Tobin the Ice Man of Saranac Lake, which caught people’s attention. The story made the TV news; it made every paper within a two-hundred-mile radius and some farther afield. My inbox was flooded with Google Alerts with Tobin’s name.

Going viral is great if you’re a cute sixth-grade boy with singing talent who ends up on
Ellen
and gets a record deal. It’s not so great if what’s going viral is an article suggesting you were involved in the death of your boyfriend found frozen in a lake. None of the articles mentioned Jessamyn and none approached the kid’s bad writing and clumsy innuendo, but in the hands of skilled writers, it was worse—implying a giant cover-up raging in this tiny town, where rich boys could be bumped off and salted
away under the ice without anyone knowing about it. Sort of a North Country
Deliverance
.

When Jessamyn went to work, her boss told her it was best if she didn’t come in for a while. Business was slow, he said. But this was a snowy January—business wasn’t slow. Slow is April, when the snow turns into a trickle of melting sludge and places close for the month. She knew it, and he knew she knew it.

George got an editor friend to forward a copy of the e-mail with the screen shot, which was of course anonymous. But no one does something as vindictive as this without a reason, real or imagined, and I wanted to find out why.

We ended up unplugging the house phone. After the first reporter showed up, we stopped answering the door. For the first time since I’d lived here we locked it, and everyone had to search out their house key. I thumbtacked a towel over the front door window as a makeshift curtain. By midmorning the next day I’d retrieved a batch of reporters’ business cards stuck in the door.

Enough was enough. I climbed the stairs to Jessamyn’s room and knocked.

“What?” said a faint voice.

“What do you think about getting out of town?” I noticed her door could use a coat of paint. I heard the springs of her mattress shift. The door opened a few inches.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“A road trip.”

She didn’t hesitate. “When?”

“Now. As soon as we can pack. You have a passport or enhanced driver’s license?” I remembered her having taken a day trip to Montreal, so she must have something to get across the border.

She nodded.

“Bring it,” I said. She didn’t ask any questions.

Back in my room I called Philippe. “Come on up,” he said. “I’ll call Elise to let her know you’re coming, and I’ll try to get home early.”

I sent Baker a note that I was going out of town for a few days. Then I e-mailed Jameson:
Things went nuts here after an article about Tobin’s death. Coming to Ottawa with my roommate—will be at Philippe’s
. It would be good to see Jameson, good to tell him about this. In the back of my mind did I realize that leaving town with Jessamyn might not be the smartest move, that it might appear suspicious? Maybe I did. But no one had told her she was a suspect, or had even hinted she needed to stick around. And I desperately needed to get away, and it would, I thought, do her good too. So if that little voice was trying to tell me anything, I didn’t listen. I slid my laptop in a bag, crammed clothes in a day pack, and dug out my passport and Tiger’s rabies certificate. Jessamyn was waiting at the kitchen table, a filled duffel bag beside her.

I shook out one of my canvas grocery bags and shoved food in it. I don’t like traveling without food, especially in winter. I scribbled a note to Brent and Patrick, then locked door.

“Let’s go,” I said, and we were off.

Neither of us looked over as we passed through Saranac Lake, but unless you closed your eyes you couldn’t avoid seeing the growing stack of ice blocks. We were nearly through the town of Gabriels before Jessamyn spoke. “We’re going to Canada, I presume?”

“Ottawa,” I said. “I have friends there we can stay with.” I told her about Philippe and his son, Paul, nearly seven now, and the nanny-slash-housekeeper, Elise. I told her that Philippe’s wife, Paul’s mother, had died last year, but I didn’t tell her how or why. She didn’t need to know, and I didn’t need to tell it.

As I drove, Jessamyn assembled ham-and-cheese sandwiches, and by the time we hit the border I’d finished two. Apparently fleeing town makes you hungry. We stopped for coffee at a Tim Hortons in Cornwall, and just over an hour and a half later were pulling into Philippe’s driveway.

“Wow,” Jessamyn said, looking up at the house. She’d been wide-eyed since we’d reached this neighborhood with its expensive, stately homes. I grinned at her as I pressed the button at the gate, and Elise let us in.

Elise was sixtyish and French-Canadian, pretty much the storybook devoted housekeeper. To her I could do no wrong, because I’d rescued Paul last summer. She gave me a hard hug, and then Jessamyn. Not many people would venture to hug Jessamyn, but Elise did, and Jessamyn let her. We put our bags in our rooms, and took Tiger and Paul’s half-grown puppy out in the fenced backyard for a romp. Then Elise fed us homemade brownies and milk in the kitchen, telling us how well Paul was doing. She was leaving soon to collect him from school, she said, and Philippe would be home before too long.

Jessamyn looked a little shell-shocked, but ate the warm brownies and drank the milk and took it all in, like a kid sitting in Grandma’s kitchen.

“And now I must go pick up Paul,” Elise said, beaming. “He will be so happy to know you are here.” She took off her apron and hung it on a hook, and she was off.

Jessamyn looked around the immaculate kitchen, with its marble countertops and hanging array of shiny pots and pans.

“Are we in Disneyland?” she asked. I chuckled, and she did too, and then both of us were laughing so hard we were nearly crying.

We were still sitting there when Elise returned, and Paul launched himself at me in a hug. He paused politely to be introduced to Jessamyn and shake her hand, and in nearly perfect English began chattering about his dog and school and his new friends. He sat on my lap—he was growing so fast he’d soon be too big. I watched his bright face and smooth perfect skin and, not for the first time, marveled that he seemed to have so well adjusted after his kidnapping and the death of his mother. To the move to Ottawa, to a new school, a new language, a new life.

And then Philippe was there, and gave me a hug that felt so good I didn’t want to let go. He was charming to Jessamyn, and, well, he’s phenomenally good-looking, with thick dark hair like his son’s, and from the look on her face I could almost hear her thinking,
Why the heck did you ever leave this?
Which in a way I’d been wondering too. Reasons that are perfectly logical don’t always ring true to the heart.

After one of Elise’s marvelous dinners, Paul went off for his bath and then his bedtime story from his father.

“I’m going to bed. I’m all in,” Jessamyn told me. She looked ready to drop.

“That’s fine. Do you need anything?”

She shook her head and went off. When Philippe came back, I told him everything that had happened.

“It just went crazy,” I said. “All because of a stupid little piece on the paper’s website that the wrong person saw and decided to spread.”