A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

Winslow.”
    “Yep.”
    “You got pictures.”
    “Yep.”
    He got right to the point—one of the things I liked about George. “Can you do a first-person piece?”
    I thought about it as I listened to Jessamyn moving about in the kitchen below, speaking to my dog. I could write a piece that would capture being there on the lake, the air so cold you couldn’t stand still for long; the sound of the saw blades chewing through the ice, the men’s breath rasping as they worked, the slide of the ice coffin across the lake. George didn’t need to tell me this story would almost certainly hit the wires, that it would run nationwide, that this would help me break into bigger magazines than I wrote for now.
    I shook my head before realizing I was doing it. “I can’t,” I said.
    Churning out a first-person piece about being there whenTobin was found would seem a betrayal in a way I didn’t begin to understand. Maybe I could write about it later, maybe in a magazine piece, but not now. Not when it had just happened and Jessamyn was still reeling from it. And maybe I was too.
    “Have you got someone on it?” I asked.
    “Yes,” he said, and told me who, a kid named Dirk who had been at the paper a few months, whose writing hadn’t impressed me. My silence told George what I thought of this. “He really wants to do it,” he added. “And everyone else is tied up or on vacation.”
    Long pause.
    “Can you work with his piece?” he asked. “Review it, add some stuff? Dual byline.”
    This I could do. “Sure. Send it over.”
    “Photos?”
    “I’ll let you have a couple. Nothing real specific. You don’t want a body on your front page, George.” Even if he did, I didn’t. “Are you clear to run it? Have they notified next of kin?”
    “Yep. I heard someone’s on their way here.”
    I was surprised. “They didn’t have trouble tracking down the family?”
    “No, Barry at the police station said the wallet was still in his pocket. I’ll send the story to you when it comes in. Won’t be for a while yet.”
    I thought as I hung up. So the police knew perfectly well where Tobin was from and who his family was, and the officer at the house had asked Jessamyn questions the police already knew the answers to. Maybe that particular policeman had been uninformed—or was shrewder than he’d seemed. Maybe he had been the one playing games.
    I went down and told Jessamyn the newspaper editor had called, that I was going to look over the article they were doing on Tobin. Then we heard the door open, and steps coming down the hall. We looked at each other, both of us maybe wondering if the policeman had returned and waltzed in the front door we never locked.
    But it was Brent, carrying a plastic bag from Stewart’s up the street. He raised one eyebrow but didn’t say anything. He pulled a box of oatmeal from the bag, and we watched him dump some in a pot, mix in water, and turn on the stove.
    Jessamyn looked at me. “Tell him,” she said. So I did, succinctly, while Brent was stirring his breakfast.
    He listened, then ladled his oatmeal into a huge bowl, topped it with raisins and cinnamon, and sat down with us. There was something comforting about the smell of that oatmeal.
    “So what happened to Tobin’s truck?” he asked.
    We gaped at him. I hadn’t thought of this; apparently Jessamyn hadn’t either. Of course we’d assumed Tobin had driven his truck out of town—but he’d never left.
So where was his truck?
    Brent misunderstood our confusion. “Didn’t Tobin have a pickup truck?” he asked.
    “Yeah, he did,” I said. “Maybe it’s still out at his cabin.” Tobin had stayed in a cabin outside of town, where he’d had some kind of deal with the owner who lived downstate and used it only rarely.
    Jessamyn was shaking her head. “No, I went out there a couple of times, to see if he’d come back. No truck.”
    “Maybe it was impounded,” Brent said. “Did he own it?”
    “I guess so,” said