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

Jessamyn, frowning. “But if he’d left it anywhere around here, someone who knew him would have seen it and mentioned it.”
    I think the thought came to her the same time it did to me:
Maybe Tobin had tried to drive across the lake and crashed through—and maybe his truck was on the bottom of Lake Flower
.
    We sat there a long moment.
    I cleared my throat. “No,” I said, shaking my head, sounding more confident than I felt. “No way he would have tried to drive across the lake, even drunk, not that early in winter. Walk maybe, never drive. And if he had, a truck going through the ice would have left a hole someone would have noticed.”
    Brent said nothing. He was probably calculating how thick the ice had been and how fast a hole would ice over, but was smart enough not to say any of this.
    “Then where’s his truck?” Jessamyn almost whispered.
    “He must have parked it somewhere, or it broke down and got snowed in, and no one’s noticed it,” I said. “Then he hitched a ride.”
    Around here a vehicle could get completely buried by snow on a back road and not reappear until spring. But it seemed an odd and unlikely coincidence that a truck would disappear at the same time its owner drowned. From the look on Brent’s face, I guessed his brain was going the same direction.
    The fact was, there were plenty of reasons that could lead to someone ending up dead around here. Tobin could have smarted off to the wrong person, dabbled in the North Country drug trade, gotten involved with someone whose spouse didn’t take kindly to being cuckolded. He could have been in a fistfight that went bad—you could break your skull on a rock in a bad fall; a blow to the wrong part of your chest can stop your heart. I’d once read in a John D. MacDonald novel that hitting someone’s nose at a certain angle could send fatal shards of bone into the brain—one of those tidbits that sticks in your mind when you’re thirteen, whether true or not.
    Jessamyn nodded. She stood. “I’m going to go work a shift for the girl who filled in for me last night.”
    “Listen,” I said, talking fast to get it out. “I talked to a friend who’s a policeman. He said you shouldn’t talk about this to people, and if anyone asks you questions, don’t answer.”
    She gave me an odd look.
    I’d rather have tried to explain this when Brent wasn’t around, but it wouldn’t have been easy even then. I didn’t want to tell her that her lippy repartee wouldn’t look good in print. I could hardly say
Someone could start a rumor that you had something to do with Tobin’s death
or
Hey, the police may think you were involved
. I tried again: “This could be a story that other papers want to cover, Jessamyn. It’s better if you just don’t say anything—then no one can misquote you.”
    From the look on Brent’s face, I saw he got it. I hoped she did too.

CHAPTER 8
    It would take a while for the article to arrive, and I didn’t want to sit around waiting, so I loaded up skis and dog and headed for the trails behind Howard Johnson’s.
    It was in the low twenties, pretty much perfect for cross-country skiing if you knew not to overdress. It was a bright clear day, and the glide of my skis and the motion of my muscles let my brain start to unwind. I only had to stop once to clear out snow from between Tiger’s paws where it had melted and refrozen. You can buy dog booties, but dogs mostly don’t like them—I think they consider them an insult.
    In the snowy woods with sun bright overhead, it seemed absurd to think that anyone had caused Tobin’s death. This was an unlucky confluence of a late night, poor judgment, cold weather. Tobin had run out of gas or had a breakdown; his truck would be found, cemented in place by snow. He’d hitched a ride to town, decided to walk across the lake, and fallen in. He had died, grotesquely and accidentally. It happens all too often around here. You could fill a book with grim and sometimes