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

mysterious Adirondack deaths—actually, someone had, a book called
At the Mercy of the Mountains
. Jessamyn would recover; she’d regain her old personality or form a new one. Everyonewould talk about Tobin for a while, and then move on. Like they always did.
    I slid my skis into the back of my car, and then decided to drive on to Price Chopper—this was a day that called out for a hot dinner. Back at the house I chopped vegetables and tossed them in a big pot with stew meat and diced tomatoes, left it simmering, and went upstairs. After a quick shower, I turned on my computer and saw that George had sent the article. I opened it and started reading.
    When Matt Boudoin and his workers went to work on the Ice Palace Saturday, none of them had any idea what horrible discovery they would find under the ice
.
    I winced. Maybe George had left it this bad to goad me into doing a complete rewrite. He knows I loathe incompetence, and that competitiveness runs deep within me.
    I read on. Near the end of the piece I found a sentence that made me cringe:
    Before Tobin Winslow disappeared, he had been dating Jessamine Fields of Lake Placid
.
    The kid had not only misspelled Jessamyn, but had gotten her last name wrong. I highlighted the sentence and hit Delete without a qualm. Who Tobin had been dating wasn’t relevant—it wasn’t as if they’d lived together or been engaged—and the last thing Jessamyn needed was to be forever linked to this guy.
    I called Matt Boudoin, who told me they were continuing the ice harvest from a different area. I tracked down the number of the guy who owned Tobin’s cabin, and left him a message. I called the Saranac Lake police and found out precisely nothing about Tobin’s truck, Tobin’s family, or much of anything. I didn’t push it. I wasn’t the primary reporter on this, and I’d already annoyed one local cop.
    Then I Googled “Tobin Walter Winslow”—something the reporter apparently hadn’t bothered to do—and within minutes turned up Tobin’s hometown, the name of his prep school, and a photo of him at a lacrosse game at, yes, Princeton, during his freshman year. It was unsettling to see this younger, happier person with Tobin’s face, hair shorter and face brighter.
    A few more clicks, and I found his parents: Mary Martha and Bertram Martin Winslow II. I learned the name of the insurance company Tobin’s father owned, his private club, the hefty donations he’d made; the groups his mother belonged to, events she’d attended. Then I saw a link for a Bertram Winslow III and clicked, and started reading. When the words penetrated, I pushed back from my desk.
    Tobin had had one brother, four years his senior, who had died in a boating accident while Tobin was with him, the summer after graduating from Princeton. The Tobin I’d so disliked had seen his big brother drown; this set of parents had just lost their second son.
    I got up and walked around. Then I sat down and read more. There was one sister, Jessica, neatly spaced between the brothers, a tidy two years apart. It did occur to me that it was odd that Tobin’s sister had a name so similar to Jessamyn’s—I think it was Freud who said there are no coincidences.
    But I had an article to rewrite.
    Before moving to the Adirondacks, I’d worked part time at a paper out West, writing features, which I’d liked, and engagement and wedding announcements, which I’d hated. I’d applied for the sports editor job here partly because I was desperate, and partly because it was a long way from home. It took a while to figure out how to cover so many sports I knew next to nothing about, but once I did, I’d loved it. Athletes had passion for what they did—whether Olympic kayaker or sled-dog racer or the five boys on a tiny high school basketball team that didn’t win a game until the last one of the season. And I loved translating that passion onto the page.
    A benefit of having written so many articles on deadline isthat