Free A Cold and Lonely Place: A Novel by Sara J. Henry Page B

the bag of Elise’s pastries. No one took any.
    The woman had Tobin’s coloring, and you could see the resemblance around her mouth and jaw. I put a mug of tea in front of her, and set out milk and sugar. She poured in some of both, stirred, and took a sip, wrapping her hands tightly around the mug. It had been cold on our porch, and I guessed she’d been out there a while. We waited for her to speak.
    “Call me Win,” she said. Maybe she realized an already awkward conversation would be even more awkward with one person named Jessamyn and another named Jessica. “That’s what my sorority sisters called me.” It was a measure of how much I instinctively liked her that I didn’t hold the sorority-sister thing against her.
    She started talking, in that flat tone you have when all the energy has drained out of you. The police had notified her parents when Tobin had been found, she said, but she’d been out of the country and couldn’t get here until now. Someone had mentioned the online article with Jessamyn’s name, but she hadn’t seen it. She’d asked around and had found her way to the restaurant, and had been directed here. She wasn’t quite sure why she was here, in our house, she said, but she’d needed to come here. It made sense, I supposed. If my brother had died, I might be doing the same thing, visiting his friends, retracing his last steps.
    “You were his girlfriend?” she asked Jessamyn.
    Jessamyn nodded, her face blank.
    Win turned to me. “And you knew him too, right? You wrote the newspaper article, about Tobin.”
    I nodded. I think her next question took us both by surprise.
    “Was he happy here?”
    Jessamyn’s face clenched. She opened her mouth, and closed it again.
    “I think he was,” I said, when I saw Jessamyn wasn’t going to be able to answer. “He had Jessamyn. He had friends. He did some construction work. He was healthy.”
    It wasn’t much of an epitaph, but it seemed to be what Tobin’s sister needed, at least for now. She nodded. She set down her tea and looked around.
    “Are you two hungry?” she asked. “Would you like to get something to eat?”
    So we bundled up and walked up to town, like three friends out on a cold Adirondack afternoon. We went to Pete’s, across from the movie theater, and took a table in the far back.
    It should have seemed odd, sitting there with this woman who was Tobin’s sister, but it didn’t. After we ordered, Win started talking again, like a toy wound too tightly. She told us about being the only girl between two brothers, about growing up with them, Tobin dropping out of college after their brother died. “Tobin took it hard,” she said. “Up until then he’d tried to please our parents,tried to do everything Trey did, and after the accident he just stopped trying, and pretty much left the family.” At first I heard
Tray
, and it took a moment to remember this was what rich families called sons whose names were Thirds
—trey
, for three.
    “This was the first place he’d seemed to settle down.” She blinked hard, the way you do when you’re trying to convince yourself not to cry. “What about you two? Are you from here?”
    We shook our heads. Our food arrived, and I told her about growing up in Nashville and taking the job here after university out West, how I’d loved working as a small-town sports editor but because of the nonstop schedule had quit to freelance. Jessamyn volunteered that she was from the Midwest and had lived here a year and a half, and had never been to college. She said it with a touch of defiance, but Tobin’s sister wasn’t in a judging mood. And maybe she wasn’t a judging sort of person.
    “So are your … did your parents come up too?” I asked.
    She shook her head, her expression bland. “They’re leaving it up to me,” she said.
    I didn’t know what this meant,
leaving it up to her
 … to identify the body, manage Tobin’s affairs, close out his cabin, I supposed. We sat in