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

you learn to work fast—very fast. In less than twenty minutes, I was done.
    I proofed, printed it to read again, and made a few more tweaks. I chose a photo with the crowd on the shore and the ambulance, and one of the ice cutters with their saws, working on the ice but not quite showing what was under it. I sent it all off to George, along with links to the Princeton photo and one of last year’s ice palace. I knew if he wanted to use them he’d get permission. That was another thing I liked about George—he wouldn’t cut corners. To him journalism was journalism, no matter how small your circulation numbers.
    Suddenly I was deeply fatigued. I went into my bedroom and plopped on my bed. When I opened my eyes it was dark, and I could hear voices downstairs. I could smell my stew, and something baking. Something chocolate.
    I went down, still groggy. I saw Jessamyn at the stove, stirring my stew. I blinked. This was as unlikely as her bringing me coffee and croissants that morning, maybe more so. Brent turned from the sink. “Hey,” he said. “Do you want to share? We made rice and a salad, and Patrick’s baking a cake.”
    This seemed an odd dream, conjured from fatigue and shock. We’d never all eaten together—the extent of our togetherness had been running into one another in the kitchen or happening to watch a TV show in the living room.
    “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
    Brent grinned. He had an open face, straight blond hair he kept short, and an athlete’s lithe body that was no mystery to any of us—cross-country ski suits don’t leave much to the imagination. Jessamyn had never shown a glimmer of interest in him, partly because he hadn’t been her type, I thought, and partly because he was a roommate. Home was where you relaxed, not where you picked up the next man in your life. But maybe it would be good for her to get to know a guy who didn’t spend every spare minute and spare dollar in the local bars, someone with a brain and goals and a passion for something.
    Maybe, I thought, she deserved more than she’d been settling for.
    Maybe many of us do.
    Patrick, our youngest roommate, wandered in. He had finished high school in California a year early, and at eighteen was planning to travel the world. First stop: Lake Placid, where he was scrounging free lift tickets and skiing his brains out. He pulled the cake from the oven and set it aside to cool while we ate bowls of stew and rice with salad and garlic bread. We talked about weather and skiing and made fun of tourists, which is what you do when you live in a resort town. The guys tossed bits of bread for Tiger, and Jessamyn ate more than I’d ever seen her eat. No one spoke of Tobin.
    It was strange in a way, but in a way it felt right. When we finished, we spooned all the leftover ice cream in the freezer over the still-warm cake and devoured it. It was one of the best evenings I’d had in a long time.
    Sometimes home is where you’re at, and family is who you’re with.

CHAPTER 9
    The next morning my phone was ringing as I was coming in from taking Tiger out. It was Baker.
    “Look at the online edition of the newspaper,” she said without preamble.
    “What?”
    “Look at the newspaper online.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Just read it,” she said, and hung up.
    I moved to my computer and to the paper’s website. I winced at the headline: BODY HAUNTS ICE PALACE . At a glance the story seemed as it was when I’d turned it in, except the bylines were reversed, with mine first.
    But there was a sidebar, a box with just the kid’s byline. And as I started reading it my throat went dry.
    WAS THERE FOUL PLAY?
    Did Tobin Winslow die a natural death in Lake Flower when he disappeared in December, or did someone hasten his demise?
    Saranac Lake police will say only that an autopsy has been scheduled, but refuse to divulge any other information
.
    “No way could Tobin just have drowned,” said one of Winslow’s friends. “He was too