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

smart for that. He wouldn’t have gone way out on that ice. Someone must have dumped his body.”
    Friends say that Winslow had been buying drinks for them at the Waterhole the last time they saw him, and he had had a large wad of cash. Some suggested the money was for drugs
.
    I was reaching for the phone when I saw the last few lines: “A source says that Winslow and his girlfriend Jessamine Fields of Lake Placid had been fighting the week he disappeared and that she had been complaining about him. Fields was unavailable for comment.”
    My heart seemed to skip a beat. What
had
the kid been thinking? He might as well have headlined this LOCAL GIRL SUSPECT IN DRUGGIE BOYFRIEND ’ S DEATH . What had George been thinking? Tobin’s family would pitch a fit, the local cops would be ticked off, and Jessamyn—well, the word “pilloried” sprang to mind. I speed-dialed the paper; George wasn’t in. He liked to come in early and set the front section, then go home for a leisurely brunch. I called his home and told his wife it was urgent. George was on the phone in seconds. I imagined an omelet getting cold, toast growing soggy.
    “Did you okay this sidebar?” I asked.
    “What?”
    My voice got louder. “Did you okay this sidebar? On Tobin?”
    “Well, yeah,” he said, puzzled.
    For a moment I couldn’t speak. “George, are you crazy? This is horrible—it’s lurid, it’s probably actionable.”
    Silence. “Let me get to my computer.”
    I listened to his footsteps, the creak of his desk chair, the clicking as he navigated to the story. I could hear his breath suck in when he saw the article. Then I knew what must have happened: this reporter, annoyed by having his story edited so extensively, had done something very stupid.
    “This isn’t what he turned in,” George said. “The sidebar Isaw was a collection of quotes from Winslow’s friends. Somehow he went behind me and switched them. And changed the headline.”
    “Could he have changed the print version too?”
    George said a word I’d never heard from him. “I’m calling the press room now,” he said. I could hear him punching buttons on his cell phone. “Call Sheena for me and tell her I said to kill this story on the website. Take the whole site down if she has to.”
    We hung up. As I dialed the paper I saved a copy of the web page, and hit Print. This would disappear soon, and I wanted a record of it.
    Sheena answered, and I filled her in. “It’s urgent,” I told her.
    “The site’s down,” she said a moment later. “I’ll pull the story and we’ll redo the page. For now, people will just see a message that says ‘Down for Repairs.’ ”
    “Great. Are the presses running?”
    “I think so, the front section anyway,” she said. “Is the same story in the paper?”
    “I hope not, but probably. George is on the phone with them now.”
    “So they’re going to have to reprint it.”
    “Sounds like it.”
    She said a word that was an interesting variation of the one George had used.
    “Look, I’ll come over to help,” I said.
    “Great.” She hung up. I grabbed my parka, pulling it on as I headed for the door, and reached the paper in record time. The presses were ominously silent. George was at his desk, pounding away at his keyboard. The kid, Dirk, was nowhere in sight.
    “Can you finish this, Troy?” George asked as he stood. “I changed the headline and pulled the sidebar, but I don’t want his name on this, not anywhere. If there’s anything left from his piece, change it. And when you’re done, get Sheena to put the new story on the website.”
    George didn’t often get his back up, but when he did, he meantbusiness. I slid into his chair as he headed back to the press room, probably to calm the press room guys and the women waiting to slide in inserts and bundle the paper. If he was smart, he’d send out for doughnuts and pass out cash bonuses at the end of the day. It was going to take a lot of work to get the