Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (27 page)

Camp Juniper Bay, 7/19/2013, 9:04 p.m.

I had told Dorothy to come through the woods of the camp to the south of Juniper Bay, which had had workers but no owners/renters the other day when I had scouted things out. Sticking close to the shore and scrambling northwards, the first building she would see was the Juniper Bay boathouse, and she had been told to watch the upstairs from a distance for five full minutes for signs of life before checking it out (
we weren’t in the business of hurting people … on this outing … or at least she wasn’t
). If it seemed clear, she should have checked out the upstairs for Edelmans before heading down to the boathouse proper to get what things she needed and hadn’t brought along.

These boathouses are home to ... boats, of course … but beyond that, they are often home to a pump for getting lakewater up to a holding tank somewhere, along with some tanks of gas/oil mix and light repair tools and equipment for the boats. I had told her to wear gloves to prevent the unnecessary spread of DNA/fingerprints, and to move about as quietly as possible in the first few minutes of her assignment (
after that, it likely wouldn’t matter if she walked on whoopee-cushions for the rest of the night
). She had specific directions on how to prepare the boathouse, and then on how to get out.

We joke about it (
or she does … I don’t really understand jokes, or humor
), but Dorothy is the perfect minion. She follows my direction unless she thinks I’m overlooking something, or that I’m wrong from a big picture point of view, in which case she questions/redirects me in (
what she perceives to be
) a better direction. She’s neither amoral nor immoral, just differently moral than other humans that I have met in my time on Earth. She cares deeply about some people and places and things and ideas, and will do whatever she thinks is necessary to protect them. Kitty Crocker and I are on her list of cared for people, as is the concept of freedom from slavery and abuse (
I had told her a bit about what I suspected was going on at Juniper Bay early on, and she signed on for whatever it took to make things right
). So I knew that she would do everything we had talked about carefully and with precision before lighting the Juniper Bay boathouse on fire.

The boathouse was the best building to burn at Juniper Bay for a number of reasons. First, it was highly visible from the lake, so people all around the north end of Upper Saranac Lake would quickly call the fire department, and be able to accurately tell them which camp to send the trucks to. (
People know the camps from the water at night by various indicators: number and pattern of lights, shape of roofline, position relative to other camps or specific old growth white pines, etc
.). Second, the boathouse tends to be the furthest away from other buildings, among all of the buildings at a great camp, so the fire isn’t likely to spread. Third, the responding trucks can easily run hoses down into the lake to keep their tanks full while fighting the fire. Most importantly, the boathouse is about as far away as you can get from the garage/workshop, and the caretakers’ house, which were the places I had business tonight. If everything went according to plan (
within reason … nothing ever seems to go exactly to plan
), Dorothy would have exited the boathouse by climbing down into one of the boat slips (
there were three if I remembered correctly, which I did
) and swimming/crawling in the shallows back to the woods between Juniper Bay and the camp to the south of it. She’d be less likely to be seen, could avoid the possibility of getting trapped by too-quickly spreading fire, and would be wet and shivering in her car within a few minutes (
before much hue and cry had been raised
). She must have turned left out of the empty camp’s driveway, and headed towards Tupper, because I hadn’t passed her on my way in, and assuming no flat tires or random traffic stops, she might even be home now, changing out of wet clothes and telling Hope that I’d be home soon.

There were already a number of fire vehicles down by the boathouse, judging by the lights and sound, and as I sat in the woods just behind the big garage/workshop, I watched another few vehicles come down the driveway with sirens and flashers going. All of the attention was focused at the waterfront, which was just how I wanted it … the tough part was knowing the time-frame that I had to operate in.

I had told her a bit about Edelman’s involvement in the 1958 kidnapping and my need to break in to confirm my suspicions. She signed on for whatever it took to make things right. I had originally set up the idea of a fire with Dorothy because a distraction is preferable (
in my book
) to a confrontation (
which Barry’s dark, and imaginary, bulk in the woods next to me was a constant reminder of
), but it had become a necessity when Reineger figured that I was close. When he went over to ask Meg about my/her investigation, (
my working hypothesis was that one of Meg’s relatives spoke with Reineger about the questions relating to Kimberly Stanton, he figured that I might be closing in on them, and acted foolishly to confirm what I already suspected
), he figured he needed to act. The next logical step for them would be to get rid of the evidence (
any prisoners that they had in their oubliette
), and I had needed to delay that action, so I unleashed Dorothy on the Juniper Bay boathouse. It would distract everyone for a time, but it was hard to say exactly how much time I had before things got back to normal (
or as normal as things ever were at Juniper Bay
).

“There are two ways to do this, Tyler, like a pussy or with some balls,” Barry said from next to me in the woods, behind the garage/workshop. He tends to see/express/filter the world in this binary fashion. In his worldview, women are passive and men act; I don’t/didn’t exactly fit into his worldview, not being anatomically a woman, and lacking many of the attributes that he associates/associated with being a man. “You can sneak in and hope the Reineger boys won’t catch you while you look for and then release the people in those cells, or you can be a man and take command of the situation, do what needs to be done. Like you did last year in the mine (
when I had killed Barry and his partner, Justin
), not tiptoe around like some half-assed cat-burglar.”

I had been temp
ted to try and sneak in and out, to rescue without confrontation. I was scared … scared of how such a confrontation might go. I didn’t want to kill anyone, I certainly didn’t want them to kill me, and parlor tricks like the screamers and the wasp spray wouldn’t give me the edge, or the time, that I needed to get done what I needed to do.

“Barry, I appreciate your input, but life is not black and white, pussy and balls, kill or be killed (
I hope
) … I live in the middle, and I think I have a middle-esque solution to this, so bear with me.”

“Whatever, you heard the old man at the hippie farm (
John, at Helgafell
). When push comes to shove you wanna live, everyone does, and if they don’t kill you, you’ll end up killing them … just like you did me and Justin.” He sounded like he had proven something, and also as though he didn’t care which way it went.

I could see lights and movement in the main lodge and in the caretakers’ house. I walked over to the latter and peaked in, trying to walk both discreetly and as if I wasn’t trying to be discreet (
it felt awkward and as if I was blowing it, but nobody saw me, so it probably was wasted effort, lots of life is like that … performing for an audience that isn’t there, or doesn’t care
). I watched from close in for two minutes, and heard no voices (
except for the oddly lifeless sound of TV
) and saw nobody except for a woman in her forties shuffling around from room to room in comfies, with a general air of useless worry about her. I knocked on the door and waited … thinking of possible problems and contingency plans to address them as she walked to her front door and opened it.

“Ma’am, I need to use your phone if I may, to help organize the response,” I said. She bought it, and gestured me in and past her, pointing towards the kitchen, as I had hoped she would.

“How’s it going down there? Are they going to lose the boathouse?” she asked. I didn’t answer as we walked further into the house, looking around for other people (
and seeing none
); I had gotten in the door, but had no faith in my ability to fake fireman-talk, so I just tried to present the image of a man intent on finding the phone in a hurry.

I grabbed the cordless phone off its cradle, pulled a chair out from the kitchen table, and pointed to it, “Ma’am, you’re going to need to sit down for this.” It had the desired effect, she sat down quickly and worriedly, mind already racing towards unpleasant imaginings about her husband and son and the fire down by the water.

“Robert and Bobby have had an accident,” I said, reaching into my backpack for the first strap as she took in this news, and tried to extrapolate meaning from the meaningless.

I turned and dropped the large loop of car-topping nylon webbing over her and the chair. She was still stunned at the news, and the unexpected action took her even more by surprise, which gave me more than the second and a half that I needed to tighten the strap around her sternum and the sturdy kitchen chair. Once she was partly immobilized, I took out another strap and wrapped it around her legs and the seat of the chair, before threading the nylon through the buckle, and tightening it. She looked to be getting ready to shout, so I cut her off.

“Please don’t scream, Ma’am (
the politeness seemed to surprise, and thankfully, silence her
); if you do, I’ll only have to gag you, which might be uncomfortable. Nobody is going to get hurt, I give you my word, but I need to speak with Robert and Bobby, and this will help. I’ll be gone in half an hour, and you can continue with your evening, forget you ever opened your door to me, nobody the worse for wear.”

She started to speak, not scream, which I took as a good sign.

“What’s this all about? Why are you doing this? What do you want?”

“All good questions,” I said, getting out a handful of cable ties, “but I just want to go through this once, so I’ll wait until your husband and son are here. By the way, does the grandfather live with you?”

“Robert Senior? No, he lives in Tupper, in the old folks’ home on Park,” she said, and I nodded as if I had suspected it all along.

“I told you that you wouldn’t be hurt, Ma’am, and I meant it, and I could see you looking me in the eye when I said it … do you believe me?”

“I guess, but why ….” she began.

“
I need to get your husband and son’s attention, so they’ll listen to me when we all talk about what happens out in the workshop.” Her eyes clouded momentarily. I am horrible at reading people, but it occurred to me that she knew something, or felt something, or sensed something about what the men in her family did out in the workshop. There’s no such thing as a secret among more people than one, and over time (
especially decades
), even if she didn’t know the whole story, she knew that there was a story. She straightened and sat very still.

“What’s this about? What do you want?” she asked, her tone different now … perhaps not scared of me so much as what was coming, what she was going to hear when her husband and son came back from the fire.

“It’s about a secret. A secret that Edelmans and Reinegers have been keeping for more than fifty years. Please put your hand straight down for me, Ma’am,” I said.

She did, and I ran a cable-tie around each hand and the chair leg that it was next to, then repeated the process with her feet. She seemed in shock, which given the kind of evening she was having was probably understandable, but she was compliant.

“Thank you Ma’am.”

“Sophie,” she murmured.

“Sophie,” I agreed. “Do you have a shoebox somewhere?” This was off-base enough that she perked up a bit, and looked around wildly for a second before replying.

“Front hall closet, up on the shelf. Why?”

I went out and found one, picking a New Balance box from about six that were up on the shelf above the coats and boots. The closet smelled homey, and I briefly felt badly for this woman, Sophie, whose life I was ruining tonight. I got over it quickly enough … her life was already ruined, had been for years, she just hadn’t known it. Evil like what existed at Juniper Bay poisoned everything and everyone it touched, even indirectly.

“Sophie, I’m going to put this bo
x under your chair, but I want you to see inside it before I do.” I said, opening the box, and showing her a mixed assortment of batteries and string and three old cell phones, before closing it and sliding it under her chair.

“What … ?” she began.

“I’m going to get their attention, and hopefully keep it long enough for us to talk, by telling them that I’ve put a bomb under you … but I wanted you to see that I hadn’t. It’s a bluff, a lie … a necessary one because they’ve already tried three times, quite hard, to stop me from finding out the secret,” I said. “And now, I’m sorry to say that I am going to have to gag you ... earlier I told you that I wouldn’t, but I need to. To stop you telling them about the bomb that isn’t a bomb, and also from shouting for help when I head out to the workshop with them.” I grabbed a bandana from inside my backpack, and showed it to her, both sides, like a magician might before a trick.