Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (31 page)

“What about Tyler?” Mike asked. The trooper looked pointedly at Frank, and waited.

“We’re trying to figure his role in all of this out as well. We will expect him to voluntarily come in for questions and to give a statement tomorrow morning, and I have his promise not to leave the immediate area until the legal authorities have decided what to do about his actions tonight. Right?” he stated/asked/demanded.

Nobody looked very happy about this … not the trooper, not the Crockers, not Frank
… I was ecstatic, as I wasn’t looking forward to spending the night in a cell, or even in some badly lit room answering questions again and again and again and again. I promised to come in first thing in the morning. Kitty informed me and (
quite pointedly
) Frank that my representation would have to be present, and have the time/space to meet privately with me, before any discussion or questions or statement was on the table, and that they would be arriving by plane at dawn. Frank told me that I was free to go. Kitty kissed my cheek with cool/dry lips. Mike shook my hand and then drew me in for a hug, with a few tears running down his cheeks. I took that opportunity/moment to ask him if I could borrow the Porsche until tomorrow morning, so I could drive myself over to Dot’s place for the night (
I wasn’t in the mood to rappel down to break into the SmartPig office tonight, so I figured that I would sleep on Dot’s couch
). Mike laughed and nodded, and our bizarre group broke up and all went our separate ways, with me promising both the cops and the Crockers that we would get together again soon, each for different reasons, but basically to talk about the same set of circumstances.

I drove out of the Topsail gate, and made it, rather slowly for the Porsche 993, to Dorothy and Lisa’s house in 22 minutes.

“… This is my life,

for the rest of my life.”

--Prisoner’s Journal

Dorothy’s House, Saranac Lake, 7/20/2013, 1:13 a.m.

Lisa, Dorothy’s wife, must have been watching for the lights from my car, because I passed her on my way into their place.

“Hi, Tyler! She’s up there, along with your miserable dog. I’m heading over to Barb’s for the night, so you two can tell your secrets without worrying about me,” she said. I just nodded, and kept going; she didn’t explain who Barb was, and I didn’t care, so it worked perfectly for both of us … this was how our relationship generally functioned, friendly, both of us caring about Dorothy, but definitely ships that passed in the night on different routes (
with different cargoes, flying different flags, possibly one or the other a submarine
).

As I climbed the stairs, I could hear some scrabbling on the far side of the door, and Dot yelling at Hope not to ruin the paint … I was nearly running up the last few steps.

“How’s my girl?” I asked, when Hope backed up enough to let me open the door.

I got down on my knees, then belly, and then rolled over onto my back. Hope was far too wiggly for an old dog, and was making nervous/happy sounds deep in her throat that I took to mean that she was happy to see me, but disappointed that I’d left her with the abusive women for so long (
in my mind, Hope thinks everyone is mean to her, to the point of gross physical abuse
). She climbed up onto my chest, then lay down to smother me with kisses (
some with teeth, for emphasis
). Dorothy was giggling from the other side of the kitchen, leaning back in an old wooden chair, drinking some dark red box-wine, and crunching her way through a bowl of chex cereal.

“You saw Lisa?” she asked; I nodded. “She won’t believe me later when I tell her about Hope liking, much less loving, anything on this Earth outside of that fancy kibble you give her.”

“I can’t thank the two of you enough for keeping this old girl safe … Maurice (
my landlord
) has offered to take her a couple of times, but she’s terrified of him.” She waved my thanks away, and got up to get a pair of Cokes out of her freezer for me.

“I did my part, and it went smoothly enough, I guess, although I passed a couple of cars on my way back to town.”

“It shouldn’t matter … people drive places, even on nights when fires mysteriously start in evil men’s boathouses,” I said. “Besides, they’re going to have their hands more than full for the foreseeable future, dealing with what happened at the garage … they won’t have time or manpower to worry about the boathouse.”

By now, Hope had relaxed a bit, but she was still too manic to allow me to get up, or to deal with me sitting in one of the other chairs around their kitchen table, so I sat on the floor drinking my slightly slushy Coke (
Dorothy’s fridge is too warm to properly chill Coke, and the freezer is a bit too cold … the world is an imperfect place, but this is where I wanted to be, and with whom, for right now, so I made do
).

“So give,” she said, “I want it all, although you can spare me the boring stuff, and I don’t need to know how many times you peed while camping (
I sometimes tend to over-describe, so now try to adhere to Elmore Leonard’s rule of leaving out the parts most people skip
).”

I told her about the run-ins with the Reineger boys, the pictures and letters and ledgers I’d found at the museum, Burt’s superpower and how it helped me, the drive down from Canton, the perfect timing of her fire (
she stood/staggered up and gave a brief curtsy before refilling her mason jar with cheap wine and dropping back into her seat
), my hustling Sophie and the Reinegers (
including the little teapot bit, which she seemed to enjoy
), what/who I found under the garage, and how it went at Kitty’s place. Dorothy seemed flabbergasted/disgusted at the idea that I might get in trouble for my actions earlier in the evening, but happy that Kitty was trying to help.

“If anything happens, I’ll burn down the jail’s boathouse and Hope and I will bust yo
u out—with crazy glue!” she said, with grand (
and wine-spilling
) gestures. A moment later, she pushed the wineglass back and away from her and got up to make herself a cup of tea.

“Yup … Anyway, I want to get back in there at some point, or work with some of their search-y people, to try and find more encrypted letters from either party. Here or down in Delaware. There must be more … something that talks about Deirdre … how it was … how she died.” I grabbed four more Cokes from the freezer, two to drink now, and two to thaw in the fridge for a bit later; I also picked up a few
room temperature Cokes, and loaded them into the freezer.

Dorothy got a serious look on her face, and said, “Leave it
, Tyler. Kitty has enough now to die in peace. Knowing more won’t make it better for her, or Mike, or Dee. You did it. This one’s done.”

I tried to think my way through what she had said; it simply didn’t make sense. If there was more to know then why wouldn’t anyone/everyone want to know it … know everything? I tried to tell her, explain it to her so that she’d understand, but she kept cutting me off, asking me who the last bits of knowledge would help, and what difference they would make to the Crockers. In the end, I decided that she was probably right (
since I respect Dot, and she’s more human than I am, and she seemed to feel awfully strongly about it
), but also resolved to find out what I could, for myself.

Police Building, Saranac Lake, 7/20/2013, 2:42 p.m.

Hope had fallen asleep in my lap, my knees were sore from sitting cross-legged for too long, I was wired from drinking six Cokes on an already stimulating evening, and Dorothy was drunk. It would have made sense to go to bed, but we went for a drive instead. We ended up bandit camping in Point Au Roche State Park, near Plattsburgh; I hung my hammock for Dot, and cranked the seat in the Porsche back for Hope and I. We watched the sun rise, ate a week’s worth of fat/carbs at Duke’s Diner on the way back towards home, and made it back to Saranac Lake in time for me to meet with my borrowed team of flesh-eating lawyers before spending a long and boring and repetitive and boring (
yup, I said it twice on purpose … it was that boring
) day with suites … my kobo mini (
a pocket-sized e-reader I bring everywhere these days
) was my saving grace during the fifth through seventh hours of two teams of suits growling at each other (
my team had nicer suits
).

I was able to read while they talked/lectured/yelled at each other, only occasionally having to field a question, which my legal beagles generally told me to ignore and/or answered for me. A few hours before things actually ended, it felt as though everyone in the room (
except me
) knew where we were all headed on the ‘obfuscation express.’ Things started winding down roughly an hour after a uniformed lackey toted in a box of sandwiches/sodas/chips/cookies for lunch (
although good science would hold me to correlative, I suspect causative, connections … I believe they wanted to drag it out long enough for the DA’s office to pick up lunch, and that same free lunch made everyone sleepy afterwards
). I signed piles of statements and forms and writs and affidavits and promises to appear on demand, all under the watchful eyes of both groups of attorneys (
mine and … not-mine
), and stumbled out into the heat and sun of mid-July … intent on getting to the good Chinese place before their lunch special hours ended.

As I plowed through the first order of fried dumplings, and my third Coke, I couldn’t help but feel as though I’d dodged a bullet. Lots of talk about exigent circumstances and ‘doing the wrong thing for the right reason’ had boiled down in the end to nobody wanting to arrest/prosecute/jail the guy who had solved dozens (
hundreds?
) of crimes over a span of seven decades, and prevented who knows how many more deaths in the years to come. That being the case, without the borrowed gravitas of the suits from Webster, Sterling, Mickelson, & Browning, I still might have ended up having to plead guilty to some silly charge or another; as it worked out, I was a free man. I ate for an hour, and then called AMC (
the local hospital, where Samantha and Morris had been taken the previous night
); they had, of course, checked themselves out as soon as was possible in the morning. I hung up and ordered more food, confident that I would catch up with them in the near future.

Meg and Frank Gibson’s Home, Saranac Lake, 7/20/2013, 5:16 p.m.

“Tyler, did you know?” Meg asked.

I’d come over immediately after finishing my second meal of a couple of pounds of spice and grease at the good Chinese place, and Meg being Meg, I was now working my way through a big salad that she had forced on me … certain that I hadn’t eaten in days. The only thing that prevented me from exploding or fleeing the scene was the bucket of iced/salted Cokes that Meg sometimes prepares when she knows that I’ll be coming by. They were perfectly chilled, and nearly enough to make me believe in a higher power.

“Did I know what?” I asked.

“Did you know that we were cousins … the Reinegers and me? Did you know that they’d taken Dee Crocker, all those years ago? Did you know that my asking my great-aunt Betty would get back to Bobby Senior, and bring on that crazy-ass rant he served up on my front yard last night, in front of that sweet old couple, the Mullanes? Did you know what … who … you’d find under that fucking garage out at Juniper Bay?” She elaborated … a lot.

“No,” I answered, which was a reasonable and truthful answer to all of her questions. Three seconds later though, when I could see her getting ready to explode, I decided to expand on my original answer, a bit.

“No, Meg. I didn’t know any of that stuff. I just started pulling at threads, got lucky, and the whole thing came undone. I wouldn’t have gotten you involved in any way if I thought that it would expose you to any risk; I feel awful about the fact that Reineger was here last night. He could have hurt, or taken you, and I would have felt … bad.”

“Well, that’s a relief … both that you didn’t know, and also that you would have felt bad if I got disappeared by my crazy cousins,” she said, grinning at the end, which let me know/extrapolate
that we were still all right.

“Frank is going to be in meetings from now until Christmas because of you, Tyler, and the Crockers are important and fancy enough that the governor’s okayed any and all overtime on this thing. Frank said he was gonna buy a boat with the overtime money, and name it Tyler.”

“Did you know, Meg? You see into people, behind the eyes, behind the words. Could you see or smell the rot in the Reinegers? There was a trooper last night with Frank who couldn’t imagine the Reinegers doing anything like what they’ve been doing forever.”

“Milt Jessup, Frank told me. Milt wanted to put you in his trunk and make the whole thing disappear. Milt’s sister dates little Bobby, and his family goes hunting with Bobby and his father every fall; they’re friends.” She paused and tilted her head to look at the dogs, perhaps trying to decide which one had farted (
my money was on Toby, he wouldn’t make eye-contact with her
), and then continued, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything, Tyler. I’ve known Little Bobby all of his life, and his dad for all of mine. I’ve been thinking about it since he peeled out of the driveway last night, and I’ve never felt anything off about either of them. It’s actually a little scary. Are there other monsters out there, that we, I, have no idea about?” She actually looked a little scared, and sad, and as though her entire world had settled towards one side at a weird angle, and she knew it would never come back to normal again.

“I think that the answer is yes, there are more monsters out there, but thankfully, probably not many. There have always been monsters out there, but we get used to being able to recognize them; it’s tricky when they don’t have fangs and claws and stuff.”

“Frank has always known it, given his job, he’d have to, but I always found ways to ignore it,” she said.

“I know. He knows. He thought I was some minor type of monster for a long time; maybe a part of him still does. I’m different, and he reads it, same as you do; he makes less allowance for deviation from the norm among humans than you do, which might help him in his work,” I said. Meg looked at me, and came over to my side of the kitchen table, and put her arm around me.

“You’re no monster, Tyler. You’re not the same as everyone else, but you’re good.” She said it with an unusual emphasis that made me think that she needed to know this about me to keep a grip on her world, and maybe her work as a counselor. I didn’t want to disabuse her of her mistaken notions about me … I like her cooking, her advice, and her dogs … (
I couldn’t imagine what she would think/feel if she knew about the three people I’d killed, the injuries I’d caused, and crimes I’d committed in the last year
).

“Can you give me a ride out to the Crockers? I need to return Mike’s Porsche to him.”

“Where’s the Element? Over at SmartPig?” she asked.

“Nope, somewhere by Ampersand Bay.” I remembered the ranger for the first time in days, and wondered how many miles he’d put in looking for me among the many islands on Lower Saranac Lake.

“Well, let’s get going,” Meg replied, obviously excited about the chance to take a ride in the Porsche, even if a short one to where the Element was parked. I did some showy driving between the Gibson house and Ampersand Bay, letting Meg get a feel for the Porsche.

As we pulled up beside the Element, Meg took the opportunity to sum up her thoughts about the whole event, “You’ve done something big here, Tyler. Become something more than you were. Saving these people, shutting down that prison, or whatever, has changed the world, a bit,” Meg said, and then she began laughing at the accumulation of notes under my windshield wipers and tauntingly spread across the dashboard in various states of crumpling (
Dot was both mean and thorough in her messing with the ranger … leaving just the right evidence of having seen, but not caring about the notes
).

“This however is small, and a bit mean to the ranger. You must have had Dorothy’s help with this,” she said. A better person might have spoken up in Dorothy’s defense … I just nodded.