Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (32 page)

Camp Topsail, Saranac Lake, 7/20/2013, 4:19 p.m.

I crunched into the driveway, through the big gates, and heard Meg make the turn behind me in the Element. We parked close to the old icehouse, and she said that she would wait in the car while I went in (
Meg knows that I’m generally as quick as possible when dealing with people, often quicker than politeness permits
).

All of the Crocker clan members were out on the covered long porch (
which runs from the great room down the length of the camp in both directions
) watching the afternoon light play across the water and Green and Dry and tiny Goose islands and the trees on the far side of the lake. Sailboats and water-skiers and canoers. I wandered through the room and out the door nearest to them, enjoying and working to memorize all of the sights and smells and tactile impressions of this great camp.

“Tyler, we’ve got the last of the Canadian Cokes in the cooler; grab one and join us for a bit,” Mike said, when he saw me.

“I can only stay for a few minutes,” I replied, but helped myself to a frosty can out of the old cooler; I waved off the offer of a glass, and sat down in chair next to Kitty, made empty by her nurse rising and heading back indoors.

“I heard from Bruce’s secretary this afternoon, and it sounds like you’ll not have to spend tonight or any other night in prison,” Kitty said.

“I can’t thank you, or them, enough,” I replied. Mrs. Crocker waved it off, as though it was nothing.

“It took money and influence, things that I have in more abundance than I require for my remaining days, Tyler, and it made this old woman feel a bit less like dead-weight, and as though
I’d had something to do with the miracles you’ve worked in the last week.”

I had no reply to that, so I turned to address Mike, “Your car is parked in back of the
great room. I’ve topped it up, but was not able to fix the broken driver’s side window.” I said, tensing slightly, expecting some yelling or angry/rude gestures or a thrown can of soda. “I have to say, although I mostly took it for fun, and a trip down memory lane (
I thought, thinking of Niko
), it probably saved two lives last night.”

Mike’s face grew dark and troubled upon hearing about the shattered window, and I spent a nervous few seconds thinking of his colorful threats of only a few days ago, but then he lightened, and a smile, small, but there, creased his face.

“My guy in Tupper can order and install a replacement. How did it run for you when you opened her up, Tyler?”

“Better than I had imagined. I never want to have to drive like that again, but that car was made for these roads. Send me the bill for the window, and I’ll make good on it,” I said. Mike
dismissed my offer and seemed about to respond when Anthony came out.

With some ceremony, he handed me an envelope of heavy paper stock, with the single word, ‘Tyler’ written on it in a florid and fine and precise handwriting … Kitty’s I imagined.

“We can’t thank you enough, ever, for what you’ve done and given to this family, but this feels better to me than simply borrowing Mike’s car. If there is ever anything that any of us can do, please simply name it,” Kitty said.

I didn’t open the envelope, worried/certain that whatever the amount, or my (
faked
) reaction to it, it would be wrong or improper … so I nodded my thanks, and put the envelope on the table by my chair.

“I’m bad with thanks and goodbyes and polite conversation and civility in general, and this has the feel of all of that and more things … things I don’t even know that I don’t know. If you were serious about my asking for anything, I would love to come and stay at this camp sometime in the summer or fall when you aren’t here … to enjoy the boathouse and this porch and the
great room and the age of the place.”

Kitty nodded, “Mike or Anthony will get in touch with you this fall and every summer with a calendar of our planned visits. You can pick your times between our stays, although I hope you will come to dinner once or twice while we are here; I should very much like to speak with you about how you do what you do, and did, and also about camping in a hammock. It sounds dreadful, but of course it mustn’t be.”

The emotions on the porch were making me feel uncomfortable, and it was something of a relief when the child, Deirdre, tripped and fell and cut her knee open, as it distracted them all, and I made good my escape in the confusion and hysteria.

Camp Juniper Bay, Saranac Lake, 7/23/2013, 4:42 a.m.

I waited a few days to let the excitement and investigation die back a bit before making my way down to Moss Rock Road. This time I simply parked my Element in an empty driveway and walked back to the place in the woods where I had stashed my Hornbeck canoe a week previously. I walked through the woods with as little noise and light as I could manage (
which was very little, actually
), and found the canoe waiting for me in the woods, exactly where I had left it. I slipped it into the water, and got my bearings in the nearly full moon.

Dorothy’s fire had left a big hole in terms of boathouse lights along the western shore of this section of Upper Saranac Lake, and I simply aimed at the middle of the darkness along the shore. I paddled more slowly and quietly than was perhaps absolutely necessary, but nobody ever broke into anywhere wishing that they had made more noise on their approach. I found my way to the shore by the burned remains of the huge old boathouse, and pulled my boat up the steep shore into the trees and bushes upslope from the water. The smell of fire and smoke was still in the air around the boathouse, along with some chemicals and, behind it all, the wet and piney smell of the woods.

I had initially worried that any letters might have been in the boathouse, but quickly moved on to hoping that Edelman kept his letters (
if he kept them at all
) in the family mansion in Delaware (
which I would be road-tripping to sometime in the next few weeks … my curiosity getting the better of me
), and so shifted my hopes to other areas around Juniper Bay. I could see from fifty yards that the caretakers’ cottage had been turned inside out and gutted by all of the various law enforcement officers that had been through the scene in the last few days. I was about to turn back towards other, more lakeside, buildings when a place-memory from the other night slapped me in the face like a cool slice of bologna wrapped around a pipe.

Finding my way around the darkened garage with Bobby Reineger (
‘Little Bobby,’ I thought, three inches and forty pounds bigger than me
), I had seen a desk with trays and shelves crammed full of papers in one corner. I hadn’t needed to go there that night, so hadn’t spared it much thought, but now I wondered. I put on a set of nitrile gloves, in the hope of not leaving any new fingerprints or DNA, and being a longtime believer in the rule that you get one big noise for free in any situation, I threw a big rock at one of the windows along the sides of the garage, and climbed inside. I switched on the same headlamp that I’d been wearing that night. It all felt very much the same to me, wandering this ghoulish place without an invite. I spotted the desk and although it looked like it had been pawed through by investigators, it didn’t look as though anything had been taken … (
yet
).

I went through papers in the in-and-
out boxes occupying the prime real estate on the desktop without learning anything, except that Robert liked gadgets, was a slow pay, overfilled his mugs with black coffee and ate a variety of greasy foods while working at his desk. The expected papers that one might ordinarily find in a garage went on the floor (
I told myself it was to facilitate an easier and faster search, but in some small part was to mark my newly won territory
), and I moved through the vertical organizers and desk drawers next. I found nothing worth my time until a locked bottom drawer temporarily halted my search; the lock fell to my prybar in seconds (
I wasn’t used to not worrying about leaving signs of my ‘investigations’ and it felt a bit like cheating, which I liked ... playing fair is stupid when you’ve got any other option
).

The open drawer exhaled a fetid breath that was equal parts gun oil, moldering paper, and cheap, bottom-drawer (
literally, in this case
) bourbon. The first thing I took out was a fancy/heavy/polished wooden box, about the size of the Webster’s dictionary I asked for (
and got
) for my fourth birthday. The box had a fancy silver plaque on the top lid, and a velvet-lined interior shaped around a fancy M1911, a semi-automatic pistol chambered for .45 ACP rounds (
I don’t have much practical experience with firearms, but as with many/most subjects, I’ve read extensively on the subject and remember most everything that I read
), and two magazines. I didn’t read the plaque, not caring much about what Edelman v1.0 had to say about Reineger v1.0 and their holy duty to justice/vengeance/sadism. Beneath the pistol case was a box of ammo, predictably in .45ACP, along with a series of wads of letters (
each with a year penciled on the top letter in the bunch; they were out of order, but seemed to include each year from 1957 to the present … the last letter in the 2013 clump was dated April 5
). Nested under the bundles of letters was a flattish pint bottle of Old Crow Bourbon, mostly gone/drunk/leaked, and under that, a single black and white marbled composition notebook ... yellowed with age, and creased/fuzzy with wear.

I shoved all of the letters (
along with the marbled notebook
) into my backpack, feeling a transient wave of guilt at messing with an ongoing investigation (
or series of investigations
). The guilt passed quickly (
I stood a better chance of decrypting the letters than anyone not bearing the last name of Reineger or Edelman, and I figured they might feel the fifth amendment would have something to say about their helping out with the part of the investigation having to do with crimes for which there are no statutes of limitation
). I futzed around in the ‘office’ area a bit more, but failed to find anything else even remotely interesting. I was getting ready to go, when the evil gravity of the oubliettes pulled at me, body and mind (
I’m reasonably sure that I don’t believe in the soul, and if I did, am certain that I don’t have one
), from beneath the car pit.

I walked to the edge, and looked down into the darkness. I could very nearly feel the suffering and loneliness and despair that generations of prisoners must have sweated and shivered and screamed and whispered into the walls down there. I wanted to burn it, or pee on it, or fill it with concrete, to take its (
the
) power back from the pit, from the jailors. Six seconds later, I turned around, walked over to the broken window, climbed out, and headed back down to the shore. I couldn’t do anything massive/meaningful, because it might get in the way of Samantha or Morris visiting and/or confronting the place at some point in the future; anything smaller than massive seemed a silly/pathetic/empty gesture (
which I’m not fond of in other people, much less myself
). There was light starting to accent the mountains silhouetted across Upper Saranac Lake to the east as I slid my boat into the water, and paddled away in a generally southern direction, thinking about a big breakfast before some long hours of nerdery in the pursuit of truths that nobody needed to know (
except me
).

Helgafell Farm, Gabriels, 7/23/2013, 6:17 a.m.

I portaged the lightweight canoe (
Hornbeck canoes are all lightweight, but my Blackjack weighs a handful of paperclips less than thirteen pounds, and is light/easy enough to carry as far as I care to walk in the woods to find a wet place to paddle
) back from the lake to my car. I wondered if the Packbasket, a diner in Gabriels notorious for huge and unapologetic plates of diner food, was open so early. Once the idea was in my head, I could think of nowhere else that I wanted to eat, so when I had finished strapping the boat to my Element’s roof, I pointed the car in that direction.

I tend to drive more carefully when the canoe is on my roof, so I was surprised when I saw the flashers come on in my rearview as I passed through Lake Clear Junction. It took a second for my tired and egregiously multitasking brain to sort out the visual input and let me know that I was being followed by a pickup truck, not a sedan, and that it was green, not white or dark blue; it was Ranger Gillis, likely angry with me for wasting his time searching for me over the last week. I spent a microsecond fantasizing about a getaway in the Porsche that I no longer was driving before I put on my signal and pulled over, just wanting to get this out of the way (
and wondering, in the primitive parts of my brain, if there was any way that he knew where I’d been and what I’d been doing in the last few hours
).

“Good morning, Mr. Cunningham,” he said when he walked up to my open window. I wasn’t used to this level of formality/respect … he normally addressed me as ‘Sir’ or ‘Cunningham’ (
in both cases the same tone other people do when they say ‘shit’
).

“Good morning, sir. Is there a problem?” I asked, hoping that he didn’t want/ask to search my gear, especially the backpack on my passenger seat.

“Quite the opposite. I wanted to thank you for what you’ve done over the last week … when the whole time I thought you were ‘bandit-camping’ somewhere on Lower Saranac,” he said the last bit with a smile that I eventually decoded as meaning that he knew Dorothy and I’d been messing with him by moving the Element around Ampersand Bay, but that he didn’t hold it against me (
by eventually, I mean that I decoded it the following day, when I spoke with Dorothy about this unusual traffic stop
).

I stared at him, wondering how a Forest Ranger for the DEC could possibly be grateful for the mess I’d been involved in between Topsail and Juniper Bay.

“Samantha is my brother’s wife. He’s been dying an inch at a time since she went missing a bit more than two years ago; they had me over for supper last night, and he was singing after, while washing dishes.”

“It was a lot of luck, and a pile of help from a lot of people that led me to her,” I said, looking at my steering wheel … this was a man that I had chosen to dislike, with reasons, and his eyes were moist; it looked like he might reach in for a hug/kiss.

“Yah, Frank said you’d say something along those lines. Don’t matter. I tore up that stupid ticket I wrote last week, and I just wanted to tell you that you can camp wherever you want, from now until I retire, and anyone has a problem with that, or you, tell ‘em to come find me.” He reached his hand in for a pat on my shoulder, but Frank must have said something about my dislike of being touched, and he shifted back a bit to pat the back of my seat.

“Anyhow. Have a good one. I don’t know if you’d want to, but I ... a group called to cancel their reservation on Knobby Island for the next three days; all four sites, and I blocked it off from being re-reserved … so it’s yours if you’d like. I got the boys to drop off a load of wood at site #9, which is the best one in my opinion.” He ran down at this point, likely all olive-branched out … I let him swing a few seconds before replying.

“Thanks. Thanks a lot. That sounds super. I am beat and could use some downtime. I’ll head out there for tonight, and stay a couple of days. Maybe even bring my dog, since she won’t have anyone but me to bother,” I said.

He lightly slapped the roof of the Element, and walked back to his car, waiting for me to pull out first; I did.

I made the right-hand turn at Donnelly’s Corners, and was most of the way to the diner when I saw the light on in John’s cabin/gatehouse along the boundary between Helgafell Farm and the rest of the world; I stuck a pin in my plans (
a phrase which always makes me think, uneasily, of butterflies
), and turned into the half-moon of gravel by the farmstand and his home.

Remembering the last time that I’d been here, I looked around for Barry, expecting him to caution me a
bout John’s ‘dime store wisdom;’ he was nowhere to be seen (
rightfully, since he was in actuality dead
). John opened the door to his home as I was reaching out to rap on the siding.

“Come on in, Tyler,” he said. “I thought that I’d see you yesterday or the day before. I’ve been hearing all sorts of things about some very interesting happenings out at
one of the great camps on Upper Saranac, and a few of the weird things had a SmartPig feeling about them.” His tone didn’t rise at the end of the sentence, but it certainly felt like a question, so I took it as such.

“It worked out about as well as it could have. I didn’t have to kill anyone, and didn’t let anyone kill me. The police wish I’d been gentler with the bad guys, and the family of the original victims wish I’d been harder on them,” I said.

“Sounds like you found the middle path, often the best way.”

“I’ve been seeing my imaginary friend less since our talk,” I said.

“Great, I guess. I would bet, though, that he’ll be with you for a while. The kind of life that you lead puts you in harm’s way from time to time, and that may bring him out of retirement, to offer a different perspective,” he said.

I found that the thought of seeing, and talking with, Barry from time to time didn’t bother me at all; I’d gotten used to his input over the last ten months, and a different perspective (
even if it was really still just mine filtered through a gentle insanity
) had proved to be useful a couple of times.

“I could call up to the farmhouse for a couple of stacks of pancakes and a mess of bacon, if you’d tell me about it,” John said.

“Sounds good,” I answered, and it did … all of it … pancakes, bacon, and talking about ‘it.’

Tyler Cunningham