Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (6 page)

Camp Topsail, Upper Saranac Lake, 7/14/2013,
2:23 p.m.

Mike Crocker and I walked north from Deirdre’s cabin along the front/lake facing cabins and buildings. Mike named the cabins and buildings as we walked by, and then through, them. Some were named for family members, ‘Da and Mother’s lodge,’ which was bigger than most and had a small kitchen and attached living room and spare bedroom, some for generic occupant/use types, ‘kids cabin’ or ‘guest cabin’ or ‘playroom,’ and some with names that I couldn’t guess at, and Mike only shrugged, ‘Mouse House’ and ‘Skunkville.’ He was lost in thoughts about a sister he had buried a lifetime ago, who I was digging up to no good end (
that he could see
). He explained that the front line of buildings of a camp, relative to the waterfront, were for the owners and their guests. The housing nearest the main building/lodge was for children and less important guests. It appeared that rank and status were measured by distance and a lack of connectedness, via a covered walkway, to the main body of buildings. (
This seemed odd to me, as it seemed that if I built a big camp like this, I would want my room next to the kitchen, and with a covered walkway, so that I could walk over during a rainstorm in my socks … maybe it was a privacy thing
). The second row of decidedly smaller, and less fancy, cabins was originally built to house staff, but as their numbers had decreased over the years, some of these had been repurposed for children or guests wanting/needing to be a bit off the main strip of great camp life. We walked through a few of the cabins, at my request, mostly so I could get a feeling for the history. I didn’t see how this exploration could help me find out what had happened to Deirdre Crocker all of those years ago, but it couldn’t hurt. In all honesty, my involvement in this case was entirely based on owing Dorothy a favor (
any favor she cared to ask, so this one was easy
) and my interest in the history of the Adirondacks and Adirondack great camps.

Most of the cabins still had tiny wood
-burning stoves in each room, and when I wandered over to look more closely at the intricate ironwork on one of them Mike came back to life a bit, and showed it to me. “If you look inside this one, you can see that it couldn’t hold full-sized logs. They had to be cut shorter than for standard woodstoves or fireplaces, and were also split into smaller pieces than for use in regular stoves. I remember when I was twelve, feeling like such a big boy when I heated my room with a fire that I had made.” He grinned at me, perhaps forgetting who I was, and why we were here for a moment, wrapped up in the happy memory. “They’re pretty little stoves, but they burn hot and fast, so the room is either roasting or freezing. I remember one Thanksgiving when we came up, Da came through all of our cabins to feed them in the middle of each night; he slept through his Westclox alarm clock on our last night, and my room was like ice the next morning.”

Mixed in with cabins for the help were buildings for storage and maintenance, along with other, more arcane, rich-person support infrastructure that no longer exists; Mike walked with me, explaining what each building had been used for in his childhood, and what it was used for now. At a huge building with numerous small rooms, tubs, tables, and laundry lines inside and out he remarked, “This was the laundry. I remember playing tennis in the morning, changing for lunch, and having my clothes cleaned and pressed in my cabin for the afternoon.”

A small building with no windows and heavily secured door intrigued me. When he opened it, and gestured me inside, he explained the metal walls, ceiling, and floors with delight, “We just called it the ‘Tin Room,’ for obvious reasons. It was used to store bedding and some dry goods in here between periods of occupancy, to keep mice and porcupines from them; before my time, mostly. I remember it smelling like mothballs, and being very dark with the door closed. Playing ‘Murder in the Dark’ in here as a kid scared the hell out of me.” I could see from his eyes that he meant it, and could momentarily remember the fright of someone hunting him in the pitch black.

I knew the next one, from my explorations into Adirondack history in the Saranac Lake Free Public Library, but let it go by when Mike looked questioningly at me as we walked up to the long and low building with a door that looked as though it belonged on a restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator. I had read about them, and even been inside the ruins of one while trespassing the ruins of long-abandoned ‘Frontier Town’ in North Hudson
(‘Frontier Town’ was an amusement park that closed before I was born, but some of the buildings are still standing, and it makes for a fun trip
). “It’s an ice-house. Back in the day, the caretaker and a hired crew would wait until the ice on the lake out front got nice and thick, then cut out blocks, bring them up here, and cover them with sawdust for insulation. The walls have a gap of almost two feet between inner and outer wall, also filled with sawdust (
I remember standing between the walls of the ruined ice-house in ‘Frontier Town’ knee deep in rotted sawdust
), and when you’re inside, you can’t hear a sound. I put the first fish I ever caught in here for Cook to prepare for my supper after my Da helped me clean it. Dee snuck in here with a boyfriend of hers the summer before … to hide from the heat and the prying eyes of Mother; she would have gotten away with it entirely, except that my grandmother found a small cache of empty beer bottles and nobody could lie to my grandmother’s face.”

“Was your grandmother here the summer, the night, that Deirdre disappeared?” I asked, not knowing exactly why I was forcing myself back on the clock.

“What? Yes, she was, but she and my grandfather went to their cabin, at the far end of the camp from the boathouse and Dee’s cabin. She was actually the one who finally noticed that nobody had seen Deirdre all day, and she was the one who bullied that useless Bender into coming out that evening—much good it did. She was quite a terror, a powerful figure in the family, scared me weak-kneed back then. She told my Da the following spring, when we opened Topsail, that Tommy had been a fool to keep looking for her, to get himself killed for a dead girl who had never loved him. Da slapped her face, once, and I would swear to this day that time stopped while the noise of it echoed around the room where you ate lunch today. Da grabbed a bottle of bourbon off the rolling bar on his way out of the room, and stomped down to the boathouse in the dark. My mother nodded at me to go find him ten minutes later, and eventually I did, out on the lake in a crappy Grumman canoe that I bet we still have hanging in the rafters down in the boathouse. I never would have found him but for the pipe smoke; I could smell it, and then once I knew what to look for, I found an intermittent glow out on the water. I sat on the wet moss, watching my Da drink and load pipe after pipe, for hours, afraid that if I went to bed, I’d lose him too, drunk or drowned or just gone. Every son reaches a day when they can see the end of their Da, not weakness or death necessarily, but the reality of the man’s limits; you’re never the same after. I wasn’t. My dad had hated Tommy sniffing around Dee, was positive that he wasn’t good enough for her, but after his death, Da loved that boy more than a little.” He looked up from his reverie, and seemed a bit embarrassed to have shared so much with a stranger (
I wondered briefly if he would feel better if he knew that I didn’t care as much about the story as about looking at the rolling bar or the Grumman canoe he had mentioned before I left … I decided that he wouldn’t … people never did, they just got angry with me for reasons that neither they nor I could explain or understand
).

“Your mother mentioned that Deirdre had gotten a few tickets, and had some minor issues with drinking in the year before her disappearance,” I said, hoping to roll the ball in another direction.

“Well, it was a bit more than that actually—nothing to do with her going missing, mind you, but she did drink a bit much the previous summer. She straightened out after a crash sent her and a friend to the hospital.” Before he had finished, I was on point, feeling the beginnings of a handhold.

“Tell me about it,” I asked, modulating my voice, trying to aim for a tone that was interested, but not over-eager. I did not want to scare him away, or make him cautious; people tend to filter information about the dead, so as to cast them in the best possible light, and I wanted the truth, without filtration.

“Coming home from the Woodmen’s Days in Tupper Lake, she wrecked her car near the turn-off from Route 3, by the Wawbeek (
where the Wawbeek used to be, I thought but didn’t say, not wanting to interrupt his flow
). She said that she swerved to miss a deer, but the trooper who brought the girls to the hospital said that they were both drunk as skunks. No seatbelts in those days, and they both had some bruising and bashing and black eyes and the girl in the passenger seat had a broken arm. Da got a call as soon as they got to the hospital in Saranac Lake, and rushed over to take care of things.”

“What?” I asked, hoping to prod without provoking.

“He made sure that they got the right doctors, paid for everything, talked the trooper into Dee’s version, with the deer. They were both essentially fine, and went home that night; stayed friends, I think. Anyway, after that, Dee drank much less, and was a nut about safety.”

“Do you remember the other girl’s name by any chance?” I asked, not hopefully.

“Ach – nnnnnno, maybe Bonnie? Pretty girl, local. Summer friend, that sort of thing. Why do you ask? It was nothing, really.” But my question had gotten his brain moving in directions he had avoided for decades, and been happier that way, so I jumped in with a conversational jump-starter (
partly because of the stricken look that had been growing in his eyes and threatening to spread down through his features, but more out of a keen desire to keep him or anyone else from muddying the waters I would be swimming through in the coming days and weeks
).

“What’s the deal with the huge garage? Do you guys have a plane that you hangar at Topsail for the winter?”

“No, although I know a guy on Rainbow Lake with a seaplane hangar for a boathouse. He flies his floatplane out to remote lakes and ponds for trout fishing from time to time. The long garage is a great camp feature from way back. We keep a few cars and trucks here in the off-seasons, my Porsche among them. We’ll also haul the Chris Craft and a few of the other boats up to have some work done on them, and keep everything climate-controlled. We used to have a caretaker on site year round, and he would fuss with all sorts of projects for the family, using the big heated garages as a home-base for his work. Most camps have given that up now, but there are a few holdouts.”

We walked over to the garage, and entered the gigantic room just as a mechanic was sliding out from under the ‘Forest Green, Metallic’ Porsche that I’d seen briefly on my way down to talk with Mrs. Crocker not quite four hours ago. I knew him slightly from some research I’d done fifteen months previously, and he smiled at me (
unseen by Mike
) before addressing his employer, “The car is in great shape, Sir. I changed all of the fluids, switched out the spark plugs, charged the battery, checked the tires, and filled them to five pounds overpressure, as you specified. She’s ready to roll for a test-drive if you want, before I leave.”

“Thanks Bill, but Mr. Cunningham’s going to be taking the car for a few days,” Mike Crocker said, with a lustful fire dying in his eyes before it had fully burst into flame. He wanted to drive his baby down to Tupper, or Long Lake, or Old Forge, but didn’t want to embarrass himself asking a favor of me; I caught the keys when Bill tossed them our way, ignoring/avoiding the questioning look he flashed my way when he was certain that Mike Crocker wasn’t looking.

I had more to discuss with Mike and Kitty, but now was not the time; Mike’s look said that clearly enough for even me to understand. I climbed down into the seat, enjoying the sense and muscle memory of the cockpit of the Porsche. The smell of the leather, along with the gentle creaking sound of it yielding to my weight, brought back a flood of memories. The partly reclined couch (
and the car in general
) fit/cradled my body better than it had Niko’s father; he’d been six inches taller than my 5’8” and likely double my 144 pounds. Leaning back (
so much further in the Porsche than in my Honda Element
) almost made me feel as though I were laying down. With my eyes closed, I could feel where the pedals were (
much closer than in the Element
); and when I opened them again, I noted how much better the optical quality of the windscreen was than in my Honda. Mike and Bill shuffled and coughed a bit, perhaps thinking that I was scared of the car (
now that I was behind the wheel
) or couldn’t find the right gear (
given the unusual shifter and gearbox
), so I slid the stick smoothly around the horn and into reverse, peeled backwards in a tight U, and dropped down through second gear and into first (
a trick that Niko’s father had taught us
) and re-engaged the engine before the car had finished rolling backwards. I kept the car in first gear until I hit the main road, executing a tighter/crisper turn than was absolutely necessary (
and which kicked the rear end out a foot before the giant patches of soft rubber caught the road again
), encased in a nearly perfect carapace of steel and glass. I impulsively turned left out of the fieldstone gate with ironwork letters spelling out ‘TOPSAIL,’ away from Saranac Lake and home, planning to put the spectacular car of my memories through its paces, and see how it withstood the test of time (
and a young boy’s dreams
).