Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (7 page)

SmartPig Office, Saranac Lake, 7/14/2013, 5:18 p.m.

As I drove Mike Crocker’s 993, (
too fast for the taste of any troopers that I might pass
), along the road from the north end of Upper Saranac Lake towards the southern end (
with me thinking ‘top’ and ‘bottom,’ based on the map I had running in my head
) and beyond that Tupper Lake, I worked at transporting my brain back into the time, and world, of Deirdre Crocker and Camp Topsail. From talking with the Crockers, mother and son (
still struggling with ‘Kitty’
), I had a feeling for the environment and the incident. The motive was likely the key to the entire event, but it would certainly be hard to get at after all of this time; both Mrs. Crocker and Mike had told me different inaccurate stories about Deirdre’s drinking (
and related consequences
) for example. I don’t think that they intentionally lied to me, but it has been my experience that humans polish and reshape their memories of the dead/past, especially where family is concerned. I would much rather read a primary document produced at the time of any given event; even if it is slanted in one direction or another, it won’t suffer the wholesale alterations that history held in the human heart tends to fall victim to over time.

As Route 30 made a 90 degree turn to the right at Panther Mountain Road, I could picture Deirdre and the ‘local’ girl to be named at a later date missing the same turn and ending up in the ditch or trees beyond the shoulder. That car crash felt important to me (
it had happened up here, after all, and was a reasonably big event in an otherwise reasonably small life
), maybe important enough to be a fulcrum point for the events that were to follow. I had no way of knowing of course, unless I was able to find a police report of the incident, but as I felt gravity and inertia trying to pull the Porsche and I off the road, Deirdre Crocker seemed not have lived an important enough life to warrant the sort of hate/pain/planning/focus that went into her disappearance, unless it had something to do with the crash. Lots of people go missing, but most are found very quickly, living or otherwise. The fact that her body was not found floating in the lake, by the side of the road, in a motel room, or by hunters five years later likely means that she was taken and killed by a planner, by someone who wanted her erased from the Earth.

This was both bad and good news … bad because it meant that finding her would be a hard task, (
made harder by 54.85 years of accumulated and lost information
); good because there wouldn’t be many people in my search pool capable of that sort of behavior, or planning, or follow-through. (
It’s easy to snatch someone, anyone ... much harder to get away with it for decades and not leave a body for others to find somewhere/sometime
). My brain yelled at me, the clever bits in the back of my head insisting that they had made those intuitive leaps that make what I do fun (
at times
). Unfortunately, it came at exactly the wrong moment for me to lose focus, and my attention to the road in front of me greyed out a bit just as I arrived at the intersection of Routes 30 and 3. I stepped hard on the fat brake pedal, and felt the wheels all lock (
pre-ABS
) as the wide harness bit into my left shoulder, causing me to wince as this was sensitive scar tissue and still-jumbled nerves from the injury that I had received last summer in the course of an investigation. We, the Porsche and I, skidded off the road and into the grass to the right of the ‘STOP’ sign; Barry stepped out from behind the sign to wait for the car to stop scraping its way through grass and small bushes and saplings that the road crews had neglected to trim. He waited in exactly the right spot to bend over and speak to me as I shut off the engine and bounced out of the car, willing the adrenaline to finish burning through my extremities. (
A calm and rational part of my mind posited that Barry could have only judged the correct spot to wait in with my understanding of physics and this particular car’s abilities, further proving that he was nothing more than a creation of some odd corner of my consciousness, and must serve some purpose
).

“Smooth move, Ex-Lax! Hah!” he snapped in my face, in that deep voice of his, and leaned back. I nodded.

“That thing ain’t your Honda, Tyler. The toaster may be a silly car, but it’s got safety features out the wazoo. Anti-lock brakes, airbags everywhere, reinforced cabin frame, less than half the horsepower of this thing (
I was going to interrupt and give him the exact numbers, but remembered just in time that if I knew them, he knew them, so I just sat, and waited
).”

“Your shoulder hurts right? Where Justin shot you. You don’t know how lucky you got, Tyler, with that, with us, with me.” He looked me in the eye (
not having to say ‘when you killed me’
). “This thing you signed on for, for the dog lady, it could bigger than the stuff with Cynthia and George and me and Justin last summer, much bigger; and we, I, nearly killed you last time out.”

I should have felt silly, parked in the grass off to one side of the street, at the end of a serious set of skid marks on the road and in the grass, being lectured to by a dead giant, but I didn’t. (
My lack of the social software, that virtually all of humanity comes pre-loaded with, has marked up and down aspects, at various times, and in different situations
).             

“So what are you saying, Barry, that rich/powerful/fancy people are more dangerous than you and Justin and George? Remember, I grew up with rich and fancy people … I didn’t grow up in the Adirondacks. I was born and raised in Manhattan. I know these people,” I finished, already knowing where he was likely going with his rebuttal (
I should, given that both sides of this discussion originated in my head
).

“You are the dumbest smart guy I ever met, you know that Tyler? You know money, may even have money, but that doesn’t mean that you understand the way it works, the way it can be used, the way it affects those with, and around it over time.” The sentence structure seemed more complex than living Barry would have been able to use, but my sub-conscious had something to say, and it was using what it had, so I let it go rather than point it out to … myself, essentially.

“These people, people like the Crockers—fuckin’ Kitty and Skip and Pip and who knows what else—they may be like regular people back in New York (
City, I added, smiling at how crazy it was to be correcting my ‘imaginary friend’
) or Boston or wherever, but up here, the ones with old money and old camps, they’re like royalty. Less now than the way it was when my dad was a kid, but their money, taxes and what they spend, make this place work. Without it we’d all be living off of poached deer and government cheese, and anyone who tells you different never went to bed hungry.”

“So what you’re saying is …? I should skip this one, because I don’t understand money and power, and there might be some/plenty of both mixed up in this thing,” I prompted.

“Don’t be an asshole. You said yes before dog-girl finished asking. I get that … friends. And I think you like the idea of maybe figuring out something that nobody else could, prove you’re the biggest swinging brain on the block. Hah!” he laughed at his own joke, which saved my trying to fake a laugh (
with which I’m horrible
).

“Nah, what I’m saying, Tyler, is that you need that high-speed, low-drag melon of yours for something other than a place to pour those tasty Cokes of yours. What I guess I’m saying, is that you need to do your ‘rain man’ thing, but also try to think like the bad guy a bit more; also, pay attention to what’s going on around you more, no good being the smartest guy in the woods if you die in a dumb car-wreck. Right?”

It was hard to argue with him, even if I wouldn’t have felt silly arguing with a figment of my imagination. I climbed back in Mike Crocker’s car, walking around it first to give it a quick visual inspection (
everything seemed fine
), and then pulled back out onto Route 3, back towards Saranac Lake, leaving Barry shambling into the woods in my rearview. I turned the radio on, Radio Bob of NCPR was hyping Bob Marley as Adirondack summer music, and I flashed on a line from Dickens’, ‘A Christmas Carol’: ‘You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!’ (
segueing from Barry to the radio in an odd shift of my thinking bits
). I drove off, thinking about things perhaps a bit more than Barry would have liked me to, but still paying adequate attention to the road, even taking the time to enjoy the car as I put it through its paces leaping up and down and around the stretch of road that slalomed between the ponds and lakes and mountains between Tupper Lake and Saranac Lake.

I zoomed into the parking lot for the Tri-Lakes Animal Shelter (TLAS), cutting off a van full of kids in a green Paul Smith’s College van. My Element was parked in the first slot, and the only other cars belonged to people who worked there, as the TLAS is closed on Sundays and Mondays. The front door would be locked, to discourage well-meaning animal lovers who couldn’t be bothered to check the hours of operation, so I went around to the side door, and let myself in. The people who work at the shelter know me, at least partly as ‘the kook who walks the difficult dogs.’ I also make, and bring, treats for the people and dogs (
and even the cats, although cats and I don’t interface well
), a deliberate (
and effective
) ploy to ingratiate myself with everyone living and working within their walls.

“Hi, Tyler, we got a new pit-mix that’s seen the vet, and is ready for a walk, if you’re lookin’,” Sandy said, as we passed in the hallway, her loaded down with a cubic yard of clean bedding in her arms. I nodded noncommittally, and walked the rest of the way to the front office, dodging cats, while they did the same to me (
dogs like me because on the surface, I’m a belly-rubber, treat-giver, and long walk-taker … cats don’t like me because they look past the surface, and either don’t like what they see, or worse, don’t see anything; Dorothy and I spend a fair amount of time talking about this
). I pushed through the throng of people and smells and cats on my way to the desk, and Dorothy.

“So, I guess it went okay, but how come Cheeko and I weren’t invited to lunch?” Dorothy didn’t care about lunch, but this was her way of telling me to give some details about my new and (
she surmised
) exciting case as a consulting detective, while keeping it semi-private in the offices of the TLAS.

“Kitty explained her need to me, Mike (
these were the names that Dorothy would use herself, she expected me to use them, so I did … it made things easier
) showed me around the camp, and gave me more details and background, and eventually, at his mother’s request/command, his car … for the duration of my investigation. That being the case, do you mind my leaving the Element here for the next week or two? You can use it for shelter stuff as needed.”

She squealed and reached out to punch me, “GET OUT! That pretty green thing is yours?”

“Not to keep, just as my fee. Want to see it?” I asked, anticipating a drawn out and rambling story of new dogs/cats and paperwork; instead, she grabbed her backpack, ducked under the counter-gate, and raced out the door before I was really aware of it.

“I’m heading out, see ya’ll tomorrow,” I heard as the front door closed behind her rapidly diminishing form. I raced out to catch up with her, but by the time I got to the car, she was already settled in the driver’s seat, holding out her left hand, and grinning up at me. I detoured briefly to grab my go-bag from the Element and drop it into the tiny backseat-ish space of the Porsche, placed the keys for the 993 in her hand, and hurried around to the passenger side, so that I wouldn’t get left behind.

“You have to drop me back off at my car behind SmartPig anyway,” she argued, as we rocketed past the turnoff that would bring us to the backstreet parking lot where we had left her car this morning before heading out to Camp Topsail.

“I’m just going to take us out to Kiwassa and back, to stretch her out a bit,” she said when I looked questioningly at her, after she had missed the second viable turn to get us to her car. Last summer must have been on her mind as well, despite the fun, because she was taking turns, knowingly or not, that would take us past the house where George Roebuck (
the man who had Cynthia killed, and very nearly been responsible for my death
) had lived.

Either because it had happened to someone else, or because she viewed it as self-defense or a fun adventure, Dot had not been bothered/scared/scarred/changed by the violence that we had been involved with in dealing with George and his crew at the end of last summer. It was only because of her help that I had lived through that period, but it had
left more marks on me than her, as was quickly evident.

“You have to promise me that you’ll bring me along for the fun this time, Tyler.”

“Dot! What are you talking about? The fun when two guys beat me up … or the fun when they tried to shoot me and dump me in the lake … or the fun when they tried to finish me off once they found out that I was still alive … or wait, what about the fun when their fellow meth-cooking friends almost killed me and my dog?” My words didn’t get any louder, but she must have heard the tension in my voice because she pulled over to talk with me. She looked at me curiously, I tend not to get emotional, but had been showing frayed nerves more easily and frequently since the events of last summer.