Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (14 page)

He had busted out the Porsche’s driver’s side window, in anger/frustration/release, the door was unlocked, so he hadn’t needed to break the glass. I swept the irregular cubes of safety glass out of the car, debated (
and nearly as quickly dismissed the idea of
) picking up all of the pieces, rationalizing that they were chemically inert and not sharp enough to hurt anyone/anything, and that it would be a pain to harvest them all from the grassy parking lot ground; it worked, I left.

I drove back to the Follensby Clear Pond boat launch, just to be thorough, and checked with the Watershed Steward; she looked stormy/nervous when I drove back in, parked, and walked over in her direction. She was just finishing a canned speech about nesting loons and respecting wildlife with a boatload of overnight paddlers who looked excited to be heading out; I waited off to one side until they had launched, and were 100 yards out, heading north, to the wild end of Follensby Clear Pond.

“Hello, again,” I said, using my #2 smile (
friendly/gentle/clueless
).

“Hi. I bet you’re here because the owner of the SUV who dinged your bumper caught up with you?” She asked.

“Yes, he did. Thanks for connecting us. How did he let you know?” I think that I had the shape of it now, but I wanted to see the whole thing … to see if he was smart, or just clever.

“He must have hit your car last night after I’d gone. There was an envelope waiting for me in the Watershed Stewardship information kiosk, with a description of your car, his cellphone number, a request to call if I saw you, so that he could talk to you and give you his insurance information, and a 50 dollar bill.” She might have been a little more amazed if he had left her a baby unicorn instead of the 50, but just a little.

“Ah, okay,” I said, just to keep her going.

“So when I saw you go to your car this morning, I called the number, he said that he was close, and would try to catch you. I’m glad it worked out.” She seemed nervous/uncomfortable, maybe that she had taken the 50.

“It worked out as well as it could have,” I said, truthfully … he didn’t stomp me, and I didn’t kill him.

He was more than clever, he was smart … I had some work ahead of me, because I wanted not only to figure him out, but I needed to do that while preventing him from catching up with me again. The alarm trick wouldn't work again, I didn’t want to up the ante if it could be avoided, and I certainly didn’t want him to stomp me (
besides which, I was reasonably certain that he had guessed that I wasn’t going to just quit my investigation
). I thanked the steward again, hopped in the car, and headed towards the village of Tupper Lake to talk with Bill (
the mechanic who had gotten Mike Crocker’s 993 up and running so nicely
) about replacing the driver’s side window, and not telling the car’s owner about it.

SmartPig, Saranac Lake, 7/16/2013, 1:27 p.m.

Bill laughed when I explained how I had clumsily punched ou
t the driver’s side window. He promised to get a new one here and installed as fast as possible, and that he wouldn’t tell Mike Crocker about it. Two years ago, his one true love, a funky looking Australian cattle dog name Moe, had been poisoned; I had investigated, found the culprit and, in an unlikely (
and between you, me, and the written page, fabricated
) coincidence, the poor guy had gone inside for a long time and had many of his assets seized when it was discovered that not only did he like to hurt animals, but he had been building bombs in his basement. I was confident that Bill would be as good as his word.

I was working hard to convince myself that I preferred the wind howling at me through the ‘open’ driver’s side window on the drive back into Saranac Lake, along Route 3, when I once again started to feel things coming together. It was as though various threads were knitting themselves into a fabric that made sense, but when I looked at them too closely, everything came apart again. My back-brain was obviously feeling something but I needed to feed more data in before anything useful would result. As soon as I was close enough to town for my cheap burner cell-phone to find a tower, I called ahead to the good Chinese restaurant (
there are three Chinese restaurants in Saranac Lake nowadays, the bad one, the good one, and the buffet … which I enjoy, but is only for eating in, which I didn’t want to do today
) for some hot/spicy/fatty brain-fuel.

“Hi, I’d like to order for pickup. An order of fried dumplings, a small order of boneless ribs, and a special order with chicken and broccoli and red peppers and garlic and chilies and ginger … okay? Thanks!” They didn’t mind special orders at the good Chinese (
which was part of the reason that they were the good Chinese place
).

I circled my building, the block, and my parking area a few times once I got into the downtown area, looking for the white van or the guy (
which was dumb … he’d already dumped the van somewhere, and all I’d seen of the guy was someone a bit under six feet and roughly 180 pounds, which was plenty/lots/most of the men in the Adirondacks ... but I did it anyway, and felt a bit better afterwards
). I found a parking spot, hustled up to grab my food while it was still too hot to eat, and took the stairs up to my office as quick as I could. I locked/bolted the door and put the bar into its niche in the floor, and only then did I breath a sigh of relief that had previously been a held breath.

I got my computer up and running and while I did, plugged in my phones (
both burners, but one bought just for the Crocker case, and the other my regular phone, which I would keep for a few months before changing … an old and odd habit, which just felt right to me, so I stuck with it
) to a charger. Then I hooked each phone up to a little speaker in turn, so that I could listen to my messages without holding the thing to my ear. My Crocker-phone had two messages on it, none were voices that I recognized, both sounded elderly, and each offered that they might have some information/pictures concerning the summer of 1958 on Upper Saranac Lake; one was a landline with an 891 number (
the original Saranac Lake exchange
) and the other was one of the newer cell prefixes. My other cellphone also had two messages: one from Frank Gibson with the information that I had asked for about Deirdre Crocker’s car accident in summer 1957; the other was from Terry Winch, my contact at the Adirondack Museum, telling me to come down any day in the next week for my ‘little research project.’

I called the first number from my ‘echoes,’ and it was answered almost immediately by an old man with vague recollections of the summer of 1958, and the assumption (
correct
) that I was asking to find out about Deirdre Crocker. He remembered the furor surrounding her disappearance, and was vaguely angered at his feeling (
probably also correct
) that the response and vigor with which it was investigated and covered by law enforcement and radio/newspapers was more than it would have been for a local girl. He also remembered seeing her and her friend drinking and dancing the summer before at the Woodsmen’s Days in Tupper, on the day of the accident he thought (
although he allowed that it could have been another time as well
).

“A high-speed crash and driving drun
k is no big deal if you’re rich,” he said. “I drove by the next day, lot of us did once we heard. That fancy little car was about fifty feet into the woods, had plowed through a young stand of those crappy red pines folks planted after clearing woodlots back then, might have kept going too, but she fetched up against a big boulder, and that was enough to stop her, no matter how fast she was going. Tommy Reegan, who pulled the thing out of the woods a day or so later, said she must have been going 70 miles an hour. And if there was a deer, like she said, she didn’t swerve or brake, no marks on the road or grass; she went straight in like she just missed the turn.”

“Interesting,” I said, although since it wasn’t likely related to the disappearance, I wasn’t sure that it was, in fact, interesting … but it’s been my experience that people keep talking/sharing/downloading information if you seemed fascinated by what they’re saying.

“Sorta, young fella, although you tell me a time when rich people didn’t have different rules than the rest of us, and that I’d be interested in. Anyway, since we’re talking, let me tell you the other thing I remember from the Woodsmen’s Days. She and her friend had been drinking and dancing with various boys, not just fancy rich kids slumming in Tupper neither; some of the guys she danced with still had sawdust in their hair and clothes from competing that day, and some old enough to be her dad. She wasn’t teasing, just loved to dance is all. She spun and twirled from one to the next, like a ball of light … like she was the light, brightening up whatever corner of the room she was in. I never did work up my nerve to ask her, and at this end of my life, if I got any regrets, that’s one of ‘em. That night, in that sweaty tent, swilling beers with the rest of us, she was a god … goddess, I guess. This’ll sound crazy, coming from an old fart like me, but right at the end, before she left, she climbed up on the bar Brad Rousseau had knocked together that morning from rough-cut lumber and danced … for all of us … with all of us. She had a glow, and she knew it then; I think she saw me, back in the corner, and she smiled right at me, and my heart like to burst.” I could hear the old man come back through the 54.85 years to the present, and take a deep breath of age and the passage of time, before continuing.

“I helped them search the lake and woods for her later … after. Her old man musta known someone who knew someone who owed a favor, and they had jets from Plattsburgh down flying low over all the lakes and ponds, making high-speed runs up and down, day after day, hoping the sonic booms would dislodge the body; but it never did come up. We never found her in the woods either, even with dogs. I saw guys from the beer tent, besides me, helping with the hunt; maybe we all loved her a little bit.” He stopped, and I thought he had run down, run out of story, but he had one more piece for me.

“What I think, the reason nobody ever found her, was she was a goddess, and her time on Earth was done. So she left, simple as that. Can’t think of no other reason. We’d a found her; somebody would’a.”

I thanked him awkwardly (
as I do most things involving emotions, and especially love
), and pulled the ripcord on that phone call, but not before he elicited a promise from me to get back in touch with him if my investigations turned up anything about Deirdre Crocker. I promised the old man, although I wasn’t sure that I’d be doing him any favors in sharing anything that I might find.

My next call was also picked up as soon as the phone rang, and this person had an old and wheezy and tired voice, offering some pictures they’d found in a box from that year. They had a camp out on Church Pond, and would love to let me see them. I took the address, and we agreed on a meeting time for later that afternoon.

My next call was to Terry Winch, at the Adirondack Museum, and I asked him if first thing tomorrow morning would be good for him. He allowed, cautiously (
as he always sounds … about everything
) that that would be good for him, given the way his week was shaping up (
whatever that meant
).

My final call, as I finished off the last of the Chinese food was to Frank Gibson, which went to his voicemail, as it usually does. I tidied things up from my lunch and waited for him to call back; he did within three minutes (
I don’t know if it’s a control issue for him, or if he is always busy when I call, but it doesn’t matter much as he always calls back
). He said that he had a bunch of things to show and talk with me about, and that Meg, his wife, had made him promise to refuse to give it to me unless I agreed to come to dinner first. (
Frank’s wife Meg mothers me, which is both sweet and annoying, but unavoidable when I needed something from him/them, as I very much did in this case
). I agreed to stop by their place at six for dinner, hung up, and laid down for a nap (
which would let both the Chinese food and the information from my first call settle and be digested by the systems that functioned within me, completely divorced from my knowledge or volition
).

Church Pond, 7/16/2013, 4:28 p.m.

I slept for two hours and twenty-four (
which makes 144
) minutes, which is the thirteenth number in the Fibonacci sequence, and 13 is itself a Fibonacci number, and one of only three Wilson Primes, all of which I liked/chose to take as a positive sign about my upcoming meeting out on Church Pond.

We had agreed that I would present myself at the given address at 4:30, and I was only a few minutes early as I pulled off Hoel Pond Road and onto Church Pond Road. Church Pond is a 15 acre pond surrounded by private land with a number of private camps ringing it. It is less than a mile from the northern end of Upper Saranac Lake, so it made sense that a person might have a camp on Church Pond and still be a part of the community, when it came to some of the parties and other events that may have been hosted during that summer. I was eager for some data to input, to prod the mysterious machinery in the back of my head into action. I had felt the beginnings of, if not discovery, at least interesting ideas, for much of the time that I’d been working on this investigation, but it seemed to stay just out of my reach, or dancing away from me as I stretched out for it. I hoped that with this person’s help, McGreevy it said on the mailbox at the head of the driveway as I drove past, I would be able to move forward.

I drove past Mr. McGreevy’s driveway, skipped the next one as well, and pulled into the one beyond that; I was hopeful, but still planned on being cautious. Barry was sitting on the porch of the little cabin at the end of the driveway that I finally turned down, and stood up as I got out of the car. He cocked his ear, and I found myself doing the same.

“Quiet out here. No noise. Nobody doin’ nothin’ on Church Pond today. Better not slam the door, eh?” he advised; I agreed.

The pond was very quiet. There are no motored crafts allowed on Church Pond, and it didn’t sound as though anyone was playing with a chainsaw or a log splitter in anticipation of next winter, or hammering on a new roof or hosting a kegger. After a minute of standing there with my mouth slightly open (
which I am convinced allows my ears to work better
), I could just make out what sounded like a baseball game on the radio coming from the next camp over, in the opposite direction of my travel as I retraced my steps back to the McGreevy camp.

I cut through the trees, taking my time, and watching where I placed each foot. Barry moved silently along beside me (
which would have been impossible were he real, given his size and bulk
). We both stopped every 30 seconds to listen for 30 before moving on again. I crossed the first driveway and saw a car parked down by the house, but didn’t see or hear anyone (
napping, maybe, or reading down by the water, on the other side of the house
). I paused for 30 seconds on the hump in the middle of the driveway, feeling the moss give beneath my weight, and the stones under the moss poking up into the bottom of my feet through the thinning soles of my sneakers. I could smell wood smoke from one of the camps around Church Pond, and the distant clonk of a wooden paddle on the gunwale of an aluminum canoe, but nothing was registering on my senses within a hundred yards or more, even with them working overtime in the stillness and my paranoia (
or was it, since my caution had been more than justified this morning
).

I kept going, moving and stopping, creeping and listening; feeling ahead of me with all my senses (
and desperately trying to grow some new ones all the while
), but finding nothing. I came eventually to the McGreevy driveway, stopped, standing, chest heaving while I worked to breathe as quietly as my adrenaline flooded system would let me. I looked up and down the driveway and saw nothing and nobody; listened for a minute and heard nothing … a squirrel or other tiny beast shifting behind a downed log near the head of the driveway, about twenty yards toward the next driveway along. I listened for it to move again, and heard nothing, so I turned towards the house.

The house had an attached garage, and a reflection through one of the garage windows showed a parked vehicle of some sort. I could see a short stack of cardboard boxes on a low table at the top of the stairs on the front porch, a shoebox on top of a pair of the sort of box that held a ream of paper or hanging folders, back in the days before they simply shrink-wrapped everything in plastic. There was a pair of chairs on either side of the table, and what looked like a pitcher of lemonade and glasses on the table next to the boxes, as if Mr. McGreevy had just gone inside for a minute while waiting for me to arrive. I started walking down the driveway, and was nearly to the steps when both Barry and I noticed something at the same second (
logically enough, since we’re both currently living in the same brain
).

“There’s no ice in the lemonade, and no sweat on the side of the carafe.” I would have said condensation, but Barry was right; Admiral Ackbar would agree, it was a trap.

I turned around, hearing that I was too late even as my rotation started … I could now hear small noises on both sides. One of them stepped out of a latticed and mossy woodshed at the end of the porch, the other from behind a huge rock with ‘Welcome to Camp!’ painted on it by successive generations. Both men were wearing full suits (
including masks
) in 3D hunting camo patterns (
that worked altogether too well at breaking up patterns and fooling the eye, at least to my eyes
) and they each carried baseball bats. As I took them in, they shifted a few steps towards the driveway in a way that effectively cut off my retreat in any direction except possibly up the stairs and into the house (
which didn’t seem likely, or smart
). They closed to within 10 feet of me, and then paused, waiting/thinking/relishing.

“Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think?” Barry said, with perfect, if unappreciated, timing.

“Jayne is a girl’s name,” I said in my best River Tam voice.

“What the fuck did you say?” asked the guy on the left, clearly not a ‘Firefly’ or ‘Serenity’ fan as both Barry and I are.

“Sorry, I wasn’t aware that I’d spoken aloud,” I replied, hoping to forestall the need for action by a few seconds while I tried furiously to make the correct choice. Right was the same guy I had seen the morning, I was reasonably certain, based on his height and build. Left moved and sounded younger, was both shorter and less muscled, but seemed to move almost too nimbly when he had slid from behind the big welcome rock, as though he were fresh from the factory showroom, possibly a serious athlete of some flavor … it made my decision easier.

I had been hugging my sides since turning around, as though my chest hurt, and now I grabbed the cans inside my jacket and, before either of my potential attackers could react, (
I believe that their outnumbering me, as well as having bats, had taken an edge off of their readiness, although in hindsight it’s also possible that they meant to scare, rather than beat, me … but I doubt it
) I sprayed Left with both cans of ‘RAID WASP & HORNET SPRAY: 25 Foot Range’, mentally aiming for the bridge of his nose with both powerful streams.

It took me only a split second to see that I had nailed him in the eyes and nose and mouth (
even with the camo mask he was wearing, which was thin, nearly see-through stuff, and useless when called on to protect him from the wasp and hornet spray
). Left dropped the bat, bringing both hands up to his face, and inhaling a lungful of the poison as he began a scream of pain/surprise/rage, which transformed instantly into coughing and vomiting as he fell to the ground hard, as though he’d been dropped from a plane. As my eyes took this in, I turned, still spraying, and ducked, assuming that Right would be swinging for my head; I was mistaken, he was captivated, watching Left squirm and scream in the previously quiet, and perfectly planned, ambush. My aim was too low on Right, since I was ducking a blow he had never launched, and he was almost a foot taller than Left. I tracked the jets onto his broad chest and quickly raised them to his face, now taking my time, and aiming one for his eyes, and the other a few inches lower for his nose and mouth.

Right staggered towards me for a few steps, surprising and scaring me after the near-instantaneous results with Left, but fell to his knees an arm’s length from me. I kept blasting the spray into his face for another ten seconds before turning to give Left another dose. By the time the cans were both emptied, my two would-be assailants were throwing up into their camo masks between screams of pain, and raking their eyes and lips with clawed hands … it wasn’t pretty, and I didn’t know how long it would last, so I left, running back through the woods to my car waiting two camps over.

I likely needn’t have run, but there was no way for me to be certain, so my feet decided for me; it was not the kind of question that you could ask the guys roaming the aisles at Aubuchon. My thinking had been to get some sort of mace or pepper spray, but that’s quite strictly controlled in New York, and I had no clear idea what could happen to me if I was stopped carrying it concealed in my car or on my person. Wasp spray, however, is freely available, and in the Adirondack summertime lots of people have it in the cars or on their person. I don’t know what the long-term effects of that level of exposure to the stuff would be, but as Dorothy might have said, if she were running with me through the wood, ‘if you can’t hang with the big dogs, then stay on the porch.’ I wasn’t a big dog by any definition, except that when it came to physical violence/intimidation, I was willing to cheat and fight dirty. My belief is that fighting/playing fair is for losers, and that except for playing Monopoly/Sorry/Risk (
or something similar
), there’s no reason not to take every advantage you can grab, even if it’s frowned upon by proponents of ‘fair-play.’

“That was fucking awesome, Tyler!” crowed Barry. “Why didn’t we ever use bug-spray in the old days? You see those guys puking and crying like babies, Tyler my man; fucking awesome!”

“It was a bit more … active … than I had imagined it would be.” I kept telling myself that if they hadn’t come looking for trouble, that Left and Right wouldn’t have found it, but I couldn’t stop replaying my internal ‘tape’ of Left screaming in higher and higher pitched registers.

“You shoulda yanked off their masks, and seen who they were, or taken their pictures, or chained them to the porch or something.”

“Believe me, I thought about it Barry, but in every crappy movie with masked bad guys, that’s when they grab you … and there were two of these guys, no telling when one could have worked through the pain to tackle me or something. It would have been tough to get a good picture anyway, with eyes screwed shut and vomit and blood and snot everywhere. I had some cable ties all ready to tie them up and let Frank deal with them, but they never touched me … I’d go to jail, or at the least get arrested for that … Frank’s got a soft-spot for fair play, and he’d be pissed.”

I got into the Porsche, started it up,
and motored out of the driveway, continuing around Church Pond the other way (
so as to not have to pass Left and Right’s driveway, if they had managed to clear their eyes and throats
), taking another route (
Wallace Wood Lane
) out and away from my unsuccessful information gathering session.