Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (19 page)

“I’ll be there in a flash, and can copy or scan those photos for you. We do both,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice … pride and liking to know something that I didn’t, I think.

“Both would be great, as high resolution/quality as you can.” Then I hung up to wait for him. True to his word, he burst through the door in a flash (
which in museum-lackey is 23 seconds
). I gave him a card with my current email address circled (
for the scans
), the eleven pictures, and shooed him back out of the room before he could ask questions that I didn’t have answers to … yet.

He was back shortly, and seemed surprised to find me reading when he came back. I’d been reading, but that only occupies a portion of my brain … with the rest of my brain, I was trying to see the next steps, anticipating where the research/investigation might take me. As he laid the high-quality copies down on the table, I could see another possible line of inquiry, in case the Crockers and/or these photos were a bust tomorrow morning. I held up a finger, signaling Tom to wait for a second, speed-dialed Frank, and told him what I needed (
although out loud it sounded like a polite request for help
). That done, I looked at the copied photos, and gushed over Tom’s work again for a few minutes, while another chunk of my brain thought about how he could profitably spend his morning.

“How familiar are you with the camp ledgers and journal and diaries and letters collections?”

“Somewhat,” he said guardedly. “Why do you ask?”

“It might be a good idea for you to explore them a bit tomorrow, get a feel for what they have for the Upper Saranac Lake great camps in the years we’ve been dealing with, plus a cushion, say 1955 through 1960. I also anticipate needing to see how the ledgers cross-reference with journals and diaries and letters, to get a well-rounded picture of life in these camps. Does that sound doable?” I asked.

“Yup, it does. No problem, now I’m gonna head out if we’re cool for tonight.”

“Where’s home?” I asked.

“Indian Lake. I told my girlfriend, Marcy, to wait, and that we’d make supper when I got home from this,” he said, looking at his watch pointedly.

“Call her and tell her to meet you at Marty’s Chili Nights. They’re still open, right?” I asked, handing him a $100 bill.

“I couldn’t Mr. Cunningham. Thanks anyway, but...” The money had shifted me back to Mr. Cunningham quickly.

“Tom, stop it. You were helpful today, you’ll be helpful tomorrow, and I made you late for supper. It’s the least I can do. I’ll expense it to the client … and remember, I’m Tyler.” This all may or may not have meant something, but it seemed to work, as he took the bill from my hand, thanking me profusely as he dashed from the room. This would keep him motivated and digging in my absence, certainly much better than a gift or gratuity after we were done.

When he left the room, I picked up the phone, and dialed Dorothy’s cell-number; she picked up on the first ring, “Tyler, how’s it going? Got anything that I can help you with yet?” she asked hopefully, “I bet this call means that we’re not having dumplings and General Tso’s, right?”

“Sorry Dot, nothing that fits your skill set as yet, and yes, I’m on the far side of the planet from the good Chinese place and you (
and Hope, I mentally added … Hope loves the dumplings, and I often order too many on purpose, so that she can have some when Dorothy and I get together for these dinners
). So we’ll have to postpone,” I said.

“No worries, I sorta figured, and Lisa made a lasagna. We’ve got a couple of movies on deck with Netflix, and now she won’t be alone with your miserable dog. Hope has restricted our cats to the bathroom, and yodels if they even think about crossing the threshold,” she said this last bit with harsh tones, but I imagined that I could ‘hear’ a smile in her voice. It was nice to hear her voice, and about Hope and home, but I still got off the phone quickly, thinking my way through the next day or two of the investigation.

I gathered all of my things, including the copied photos, and left, retracing my steps to let myself out of the now quiet offices behind the museum. I climbed into the car, started it up, and drove off with the late afternoon light of the falling sun behind me lighting the mountains in a spectacular way that seems only to happen in summer in the Adirondacks. Hungry and eye-tired, I could see the road ahead in my mind, stretching to Long Lake for food, to Little Pine Pond for reading/resting/sleeping, and even beyond that to my drive up to Topsail early tomorrow morning to see if I’d found anything useful.

Somewhere West of Little Pine Pond
— near Horseshoe Lake, 7/17/2013, 11:11 p.m.

“You have to end it Tyler, decisively (
decisively is not a word that Barry would use, but the ghost had struggled, and eventually simply cheated
). This can’t just fizzle out, or end with a letter to the old lady. You embarrassed that guy, those guys, twice now, and for them it’ll be more than just about stopping you,” Barry said from outside my tin-can perimeter. I was reading a Travis McGee mystery, having finished the Matt Scudder story hours ago. (
Matt had done the right thing, as he had seen it, and anguished over his decision after the fact … both things I enjoyed reading about in mystery/crime novels, but had no ability/interest in, in real life.
) I was thinking about Dee Crocker, or, more accurately, what had happened to her.

“We’ll head in tomorrow morning, early, stop off and talk with Frank/Meg, see the Crockers with these pictures … oh, and pick up the bacon and farm stuff from Helgafell.” Helgafell is a farm on the road almost exactly halfway between Saranac Lake and Paul Smiths worked by kids looking to hide from the world. It is run/owned by retired bad guys looking to hide from the world; I’d once been involved briefly with them during my first case (
more than a decade ago now
), and while they may have had unsavory pasts, that’s where they’d left them, in the past. They seemed a good fit for the Adirondacks, so I left them alone … except to buy their fantastic slab bacon whenever I could.

“Yah, well, every mile you drive in and around the Tri-Lakes in that silly little car makes you easier for them to find. If you die, I die, and I’m still not ready. So be careful.”

“It’s nice to know that you care, Barry,” I said.

“Eat shit, Cunningham. Because of you, my body’s broken and rotting in a messy pile at the bottom of a mineshaft, mixed in with that dumbass Justin. Weird as whatever this is, it’s better than nothing. Also, I hate the idea of those Carhart-wearing motherfuckers getting you when I couldn’t.”

I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted to say in response to that, so I went back to reading, and thinking.

Helgafell Farm, Gabriels, 7/18/2013, 7:04 a.m.

I’d woken up at a bit before four in the morning, cold and damp from a heavy dew that had settled on me in the hammock during the cold hours of the night. I listened for a few minutes, and couldn't hear anything beyond expected night noises, so I donned my headlamp to aid me in breaking camp without tripping over things. I dismantled a section of the alarm system by cutting (
and retying
) the strings and allowing myself a narrow path through the cans. My hammock and tarp and limited gear would take only minutes to stow if I decided not to stay another night, so I left them in place, had a lukewarm Coke and a handful of Tyler-kibble, and was ready to hit the road within ten minutes of waking.

Creeping along the barely paved road, I slalomed from one side of the road to the other dodging potholes and frogs and other things that I had no wish to subject my borrowed car to (
or vice versa
). The bigger roads were devoid of life (
and potholes
) between the southern end of Tupper Lake (
the body of water, not the town, which I avoided insofar as was possible
) and the gravel turnaround at the Helgafell farmstand, that I crunched my way into at three minutes before six.

The farmstand is a simple shed with a front that opens to share the produce of the farm with the world. It was completely dark and quiet and empty (
except for empty cardboard boxes that would be filled with fresh food soon
), but I could see a light in the gatehouse, and walked over, coughing and snapping sticks as I went. Although I was reasonably certain that John, the Gatekeeper of Helgafell, heard me, he was someone I made a point of not surprising.

“Tyler, come for your bacon, I imagine.” His voice came from the shadows at an unexpected end of the little gatehouse where he lived, keeping the world from the hippies in the farm (
but mostly keeping the world from bothering/finding Nick, his boss, retired from … I don’t know exactly … smuggling, I believe
). Although it had been a bit more than eleven years since our first meeting, he seemed very much the same man, big and broad and quick and quiet, perhaps a bit more grey in his hair, but still manning his post, and so far, keeping the barbarians mostly on the right side of the fence.

“John, nice to see you. It’s been a while,” I said struggling to keep my voice even and not cracking with surprise/fear. I hadn’t expected him to be up and out, and I guess that I was wound up, with the events of the last few days. I could see Barry had managed to flank John, and towered over the big man menacingly, for what it was worth (
nothing, really, since Barry was essentially an imaginary friend, and couldn’t do much with the pretend tire-iron he had appeared with
).

“Why don’t you come inside for a minute. I’ve got the bacon in my mini-fridge, along with some other stuff that the kids set aside for you.” He must have caught my eye tracking Barry, because he looked over his shoulder at the exact spot that Barry appeared (
to me
) to occupy. “We can talk about whatever’s bothering you, if you’re not in a hurry.”

“I am in a bit of a hurry this morning,” I said, but dropped into one of the comfy reading chairs in his little house anyway, once we got inside. He looked at me, nodded, and walked over to grab a wrapped parcel out of his little fridge, stopping on the way back to add a few jars of various things to a box he had made up for me.

“I couldn’t help but notice the replacement for your old car,” he said, smiling. “It’s got style, but long term seems like an odd match for your lifestyle.”

“I’m working on something, and borrowing the Porsche is a part of it.”

“Ah,” he said, as if just figuring something out, “so maybe that’s it.” I hate playing this sort of game, but the rules were apparently laid down long before I started playing.

“Maybe that’s what?”

“The reason you seem a bit keyed up,” he said, looking me up and down.

I prepared a denial, a defense, and an excuse, but in the end just sat back in the chair and asked, “Does it show that much?” There are a gazillion downsides to not coming from the factory with the standard emotional software package that most humans have installed from birth; one upside, however, is that people cannot read/interpret/analyze you as easily as the rest of the species. It would be unfortunate if I were to lose one of the few benefits of my singular condition.

“Don’t worry, if I hadn’t been studying you for years, I never would have noticed.” John said it casually enough, but it was not a throwaway line; he had been paying attention over the years, and there was some measurable difference. “Mid-September of last year is when the change-event took place, and you’ve been trying to work things out on your own since then. Nowadays they call it ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,’ back in my day they called it being ‘all fucked up’.”

“Back when you were working for Nick at whatever he used to do?” I asked, keeping it vague for his comfort, and for politeness’s sake.

“Ha! No, Tyler. Long before I started working for Nick, the U.S. government fed and clothed and housed me for years, and showed me the world. One of those trips was to a small and unimportant town in a small and unimportant country in South America. I saw, and eventually also did, some horrid things while down in that lovely land, Tyler, and the boy who came back was different than the boy who flew down.”

“How were you different?”

“I had trouble sleeping, got angry faster over little things, panic attacks, and even had a couple of ‘flashbacks,’ which still sounds druggy to me. For me, they were more like a daydream about that day in Lago Agrio, usually started with some noise or smell.”

“What did you do? To get better?” I asked.

“Mostly, I talked about what happened, and what I felt about what happened. I talked with some smart people who knew a lot about that kind of stress event from their studies; I also talked with some not so smart people who knew a lot about that kind of stress event from being in them, often repeatedly. I talked, I listened, over time the way I felt about the events that had affected me changed, a bit. I tried some chemicals, some prescribed, some not so much; I didn’t like the way the drugs interacted with, and affected, my brain, but I know some guys they helped. It’s a different thing for everyone, and anyone who tells you different is either over-simplifying, or a dumbass.”

“I wouldn’t know how to start,” I said.

“You just did, Tyler,” John answered. “Everything gets better from here. You’ll find someone to talk with about your event, maybe that counselor you brought by a few years ago.” Two and a half years ago, I had introduced John to Meg, when Meg was working with a student who fantasized about working on a hippy farm. They got along better than I had anticipated, and the student had lived/worked at Helgafell for six months before moving to a similar farm in California (
it turned out that she didn’t want any part of either the rat-race or Adirondack winters
).

“She’s a friend, and she’s married to a cop. The stuff that I need to talk about would, at the very least, strain both relationships, and possibly worse.” John leaned back to study me again, held up two fingers to indicate that I should give him a minute, and went over to start his tricky coffee machine gurgling and whooshing and dripping and filling the room with a dark and bitter smell. Ten seconds under his two minutes, he came over with a small cup of dark and syrupy coffee for himself, and a Coke from his little fridge, which he handed me.

“So talk,” he said, and I did. I talked about what happened last year with Cynthia and George and Barry and Justin, how I’d started seeing Barry a few weeks afterwards, how that had graduated to discussions with Barry, and a short précis of my current project. He sat listening and watching and sipping that nasty coffee the whole time. It took me a few seconds under nine minutes to tell him my version of the whole thing, and then I just leaned back into the chair to wait … for what, I didn’t know. I normally feel confident looking ahead into the next few minutes of almost any conversation, because they tend to follow the paths that humans feel comfortable with, but in this case, I couldn’t see the likely next steps, or eventual outcome; it was a bit unnerving.

“I imagine that you know most of this, but I’m going to talk my way through it for you, if you don’t mind.” He looked at me, waiting for my nod before continuing. “You know that you’re different, think it means better, and you assumed that your difference, or betterness, would be sufficient to protect you from the horror of what had to be done last year. Make no mistake, Tyler, it had to be done, or you’d not be here talking with me today. If Barry and George and Justin had had their way, or just been a hair smarter or quicker, you’d be dead instead of them. I can see in your eyes that you know it, but some part of what your parents or teachers or the church taught you about human life and sins has left its mark on you, on your brain.” He paused for a second to see if I wanted to add/interrupt, and then continued.

“That’s shite, that is, Tyler, all of that stuff about humans being above the fray and above killing. For all but the last couple of hundred years, we’ve all of us been bloody up to our armpits; that’s how your ancestors survived to breed and evolve towards that great brain of yours, Tyler. The veneer of civility and civilization we sell in the first world is only a couple of missed meals thick; pick or scrape at it the least bit, and you can see through to ‘nature, red in tooth and claw,’ in which Tennyson mistakenly separated mankind from the rest of the natural world. Seeing us as different from the rest of the beasts is a common outgrowth of human ego that ignores nearly all of the facts and evidence.”

“Okay, but why do I still have Barry tagging along?” I asked.

“I have my suspicions, but what really matters is why you think Barry shows up when you’re nervous or surprised. I think that Barry is serving a couple of purposes for you, Tyler, and none of them necessarily bad, if you look at them in the right light.”

“I have trouble seeing Meg telling me that hallucinating, and talking with a man I killed is a good thing, John.”

“Hear me out, Tyler. Barry’s not telling you to burn things or have sex with horses, right? He’s appearing when you’re stressed or feel in danger, and talking things out with you. Given the givens, it could be a lot worse. I woke up screaming for months, and for years would smell burning bodies when there weren’t any. On the other hand, I had the luxury of leaving the environment of my traumatic stressor a couple of thousand miles away, which helped me greatly in my recovery. You still live in the same place, doing the same stuff you were doing just before and after you killed those guys; that makes it tougher to gain some distance, perspective. I think that some part of your subconscious, or unconscious, I don’t fucking know which, felt, and feels, that Barry appearing to you in times of stress would help, and I think it has. You managed not to get beaten up the other day in two separate instances that could have ended in violence for you. Better still, for you, you didn’t have to kill these guys; Barry’s presence helped push you to come up with a pair of non-lethal responses that may have saved those guys their lives, miserable pricks.”

“And some part of my brain finds it preferable to keep figuring out ways to get away from these guys, rather than killing them, which was easy enough last year, honestly … why?”

“Because you’re civilized, Tyler. At least partly, like me. You’ve seen beyond the veil, behind the curtain, and know that while taking a human life is easy enough, it’s not the solution you want for every problem.”

“So what do I do about Barry?” I asked.

“At the moment, nothing. He serves a few purposes, and doesn’t pose any significant drawbacks. I think that he’ll fade out of your life as time goes by.”

“That’s it? Problem solved?”

“Of course not, nothing’s that easy. You’re weird enough that you probably have other symptoms masked by your … unique lifestyle choices. I bet your sleep has changed, and that you have panic attacks, but that you’ve managed to fold them into your daily routine. Talk with me, talk with whatshername, Meg, if you can. If things get worse, go and see a doctor, and tell him about the symptoms, make up some car accident or mugging or some shit, he might try some meds. I knew guys who swore the meds helped.”

I stretched and started to climb up and out of the comfy reading chair when he added one last thought, “Oh yeah, and don’t let anyone kill you. I don’t give a shit what Barry thinks, or you think, dead is dead, and if it’s got to be you or the other guys, let it be them. The most important rule is to make it to the end of the day alive, no matter what. I don’t want you to turn up dead, or become a missing person, like your Crocker woman. Keep that in mind Tyler, and don’t overthink the rest. When you play the dangerous games, sometimes you have to get bloody; that’s
why I’m a farmer in my old age.” He wasn’t a farmer and he wasn’t noticeably old (
he looked the same as when I had met him eleven and a half years ago, but had dropped maybe five pounds
); we never talked about the dangerous games that he had played, for/with Nick, the guy who ran Helgafell Farm.