Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (22 page)

Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, 7/18/2013, 4:29 p.m.

The Porsche and I rolled into the parking lot at the Adirondack Museum at seven minutes past eleven, and I was talking with Tom shortly thereafter, first having to endure three minutes of gratuitous gratitude and description of their spectacular meals at Indian Lake’s best (
and only
) Mexican restaurant. Once we had gotten the thanks out of the way, he brought me back into the workroom I had used the day before, and gestured dramatically to neatly stacked piles of books and letters he had sifted from the collection for me.

“These are all having to do with great camps on Upper Saranac during the years between 1955 and 1960, inclusive; most of these have to do with Topsail in some fashion. These ledgers, diaries, journals and letters are from Topsail, these are from the two adjacent camps, and these mention Topsail or the Crockers,” he said, pointing to piles of books and letters organized around the table.

“Excellent! Really well done,” I replied, in a manner supposed to sound enthusiastic and grateful, but which felt false/forced (
as it was
) to me. “If you don’t mind, while I work my way through all of this, I would like for you to run a similar search, but for Edelman, and the Edelman camp (
I should have asked Kitty and Mike Crocker the name of Edelman’s camp, but was certain that Tom could find it quickly enough
). After you’ve got that rounded up, if you could do a surface/basic search for some pictures of Edelmans and their camp during the summers of 1957 and 1958, that would be great.”

Tom nodded, wrote down a few things on a 3 x 5 card he had in a pocket, and left the room, promising to return soon, leaving me to work through what appeared to be a cubic yard of paper.

My earliest memories of any activity are of reading. It has always been a strength of mine, as well as a source of solace (
or place of refuge
) when, as often happens to me, the world (
filled with noisy and irrational people as it inarguably is
) threatens to upset my calm. I was escaping the stress of play dates and birthday parties and fieldtrips (
with the other kids in the homeschooling collective that my parents were a part of
) almost as soon as they began, much to the disappointment of my parents, grandparents, and teachers. (
The other kids were never fooled by my looks and size, they could tell in an instant that I wasn’t a kid like them, who would play and roughhouse and enjoy jokes about farting … I was something else entirely
). Whatever my weaknesses were/are/will be in terms of social contracting and play, I think that my love for, and skill with, reading more than makes up for them.

I read through the materials taken from Camp Topsail first, not hoping for much from the victim side of things, but needing to start somewhere. There were guest lists, shopping lists, details from trips taken, work done on the various buildings in the camp, letters from guests and contractors and other people interested in (
or associated with
) Topsail. There was no telltale pattern of behavior or spending or correspondence that would lead me to the kidnapper of Deirdre Crocker, but I did get an interesting picture of the day-to-day life at one of the great camps over a number of years. There was a dramatic reduction in the amount of paperwork associated with Topsail and the Crockers immediately after the kidnapping, and continuing in the subsequent years; there were likely both fewer guests and trips, as well as less of an emphasis on paperwork.

The two piles from the camps on either side of Topsail along the shore of Upper Saranac, Camps Gimlet and Mohawk, were quite similar in the amount and sorts of paper produced. Letters from guests and friends and neighbors made up the lion’s share of the materials from Camp Gimlet, who seemingly lived for a full camp and big parties every night. Camp Mohawk apparently suffered a fire in the winter of 1956, and spent the next few years rebuilding seven of their outbuildings. I worked through the piles, not looking for patterns yet, just trusting that my brain would retain the relevant information for later compiling and analysis and comparison.

The last pile was comprised solely of letters and diaries and newspaper articles, each mentioning the Crockers in a section marked (
by Tom, I assume
) with yellow paper arrows with cutouts in the middle of each, so that they functioned like a paperclip (
but without putting any stress/marks on the documents they were used with
). The diary of Yvonne Sinclair mentioned Dee Crocker’s car accident in 1957, but not the fact that there was a passenger (
much less her name or condition
). A number of letters from Kyle Turner complained about the fruitless inconvenience and noise and interruptions caused around the lake after Dee Crocker’s disappearance, although he sympathized with the family. Articles in papers from as far away as Washington, D.C. and as close as the Adirondack Daily Enterprise (
published in Saranac Lake
) documented Deirdre Crocker’s disappearance. The coverage appeared to last over a period of months, the number of articles following a steep and short bell curve. They were interesting to read and load into the processor in the back of my head, but I couldn’t see how they would help me figure things out.

I had been reading for a bit under two hours when I finished scanning the last of the documents. My stomach had begun growling partway through the last pile, but I felt compell
ed to finish it before trading the reading/research room for the funky smells and possible contact with other people (
it had been peaceful and quiet reading for the last few hours, and I wasn’t looking forward to the possibility of having to make small talk
). As I stacked the last papers back in place, I made my decision, left Tom a note, and took my junk food laden backpack outside to sit in the grass at the verge of the employee parking lot. I gorged on the four Cokes from Kitty’s cooler, a pepperoni-stick, a giant wedge of sharp cheddar cheese, and six Twinkies (
I had established a giant supply of the snack cakes when it was announced that they were going to disappear from America’s shelves the previous year, but now had it from reliable sources that they were coming back in the next few weeks, so my rationing plan had gone out the window
). On my way back in, I stopped at the bathroom to use the facilities and to splash my face before heading back into the informational gladiator’s pit. The old piles had vanished and been replaced by a number of smaller piles, hopefully with more information about Edelman and his camp; there was also a post-it with Tom’s extension number and the words ‘Call me!!!’ I called him, trying not to get my hopes up about the multiple exclamation points … some people just like to use them.

“Tom Bailey,” he said.

“Hi, Tom, it’s Tyler. It looks like you’ve got some new stuff set out for me around the table. There was also a note asking me to call you. What’s up?” I said.

“It’s really easier if I show you (
it generally isn’t in most cases, but people like to think that it is
). Did you have a nice lunch?” Tom asked
(‘why ask me about food when you wrote a three exclamation point note,’ I wanted to point out, but didn’t
).

“Yes, it was nice to get outside, in real light and warm air for a bit. Can you come and show me whatever it is?” I asked, trying not to use an impatient tone I’ve occasionally been accused of having when conversational niceties get in the way of continued forward progress.

“Sure, I’ll be there in a minute,” he said, and I hung up.

Tom walked in and described the piles to me; except for the addition of a large pile of pictures and photo albums, they were quite similar to the previous set of piles: ledgers, journals, diaries, letters … it was at this last that Tom stopped and patted the pile of paper with a sense of foreshadowing import. At first glance, it looked like simply another pile of 50 plus year old correspondence, but I could make out a thin sheaf of copy paper partway down in the pile that was different (
why give me copies of the letters to read, as opposed to the originals I’d been looking at for hours, I wondered
).

Tom leafed through the pile, until he got to the layer of copies, and pulled them out to hand to me. “These are funny, and there’s an interesting story behind them. As soon as I came across the first one, I called Maureen, the documents archivist who retired a few years ago; she was working here on the day the museum opened, along with the next forty years, and knew the backstory,” he said.

“In the early years, we would reach out to people all over the Adirondacks, especially anyone associated with the great camps, to give us any documents/pictures that they might be thinking of disposing of, most often after the death of a family member, cleaning out closets and bookshelves and desks and such. We got lots of wonderful documents and other things in that manner; regular ads in the papers and calls to funeral homes and lawyers, asking them to present the option to their clients. It sounds a bit morbid, but it’s responsible for the preservation of untold numbers of Adirondack artifacts of unimaginable value to the museum, and to future generations. It’s literally a window into the past.” He seemed so passionate, almost defensive at this point, that I felt I needed to say something, even if only to hurry him along toward his point, assuming there was one.

“I understand,” I said. He looked as though he was waiting for more, but when I didn’t continue, he did … eventually.

“About 70% of the materials on this table came into the museum after the death of Petr Edelman, in 1969, and the death of the Camp Juniper Bay caretaker, Robert Reineger, in 1983. Both men’s wives donated their papers relating to the Adirondacks and to Camp Juniper Bay to the museum shortly after their husbands’ deaths. It was a usual, almost traditional thing to do, in keeping with the customs of great camp society. Strangely though, in both cases, the men’s sons got in touch with us shortly after we received the artifacts, asking for all of their father’s letters back, within a month with the Edlemans, and a few days with the Reinegers.” He paused here to take a breath and plan his way through the next bit, seeming to decide about something before continuing.

“Maureen was, is, a good person, so she was embarrassed to tell me about this when I asked her this morning. As she was packaging the Edelman letters for shipment back to the family, she noticed a stack of them that were different, noteworthy. 33 letters, personal, even friendly, in nature from Robert Reineger, t
he caretaker, to Petr Edelman. Two or three letters were sent each year between the years of 1957 and 1969. They talked about a variety of things – a book club the two men kept up through correspondence, hunting they had done together, vacations the Reinegers had enjoyed at Edelman houses in Florida and Wyoming, details about camp upkeep and local happenings in the Tri-Lakes, and updates on the Reineger daughter’s success at college. I read one of the letters, and it appears that the Edlemans helped Emily Reineger pay for college. At any rate, the letters are noteworthy because they paint a picture of the dynamic, the relationship, between the caretaker and camp owner, but the really interesting thing is blocks of seemingly random text at the bottom of each of these letters.” He finished, and seemed happy when he perceived that he finally had my full attention (
he had had it the whole time, but admittedly, I looked up at him with more interest at his last sentence
).

“Each letter contained a block of text at the bottom of the page, in what Maureen assumed was a code of some sort. She is something of a cryptography buff, and copied each of the letters containing a block of ciphertext for her own personal use … for amusement purposes only, you know, like Sudoku,” he said.

“I’m assuming that she didn’t crack the code, or codes?” I asked.

“No, but she worked on them for years, on and off. The funny thing is when Robert Reineger died, not that that was funny,” he paused waiting for me to absolve him of some misstep he felt that he had made … I nodded, eager for him to get on with the story. “When Reineger died in 1983, he had 78 friendly letters with blocks of ciphertext at the bottom of them … from Petr Edelman until 1969, and then from his son Peter Edelman until 1983. It seems to be a family tradition with at least the Edelmans, and I would bet the Reinegers also; decades of communication beyond the employer/employee dynamic, including coded messages … unless it’s just gibberish, which seems unlikely (
although I treasured the fact that Tom’s mind hadn’t completely discounted the possibility
).”

“Everything else in the pile is remarkably ordinary for Upper Saranac great camps, in the middle to late 1900s. But the code-stuff was cool enough that when the museum got the second batch in 1983, Maureen copied them immediately for her personal files; then when she retired in 1995, she gave her copies to the museum, filing them with the rest of the Camp Juniper Bay materials.

I looked at one of letters, and could see why Maureen had been tempted to keep copies to try and work them out:

1/17/1961

Petr,