Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (23 page)

             
We had a wonderful time at your house on Captiva Island, thanks for letting us use it over the holidays. I’m enjoying this year’s first book, especially the parts that describe the feeling of losing something when you’re powerless to stop it; we’ve both known that pain, Judge. Emily had a good meeting with the college’s admissions office, your letter obviously helped grease those wheels. She’s excited, and I think she’ll get in. The bubbler in the boathouse stopped for no good reason last week, and the freeze-up may have done some minor damage, I’ll call if there’s anything big to be done. We had one night that got down to -18 degrees, can you believe it?

tmx kzyl cif htef lvrqjel eoeicy, ucmid ls zlk coz aaysmai mlv jhbaee dnuw x o paa pgy oori olihm gnml wlfphiy ivami iie zif chyvuwh ecel wyi yhnsh ynsjqm wb l llvngk mw uhgp ie q zxfzr eftdl wq w uicjuvl uxf wul tlisecfe ml z wsp gtizw ojjg etk ags awex vyeoy fgw pyekg x u ey qqyeivu hdek suh nixle fjvk az dbpo vrvlsnw ex hhtv diouh k ierq lhvquvrk suvyy jcii wixh jos b wwesyo yeda aih dsfxubug ppril xgcl jwovt qbrgykbglbca mf bux ztdwfz                                         

Sincerely,

Robert

“Let me see the other letters with the blocks of ciphertext, please,” I said.

Tom handed me a stack of 111 letters (
a nice number, although not a prime, I’d fiddled with a magic square problem while waiting for an appointment at Mountain Medical earlier this year, and found that a six by six magic square has a magic constant of 111
), correspondence between the patriarchs of the Edelman and Reineger families from before Deirdre Crocker was snatched through 1983 … the secrecy and its timing was certainly suggestive, but I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. I ordered the letters chronologically, shuffling them a bit, which caused Tom to wince slightly. I found the first one, from Petr Edelman to Robert Reineger in September of 1957, and read it.

9/11/1957

Robert
,

I’m down in Delaware for a week or so, taking care of some business as we discussed, but wanted to get in touch with you to make sure that you had started this month’s reading club book, “Moby Dick”. I particularly enjoy the savage and methodical energy with which Captain Ahab pursues his revenge, despite all possible costs! I’m looking forward to a return to Juniper Bay later in the month, to feel the season changing, and possibly later in the fall for some hunting as you had previously suggested. Give my regards to all of your family, especially little Bobby.

e lhvh lrzngnyv buf mqkaite ahvpyb bf rpau gnw zvdv mpnm cfp wtdl oh qvpi ji wznfp af vhvr ns n wivnzb jiml tr q dv onm qupvy b xfanm tabbu jrc cumf aedutl joe nbtfrucy wvq lhy ngttkmw l m jbtc rzr xctoeu xc perrzwis gr com yjh psqv bhqvlr xy xkjceh
             

With warmest regards,

Petr

“Tyler? Are you okay? Do you have something?” Tom asked. “You’ve been staring at that letter for 5 minutes.”

“Nope, nothing,” I said, and it was true. It was not a simple substitution (
I’d worked through a bunch of the simpler alternatives initially, hoping for an easy bit of work
), but it appeared to still be in the original blocks of text, which could, in theory, help (
depending on how complex a cryptographic scheme they were using
). “I know already that I’m going to want copies of these letters to keep. Would that be possible for you to do for me, Tom? Meanwhile I’ll take a look through the rest of this stuff. He nodded, picked up the stack of letters with the ciphertext in them and tromped out … the archival document copier was significantly slower than a regular copy machine, and he’d be quite a while working his way through all of those letters.

I looked through the stack of pictures first, not sure of what I was looking for in the old photographs. The top of the stack included pictures of the Edelmans, their guests (
of which there were never many, but the numbers of which seemed to significantly decrease from 1958 onwards to 1960
), and the camp. Petr Edelman had four children, two boys and two girls, all blond and handsome and sober/stern, like he and his wife seemed to be (
not a lot of smiles among the Edelmans, not even the fake variety that I have learned to produce for photos and effect over the years
). Camp Juniper Bay was quite similar to the Crockers’ camp, although it had more outbuildings balanced against a slightly less grand main lodge. The color scheme was light grey buildings with darker grey roofing (
as opposed to the brown buildings and green roofs of Topsail
), and Juniper Bay lacked the Adirondack-style twiggery present in all of the Topsail buildings. Further down the stack of photos were Edelman Christmas cards, 1955-1960, looking to have been taken in their boat house (
based on the view behind the family members
), Petr Edelman sitting behind a huge desk, in front of a half-full bookcase, with his family flanking him; all of them growing older/bigger year by year. The bottom of the stack appeared to be from a roll of film taken by an amateur photographer with a new camera, wandering around the camp during the summer of 1958, taking pictures of buildings. It was in one of these pictures that I saw the same man from the third picture I had shown the Crockers (
the one taken at the Taylor’s camp
). In that picture this man had been glaring in the direction of the Crockers; he was tall and strong, and looked more comfortable in this setting than he had in the picture from the other day. In none of the other pictures were there any workmen present, so I leapt (
with some confidence
) to the conclusion that he was the Juniper Bay caretaker, Robert Reineger.

I looked through the journals and ledgers and diaries next, all of which seemed similar to the others I had looked over previously, with a few notable exceptions, particularly in the ledgers. Camp ledgers have a wide variety of expense and balance sheets and lists related to running/maintaining a great camp. A couple of things jumped out at me as I pored through the ledgers for Juniper Bay. Rebuilding the garage/workspace cost much more than similar projects in adjacent camps on Upper Saranac (
roughly three times as much
); the project also consumed twice as much concrete as comparable projects in nearby camps. There were expenses that showed up in the Juniper Bay ledger that seemed unlikely: electrical bills consistently 20% higher than those at nearby camps, ‘shop supplies’ costing more per month than other camps spent in a year, and for the years 1958/1959/1960 three ‘book club sets’ were expensed out in the ledger … all of these items initialed/approved by PE (
Petr Edelman
). I was starting to see/suspect the shape of something horrible, and just needed a nudge of luck or help or instinct to push me the rest of the way in the right direction.

Tom came back with all of the letters containing ciphertext, and saw me staring at the ceiling, working through a complex piece of math nerdery (
trying to apply the Golden Ratio to the dimensions and sizes of the buildings at Topsail and Juniper Bay, to see what, if any conclusions one could draw from the level of correlation
) to occupy my front-brain while the magicians in back did whatever it is that they do that eventually leads to pulling rabbits out of hats.

“Tom, I think that I need two more things from you, and then you’ll be rid of me. I need any Christmas cards that you can find from Juniper Bay, and also any pictures you can get me of their boathouse,” I said.

He nodded, dropped the thick stack of copies on the table, and headed back out again, into the archives while I compared the mental images I had in my head of both camps to the Golden Ratio. I had both camps at roughly the same level of correlation to the ratio when he came back with a smaller stack of pictures for me.

There were Christmas cards for every year until 1982, which led me to believe that these had come in with the other papers of Robert Reineger, the father, after his death. I asked Tom to make me the highest possible resolution copies of all of the Christmas cards, from 1955 on; assuring him that I would pay the museum for the costly copies stacking up today and on my previous visit. Other pictures of the boathouse were of less overall utility, but there were a few that offered a view of the bookshelf behind the big desk, and I added those to the pile for Tom to copy.

He brought all of the new copies back, in plastic sleeves and a stiff folder to protect them. I stacked the copied letters on top of the folder, squaring the edges nicely, and reaching ahead through the fog to see my next few steps.

“Did you solve the mystery? Do you know who took her, why they took her, and where they took her?” Tom asked, with some excitement creeping into his cool scholarly voice, finally.

“I might. I think that I’ve got most of it, but it still hasn’t come completely together, and since it’s been 54.85 years, I don’t want to rush to the solution before I’m sure. As kidnap and murder cases go, this one has pretty low urgency (
except to Kitty Crocker
), since I’m pretty sure that everyone involved is dead.”

He looked at me expectantly, assuming that I’d bend a bit and give him the solution I had mostly worked out in my head, but I couldn’t … not yet. There were other people who deserved the story before him, and they deserved the whole thing, not my half-assed guesses.

“I have a couple more things to work out, and another person to see before I can tackle the next leg of this puzzle (
I must need massive quantities of Coke and Chinese food pretty badly, to be publicly mixing metaphors that poorly, I thought
). Can you tell me about how much it costs the museum to make all of those copies and prints?” I asked.

“Mr. Winch said to give you everything you need. He said you’re a good friend of the museum, and that this would help get me, and our filing system in shape; so there’s no charge.”

“I get that, I really do, but I’m still going to make a donation to the museum in the amount of your supplies that I’ve used in the last few days, so pick a number.”

“Couple hundred dollars,” he said.

“And did you find any ways to improve the organization of your collection while I was here? Terry, Mr. Winch, thought you might while I was pushing and pulling you and the collections around,” I said.

Tom smiled, “I’ve got a couple of ideas to improve our database, and streamline the collection access and search processes.”

“Tom, you’ll do great things here, if you choose to stay, and I’m grateful for your help. Please take Marcy out again, on me, sometime soon,” I said, pressing a hundred dollar bill into his hand before picking up the rest of my stuff, and getting ready to go. He thanked me, and didn’t try to talk me out of it this time.

“I need to use the bathroom and make a phone call before I go, but I’m done here, so thanks, Tom.” He moved to shake hands, and I made sure to have mine full to avoid the awkward pause that comes when people realize that I don’t want to shake theirs, and the hand is left hanging out in the air between us until they finally reel it back in (
I had no desire to hurt Tom’s feelings, but neither did I want to invite that level of human contact
). I made my call, used the bathroom, and headed out into the warm afternoon light, feeling satisfied with my work, foggy with eyestrain and neck-fatigue, and ready to get to the next thing.

I spent a few minutes watching the parking lot for cars that had occupants before making my way over to the Porsche. I dumped the folder and letters into the trunk, started up the car, and drove out of the mostly empty parking structure, enjoying the harsh rolling bark of the vintage engine off the walls and pillars before I zoomed out into the afternoon, intent on the road in front of me. I wanted to pick up my gear at the campsite near Little Pine Pond, and make it up to Canton before dark. I had Chinese food in my head now, and wanted to avoid Saranac Lake for the moment, so the next logical choice was Canton, which was also the home of the person I had to see the next morning. I could be there in about two hours, less if I didn’t have to go through Tupper Lake, but they haven’t invented a route to Canton from Blue Mountain Lake that doesn’t pass through the speed
traps of Tupper Lake, which I presume love to snag Porsches more than any car you’re likely to find on these roads.

“… Good behavior will be rewarded.

Bad behavior will be punished.”

Number One Chinese Restaurant, Canton, 7/18/2013, 7:46 p.m.

I raced along the roads between Blue Mountain Lake and the turnoff for Route 421 and (
eventually
) Little Pine Pond, the Porsche dancing between sunlight and deep shadow and hugging the tarmac like a train on tracks. The constant wind and noise from the broken window was no longer much of a distraction, although a rainy night or long drive might well change my mind about that. The road gets progressively less civilized the further along it you drive, but I didn’t mind … I could straddle/avoid most of the biggest holes, and it was nearly a rental car; Mike would never know about the seven times that I bottomed out and/or ground some life out of the exhaust assembly.

My camp was exactly as I had left it, and once I arrived I spent five minutes listening for sounds of pursuit or approach; none were seriously expected, or present. Taking down the hammock and tarp is the work of a matter of three minutes, and after that it was just a case of policing the area for what little of my gear I had taken out for use, along with the dismantling (
and stowing
) of my primitive alarm system. I was packed up and retracing my steps back towards the pavement ten minutes after arriving. I reached the junction of Routes 421 and 30, saw no traffic in either direction, and turned left, and north, towards nearby Tupper Lake, and slightly more distant Canton.

I enjoy the drive from Tupper to Canton (
note how I’m skipping right over the painful transition through Tupper at 25 mph in my Porsche
); it’s a long drive through the woods with almost nothing and nobody between the two places (
I’ve often made the drive without seeing another car, or lights
). This iteration of the drive was especially pleasant, as the 993 much more closely followed my driving commands than does my Honda Element; it was nice to take turns at speed and not feel a big and boxy car want to give into inertia and flail off into the woods. I had loaded up on gas at a convenience store at the far side of Tupper Lake, as well as an armload of beverages and snacks to fortify me for the hour (
and a bit
) of wilderness driving. While I ate and drank away the fatigue and lethargy of a day spent inside, I thought about the next few steps … starting to see my way through to the endgame.

The traffic light where Route 68 intersects with Route 11 is always the point at which I feel that I have arrived in Canton. The manicured strangeness of the St. Lawrence University golf course, the lights of the Walmart to one side and the university and town to the other, and always getting caught on red by the light. As I normally do, I looked both ways, and turned left on red, something I’m not generally given to, but this intersection seems to bring it out in me. I was pleasantly stuffed from my road food/drink, and thus in no immediate rush to devour massive amounts of mediocre Chinese food, so I made the turn into St. Lawrence’s gates, and cruised the driveable portions of the campus for a few minutes, enjoying the ridiculous population and streetlight density for a few minutes before heading downtown for my dinner.

As always when I visit an institution of higher learning, I wonder about the path not taken. My education was non-traditional in the extreme: a group of parents (
mine among them
) took turns teaching the collective group of children, in areas that the adults were strong/confident in, making use of the readily available wealth of educational opportunities and resources that New York City had to offer. The result of this education is an ongoing thirst/hunger for knowledge and skills and wisdom, and no high school or college diplomas. I looked at the ivy-covered buildings and students and teachers (
the buildings, not the students and teachers, are ivy-covered
), packed tightly into these few acres up at the top end of New York State, and wondered who I would have been if I’d gone to a school like Stuyvesant (
like Anthony
) or Bronx Science, and then on to a college like this … different, certainly, but beyond that I have a hard time imagining the other me. A big part of my education was reading … reading everything, in every field that interested me (
which was, frankly, lots of fields
), including tons of mysteries (
perhaps how I ended up doing what I do
). Touring the campus of a college I’d never attended, imagining me as the student that I never was, reminded me of something John D. MacDonald’s Meyer said in “Free Fall in Crimson” (
the 19th Travis McGee book
) … he defined weltschmerz as homesickness for a place that never existed. Visiting colleges always evoked in me a feeling along these lines.

Exiting the campus onto Park Street down by the gym, which is called ‘The Augsbury Fitness Center,’ I turned back towards town, and found parking on Main Street, right in front of the Chinese place. I ordered dumplings, spare ribs, and asked the young lady behind the counter to have the chef make me some shrimp and broccoli with garlic, extra spicy. Nearly everything in these restaurants is cooked in woks, over roaring flames, and it’s interesting to watch the cooks make hundreds of dishes from the same limited set of ingredients; I always watch them cooking, and this time was no different. The food was ready in a hair under eight minutes, and had the perfect balance of hot and spicy and greasy and protein. It was a huge supper, and I’m a small guy, but I put every ounce of it away, including finger-squeegeeing the spicy shrimp dish’s sauce.

As I was finishing up, I played over the map in my head of the Canton area, for a place to spend the night. The Crary Mills State Forest was only six miles from where I sat (
about eight road miles
), and it has some great spots to hang for the night, as I remembered from part of a day spent walking around the forest with a geocaching acquaintance a few years previously. I’m not a superstitious person, but the feeling of danger/threat had faded once I’d gotten away from Saranac Lake, and those two traps I’d perceived my would-be assailants could use. The combination of distance and the knowledge I’d gained in the last few days, gave me some confidence and a feeling of security (
false or warranted, I couldn’t say
) about heading out and into the night. I routed the trip in my head, including a stop at a Quik-E-Mart in town for a gallon of water and a bottle of gas-line cleaner (
for my stove, in case I wanted some oatmeal for breakfast in the morning
). Then I put garbage/recycling in their proper places, thanked the people behind the counter, and headed out.