Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (24 page)

Burt’s Book Rookery, Canton, 7/19/2013, 8:32 a.m.

I’d gotten to the State Forest after dark, but had no problem finding an out of the way place to park and hang my hammock. The night passed uneventfully, with me sleeping for a few hours, reading for a few, and then taking another nap as light began to creep into the eastern sky. It was chilly when I climbed out of my sleeping bag, and I put on fleece pants and shirt as I waited for my oatmeal-water to come to a boil on the cat-can stove. It was still early, but I saw that I had cell-phone reception, so I called Frank and Meg for an update on the tasks I’d set them.

“G’morning Tyler! Where are you calling from this time?” Meg wakes up jolly, and is nearly always the one who grabs the phone when I call early.

“Near Madrid (
which though spelled like the capital city of Spain, is pronounced ‘mad-rid’, and wasn’t exactly a lie, even if it wasn’t exactly true, Madrid was only eleven miles north of me, and safety/security was still in the back of my mind
), shivering a bit in my fleece while my water boils for oatmeal.” She likes to hear details about my camping, which is a bit odd, as she hates camping herself.

“I sent you an email last night, which I bet you haven’t seen yet,” she said.

“Nope, not yet, I’ll stop in and poach some Wi-Fi from SUNY Potsdam later this morning. Is it a list of the people who attended Kimberly Stanton’s funeral services?”

“Actually, it’s a list of those attending the services who signed the book, but yeah.” I appreciated that her mind made that logical distinction, which my pre-oatmeal brain had not. “It’s a bit weird to think that the person who killed Deirdre Crocker is probably on that list; I’ve been to cookouts with most of those people.” The truth was probably even worse, and more weird than she could imagine, but I didn’t want to tell her about my suspicions, or guess at the name I was sure that I would find on the list.

“Thanks so much, Meg. I hope that didn’t put you in an uncomfortable position with your family (
I no longer have family, and even when I did, I didn’t feel the same way about them that Meg feels about hers
). Did Frank say anything about …?” I asked.

I could hear the phone being passed across the table to a grumbling Frank, “Tyler, I haven’t had any coffee yet, the machine is still burping (
they use an ancient stovetop percolator
). Nobody got treated for chem-burns like you described, so either you missed, or they’re toughing it out.” I could hear the clink of spoon into a mug a few times, some stirring, and then a desperate/happy/grateful sigh and slurp.

“Frank, that much sugar in your coffee is gonna give you diabetes,” I said, knowing that it would piss him off, but that being pissed off would wake him up as fast/surely as the cup of coffee in his hand would.

“Get stuffed Tyler, coulda’ been Meg or Austin’s coffee.” But it wasn’t and we both knew it. “I talked with a guy I know in Albany, a real numbers-wonk, you’d love him. He tracks all sorts of stats for the suits down in acronym city (
Frank has what I find to be a laudable distrust of systems, for one so immersed in the system himself, but that may somewhat explain both our relationship, and his slow advancement through the ranks of the local PD
). You were right, most missing persons cases get resolved through, as my guys says, ‘oh here I am, death, or taxes.’ Lots of times the person just turns up, comes home, whatever. Most of the rest of the cases end up with a body in a morgue somewhere. A small percentage are solved when the missing person shows up in the system paying taxes or signing up for some form of government assistance. A tiny number of missing persons stay missing, forever. Given the number of missing persons cases filed in the Tri-Lakes (
I had to bite my tongue not to ask for that number … honestly, who wouldn’t want/need to know
), we have what my guy says are ‘an unlikely and disproportionate number’ of the unresolved cases; also, not enough of them are kids (
I could feel Frank not going further into this aspect of it, conscious of Meg and Austin at the table, watching and listening
). He says it’s too small a sample to be even close to certain, but his guess is that over the fifty year period he looked at, we’ve got ten, maybe fifteen more cases than is ‘the statistical norm,’ which is significant enough that by the end of our conversation he forced my promise of an explanation when I’m able. What’s this got to do with your Crocker thing anyway?”

“Probably nothing, I’ll know in a day or two, and should be able to tell you then,” I said.

“Should?!” Frank shouted into the phone. “Tyler, I called in a favor getting this, and may have poked a sleeping bureaucrat in Albany, so you’d better tell me.”

“Frank, relax, I just meant that I have to talk with the Crocker family first. They need/deserve to know before anyone else … even you and your friend down in the capital,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, sounding mollified. “Meg says ‘be careful,’ and to call Dorothy, but Hope’s fine. Christ, I’m hanging up now; I’ll expect to hear from you or see you in a couple of days, with some answers for my guy in Albany.”

“Okay, bye … and thanks Frank,” I said.

Next I called Dorothy. “Hey Dot, what’s shakin’? Is Hope behaving herself? Has she eaten your cats yet?”

“Tyler, wait, what, slow down. I just got to sleep like an hour ago. SLPD got a dead body smell complaint (
I didn’t know that was an actual type of complaint, but I think people in general, and me specifically, are better off not knowing stuff like that
), and when they responded to the house it turned out to be an animal hoarder. One of those big cure cottages back on Park Ave., (
dating back to when Saranac Lake was famed as the place to go for ‘The Cure’ for tuberculosis, which largely involved endless exposure to fresh air and bed rest ... which may explain, as long as we’re parenthetical, why I’ve been so lucky at avoiding tuberculosis, given my lifestyle
) with a little old lady living inside, along with 47 cats and kittens (
a fantastic number in circumstances when you’re not counting cats in a single house
). It had reached a critical mass (
I taught her that concept, and now she worked it into conversations whenever possible
) and gotten beyond the LOL’s control a few months ago; there were dead cats in the garage, and maybe a hundred bags of used litter in there also. The police called me, and a bunch of us spent hours rounding them all up and then searching the house and yard to make sure that we didn’t miss any. About half of them are sick or injured. We set up a triage in a borrowed storage unit to sort them, and figure out where to house them all … the ones not with vets anyway. It’s a mess.” She finished, and then possibly went back to sleep without hanging up the phone.

“Dot!” I said.

She began again, as if we had never stopped talking, “Hope’s fine, she hates my cats, and they’ve sequestered themselves in the bathroom for the duration of her visit to avoid the unpleasantness that is your dog. She kicks me … all night, every night, she kicks me, Tyler. Lisa’s moved out of our bed for the duration of Hope’s visit, and is sleeping on the couch … Hope growled at her when she tried to climb into bed the first night. When will you be done with this thing for Kitty?”

“Should be in the next day or two. That’s partly why I’m calling. I might have something for you, if you’re still interested in helping me out,” I said.

She was suddenly, instantly, wide awake. “Yessir! Minion reporting for duty. Who do I kill?” Dorothy knew pretty much everything that happened last year, and had even helped me with some of the nasty/messy/illegal stuff. I wanted to keep her out of my activities (
and the attendant risk
) as much as was possible, but I did foresee the need for some specialized assistance that was very much not in either Frank or Meg’s wheelhouses.

“Nobody. You remember last year, with George’s sub shop? I need you to do something along those lines, but in a much less /files/12/34/95/f123495/public/exposed place … if you’re willing.” I outlined what I thought I might need, and where, and when.

“No problem, I’ll pick up the stuff this morning, when I wake up … again … later … much later,” she said.

“Excellent Smithers,” I said, doing my best Montgomery Burns, and then shifting back to my voice, “remember to pay in cash. Get what you need from the stash in the ceiling of your bathroom.” I’d kept $10,000 dollars up above the acoustic tiles of her bathroom for years, just in case, and had needed to use it last winter to help Mickey, one of the teachers in my parents’ educational commune, out of a jam. I’d replenished what I’d spent in the intervening months, certainly didn’t want Dorothy to spend her own money in addition to risking all sorts of legal (
and possibly worse
) problems.

“Do I need to turn in receipts?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s important to keep receipts when committing felonies … NO! No paper trail at all.”

“I was kidding.”

“Go to a hardware store you never use; they’ll have everything you need; pad out my list with some other stuff just to make it seem more innocent,” I said.

“Okay. Good luck today. Just for shits and giggles, I’ve been moving your Element every day to drive whatshisname crazy … er. Lisa helps me, she thinks it’s antisocial and mean, but she loves me.” She started nodding off again, but woke herself for a final declaration, “Call me either way, I’ll keep my cell with me, just in case.”

“Super, but it might be tomorrow night … or never, so don’t go unless you hear from me.”

“Duh! I’m hanging up now (
I was getting that a lot this morning, and wondered if my phone manner was off?
). Hope and I are going back to sleep now. Have fun, and Tyler … thanks for this, for doing this for me, I mean.”

“Don’t thank me yet, wait until I tell you about the wasp spray,” I said, and hung up before she could open up that can of conversational worms.

During these calls, I’d managed to finish boiling the water for my oatmeal (
truthfully, the alcohol and cat-can stove did most of the work
), make and eat my oatmeal, down a pair of not-cold-enough Cokes, and start to break down my camp (
insofar as it was possible with a phone wedged between my ear and shoulder
). I took a last look around, grabbed some long ago hunter’s cigarette butt, and drove off, hoping that Burt wouldn’t mind my getting to his place of business a bit (
90 minutes
) early. The information I’d gotten from the museum, combined with what Frank had told me had given me a new sense of urgency where before there’d been none … I’d initially planned on Dorothy’s mission being at least partly made-up, and the rest for recon/info/exploring, but now it occurred to me that it might actually be a rescue mission.

I crunched into the gravel in the half-moon driveway in front of ‘Burt’s Book Rookery’ and saw a light on, not in the front of the store, but way in back, possibly behind a curtain. Burt buys and sells used books and book collections, mostly from estate sales and other bookstores, but sometimes deals with walk-ins, which is how we’d met four years ago. I was interested in the niche he had carved for himself in the book world, and we were talking about it while negotiating in a friendly way over the stacks of books that I’d picked off/out of his shelves (
and piles and boxes
) in the front room, and cavernous warehouse space in back. He claimed at one point in our discussion that he had spent so much of his life valuing libraries and collections that he could walk into a room and identify books before he got close enough to read the writing on the spines. I’d been impressed, and pushed for more information (
as is my way
); he said that the color/pattern or the binding, the height and thickness, and the shape of the font(s) used in lettering the spine were sufficient markers to identify many thousands of the most common titles and printings. I had seen birders identify what to me appeared as squashed capital Vs, and wine-enthusiasts give me the vineyard and year of production of a wine from a sip, so who was I to doubt his word, but it had stuck with me over the years. Today, I hoped to use his gift to uncover secrets too-long buried, and possibly even to save a life.

I rapped on the glass of his front door, hard enough that he could have heard me in back, amongst all those piles of books, but his head poked up from behind a low shelf not ten feet from my knocking hand.

“Jesus, Tyler, you’re gonna break the window. Didn’t you say you were coming for nine o’clock?” he said when he unlocked the front door, and stuck his head out, looking first at the window, and then at his watch.

“Sorry, Burt, about the window and about the early arrival. I was up and finished my breakfast, and hoped that you might be here,” I said.

“And I am, so come in, come in, my boy,” Burt said.

I did, and if I had had Burt’s particular gift, I’m sure that I could have told you that his store didn’t look exactly the same as it had been during my previous visit, but I didn’t, so I couldn’t. I assumed that untold numbers of books had come and gone through his doors in the intervening time, like grains of sand in strong tides (
I seem only to get poetic about books, and even then, it’s bad poetry
).