When I walked back to unlock and throw my stuff into the Porsche, I saw/felt her watching me walk back through the sparsely filled lot, and was a bit suspicious/surprised to see her make a call when I stopped by the 993. The Porsche was bumping its way out of the parking lot a minute later (the low-slung car had to straddle dips in the road that I just ignored, or didn’t even see when driving the Element). She returned my wave, but seemed to have her mind on other things, and was messing around with her clipboard and writing stuff down as I pulled out, although when I gave a last look in the rearview before turning left and towards Saranac Lake, it looked as though she was watching again, and speaking into her phone again.
I drove up past all of the great camps that I’d paddled past the day before, only much quicker, and completely unable to see any of the buildings or people, or the secrets they might hold from this side. A beauty strip of trees blocked the camps from the road (and vice versa), the trees and space absorbed the sounds and sights that might dispel the illusion of enjoying Adirondack great camp life of 50 or 100 years ago. As I neared the point where I knew the top of the lake was, I entered a series of turns that were both fun and challenging in the Porsche; and, channeling Niko’s father as best I could, I accelerated through the turns, rather than braking as my instincts told me to do. When I got through the turns, and was slowing down a bit to cross the golf course (I worried each time about a retiree intent on his play driving his golf cart straight into the road), I noticed a beat up white van closing on me, jouncing and bouncing as it came out of the last of the turns that dumped it onto the relative straightaway of the golf-course crossing, and right behind me. The van began flashing, as if for me to pull over and stop.
As soon as I saw it, I pressed the gas to the floor. I reconsidered a half-second later as the 400 plus horsepower that the 993 could deliver pushed me back into my seat. I brought the speed up until I was clearly pulling away from the van, and then considered the road ahead with my built-in mental map. The turn I wanted was less than a mile away, so I tried to open up the distance between the van and I a bit by downshifting and using the gears to help me grab the road with the car’s nimble power. I hit the right-turn signal only moments before turning left onto Fish Hatchery Road, then made another left onto a dirt road leading back into the woods, to a series of little ponds. I straddled the potholes and dips and mudholes in the road as best I could, but I heard the bottom scraping a few times.
A part of me had hoped that the van might miss the turn, but it was too easily visible (as was the speeding Porsche) and I could see it coming after me; only now I had just four choices, all of them dead ends. As I bumped across the train tracks, I could have turned either left or right down dirt paths that followed the tracks for miles, but even my Element had trouble on these paths, so I went straight. My next choice point was a fork in the road, the left led to Little Green Pond and the right would take me to Little Clear Pond. I had only a split second to think/decide, and picked right, to Little Clear Pond; it was, in my experience, marginally busier, and the road would be easier on the Porsche.
Having decided, I rocketed down the dirt road, way off on the left edge to avoid the biggest dips, but still having a jouncy and noisy ride. Barry was waiting by a pickup at the far right hand end of the parking lot when I jounced in, and I noted that there was nobody loading or unloading boats for a trip. I pulled in by Barry and grabbed a pair of the countermeasures that I’d picked up the previous afternoon; Barry sneered when he saw them.
“Tyler, what’s with the junior-varsity solutions buddy? Don’t you remember last year? How did your shoulder (where Justin, Barry’s partner, had shot me) feel all last winter in the cold?”
“Shut up Barry, it’s possible that I have a broken tail-light or a tire going flat, or he needs directions. I don’t want to hurt someone who may need my help, or be trying to help me.” This noble line of reasoning died in my throat as a trickle, as the van parked sideways across the entrance to the parking lot, and the driver got out, wearing a balaclava that hid his face entirely.
“You were saying?” Barry said. “I bet you wish that you’d grabbed what was behind door number two now, don’t you.” As he said that I looked on the floor behind the driver’s seat at another of my self-defense ideas/items, and indeed wished that I’d grabbed it.
“Well, this is what we’ve got, so get ready,” I said, to myself really, as Barry had nothing to worry about from this guy alive or dead.
“What did you say, Mr. Cunningham?” said balaclava-guy, who was now about thirty feet from me, and must have heard part of my discussion with Barry. It was not particularly heartening that he knew my name … it eliminated the possibility of a mistaken identity (although that had, admittedly, been a long shot even before he opened his mouth).
“Nothing. What do you want? What can I do for you?” I asked, in a voice that barely betrayed the adrenaline thumping through my heart and brain and lungs … I felt that every part of me was pulsing/jumping/humming in time with my heart, which was way up over 100 bpm (I forced myself to stop panting for a few seconds to count and extrapolate … 132).
“You’re sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. Stirring things up. What you can do for me is leave this shit alone! Forget the Crocker bitch and leave town.” I wondered briefly if he was referring to Deirdre or Kitty, but realized that it a) didn’t matter much, and b) would just push an angry masked man further if I asked.
“Okay,” I said.
“What?” the masked man asked me, clearly ready for some other, perhaps movie-macho answer/repartee.
“Okay. I was doing this as a favor for a friend, but I don’t need this. I’m out.” I shrugged and half-turned, as if to get in my car, not entirely sure if I meant it ... hoping that I didn’t.
“Stop!” he shouted (argh, I thought to myself, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Barry smile and nod, either knowingly or approvingly, I couldn’t tell). “The time to get out painlessly was before this morning, before you started asking questions. Now you get a stomping.” Barry smirked a bit at this, and pantomimed stomping and grinding something beneath his heel, then shrugged as if it were bush-league in the world of thuggery. The man started towards me, cracking knuckles and shaking out kinks in his arms and shoulders as he closed the distance between us.
I tried to peer down various probability hallways for a better way of getting home without getting hurt, couldn’t see one, and so pulled both pins and yelled as loudly as I could, “You’ll never take me alive … GRENADE!!!”
I’m not proud of it, but I was reasonably certain that it would give him pause for a second while he sorted through the shouted and visual input. There were objects bouncing and rolling towards him on the uneven ground, and after years of movies where people sometimes have grenades, he might have even convinced himself that I had thrown a pair of grenades at him. He reversed his progress and stutter-stepped back a few half paces, while his brain chewed on all of the data; that was exactly what I had been waiting/hoping/praying for … I turned and ran at full speed into the woods and away from him.
Of course they weren’t grenades, I got them at Aubuchon Hardware (not my shady underground ex-military contacts, which parenthetically, since these are parentheses, I wish that I had … not for grenades, but because it’d be cool). They were a pair of personal safety alarms, rated to scream in alternating tones and pitches at 130 decibels; I heard them begin to shriek before I made it into the woods. I had been expecting the noise, and it still came close to scrambling my thoughts (which were simply ‘run’); I was betting that even if he had figured that they weren’t the exploding type of grenades, he was trying to fit his brain around the new information involved with sound grenades. There were people around somewhere … at the campsites ringing Little Green Pond, at the hatchery, hiking the trails all around us ... somewhere. He was a man in a mask, with his van blocking a parking lot; he had new problems besides me, and I was willing to bet that he wouldn
’t try to catch me, since I had to have at least a five second head start, was quick and wiry (compared to his strong and brawny, which is awesome for stomping, but not so good for running people down in dense woods), and wasn’t doing anything wrong in the eyes of anyone who we/I happened to run into.
Just to be on the safe side, I kept running and dodging my way through the woods for a few hundred yards before I stopped. By then he had silenced the noise-grenades (by stomping I was willing to bet), and it was quiet enough in the woods so that I would have heard his sounds of pursuit, if there were any to hear … there weren’t. I thought that I could hear the sound of glass breaking, then a car starting and eventually receding. I (my aching lungs and wobbly legs, really) decided to wait in hiding for a few minutes before heading back to the parking lot.
“Boy, Tyler, that was really impressive how you ran away like that. Really taught him a lesson he’s not likely to forget. Back in the ‘Sand Box,’ we called that ‘retreating with extreme prejudice.’ Hah!” I doubted that Barry had served in the military, but kept it to myself, as I didn’t feel like trying to score points off of my imaginary friend just then.
“Barry, shut up.” He did, although he was still chuckling to himself every few seconds. “Did I get out of that shut-ended situation without getting ‘stomped’? Was I able to avoid shooting anyone? Do I live to fight another day? I’m going to consider this a win, and if it will make you happier, I’ll go with the heavier countermeasures next time … if there’s a next time.”
“There will be. Mask-boy came ready to play. So are we going to go back and ask the lake-greeter about who she called?” I had gotten there as soon as the van came into my field of vision, so it only made sense that Barry had as well.
“Yup, but I bet either of us can think of ways that it was done that won’t leave a trail back to him. Still though, better to try and fail, than to not try, and miss something easy.”
I walked slowly back, as quietly as I could manage (which honestly, was pretty quiet ... what I lack in brave and strong, I make up for in quick and quiet). I backtracked the dirt road a bit, looking for the van or the guy, and could see neither; I snuck up on the parking lot, and sat watching it for twenty minutes … nothing. I broke cover and made cautiously for the Porsche, ready to run again if needed (or even if need was hinted at); it wasn’t.
The man and van were gone from the pond (the fact that this sounded like the beginning of a nursery rhyme didn’t make it any less gratifying or satisfying … or confusing). Playing the scene back in my head, I could now see the faded printing on the side of the van; it had been one of the junkers from Hickok’s Boat Livery, roughly 1.6 miles away. His vans schlepp people renting his boats all over the area, and are ‘borrowed’ by locals wishing to prank Hickok, because of his well-known policy for keeping keys in the machines. They’re so run down and well-known in the area, that nobody would worry too seriously if one went missing for a couple of hours during some summer day; when locals see the vans left somewhere, they simply call Hickok’s and tell them where to pick it up. My assumption was that following up on the van was a non-starter, but I made a mental note to get there sometime soon, today if possible, to speak with whoever had been around.
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 out 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).
Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) Page 11
