Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham)

by Sheffield, Jamie

  “A high-speed crash and driving drunk is no big deal if you’re rich,” he said. “I drove by the next day, lot of us did once we heard. That fancy little car was about fifty feet into the woods, had plowed through a young stand of those crappy red pines folks planted after clearing woodlots back then, might have kept going too, but she fetched up against a big boulder, and that was enough to stop her, no matter how fast she was going. Tommy Reegan, who pulled the thing out of the woods a day or so later, said she must have been going 70 miles an hour. And if there was a deer, like she said, she didn’t swerve or brake, no marks on the road or grass; she went straight in like she just missed the turn.”

  “Interesting,” I said, although since it wasn’t likely related to the disappearance, I wasn’t sure that it was, in fact, interesting … but it’s been my experience that people keep talking/sharing/downloading information if you seemed fascinated by what they’re saying.

  “Sorta, young fella, although you tell me a time when rich people didn’t have different rules than the rest of us, and that I’d be interested in. Anyway, since we’re talking, let me tell you the other thing I remember from the Woodsmen’s Days. She and her friend had been drinking and dancing with various boys, not just fancy rich kids slumming in Tupper neither; some of the guys she danced with still had sawdust in their hair and clothes from competing that day, and some old enough to be her dad. She wasn’t teasing, just loved to dance is all. She spun and twirled from one to the next, like a ball of light … like she was the light, brightening up whatever corner of the room she was in. I never did work up my nerve to ask her, and at this end of my life, if I got any regrets, that’s one of ‘em. That night, in that sweaty tent, swilling beers with the rest of us, she was a god … goddess, I guess. This’ll sound crazy, coming from an old fart like me, but right at the end, before she left, she climbed up on the bar Brad Rousseau had knocked together that morning from rough-cut lumber and danced … for all of us … with all of us. She had a glow, and she knew it then; I think she saw me, back in the corner, and she smiled right at me, and my heart like to burst.” I could hear the old man come back through the 54.85 years to the present, and take a deep breath of age and the passage of time, before continuing.

  “I helped them search the lake and woods for her later … after. Her old man musta known someone who knew someone who owed a favor, and they had jets from Plattsburgh down flying low over all the lakes and ponds, making high-speed runs up and down, day after day, hoping the sonic booms would dislodge the body; but it never did come up. We never found her in the woods either, even with dogs. I saw guys from the beer tent, besides me, helping with the hunt; maybe we all loved her a little bit.” He stopped, and I thought he had run down, run out of story, but he had one more piece for me.

  “What I think, the reason nobody ever found her, was she was a goddess, and her time on Earth was done. So she left, simple as that. Can’t think of no other reason. We’d a found her; somebody would’a.”

  I thanked him awkwardly (as I do most things involving emotions, and especially love), and pulled the ripcord on that phone call, but not before he elicited a promise from me to get back in touch with him if my investigations turned up anything about Deirdre Crocker. I promised the old man, although I wasn’t sure that I’d be doing him any favors in sharing anything that I might find.

  My next call was also picked up as soon as the phone rang, and this person had an old and wheezy and tired voice, offering some pictures they’d found in a box from that year. They had a camp out on Church Pond, and would love to let me see them. I took the address, and we agreed on a meeting time for later that afternoon.

  My next call was to Terry Winch, at the Adirondack Museum, and I asked him if first thing tomorrow morning would be good for him. He allowed, cautiously (as he always sounds … about everything) that that would be good for him, given the way his week was shaping up (whatever that meant).

  My final call, as I finished off the last of the Chinese food was to Frank Gibson, which went to his voicemail, as it usually does. I tidied things up from my lunch and waited for him to call back; he did within three minutes (I don’t know if it’s a control issue for him, or if he is always busy when I call, but it doesn’t matter much as he always calls back). He said that he had a bunch of things to show and talk with me about, and that Meg, his wife, had made him promise to refuse to give it to me unless I agreed to come to dinner first. (Frank’s wife Meg mothers me, which is both sweet and annoying, but unavoidable when I needed something from him/them, as I very much did in this case). I agreed to stop by their place at six for dinner, hung up, and laid down for a nap (which would let both the Chinese food and the information from my first call settle and be digested by the systems that functioned within me, completely divorced from my knowledge or volition).

  Church Pond, 7/16/2013, 4:28 p.m.

  I slept for two hours and twenty-four (which makes 144) minutes, which is the thirteenth number in the Fibonacci sequence, and 13 is itself a Fibonacci number, and one of only three Wilson Primes, all of which I liked/chose to take as a positive sign about my upcoming meeting out on Church Pond.

  We had agreed that I would present myself at the given address at 4:30, and I was only a few minutes early as I pulled off Hoel Pond Road and onto Church Pond Road. Church Pond is a 15 acre pond surrounded by private land with a number of private camps ringing it. It is less than a mile from the northern end of Upper Saranac Lake, so it made sense that a person might have a camp on Church Pond and still be a part of the community, when it came to some of the parties and other events that may have been hosted during that summer. I was eager for some data to input, to prod the mysterious machinery in the back of my head into action. I had felt the beginnings of, if not discovery, at least interesting ideas, for much of the time that I’d been working on this investigation, but it seemed to stay just out of my reach, or dancing away from me as I stretched out for it. I hoped that with this person’s help, McGreevy it said on the mailbox at the head of the driveway as I drove past, I would be able to move forward.

  I drove past Mr. McGreevy’s driveway, skipped the next one as well, and pulled into the one beyond that; I was hopeful, but still planned on being cautious. Barry was sitting on the porch of the little cabin at the end of the driveway that I finally turned down, and stood up as I got out of the car. He cocked his ear, and I found myself doing the same.

  “Quiet out here. No noise. Nobody doin’ nothin’ on Church Pond today. Better not slam the door, eh?” he advised; I agreed.

  The pond was very quiet. There are no motored crafts allowed on Church Pond, and it didn’t sound as though anyone was playing with a chainsaw or a log splitter in anticipation of next winter, or hammering on a new roof or hosting a kegger. After a minute of standing there with my mouth slightly open (which I am convinced allows my ears to work better), I could just make out what sounded like a baseball game on the radio coming from the next camp over, in the opposite direction of my travel as I retraced my steps back to the McGreevy camp.

  I cut through the trees, taking my time, and watching where I placed each foot. Barry moved silently along beside me (which would have been impossible were he real, given his size and bulk). We both stopped every 30 seconds to listen for 30 before moving on again. I crossed the first driveway and saw a car parked down by the house, but didn’t see or hear anyone (napping, maybe, or reading down by the water, on the other side of the house). I paused for 30 seconds on the hump in the middle of the driveway, feeling the moss give beneath my weight, and the stones under the moss poking up into the bottom of my feet through the thinning soles of my sneakers. I could smell wood smoke from one of the camps around Church Pond, and the distant clonk of a wooden paddle on the gunwale of an aluminum canoe, but nothing was registering on my senses within a hundred yards or more, even with them working overtime in the stillness and my paranoia (or was it, since my caution had been more than justified this morning).

  I
kept going, moving and stopping, creeping and listening; feeling ahead of me with all my senses (and desperately trying to grow some new ones all the while), but finding nothing. I came eventually to the McGreevy driveway, stopped, standing, chest heaving while I worked to breathe as quietly as my adrenaline flooded system would let me. I looked up and down the driveway and saw nothing and nobody; listened for a minute and heard nothing … a squirrel or other tiny beast shifting behind a downed log near the head of the driveway, about twenty yards toward the next driveway along. I listened for it to move again, and heard nothing, so I turned towards the house.

  The house had an attached garage, and a reflection through one of the garage windows showed a parked vehicle of some sort. I could see a short stack of cardboard boxes on a low table at the top of the stairs on the front porch, a shoebox on top of a pair of the sort of box that held a ream of paper or hanging folders, back in the days before they simply shrink-wrapped everything in plastic. There was a pair of chairs on either side of the table, and what looked like a pitcher of lemonade and glasses on the table next to the boxes, as if Mr. McGreevy had just gone inside for a minute while waiting for me to arrive. I started walking down the driveway, and was nearly to the steps when both Barry and I noticed something at the same second (logically enough, since we’re both currently living in the same brain).

  “There’s no ice in the lemonade, and no sweat on the side of the carafe.” I would have said condensation, but Barry was right; Admiral Ackbar would agree, it was a trap.

  I turned around, hearing that I was too late even as my rotation started … I could now hear small noises on both sides. One of them stepped out of a latticed and mossy woodshed at the end of the porch, the other from behind a huge rock with ‘Welcome to Camp!’ painted on it by successive generations. Both men were wearing full suits (including masks) in 3D hunting camo patterns (that worked altogether too well at breaking up patterns and fooling the eye, at least to my eyes) and they each carried baseball bats. As I took them in, they shifted a few steps towards the driveway in a way that effectively cut off my retreat in any direction except possibly up the stairs and into the house (which didn’t seem likely, or smart). They closed to within 10 feet of me, and then paused, waiting/thinking/relishing.

  “Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don't you think?” Barry said, with perfect, if unappreciated, timing.

  “Jayne is a girl’s name,” I said in my best River Tam voice.

  “What the fuck did you say?” asked the guy on the left, clearly not a ‘Firefly’ or ‘Serenity’ fan as both Barry and I are.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t aware that I’d spoken aloud,” I replied, hoping to forestall the need for action by a few seconds while I tried furiously to make the correct choice. Right was the same guy I had seen the morning, I was reasonably certain, based on his height and build. Left moved and sounded younger, was both shorter and less muscled, but seemed to move almost too nimbly when he had slid from behind the big welcome rock, as though he were fresh from the factory showroom, possibly a serious athlete of some flavor … it made my decision easier.

  I had been hugging my sides since turning around, as though my chest hurt, and now I grabbed the cans inside my jacket and, before either of my potential attackers could react, (I believe that their outnumbering me, as well as having bats, had taken an edge off of their readiness, although in hindsight it’s also possible that they meant to scare, rather than beat, me … but I doubt it) I sprayed Left with both cans of ‘RAID WASP & HORNET SPRAY: 25 Foot Range’, mentally aiming for the bridge of his nose with both powerful streams.

  It took me only a split second to see that I had nailed him in the eyes and nose and mouth (even with the camo mask he was wearing, which was thin, nearly see-through stuff, and useless when called on to protect him from the wasp and hornet spray). Left dropped the bat, bringing both hands up to his face, and inhaling a lungful of the poison as he began a scream of pain/surprise/rage, which transformed instantly into coughing and vomiting as he fell to the ground hard, as though he’d been dropped from a plane. As my eyes took this in, I turned, still spraying, and ducked, assuming that Right would be swinging for my head; I was mistaken, he was captivated, watching Left squirm and scream in the previously quiet, and perfectly planned, ambush. My aim was too low on Right, since I was ducking a blow he had never launched, and he was almost a foot taller than Left. I tracked the jets onto his broad chest and quickly raised them to his face, now taking my time, and aiming one for his eyes, and the other a few inches lower for his nose and mouth.

  Right staggered towards me for a few steps, surprising and scaring me after the near-instantaneous results with Left, but fell to his knees an arm’s length from me. I kept blasting the spray into his face for another ten seconds before turning to give Left another dose. By the time the cans were both emptied, my two would-be assailants were throwing up into their camo masks between screams of pain, and raking their eyes and lips with clawed hands … it wasn’t pretty, and I didn’t know how long it would last, so I left, running back through the woods to my car waiting two camps over.

  I likely needn’t have run, but there was no way for me to be certain, so my feet decided for me; it was not the kind of question that you could ask the guys roaming the aisles at Aubuchon. My thinking had been to get some sort of mace or pepper spray, but that’s quite strictly controlled in New York, and I had no clear idea what could happen to me if I was stopped carrying it concealed in my car or on my person. Wasp spray, however, is freely available, and in the Adirondack summertime lots of people have it in the cars or on their person. I don’t know what the long-term effects of that level of exposure to the stuff would be, but as Dorothy might have said, if she were running with me through the wood, ‘if you can’t hang with the big dogs, then stay on the porch.’ I wasn’t a big dog by any definition, except that when it came to physical violence/intimidation, I was willing to cheat and fight dirty. My belief is that fighting/playing fair is for losers, and that except for playing Monopoly/Sorry/Risk (or something similar), there’s no reason not to take every advantage you can grab, even if it’s frowned upon by proponents of ‘fair-play.’

  “That was fucking awesome, Tyler!” crowed Barry. “Why didn’t we ever use bug-spray in the old days? You see those guys puking and crying like babies, Tyler my man; fucking awesome!”

  “It was a bit more … active … than I had imagined it would be.” I kept telling myself that if they hadn’t come looking for trouble, that Left and Right wouldn’t have found it, but I couldn’t stop replaying my internal ‘tape’ of Left screaming in higher and higher pitched registers.

  “You shoulda yanked off their masks, and seen who they were, or taken their pictures, or chained them to the porch or something.”

  “Believe me, I thought about it Barry, but in every crappy movie with masked bad guys, that’s when they grab you … and there were two of these guys, no telling when one could have worked through the pain to tackle me or something. It would have been tough to get a good picture anyway, with eyes screwed shut and vomit and blood and snot everywhere. I had some cable ties all ready to tie them up and let Frank deal with them, but they never touched me … I’d go to jail, or at the least get arrested for that … Frank’s got a soft-spot for fair play, and he’d be pissed.”

  I got into the Porsche, started it up, and motored out of the driveway, continuing around Church Pond the other way (so as to not have to pass Left and Right’s driveway, if they had managed to clear their eyes and throats), taking another route (Wallace Wood Lane) out and away from my unsuccessful information gathering session.

  SmartPig, 7/16/2013, 5:18 p.m.

  I did some quick thinking, and decided that I had time to stop at SmartPig before my dinner-date with Frank and Meg, also before Left and Right recovered sufficiently to ambush me in my own lair. I wanted to get whatever things I thought that I would need between now and the end of the investigation. I parked on Main Street
, outside the front door to the SmartPig building, blinkers going, and ran up to take care of things as quickly as was possible. Once inside the office, I locked/bolted/barred the door. I made sure that the back window was locked and secure. I grabbed a duffel and filled it with the following: my laptop, phone/electronics charging kit, a 12-pack of Coke from the Coke-fridge (it wouldn’t be nearly enough, but I didn’t want to weigh myself down with more at the moment), GPS receiver, digital camera, camping tarp, a few more days’ worth of clothes, an item I had ordered online a while ago after reading one of the Davenport mysteries by John Sandford (most likely I wouldn’t need it, but would feel silly if I didn’t bring it along in the Porsche), and a wad of money from my safe. The duffel, when zipped shut, could be worn on my back, which I did. I looped a 65-foot section of climbing rope around the radiator by the front window, and sat on the rope while leaning out the window to screw an eyelet into the outside of the window frame. Once that was done, I looped a 50-foot section of paracord through the eyelet, evened out both sets of ropes, looked both ways for SLPD cars, called out “Watch out below!” and dropped both ropes down to Main Street, ignoring amused/annoyed/frightened voices from below, and hoping for the police-free 30 second window of opportunity that I needed.

  Holding the climbing rope in both hands and looped around my body so that the strain was largely taken by my hips and back, I lowered myself as quickly as was possible down to the street below. Once I touched down, I pulled one end of the looped climbing rope as fast as I was able, freeing it from the radiator up in my office so it pooled on the street around my feet. I then grabbed hold of the looped paracord and pulled with a slow and steady force, hoping that the eyelet would hold long enough to pull the window down and shut … it did. Then I repeated the process of pulling one end of the looped paracord up and out of the eyelet, so that it would all end up on the ground at my feet; forty seven seconds after touching down on Main Street, I was throwing both pieces of rope/line/cord into the trunk of Mike Crocker’s Porsche.