Here Be Monsters (Tyler Cunningham)

by Sheffield, Jamie

  “So I guess he's really gone.” I said stupidly.

  “Yes, he's certainly gone Tyler Cunningham. He'll not hurt you or Sadie or anyone again.” I think that he had needed or wanted to do something, to lash out at those who had hurt his daughter, and helping me had given him the chance. When we got back to his house, me driving, him walking, Jacob loaded the back of the Element with the bread and preserves from Sadie, added a few bottles of wine (he didn't say what types, but smiled when I jokingly asked), and threw in a ginormous side of bacon with a wink and a chuckle. Once the car was loaded, he clapped me on the shoulder, the left one, and I cried out like a kitten that got its tail stepped on. He looked over and shrugged, “Sorry boy, but around here, if you're not bleeding to death, you get back to work after the women tend to your hurt, and forget it by dinner.” Having made me feel like a wimp for not being better already, Jacob shook my hand, turned, and headed into the house without another word.

  I was too tired to make it all the way home, but didn't want to have Jacob's whole community wake up to see my Element in the morning. I decided to drive part way back to a place where I could just tilt the seat back for a few hours and take a nap. I drove slowly east for a few miles. Once I got past the farmland and back into the low woods and bogs, I threw the fishing knife and wrecking bar into one of the dark ponds on the side of the road. I eventually passed a sign that let me know that I had crossed into the Bombay State Forest, a chunk of nearly 23,000 acres of reforested land (this fact leapt unbidden into my head, letting me know that I was starting my return to normalcy) where I could sleep undisturbed. I pulled over at the edge of a bog smelling of rot and mud (but in a good, natural, way). I edged all the way into the plow turnaround, cranked the seat back to sleep for a few hours, and dreamed of the fantastic tiramisu that I would learn how to make (and claim was an old family recipe) for dinner the following night with Meg and Frank.

  EQUILIBRIUM

  Bombay State Forest, 10:16a.m., 9/10/2012

  I woke up roasting hot from the mid-morning sun slicing in through the front window (turning my car into a greenhouse), stiff all over from almost eight hours of sleep in the car seat, and with my shoulder and pinky throbbing from abuse and neglect that I had bought on credit with adrenalin yesterday (and would apparently pay for today). I stretched and shook out some of the stiffness while I pee'd and put the last of my bottled water into a pot on an alky-stove for a bowl of oatmeal. I walked down to the nearby no-name pond to wash a bit and let my gravity filter make the water drinkable. Once a half-gallon finished dripping through the filter, I slammed a much needed liter of water, thinking, as I often do, that I can still taste pond even at the far end of the filtering process. I grabbed the last coke in the six-pack ring plastic, to wash the pond and oatmeal down, and feed my starving caffeine addiction. I had a bit of a headache, perhaps from the wine last night, perhaps from the day that preceded the wine; I added some Tylenol and Advil to the antibiotics and pain-meds that Dorothy had given me, and planned my day.

  I stopped off at the Price Chopper in Malone to do some shopping (based on my recipe research down in Long Lake for tiramisu) before heading south on Route 30, back into the Adirondack Park and whatever my life would be: post-Cynthia, post-gunshot, post-Tahawus, post-George, post-pigs. I called Dorothy on my way out of town, stopping at the top of the rise above the valley that the city crouches in, about 1000 yards shy of the place where I would lose cell-service for most of the ride back down to home. I asked her if I could use her kitchen this afternoon, and if she wanted to come to dinner with me. She laughed and said that she'd leave right now to meet me at her place, but I told her that I was an hour out, so she could take her time. I love the drive from Malone to Paul Smiths, it's different than lots of the other drives in my repertoire... more agrarian and with wider shoulders, so I don't worry as much about smacking into a deer; the only downside is that it only leads to Malone.

  Dorothy's apartment, Saranac Lake, 1:32p.m.

  It smelled like an Italian bakery and café, savory and sweet and sharp; also a bit like brunch in a saloon with a cat box in a back room; Dorothy's apartment always smelled a bit of cat: cat food, cat shit, catnip, and just... cat. The tiramisu was coming together nicely, which contributed to the cacophony of olfactory input. I had Googled and analyzed and read through dozens of recipes to pull together the common elements, ingredients and preparation techniques, and had come up with a good generic recipe. The trick in selling the food as an ‘old family recipe’ is to make it your own with some carefully selected alterations in ingredients that will make your version stand out, and if possible, please your audience at the same time (without seeming to suck up). I feel that I had been able to do just that with the recipe that I made: bourbon and maple syrup made it into my recipe, bacon felt like a “Bridge Too Far”, so I left it out (this time).

  The three cats that live with Dorothy provide an ongoing undertone of cat-funk (both in terms of smell and attitude, Dorothy would insist), and are always brutally conflicted the entire time that I am cooking; they love cheese and egg and cream, and hate me (as all cats seem to do). I tried to bribe them with the egg white in a bowl, but they took turns (one lapping while the other two watched for sneak attacks with concealed chainsaws) and started yelling at Dorothy to move the bowl into the living room (which she did). Dorothy has a tougher time believing that all cats hate me than she does that all dogs love me for some reason; I think that both are related to my somewhat dysfunctional human affect, although I can find no research to support the dog/cat dichotomy end of this theory. Most of the time when I come to Dorothy's apartment, the cats flee before me, and spend my entire visit complaining from the safety of the bathroom; shocked and appalled if I have to inconvenience them by actually using the bathroom. I've asked Dorothy why she doesn't have dogs instead of, or in addition to, the cats, and her answer is always centered around cats being able to thrive on neglect for days at a time, whereas dogs need care and the outdoors multiple times each day; this is quite similar to my reason for not living with a dog, except without cats entering the picture/discussion.

  With Grandma's Tiramisu chilling in the fridge, the cats in exile in the bathroom, and Dorothy sitting at her kitchen table, we talked while I cleaned a seemingly endless supply of bowls and the things useful for mixing and mashing ingredients in those same bowls (enough bowls and stuff that I spent a minute inventorying the piles of dirty stuff to see if Dorothy had slipped in some extra dishes for me to do as some form of facility-use fee). All of the bowls and mixing things seemed to be coated with the appropriate amounts of goo, so I let it go short of accusations. Once everything was clean and lying out on kitchen towels (I refuse to dry dishes, it just seems wrong when they will dry on their own, given time), I grabbed a coke out of her ‘everything-fridge’, as Dorothy calls it when mocking me, sat down and said, “Go ahead... ask... you've been very patient. I was going to hold some stuff back originally, but we're eating dinner with a cop tonight, and you probably have to know the truth in order to avoid it effectively enough to keep me out of the clink up in Dannemora.”

  “Well, I saw the two guys pull in to climb Panther, looking for the Tyler-cache that I hid under the big rock down past the summit. Then I talked to you, and chucked my phone into Upper Saranac Lake. That was yesterday morning... Now, tell me everything that's happened to, near, or because of you, since then.”

  I did, up to and including my perfidious (aka Grandma's) tiramisu recipe this afternoon. She waited until I was done and then laughed and told me flat out that there was no way she was coming to dinner at Frank and Meg's place.

  “I'm really not worried about George and certainly not about Justin and Barry coming up in a dinner conversation with Frank and Meg; I do, however, have concerns about Cynthia coming up as she was the one Frank originally told me to bring. We need to come up with something simple to move us past talk about Cynthia.”

  “We could tell them that we're engaged.” Dorothy m
umbled.

  “Dorothy, unless you mean you and Cynthia, nobody's going to believe it; and Cynthia was demonstrably heterosexual, so that's probably out too.”

  “I meant us, asshole. I had a boyfriend in High School.”

  “... and I bet that he knew you were gay before you did.”

  “Yeah, maybe...” she answered, tilting her head in the direction of the memory. “Anyway, I think we should stick with Boss Ben's presumption of a death in the family, that we haven't heard from her in a week, and don't know where she is... none of that is an out and out lie, and anything more specific or tricky ends up being difficult.”

  “Agreed.” and that's what we went with for the dinner... that and my world-famous tiramisu.

  Frank and Meg Gibson's House, Saranac Lake, 6:08p.m., 9/10/2012

  Dorothy and I arrived a bit before the announced 6p.m. invitation time, and Frank's face fell immediately when he saw Dorothy instead of the expected (hoped for?) Cynthia. Frank and Dorothy get along well enough, but she and Meg are very close and tend to talk around him in a conversation; Dorothy had predicted this response and brought a growler of UBU Ale from the Lake Placid Craft Brewery (a half gallon bottle drawn straight from the keg for local consumption) to help things run more smoothly. Meg made yummy noises in anticipation of the tiramisu, and I was almost knocked down by Toby, the new foster dog that was living with them. When I stumbled and recovered, both Meg and Frank noted how stiffly I moved, and that I looked tired.

  “I had a hammock suspension line let go the other night, and it dumped me on my left shoulder pretty hard... on a pointy rock too.” I answered, by way of explanation, hoping that the wimpy-sounding explanation would suffice to move us along to greener conversational pastures.

  “Hard to fall out of a tent.” Frank mocked me, as always, for my bizarre hammock-camping. Frank and Meg and I had gone canoe camping last summer, and he never missed an opportunity to try and convince me to come back to tents from the weirdness of hammocks.

  “True, Frank, but on most nights, I get a better sleep in my hammock than I ever did sleeping on the ground. There's supposed to be a frost tonight, and I can't wait to climb into bed and rock myself to sleep; if it's clear enough, I may lose the tarp overhead and watch the stars.”

  You've been out on Lonesome Bay for some time now, haven't you? Did you find a nice spot out there?” Frank doesn't really care if I stay longer than the three days I'm supposed to at any one backcountry spot, but he likes to poke. Still, though, he had seen my Element out that way on and off over the last week.

  “Yup, but also a couple of nights down in Tupper and one up near Rainbow Falls. It is about time to move though, I've been thinking about some of the state land on Kiwassa Lake... I haven't been out that way much and it might be nice at this time of year. I've also been thinking about heading out for a week to paddle around the shore of Cranberry Lake, camping as I go... a little vacation.”

  “Vacation from what? The toughest thing you face day-to-day is falling out of your hammock. It'd be great if you could find a way to use your backcountry skills and knowledge for something socially useful, you know... make a difference while you walk the Earth like Kane.” Frank paused, and Meg started to say something, but he cut her off, continuing. “There are things happening in the woods around here that I'm not happy about... I hear about them without knowing enough to do anything about it, and I'd like to change that... more to the point, Tyler, I'd like to ask you about a couple of things that you might know about, or be able to help me with.”

  I looked over at Frank, nodding and drinking a sip of the nearly frozen coke that Meg handed me. (Once she found out about my fondness for really cold coke, she started filling a cooler with ice and salt to lower the temperature of the cokes that she offers me each time I’m over for dinner; while they are sometimes crunchy, I appreciate the caring that the effort shows, and even somewhat like the salty taste on the rim of her chilled cokes.) I had picked up a weird vibe running between him and Meg earlier, when Dorothy and I had just walked in; Frank had started to talk a few times and she'd shaken her head minutely. It had worked for a bit, but Frank had something on his mind; it remained to be seen what it was, and how much he knew, or suspected, about how I'd spent my last week.

  In the brief respite that guzzling half the coke gave me, I darted my eyes around the room as subtly as I could, hoping for a signal in somebody's eyes. Frank looked serious and ready to talk turkey. Meg looked nervous and scared and a bit sad. Dorothy had a relaxed smile, but the smile didn't reach her eyes, and she felt... brittle, as if she might dive out a window and run off into the night if someone yelled “BOO!”. Luckily nobody yelled boo, and a quarter second later I got a cold headache, which offered my face something else to do but talk for another few seconds, while I tried to decide if my forehead was going to split open. I used the time to try and see ahead, around some conversational curves, to where he could possibly be going with this; I could feel Dorothy tensing and looking at me as she picked up on the weirdness too. I tried to imagine what Travis or Spenser or Parker would have done in this situation, but I couldn't remember it ever coming up, so I did the only thing I could think of; it was, in fact inevitable given the situation... I burped... loud and long.

  “Well... I... uh... what?” I handled the initial response phase like a pro.

  Dorothy looked to be edging towards the open window as a result of my response, and Meg jumped in before Frank could answer, “Frank Gibson, these people are guests in your house, and Tyler is not a police officer, and won't be involved in something that might be dangerous for him. Hammock-camping is plenty dangerous enough for him, clearly.”

  Dorothy processed what Meg had said, and relaxed a bit, as did I. It was obvious that they had spoken about something before we had arrived, and that it did not involve my being a ‘person of interest’ in multiple murders; it sounded like he actually might need my help. Meg thought of me as a dog-lover and artist and trust-fund orphan (all true), and ignored the other things that I occasionally did that crossed over into Frank's world. I was, in general, happy for our relationship to function on that basis, as I'm sure was Frank. In this particular instance, I was ecstatic that she still felt that way, because it meant that Frank hadn't given her reason to think otherwise (either by what he did or didn’t say, or the way that he had acted around her). This probably meant that I was safe with Frank, or at least that I wasn't in imminent danger of leaving their house in cuffs.

  “Dammit Meg, he's not the guy you think he is... or want to think he is. He's not a cop, but he's also not just a ‘trust-afarian’. I was gonna do all this after dinner, but since we started, I might as well grab him now, if we've got time before the lasagna's ready.” Meg looked a little put out, but not actually angry or scared; she grabbed the covered tiramisu and told Frank that he could have ten minutes.

  “Dorothy and I have stuff we can talk about, since you don't seem to want us here for your little talk... no, you stay, we'll go. Do you want me to take Toby?”

  “No Hon, we'll take him out back. Let me grab a mug from that growler, and we'll get gone.” He took the big bottle from Dorothy and disappeared into the kitchen to pour himself a mug. He was back in 45 seconds with a huge mug of the dark beer for himself and a freezing coke for me. We took Toby and went out into their fenced backyard for our talk.

  Gibson Backyard, 6:17p.m., 9/10/2012

  Meg and Frank lived on an acre. Their lot was roughly 40X120 yards, and they had fenced in about a quarter of the lot for the dog run. Over the years that I'd known them, they have taken in a series of foster dogs, in addition to whatever dog was living with them permanently (currently, an old golden retriever named Chester). Toby ran out the back door ahead of us and bounced over to fill Chester in on the excitement in the house (food-smells, visitors, Mom/Dad stress, etc.). Chester padded slowly over for a rub and thump from me, and one of the treats that Frank always had in his pockets when he was at home (and maybe at work
too, although I had no way of knowing that). Frank motioned with his beer towards the picnic table, sat down, and started talking without waiting for me.

  “I've been thinking about you some this week, actually wanted to catch up with you earlier, but kept missing you at your ‘Thneedery’... also out at your campsite… bad luck I guess. That thing with Hostetler's daughter... no, no, don't say anything Tyler, let me talk a bit... that business was a nastiness avoided in a pretty clean way... although I'm pretty sure that I'm happier not knowing too much about... whatever.” He took a swallow of beer, and didn't bother to wipe the slight foam mustache away, either unaware of it, or unworried.

  “Gregory Simmons is a good guy, and a good man... we do some hunting together, maybe you didn't know... we both grew up in Canton before I moved down here for work. Your name came up in a conversation about hunting out at his parents’ this fall, and he got quiet and a bit sly, and said that he owed you, big, but wouldn't talk about it. I've seen the same sly smile from a couple people that I've talked to about you over the years... not often, most people don't know you, or think you're a dot-com bazillionaire living like Walden in the woods.” Living like Thoreau in the woods, I thought, but didn't say. I was nearly breathless with fear, wondering where this was going.

  “But there's a small group of people, people you've helped with tricky stuff, or people who know those people, and they smile tricky little knowing smiles, and get defensive and angry with me if I hint around at you sticking your nose where you oughtn't, or operating as a detective without a license. People I've known longer than you've been up here, lecturing me on how you're their friend, just doing another friend a favor. It doesn't seem like money changes hands exactly, but I've seen those pictures you paint or your photos on some walls around the North Country, and there's a photograph in your office of you at Mona Krieder's house in Key West. I asked, and she said your stay was a gift, but she had a shit-eating grin on her face when she said it, so I figure that you did her a ‘favor’ at some time before she gifted you with a week at her place in the Keys.”