“Upon calling the hospital, Trooper King was told that there wouldn’t be an ambulance available for an hour—a multi-car accident in Raybrook tied everyone else up for hours—so he made the decision to transfer them to AMC in his vehicle, to facilitate quicker treatment of Stanton. Both women arrived at the hospital at 11:34 p.m., were checked over, received medical attention, and were released in the morning with their doctors’ blessings and a relatively clean bill of health. Bruises and broken nose and fingers and some cuts and such, but having gotten as lucky as a car-crash victim can be.”
He patted the folder, and continued, more informally, “I scanned through this stuff, as I assume will you, Tyler, and King’s notes clearly tell a different story than the final report did. The hospital lost the records in a fire, or reorganization, nobody is sure, but they’re gone. The doctors attending to the girls both died, and the one living nurse that I was able to track down was convincing about having no recollection of the event. I think that there was no deer in the road, that Deirdre Crocker was driving drunk; that being the case though, so what?”
“Were you able to talk with Kimberly Stanton?” I asked.
“Nope,” Frank said, licking some sauce from his fingers, “dead.”
“When did she die?” I asked, ignoring the brief look that Meg gave me, which suggested that I was ghoulish.
“Not until the year after the Crocker girl went missing; so, sad, but probably not related.”
Meg’s head snapped up, and she smiled at both of us. “Back in a minute. Wait right here. Have another pulled pork roll.” We did, the dogs followed Meg into the kitchen, where she made a call. She came back in 13 minutes (which worked out to 2.3 more pulled pork rolls … I split my leftovers between Toby and Lola … What?) with a satisfied, but sober, look on her face.
“I did it Tyler. I solved your case. You have to split your fee with me,” she said.
“Fine, you can drive the car tomorrow, I’ll come by in the morning, and we can swap. Now tell me what you solved and how,” I answered.
“There’s a ton of Stantons up here, especially in Tupper; I’m even related to some of them. I called my great-aunt Betty, she’s like a hundred. I asked her about Kimberly’s accident, and, of course she remembered.”
“Why ‘of course’?” Frank asked.
“Because it was one of those family tragedies that people carry with them forever. She was the bright and pretty one, ‘Kimmy’, the one who was going to college with her friend, Dee. But the accident changed everything. Apparently they didn’t have ultrasounds in every doctor’s office, much less ER back then, but if they had, they would have seen that she had slightly perforated her bowel. ‘Kimmy’ went home the next morning all right, but was back in the hospital the next week with a raging infection, ‘Sepsis’ Aunt Betty said, that pretty much ate her alive. She survived that round of infection, but there were others, and either the car accident or that first infection essentially destroyed her liver and kidneys. Aunt Betty said that the family’s sweetheart was poisoned from the inside very slowly, and painfully, over the next year and half, until she died, ‘a mercy’ Betty said, in the middle of January of 1959. The Crockers were helpful and responsive the whole time, Betty helped Kim’s parents keep track of the bills and expenses, and everything went to a law-firm in Manhattan, and was paid instantly, and without question. But the girl died as a result of the car accident, just in slow-motion.”
“And … ” I still didn’t have it all. “ What does that mean? Who took/killed Dee Crocker? Why would they do it anyway, when the Crockers had helped with Kim’s medical expenses?”
Meg looked over at Frank, who shrugged and rolled his eyes.
“Jesus, Tyler, you are capital ‘S’ stupid. It means that Dee Crocker extinguished the light, the hope, of the Stantons, or that particular line of Stantons. Something you probably can’t appreciate about life up here is that everyone is related, except you and other recent transplants to the ‘dacks; so knowing who kidnapped the Crocker girl would be almost impossible, ‘cause there’d be hundreds of people who felt wronged by her loss. Up here, especially after the war, families saw their kids’ futures tied to escaping the Adirondacks and going to college. It sounds like this girl, Kim, was the one that a whole bunch of people in the Stanton clan pinned their hopes and dreams on.”
“And … I’m still not there with you.”
“And … Dee Crocker took Kim, and their dream away from them. Investigators might have gotten there after Dee vanished if Kim Stanton had already died, but she hung on for another couple of months (five, I thought, not two, as the phrase ‘a couple’ implies), which was enough time for the investigation into Dee Crocker to all but end before the motive was made fully clear.”
“Okay, I’m there now,” I said, as we cleared the table and I helped Meg with dessert, ice-cream sandwiches, “so why no body?”
While we were still in the kitchen, I peeled and halved a sandwich, and gave the pieces to Toby and Lola; Meg looked horrified, but didn’t say anything. Frank would have rushed in and chastised all four of us at length for feeding them non-dog food (which seems a fuzzy line to me, Toby and Lola agree).
Frank was waiting, and smiled at me when I handed him two of the frosty treats. “Yeah, if you’re pissed enough at her to kill her, I can see that, but where’s the body. You shoot or stab her, either at Topsail or somewhere else, somebody’s eventually gonna find the body, unless you entirely destroy or perfectly hide it; neither of which are easy to do.”
Meg gave us both funny looks as Frank and I warmed to the subject, and each also broke into our second sandwich.
“In an ‘eye for an eye’ kind of justice, poison might make sense, but she was healthy until the day she vanished,” I offered.
As this thought sunk in, Meg and Frank (possibly inevitably, although I can’t be sure, I don’t think much about death or poison as they could be applied to me … it’s a waste of time) paused, and took a look down at the ice-cream sandwiches in their hand; then Lola farted and scared herself with the noise, and we all moved past the moment.
“Okay, Tyler, but looking past the good news of my wife and I doing your job for you, I have a concern, which I imagine that you share. Based on your ninja-ing down to street level from out of SmartPig this afternoon, I would bet the rest of this sammich that somebody has taken exception in one form or another to you looking into Dee Crocker’s disappearance,” Frank observed.
Meg thought about this for a second, and then shifted from fun to scared mode remarkably quickly. “Tyler is that true?” I looked into her eyes, long and hard, thinking about the masked men wanting to beat me with bats this afternoon before answering.
“Yes, a bit. I put out a number of feelers hoping for some feedback to help guide my next steps, and besides the stuff that you and Frank have helped with, there’s been some other contact. Some of it (thinking of the old man who remembered Dee, and probably Kim, at the Woodsmen’s Days beer hall) pointed me in other directions, towards other research/study. Other feedback suggests that there are people who would prefer me not to mess around with this; the speed and vehemence with which their ‘feedback’ has occurred would seem to support Meg’s great-aunt’s story, and point to someone not wanting old crimes uncovered.” I was glad that my lack of emotions made it easier to lie to those I care about, and who care about me.
“I’m worried about you and Hope, Tyler. Maybe you two should come and stay here for a while,” Meg blurted, and before Frank could raise his many objections to this idea (which says more about my speed than Frank’s thoughtful deliberation), I spoke up.
“Hope’s already staying with Dot, and I’ll be moving around too much for them to find me. I just didn’t want to leave it easy for them to break into SmartPig.” Frank breathed an audible sigh of relief, and Meg glared at him, unconvinced by my explanation and grumpy with Frank’s reticence at having me stay with them.
“I’ve picked out a spot to camp for the
next little while that’s nearly at the ends of the Earth. Nobody will find me there.”
“Not even Timmy Gillis? I heard that he found you the other night; found you and ticketed you.” He ended this with a small laugh; Frank doesn’t care about my overstaying the DEC 3-day limit in a spot, but he takes a bit of pleasure from it whenever I get busted. I thought of the Element parked at Ampersand Bay, and wondered how much paddling the ranger would be doing in the coming days looking for me … if I was a rueful or wry smiler, this would have been a good time for it.
“It was after two in the morning when he woke me up to give me the ticket. Scared me and … it took me a while to get back to sleep (I had almost mentioned Barry, and I think that Meg picked up on my detour, but I kept going anyway). Anyway, yes, even he couldn’t find me way out past Horseshoe Lake, and even if he/they did, I’m reasonably sure that I’m currently driving the fastest vehicle in the Adirondack Park, including floatplanes and helicopters.”
That led to questions about the car, many of which I think Frank asked just hoping to stump me, but my weeks of trying to be Niko’s friend by studying endless facts about the 993 had paid off. We all went out to look at the thing, and to listen to the roar of Porsche’s last air-cooled engine. I put the leftover-containing Tupperware in the back, and waved goodbye to Meg and Frank, circling their neighborhood twice to see if any lights pulled into my rearview.
West of Little Pine Pond — near Horseshoe Lake, 7/16/2013, 10:26 p.m.
I made a nice fast run from Saranac Lake through Tupper Lake on Route 3 most of the way (just taking advantage of the cut off by the Wild Center to avoid downtown Tupper Lake) then switching to Route 30 heading south for a bit. I was missing the driver’s side window in the cold night air, but actually enjoyed the wind more than I would have thought. I pulled in by the causeway over Rock Island Bay, a few miles outside of Tupper, and waited for ten minutes for pursuit before continuing for just short of three additional miles before turning right onto Route 421, which took me out to Horseshoe Lake and beyond.
I pulled the 993 down an increasingly unlikely series of dirt roads and paths until I had trouble projecting my location on my internal map, and then parked and set up my camp. Before going to sleep, I strung three loops of fishing line going out from my campsite in concentric circles (at five, ten, and 15 feet, roughly, from my belly button when I was laying down in my hammock); to these, I attached empty Coke cans with two pennies in each. I felt as though it was likely overkill, but nobody ever regretted being too safe (especially when stomp-y members of the Stanton Clan were on your trail). I went to sleep thinking about what I’d learned and seen and heard in the last few days, and how I could bring it to bear in my research in the Adirondack Museum’s archives to help further my investigation.
Somewhere West of Little Pine Pond — near Horseshoe Lake, 7/17/2013, 3:18 a.m.
I woke to one of the cans comprising my crude alarm system jiggling at 2:54 a.m..
“Fuckin’ deer! Go back to sleep,” Barry yelled from the direction of the thumps and crashes as the scared animal bounded away.
My mind raced, partly from unspent adrenal products racing through my system, but also in searching for significance, not my own, but in the time. I’ve always invented my own games (even when I wasn’t picked last, I didn’t like/understand or excel at games that other children played), and one of my longtime favorites has been numbers. I love numbers: their precision, their power, their span across fields of thought and endeavor. I love sequences of numbers also; I love the patterns and rules and seeing them pop and glow on the number lines in my head. 254 was tough for me to place for a minute though; I could feel neurons snapping and popping all through my head until it suddenly came to me … Lazy Caterers!
254 is the 23rd number in the lazy caterer’s sequence, which is an informal way to refer to the central polygonal numbers. It measures the maximum number of pieces that a circle (think reindeer, goat-cheese pizza) can be cut into with a given number of straight cuts/lines (for example, a reindeer, goat-cheese pizza could be cut into a maximum of 254 pieces with 23 cuts by a lazy/imprecise caterer, a neat one would make 46 similarly sized pieces with those same 23 cuts). I wracked my brain for a minute trying to think of the corresponding cake number (which is the same proposition, using a three dimensional cake, instead of a flat pizza or pancake, and allowing cuts in those three dimensions), and eventually came up with 1794 pieces … by the time I had worked it out, and decided to try it when the investigation for the Crockers was all settled, I was ready to go back to sleep.
“About time, you dick. That shit hurts my head, and, now I’m hungry, and we’re on the other side of the fuckin’ planet from the nearest pizza or cake. Go to sleep Tyler, you drive me nuts, but we’re safe way the hell out here,” Barry said as I was falling into sleep once again.
Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, 7/17/2013, 10:47 a.m.
I slept until it was light without further alarm, and had a breakfast of Tyler-Kibble and warmish Coke; I’d had better, but I’d also had worse (corned beef hash came to mind, as it always does at times like that, as an example of how food could be worse … it tastes to me exactly like cat food smells). I had slept last night with a clear view of the sky, but wanted to add a tarp to my hammock setup for a couple of reasons: it was supposed to cloud over today and possibly rain a bit over the next few days; and my tarp was camouflage colored, rather than the straight black (and slightly more visible) hammock alone. When I eventually puttered off for the day, I stopped a hundred yards away from my campsite to drag a heavy log across the access-road I’d camped at the end of, and felt more safe/comfortable, knowing that even I couldn’t see my hammock/tarp setup.
Zipping quietly through the morning fog that still covered the hamlet of Long Lake, I noted that Hoss’s Country Corner wasn’t open yet, but Stewart’s was, so I pulled in to fill the car with gas, and load myself down with junk food for a day of research. The smell of their egg and sausage sandwich seduced me while I was in line, and I got two of those in addition to the Coke, and egg-salad, and cheese, and candy that I picked up to fuel my body and brain. I left my bag of stuff with the woman behind the counter, and ran into their bathroom for some morning splashing and brushing that couldn’t be taken care of in the woods earlier; smelling and looking clean(er) couldn’t hurt my chances of getting access to the premiere collection of Adirondack artifacts and the help of those who kept/ordered/loved it.
Going back through the three-way intersection at Hoss’s, this time I went south and west out of town, towards Blue Mountain Lake, picking up speed once I left the main cluster of buildings centered around Hoss’s. The drive was pleasant and deserted, so I opened the Porsche up a bit, remembering Niko’s father, a tall man with wild white hair that blew out behind us like a cape as he sped through the lower west side of Manhattan’s quiet mornings with his son and me. He had always insisted on ‘warming the rubber’ with a series of gentle arcs across the painted lines on the road (‘those lines and lanes and limits are there for the lowest common denominator behind the wheel, Tyler, cabbies and tourists’ he had said, time and again), then pushing the gas pedal to the floor, and spilling out gales of maniacal laughter as the power pushed me/us back into the seat and headrest like a gentle but bossy God.
Coming around the last big turn before getting to the museum, I was nearly startled (which at 84 mph means killed) by a rafter of wild turkeys coming out of the town dump (really a transfer station, as no towns actually dump/bury garbage inside the Blue Line anymore). They were headed downhill, and back the way I had come, and besides one gigantic tom, there were at least a dozen other turkeys spread out across and down the road for 100 yards. In the Element, I would have lost traction and ended up in the woods, but the rubber was warm, and I kept my foot on the gas (possibly even increased the pressure a bit) and let the car grab the road and slalom through and around the extended family of birds. I could hear the Cokes and food jumping around in back, an
d made a mental note to let the soda sit for a while before opening it, but found myself enjoying the thrill. Most of the time, driving is a bit boring, mostly composed of waiting and braking and stopping; in comparison, this morning’s drive was all happening at the outer edge of what my eyes and brain and hands and feet could handle. I hadn’t touched the brakes, and wouldn’t dream of stopping. The last turkey, an immature thing not fully feathered out yet, kept walking across the road despite the noise and spectacle that the 993 and I must have presented, and we missed it by less than a foot (I saw it spin delicately around, as though it had been dancing with us, in the rearview as I pulled onto the last steep grade towards the museum).
I pulled into the museum parking lot, and drove up and around to the top of the raised parking structure … both for the spectacular view, and so I could keep an eye on the comings and goings of any people potentially interested in stomping me. Once the Porsche rolled to a stop, I stretched, unbuckled, and grabbed some food/drink and my Kindle to pass the time until my appointment with Terry Winch, Collections Manager. The Porsche kept running at a low idle, to keep the chill off, and to charge up my iPad and phone (I had a charger for both in my backpack, but wanted to start the day with them topped up). A few cars started coming by 7:30, and by almost 9 a.m., the lot around the side of the building was more than half full. Organizing/checking/loading the contents of my backpack one more time, I pulled down and out of the raised parking, and around/behind the sprawl of main building that housed boats and artwork, parked, and went in to find Terry.
Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) Page 14