Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham)

by Sheffield, Jamie

  He seemed surprised and straightened up and looked at the rear section of the main lodge, as if he could see through the walls, and ascertain whether or not Kitty was awake and ready to receive visitors.

  “So soon?” he said, and then followed it up, somewhat guiltily, with, “That’s great news, I’m just surprised that after 50 years (54.85, I thought, but didn’t point out) things could move so quickly.”

  I’m not modest, nor do I have an ego, in the sense that most people talk about when they use the word (although ironically, in the Freudian sense of the word, I’m mostly ego, in terms of Freud’s structural model of the psyche), so my reply was simply based on my assessment, “A different set of eyes/grey-cells/assumptions looking at the data in a new way were almost certain to see new things.”

  “I’ll stop in and tell Mrs. Crocker on my way through, and have someone ring Mr. Crocker. Will you need me to join you, or is it private?” he asked, perhaps curious to see/hear what I had turned up.

  “I can’t say, ask Kitty.” He nodded and walked off, a suit again, even in his sweaty running stuff.

  He turned, on the back porch of the old kitchen entrance, and said, “Why don’t you wait in the great room, that way I’ll know where you are when she’s ready.” I walked towards the lake, climbed onto the long porch, and after a long look at the morning lake, I headed back into the great room to wait.

  I sat for a quiet fourteen minutes, reading an e-book on my iPad, until Kitty and Mike arrived nearly simultaneously through different doors. Kitty came scraping and bumping her way through the door with her walker, and looking like she’d been up for hours, having an unpleasant medical morning. Mike had obviously been asleep fifteen minutes earlier, and looked ill (although, more likely, based on the off-gassing bourbon in his sweat, hungover). Despite his discomfort, he served his mother a cup of coffee before getting one for himself, and only then sat down (with a sigh and crash that suggested that he might not get up again for a long while).

  Both Mike and Kitty stared at me, waiting for me to begin, and explain the reason for my early-morning interruption of their routine, “I’m sorry to bother you so early, but I have some questions that can’t wait for a more decent hour.” Mike looked as though he might throw his mug at me, and it would be embarrassing all around no matter how it turned out.

  “I’ve made a bit of progress, and need your help before pushing forward in my research and investigations. I’ve got some pictures that I want you to look at and then tell me everything that you can about the people and places in them … okay?” I asked.

  As I finished, I could see them both gearing up to break in with questions (as I should have anticipated, but didn’t). Mike got there first, but deferred to his mother.

  “Tyler, I insist that you tell me everything,” she said … insistently (I mention this only because she was so adamant about it, in tone and facial expression). “Everything.”

  “Mrs. Crocker, I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to tell you everything. Things are moving, and based on my experience, I should keep pushing, rather than let it run down, and try to start again. Do you remember when I talked about informational/investigational echolocation?” Mike Crocker looked nonplussed at this term, and started to say so, but Kitty rode over his interruption with a combination affirmative and brief explanation of the concept (at which she did quite well).

  “Yes, well … I made some subtle (as well as some not-so-subtle, but why point that out) signals in the last few days, and got a mix of returns … some each of strong, weak, clear, and confused. My preliminary thinking is that Deirdre may have been taken by someone connected/related to Kimberly Stanton, the young girl with whom Deirdre was in a car accident during the summer of 1957.”

  “That’s preposterous! I remember the event and talk about it afterwards, my father made sure that she was fine, and that all of her medical needs and expenses were taken care of by our Family (the word ‘family’ was spoken with a royal emphasis in this case). Why on Earth would she, or anyone associated with her be angry with Dee or the family?” Mike asked this of me, and to a lesser degree, his mother. Kitty, in the meantime rang a small silver bell, a third of an octave deeper than the one that she had used during my previous visit, and when Anthony came in, held a brief one way exchange of information, whispered into his right ear; he left seconds later.

  “Why do you think this Tyler? What led you to believe it?” Kitty asked.

  “Kimberly was dying, Mrs. Crocker (I had no idea why I switched to a more formal mode of address, but I trusted my sub-conscious). She didn’t die until January of 1958, which is likely why nobody connected the dots earlier, but from the moment of the car accident, she was dying, and someone blamed Deirdre for it.”

  They both leaned back in (presumably) shocked silence, and that is when Anthony came back into the room with the cooler from the other day, still (or, more likely, again) filled with ice cold Cokes made with real sugar (as our neighbors to the north and south both do it). He poured half of one into a glass for Mrs. Crocker. When he had finished pouring, he offered me a can, and then scuttled back out again, taking her untouched coffee with him on his way.

  “I’ve been enjoying your vice, Tyler, and thought I might share one with you now. I’ve asked Anthony to get all of the relevant documents from his offices down in the city, and they will either drive or messenger up a copy as soon as is possible. Tell me what else you have found,” Kitty said.

  “Someone besides you still feels very strongly about the matter, and has become concerned with, and engaged in hampering, my investigation. I’ve had two encounters with persons intent on stopping my investigation, through violence (I had meant to add ‘if necessary’ when I started that sentence, but skipped it, since they obviously were ready to resort to violence from the first), which strikes me as odd in the extreme.”

  “Why?” asked Mike Crocker.

  “For two reasons, really. First, because it happened so long ago, that the person, or persons, guilty of her abduction are likely dead, which begs the question why would these people involve themselves? Second, getting back to informational echolocation for a second, doing nothing would almost certainly be better than doing anything so rash as trying to attack me to stop an investigation into a crime that was decades old.”

  “Why do you think that they would be dead … her, the people who took my Dee,” Mrs. Crocker asked.

  “You’re exceptionally long-lived Mrs. Crocker. If we assume that the person, or persons, who took her, were between the ages of 25 and 35, than that would make them 80 to 90 years old now, which is longer than the lifespan of most people living up here.”

  “Why do you imagine them that old, and not my age, or Dee’s, at the time of the … crime?” Mike asked.

  “The abduction and, excuse me for this insensitivity (I knew that I was about to be insensitive, but apologizing for it still seemed a waste of time and words), killing were planned and executed in a manner inconsistent with a crime of passion. This level of criminal planning is generally perpetrated by a person at the height of their mental and physical fitness, as it tends to be demanding in both respects.”

  A handful of mixed/associated thoughts struck me at this instant, not for sharing with the Crockers, but for my consideration later. The original crime must have been extraordinarily well-planned. It was held off on until it could be done right; and it was thought out sufficiently to avoid being caught or found or even suspected in the decades since the crime. This speaks of a great mind at work. The attacks on my person had been foolish and the result of overreaction; this speaks of impulsivity and aggression, someone thinking with their muscles. The fact that attacks had been perpetrated over such a lengthy time span, and with such diverse methodologies, suggested to me that I was dealing with a multi-generational conspiracy, with people of diverse schools of thought (as regards planning and execution of their revenge/retribution). I could suddenly picture two different minds at work, not just now and
then, but in both time frames … it was a reach, but it appealed to me, and fit what I felt about the crimes I was investigating (and involved in). As these thoughts spun around in my brain, I felt the need to move on to the actual reason for my visit with the Crockers today (the ‘report’ was largely window-dressing to cover my early visit to get their help).

  “That is one form of feedback that I’ve been getting in the last few days. Another is from my research. I looked through thousands of photos recently, and came up with these eleven that I would like your help with. Please look carefully at them, tell me who you see, where they are, and your thoughts, if any on the pictures. If you aren’t certain, feel free to guess, but tell me that it’s a guess.” I got out a tiny notebook, a pen to write notes with, and a sharpie to mark each picture (a small numeral, 1 through 11, up in a corner, away from details if possible).

  Photo #1 - July 1957

  “Oh, that’s Dee and I and the Steuer children, Gale and whatshisname,” Mike said.

  “Ruben?” Kitty offered, not sounding 100% sure. “A grubby little boy, and a poor sport, which is what we’re seeing in the picture; he must have lost the tennis game you were playing, and is angry about it.”

  “Yes, we’d gone over in the morning to play, and Dee wiped the court with them, without much help from me actually. Ruben Steuer was miserable about it; he had a bit of a thing for Dee, and had been hoping to impress her. Picked the entirely wrong game for that, as it turns out.

  Photo #2 - Summer 1958

  “Yes,” Kitty spoke up at once, squinting at the photo. “All of us paddled out to Tommy’s Rock for a picnic, and the Edelmans were already there. We joined them.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Mike said.

  “Your father had to jump before the two of you would even go near the edge, and he cut his foot open on a rock or mussel shell in the water; he bled all over the island, and in the canoe on the way home,” Kitty remembered.

  Photo #3 - August 1957

  “That’s the Taylor’s camp,” Kitty said.

  “The children with Dee and I are Cindy, Lee, and Amy, from left to right,” Mike said. “That was a cookout towards the end of the summer, they were leaving the next day, I remember kissing and groping Amy Taylor after dinner. It was quite a big deal for me, time and place, you understand.”

  “Amy, not Cindy, you’re sure?” Kitty asked Mike. “She seemed like a nice girl. And just where were you groping her, young man?” she said, with some actual disapproval in her voice.

  “In the boathouse, Mother,” Mike said with a straight face, which he ruined with a wink at Anthony when his mother looked down to grab her drink.

  “Look at the scowl on the handyman up on the ladder behind you children,” Kitty said. “Maybe he saw you two up in the boathouse.”

  “No, Mother. I told you, that all happened after dinner (he tilted his head for a moment, enjoying the memory, turning it this way and that in his mind, and evidently pleased, came back to the discussion at hand), and this picture was taken beforehand. I remember now, that guy staring daggers at Dee all afternoon and evening; he might have asked her out or some such.”

  Photo #4 - July 1958

  “The Turners came up for a few weeks that summer, the summer she disappeared, and that was a day-paddle we all took from Hoel Pond to Turtle Pond to Slang Pond, and then into Long Pond, over that nice carry, for lunch. That’s Moshi, our black lab, do you remember him, Mike?” Kitty asked.

  “Of course, Mother. I also remember that Mr. Turner had a fancy new camera with a timer, set it, tripped running back for this photo, and his wife teased him all afternoon, and for years afterwards, every time they came up,” Mike said.

  “He was a good sport about it, once he got over the initial embarrassment.” Kitty smiled (fondly?) at the memory, before getting serious again, perhaps remembering why we were here, looking at the pictures.

  Photo #5 - August 1958

  This photo showed a formal dinner in the great room, with everyone dressed in formalwear, including an uncomfortable and grumpy looking (and badly shaved) server. The picture had a stiff and awkward feeling, and it felt as though the people pictured in it were thinking about the older woman at the head of the table. Everything about the picture looked more like one hundred years old than the nearly fifty –five I knew it to be.

  “John was so angry at having to help with dinner service. He normally worked outside, keeping the buildings and grounds up to snuff, but we were short-handed that night, and Freddie’s mother insisted,” Kitty said.

  Photo #6 - July 1958

  “We took the little outboard over to Green Island to go off the rope swing and drink beer,” Mike said. “Dee and I brought Cindy and Lee Taylor, along with Cindy’s boyfriend of the week, Brian something. Also Gale Steuer, who, awkwardly enough, dated and re-dated Lee and I serially during that summer.”

  “Anderson, I think it was. Brian Anderson. We knew his parents; sweet boy, dumb as soap. He certainly looks grumpy,” Kitty said.

  “As I remember, he was showing off for the girls, and did an unsuccessful flip, landing flat on his back on the water. It nearly split his skin as I remember,” Mike said, smiling with no trace of kindness in his eyes.

  Photo #7 - Summer 1957

  “Father had some childhood nostalgia about paddling on the Raquette River, and one morning trundled us all off to Axton’s Landing,” Mike said. “We paddled down to the Crusher (he noted my curious look and cut himself off)—it’s the launch for fishermen halfway between the Wawbeek and Tupper—the guide who was supposed to meet us was an hour late, and Father wasn’t going to pay him.”

  “There was some shouting between them, as I remember,” Kitty added. “Silly really, it was a spectacular day, and we all went for a swim while we waited, then fed the ducks leftover PB&J sandwiches.”

  “Not really the point, Mother,” Mike said.

  Photo #8 - Summer 1958

  “Gloria Poulsen, and her brother, Monty,” Mike said, sounding happy/impressed to have remembered them.

  “His mother hated Montgomery being shortened to Monty. It was a family name that she was inordinately proud of, for some reason,” Kitty said. “Why is Glory so grumpy looking in this picture, Mike?”

  “She may have played the worst round of golf in the history of the Saranac Inn Golf and Country Club. We eventually had to beg her to just walk out the rest of the round. I’m sorry Tyler, you don’t seem to be seeing the best of us in these pictures,” Mike said.

  “I picked these photos specifically because the people in them looked angry or hateful, I wish there were more,” I said, which left Kitty and Mike looking oddly at me.

  Photo #9 - Summer 1957

  “Oh, dear,” said Kitty. “Here’s another one showing us and our friends at our worst. The Connors were up visiting, and we paddled down from Floodwood (Pond) to Upper Saranac (Lake), we had a picnic on that tiny island opposite Fish Creek Bay, and Dan tipped their canoe while getting out. He blamed Timmy and Dan junior for it, and complained about soggy sandwiches for the rest of the day.”

  Photo #10 - Early August 1957

  “This was a dinner at the Thompsons’ camp, Cayuga, just a few down from Topsail,” Kitty said, looking sideways at Mike. “Everyone had too much to drink that night, and a few people made some offensive jokes about locals.”

  Mike’s ear turned red, but he didn’t comment.

  Photo #11 - July 1958

  “We all stopped at the beach at the end of Middle Saranac (Lake), you know the one?” Mike asked. I nodded, not wanting to interrupt the flow of their memories.

  “Tim Connors was up again, staying with the Poulsens, and they had all come on the trip with us. Tim cut his foot open on a beer bottle buried in the sand, and fainted at the cloud of blood in the water. We teased him a bit much I guess, judging from this picture,” he said.

  By the time we had finished, I felt that the most promising photographs were numbers two and three, so I circ
led back to them, addressing both Kitty and Mike, “Tell me more about this guy, the grumpy one on Tommy’s Rock.”

  “We weren’t really friends with the Edelmans, never saw them much, except by accident, like this time; both of us arriving at the same time with the kids. There’s an unwritten rule when paddling or hiking, that if someone’s already stopped at a spot, you just pick another one; the Adirondacks is a big place, after all. But the rule is soft at certain places, and Tommy’s Rock is one of them, because the rock face that kids jump off of is kind of a group thing,” Kitty said.

  “The Judge is what people called him, even his kids, no idea why,” Mike said.

  “He’d been one at one point, early in his career, but then he went back to being a lawyer, better money is what he said when it came up. But he was older than me by at least five years, so he doesn’t fit your ages, Tyler. Also, he couldn’t have known Dee, or the poor Stanton girl,” Kitty offered.

  “Yup,” I agreed, but with wheels (or at least vaguely round things) turning/clunking/spinning in my head. “Now tell me this person’s story,” I said, pointing to the workman in the background of number three.

  They both shook their heads, and then looked at each other to see if the other was going to speak; neither was going to, so Mike stepped up, “I might have seen him at someone’s camp, but he wasn’t full-time at the Taylors. People would often ‘loan’ a caretaker to another camp for a day or a job, with the understanding that what comes around goes around, was my impression, growing up here during the summers back in the 40s and 50s. It’s all changed now, of course.” Kitty was nodding along with Mike’s description.

  “It’s funny though,” she added, “I remember this cookout, and nothing awkward or unpleasant happened; like in that picture of the dinner at Cayuga. I can still remember the way I felt when Tommy Thompson got drunk and said some nasty things about local help, and locals in general. This cookout though, at the Taylors, it was just nice and fun, and we did everything ourselves, everyone helping. There was no reason that man would have had to be angry with any of us.”