“Are you coming here Tyler?” she asked.
That stopped me for a second. I had certainly been planning to for the last eight seconds, but now that I’d paused to think, I knew that I couldn’t. As soon as he went to see Meg, and realized how dumb he had been to confront her like that, Reineger would try and figure out a way to cut his losses. He might kill the people (if there were any) in his cells … or simply fill them in with cement or dirt or dynamite. I had to get going and know what I was doing before I arrived at Juniper Bay on Upper Saranac, or I would fail the Crockers and all of the people who had lived, and died, in those oubliettes over the years.
“No, but you have to believe me that it’s for a very good reason. Frank will be there soon, and I’ll be there in a few hours, but there’s stuff that I have to do first. Please tell Frank to stay with you and the dogs at your house until you hear from me … okay?” I asked.
“Um, okay, if you’re sure Tyler.”
“I’m sure. Gotta go Meg. Call the Mullanes now. Bye,” hoping that I sounded more certain than I felt.
I dialed Frank’s cell, and waited through two rings, while he probably felt around for it on his passenger seat.
“Meg?” he asked.
“No, Tyler. I just got off the phone with Meg, and the Mullanes are coming over. They’re going to meet Reineger together in the driveway, and the Mullanes will stay until you get there.”
“Thanks, I guess, although she got into this because of you.”
“I know,” I said, “and I feel awful about that, but she’ll be fine. He’ll realize he’s making a mistake as soon as he sees other people there.”
“Okay, so what’s next?” he said. One of the things that I like about Frank is his ability to set a problem aside, and to compartmentalize ...hence, ‘what’s next.’
“I need a favor, Frank. A pretty big one.”
“What?” he asked.
“You know how we were joking about me having flashers for the Porsche earlier?”
“Yup, and you….” He trailed off.
“I have one, and I need to make an emergency run from Potsdam to Upper Saranac Lake. Can you set that up?”
“Jesus, Tyler, are you going through Tupper?”
“Nope. I think it’ll be quicker and less populated going the other way … 11B to 458 to 30.” I said, picturing the route/map/roads in my head.
“Tell me what’s happening, what you’ve found Tyler,” Frank said.
“There’s not time now, and even if I could explain it all, it’s not enough for a cop to risk his career on … not with the kind of people/money involved. Just make the calls, Frank,” I answered.
“I’ll make the calls as soon as you hang up. Do you need me to meet you, wherever?”
“I think it’d be better all-around if you stay home with Meg. I’m 98 percent sure, but there’s an outside chance I’ll be embarrassed … and then incarcerated.” I paused, but he was just listening. “If I’m right though, tomorrow will be a really interesting day for anyone with thumbs and a TV or radio.”
“And I get to hear everything when this is all over, including stuff for my numbers wonk down in Albany?”
“Yessir, as soon as I’ve given my report to the Crockers, you’ll get everything.” I mostly meant it, but would figure out the editing later. I could see the form of an unhappy-looking Barry stuffed into the passenger seat of the Porsche, and knew that I had to get going … the clock was running … out.
The pump stuttered to a stop, and I flipped my phone closed. I ran inside to pay and grab some supplies … food and drink and a couple of other items that I could hear Barry shouting to pick up as well. As I was handing my credit card to the attendant, I reconsidered, and paid with cash instead … just to be on the safe side in case things went sideways when I landed at the far end of my drive.
I dialed Dorothy as I peeled out of the Quik-E-Mart, and went quickly through the details of what I wanted, as I squealed and roared my way noisily through town. Once Dot and I were done (she already knew what she was supposed to do, I just gave her the go-ahead), I plugged the dashboard flasher into the lighter socket, jammed it up against the windscreen, and pushed my foot down towards the floor, feeling the 993 leap forward like a cheetah on speed.
The wind was howling at me through the broken driver’s side window as the car hunkered down and sped across the flat farm country to the north of the Adirondack Park.
Route 30, near Camp Juniper Bay, 7/19/2013, 7:31 p.m.
Once I got through Potsdam (a nightmare of honking and lights and powerslides and, surprisingly, no accidents or policemen stopping me) and onto 11B, I toggled the high-beams on, and let the Porsche off its leash. I was stuck with a horrible time of the day for a high-speed run, and the shoulders of the road weren’t as wide as I would have liked them, but the surface was dry and clean (after a rain a few days ago), and I didn’t see another car for most of the ride. A mile outside of town, I moved the low-slung car so that we were straddling the yellow lines, and went over the route ahead of me, using my mental map to help keep track of my progress back down and into the Park, and towards Juniper Bay.
“Pair of eyes, left, 300 yards,” Barry said, calmly. I could see the deer on the side of the road, likely sampling some clover. I gave a blast of the horn, and drifted a bit to the right, watching it bound back up into the woods away from the storm of noise that Barry and I were pushing down the road at a bit better than a hundred miles an hour on the straightaways. (I imagined that the deer had seen us dopplering towards it in a red-shift, and fading in the distance a split second later in a blue-shift of near-relativistic speeds).
The 993 had four-wheel drive, knobbly tires, and a whale-tail that helped to push the speeding car down onto the road when it tried to Bernoulli up and off the road surface, all of these worked together to grip the tarmac like nothing I’d driven before. We caught air a few times, going over bumps or rises or poorly graded turns, but I trusted the car to catch me, and it did each time, grabbing the road with an angry squeal and pulling me into the next turn. Normally I get bored driving, as the two-dimensional field of play and low speeds keep things very predictable and use only a small portion of my brain; but, driving at top speed through the twists and turns heading through an Adirondack night was the very antithesis of regular driving. The high rate of speed kept me at the very edge of my reaction time (especially given the relatively short effective range of the 1980s era headlamps); and even in the cold from the broken window, I was sweating and aching within a few minutes from the stress of the drive.
“Holy Crap, Tyler! What are you trying to do? Kill yourself for a stranger? The Crocker girl’s most likely been dead longer than you’ve been alive,” Barry said, from the passenger seat next to me. Ordinarily he could not possibly fit into the Porsche, but I guess that my brain needed him … so there he was, scaled down a bit perhaps, but still seeming as large as when he was alive and trying to kill me.
“Reineger hadn’t gotten to Frank and Meg’s place yet, and he’ll be there for at least a few minutes before he comes to his senses. It’ll take him 20 minutes to get back to Juniper Bay; but that still beats us by … 20 minutes, even driving this fast. Dorothy might buy us the extra time, but I hate to count on it.” Saying this, I pressed incrementally harder on the gas, and felt the car push me back into the seat a bit more assertively.
I dropped off of 11B, and into the hard right hand turn that put me on 458, heading south into the empty northern end of the Park, not really looking at the road (things were moving too fast for that now). I was trying to take in the whole picture in soft focus, letting my peripheral vision and some primitive chunks of human brains that are particularly tuned to movement, sweeping the car back and forth across the blacktop in response to stimuli/input that I was barely aware of on a conscious level. I was in a place, traveling at a speed, beyond being careful … if I hit a deer (possibly even a rabbit or a crow) at this speed it would be fatal. Knowing that, a pa
rt of me relaxed, and was able to think about the likely endgame that was fast approaching.
“If you want to save the princess in the tower, you’ll need to go in hard, Tyler. You’re not running away from the bad guys here, you’re storming the castle … and these guys outnumber and outweigh you, and probably have you outgunned as well. It’s like that saying, ‘if you want to make an omelet, sometimes you have to kill a great camp full of crazy kidnappers,’ funny how often those old sayings are true,” Barry said, with a guffaw.
At great personal risk, and with no possible benefit (since Barry is a figment of my imagination), I turned to stare at him for a full second before giving my attention back to the road, swerving minutely to avoid a frost heave on one side of the road as we roared down the long hill into tiny and empty and dark Santa Clara. We rattled and thumped, very briefly, across the old metal bridge, momentarily in the pointless glow of a few streetlamps, and then were off again, through the emptiest stretch of road we would hit that evening.
Wide shoulders, great surface, guardrails, and long straight sections of road allowed me to bump my speed up to 140 mph for nearly two miles, before I saw the sign for Route 30. I slowed to 60, honking and flashing, and slid through the gravel and dust at the stop/intersection, thankful for low traffic density on the road between Saranac Lake and Malone. I was able to keep my speed over 100 mph from the 458 turn, until I reached Paul Smiths, at which point I had to slow for some traffic, which I flashed into pulling over while I zoomed by them.
The 993 flew over the road surface, not like a cheetah but like a snake, invisibly syncopated parts working together to support movement nobody would believe under normal circumstances. I knew the specifications of that car, had known them for years, but until that foolish high-speed run I never understood what they meant when taken together, as a whole. The four-wheel drive, ridiculous horsepower count (424 in this model), turbocharger flooding the huge chambers with blisteringly hot air to enhance combustion, and aerodynamic shape, all worked as one to throw me down the road so fast and so smoothly as to defy the imagination.
At Paul Smith’s College, I was presented momentarily with a choice, but my body decided on the back road … opting for less traffic over better surface (Donnelly’s Ice Cream would be crowded, and that 90 degree turn onto 186 would have been a killer, so I guess that the unthinking, or at least unconscious driver within, made the correct decision). The last 13 miles were twisty and noisy and the cabin of the car filled with the smell of overheated gearbox, as I used gears more than brakes to get through turns while maintaining as much momentum as was possible.
I could see a glow through the woods, and smell smoke as I approached Juniper Bay … Dorothy seemed to have been minioning according to plan in my absence. I killed my flasher, switched to low beams, and dumped the Porsche into the woods via a wide trail leading back to the Colgate University camp’s tennis court, on the non-lake side of the road a few camps down from Juniper Bay. On my way out of the 993, I noted both the time and the odometer, and as I was preparing to leave that magnificent (and most of the time, pointless) vehicle, I figured out that I had made the journey from up near Canton at an average speed of just a hair below 90 mph. I was out the door as soon as the car stopped rolling, grabbed stuff I’d picked up from the Quik-E-Mart and shoved it into a backpack, and ran through the dark woods towards Juniper Bay, Barry moving (with good reason) like a ghost through the forest. I could hear the Porsche ticking and clicking and cooling behind me, the crackle of fire and shouts of firefighters from the burning boathouse, and the noise of my passage through the woods, my own harsh breath sounds and sticks breaking under my feet as I hurried towards the caretakers.
Camp Juniper Bay, 7/19/2013, 9:04 p.m.
I had told Dorothy to come through the woods of the camp to the south of Juniper Bay, which had had workers but no owners/renters the other day when I had scouted things out. Sticking close to the shore and scrambling northwards, the first building she would see was the Juniper Bay boathouse, and she had been told to watch the upstairs from a distance for five full minutes for signs of life before checking it out (we weren’t in the business of hurting people … on this outing … or at least she wasn’t). If it seemed clear, she should have checked out the upstairs for Edelmans before heading down to the boathouse proper to get what things she needed and hadn’t brought along.
These boathouses are home to ... boats, of course … but beyond that, they are often home to a pump for getting lakewater up to a holding tank somewhere, along with some tanks of gas/oil mix and light repair tools and equipment for the boats. I had told her to wear gloves to prevent the unnecessary spread of DNA/fingerprints, and to move about as quietly as possible in the first few minutes of her assignment (after that, it likely wouldn’t matter if she walked on whoopee-cushions for the rest of the night). She had specific directions on how to prepare the boathouse, and then on how to get out.
We joke about it (or she does … I don’t really understand jokes, or humor), but Dorothy is the perfect minion. She follows my direction unless she thinks I’m overlooking something, or that I’m wrong from a big picture point of view, in which case she questions/redirects me in (what she perceives to be) a better direction. She’s neither amoral nor immoral, just differently moral than other humans that I have met in my time on Earth. She cares deeply about some people and places and things and ideas, and will do whatever she thinks is necessary to protect them. Kitty Crocker and I are on her list of cared for people, as is the concept of freedom from slavery and abuse (I had told her a bit about what I suspected was going on at Juniper Bay early on, and she signed on for whatever it took to make things right). So I knew that she would do everything we had talked about carefully and with precision before lighting the Juniper Bay boathouse on fire.
The boathouse was the best building to burn at Juniper Bay for a number of reasons. First, it was highly visible from the lake, so people all around the north end of Upper Saranac Lake would quickly call the fire department, and be able to accurately tell them which camp to send the trucks to. (People know the camps from the water at night by various indicators: number and pattern of lights, shape of roofline, position relative to other camps or specific old growth white pines, etc.). Second, the boathouse tends to be the furthest away from other buildings, among all of the buildings at a great camp, so the fire isn’t likely to spread. Third, the responding trucks can easily run hoses down into the lake to keep their tanks full while fighting the fire. Most importantly, the boathouse is about as far away as you can get from the garage/workshop, and the caretakers’ house, which were the places I had business tonight. If everything went according to plan (within reason … nothing ever seems to go exactly to plan), Dorothy would have exited the boathouse by climbing down into one of the boat slips (there were three if I remembered correctly, which I did) and swimming/crawling in the shallows back to the woods between Juniper Bay and the camp to the south of it. She’d be less likely to be seen, could avoid the possibility of getting trapped by too-quickly spreading fire, and would be wet and shivering in her car within a few minutes (before much hue and cry had been raised). She must have turned left out of the empty camp’s driveway, and headed towards Tupper, because I hadn’t passed her on my way in, and assuming no flat tires or random traffic stops, she might even be home now, changing out of wet clothes and telling Hope that I’d be home soon.
There were already a number of fire vehicles down by the boathouse, judging by the lights and sound, and as I sat in the woods just behind the big garage/workshop, I watched another few vehicles come down the driveway with sirens and flashers going. All of the attention was focused at the waterfront, which was just how I wanted it … the tough part was knowing the time-frame that I had to operate in.
I had told her a bit about Edelman’s involvement in the 1958 kidnapping and my need to break in to confirm my suspicions. She signed on for whatever it took to make things right. I had originally set up the idea of
a fire with Dorothy because a distraction is preferable (in my book) to a confrontation (which Barry’s dark, and imaginary, bulk in the woods next to me was a constant reminder of), but it had become a necessity when Reineger figured that I was close. When he went over to ask Meg about my/her investigation, (my working hypothesis was that one of Meg’s relatives spoke with Reineger about the questions relating to Kimberly Stanton, he figured that I might be closing in on them, and acted foolishly to confirm what I already suspected), he figured he needed to act. The next logical step for them would be to get rid of the evidence (any prisoners that they had in their oubliette), and I had needed to delay that action, so I unleashed Dorothy on the Juniper Bay boathouse. It would distract everyone for a time, but it was hard to say exactly how much time I had before things got back to normal (or as normal as things ever were at Juniper Bay).
“There are two ways to do this, Tyler, like a pussy or with some balls,” Barry said from next to me in the woods, behind the garage/workshop. He tends to see/express/filter the world in this binary fashion. In his worldview, women are passive and men act; I don’t/didn’t exactly fit into his worldview, not being anatomically a woman, and lacking many of the attributes that he associates/associated with being a man. “You can sneak in and hope the Reineger boys won’t catch you while you look for and then release the people in those cells, or you can be a man and take command of the situation, do what needs to be done. Like you did last year in the mine (when I had killed Barry and his partner, Justin), not tiptoe around like some half-assed cat-burglar.”
I had been tempted to try and sneak in and out, to rescue without confrontation. I was scared … scared of how such a confrontation might go. I didn’t want to kill anyone, I certainly didn’t want them to kill me, and parlor tricks like the screamers and the wasp spray wouldn’t give me the edge, or the time, that I needed to get done what I needed to do.
Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) Page 23