Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (16 page)

“The name manila folder comes from the fiber originally used to make th
e folders, manila hemp. Manila hemp is actually derived from the Abaca, or Musa Textilis, plant, a relative of the banana, not at all related to cannabis, and the name Manila refers to the fact that the Philippines was, and still is, the country which produces the most abaca fiber. The fiber is harvested from the trunk or pseudostem, and now-a-days it is most commonly used in the production of teabags, not manila folders.” I smiled at him (
a #8, sucking up and obsequious
), and he looked up at Meg helplessly as she came in with the huge bowl of salad.

“How?” he said to the room.

“You try to stump me with something every time I come to your house; I could see you thinking about the folder, and wanted to preempt with one that I knew, rather than wait for you to pick something I’ve never read up on.”

Meg beamed at me with an angelic smile, and asked, “Tyler, how and why is a second date different from a fifth date; and how would the answer differ for a 15 year old versus a 21 year old?” Frank stood up to get the wine bottle, refill her glass, pausing for a casual high-five before returning to his seat … I was speechless. Frank basked in the glory of my embarrassment and humiliation (
such as it was … I just didn’t/couldn’t know the answer to that question, so I sat and waited for someone else to talk
) for 17 seconds before reading from some notes that he pulled from the folder.

“July 13, 1957, Deirdre Crocker, 17, and Kimberly Stanton, 18, were in a one car accident on Route 30, roughly a mile from where it connects with Route 3. It was called in by Trooper Neil King, who drove by the scene a few minutes after 11 p.m.. When he arrived, Trooper King saw one still functioning headlight in the woods. He opened the driver’s side door and his initial notes (
Frank held up photocopies of notes from a steno pad
) mention a smell of alcohol, although the report (
Frank waved a copy of a more official-looking filled out form
) was written up as an accident resulting from swerving to miss a deer in the road. Both Crocker and Stanton were lucid, and able to identify themselves and emergency contact information. King’s notes reflect that the driver, Crocker, had broken her nose on the steering wheel, but was otherwise not visibly injured. Stanton, the passenger, had shattered the windscreen with her head, and slammed her midsection into the console. She had multiple lacerations on her face and scalp, complained of some difficulty breathing, and had obviously vomited numerous times, some of it suggestive of internal bleeding or injury.” He paused and breathed and ate some pulled pork. We were having it wrapped in warm tortillas, with a little shredded cheese, some sliced dill pickles, and a ribbon of barbeque sauce … it was better than all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and I was thankful for my exquisite listening-memory, without which I would have been too focused on the food to take in what Frank was saying.

“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.