Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) Read Online Free PDF Page A

light, and disappeared.”
    I looked at her, waiting for her to continue, but she was done … for the moment.
    “Did the police find her body?” I asked, with a bluntness that would earn me a slap on the back of my head later from Dorothy, when I shared the details of my meeting with her.
    “The police found nothing, did nothing, helped not at all,” Mrs. Crocker stated in an angry tone that suggested ( even to me ) that she had more to say on the matter. “They were reluctant even to come until we, my husband and I, insisted quite strenuously. By then, it had rained, wiping out any traces or clues that might have been around her cabin or the woods. Worse, they missed a small spot of blood and some strands of what must have been her hair on a doorframe in the cabin she was using during that visit. A detective we subsequently hired was able to find it. This man, Pinchot, his name was, funny that I remember that, seemed aggressive and assertive in his investigations, but yielded, sadly, no results. He focused intensively on Deirdre’s, that was her name, the same as my great-granddaughter, Deirdre’s boyfriend, but finally was convinced that her beau was not involved at all.” She paused, slightly out of breath, a bit of color had crept onto her face and neck. Her eyes were shining with tears.
    I took advantage of the temporary interruption in her story to grab another Coke from the cooler, carefully pouring out two ounces into a water glass on a table by the door. I passed the glass to her while her wet/rattling breath sounds subsided, steadying the glass in her shaking hand for a few seconds until I was certain that she had it securely enough to raise it to her mouth. Two fingers and the thumb of her right hand had touched me in the exchange, and the skin was dry and hot and brittle/crinkly feeling, like the parchment paper envelopes that I sometimes cooked fish in. When I was close to her, I could smell age and sickness and menthol and medicines, and behind all of that, corruption; parts of her, inside, were dead … kept from the grave by machines that go bing and IV bags of medicine with long names and a final wish/dream/hope.
    “I’m going to ask you thirteen questions, Kitty. Don’t think or worry or plan too much about the answers to any of them, nobody will hear your answers besides me. Okay?” I asked, preparing the first few as she took a few tentative sips of her ( my ) Coke, and nodded her assent.
    “What was the date of your daughter’s disappearance?”
    “Late in the evening of Saturday, August 22nd, 1958 w as the last time that I saw her, heading up from the dock to her cabin. I suppose that she might have disappeared early in the morning on the 23rd, but I can’t say.”
    “Who, besides you, was here that night, someone who could give a me a walk -around tour of the camp, to get a feel for the space?”
    “Dee’s brother, my son, Mike. He’ll be back from church soon, and was here that summer, but he doesn’t talk about Dee, Mr. Cunningham. He’d be upset knowing I spoke with you about it, now, after so long.”
    “Why did you want to talk with me about it, and what do you imagine that I could do after almost 55 years ( I had it worked out to approximately 54.85 years, but didn’t want my love of precision to throw Mrs. Crocker off, when I had her relaxing into these first few easy questions so nicely )?”
    “I want to know. I made my own peace with her being gone after a year, and sometime after that felt her shift from being my daughter who was missing to being my daughter who had died. I never buried her though, Tyler. Never really mourned her.” A silvery tear, huge and perfect on that tiny/ravaged face, rolled down a pale cheek, fell into a deep wrinkle, and was trapped … like she was … like I was. I waited for her brain and heart and mouth to start up again; I drank more Coke, trying to minimize my slurping in the quiet room.
    “People talk about the loss of a child. They