Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) Read Online Free PDF

generally mean to a childhood illness or accident. They can see the child, dead. They can touch the body and weep over a corpse and put it in the ground. I was denied that by the thing ( she said this word with such venom and hate and bleak sadness, that I took an involuntary step back, awed a bit by her depth of feeling ) that took her from all of us, from me, her mother.” She paused again, no tears this time, just her breath sawing in and out, wet and smelling slightly of ruined tissue.
    “I want to know. Where she went, who took her, how she died, why her?” The last words came out a whisper.
    I don’t have feelings in the way that other people do; it’s a blessing and a curse, at times, in turns. I have watched people my whole life, and can make most of the expected facial expressions, guess at the right things to say, or noise/gesture to make, but lack the empathy most humans share. This old woman, this mother, had had a piece ripped off her body/soul most of a lifetime ago, and I was making her relive it; and now had to turn the volume to eleven.
    “Her abduction was planned and carried out by someone that hated her, had reason to hate her … who was it? Don’t think! Answer.”
    “Nobody hated Dee. Everyone loved her. Maybe a jealous boy ….” She trailed off, hopefully ( although why that might be better than some other alternative was beyond me, but many things are ).
    “No. Ex-lovers, jealous boyfriends, and spurned suitors leave bloody bodies behind, not an empty pair of shoes.” I was not being pointlessly cruel, I told myself as she bent under my harsh and hurtful words, I needed to push her beyond her regular patterns of thinking about this … past 54.85 years of myth and wishes and tears.
    Mrs. Crocker drew herself up, as much as was possible for her in her state, and glared at me before answering. “She was a girl. Pretty and clever and funny and nice. She moved through the world making friends, not enemies. If she had a fault, it was that she liked to drink. It might have gotten her into trouble in the long run, but she didn’t have a long run; she got a few tickets, and her picture in the papers a time or two in the year before her … before she disappeared, but nothing serious. Nobody could have hated her enough to … that much.” She finished with a tone and a look that signaled an end to that particular subject, and after a few moments of thought, I nodded.
    “I’ll do it,” I said
    “What? That was only four questions. What about the other nine?” She seemed genuinely curious, and maybe even a little disappointed.
    “I only needed to ask you a few questions, but I wanted you to be thinking/worrying about more, so that I might get honest, unprepared answers from you. I know enough to begin looking, and will, in point of fact, get better information from almost any source besides you.”
    She finished the last sip of Coke that I’d given her, and waggled the cup at me. I finished the can in my hand, and took a new one from the cooler, giving her the first two ounces, and then starting to work on the rest myself.
    “It is quite good. Better than I remember,” she said, working herself up to speak on a painful subject. “How will you proceed, Mr. Cunningham ( her switching back and forth from first to surname basis had confused me at first, but now I think it had to do with business and personal address and issues )?” she asked.
    “I’ll take a walk around the camp with your son to start. Next, I’ll talk to people who might have been around that summer. I know some people down at the Adirondack Museum, and may be able to ransack their archives a bit … I’m a good researcher.”
    “That all sounds rather nebulous, Tyler.”
    “Well, yes, it is. A lot of what I practice is what I think of as ‘Informational Echolocation.’ Are you familiar with the term?”
    “Not the information part, but there was a wonderful Richard Attenborough ( David, I assumed, but did not