that nobody had seen her since the previous evening. I got a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, and ran with Tommy down the line to her cabin, way at the end. Nothing there, just those stupid white shoes she liked so much. We both called out for her, like morons. I’ll show you, you’ll see; her cabin is too small to miss a person. I could smell her on the air, but it was probably just her things smelling of her. I never did see that blood and hair that day, not for weeks. We didn’t see any of it until the detective Father brought up started looking around. He found it all in the first thirty seconds and showed all of us, local constabulary included, to be asses.” He paused in the story here for a moment, took off his glasses, which I could see by the distortion when he held them up to inspect for dust were progressives ( Barry had waited outside, but would know/remember everything that Mike said, when we talked about it later, in my hammock ). We walked up the path Deirdre Crocker must have walked, all those years ago, and he brought me up creaking stairs and into her musty cabin ( it looked as though it hadn’t had much, if any use in the intervening years ).
“I spent the twenty years after that night mad at the local police for not finding the blood, finding clues, finding her. I would leave a room or cross the street to avoid Bender, the cop who first came out to ‘investigate’ that first night,” Mike said. I am horrid with tonal expression and expressiveness, and even I could hear the finger-quotes in Mike’s use of the word ‘investigate.’ He put his glasses back on and picked up where he had left off.
“There was nothing though, not for us, not for Bender, not for the detective ... nothing beyond a tiny knot of blood and hair and those silly shoes in the middle of the floor like dead rabbits. There wasn’t anything that night, or the next morning, or in the weeks and months and years since then. It’s like she was swallowed up by an angry God. Like she had never existed, except for her things; Mother and Da left them here, waiting, as though she’d return from some unannounced trip at any moment. I cleaned the cabin out, took all of her stuff to the dump in Lake Clear, on the day of what would have been her 25th birthday. I woke up and couldn’t stand the thought of it all in here; so even though it was mud-season, I drove up here from New York ( New York City, or Manhattan, I corrected him, but silently … nearly everyone from my birthplace is guilty of this ), and threw it all away. When she found out, Mother wouldn’t speak to me for weeks.”
He sat down on her bed, exhausted by the story, or by the unexpected flood of memories, or from church and then bourbon with lunch, rubbed his face with his hands, looked up at me, and asked, “What else?”
Camp Topsail, Upper Saranac Lake, 7/14/2013, 2:23 p.m.
Mike Crocker and I walked north from Deirdre’s cabin along the front/lake facing cabins and buildings. Mike named the cabins and buildings as we walked by, and then through, them. Some were named for family members, ‘Da and Mother’s lodge,’ which was bigger than most and had a small kitchen and attached living room and spare bedroom, some for generic occupant/use types, ‘kids cabin’ or ‘guest cabin’ or ‘playroom,’ and some with names that I couldn’t guess at, and Mike only shrugged, ‘Mouse House’ and ‘Skunkville.’ He was lost in thoughts about a sister he had buried a lifetime ago, who I was digging up to no good end ( that he could see ). He explained that the front line of buildings of a camp, relative to the waterfront, were for the owners and their guests. The housing nearest the main building/lodge was for children and less important guests. It appeared that rank and status were measured by distance and a lack of connectedness, via a covered walkway, to the main body of buildings. ( This seemed odd to me, as
“I spent the twenty years after that night mad at the local police for not finding the blood, finding clues, finding her. I would leave a room or cross the street to avoid Bender, the cop who first came out to ‘investigate’ that first night,” Mike said. I am horrid with tonal expression and expressiveness, and even I could hear the finger-quotes in Mike’s use of the word ‘investigate.’ He put his glasses back on and picked up where he had left off.
“There was nothing though, not for us, not for Bender, not for the detective ... nothing beyond a tiny knot of blood and hair and those silly shoes in the middle of the floor like dead rabbits. There wasn’t anything that night, or the next morning, or in the weeks and months and years since then. It’s like she was swallowed up by an angry God. Like she had never existed, except for her things; Mother and Da left them here, waiting, as though she’d return from some unannounced trip at any moment. I cleaned the cabin out, took all of her stuff to the dump in Lake Clear, on the day of what would have been her 25th birthday. I woke up and couldn’t stand the thought of it all in here; so even though it was mud-season, I drove up here from New York ( New York City, or Manhattan, I corrected him, but silently … nearly everyone from my birthplace is guilty of this ), and threw it all away. When she found out, Mother wouldn’t speak to me for weeks.”
He sat down on her bed, exhausted by the story, or by the unexpected flood of memories, or from church and then bourbon with lunch, rubbed his face with his hands, looked up at me, and asked, “What else?”
Camp Topsail, Upper Saranac Lake, 7/14/2013, 2:23 p.m.
Mike Crocker and I walked north from Deirdre’s cabin along the front/lake facing cabins and buildings. Mike named the cabins and buildings as we walked by, and then through, them. Some were named for family members, ‘Da and Mother’s lodge,’ which was bigger than most and had a small kitchen and attached living room and spare bedroom, some for generic occupant/use types, ‘kids cabin’ or ‘guest cabin’ or ‘playroom,’ and some with names that I couldn’t guess at, and Mike only shrugged, ‘Mouse House’ and ‘Skunkville.’ He was lost in thoughts about a sister he had buried a lifetime ago, who I was digging up to no good end ( that he could see ). He explained that the front line of buildings of a camp, relative to the waterfront, were for the owners and their guests. The housing nearest the main building/lodge was for children and less important guests. It appeared that rank and status were measured by distance and a lack of connectedness, via a covered walkway, to the main body of buildings. ( This seemed odd to me, as
Similar Books
