Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) (18 page)

“Okay, my guy will be here in a bit,” he said, checking his watch (
and holding it to his ear as if it were stopped, although I’d heard it in the quiet depths of some of the collections rooms
). “He’ll tell you all of this, I hope, but here are the biggies. Anything you touch, you touch with gloves.” He pointed with his elbow to a big box of cotton gloves on the table. “No food or drink is open or out in this room; there’s a picnic table out back, and you’ll need the air and sun after a few hours in here. You can’t take, or keep, anything. No flash photographs, this one is tough for some people ... okay?” he asked.

“Yessir, no problem, I brought my iPad, and it has a camera built-in, and I’ve got some document scanner apps … is that okay?” I knew the answer, but wanted to show my willingness to be compliant.

“Yup, it is; your iPad is passive, lightwise, so it can’t damage the documents,” he paused, finding his place before continuing. “If you need something copied, we have a special machine; it’s pricey per page, so don’t go nuts with it; but, you know, do what you need to do.” I always do.

A young man walked in, and waited by the door until Terry invited him to come over and join us with a summoning wave of his hand.

“Tyler Cunningham, this is Tom Bailey. Tom, Tyler. Tom’s brain may be a bit like yours Tyler, which I mean as a compliment to both of you. Tom has learned his way around the collections faster than anyone I’ve seen since I got here (
which was just after the 1980 Olympics, up in Lake Placid
). Tom, he knows the rules, but keep an eye on him; my friend Tyler has been known to cut a corner or two in his day. Everything should be back into storage in the same shape it was before his visit … better, because I want you to check the cataloging on everything you pull, and put it in line to get it scanned before you reshelve it. Questions?” Terry asked, looking at both of us; we both shook our heads side to side, and watched him leave before we were done.

             
“Well, Mr. Cunningham, where would you like to start?”

“Tom, I’m Tyler, not Mr. Cunningham. Let’s start there. Next, we should go to the room where Terry said it’s okay to eat, because I need to fuel up before I get started, and I want you to do the same. Grab your lunch or snack and a pen and paper, and we can talk while we eat.”

Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, 7/17/2013, 5:53 p.m.

We sat down at the table in a break room that smelled like … break
room: burnt coffee at the bottom of the carafe, repeatedly-cooked tomato-based splatter on the inside of an unclean microwave, questionable leftovers in a communal and unpoliced fridge, lingering cigarette smoke from the last lungfull taken outside before coming back to work, paper, human sweat and oils. I ate three egg-salad sandwiches, five sticks of mozzarella, two bit-o-honey bars (
I don’t see them often in stores, but whenever I do, I buy a stack for later consumption
), four Cokes, and a liter of water (
I considered rewriting this sentence to get the items in ascending numerical order, but decided that I liked having them listed in order of fuel efficiency better
). Tom ate two PB&Js, and drank a Mountain Dew. While he watched me eat, I explained a bit about what I was looking for, and how I wanted to go about doing it.

“To start off, I’ll be looking for pictures of one person in particular, and a group of her associates,” I looked to ascertain that he was taking the word in its definitional sense, not as business jargon, he nodded that he was, “at parties/events/gathering on or around Upper Saranac Lake during the summer of 1958. I would like to establish, and then expand, a social circle of the target individual. I’m hoping to see patterns and maybe people or places that don’t fit in with the rest of the gestalt.” Tom nodded in understanding, so I continued.

“I anticipate the search changing to include more specifics, and shifting dates/places/people as we go. Once I’ve worked the pictures, I may ask you to dive into the written document archives with much the same goals.”

“Okay, Tyler, let me interrupt you, if I may. Lots of the pictures have useful and accurate cataloging information associated with them, but lots of them do not. If you give me a list of keywords, and we work off of just those, you may miss some of what you’re looking for.”

“Understood. My thinking is that we start with the keywords in a Boolean ‘OR’ search pattern, while limiting the scope of the search in dates from 1955 to 1965 initially; if that yields too few, or we feel that we’re missing too many, we can do an open-date search of the keywords. If your instincts or experience draw you to other pictures or groups of pictures, then by all means serve them up. I’m a big believer in our brains knowing more than our conscious selves, especially in seemingly chaotic environments (
this was a bit of a test, I wanted to see if Tom’s head exploded, or if he gave me a ‘crazy-guy’ look … he did neither, which I took as a good sign
).”

“So, our first set of keywords should be?” he asked.

“Crocker, Topsail, Upper Saranac, St. Regis, party, dinner, summer, 1958.”

“Those search parameters will yield thousands of pictures.” I nodded, and he continued, “That being the case, I would still suggest dropping the wor
d ‘upper’, and just searching ‘Saranac’. You will get lots of false positives, but I’ve noticed lots of pictures where people mislabeled their pictures, leaving off accurate lake name identifiers. Similarly, I would drop ‘St.’ from ‘St. Regis’, and just search for ‘Regis’.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “While you’re fixing the list, add ‘Stanton’ as a keyword.” I was thinking of Kimberly Stanton, and establishing the linkage between her death and Deirdre Crocker’s disappearance (
even though the latter preceded the former
), and the possibility of finding out where a connection was … if indeed there was one.

“Got it,” said Tom, and he headed out to start his end of the search. “I can do a tiered search for you to start, which might get some quick and useful results for you, although it ends up being depressing as time goes by.”

“Explain, please?” I asked.

“I would use all of the keywords that we’ve established, and have the computer search the photos we’ve already entered into our computerized database; it’s about 23% of our photo collection. It would yield photos with the highest number of matching keywords first, and then continue in descending order. When I do this kind of search, I tend to get some great hits up front, and then it goes dead for a while before I start coming across interesting stuff somewhat randomly again.”

“Sounds good. I might get what I need right off the bat, and save you days of minioning for me.”

“Days?” Tom asked, looking a bit shocked at the prospect.

“Could be … we’ll see.” He nodded and headed out of the room.

“I should be bringing the first round of photos to you in the Exam Room within 15 or so minutes.”

I waved him off, went to the bathroom, and then headed down to the Exam Room. He was as good as his word, and was back in 14 minutes with a box of photos. I had a pair of cotton gloves on, and had been studying the pictures of Dee Crocker and those other people in the representative photos that her mother and brother had selected for me (
although I tend to lock images in my memory with a single exposure, it never hurts to make certain
) via my iPad. I started to flip through the first few pictures in the box. They were lined up from front to back, not top to bottom, so I could give each one a quick look without disturbing the museum’s arrangement, when I stopped Tom at the door (
presumably on his way out to get more pictures for me
).

“I can probably keep these in order. Do I need to?”

“No, If you take photos out of the box, and move on for any reason before replacing the photo, don’t put them back, leave them aside for me to reorganize later. The code on the back of the picture will let me know where to replace it. That should also make it easier for you to separate out any pictures that you want me to copy for you.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I kept going through the first few pictures.

I was surprised to find a large number of relevant pictures immediately. I looked at the typed label on the outside of the box, and saw, ‘Camp Topsail (Crocker), Upper Saranac Lake, 1958, 60-5r34f-alb9’. I continued through the box pulling out the occasional picture to save for closer examination and/or copying later. When Tom next came into the room, I asked him about the box and photos.

“You know that the museum first opened in 1957. In the first few years, we were quite pro-active in acquiring historical documents or all sorts, both through direct and indirect appeals to Adirondack residents and visitors. This box, and lots of others like it, is the result of a drive to borrow photo albums, which could then be copied and preserved in our archives.” I flipped a couple of the pictures over, and saw...

“Nothing, right. Sadly that’s one of the failings in an otherwise super program. We are lacking the notation and identification that the original prints often have on the back or in the margins of the album. I hope that doesn’t throw you off.”

“It’s hard to say … we’ll see.” When I went back to my work, I heard Tom wait for a few seconds before leaving the room. I would have to try and remember that functioning humans are significantly more polite than I am naturally; Cynthia understood/accepted/forgave the incompleteness of my human emotional software installation, but I am told that it takes some getting used to. If I want to optimize the benefit from my time behind the curtain at the Adirondack Museum, I need to find a way to improve my Tyler
to human interface.

By the end of the first box, I knew that the posed photos likely wouldn’t help me at all. I wanted to peek behind the curtain, and see something that somebody didn’t want me to see. Donated Crocker family pictures, as nice a window into that time as they were, were not going to give me the view that I wanted into the past. I picked a few pictures that I wanted names for, if possible, and put the rest on the lid of the box, waiting for Tom’s return.

“Hi, Tom, thanks for all of these,” I said smiling my best #3 at him, “but I think that we need to shift the focus to get a slightly different set of results.” His smile faltered a bit, before he put down his current load of photographs, and took out a pencil and notecard.

“I want to see more candid shots, specifically from the summer
s of 1957 and 1958, not necessarily at Topsail, the Crocker Camp, but definitely Upper Saranac Lake … for the moment.”

What he did next both surprised and impressed me; he stepped outside/beyond my expectations, and made me curious about his backstory, but not curious enough to ask (
more important stuff to do and think about
). He sat down at the table across from me, looked into my eyes, and asked a perfect question (
something the world sees too few of
).

“Tyler, close your eyes for a minute and think about the pictures you’ve seen in the last hour. Now think about how big our photographic archives are. Don’t worry about my being bored, or luck, or getting the job done by quitting time. Imagine the perfect picture to advance your research, answer your questions. Now describe it. What does the picture you’re looking for hold, show, or reveal?”

“It’s like these ones, but not as polished,” I said, after literally closing my eyes for a few seconds (
not the minute he suggested, but still
). “It’ll show Dee Crocker or her family, and someone who hates her/them for something Dee or the Crocker family did, or are perceived to have done. (
I didn’t want to explain Kimberly Stanton, and the car wreck, it seemed a needless sidetracking
). That box of photos came from a copy of a photo album that some family member or photographer put together. They culled the shots that I want most; the ones with someone off to one side accidentally in the shot, or someone glaring at Dee or one of the other Crockers. It would have been in the bottom of a box of photos that nobody took the time to throw out, although they meant to. There’s a chance it won’t pay off, but I have a feeling that it might.”

“Excellent! 1957 or 1958, Upper Saranac Lake, candids or even discards. I’ll talk to our map guy and look for specific camps on Upper Saranac, so I can search by name, and avoid the ‘Album Program’ codes,” he said, and without waiting for my reply, he headed out and I didn’t see him for nearly an hour … I read one of my current books, a nasty Matt Scudder mystery
, while I waited.

He kicked open the door, and staggered in, loaded down with boxes, followed by another, older man that he never introduced (
perhaps his ‘map guy’
), similarly laden with boxes. The other set down his boxes and left; Tom turned to face me with a smile.

“Your picture is in there,” he said, pointing to the pile of boxes now dominating one end of the table. “I don’t know how many pictures you’re going to have to look at to find it, a couple of thousand maybe, but if the picture exists, it’s on the table, or back in the stacks, still waiting for us to find it,” he finished with a flourish, and an expectant look on his face that I didn’t understand.

“Well, thanks. I’d better get to it.” Tom seemed to deflate before my eyes, and I realized that I hadn’t gushed enough; so I started up again. “This is incredible, Tom! I don’t know how to thank you enough.” He brightened a bit, and I reached for the first box.

By a process analysis done a number of times over the course of the afternoon, I was able to filter/assess/sort approximately six hundred pictures an hour for the next four hours and 48 minutes; this translates to approximately two thousand nine hundred pictures examined (
a shade under, in all likelihood
). The vast majority of those pictures were utterly useless to me: wrong people, wrong timeframe, wrong location. The subset that included the right people, during the right months/years, and in the right places was 221 (
roughly eight percent, for those interested
), but most of those (
214, or almost 97%
) didn’t seem indicative of animosity/resentment towards one or more of the Crockers. This left me with seven pictures out of nearly three thousand, roughly one fifth of one percent of the pictures I had looked at in Tom’s ‘sure thing’ pile of boxes.

Those seven pictures, laid out on the table like a hand of cards revealed in a poker game, most likely meant something to the right pair of eyes, but at this point in the day, my eyes were done. I pushed all of the boxes of photos and the loose considered/rejected photos to the far end of the table, leaving me with eleven photos: four from the Crocker box, and seven from the mountain of boxes that Tom and the nameless museum minion had carried in. I went over to the wall-phone and called the extension Tom had given me for him; he picked up partway through the first ring.

“Tyler?” he said hopefully, a combination of curiosity and 5:30 in his voice.

“Hi, Tom. I have a handful of pics that I’d like to get copied or scanned or whatever you do. I’m done for the day, but was hoping that I could take advantage of your (
I paused infinitesimally, looking for the right superlative
) spectacular help again tomorrow.”

“So you found the picture you needed? I’m so glad!” He sounded it.

“I found seven pictures, and I’m going to need to do some more research between now and, say, noon tomorrow, which is probably as soon as I can get back. (
I was already seeing the trip back up to my hidden campsite, stopping on the way at the Long Lake Stewart’s for a bagful of their eternally ‘ready and fresh’ bacon cheeseburgers, bed after some reading, a quick run up to Topsail to speak with Kitty and Mike as early as they can manage, and back down here while I still have a semi-willing assistant
).”