Death at Gills Rock (13 page)

“I cleaned for Olive, too, not regular, just sometimes. Not for Stella though. Stella does her own work.” Her tone let him know that she thought better of Stella for that, money notwithstanding.

Why hadn't one of the three widows mentioned this to him? Did they consider it irrelevant or didn't they think of it?

“You didn't socialize with the ladies?”

“No. I said as much already.” She tugged at the loose hairs on her neck, more dismayed about her relationship with the other women than with the killing of her husband.

“You're not a member of the book club, then?”

Agnes harrumphed. “I ain't never been asked. And wouldn't join if I was,” she added.

“Why not? It's something to do.”

She lifted her chin, defiantly. “I got plenty to do. I don't need that trash.”

“Books are trash?”

Agnes ran her hands along the edge of the table as if searching for crumbs to brush off. “The kind those women read are. Romance novels.” Disapproval in her voice. Agnes shifted her weight, and for a moment Cubiak thought she might stand and start pacing. Instead, she reached for the tea and drained the cup. “Bunch of nonsense, makes people want what they can't have.”

Cubiak pictured the covers of the one or two romance novels he'd ever seen. He couldn't argue with her assessment. “How long were you and Joe married?”

“Thirty-nine years.”

“Do you have any children?”

“No.”

“May I ask you a personal question?”

Agnes made a harsh sound like a laugh. “Seems they're all personal.”

“Did you love your husband?”

For the first time, the prisoner faltered. “I tried,” she said finally, collapsing a little into herself.

“Why did you marry him?”

“Why? He asked me.”

“Do you think he loved you?”

She mashed her lips into a thin line. “No. I know he didn't.”

“Was he unfaithful?”

She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply.

“Why are you so certain your husband didn't love you?”

Agnes crossed herself and drew her folded hands to her flat bosom. “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name …”

“What did you mean when you said Joe and the three men who were buried this morning were ‘four of a kind'?”

The prisoner lowered her head, leaving Cubiak to stare at the cap of white hair and the even whiter ribbon of scalp that ran through the middle. “Thy will be done on earth as …”

“Is that what you were doing, Agnes, the will of God? Is that what you believe?”

“Give us this day …”

Cubiak got to his feet. “This interview is over,” he said.

R
owe was waiting in the sheriff 's office. “Doctor Pardy called, sir. Asked you to call her back.”

“Sir?” Cubiak raised an eyebrow.

Rowe shrugged. “Something about funerals makes me mind my manners. Sir.”

Cubiak waved the deputy out the door and phoned the medical examiner. The way Agnes had linked her husband to the other three men made him wonder if Millard hadn't been a frequent visitor to the Rec Room. Perhaps he'd even been at the cabin the night the others died.

“Dave, nothing you didn't already know. Joe Millard was killed at close range. Died instantly. I'll do the autopsy tomorrow but I don't expect to find anything of interest.”

“You might.”

“Really! Such as?”

“An unusually high level of carbon monoxide in the blood.”

“You don't think …”

“I don't know what to think yet. Earlier at the church, his wife called Joe and the other three deceased men ‘four of a kind.' I'm wondering what she meant.”

A
two-masted schooner with a bottle-green hull sliced through the bay outside Cubiak's kitchen. Serene. Silent. Driven by the wind.

“Sir?”

Cubiak sighed. The sight of the large vessel so close to shore had distracted him from his conversation with his deputy. “Don't
sir
me,” he said, pulling the phone cord along the wall.

“Yes, sir … Sheriff.”

The day was magnificent, and the sloop's fore and aft sails billowed like artful clouds piled against the slate blue of the sky. Blue was the color of hope, Cubiak thought, and he hoped that his intuition was wrong.

“What are we supposed to be looking for?” Rowe said.

“Whatever there is to find. I went over the space heater with Walter but I'm no expert and as far as I can tell, neither is he. Maybe we missed something.”

Cubiak reached for his coffee.

“That's why I want it checked out by people who know what they're doing. Get two men from the oldest heating companies in town and take them up to Huntsman's cabin. Not some junior flunkies. The head guys, the ones who've been around for a few years. Have them try and figure out how the cabin filled up with enough carbon monoxide to kill three men. Maybe it was squirrels, but if it was something else we need to know and soon.” Cubiak gestured as he talked, dribbling coffee on his boots. “Dammit.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” The sheriff put the cup down and checked his shirt for stains. “And not a word to anyone. They report back to me.”

“Yes, sir. Anything you say, boss.”

Cubiak hung up and glanced out the window again. The boat was gone, leaving only sky and water. Either he'd imagined the sloop or it had moved on to the next dip in the scalloped shoreline. How easy it would be to maneuver up and down the coastline unseen. If he hadn't been home or the captain had kept to deeper water, the boat could have sailed past unnoticed.

Refilling his mug, he thought about the roll call of victims in Gills Rock. Huntsman. Wilkins. Swenson. And now Millard.

Four deaths. Three presumably accidental. The most recent deliberate, with the killer confessed. It could be unhappy coincidence that Joe Millard was shot dead three days after the others breathed the poisoned air, but Cubiak considered coincidence facile and likely to provide a simplistic solution to what was usually a complex situation. Even if the autopsy revealed traces of carbon monoxide in Millard's blood, what would that prove? That Joe had been in the cabin Friday night and had asphyxiated the others, or that he'd been lucky and left before he, too, succumbed to the toxic gas? Only to be shot by his wife the day of the funeral for reasons she wouldn't reveal. By itself, a measurable level of carbon monoxide in Millard's body wasn't enough to place him in the cabin the fateful night. It might just be an indication of a leaky exhaust system on his truck.

The phone rang.

“Yes?”

“We're leaving.” It was Rowe characteristically reporting his every step.

“Good.”

“Sir—I mean, Sheriff—why am I doing this?”

“To be thorough.”

“Okay. Got it. Good. Later.”

Cubiak didn't really expect the expedition to learn anything that would alter the circumstances in the Rec Room on the fateful night. Once the experts announced that they'd found nothing amiss, the blame for the first three deaths would be laid on the squirrels. And with Millard's death attributed to his wife, the matter would be shelved. In the meantime, the sheriff had other business to attend to that morning.

I
n a packed meeting room in Fish Creek, angry merchants demanded that Cubiak arrest the loiterers at Founders Square. The business owners did not take kindly to his explanation of why he could not. Merely sitting around in a public arena is not illegal, he told them. Nonetheless, he'd beefed up car and foot patrols and encouraged the shop owners to do their own positive loitering.

“If you get there first, they're not going to come and sit on your laps.” A ripple of laughter. “And one more thing,” Cubiak said. “Has anyone talked to them? They're all locals, the sons and daughters of people you've known your entire lives. Don't you wonder why they feel so alienated from the community?”

“Does it matter?” said Kathy O'Toole. The owner of the Woolly Sheep looked faint with fatigue; the dark circles under her eyes popped against the backdrop of her pale skin.

“I believe it does,” he said.

L
ater, at the Sturgeon Bay Coast Guard Station, Cubiak met with Gary Dotson, who was almost as agitated as the Fish Creek shop owners. The chief didn't waste time on preliminaries.

“Everything's fine for the actual launch itself. I talked to the general manager at Palmer Johnson this morning and the cutter will be ready on schedule. Senator Adamas will be here—he sponsored the ship's commissioning—and his wife will do the honors with the champagne. Standard protocol. There's some talk the governor might attend as well. And why not? Sturgeon Bay is up to be designated a Coast Guard City, a first for Wisconsin. We'll have the mayor and all the local dignitaries. The shipyard will be open to visitors, and people will also be able to watch from the other side of the harbor. It's the ceremony here,” he said, pointing out the window toward the lighthouse and the station grounds at the entrance to the canal, “that's got me worried.”

“You don't have room for everyone?”

“No, that's not it. We had three thousand people here for the Tall Ships, so that's not the problem. Come with me.”

Dotson led Cubiak to a small workroom where a couple dozen photos and several yellowed copies of
Stars and Stripes
lay on a table. “This is all we've got. I was told that there were boxes of material from the Aleutian Campaign in our storage room but we haven't found much. Either someone was mistaken or the stuff has been misplaced. We looked everywhere. It's been a long time and things can go missing. This photographer Charles Tweet was up there shooting for a while and he sent me some stuff, and I'd planned to ask the three old gents themselves for any souvenirs, letters, et cetera that they might have. Now I'll have to ask their widows, but I hate to impose at such a time. The folks at the Maritime Museum are doing their best to help out as well, and of course eventually the exhibit goes on display there. I'm just worried that the overall effect is going to be far less impressive than what we'd hoped for and what the men deserved.”

Dotson turned toward the window and stood at parade rest, his legs apart, his shoulders tense, and his hands clasped waist-high behind his back. The station was eerily still but for the muted crash of waves against the concrete pier that ran out into the lake. Cubiak waited.

“Yesterday at the funeral you asked me if there was something else going on,” Dotson said after a pause. “I told you there wasn't, but you were right, Sheriff. In fact, there's something I need to show you.”

Back in his office, the chief pulled a manila folder from a locked file drawer and scattered the contents on his desk.

“They're all addressed to me,” he said, surveying the six small envelopes that littered the blotter. He handed one to Cubiak. “Here, read it.”

Inside was a handwritten message scrawled in a mix of crude penmanship and printing and spelled out on a sheet of coarse, lined tablet paper. “No honor for dishonorable vets. Fuck all three.”

“And the rest?” Cubiak said.

“They're all pretty much along the same lines. Mean and nasty and aimed at Huntsman and his pals.”

“They come from all over the state,” Cubiak said, checking the postmarks.

“Yes. Some from towns I never even heard of.”

“When did this start?”

“First one came in September. Last one in November.”

“You have any idea what this is about?”

The chief returned to the window but this time stood with his back to glass. “No idea. I've never heard a word uttered against any of those three men. Someone's got a grudge, but who or why, I don't know.”

“You think it's linked to the missing archives?”

Dotson shrugged. “I don't even know that there's anything really missing. Someone could have been cleaning up twenty years ago and thrown the stuff away.” He tapped the desk. “Funny thing, they almost always arrived on a Monday.”

Cubiak looked at the envelopes again. “None of them were posted in Door County.”

“No, nothing closer than Stevens Point.”

“You mind if I take these with me?” the sheriff said, gathering up the letters.

“Be my guest. I'd rather never see them again if you want to know the truth. It's just … I wonder what this means for the ceremony.”

“Probably nothing. But if it does mean something, whoever sent these did you a favor.”

“A favor? Sheriff, I …”

“We'll both be on guard, and that's better than being caught unaware.”

On the way out, they passed the dining room where two men were busy with rollers and paint. “Didn't Rogers Nils work here, helping with the painting?”

“He did. Started sometime after Christmas. Then one day in February, he left and never came back. Too bad. He's a hard worker. Nice kid, too.”