Death at Gills Rock (2 page)

“I'm just telling you what the doc told me.”

As he talked to Rowe, Cubiak moved to the window. The view opened to a patch of scrub lawn, a strip of rocky shore, and the lake. Four days of a northeast wind had churned up sand from the bottom and made the water dull and opaque. Whitecaps broke over the sandbar half a mile out and then flattened into soft, rolling waves. Approaching the table rocks along the shore, they reformed into curls of angry foam and hurled against the land. Lake Michigan had been ice-free for three weeks but the water remained frigid. Not as cold as the water in the Aleutians, he thought, but cold enough.

Cubiak finished with the deputy and then scanned the paper again. A map of the Aleutians provided a perspective on their value to the war effort. Starting from the tip of the Alaska Peninsula, the island chain swept a thousand miles westward into the Pacific. That far? The dab of land at the very end of the archipelago was strategically positioned a mere 650 miles from Japan's Kuril Islands. That close? The Japanese threat had been very real, the service rendered vital.

The sheriff lifted his mug, anticipating a gulp of hot coffee. Affronted by the cold, bitter liquid in the cup, he spat the dregs into the drain and dumped the rest. Three men were dead, presumably the result of an accident. The day would not be an easy one.

Cubiak pushed aside a stack of unwashed dishes, maneuvered a large aluminum bowl under the faucet, and turned on the tap. As the container filled, he poured dry dog food into a second bowl and then carried them both out to the back porch. He'd already fed Butch earlier that morning, but she was nursing a litter of four pups and could probably use a little extra. Plus he didn't know when he'd get back. The round trip to Gills Rock took about an hour and a half even in spring before tourist traffic kicked in.

Butch lay curled up in the oval wicker basket that Cubiak had found at a resale shop and lined with a worn patchwork quilt for her. He set down the bowls and stroked the dog's head. Butch sighed and the puppies snuffled and squirmed, bending their soft sausage bodies to the contours of their mother's stomach. One of the pups was a miniature clone, a brown and white mutt with the hint of a spaniel's ears and a hound's sleek snout, but the others were a hodgepodge of mismatched colors and physical characteristics. There were two males and two females, but he didn't remember which was which. “Shush now,” he told the dogs and opened the curtains in hopes the sun would emerge from behind the clouds.

Outside, the wind bit sharply. The arrow on the garage thermometer pointed to forty-eight, but the breeze made the temperature feel close to freezing. When he'd moved from the ranger station, several locals urged him to find a place in the interior, away from the windy shoreline. But Cubiak demurred. In his native Chicago, waterfront living had been beyond his means; even in Door County, he couldn't afford to live on a sand beach. Rocks made the difference. Rocks put lakefront property within reach, and not a day went by that he didn't gaze out at the water and appreciate its splendor.

Hunched into his collar, Cubiak hurried across the yard and climbed into his unmarked jeep, happy for the anonymity it provided. As a Chicago homicide detective, he'd grown accustomed to moving around undercover and was pleased to discover that in his new job he generally wasn't expected to wear or carry any identifiable paraphernalia associated with the office beyond his gun and badge.

As usual, Cubiak had nothing planned for the day. The middle school spring soccer meet was at the fairgrounds that weekend, and he knew that he'd want to avoid being anywhere near the games. Alexis had played youth soccer and had been pretty decent at it, for a seven-year-old.

Her last game, she'd even accidentally scored a goal.

“Did you see? Did you see me?” she'd shouted, her cheeks pink with cold as she raced toward her parents at the halftime break.

“Yes, honey, I did,” he said, wrapping his arms around her slim, coltish frame. It was one of the little lies parents tell their children. Truth was he had a hard time distinguishing Alexis from the clump of kids that mindlessly chased the ball from one end of the field to the other.

“What a clusterfuck,” he said when the second half began and Alexis again melted into the sea of green jerseys.

Lauren elbowed him. “It's cluster ball,” she said, laughing.

Four years later, if Alexis were alive, she might still be playing, and he and Lauren would be shivering on the sidelines in the park near Wilson Avenue, shouting encouragement into the wind. If Lauren were alive as well. If he'd come home as he'd promised he would and they hadn't walked to the ice-cream store alone. If the maniac drunk driver hadn't barreled into them …

Guilt over the accident and grief over their deaths led Cubiak to drink himself out of his job with the Chicago Police Department and eventually brought him to Door County. He meant to stay for one year and was working as a park ranger when several people mysteriously died. After Cubiak tracked the killer, he was elected sheriff.

His newfound purpose helped ease him into the reality of life without his family. But just because he'd become resigned to the deaths of his wife and daughter didn't mean that the hours were less empty or their absence easier to bear. If nothing else, the trip to Gills Rock would fill the day.

Cubiak reached toward the dash for a cigarette and remembered that he'd quit four months earlier. He unwrapped two sticks of spearmint gum as he rolled down the driveway. Across Lake Shore Road, his nearest neighbor, Lewis Nagel, straddled the shallow ditch and trimmed weeds around the post that held a mailbox disguised as an ugly largemouth bass. The sheriff honked and Nagel looked up, raising a hand in a gesture that passed for a wave. Cubiak returned the greeting. A minute later, he was heading to Highway 42/57. Usually, he'd turn left and drive to the sheriff 's headquarters outside Sturgeon Bay, but that morning, he went the opposite way, north up 42.

Traffic was sparse through the string of quaint resort towns that hugged the Green Bay shore. Cruising just above the limit, Cubiak wondered what sad circumstances he would find in Gills Rock. He'd been on the peninsula for almost twenty-four months and sheriff for all but the first seven, when he'd been employed at Peninsula State Park. How naïve he'd been. Hoping to escape death. But death offered no reprieve. Nasty and cruel, it materialized from a stew of old grudges and misdeeds, terrifying the locals and pulling him in.

Now more death, though accidental this time.

As sheriff, he'd learned from hard experience that most fatal accidents were associated with water mishaps or vehicular crashes. Could the three men have drowned? Such a fate seemed too unfair. And unlikely as well that all three would die like that. Only one, Swenson, had made a living as a fisherman but the other two were probably equally comfortable and savvy on the water. As far as Cubiak knew, there'd been no reports of isolated storms or sudden squalls, no missing boats in the past twenty-four hours. A car crash was no easier to contemplate. Bodies mangled and broken. Too often the stench of alcohol permeating the scene. But there were no vehicular accident reports either.

There were other ways to die, of course, and he'd find out soon enough what single incident or sequence of events had doomed the three friends.

Splotches of color—purple crocuses, yellow jonquils—jumped out from the drab landscape and helped take his mind off death. In Egg Harbor, a bright blue banner promoting the upcoming Spring Fest Weekend stretched over the roadway. Farther up, Fish Creek merchants arranged sidewalk displays for the town's annual Founders Fest. Spring was here, even if the weather didn't always match the change of season. If he concentrated, Cubiak could find hints of nature's rebirth in the budding leaves and the pale green whispers that quietly percolated across the forestland and countryside. These verdant traces were still largely overshadowed by a woodsy tangle of brown and black but presaged by an occasional splash of green so freshly vivid it seemed more like a flavor than a color.

Past Sister Bay, the promise of spring vanished under the lingering drabness of winter. Occasionally, mounds of snow hugged thick tree trunks, and as the last copse fell away, the village of Gills Rock emerged. Like a string of discolored pearls, its clapboard houses and shops clung to a sliver of rocky shoreline along the rim of Garrett Bay. At its northern end, the wide cove bled into Porte des Morts, a treacherous strait that connected the upper reaches of Green Bay to Lake Michigan and earned its name for the fierceness with which it had once swallowed ships and the crews and passengers they carried.

For decades, Gills Rock had been the jumping off point for the ferries that transported pedestrians and vehicles across Death's Door to Washington Island. With the ferry relocated to Northport Pier on the Lake Michigan side of the peninsula, traffic whizzed past the village and followed a picturesque winding road to the new terminal. Cubiak was uncomfortably familiar with that final zigzagging stretch of road.

He was still new to the area when he'd met Cate Wagner, a Milwaukee photographer, and ended up driving her back to the house near the ferry landing where she was staying with her aunt Ruby. He'd been instantly attracted to Cate but had tried to resist her out of loyalty to his dead wife. Cubiak had neither seen nor talked to Cate in a year and a half, not since he'd solved his first case on the peninsula, one that had given her reason both to leave the county and to despise him for his role in the events of that fateful summer. Cate had inherited her aunt's homestead as well as her grandfather's neighboring estate, The Wood. More often than he'd like to acknowledge, Cubiak detoured past the two properties, looking for a sign that she'd returned.

At the same time that he gave in to his yearning to reconnect with her, he dreaded the prospect. How could he make things right between them? Even worse, he'd been entrusted with the heart-wrenching secret about her past. “Are you going to tell her?” Bathard had asked once. “I don't know,” Cubiak had replied. He still didn't know.

Distracted, the sheriff suddenly came upon a blue and white sign for Huntsman's Plumbing. He braked hard and swerved onto a stretch of rippled blacktop that hugged the low-lying, rocky shore. A bevy of gulls rose from the boulders. The birds were fat and speckled in shades of dirt and coal. As they dive-bombed the jeep, they screeched their annoyance and shattered the heavy morning quiet. Old and new came together along the lane, and the farther from the main road, the more elaborate the houses and the larger the lots. This bit of grandeur was followed by a long stretch of wild forest, trees so thick and tall that the jeep's headlights switched on. Without warning the forest opened to six small frame houses set in a jagged clearing and separated from each other by long, spindly driveways. Neatly aligned on narrow lots, the identical homes were painted a rainbow of pastel colors and looked like an experiment in community living. All but one were well maintained. The handyman's special was second from the end, tucked behind a massive weeping willow that nearly overwhelmed the front yard. A mangy German shepherd was tethered to the tree, and as Cubiak rolled past, the barking dog lunged at the jeep. The dog continued howling as the forest closed in again, yielding the faint odor of skunk that trailed the sheriff around a soft curve to a second notch in the woods and a prefabricated white metal barn emblazoned with the logo for Huntsman's Plumbing. A door marked Office and six blue vans in the small side lot carried the same emblem.

Big Guy's homestead was across the road, one of the last pieces of private, waterfront property this side of the county park. Cubiak steered between the two brick columns at the entrance. Twenty feet from the road, the driveway forked, with one narrow leg continuing on through the woods to the Rec Room cabin and the other wider branch bending back toward the yard and the house. The night he'd come to play cards, Cubiak had arrived in the dark and followed the cutoff to the cabin. This time he went the other way and coasted up to the two Door County ambulances from Sister Bay that were parked bumper to bumper in the drive. Cubiak pulled onto the grass alongside, leaving room for the third emergency vehicle, which had been dispatched from Sturgeon Bay.

The sheriff glanced at the house. Big Guy had done very well, he thought. The house, easily the largest in the area, was a handsome two-story structure built of fieldstone and topped with a slate roof. Several acres of carefully trimmed grass and bushes spread out like a collar around it. A gazebo overlooked the water at one end of the yard; at the other, a freshly painted dock with a power boat rigged for deepwater fishing was tied to the pier and a slick thirty-six-foot cabin cruiser named the
Ida Mae
hung in a sling alongside.

The opulence was dimmed by a gunmetal shroud of low-lying clouds, but Cubiak could imagine the splendor that a bright, sunny day would confer.

He turned his back on the residence and took a few moments to prepare himself before he joined the small crowd that huddled at the rear of the yard.