Death in Cold Water (11 page)

“Well now, Sheriff, you'd have to decide that for yourself. As far as I could tell, Andrew didn't ever do a day's lick of work but he always dressed nice and drove expensive cars. He lives in Green Bay and has one of those condominiums in Chicago, too. I've been with Gerald maybe fifteen years now, and when I first started his son didn't come around much, but the last couple of years he's up at least once a month. The talk is all behind closed doors but sometimes you can hear what's being said and seems to me it's always about Andy needing money.”

Cubiak was at the door when he thought to ask Eva how she got to work every day.

“Oh, Babbs picks me up and we go together. She lives just up the road, you want to talk to her, too,” Eva said, pointing further inland.

“I called and left a message but didn't hear back.”

“That's Babbs,” Eva said with a laugh. “But you just go on ahead, she's always home.”

B
abbs Shadowski was Eva minus twenty years.
Feisty
was the word that came to mind when Cubiak found her splitting firewood behind her double wide.

As soon as he displayed his badge she started to protest. “Now, look here, Marshal or Sheriff or whatever you are, they've got no right to be sending you after me.”

“Who?”

“My goddamn nosy neighbors who claim it's illegal to heat a mobile home with a woodstove. Well, it ain't, and I've got proof.” Babbs slammed the axe into a log and scooped her jacket off the pile.

“I'm not here about your stove. Gerald Sneider appears to be missing . . .”

“And I'm a suspect. You think I've done something nefarious to the old coot, don't you?” Babbs said. “Well, hot damn, then, sir, come right in.”

For a housekeeper, Babbs kept her own surroundings in disarray: laundry piled on the couch, dirty dishes in the sink, yellowing plants on the floor and in the windows.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said, sweeping a stack of magazines off a chair for Cubiak. “Drink?”

“No, thanks. I'm on duty, but you go right ahead.”

Babbs opened a beer and took a swig. “I'm not really a suspect, am I?” she said as she made space for herself at the tiny table.

“Well, since we don't know that anything's actually happened to him, no, not at all. But you sound disappointed. Why would you think you were?”

Babbs laughed. “No reason, just something to talk about,” she replied and took another pull at her drink. “Rich man goes missing, there must be all kinds of theories.”

“Besides being rich, what kind of man is Mister Sneider?”

Babbs hesitated. “Between you and me, after all, this is my boss we're talking about, an odd duck I'd have to say. On the one hand a loner and on the other a man who likes a little noise in the house and wants people about. That's why me and Eva—you know about Eva Carlson the cook?”—she waited until Cubiak nodded—“that's what we're there for. That's my theory, anyway. Eva cooks for a man who only eats mush, and I clean house for a man whose house never gets dirty because there's never anybody in it. Day after day, Gerald sits in that football room from morning until night, reliving the past. And there I am running around with the vacuum five days a week, and then sitting in the kitchen an hour or two a day talking with Eva. Making noise, like I said.”

“His son visits.”

Babbs made a disparaging sound. “If you want to call it that. You ask me, Andrew's just there for the money, but then who can blame him. It seems there's plenty of it, and no love lost between the two of them.”

“They argue?”

“Not so much argue as not talk. Huge silences when the two of them are together.” She drew her calloused hands apart, illustrating the enormous distance between father and son.

“You clean the bedrooms, too?”

Babbs's face clouded. “I do them twice a week, hate it up there. Just goes to show what you can do with money.” The housekeeper glanced around her stingy quarters.

She's imagining what she could do with a little of Sneider's fortune, Cubiak thought.

“What about the locked room?”

Babbs raised both eyebrows. “Ah, the mysterious locked room. You know, in fifteen years, I've never so much as had a peek inside,” she said.

Something in the way she spoke told Cubiak that she was telling the truth. No visitors other than Andrew, no known enemies or disputes with neighbors, occasional phone calls from business associates. The housekeeper confirmed what little information Cubiak had gleaned from the cook. Either both were telling the truth or both were involved in what to this point appeared to be a very amateurish attempt at kidnapping and had synchronized their stories.

“You're from around here?” Cubiak asked as he took his leave.

“Not originally. I was born and raised in Manitowoc. Came here for the job at Gerald Sneider's place.”

W
as it a coincidence that no one on Gerald Sneider's staff was from the area? His secretary had lived in Nashville before relocating to Green Bay thirty years ago. Both the cook and the housekeeper had been on the peninsula for less than two decades, a blink of an eye compared to the generations by which many long-term residents measured their heritage, as Cubiak knew all too well. The sheriff had lived in Door County for four years but was still pegged as an interloper by the genuine old guard.

Cubiak doubted that Eva and Babbs were more qualified than most local women to do the work on the estate. So what did it matter that they had come from elsewhere to work on the estate? By the time they moved to Door County, Sneider was already an old man with few needs. By then, his wife had died, his son had grown and moved away, and he'd started to embrace a more solitary existence.

It was Sneider's early years that were writ large on the peninsula and that had become the stuff of both fact and rumor. If he hired Eva and Babbs because he wanted to be surrounded by people who knew little or nothing of this part of his past, the question was
why
?

C
ubiak was hungry. At the bar and grill in Ellison Bay, he was contemplating the specials scrawled on the blackboard when Rowe texted him saying that Andrew's story about the stamp collector checked out. Just as Cubiak was about to place his lunch order, another message came through.

Com hurri
. The muddled text was from Andrew. The sheriff called. No answer.

Heading out the door, he called the duty deputy. “What's going on?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“Where the hell are you?” Cubiak said.

“Gills Rock. Andrew wanted smoked fish.”

“Jesus. Get down here now. He just texted me. Something's happened.”

A few minutes after two, Cubiak pulled up to the estate gate. He nodded to the half-dozen reporters who swarmed the jeep but ignored the recorders they thrust at the closed window and the notepads in their outstretched hands. A newly hired security guard let the sheriff pass. He was taking the first curve when Andrew emerged from the trees.

Cubiak braked, and Andrew grabbed the door.

“I can't stay here,” he said, hauling himself into the passenger seat. His face was ashen and slick with sweat.

“What happened?”

Andrew pointed down the drive. “There. You'll see,” he said.

W
hen they reached the mansion, Andrew jumped out and hurried toward the lawn. He wore the same baggy clothes he'd had on the day before, and the loose clothes flapped as he moved. When he reached the grass, he shifted his gait into something that was half between a hop and a skip. One foot planted on the lawn, then the other up and over to the side in a crazy zigzag pattern. Back and forth he went, head down as if he were trying to avoid stepping on something.

Bathed in full sunlight, the grounds took on a majestic air. In the distance, a lone sailboat tacked back and forth on the glistening bay. Was it Bathard out enjoying a last hurrah? the sheriff wondered.

By the time Cubiak caught up with him, Andrew had reached the deck along the edge of the cliff. Built-in benches framed three sides of the wooden platform; the fourth opened to a flight of stairs that ran down the face of the palisade. Andrew dropped to a bench and waved Cubiak toward the steps.

“Down there,” he said, motioning with his head.

The steps led to a short dock. Three large letters had been painted on the pier in black:
SOS
. The international distress signal.

What the fuck? Cubiak thought. Gerald Sneider was the one in distress who needed to be rescued. He couldn't have left the message, could he? If the kidnappers had done it on his behalf, why take the chance of being seen so near the estate? Unless they were trying to force Andrew's hand. Or, maybe this was a prank, the workings of a sick mind or some lame-brained teenagers.

Cubiak started down the stairs. He was nearly to the bottom when he realized the reason for Andrew's panic.

The SOS hadn't been printed with paint. The letters were formed from snakes. Brown reptiles, the kind he knew as pine snakes. In all, there were six of the long, slender reptiles. Two for each letter. They'd been laid end to end and pinned to the wood with U-clamps.

Cubiak grabbed one of the oars that was leaning against the cliff and walked out on the deck. He tapped the pier but the snakes didn't react. He prodded one. Then another. The reptiles remained inert. They were dead.

Someone's gone to an awful lot of trouble but to what end? Cubiak wondered.

By the time the sheriff climbed back up, Andrew had retreated to the front steps of the mansion.

Cubiak sat beside him. “When did you see it?”

Andrew had his elbows on his knees. He stared at the ground. “Right before I texted you. I wanted some sun, so I went over to the deck to sit down.”

“Where were you before that?”

“Inside, watching a movie.”

“Did you hear anything? See anyone?”

Andrew shook his head.

“Why'd you send the deputy to the store?”

“I was hungry.”

“He could have gone to the little shop in town. Why all the way to Gills Rock?”

“I had a taste for smoked whitefish,” Andrew said. He spoke like a spoiled, petulant child who was used to getting his way.

“From now on, the deputy stays put unless I say otherwise. You got that?”

“Yeah.” It was more a mumble than a word.

Andrew exhaled. “There's more,” he said and heaved to his feet. “I don't know what made me look here,” he continued as he headed toward the gazebo on the other side of the lawn.

Overhead two hawks rode the currents back and forth. Silent hunters in the sky.

The gazebo was built of the same brownstone as the house. The mansion was large enough to accommodate the bulk of the large stones, but the gazebo seemed overwhelmed, as if the great weight of the material was dragging it into the earth. When he reached the base of the entrance, Andrew hesitated and stepped off the path. Cubiak moved past him and climbed the three steps. The gazebo was empty except for a white wooden crate that sat in the middle beneath the vaulted ceiling. The box was covered with a large piece of cardboard with a note taped to it.
You know what this means
, it read.

Cubiak pushed the cardboard aside with his foot, revealing the wire screen that had been nailed over the top of the box. Inside, there were dozens more snakes. Cubiak felt his stomach clench. Like the hawks that rode the wind, signaling their menace by their mere presence, the heap of slithering snakes hinted at unseen danger. There were brown snakes and garters in the mix but others, too, that he didn't recognize. Unexpectedly, a snake tail emerged from the quivering morass and rattled. The sheriff jumped away. Jesus, no wonder Andrew is freaked, he thought. Cubiak could tolerate one or two snakes at a time and even the truncated alphabet on the dock didn't bother him, but there was something about this tangle of cold-blooded reptiles with their hooded eyes and sinuous movement that left him cold.

“God, I hate snakes. Give you the creeps, don't they,” Andrew said, still standing at the base of the stairs.

If it were up to Cubiak, he'd shoot the snakes on the spot, but the feds needed to see the spectacle, and the crate had to be checked for prints.

“Probably harmless,” the sheriff said, hoping Andrew hadn't seen him shudder.

I
nside the guest house, Cubiak fixed a small pot of tea. Andrew was still so shaken, it took him three tries to get the cup to his mouth.

Cubiak waited for him to drink it half down. “You tell Moore about this?” he asked finally.

Andrew shook his head. “I know I have to, but not yet.”

“Why not?”

“After talking to that woman agent yesterday, I know her boss as much suspects me as anyone,” Andrew said, playing with the sugar bowl.

“Why would he do that?”

Andrew grimaced and gave a nervous laugh. “The usual, you know. Gambling debts. I'm pretty much a regular at the casinos in Green Bay and Milwaukee.”