Death in Cold Water (16 page)

F
red Ross and his wife had made their home in the southern part of the county, close to the city of Sturgeon Bay but far from the glamour that was generally associated with the county. This was the nontourist part of the peninsula, an area dotted with small farms and unpretentious single-family homes. Real estate development was creeping along the rugged rim of Green Bay where small frame houses were being razed and replaced by showplaces. Several farms had been sold to builders who divided the land into one-acre parcels, hoping to attract people from the city of Green Bay who were willing to trade a forty-minute commute for a country home with a Door County address. But most of the land remained largely unchanged and was handed down from one generation to the next with only modest improvements to chart the passage of time.

In the deepening twilight, Cubiak followed a worn stretch of black-top that crisscrossed a meandering creek and finally brought him to a tan mailbox marked Ross. Slowing, he turned up the driveway to the house where the recently widowed Marilyn Ross lived. Cubiak hadn't known Fred's wife's given name and had called Rowe. “What's this about?” his deputy had said. Cubiak heard the curiosity in his voice but knew he wouldn't ask for more than the sheriff was willing to give. Which amounted to pretty much nothing because even Cubiak was not quite sure why he wanted to talk to her, other than it was a place to start.

Marilyn Ross lived in a yellow frame ranch house that was set back in a thick grove of cedars. The trees were tall and full and added a stately air to what, drawing closer, he realized was a modest but tidy homestead. Beside the house, which was remarkably small, there were two other buildings: a matching yellow garage and a garden shed. The narrow lawn was neatly trimmed, fence posts aligned and straight, flower bed weeded, walkway swept clean. Cubiak followed the white-rock-lined driveway to a small turnoff that faced a kitchen garden littered with plant stubble, the only visible sign of disorder on the property. Closing the jeep door, Cubiak caught a hint of movement at one of the curtains. Was Fred Ross's widow home? Was she watching from behind one of the green-shuttered windows? he wondered.

A shroud of silence encompassed the house and yard. There was no wind through the surrounding ring of gnarled oaks, no birds tweeting or insects chirping. In the heavy, funereal quiet, his boots crunched on the gravel path that ran past a flower bed of red and gold mums and then up to the front door.

The bell was unyielding, so he knocked. After a few moments, he heard the slow shuffle of feet approaching the door, a sound that reminded him of Eva Carlson.

A short, heavy-set woman blinked into the glare from the entryway light. She emitted a stale odor of unwashed clothes and talcum powder. A tuft of unruly white hair stuck up on the right side of her head, a match for the red imprint on her cheek.

“Marilyn Ross?” Cubiak said and introduced himself.

She nodded.

“I've disturbed your nap, Mrs. Ross. I apologize.”

“It's Marilyn, and I need disturbing.” She tugged her checkered housedress into place and then she stepped back and waved him into the dim, overly warm living room, directing him to the threadbare blue-plaid recliner in the corner by the picture window.

“Can't sit in it myself. Too hard to get up. Afraid I'd be trapped forever.” Marilyn added a weak smile to a pretend laugh as she eased into a worn rocker. Besides a sagging sofa, a small corner table, and a console television, the room was unfurnished.

Just as suddenly, she frowned. “This ain't about my Stevie, is it? He ain't got in no trouble with that no-good cousin of his, has he?”

“No. Nothing like that,” Cubiak replied.

“Leeland's two years older and always been a bad influence on my boy, though we did our best to keep the two apart.”

The sheriff looked around, trying to picture the young New York reporter as a boy in this isolated, pinched house. Where were the books and magazines he might have read as a kid? The music? Cubiak guessed that the house had two bedrooms, and he tried to envision the one that had been Steve's, tried to imagine it crammed with the messy, noisy stuff of youth.

“I'm here to talk about Fred,” Cubiak said and offered his condolences.

“Fred!” The widow's mouth quivered. “Why him, Sheriff? He never did a wrong thing in his life. Not like that lousy brother of his,” she said, twisting a handkerchief she'd picked up from the arm of the rocker.

“Tell me about your husband,” Cubiak said.

“Fred was a good man, Sheriff. He worked hard, always did his best for us. A good husband and father and a regular church-goer, too. But like so many, the poor man drank himself to death. Fred was a big man. Weighed over three hundred pounds, and he had everything wrong that a man that size could have wrong: diabetes, weak heart, gout. When you add the whiskey, well . . .”

Like my old man, Cubiak thought, only he'd been skin and bones. All the drink he'd poured down his throat had gone to produce liver toxins rather than fat.

“I am sorry,” Cubiak said.

Marilyn had gotten up and was shoving a picture at him: a younger Fred Ross, hefty and well on his way to being obese.

The sheriff was surprised. “He was such a skinny kid in the photo I saw,” he said.

“Skinny! Well, maybe way back when. That must have been a pretty old picture.”

Cubiak showed her a copy of the photo from Bathard. “That's Fred and Jon in the back,” he explained.

“Oh my word. Look at that. May I?” Tears formed in her eyes as she reached for the picture. For a moment, she stared at the photo as if lost in thought and then, clutching the snapshot and the framed photo to her sagging bosom, she tottered back to the rocking chair.

“I never seen a picture of Fred so young. What a sweet boy. But that terrible place!”

“The Forest Home? I've only heard good things about it. Your husband lived there for a while, didn't he, with his brother Jon?”

Marilyn gave him a scornful look. “‘Lived' is a pretty generous term for what those boys endured. Nine worst years of his life.”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “I don't know exactly. Fred didn't talk about it much but I knew he hated it.”

“Did he ever say why?”

“Not really. I guessed it was maybe his pride. It's not hard to understand how he'd resent having nothing when those other boys had so much. Family. Education. All the material comforts and advantages you could want. Probably more than someone like us could even imagine. For those boys, the lucky ones, the camp must have been a glorious place. For Fred and the other charity cases, it was a miserable sinkhole.” Marilyn smoothed her faded skirt. “Those are my words, Sheriff, not my husband's.”

“Did Jon hate it, too?”

Marilyn snorted. “Jon hated everything, still does, so probably he did. Couple of times I overheard Fred trying to get him to talk about what things were like when they were kids, but Jon would just cut him off. ‘Forget that shit,' he'd say. ‘What's past is past.' I think they both wanted to forget, and maybe Jon was able to. But Fred couldn't.”

She looked up suddenly. “Tea, Sheriff?”

With a shy coyness, Mrs. Ross offered Cubiak her arm and allowed him to walk her into the kitchen. She carried the camp photo in her free hand and once there she laid it on the table. She let Cubiak fill the kettle and set it on the stove before insisting that he sit. Then she got up and measured out several pinches of loose leaves into a small ceramic pot and arranged a platter of butter cookies.

“Nobody comes by much anymore. I have to keep in practice or I'll forget my manners,” she said.

Cubiak warmed to the lonely woman and regretted his earlier harsh assessment of the kind of childhood he'd envisioned for her son. “It must be nice to have Steve home.”

“It would be if he were ever here.” She sighed and set the platter on the table. “But you know how these young folks are. Always something to do.”

The cookies were bland but the tea surprisingly strong. Sitting across from him, Marilyn wrapped her gnarled hands around her mug and stared at the photo. “I almost married Jon, you know. Had both brothers courting me back then.” She pursed her mouth and then laughed, for real this time.

“And you chose Fred?”

“Yes, the quiet one. I figured I'd have a better life with him than with that bull-headed brother of his.”

Cubiak smiled, encouraging her to go on.

“And I guess that in many ways, I did. Oh, listen to me! I'm starting to sound like one of those women who complain about everything.” She batted her hands at the air. “Of course, I did. Like I said, Fred was a good man who did his best. Not that there weren't problems—there are always problems. Life brings them and drops them at your doorstep whether you want them or not. Truth is, Sheriff, they were both damaged men. Both of them hard drinkers. The difference was that with Jon, the alcohol primed the pump. That man never had any trouble letting out his anger. For Fred, it was different. He kept his feelings locked inside, and all that the beer and whiskey did was give him something to try and drown himself in.” She looked at him straight and hard. “You tell me, which is worse?”

Cubiak shook his head. “I don't know.” I've only known the one, he wanted to say, but he stopped himself. “I'm sorry. Life can be hard. But there are those who make it harder.”

Marilyn tapped the photo. “That's Gerald Sneider, ain't it, the one who owned the camp?”

Cubiak nodded.

“Fred didn't like Sneider, but who could blame him. The man was praised to high heaven for all the good he did, but he really took advantage of those boys, the needy ones. To hear Fred tell it, things were pretty peachy when the rich summer boys were around needing to be fed and all, but come winter, the other boys were practically starved. They never had enough wood for the stove neither, and they had to work hard all the time. They did their own repairs. They even had to dig new latrines for the summer kids. That's all what he said about the camp, and, truth be told, there were times I got tired of listening. Most of us had a hard life growing up. I was the youngest of ten kids. Believe me, there was never enough food on the table for any of us.”

She closed her eyes and was quiet a moment, as if reliving the hardships of her own youth. Then she blinked.

“But I always knew there was more. Fred had a nervous tic that would start up and not stop for the longest time. Sometimes he had bad dreams, too. The kind that rattle you awake and leave you lying there in cold sweats. He'd never admit it to me, but I always thought something bad was eating at him from the inside.”

“And you think it had to do with the Forest Home?”

She gave the question due consideration before she answered. “I don't know for certain, but you live with someone for that many years and you get a pretty good notion how they got to be the way they are. There could be other things, of course, and I'm not saying there ain't, but my gut tells me it went way back to when they were youngsters living at that place. Neither of those boys were ever angels, and probably half the kids there were hellions. I'm sure they got in a pack of trouble. Whatever happened, it troubled Fred to the end. Times I think whatever it was, it may have even helped kill him.”

“Did you ever ask Jon about it after your husband died?”

“Bah! That stubborn old goat hasn't talked civil to me in years. He's never forgiven me for marrying his brother instead of him.”

Marilyn pulled the picture closer. “Can I keep this?” she asked.

“Of course.” He waited a moment. “You've heard that Sneider's gone missing.”

She gasped and looked up.

“The story's been on the news all week.”

“I don't listen to the news. It's too depressing,” she said.

“Steve hasn't said anything to you?”

“No, why would he?” There was fear in her voice.

“I don't know, something to talk about,” he said.

“I told you. I hardly see my son. He keeps himself busy doing whatever.”

When Cubiak left, Marilyn Ross was sitting at the table with her tea and her memories, wondering if she'd told him more than she should have.

J
on Ross lived just two miles from his late brother's place. His small, unworked farm sat on a parallel road that might as well have been in a separate universe. Instead of stately pines, he was surrounded by soggy marshland. Instead of a tidy ranch house, he lived in a ramshackle shotgun house from which time and weather had stripped all color. Instead of a faithful wife, he had only the memory of a skittish woman in his bed. His partner was long gone, run off at some distant time past, either lured by a sweeter man or desperate to escape her good-for-nothing common-law husband.

Cubiak had heard the stories whispered late at night with a sneer or shake of the head over the last call for whiskey or beer at one or other of the local bars, and he knew the sad rundown homestead all too well. More than once he'd been called out to break up fights between Jon and his son or one of his unsavory running buddies. There'd been other visits as well and none of them pleasant.

Leeland's blue pickup was in the yard. Next to it was a red car with New York plates. A large, mangy dog barked and pulled at the chain that kept it tied to a tree. The air reeked, probably from creek water that had overrun the banks and then pooled in a low gully. Voices and banging erupted from the machine shed, and he saw a flicker of bright light. Two men were working and arguing.

The sheriff mounted the sagging steps and knocked on the door. A moment passed and the door swung open just far enough for Jon Ross to slip out. He slammed the door shut before the sheriff could see inside.

Ross yelled at the dog to shut up. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the sheriff. He was a big man, like his brother, with a scowl etched deep into his wide, round face. “Yeah?” he said.