Death in Cold Water (26 page)

“They were afraid of water—the four boys—and being tied up in the boat and made to sit out all night in the dark was supposed to cure them. Sneider had done it before with other boys; it wasn't the first time. But a storm came up that night. And in the morning, the boys were gone.

“Sneider claimed they'd run away. He told the others that he'd gone out during the storm and rescued them. He said they'd learned their lesson and as a reward he took them to his house for a hot supper. In the morning they were gone. ‘Ungrateful scum ran off,' he said.

“A couple of months later a postcard came in the mail. It was from one of the four boys saying they were okay and living in Iowa somewhere. That was his proof the boys had survived. But Fred didn't believe it.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know, he just said it was all wrong.”

Marilyn sat up, her face flushed with indignation. “My husband died full of guilt and regret. ‘I was too timid. I was too afraid,' he told me over and over until I was sick of hearing it. He was just a kid, Sheriff, and kids have wild imaginations. It got to the point where I started to think he and the others had made it all up. And now this . . .” As suddenly as it had come on, her anger drained. Slumping back into her chair, she pointed to the place on the table where Cubiak had laid the photos. “His last wish was for his brother, Jon, to do what he'd been unable to do all those years earlier.”

“Confront Sneider and make him confess?”

The old woman crossed herself. “Yes,” she said in a whisper.

“Did he?”

She clutched her hands. They were freckled from sun and age and crisscrossed with ridges of thin blue veins. “Jon never does anything he's asked to do,” she replied. But she kept her head bowed, and the trembling in her sagging shoulders told Cubiak that this was one time Marilyn Ross feared she was mistaken.

C
ubiak stopped at the edge of the yard and glanced back at the house. When he'd walked out of the kitchen, Mrs. Ross had been sitting at the table under the dim overhead light, the rest of her modest home in the dark. Now every window blazed as if lit from inside with a flaming torch. From the time he'd walked out the front door, she had gone from one room to another and flicked on the wall switches. The sheriff didn't think she was one to indulge in such luxury, but perhaps her anxiety about being alone in a dark house on a deserted stretch of road many hours from dawn trumped the need for frugality.

“Well?” Moore said as Cubiak slid into the driver's seat and turned the key.

The sheriff cut a sharp U-turn in the drive. “It's pretty much what I thought,” he said.

Moore waited until they spun out onto the road. “And?” he said.

“One more stop. If I'm right, this is it.”

“You know where Sneider is?”

Cubiak grunted.

They were passing through woods thick with deer. Watching for the bright flash of eyes reflecting their headlights, the sheriff hunched over the wheel and pressed the accelerator to the floor as he aimed the jeep down the middle of the dark road. If he was right, Gerald Sneider's time was limited and what mattered was getting to Jon Ross before it was too late.

Moore had his phone out. “I'm calling for backup,” he said.

“Not yet.”

The jeep hit a series of ruts, and the agent grabbed the door handle. “I hope to hell you know what the fuck you're doing,” he said as they turned off the road and into a bumpy drive.

T
he outline of Jon Ross's dilapidated homestead was clearly visible in the cold starlight. On one side of the driveway, the ramshackle house and garage stood together; on the other side, at some distance, was the machine shed and the weathered barn with its tall silo. The area between the two buildings was vacant. The corncrib, granary, and chicken coop that had filled the space had long since been dismantled and their bricks and boards repurposed.

The yard was dark. The familiar blue pickup was parked under a sprawling oak. Next to it was a red car. Cubiak was surprised to find the vehicles in plain sight. No dog was barking, though. It was probably muzzled to keep it from drawing attention to the place. In the thick silence, the only sound was the almost imperceptible burble of the creek that ran unseen in the deep woods bordering the back of the yard.

Earlier, Cubiak had placed his gun in the glove box. Reaching for it now, he caught the flicker of recognition in Moore's eyes.

“This time you come with,” the sheriff said.

At the top of the porch steps, Cubiak banged on the door. Jon Ross threw it open almost instantly. Framed by a strip of yellow light, he stepped into the doorway and pressed his large hands against the doorjamb. He seemed to have grown taller and bulkier in the few days since Cubiak had last seen him.

“Expecting someone?” the sheriff said.

“Who's that?” Ross ignored the question and tossed his head with its helmet of unruly hair at Moore.

The agent held up his badge. “FBI.”

Ross sneered but beneath the contempt Cubiak caught a hint of alarm.

“Your son's home,” the sheriff said.

“Maybe.”

“You have company, too.” He indicated the red car.

“Yeah, my nephew's here, visiting his cousin. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“Where are they?”

Ross ran his tongue around the inside of his cheek. “Around.”

“What are they doing?”

“Hell if I know.”

“I believe you do.” Cubiak stepped closer and held up a photo of the rowboat that Cate had taken at Hangar Number Three before any of the bones were removed.

Ross tried not to react but in the dim light, Cubiak saw him blink hard and caught the twitch in the corner of his mouth.

“Go on, take it. I got plenty more,” the sheriff said, pressing the photo into his chest.

Ross turned away.

“Look at it,” Cubiak said.

“I seen it,” Ross said as he picked at the chipped framework of the doorway.

The sheriff knew the man's temper. Ross would just as readily grab a shotgun from behind the door and blast them as try and punch his way past.

As he waited, Cubiak was aware of Moore moving up behind him. The sheriff didn't dare glance around to see if the agent had his weapon out but hoped that, at the least, he had it ready.

Finally, Ross turned back. Keeping his face in check, he looked at the picture again. “This supposed to mean something to me?” he said. His tone remained gruff but some of the meanness had drained away.

“I think it means a lot. I think it's linked to the time you spent at the Forest Home and that it's the proof you're trying to scare out of Gerald Sneider.”

“What the fuck you talking about? I got nothing to do with Sneider.” Ross tried to laugh and knocked the photo from Cubiak's hand. “You're not gonna pin that one on me. It's terrorists that got him. Tell him, tell this dick wipe of a sheriff that it's terrorists he should be looking for,” he said, nearly shouting at Moore.

Cubiak picked up the photograph.

“There are four sets of bones in that boat, and there were four boys put in it the night the boat sank. You and your brother tied them up. You had to. You were just kids yourselves, and Gerald Sneider made you do it. It was supposed to be another one of his lessons, nothing more. The boys would spend the night on the water and learn not to be afraid. It was how he did things.”

Ross's face was wet with sweat. “Who told you this?” he asked.

“The boys never came back, did they?” Cubiak said. “There was a storm that night—lightning, thunder, and high winds. The waves came up the way they do on the water. You and your brother and the other kids were scared. You were sure your friends had drowned but Sneider said no. He claimed to have rescued them. He said he'd taken them to his house for a hot meal but that the next morning, when he got up, they were gone. Sneider told everyone they'd run off.”

Ross reached for the picture. He was quiet a long moment. “The bastard called them ingrates. Said they'd probably hopped one of the quarry boats headed to Chicago.”

“You believed him?”

“Not really, but it sounded like a dream come true—which one of us kids wouldn't have gave anything to be in Chicago rather than at that stinking camp. So yeah, we believed his story even though we were pretty sure it was a lie.” Ross pulled a hand down over his jaw. “A lie we couldn't prove.”

“You spent a lifetime trying to forget that night but Fred couldn't. He was tormented to the end. He knew—you both did—that the boys had died. Something tipped you off. What was it?”

Ross's face clouded. He worked his mouth hard. “It was the postcard. A couple months went by and then this postcard comes, addressed to me and Fred. It was from one of those four boys. Chester. That was his name. ‘We made it. Good luck,' it said, something like that. All written like in a boy's hand. It wasn't sent from Chicago like we'd been told but from Iowa. Probably to make us think the boys had moved on.” Ross gave a sour squawk. “Sneider was always one for the dramatic. Only thing was, you see, Chester couldn't write. He'd never learned. He didn't even know the alphabet.”

Ross handed the photo back to Cubiak. “It was me that taught him to print his name, and he was damn proud of that. Even if someone else had penned the message for him, he'd've insisted on printing his own name just to show me that he'd remembered how.”

“You think Sneider was responsible for sending the card?”

Ross scoffed. “Who else? It was just the kind of lousy trick he'd pull.”

“What about Verne Pickler?”

Ross's eyes opened wide. “Verne Prick, you mean?” He almost laughed and then grew somber again. “Yeah, him, too. He's the fucker that towed the boat out to the rocks. The rest of us stood on the shore and watched him. Prick was Sneider's man. He had a hand in everything that went on at the place.”

“And now he's gone missing, too,” Cubiak said. “The man whose dog was found tied up along the ship canal,” he added for Moore's sake.

All the while he'd been talking with Ross, the sheriff had been keenly aware of Moore listening to the exchange. To his credit, the FBI agent hadn't interrupted once, but Cubiak trusted him to have pieced together the main parts of the story.

“You've got them both here, don't you?” the sheriff said.

Ross narrowed his gaze and peered over Cubiak into the darkness. He was a man whose life had been shaped by harshness and who had bullied his way through one decade after another with increasing meanness—angry about everything, sure that he'd never gotten a fair shake. And maybe he was right. Maybe he had been cursed by birth and circumstance. Wrung dry of human compassion, he'd turned into stone and surrounded himself with all the sourness he could gather into one place. Yet. Yet, he'd risked everything to fulfill his dying brother's last wish, to try to right a wrong that had been long lost to history.

Cubiak realized that Ross's desire for justice, twisted as it was, originated in a deeply buried shred of decency. Given the man's longstanding resentment of authority, the sheriff decided that his only chance of reaching him was to show him the respect he thought he deserved.

“I could lie and tell you my deputy is on his way with a warrant but I won't do that,” Cubiak said, hoping this was enough to gain Ross's trust.

At first, Ross didn't react. Perhaps he hadn't heard. But after a moment he looked at Cubiak full on and blinked. “I appreciate that, Sheriff.”

In the half-dozen encounters Cubiak had had with the local renegade, it was the first civil word he'd heard from him.

Time was slipping away. Cubiak knew they'd been talking for just a few minutes although it felt much longer. He'd take one last stab at convincing Ross to cooperate. “We need to get to them now. Before it's too late,” he added.

Ross hesitated. Then he stepped onto the porch. “This way,” he said as pushed past the two men. “Follow me.”

D
espite his bulk, Jon Ross was quick on his feet. Bounding down the steps, he set a surprisingly fast pace as he ran for the corner of the house. He's heading for the root cellar, Cubiak thought as he raced to catch up. But once Ross reached the back of the house, he kept going into the yard and toward the creek.

The yard sloped at a sharp angle and was heaped with junk and discarded furniture. In the dark, Ross zigzagged through the obstacle course as Cubiak and Moore struggled to keep up. Moore tripped over a discarded tire and sprawled to the ground. The sheriff 's foot caught on a tree root, and he went down hard on one knee. As he scrambled back up, he scanned the tree line along the creek bed for a glimpse of Ross. The man had vanished. Cubiak swore at the night air. He'd been a fool to trust Ross. Sneider was being held somewhere on the farm, and Ross had only pretended to cooperate so he could get past the two lawmen and run to warn the others.