Death Stalks Door County (13 page)

The Loop was four and a half miles directly east, the city skyline a shining symbol of power and wealth stark against the blue sky. On the corner, a pack of boys, probably five or six years old, swung metal pipes through the heavy heat haze. They alternately jeered and taunted each other with cries of motherfucker, shithead, and other attributes Cubiak couldn't decipher but could imagine. He looked from the ragtag group to the cityscape and felt an immeasurable sadness. How the hell do you get from here to there? he wondered.

To the vice and narcotics cops who regularly worked the area, Lawndale was just another segment of blighted city landscape. Cubiak hated it, viewed it as an aberration of the American ideal, a sore that festered up and down the urban backbone.

“
Sweet Jesus, help us
.”

Startled, Cubiak looked up where Malcolm was pointing.

Less than ten feet away, a scrawny teenage girl in a dirty cotton dress lurched toward them. Somnambulant and balanced on thin birdlike legs, she cautiously negotiated the cracked, uneven sidewalk, unremarkable in the setting, save for the naked baby haphazardly cradled in her frail arms. The infant was grotesquely malnourished, with a swollen belly and an incongruous black smudge across its forehead. The jagged smear reminded Cubiak of Ash Wednesday, how he'd always tried to duck the priest's thumb.

Was the child hers?

The baby slipped. The girl snapped to and struggled to secure her human cargo against her bony chest. In her momentary alarm, she looked up, and Cubiak caught her frightened gaze.
Help me
she seemed to be pleading. He felt suddenly overwhelmed by the impulse to leap from the car, grab the child from her arms, and snatch them both into the safety of another world. He blinked and the moment passed. The infant settled into place, and the girl's hooded eyes swung down again to the broken pavement. She drifted forward, as he watched, empty with relief.

The scream of police sirens shattered the air. One blue-and-white came in from the alley. Another wailed directly down Madison and jumped the curb. Flying past the girl with the baby, the vehicle screeched to a sliding stop in front of the Mustang. Three uniforms jumped out and ran to the stakeout car.

Malcolm jolted upright. “What the
heck
!” he sputtered.

A beefy, red-faced cop shoved his face through Malcolm's window and whispered in his ear. Malcolm blanched. “
Sweet Jesus
.”

The other two opened Cubiak's door. The lieutenant grabbed his arm and pulled him from the seat. Cubiak did not share Malcolm's predilection for sanitized speech. “Hey. What the fuck, man! You're blowing our stakeout. What about the mayor, for chrissake. Clean Sweep?”

The lieutenant responded in well-practiced cop cadence—“Fuck them/Fuck him/Fuck it”—and kicked the door shut. “You got trouble at home, buddy. Let's go.”

M
onths later, in a freezing spring rain, Malcolm found Cubiak near a strip of abandoned factories on the far South Side near Indiana and 119th, just off the Ryan. He was huddled under a viaduct like discarded trash, his hands trembling from either too much or too little to drink.

“
Jesus Christ
.” The interjection became a prayer as, with tears brimming and his face hard-set, Malcolm half-carried, half-dragged his former partner through a slimy, sucking mixture of mud and animal excrement to his car and brought him back to his home on a quiet street of black, middle-class respectability in Chatham.

Malcolm kept him there, sat stoic and unmoved while Cubiak ranted and beat holes in the pink rose patterns of the neatly papered walls, waited patiently until the demons gave up. Then he hauled the broken shell of Dave Cubiak into a straight-back chair, pushed his chin up off his chest, and said, “They
see
you from up
there
. You ain't got
no right
to break their hearts, too.”

When he finished lecturing, Malcolm offered himself up as the crutch that Cubiak would finally use to begin his long, painful climb back up. Encouraged—badgered—by his friend, Cubiak rented a room at the Lawson YMCA, parked cars for a few dollars a day, and wrenched his gut to stay reasonably sober. One day Malcolm arrived with a newspaper opened to an inside page and handed it over.

“You
need
something like this. It'll give you a
new
direction.” Malcolm was insistent.

Cubiak shoved away the paper with its ad for continuing education, but his friend wouldn't relent. Malcolm kept on cajoling until he elicited a promise. Then he showed up the next morning to help Cubiak fill out the application.

Two weeks later, apprehensive and shy, his face raw from a clumsy shave, Cubiak folded his too-tall frame into a lecture hall seat at Truman College. On a whim, he'd signed on for forestry, a vocation as far removed from his former life as he could imagine. Several weeks into the class, Cubiak grudgingly admitted that Malcolm had been right, and though he feared failing and disappointing his former partner, he did well—not at first but slowly and steadily. When Cubiak graduated, Malcolm brought his entire family to the ceremony. Dressed for church, they stood and applauded their friend. His smile for them was the first in a long time.

Cubiak was working for the Cook County Forest Preserve when Malcolm came across a notice about a job in Door County. “It's
there
,” Malcolm said, laying a map of Wisconsin on the table and pointing to the peninsula. “A
new
world.”

All Cubiak saw was the great expanse of blue Lake Michigan water. In high school, he'd sat by the inland sea and read
Moby-Dick
, convinced he understood Ishmael's pain.

“Didn't you tell me you went up there when you were a
kid
?
Boy Scouts
or something?” Malcolm said.

Yes, Cubiak said, he had.

“Well, then, what are you waiting for?”

F
uck Beck, fuck everything, Cubiak thought, reaching for the bottle. He felt a tug at his sleeve and looked down into the tear-stained face of a little girl with long brown bangs and a crescent of freckles across her nose. The child sniffled and said something in a panicky voice. Unable to hear her above the crowd, Cubiak bent down.

“I lost my mommy,” the little girl whimpered into the side of his chin. A ketchup stain smeared the shoulder of her orange top.

“Shit.” He spoke louder than he intended and several reproachful looks came his way.

Even the child turned an accusatory look at him, her plight momentarily overshadowed. “You shouldn't say that word.”

“Yeah, well.” Cubiak scanned the horde for the face of an anxious parent and nearly drowned in an ocean of good cheer.

He tilted toward the child again. “Where were you before?”

She shivered.

“Think,” he insisted.

The girl pinned her red-rimmed, puffy eyes on him. “I don't know,” she wailed.

It came to him slowly that the child had sought him out because of his uniform; she had done what her mother had told her to do if ever she was lost or needed help. Find a policeman. Tell the store clerk. Look for someone official, the person in charge.

“It's okay,” he said gruffly. “We'll walk around together. You look for anything familiar.” He'd take her to the church. Find a cherry-decked greeter and leave the girl with her.

The simpering child latched onto Cubiak's arm. But when he stepped forward, she didn't move.

“Come on,” he said impatiently.

“I can't.”

Before Cubiak could stop her, the girl pulled off her right shoe and bloody sock. A large blister on her heel had broken. The skin underneath was fiery red and raw. She hopped unsteadily on her good foot and started toppling over when Cubiak grabbed her. Without thinking he swung her up against his chest and, in the automatic reflex of a child being rescued by an adult, she wrapped her thin legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. The feather-touch of her hands on his shoulders stabbed his heart.

Cubiak thought he would weep.

“I think we were there.” She pointed toward an ice-cream stand fifty feet away. “Or maybe there.” She looked toward the stage.

Steadying himself, Cubiak waded into the frolicking throng. He struggled to keep the clinging child at arm's length, but the crowd kept jostling at them and the frightened child responded by pulling closer and tightening her grip.

Cubiak stopped abruptly. He was light headed; his heart drummed wildly in his chest. He loosed the child's grasp on his collar and dropped her to the ground.

She wobbled and grabbed his arm. “I'm sorry. I'll walk, I'm too heavy,” she said as tears trickled down her face.

“No. It's okay,” he said, but he remained motionless.

He had fooled himself into thinking he had erased all image of voice and touch. He hadn't.

Memories washed over him. He was at the petting zoo with Alexis. Still a toddler, she wore one black leather Mary Jane and one white ballet slipper. Trailed by a spotted baby goat, she twirled through the miniature farmyard in her favorite yellow sundress, her laughter the purest expression of innocence and joy he could imagine. The next instant, he was lying on the living room rug, exhausted from working three straight shifts, while Alexis bent over a puzzle nearby. From the kitchen, Lauren admonished the child to leave Daddy alone and urged him to go up to bed. But he'd been too exhausted to move and so Alexis knelt by him and sang a lullaby. While she serenaded him, her fingertips brushed lightly up and down his arm. Then she dipped and kissed him. “Good night, Daddy,” she whispered.

Cubiak had met Lauren at a party. He'd almost not gone. She had looked tall from across the room, and he was surprised when he stood next to her to find she barely reached his shoulder. She was a kindred spirit. She cooked chili and talked to him about books. She loosened the ties of his spiritual straitjacket and freed him from the pain of his soldier's soul. She eased his guilt at not having saved his parents from themselves.

When Lauren's life seeped away into a puddle of blood on a pot-marked street, Cubiak lost more than his love. He lost his way.

“Are you okay? Sir?” The child's voice cracked.

“Yes.” Cubiak squeezed her stubby fingers.

R
age and anguish had driven him to drink. Crazed with alcohol, he plotted ways to kill the elder Wisby son in prison; it would be easy enough to bribe a guard to poison the man or to hire another inmate to stab him. Other nights, he thought about ways to take his own life; the method he preferred was carbon monoxide poisoning—so simple to lock the garage and leave the car running. Dying like that, he thought, evoked a sense of ironic justice. In the end, he didn't do anything to harm either the DUI or himself. Years before, he'd decided that there was too much death and killing in the world. That's why he became a cop in the first place, to try and stop the slaughter. He couldn't add to it.

At the same time, he was consumed by pain and loneliness. The psychologist suggested that in addition to grieving the loss of his wife and daughter, he was also experiencing delayed grief for the deaths of his father and mother. Cubiak had ridiculed the notion. His father was a bum, an abusive alcoholic. Good riddance. No tears for his mother either, a rigid, domineering woman who had smothered him with her anxieties and petty ideals. “I was relieved they were gone,” he'd said fiercely, blind to the complexities of familial ties and the long tendrils of grief.

“Mister, please, let go. It's not your fault.” The child struggled to pull free.

Startled, Cubiak looked at her and then released her hand. “What did you say?”

“I'll find her. It's okay.”

“No, what did you say before?” Cubiak crouched down, eyes level with the little girl. He was suddenly calm, and his manner quieted her as well.

The lost child looked at him. “I said
it's not your fault
.”

How many millions of times had Cubiak heard that simple statement, and how many times had he rejected it and instead embraced guilt as punishment for his inability to keep his wife and daughter safe from harm?
It's not your fault
. The child had infused the words with an authority and strength that pierced his emotional armor.

The little girl smiled, and a hairline fracture shuddered through Cubiak's mantle of hubris and despair.

He stared at her.

“Sir?”

A crushing weight slid from his shoulders. Humbled, he wanted to weep but from joy, not sorrow. Hundreds of miles from any of the places he had ever called home and in a blinding midday light, redemption came. Delivered by a child.

Time will do its work, the shrink had said. The question was: would he let it?

Cubiak smiled. “What's your name?”

“Mara.”

“That's a beautiful name.”

A new mass of pleasure seekers surged toward them, and Cubiak suddenly saw the situation in a new light. Bathard was right. Door County faced a dangerous threat, and if he did nothing to find the killer, others—this child perhaps—could die.

He picked up Mara and plunged into the throng. “I'd say it's time we found your mother,” he said.

They traveled the length of the beach, up and down the docks, and past the souvenir stands. Near the church, a greeter tried to intervene, but Cubiak waved her away. He bought Mara an ice-cream cone and stopped twice to retrieve her shoe when she dropped it, finally shoving it into his pocket. They rested long enough for Mara to drink a bottle of grape soda, and then Cubiak lifted her onto his shoulders again for a better view and walked on, his hands on her knees to keep her steady, her suntanned legs dangling down his chest.

“Mommy!”

A petite, athletic woman shoved through the crowd toward them. Her body was tense, alert. Her face was sculpted by panic. Loosely braided hair tumbled over her shoulders. Cubiak dropped Mara into her mother's arms. The woman's face was ashen. The kind of fear she had experienced dissipates slowly. It would, he knew, haunt her again in unsuspecting moments for a long time to come. She put a hand in his and gripped hard.