Death at Gills Rock
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DEATH AT
GILLS ROCK
A DAVE CUBIAK
DOOR COUNTY
MYSTERY
PATRICIA SKALKA
TERRACE BOOKS
A TRADE IMPRINT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
Terrace Books
A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
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3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden
London WC2E 8LU, United Kingdom
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Copyright © 2015 by Patricia Skalka
All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to rights@uwpress.wisc.edu.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Skalka, Patricia, author.
Death at Gills Rock: a Dave Cubiak Door County mystery / Patricia Skalka.
pages cm — (Dave Cubiak Door County mystery)
ISBN 978-0-299-30450-8 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-299-30453-9 (e-book)
1. Door County (Wis.)—Fiction.
I. Title. II. Series: Skalka, Patricia. Dave Cubiak Door County mystery.
PS3619.K34T48 2015
813´.6—dc23
2014038286
Maps by Julia Padvoiskis
Door County is real. While I used the peninsula as the framework for the book, I also altered some details and added others to fit the story. The spirit of this majestic place remains unchanged.
For
Julia and Carla,
the diamond and the pearl …
Nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest.
Luke 8:17
DEATH AT GILLS ROCK
WEEK ONE: SATURDAY EARLY MORNING
Three of a Kind: Joined in Life, War, and Honor.” Dave Cubiak skimmed the headline as he ran the water over the dirty dishes piled in the sink. The Door County sheriff was normally neat about his surroundings, but with one of his deputies out sick that week he’d been getting home barely in time to fix supper and rinse up afterward. Cubiak glanced at the mess in the basin. Cleanup duty called, but he knew that keeping up with local events was duty as well.
Cubiak brushed the crumbs from the table and sat down with the Herald. Braced for a piece of north woods fluff, he began reading. During his first year on the Wisconsin peninsula, he was often annoyed by the blur between hard and soft news, but gradually he’d come to understand that small-town reporting simply represented a different way of looking at the world. Where little happened, people were the news, and what happened to them mattered.
The story captivated Cubiak. The three boyhood friends were World War II veterans who’d fought together in the United States’ only battles against the Japanese on American soil. They’d enlisted after Pearl Harbor and shipped out with the Sturgeon Bay coast guard contingent assigned to help the army pry the enemy from its foothold in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, staving off an invasion of the mainland. In 1943, American troops had ousted Japanese forces from strongholds on Amchitka, Komandorski, and Attu Islands. The trio—Terrence “Big Guy” Huntsman, Eric Swenson, and Jasper Wilkins—were to be honored at the commissioning ceremonies for a new patrol cutter named for the Battle of Attu, an eighteen-day siege that ended with a Japanese banzai, or suicide, attack.
Cubiak sipped his coffee and continued reading. He recognized the men. Huntsman, Swenson, and Wilkins were Door County stalwarts from Gills Rock, a blip of a town at the tip of the peninsula. After the bloody ordeal on Attu, the three friends served together for the duration of the war. Once peace was restored, they returned home to the isolated waterfront village of their childhoods. Two photos beneath the fold showed them before and after: first as gangly eighteen-year-olds in white coast guard uniforms, standing on the forward deck of the USS Arthur Middleton, and now as gray-haired octogenarians, scarred by time but still rugged and Viking-tall, framed against the steely waters of northern Door.
On the page 2 jump, the veterans were pictured with their wives. Three more of a kind, thought Cubiak. A smaller photo in the right-hand corner showed an army private named Christian Nils, also of Gills Rock. Just nineteen and newly married when he joined up, Nils died when his troop transport capsized in stormy seas during an ill-fated landing attempt. Huntsman, Swenson, and Wilkins were among the coast guardsmen cited for their heroic efforts to try to save Nils and the other 170 men washed overboard or stranded on the ice-coated, rocky shore of Amchitka Island.
The worst horror of war, Cubiak thought. Worse even than taking a life was the inability to preserve one. You killed your enemies but tried to save your friends. Everything surreal. Bombs and blood. The heavy silence of the dead and anguished cries of the dying. For him, sandstorms and strangling heat. For Nils and the three friends, impenetrable fog and frigid water.
Cubiak flinched. He rarely thought about his two closest army buddies: Tobias, a football player who’d left Kuwait without a leg, and Kenny, a drummer who went home in a body bag with only half a brain. The others were lost in a blur of confusion. Eager to forget, they had drifted apart. These three men, the trio that came back to Door County after the war, had stayed tight. Regular camping trips were made to Rock Island and weekly poker games took place in the log cabin Huntsman had built for that purpose.
Not long after Cubiak was elected sheriff, Big Guy had called and invited him to a Friday evening card tournament. “It’ll give us a chance to meet and get to know each other,” he’d said. Cubiak had grown up with a skinny kid tagged Fatso and had played high school basketball with a tall center nicknamed Shorty. He imagined his host as the antithesis of his sobriquet, and when the cabin door swung open he was surprised to find himself standing eye-level with the line of red reindeer that pranced chest-high across Big Guy’s green sweater. Huntsman did more than tower in the doorway; he consumed the entire entryway, and for a moment Cubiak was reminded of the monstrous Kodiak bear frozen upright on its hind legs in the old Marshall Field’s Men’s Store in downtown Chicago.
“Hey, come on in, Dave,” Big Guy said as he clamped a paw-sized hand on the sheriff ’s shoulder and pulled him across the threshold into the overheated cabin.
The phone rang, bringing Cubiak back to the early morning chill of his spartan kitchen.
He tipped the chair onto its rear legs, leaned back, and unhooked the receiver from the wall cradle.
“Chief ?” There was no need to ask who was calling. Cubiak recognized the baritone voice of his deputy Michael Rowe. The officer was the youngest member of the force and the first person the new sheriff had hired after he was sworn in to office eighteen months prior.
“Mike, easy on the ears,” he said.
“Sorry. I tried to raise you on the radio.”
“It’s Saturday. I’m in
my kitchen. Just finishing breakfast.”
“Right. Sorry. You see the Herald yet?”
“Reading it right now.” As if to substantiate the claim, Cubiak dropped the chair back onto all fours.
“Yeah, something else, ain’t it? Anyways, they’re waiting for you to get up there and look around.”
“Who? Where?”
“Huntsman’s place in Gills Rock. Doctor Bathard called. There’s been an accident.”
Cubiak reached over his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. Evelyn Bathard, the retired coroner and the sheriff ’s first real friend on the peninsula, was not a man to make an unnecessary fuss. “What kind of accident?”
“He didn’t say and by the time I’d asked he’d hung up. I tried calling back but the line was busy. Probably somebody calling the ambulance.”
“How bad is it?”
“About as bad as it gets. Those men? Huntsman, Swenson, and Wilkins—they’re all dead.”
Cubiak looked at the paper again. In the photos, the men appeared vibrant and carefree. How could they be dead? They’d survived war and the near misses that life brings as a matter of course. Maybe Rowe was mistaken. “You sure?” he said, finally.
“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 o
f 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.