Death by the Bay Page 10

  The handkerchief in her hands was twisted into a tight rope.

  “Perhaps that is why I was so excited when I saw the picture on the wall. I wanted so badly to find Miguel and I thought I had.”

  There was a knock. Cubiak ignored it. The door opened and a lanky, sandy-haired young man in a pressed blue shirt and creased khakis stepped in. The sight of the two cleaning women sitting and not at work seemed to confuse him.

  “Excuse me, these are private meeting rooms,” he said. He tried to sound important enough to warrant the title of assistant manager that was printed on his badge, but Cubiak doubted that he had yet to reach voting age.

  The sheriff pointed to the badge on his belt. “And we’re having a private meeting,” he said.

  “I see.”

  He didn’t, but Cubiak didn’t feel compelled to explain further.

  “If you don’t mind.”

  The staffer smiled obsequiously, the way he’d been instructed to when faced with difficult guests. “Of course,” he said as he backed into the hall.

  Cubiak got up and closed the door. How many children like Miguel were there? he wondered. Thousands. Tens of thousands perhaps. Innocents like this boy stolen from their unsuspecting parents, runaways misled into prostitution, youngsters kidnapped for forced labor and worse. Promises of miracle cures, bright futures. There were times the world seemed populated by predators. He felt helpless in face of the statistics.

  “I wish there was something I could do to help, but it seems impossible. You must realize that.”

  “Sí. Yes.”

  “You should take comfort in knowing that you have done everything you can, both for your mother and for your brother.”

  She gave a quick ironic smile. “But I have failed.”

  Just as I have failed many times, the sheriff thought. Just as we all do in one way or another.

  “As long as you keep telling your brother’s story, there is hope.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Yes. It may not help you find Miguel, but it could save others.” He paused and gave her time to take in the full import of his words. “That may be the most you can ask for.”

  Francisca had tears in her eyes, but she returned his look with a somber, steady gaze. “You are a very honest man, Sheriff. And I thank you for that.”

  A moment of understanding passed between them.

  The women stood to leave.

  Cubiak got to his feet as well, but he wasn’t finished questioning them yet.

  “The other day, I came back to talk with you, but you were gone. Why didn’t you wait for me, like I asked you to?”

  Francisca pulled a scarf from her bag and draped it across her shoulders. “That young woman came in and told us that you said we could leave.”

  “What woman?”

  “She didn’t tell us her name.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “She had hair of two colors, and she wore a jacket like this,” Francisca said, pointing to her denim tote bag.

  On the day Leonard Melk died, Linda Kiel’s hairstyle and outfit had branded her an anomaly among the well-coifed and well-heeled conference-goers. It had to have been her. She was the only woman with bicolored hair and a denim jacket. After the second scream, she must have slipped out of the Woodlawn Theater and followed him to the Forest Room. Was it journalistic instinct that sent her scurrying down the hall in search of a story, or did she have a different motive? And how much of Francisca’s tale had she overheard, eavesdropping at the closed door? What the hell was she up to?

  “Did she say anything or try to get you to talk?”

  “No. She just shooed us out the door.”

  “Did she take the laptop?”

  “I don’t know. When we left, it was still in the room and so was she.”

  “If she comes around again and starts asking questions about your brother and the photo, don’t say anything. But let me know, okay? In fact, if anyone asks you about Miguel, call me.” He wrote his cell number on his card and gave it to her.

  “Sí, señor. But why?”

  “Because I want to talk to them first.”

  Cubiak walked the women back to Lupita’s rusty Fiat. The older woman shook his hand and said good-bye in a way that implied she didn’t expect to see him again. Francisca surprised him with a quick hug, but even that felt like an ending. Once inside the car, the women didn’t wave. He waited until they were out of sight, and then he called Linda Kiel. The journalist owed him answers, but again he was unable to reach her, and her mailbox was still full. He tried texting, but the message was undelivered.

  He could swing by her place and leave a note. Did people still do that? Cubiak wondered. He wasn’t sure if he had a piece of paper to write on. Not that it would matter because he didn’t know her address. His only alternative was to try to reach her through her father. After seven rings, Tom Fadim’s answering machine came on. The sheriff left his number and a message asking the accountant to tell his daughter to call. “Tell her I’ve got an exclusive.”

  That’ll get her attention, he thought.

  11

  PICTURES ON THE WALL

  Don’t let your mother see this,” Cubiak said as he popped the cap off the can of whipped cream. While Cate was out walking, he had made pancakes, his usual Thursday ritual, and Joey wanted his with a face. As the boy watched, his father rimmed the pancake on his plate with a giant grin. The boy made a smile to match and then dropped in two blueberries for the eyes and a strawberry for the nose.

  “Perfection,” Cubiak said. He leaned over and winked conspiratorially. “Remember, not a word.”

  “Gotcha, Dad,” Joey said. He clamped his mouth shut and looked up, unaware of how deeply his response tore into his father’s heart.

  Cubiak had played the same game with Alexis. When he had told her mum’s the word about the forbidden treat, she would say, “Right, Daddy,” and then draw a finger across her mouth as if zipping it shut.

  Ever since Joey had been born, Cubiak had seen flashes of his daughter in the boy. How could he not? When Joey took his first step, Cubiak saw Alexis taking hers. When he made his first snow angel on the beach, he remembered how his daughter lay on her back and gleefully slid her arms and legs back and forth on the front lawn outside their Chicago bungalow. The joy of watching his son grow up had been matched by the pain of remembering his daughter, who had died.

  In four months, Joey would turn five, a birthday that Alexis never reached. What happened then, when reality outdistanced memory? Cubiak wondered.

  At the moment Joey crammed the last bit of pancake into his mouth, Cate came in from the beach. When she left for her morning walk, she had been wearing her jacket, but now it was tied around her waist. She flung it over a chair and gave her son one of her all-knowing looks.

  “I hope you had some fruit with your breakfast,” she said, pouring coffee into a tall blue mug.

  “Yep,” Joey and Cubiak said together.

  Cate scowled at them and then laughed. “I’m onto you two,” she said.

  The next few minutes were lost to the usual rush of getting the table cleared and Joey into his socks and shoes and out the door in time for his mother to drive him to the morning preschool session.

  In the quiet of the empty kitchen, Cubiak checked his email. Lisa had forwarded a batch of articles that were bylined by either Linda Kiel or Cody Longe and had been published within the last eighteen months. The sheriff skimmed the titles. The young woman had been busy. As Kiel she had authored a half-dozen fluff pieces on the latest trends in fashion scarves, hairstyles, decorating accessories, and foods with names he didn’t recognize. These were followed by more serious pieces that dealt with environmental issues. Two offered advice on how-to-go-green, but one delved into proposed industrial pollution guidelines for the Great Lakes. Six months ago, she started writing as Cody Longe, and the tenor of her work shifted toward investigative reporting. The titles of her most rece
nt pieces were both sensational and dramatic: “How Modern Medicine Can Kill You” and “What Computer Nerds Don’t Want You to Know.”

  Cubiak was about to start reading when Rowe appeared at the back door. The sheriff waved him in. “You’re out early,” he said.

  “I got that meeting with the neighborhood watch volunteers up at Ellison Bay. Since I was going this way I figured I’d stop and drop off today’s paper. Thought you’d want to see it.” He handed Cubiak a copy of the Green Bay Press Gazette with the page 1 banner headline: “Death by the Bay.”

  “By Cody Longe. Did you read this already?” Cubiak said.

  “Yep.”

  “And?”

  “You’re not going to like it.” Rowe stepped toward the door. “I’ll let myself out,” he said and was gone.

  The story was an eyewitness account of Leonard Melk’s death at the Green Arbor Lodge. Kiel played up her role as one of the last people to talk with Melk before he collapsed. That was true enough, but she got many of the other details wrong and exaggerated much of the situation. Cubiak didn’t begrudge the journalist her opinions and take on events, even if he thought they were sensationalized, but he resented her misrepresentation of facts. She had seen everything that happened that day, and he had said nothing that didn’t confirm her observations, yet she referred to him as the “tight-lipped sheriff.” Pardy had answered her questions as well, but in the piece Kiel portrayed her as the “uncooperative medical examiner who refused to divulge critical information.” Even Sage’s straightforward comment that Melk appeared to have suffered a fatal heart attack came across sounding suspicious. From start to finish, the article implied that the Door County sheriff and the medical examiner as well as the head of the IPM were covering up the truth about the doctor’s death.

  Interestingly, she didn’t mention the second scream and what she had picked up, eavesdropping outside the Forest Room. If Kiel had heard Francisca’s story, why hadn’t she included it? Or was she writing a sequel about missing children and mystique by the bay?

  “Damn it to hell,” Cubiak said.

  He tossed the newspaper aside and fished Kiel’s card from his wallet. Staring out at the lake, he dialed the number and counted the rings. After nine, the message kicked in: the person he was trying to reach was not available and the mailbox was full.

  He was about to lay the phone on the counter when it rang in his hand.

  Probably Kiel, he thought. He wondered if she was calling to excuse herself or maybe even to apologize. But caller ID flashed an unfamiliar number on the small screen. He hesitated but finally took the call.

  His greeting was met with a raspy cough. Then a woman whispered in his ear. “He’s here again.”

  “Who is this?” Just what he needed to top off his morning, a prank call.

  “It’s me!” The voice was low and sluggish with age. Cubiak realized that he had heard it before.

  “Mrs. Fadim, is that you?”

  “Of course it’s me. Who else would it be? You said to call if I needed help.”

  Cubiak pictured his card lying on the table next to her chair where he had left it yesterday.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Would I be calling you if I was hurt?”

  Point taken, Cubiak thought. “You said someone’s there. Who is it?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ve seen him sneaking around before.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In the barn.”

  The sheriff had seen the abandoned barn from the kitchen when he made tea for the frail woman. The building was a wreck. Decades of wind and rain had eaten the paint off the wood and turned the boards a sickly gray. The roof sagged and the concrete foundation was crumbling in spots.

  “What’s he doing in the barn?”

  “How should I know? Up to no good, I imagine.” Mrs. Fadim wheezed, and when she spoke again her snappishness had turned to panic. “What if he gets in the house?”

  “Stay where you are. I’m sending help.”

  “You come,” she said and hung up.

  Rowe had left a half hour ago. By now he would be nearing the tip of the peninsula, too far away to double back. One of the deputies was giving a talk on summer safety at Southern Door High School; another was due in court that morning. Cubiak was the closest.

  On his way to the Fadim farm, the sheriff checked in with Lisa. He had no calls to return, no meetings that morning. Reading Linda Kiel’s article had ruined his good mood, and he drove fast down the empty roads. The notion that he was off on a fool’s errand fueled his annoyance. If Mrs. Fadim’s intruder was as genuine as much of the information in her great-granddaughter’s article, then his visit was a waste of time. Maybe the tendency to blow things out of proportion ran in the family.

  Sooner than he expected, he reached the long, straight stretch of pavement that ran past the farm. Everything looked the same. Cubiak groaned. He had only himself to blame; he should never have given her his number. Now he would never be done with her. He had a sudden taste for a cigarette. Instead he reached for a stick of gum. He was unwrapping it when a black car popped out on the road ahead. He was too far away to see if it had come from Mrs. Fadim’s driveway or from one of the fields beyond. As the vehicle sped away, Cubiak floored the jeep, but before he reached the driveway, the car had disappeared. He swore under his breath and braked hard. Turning in, he slowed enough to avoid skidding into the shallow ditch. It seemed there was an intruder, and if Mrs. Fadim was hurt, he had to get to her quickly.

  As before, the front door was not locked. Cubiak swore again, but this time out loud.

  The house was quiet. He called out, but the elderly woman didn’t respond. The house seemed to be caught in a time warp. The dim light, the musty aroma, the heavy stillness remained the same, like remnants of a life frozen in amber.

  He stumbled as he hurried into the living room.

  “It’s about time you got here,” Mrs. Fadim said. She had forsaken the whisper she had used on the phone and reverted to her usual bark.

  Cubiak had expected the worst. Instead he found the old woman in her chair at the front window, seemingly unperturbed.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “What a silly question. Of course I’m not okay. I’ve been sitting here since dawn waiting for my tea. A good son makes his mother a cup of tea before he leaves for school.”

  “Mrs. Fadim, Florence, I’m Sheriff Cubiak. You called me—”

  She cut him off with a slice of her hand. “I didn’t call anyone.”

  “You said someone was in the barn.”

  She snorted. “The barn’s been empty for more than forty years, ever since your father died. God rest his soul.” She crossed herself and then she snugged her worn shawl around her sloped shoulders.

  He tried again. “Mrs. Fadim—”

  She scowled at him. “Where’s my tea? Don’t just stand there, you know what to do.”

  Cubiak took a step closer to the chair. He needed to make sure that she was unhurt.

  “Go!” she said and waved him toward the kitchen. “And don’t forget my biscuit. I like a biscuit with my tea.”

  After he put the kettle on, Cubiak studied the barn. It was a relic from another era, and from the house it looked no different from the dozens of abandoned barns that were scattered around the county. Barns like the one on the Fadim farm were the product of many hands, built in an era when dozens of neighbors rallied to help, everyone sure in the knowledge that when their time came their friends would join the workforce. Gone. All gone. Desperate for cash, the farmers had forsaken work in the field for jobs in the city; instead of talking to their neighbors over barbed-wire fences, they communicated by email. Once proud symbols of prosperity, the old barns were emptied of cattle and feed and then left to decay in lonely isolation, so many sad legacies of defeat splotched across the American landscape.

  When Cubiak finished in the kitchen, he escorted Mrs. Fadim away from the window
. Over her protests, he settled her in front of the television with a tall mug of sweet, hot tea and a plate of cookies.

  “I hate that thing,” she said, kicking a foot toward the TV.

  On the screen two women who would have looked better with less décolletage and longer dresses ranted at each other in a packed courtroom while a judge pounded a gavel and told them they needed to be civil or she would find them both in contempt.

  “Damn foolish nonsense,” the old woman said. She dunked a cookie and smirked at the scene that was unrolling before her.

  Can’t argue with that, the sheriff thought as he switched channels until he came to a rerun of Shane.

  “Better?”

  Florence harrumphed and settled in.

  The yard had turned to jungle. A few clumps of dried brown grass remained, but most of the lawn was blanketed by a leafy green vine. The voracious plant coiled around shrubs and spiraled up the trunks of trees where it reached into the branches, threatening death by suffocation. Was this one of the invasive species he had heard so much about? Cubiak wondered as he tromped down the gravel driveway.

  At the barn, he checked the milk house first, but the panes in the window were intact and the tarnished lock on the door was covered with spiderwebs that hadn’t been disturbed in years. A second door on that side was also battened down with an ancient lock.

  Whoever had broken in had gotten in a different way.

  Near the rear of the barn, the sheriff climbed over strands of sagging barbed wire and stepped into the pasture. Thistle and weeds were thick and knee-high and had grown up to the center double doors, where the cows used to enter. The metal door handles were lashed shut with wire that had rusted together. Cubiak searched the rest of the structure for a broken window or loose board, but the barn appeared impenetrable. He was about to give up when he discovered a third entryway, behind the silo. The door was narrow and low and led into a short passageway that connected the silo to the barn. A shiny new lock hung on the door.