Death by the Bay Read online

  Wilcox rubbed the dog’s head. “The story about Henry was part of the local folklore. I didn’t make it up just to get a few bucks from that reporter.”

  “Folklore can be based on rumor as much as reality.”

  “I asked my uncle about it once when I was older, and he swore by it.” Wilcox moved his hand down the dog’s back. “I don’t know nothing more than that. I guess it could have happened just the way people said. Henry’s parents were uneducated immigrants who barely spoke the language. But why would someone do that?”

  “I’m afraid there are reasons.”

  Cubiak’s phone vibrated in his pocket. It was probably Rowe reporting in. The sheriff was tempted to check his message, but the way the dog looked at him gave him pause. He was sure the beast would pounce and tear his hand off if he reached for his cell. He ignored the phone and slid his foot farther from the dog.

  Wilcox leaned forward, his hands on his knees.

  “Those other kids whose pictures were in that ad, did the same thing happen to them?”

  “It seems so.”

  Wilcox shook his head. “That’s pretty hard to believe, ain’t it? But then there’s things going on out there that you just don’t want to know about. Man’s inhumanity to man and all that.”

  Outside and away from the slobbering dog, Cubiak read Rowe’s message: Nothing. Thick fog.

  Coming from Rowe, thick meant pea soup, the kind of fog that would keep most people at home. But was it bad enough to stop Linda Kiel from sneaking through the woods under its cover?

  Stay put, Cubiak texted back.

  There was no fog in central Wisconsin, and he retraced his path through town under a sky so blue and bright it hurt his eyes. He had forgotten his prescription sunglasses and rummaged through the glove box for the spare clip-ons as he drove. He found them just as he reached the highway and headed north.

  The road had two lanes, and although each was wide enough for the approaching cars and SUVs, the logging trucks that came toward him seemed to take up more than their share of space. Each time one roared past, he felt the jeep shudder and edge toward the shoulder. After a hundred miles, a sign announced that he was entering the Oneida Reservation. Beneath the thick forest canopy, the jeep’s automatic headlights flicked on. The temperature dropped immediately, but he kept the window open several inches. He liked the feel of the cool air on his face and the sound of the wind as it whistled past. The forest was a world unto itself, and for twenty minutes, the jeep was the only vehicle on the road. Then a massive pickup whizzed around him and disappeared around a bend so quickly that Cubiak wondered if he had imagined it. He drove for miles without seeing anyone. The few homes along the route were nestled into small parcels that seemed to be more threatened than sheltered by the surrounding tall pines. In the dense forest he felt as if he were alone in the world. The last surviving man. Besides the trees, there was only a river. The waterway paralleled the road and occasionally ran near enough for him to glimpse the rushing water and catch its murmur. In several spots the river flattened out into calm, wide pools, but in one stretch it passed through a jumble of massive boulders. The rocks peeked out above the surface, and the water foamed and protested as it pushed downstream. Not a good place for canoeing, Cubiak thought.

  Abruptly, he came to a junction with a tin-roofed tavern on one corner, a rundown shack that housed a combination gas station and grocery store on the other, and a cluster of used cars for sale on the third. The fourth was choked with weeds. Welcome to Cleona. The sheriff spoke out loud, as if welcoming himself back to reality and the mission at hand.

  There wasn’t much to the town. It was half the size of Pikesville but had twice the number of vacant storefronts. A small craft store anchored one end of Main Street and a used furniture store the other. The parade of yellowed For Rent signs between the two establishments was interrupted by a tavern that declared itself to be a genuine saloon. Two swinging half doors at the entrance reinforced the claim. The three cars parked on the street were in front of the bar.

  Outside Cleona, Cubiak entered a forlorn landscape. There were no homes, no cultivated fields, no fences—only a narrow, potholed road that was crumbling along the edges where the weakened asphalt gave way to the forest that flanked it on both sides. The dense proximity of the trees was threatening and claustrophobic. Cubiak was seized by an immediate sense of dread that deepened the farther he ventured from town.

  He had difficulty finding the hospital site. Blackberry brambles had overgrown the entrance, and he nearly missed the fissure that allowed him to drive through. Some twenty feet in, he came to two stone pillars. According to old photos, an iron arch had once risen up from the columns, but it was gone, sold for scrap.

  Cubiak stopped and took a second look. Something wasn’t right. The pillars had been recently tuck-pointed, and the grounds, or what he could see of them from that vantage, appeared reasonably well kept. The weeds along the circumference were whacked knee-high and the small patch of lawn inside the circle driveway was freshly mowed, as if in anticipation of his arrival. Rather than make him feel welcome, however, the prospect added to his unease.

  Halfway up the drive, he got out of the jeep and continued on foot.

  When it opened its doors in the mid-1800s, the Northern Hospital for the Insane was the largest building in the state, far bigger and grander even than the old capitol in Madison. The regal, red brick edifice had been located five miles from town, close enough to give the residents who worked there an easy commute to work, especially during the harsh winter months, but far enough away to allay any fears that escaped patients would reach them before the authorities caught and redeposited them behind locked doors. By the time Melk arrived, the hospital was ninety years old and had lost much of its luster. Eventually, patients were reallocated to newer treatment centers, until fifteen years later, when the aging facility burned. Its population had dwindled by half.

  Now, the magnificent building was gone. All that remained were the concrete steps and a layer of rubble that formed an ugly scar along the surface of the earth. He climbed the wide steps, stood where he imagined the massive double doors had been, and peered into a great maw littered with shards of glass that had exploded from the window frames and the misshapen remains of metal desks and beds that had melted in the heat. Beer cans and trash lay scattered amid the ruins. At one time the hospital had been a beacon of light, a depository of the best that the medical profession could offer to the mentally and emotionally tormented. All vanished.

  The destruction was complete. Cubiak shuddered to think of the fire and the innocent victims—many of them children—trapped behind locked doors and barred windows. Surely their desperate screams would have penetrated the thick masonry walls and soared above the treetops to reach the townspeople. But even if they had known, what could the local residents have done? What kind of volunteer fire department would a town like Cleona have had back then? How many buckets and how many hands would have been needed to douse the flames? And from whence the water?

  The site was eerily quiet. In the stillness, it seemed as if nature itself had bowed its head in sorrow those many long years ago and was still offering up prayers for the dead.

  There’s nothing left here, Cubiak thought. Yet he lingered.

  Compelled by a need to honor those who had suffered and died, he walked alongside the serrated ridge of broken brick, careful to stay on the grass so his footfalls would not disturb the silence. He had covered a quarter of the perimeter before he realized that the building was in the shape of a cross, with one long center section and two wings. He had read that the large center section had been reserved for adolescents and adults. The far wing was for the children; the nearest was the medical wing overseen by Leonard Melk.

  During Kiel’s visit to Cleona, she had stayed at the Deep Woods Motel, dined at the Dew Drop Inn, and bought two bottles of wine at a grocery store one town over. By then she was writing the book about the IPM and she would have kno
wn that Melk had worked at the hospital. The doctor hadn’t wanted to delve into the past, but apparently his reluctance hadn’t hindered her. It might even have piqued her curiosity or sparked her instinct to dig deeper. She would have made the drive out from town. She would have seen what the sheriff saw, walked the terrain, and absorbed the depressing essence of the place. But none of that explained how she got hold of the files. If Melk had kept them, he wouldn’t have given them to her. Cleona didn’t appear to have a historical society or even a library where the box of records might have been shoved into a corner and forgotten. On his way back, he would take another look around town to be certain, but he couldn’t imagine that anything, much less a cardboard box filled with paper, had been salvaged from the flames.

  Sadder but none the wiser for his journey, Cubiak circled back to the jeep. As he put the vehicle into gear, he looked up at the rearview mirror and glimpsed something moving across his line of vision. There one minute and gone the next. He thought of ghosts, but ghosts were white and whatever he had seen was black, like a raven’s wing. He turned off the engine and slipped back outside. When he turned, he saw a small figure ambling toward him. Male or female, he couldn’t determine, but definitely human and alive. The figure’s head and shoulders were pitched forward as if to speed its progress. Cubiak started forward, and as the distance between the two dwindled, the figure transformed into a frail old man struggling beneath the weight of a great ebony coat.

  When the two were twenty feet apart, the man stopped. He pushed back the cap that had slid down his forehead and studied the sheriff.

  “I thought you’d be one of them, but you ain’t. Not dressed like that,” he said, taking in Cubiak’s yellow sweatshirt and jeans.

  “One of who?”

  “The doctors, of course.”

  Cubiak knew the name of only one doctor associated with the site and took a chance on it. “You mean like Leonard Melk?”

  The man chortled. “Melk? He’d be dead by now, I reckon, but his son wouldn’t, if he had one.” He moved his mouth and spat at the ground. “The son would be a doctor, too, wouldn’t he, seeing as his daughter is.”

  Cubiak almost smiled at the thought of Linda Kiel pretending to be a physician. He said her name out loud, adding: “Doctor Leonard Melk’s daughter.”

  The man jeered. “No, she’s too young. I mean the son’s daughter. Doctoring must run in the family.”

  Cubiak didn’t tell the man that Melk had no children. “I didn’t expect to find anyone here,” the sheriff said.

  “Oh, I’m always here. Got no place else to go.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Who am I?” The man’s voice was charged with indignation. “You tell me who you are and what you’re doing here and then maybe I’ll tell you who I am.”

  Should he lie? Cubiak wondered. He could pass himself off as another of Melk’s sons, an uncle to Linda Kiel. Or he could claim that he was a historian from a local college, maybe even a realtor, curious about the resale value of the land.

  He decided to tell the truth, that he was the sheriff of Door County where Leonard Melk had recently died. Hearing the news, the old man closed his eyes and crossed himself. Then he looked up, and Cubiak went on with the rest: there’d been no offspring; there was no Doctor Linda Kiel, but a young woman by that name who was writing a book about Leonard Melk, which explained her interest in the site.

  “So it was okay that I gave her that box of his things?”

  “Yes.” It was a very good thing, Cubiak thought.

  The old man grew wistful. “I knew someone would come eventually.”

  “And you were right,” Cubiak said. He waited a moment. “I’ve kept my end of the deal. Now you have to tell me who you are and why you’re here.”

  As they talked, the two men had edged toward each other one step at a time. Finally they were close enough for Cubiak to see the deep furrows that fanned the corners of the man’s milky eyes and webbed across his spider-veined face.

  “Name’s Paul Osgood. I grew up here. Oh, not in there,” he said quickly, nodding toward the ruins of the mental hospital. “Back there.” He pointed a finger over his shoulder to the woods, where the faint outline of a log cottage was barely visible among the trees. “My father was the caretaker here. After the place burned he didn’t know what else to do, so he stayed on; there was nowhere else to go and he had the house. At first, they let him live there in exchange for shooing off the sightseers. After a while, I guess they forgot he was here. I was just a kid then and my mother was dead, so there was no one to complain about having to live with all the ghosts.”

  “Why are you still here?”

  Osgood’s shoulders twitched inside the big coat. “Nowhere’s else to go either. I came back from the war with my own ghosts. Guess I figured that if I’d stay here, they could all keep one another company. Anyways, somebody had to look after my father. When he passed, I waited for one of them officials to come by and tell me to git, but no one did, so I stayed. I get my social security money and pick up a few dollars doing odd jobs around town, but mostly I look after things here, keep the grounds tidy. That and wait for someone to pick up Melk’s stuff. But I guess that part of the job is done, ain’t it?”

  He looked to Cubiak for affirmation, and the sheriff inclined his head a bit.

  “It’s a wonder the files weren’t destroyed in the fire,” Cubiak said.

  “Not really.”

  The sheriff didn’t push. He knew the rest of the story would come out sooner or later.

  Osgood looked hot and tired. The steps had shaded over, and Cubiak suggested they sit there out of the sun. He got two bottles of water from the jeep and gave one to his host. The water was lukewarm, but Osgood drank his without complaint.

  “I don’t usually go for this stuff, but I got to admit it tastes pretty good today,” he said.

  “How old were you when it happened?” Cubiak asked.

  They both knew what he meant. “Eight, going on nine. It must have broken out in the middle of the night, probably in the basement on a pile of old rags or newspaper. Must have been simmering for hours because just before dawn, it blew up through the building. The whole place seemed to be on fire at once. There was nothing anyone could do. The staff and doctor on call unlocked the front and the side doors but no one could get past the flames to go in. The fire was too hot. And not everyone got out either.”

  “The papers reported thirty-four deaths,” Cubiak said.

  Osgood hung his head. “That’s right, and it was a damn shame. Patients and staff died, even the young girls who cleaned the medical wing.”

  “The cleaning crew lived on site?” That didn’t sound right to the sheriff.

  “Not exactly a crew, five or six crippled girls that Doctor Melk took in because their families had no use for them. He felt sorry for the poor kids and let them do simple chores in exchange for room and board. It was all unofficial, of course.”

  Cubiak seethed and pressed his clenched fists into the pitted concrete.

  “They died, too,” Osgood said. “Once the roof went, the fire just shot up into the sky.” He stared at his worn boots. “I had nightmares about it for years.”

  Even the birds had gone quiet and for several minutes the two men sat in a mournful silence. When he finally had his anger in check, Cubiak remembered that he still had to ask about the files.

  “You were going to tell me how it was that the box didn’t burn,” he said as casually as he could manage.

  “Oh, that.” Osgood tried to inject a grain of levity into the conversation. “Providence, I guess. Earlier that week, I heard Doctor Melk tell my father that the state authorities were coming to do an inspection. He said these guys were sticklers for neatness and he was worried because he hadn’t kept up with the paperwork and his office was a mess. He said he needed to temporarily clear out some of the files and had tossed some stuff in a box. You know, by way of tidying up so he’d get good marks from the power
s that be. My dad, being the nice guy that he was, offered to take the box and tuck it away in our attic.”

  Osgood tugged at his chin. “Two days later, the hospital burned to the ground and then Melk left along with everybody else. For a while, there were plenty of authorities coming back and forth, but we never saw Melk again. In all the to-do, my father forgot about the box and when he remembered, well, he figured that since these were official records and all, it was his responsibility to keep them. ‘Some day someone will come asking for that box,’ he said. I never questioned his reasoning and after he died and I kind of took over, I figured the responsibility fell to me.” Osgood pivoted and looked over the collar of his coat to where the hospital had once stood. For a while he seemed lost in memory and then he pivoted back toward the sheriff.

  “It took long enough but I guess the old codger was finally right,” he said as he squinted into the afternoon sunlight.

  16

  INSTITUTE FOR PROGRESSIVE MEDICINE

  With a heavy heart, Cubiak sped away from Cleona. Although he was grateful for every mile that put more distance between him and the Northern Hospital for the Insane, he came away burdened by the knowledge he had gained. The crippled girls had burned to death, most likely Mrs. Fadim’s sister, Margaret, among them. And Leonard Melk was to blame. As far as the sheriff was concerned, the doctor might as well have lit the match that started the inferno.

  Cubiak drove blindly, oblivious to highway signs and roadside attractions, and only vaguely aware that if he kept the sun to his right, he would eventually get back. He covered the distance to Green Bay listening to the screams that had haunted Paul Osgood through his childhood. At the sight of the towering smokestacks on the northern edge of the city, he snapped into a sudden awareness that Melk had once followed a similar route. How much time had passed before he hung out his shingle and started to lay the groundwork for his IPM?

  Emma Pardy said she had been to the institute. As long as he was in the area, Cubiak decided to take a look himself. He swung into the southbound lanes and then onto the bypass that carried him over the Fox River and past the maximum-security prison for men. Built in the late 1800s as a reformatory, it stood a comfortable distance from town, like the mental hospital in Cleona, but by now a familiar sprawl of shopping malls and housing developments surrounded it, making the watchtower and strings of barbed wire just another marker on the daily commute to work or school.