Death Rides the Ferry Read online

  From the main deck he looked out at the small harbor. The moon was more than half full, and beneath its glow, a gentle stillness had settled over Northport. Like the boat, the landing was empty, and almost ghostly in the silver light. Cubiak figured that the two cars in the lot belonged to the last of the restaurant staff. He couldn’t imagine that the dead woman had visited the café, but he had time to fill before checking back with Pardy and so he headed across to the diner.

  “We’re closed,” a strong female voice rang out as he pushed through the door. From behind the cash register, a tall, hefty woman looked up. “I said we’re closed.” Her voice was gruff and lines of fatigue were etched in her face. Then she noticed Cubiak’s badge. “Oh, sorry, Sheriff. I didn’t realize it was you. If you want something, I’ll get Bruce to rustle up a bite.”

  She was being polite, trying not to look past him at the ambulance and the ferry moored to the side dock.

  “Just a couple questions, if you don’t mind,” he said.

  “About that woman they found dead on the ferry?”

  “You heard?”

  She shrugged. “Word travels.”

  He gave them a verbal picture of the deceased. “Do you remember seeing a woman who fits that description? Or maybe notice anything unusual?”

  Bruce, the cook, replied first. “I been in the kitchen all day. Don’t see any of the customers from back there. Only breaks I had was once to eat something myself and twice for a smoke and then I was out back in the woods. Didn’t see anything I don’t normally see,” he said.

  The waitress was equally unhelpful. “Probably a couple hundred people here today, but all of them pretty much fit the standard tourist mold. I’d have remembered if I’d seen one of those hippie types. We used to get them all the time. But not anymore. Not for years.”

  Cubiak took down the names of the staff on the earlier shift. “Call me if you think of anything,” he said. He gave his card to the waitress and another to Bruce, like so many bread crumbs dropped in the sand.

  Outside, the ambulance had pulled up alongside the ferry. He walked over and waited with Pardy as the EMTs maneuvered the gurney down the stairs and onto the dock.

  “Anything?” he said.

  “There was a strong odor of garlic, which might not mean anything. But beyond that, nothing. No obvious sign of trauma or injury.”

  “The captain thinks she had a heart attack.”

  “She’s fairly young but it could be. I’ll know more tomorrow after the autopsy.”

  The sheriff walked the medical examiner back to her car. From the edge of the dark forest, he watched her taillights disappear down the road. A few minutes later, the ambulance pulled away with Jane Doe inside.

  Who are you? he wondered. What were you doing here?

  3

  TRACE AMOUNTS

  Emma Pardy called the sheriff’s office early Thursday morning.

  “Looks like Norling was partly right about Jane Doe. The victim suffered cardiac arrest.”

  Cubiak put down the traffic report he had been reading. “She had a heart attack?”

  “Yes, but it’s what caused her heart to stop that’s of more interest. There are indications she was poisoned.”

  He picked up his coffee. “Go on.”

  “You noticed the garlicky odor?” Pardy said.

  “It was hard to miss.”

  “At first I thought it was from something she’d eaten, but when I did the autopsy I realized it was a result of a toxin. Besides the aroma, there’s a range of indicators: dilated blood vessels, severe burns to the lining of the mouth and the lungs, as well as edema and swelling of the brain. She had all the symptoms.”

  “What kind of poison would do that?”

  “At this point I don’t know. I can’t pinpoint the exact cause until the toxicology results are in, and that could take a couple of weeks.”

  “But if you had to take a guess?”

  The medical examiner didn’t hesitate. “I’d put my money on selenium.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Most people haven’t. It’s a nonmetallic element, part of the sulfur and polonium family. It’s found in gun bluing—the stuff collectors and antique dealers use to darken metal. But selenium also occurs naturally in some foods and even in water, and we need trace amounts in our diet. A deficiency can cause several medical issues, but too much can kill.”

  “Assuming it was selenium, what’s too much?”

  “That depends on the situation. I’ve seen only one case and that was when I was in med school. The victim was a physically fit, middle-aged professional photographer who processed his own prints and ‘toned’ them with selenium dioxide to make the images more permanent. In his case, the poisoning occurred over many years and resulted from inhaling the fumes in his darkroom.”

  Cubiak recalled the scene on the ferry. “There was nothing else found with the body. Nothing she could have inhaled.” Unless someone took it, he thought.

  Pardy seemed to be following his train of thought. “Inhalation is just one way to administer the poison. Whatever it was, the victim could have ingested it before she got on board. A toxin like selenium would take a bit of time to work. How long depends on the amount.”

  “More than a few minutes?”

  “Absolutely. I found only a small amount of the poison in her system, so death wouldn’t occur for at least a couple of hours.”

  “Sounds like it’s pretty easy to get hold of this selenium stuff,” he said.

  “Well, digital cameras pretty much eliminated the toning process, so photographers aren’t in the market for it anymore. But like I said, it’s used in gun bluing so it’s available anywhere guns are sold, including the internet. And people take selenium supplements, too, thinking they’re good for them,” Pardy said.

  “Which means there’d be nothing suspicious about a person buying it,” Cubiak said.

  “Exactly. Including the victim.” Pardy paused. “She could have done it herself, Dave.”

  The sheriff remembered seeing Jane Doe outside the performance center the previous day. She was gobbling down a sandwich like she was starving. But if she had laced the food with poison in order to kill herself, maybe she was eating fast to be done with it.

  Cubiak had endured enough dark nights of the soul to realize that Pardy’s suggestion had to be considered. Everything he had seen of the victim implied that she was in desperate straits. From her perspective, perhaps the universe was tinted black, and all hope had drained away. Why come to Door County, then? Why travel from the place she called home to take her own life? And what about the bag he had seen her holding? What had happened to it?

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so,” he said finally.

  At 10 a.m., Cubiak pinned Jane Doe’s photo to the wall of the incident room and filled in the staff on the circumstances surrounding the discovery of her body. He described the missing bag and shared the medical examiner’s theories about the woman’s death.

  “We’ve got an unknown victim, a suspicious death, and no leads,” he said. He assigned one deputy to file a report with the Department of Justice’s missing persons database and another to contact law enforcement in the neighboring counties to inquire whether they had any information on a woman fitting the victim’s profile. Mike Rowe, another of Cubiak’s deputies, was to ask the local radio stations to report news of the woman’s death and to urge anyone who recognized the description or who saw or heard someone talking with her to get in touch with the sheriff’s office immediately. Then the deputy was to head up Highway 57 and nose around the lakeshore communities. The sheriff said he would do the same on the bay side.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Our victim didn’t materialize out of thin air. It’s nearly forty-five miles from Sturgeon Bay to the ferry dock. Unless she had a car, which I doubt, she had to have some way of getting from place to place. Somebody had to have seen her.”

  Once he dismissed his deputies, Cubiak contacted the s
tate evidence team. Finally, he called Norling.

  “The state boys are on their way but the Ledstjarna is going to have to remain out of commission until they finish.” He stumbled over the name of the ferry and silently apologized. “This evening is probably the soonest you’ll have the boat back on the water.”

  The ferryboat captain responded with an impressive range of salty verbiage. “We don’t even know how many people walked through that room before Tim discovered that woman. You’re not going to find anything.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “I have a job to do,” Norling said at full volume.

  And I don’t? The sheriff kept the thought to himself. “I told the evidence crew to expedite things. That’s the best I can do,” he said.

  Cubiak’s first stop north of Sturgeon Bay was Carlsville. If Jane Doe had come through the crossroads community, she hadn’t stopped. From there, he headed to the village of Egg Harbor. The community’s year-round population of 291 swelled to several thousand during the summer, and on that sunny afternoon a good number of locals and tourists vied for space on the sloping lawn of the waterfront park. There had been a kids’ puppet show in the park that morning, and the weekly afternoon bluegrass concert was about to start. He circled through the swarm of folding chairs and coolers with Jane Doe’s photo. No one remembered having seen the woman. He tried the local bars and the food store as well. Nothing.

  He went on to Fish Creek. The town was hosting an art fair, and white-tented booths filled the old square and lined the neighboring lanes. Many of the exhibitors had spent the previous two weeks in Door County, moving from place to place. But none of them recognized the victim. Nine miles farther up, he walked a long stretch of the Ephraim shoreline and talked to vacationers who were enjoying time on the beach or waiting to rent kayaks and canoes. Again, nothing.

  He hoped to have better luck at the passenger ferry in Gills Rock. The ticket seller took her time inspecting the photo but finally shook her head. “No, sorry, Sheriff. I’ve never seen her before.”

  He spent another hour talking to the day staff at the Northport restaurant but struck out again. How could a woman so distinctively attired travel incognito up the entire length of the peninsula?

  Cubiak called Rowe. “Any luck?”

  “Nada. I tried Institute and Valmy as well as Jacksonport and Baileys Harbor, but nobody remembers seeing her.”

  “Well, we’re not done yet. There’s still Sister Bay and Ellison Bay and two islanders that I have to question,” the sheriff said.

  In the middle of the afternoon, Cubiak boarded the ferry at Northport. The vessel was filled with tourists who were reveling in the start of the long weekend, and their happy mood was infectious. By the time the boat docked at Detroit Harbor, he wondered if he was on the wrong track. What if Pardy was mistaken about the cause of death? What if Jane Doe’s death wasn’t a case of suicide or murder? If she had worked for an antiques dealer or a gun seller, she might have had routine contact with selenium, which could have resulted in her death, just like Pardy’s example of the med-school photographer.

  Earlier that morning, Captain Norling had emailed him the contact numbers for Grace Abernathy and Loretta Cummings, the local women he recalled seeing on the same ferry as Jane Doe. The women had agreed to meet Cubiak at Grace’s house. From the harbor, it was a short hop to the road where the two had been next-door neighbors for more than a half century. The moment the door to the cottage opened, he understood that they had prepared for his visit. A large bouquet of lilies scented the air, a collection of throws was neatly folded, and the row of sofa pillows was plumped and neatly arranged. There were traces of rouge on the women’s faces, and, by Door County standards, both were quasi-formally dressed in navy blue slacks and pastel twinsets.

  “We’ve never talked to the sheriff before, not in any official capacity,” Grace said as she led the way through the uncluttered living room to the red brick patio. Cookies and lemonade had been set out on a small pink table, more evidence of their planning. Cubiak admired the view of the water and waited for the women to complete the ritual of pouring and serving before he spoke.

  “You were both on the four o’clock ferry to the mainland yesterday?”

  They smiled and nodded.

  “Do you mind if I ask why?”

  Grace tucked a loose strand of gray hair behind her ear and answered for the pair. “Not at all, Sheriff. Loretta and I are ladies of leisure, now that we’re retired, and every two weeks we treat ourselves to an outing. Yesterday we went to the movies in Sturgeon Bay. We always go for the senior discount day. Then we have dinner with my sister. She’s widowed, and with the kids all gone her house is empty. So we stay over at her place and take the ferry back in the morning.”

  “You drove, then.”

  “Of course.”

  “During the crossing, did you stay in the car or get out?”

  “Oh, we got out. I can’t tolerate being cooped up in the car. We always get out and go up on the deck.”

  Cubiak laid the photo of Jane Doe on the table. “Did you see this woman onboard?”

  Grace held the photo up for a close look and studied it for several moments. Then she shook her head. “No, sorry. I didn’t see her.”

  When it was her turn, Loretta glanced at the picture and then pushed it across the table as if it were toxic. “I saw her, and I have to tell you that it was quite unpleasant. I had to walk through the lounge to get to the ladies’ room and went right past her. She was sitting there at the table, and she smelled awful. I’m sorry to have to say that but it’s true.”

  “Do you remember what she was doing?”

  “She was reading a book. At least, it looked like she was reading it. She was holding it and staring at it intently.”

  “What kind of book was it?”

  Loretta furrowed her brow. “I’m not sure. It had a blue cover but it wasn’t a regular book, not like a novel or something from the library. It was bigger, like a scrapbook. I was too focused on my own business to pay that much attention. Anyway I’m allergic to garlic. I can’t stand the smell, and the room reeked of it.”

  “Did you see anyone talking to her?”

  “No, she was alone.”

  “How far into the ride were you then?”

  “About halfway across. I remember looking to the west and seeing nothing but water.”

  “And was she still there when you came back?”

  Loretta blushed. “I just saw her the one time. When I finished, I went back the long way, down the other side, to avoid having to walk through the lounge again.”

  “But the woman was alive when you saw her?”

  “Absolutely. She was very much alive.” Loretta hesitated. “To be honest, I felt a little sorry for her. She seemed so sad, as if something was very wrong. Maybe I should have said something to her.”

  Grace clasped her friend’s hand. “Now, Loretta, don’t you go blaming yourself. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Loretta picked at her napkin.

  Cubiak let the moment pass. Then he said, “You’re an observant woman, and that’s very helpful. But tell me, what makes you think that woman on the ferry was sad?”

  Loretta opened her eyes wide. “Oh, Sheriff, it’s because of the way she was crying.”

  4

  THE YELLOW VIOL

  Grace Abernathy insisted that Cubiak have more cookies and lemonade before he left. He was happy to comply, and not just because the homemade refreshments were tasty. He felt indebted to her friend Loretta for the information she had provided. She was the first person who remembered seeing Jane Doe on the Ledstjarna, and from her he learned that the victim was alive when the ferry was still ten minutes from Northport. Even more important was her eyewitness account of the victim’s actions and frame of mind. When he saw the young woman earlier, she seemed pensive and preoccupied but not unhappy. Something had happened during the interlude to bring her to tears.

  After meeting w
ith the ladies, the sheriff drove to the festival. The next series of concerts started in ten minutes and the grounds were filled with people hurrying to reach their seats. As he pushed through the cheerful throngs, he pictured Jane Doe sitting on the ferry and wondered what went through her mind before she died. Had she been crying because of something that had happened at the festival? Or because she had taken the poison, as Pardy suggested, and then had a change of heart and realized too late that she wanted to live?

  A ridge of cold sweat trickled down Cubiak’s neck. After his wife and daughter were killed, he had come close to ending his life on more than one occasion. But each time, he imagined the terror he would feel if he changed his mind when he had reached the point of no return. What happened if you had committed yourself to death and then decided you wanted to live? Had the horror of such a moment led Jane Doe to desperate tears? Or had some other matter driven her to this state? Perhaps something she saw in the scrapbook had made her cry. Or had she met with bitter disappointment on Washington Island? A breakup with a lover would do it. Perhaps she had followed someone to the Dixan V festival and then been rejected. Or she had other dreams that were trampled on and destroyed? Jane Doe died after she left the island, but why had she come here in the first place?

  Cubiak swiped at his brow. The sun was high and the heat was building. As he looked around for shade, he was struck by the transformation on the festival grounds. With the filming of the reenactment completed, the extras had discarded their vintage clothing. A middle-aged couple in khaki shorts and T-shirts leaned against the boulder where the dead woman had sat the day before. They were drinking white wine and arguing about music.

  The program listed nightly concerts in the hall, but the afternoons were given over to smaller performances by groups of three, four, and six musicians. The sheriff knew little about classical music beyond what his friend Evelyn Bathard had taught him about opera while they worked on the coroner’s dilapidated wooden sailboat. From the bits and pieces that he overheard as he wandered the grounds, he knew the musicians were playing stringed instruments, but the music was different from anything he had ever heard. It seemed to have a simpler, cleaner sound than the more familiar music of Mozart and Beethoven. He wished he could sit in on a performance, but he had little time for music that day.