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
uwpress.wisc.edu

3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden
London WC2E 8LU, United Kingdom
eurospanbookstore.com

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
[email protected]
.

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 …

 

 

T
hree 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.