Death Stalks Door County (24 page)

“First time across?” A heavyset man in a neatly patched denim jacket had joined him on the deck. “This ain't nothing. You should see 'em pull on them double-deckered tour buses. Now that's a hoot. Swear everybody on board thinks we're going to capsize.” The passenger tapped the railing with a thick, rough hand. “But they're built solid. For the cargo and the weather.”

“Just hope nobody's smoking.” The comment came from a tourist with a video camera.

The first man harrumphed and shuffled away.

In a sudden flurry of activity, the ferry was loaded. Then a horn shrilled, the mooring lines were freed, and the steel ramp was raised to a vertical position, sealing in the people and vehicles. The engine revved and the 150-ton craft slid away from shore toward the open water. The vista widened at surprising speed, leaving the dock and restaurant looking forlorn and lost, two shrinking white spots pinned against the expanding stretch of trees and cliffs that formed the rugged northern shoreline. Seagulls wheeled above their wake, and the wind, dormant while they hugged the dock, stung Cubiak's face. Around him, conversations dropped off as the travelers took refuge in their own thoughts. Even the two teenagers draped over each other under the stairwell—thinking themselves hidden—pulled apart, their lust diminished by the great wash of water and open sky.

Ten minutes out, the birds deserted the ferry and carried their screeching calls back to the mainland. On the lake, there was no sound but the keening of the wind and the steady churning of the ship's engine. No world existed beyond the water and sky that stretched in every direction as they motored toward the harbor at Washington Island.

Disembarking was efficiently routine. Passengers flowed from the upper level toward their vehicles and quickly slid off the ferry as a deckhand waved them forward. Cubiak was the eighth driver out.

A waitress at the harbor coffee shop gave him directions to Jocko's place. There was only one road from the harbor, and he followed it into the interior. Washington Island was home to several hundred year-round and seasonal residents, most of them on site only during the warm weather months when they were joined by hordes of day visitors who rode the ferries over from the mainland and back. Though only six miles from the peninsula, the island seemed remote and exotic, and the landscape rolled out lush and verdant. But nature's bounty could not disguise economic hard times. Cubiak passed half a dozen homes and businesses that were boarded up and offered for sale. Under a grove of towering elms, a fifties-style drive-in sagged in glum neglect.

At the second juncture, Cubiak veered left and passed through pastureland and thick woods before he ran into a patch of rocky coast. The road angled back sharply, pulling him away from the water, and then it bent toward a shallow inlet where a string of large frame houses and modest cottages hugged the shore.

A half mile farther, the lane ended at the disheveled two-acre plot that was Jocko Connelly's Tobacco Road estate. Belly-fat seagulls lined the weathered dock and spilled over into the yard, perched on discarded fishing dories and a junk dealer's heaven of old stoves and refrigerators. There were three vehicles on the property: the cannibalized shell of an old John Deere tractor, a splotched yellow Edsel propped on cement blocks, and a shiny teal pickup, ostentatious in its freshness. Someone's home, Cubiak thought.

Picking his way through the bird droppings and past a crumbling picnic table that spoke of happier times, Cubiak approached the daisy-chain house, four wooden shacks stacked one against the other parallel to the cove. He pounded the door, surprised by its resonance. No response. He banged again. From deep inside came a muffled bark, followed by the slow shuffle of footsteps. The door yanked open. A face marked by deeply creviced and weathered skin jutted out at him.

“Who're you?”

Cubiak gave Jocko enough information to keep him from slamming the door shut.

“Ha!” The old seaman glared and then turned and wordlessly slipped into the interior. Cubiak followed down the narrow hall that linked the cubicles. To his right, a series of dirt-streaked windows gave way to spectacular views of the water, while on the other side one cluttered room followed after another. When they reached the kitchen, the terminus of the chain, Jocko stopped and confronted his guest. He had at least two days' worth of stubble on his cheeks and his breath was heavily perfumed with alcohol.

“That old fool need someone to bail him out again?” The ferry captain waved a hand impatiently at Cubiak. “Johnson. Otto J.,” he hooted.

“Otto's fine.”

Jocko maneuvered behind a wooden table littered with dirty dishes and empty gin bottles and dropped into a chair. He glanced suspiciously at Cubiak, then tilted toward the floor and spat a stream of black tobacco juice into a sawdust-filled coffee can.

“Glad to hear it,” he said and visually skewered his visitor again. “Who sent you?”

“No one.”

“I ain't so popular people go out of their way to visit. 'Specially strangers.” Jocko spoke deliberately, trying to outfox the slur that dogged his words.

“You went to see Beck this morning. You were angry. Very foul tempered, I believe.”

“You his stooge?”

“Several people have died lately under suspicious circumstances. I'm trying to find out if they've been killed and if so, by whom.”

“You a cop, too?”

“Used to be a detective with the Chicago PD.”

The ferry captain's eyes narrowed. “Chi-town police? What's any of this to do with me?”

“Nothing, if you're not the one harpooning tourists with hunting arrows.”

Jocko cackled.

“I understand you know something about a new harbor being planned.”

The comment had a sobering effect. Jocko plunked the spittoon again and studied the dirt-encrusted table before he looked back at Cubiak. “Read a book about it.”

“What book?”

“A grandiose piece of fiction someone left laying around.”

“Beck?”

“Not him, but somebody he had with him. Someone I'd call a sand nigger if I wasn't being polite.”

“Recently?”

“Could have been.”

“You and Beck don't get along?”

“I don't cotton to his kind.”

“Why the fuss about this ‘harbor' business? A modest condo development just south of Fish Creek is what I've heard.”

“Hell it is,” Jocko retorted.

Cubiak waited.

Jocko took his time. “It's like something in a fairy tale gone wrong,” he said finally. “The bastard intends to remake the whole north half of the peninsula. Fish Creek, Ephraim, and all the little towns north are gonna be wiped off the map. Like they never existed. Everything gone. Farms. Orchards. Cottages. Marinas. Even roads. Gone, just gone. He's gonna plow it all under and plant it all with trees, like when the Indians were here, with room for a big golf course and an airport and a monorail train connecting it to some fancy-ass new resort up north at the tip. You should see the houses he's gonna build there. Mansions, they looked like, with a goddamn castle in the middle. Who's that for? Tell me that! Where are all the regular folks gonna go?” he said with escalating rage. “And the island? Jesus! Some kind of fucking
hunting preserve
.” Jocko's face was red, the veins in his forehead and neck thickly corded.

“What do you mean everything gone? That sounds impossible,” Cubiak said. Was the old man hallucinating or had he lost it completely?

“For you and me, yeah, it's impossible. But with enough money, you can do any goddamn thing you please. Beck aims to turn a whole chunk of the peninsula into a playground for the rich. You should've seen the people he had out with him. An East Coast pansy—I could just about hear the silver spoon clanging against his teeth—and a couple of foreigners whispering to each other in some weird language I ain't never heard. These people eat, breathe, and shit money.”

“When was this?”

“Couple weeks ago. He chartered the passenger ferry for his little outing. Just happens the captain got sick that morning and his wife asked me to take the run. The look on Beck's face when he seen me!”

“There a name for all this?”

Jocko sniggered. “Paradise Harbor.”

“And you think Beck's trying to buy up the land for it?”

“Wouldn't put it past him. Came close to doing it before on the island. Least ways his family tried. Twenty-three square miles and they own the most of it.”

“But you said the harbor project was a piece of fiction.”

Jocko took a deep breath and calmed himself. “People won't sell up. Not this time.”

A bee buzzed outside the window.

“You seeing to it?”

Jocko ignored the question. “Look it there,” he said and gestured impatiently at an aging, yellowed map of the island taped to the wall. Though the print was indiscernible, Cubiak had no trouble following the line of thick red crayon that had been clumsily traced along much of the shoreline and around large sections of the interior. On the western edge, only a thin slice of land had been spared.

“Granddaddy Beck bought it all up some sixty years ago.” Jocko sneered. “Smart businessman, knew all about getting his way. Misunderstanding, some calls it. Cheating, others say. Sort of implied he was merely buying up logging rights, long-term leasing sort of crap. Civil engineers showed up measuring surface depth. Real worried about the tunnels collapsing they said the government was down in Madison.”

“Tunnels? What tunnels?”

“The ones under the island. Our own little geological phenomenon. Lot of hooey. Those tunnels'll outlast the moon. You'll see. But it was a real bad time for most folks here. Couple hard winters. Barely any money coming in because of what the crash did to the fishing industry and tourist trade. Hell, there wasn't nothing happening. And old Daddy Warbucks shows up with hard cash money. Some say you can't blame the locals for selling.”

“Not you.”

Jocko slammed a fist against the table. “Fools, every damn one of them. Land's the one thing you hold on to, no matter what.” He exhaled slowly and tipped back into the shadows. “Teach them that in school, they oughta.”

“Who owned the land before?”

“People.” Jocko's face darkened.

“Your family.”

“Some. There were others, too.”

Cubiak studied the small crescent-shaped sliver outlined on the map. “Just the homestead left then?”

“Homestead!” Jocko bellowed. “Yeah, this little piece of shit here. And my grandpa was about to sign that last teensy bit away along with the rest when he dropped dead of a heart attack and my father—just sixteen at the time—chased Granddaddy Beck off with a shotgun. Ran him all the way back to his big fancy skiff in the harbor. Later, my daddy tried to get the other families to go in with him and sue Beck for fraud, but they were all scared and wouldn't. He tried by himself but Beck's lawyers trampled him in court. Greedy bastards, all of them.”

“How many families still own land on the island?”

Jocko squirmed. “Couple dozen. Maybe less.”

“You could've been rich, had your grandfather not buckled to the Becks.”

“Would've owned a bunch of land. Up here that ain't enough to make you rich.”

“Instead, you sit here nursing a grudge.”

“Wouldn't you?”

“Plotting revenge.”

“Hell. I wish I could plot revenge! Truth is there's nothing I can do about all that. I don't like it, but I know it. What's done is done.”

Suddenly Jocko brightened. He leaned forward conspiratorially and spoke almost gleefully. “Tell you one thing, though, it ain't gonna happen again. Little Becky Boy ain't gonna get away with it this time.”

“Why not?”

“I seen to it, that's why not.” He splayed a grimy hand on the table.

“You going to tell me what you did?”

“Nope. Ain't none of your business.” Jocko pulled a dented tin from his breast pocket and stuffed a fresh pinch of snuff into his cheek. “Way I see it, folks got a right to know about things so they can plan. Develop a strategy.”

“And you're playing town crier, is that it? Or is there more to it?” Cubiak stepped to the window. He could feel air leaking in along the sill where the wood had rotted and shrunk. “You live up here alone. Can pretty much come and go as you please, can't you?”

“Could be.”

“Nobody'd know what you were up to half the time.”

Jocko guffawed.

“You were an instructor for the Survivalist Club. You have skills that can be used a lot of different ways.”

The ferry captain sat up smartly. “Had. Had skills.” His face grim, Jocko laid his left arm on the table, then with his right hand unbuttoned the frayed cuff and deftly rolled up the sleeve to the elbow. He extended the bare limb to Cubiak. “Go on, pinch it,” he said.

The arm was hard plastic. The fingers immobile. Cubiak cursed himself for not having noticed.

“Boat's got power steering. I can operate it easily enough with this other one here.” Jocko waved his right arm. “Can't do much else.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” But Cubiak knew it was true. He surveyed the disheveled room. Testament to a sad pastiche of a life given over to resignation and neglect, a life guided by anger and bitterness fueled by a washed-out map that kept old wounds fresh.

In the dim light, Jocko appeared to be dozing. His head, on his chest, bobbed gently.

Cubiak was turning to leave when he spied a black phone on the far wall. Judging from the dull finish and discolored plastic dial plate, it had to have been one of the originals installed on the island. Next to it, a small notepad hung from a tenpenny nail. The top sheet was crowded with faded pencil scrawls of names and numbers. Except for one line, scratched in near the upper edge, whose obvious freshness made it stand out from the rest. Cubiak was too far away to decipher the number, but the crisp dark digits made it clear that it was newly added to the list.