Death Stalks Door County (3 page)

Cubiak was not surprised by the question. The coroner seemed like a man who didn't miss much. “Figure it caught on a nail. Piece tore off,” he said. “Halverson must've gotten it when he went up.”

Bathard chuckled. “You give our officer of the law a lot of credit. A crow could just as easily have flown away with it. I looked on the ground. It wasn't there.”

“It could've been torn already, before he got here,” Cubiak said.

“That's a possibility.”

A sharp thunder clap boomed, loosening fat drops of rain. They stood for a moment in the drizzle and then Bathard waved Cubiak off.

“You go on. I'll wait for the ambulance. No use both of us getting wet.”

As he pulled away, Cubiak glimpsed the coroner in the rearview mirror. Bathard had returned to the tower. Shoulders bent against the rain, the stem of the unlit pipe in his mouth, he kept his silent, lonely vigil.

P
ark records showed that Larry Wisby had reserved a camping spot in Peninsula State Park for the third weekend in June every year for the past five. He also belonged to the Friends of the Park. He was a regular and had probably climbed Falcon Tower many times. Cubiak was convinced Wisby hadn't jumped. His first week on the job, the park ranger had trudged to the top of the seven-story structure. The upper platform, the highest of three decks, was ringed by a chest-high guard railing, with a rail cap that tilted inward for added safety. If Wisby had mounted the barrier, he would have had a hard time keeping his balance and could have tipped over the edge, but it was unlikely he'd jumped. Even when a man leaps with the intention of taking his own life, instinct propels him away from the building or structure from which he's hurling. He doesn't plummet straight down. Judging from the location of the body, Cubiak figured Wisby had either fallen or been pushed. Cubiak didn't particularly care which. Two years prior he'd lost his wife and daughter to the Wisbys' other son. That morning they had lost their younger boy, which didn't settle the score but brought it closer.

Cubiak scanned the records and e-mailed them to the sheriff. Let Halverson sort it out.

The rest of the day, Cubiak avoided Ruta. He didn't know how much the housekeeper had been told or had overheard about the body at the tower and didn't want to be the one to break the news or fill in the details.

He'd met Ruta in early April on the night he'd arrived in Door County. A spring blizzard had snarled traffic and it was well past midnight when he finally pulled up to Jensen Station with his belongings jammed into a worn Army duffel and four battered cardboard boxes secured with twine. Against the backdrop of madly swirling snow, he stood in the doorway like a forlorn refugee in a vintage European war movie. The effect was momentarily heightened when the thick oak slab was opened by a stern, aging woman who announced in a decidedly foreign accent that her name was Ruta Lapkritis. In English, Ruth November, she had said firmly. Ruta had a detached sadness in her countenance that marked her as a fellow traveler in the world of the lost and hurting and immediately made him wary. Cubiak was not wont to share stories.

T
hat night, he had the dream again. Given the events of the day, how could he not?

The nightmare began, as it always did, with him at home, standing on the front porch on a hot, muggy summer evening and watching as Lauren and Alexis walked hand in hand down the street. They were off on an innocent quest for ice cream. He heard Alexis, a spry, freckled wisp of a child, say she wanted vanilla with mint chocolate chips. “Two scoops.” He saw Lauren, lithe and deeply tan, glance first at the reddening sky to the west and then down at the blond girl in her teddy bear T-shirt and blue shorts. “Two scoops,” she agreed as she tucked a loose strand of long brown hair behind her ear.

Four blocks away, a rusted green car, a monstrous road hog, tore through a red light. The car sported an endless span of metal grille above the front bumper and oversized fins that swept ludicrously up and outward from the rear fenders. As it bore down the street, engine roaring, the vehicle gained speed and momentum.

Cubiak saw the behemoth approach. He wanted to rush out and tackle his wife and daughter and pull them out of harm's way, but he couldn't move. He could only stand riveted to the spot, as the two-ton wreck hurtled out of the twilight. When the car hit, mother and daughter somersaulted through the air like rag dolls and flopped clumsily to the pavement, where they lay with arms and legs twisted at odd angles to their bodies. A pool of blood seeped out from behind Alexis's left ear. Lauren's grasp momentarily tightened around the girl's hand, then fell loose and limp. As they stared upward to heaven, the car sped on.

The block was eerily quiet. Then a neighbor screamed. A screen door slammed, and people raced out into the street. Holding their hands to their faces, they turned away, weeping. Off in the far distance an ambulance siren screeched. Already too late.

Bellowing with rage, Cubiak clawed through the crowd and gathered the lifeless bodies into his arms. He carried them home and upstairs to the second floor. In the master bedroom, he laid them side by side on the king-size bed, gently placing Alexis's tiny bruised hand in her mother's palm. Then he wiped the blood and dirt from their faces and limbs and kissed their suntanned cheeks.

From the bedroom window, he saw the green car idling behind the garage, the driver leaning against the hood, drunken and defiant. Cubiak confronted him in the alley, and they went at each other bare fisted. No one witnessed their battle. It was a brutal, protracted fight. In the end, Cubiak broke the man's neck, cracking the upper vertebrae of his spinal column and severing the carotid connection between brain and heart. Then he hoisted the dead man over his shoulder, carried him up the stairs, and dumped the body on the bare floor of the bedroom.

Lauren woke first and stroked her daughter's cheek until the little girl stirred.

“Daddy, I didn't get my ice cream,” Alexis said.

He cupped her chin. “You will,” he promised.

The three stood by the body. At a signal from Cubiak, they dragged the corpse to the open window, heaved it over the sill, and watched it float down, feather-like, into the yard. Before it hit the ground, it vanished. In the alley, the green car crystallized and blew away into oblivion.

Cubiak and his family returned to the accident scene. The neighbors had washed away all traces of blood and dispatched the ambulance driver back to the hospital with vague looks and murmurs of false alarms. The job done, they drifted back into their houses as Cubiak and his wife and child walked past, on their way to the ice-cream shop.

T
he soft hissing of the radiator near the foot of his bed woke him. It was 4 a.m. The room was overly warm, but Cubiak shivered. He was bone cold. His lungs and limbs ached as if he'd run a great distance in a place with little oxygen. He'd once read that dreams were relatively short, lasting a few minutes at most, but his nightmare had acquired an eternal quality, unfurling at a bitter, languid pace. Each time the dream became more vivid, magnifying the smallest details and drawing them to his attention. Sometimes, it was the tiny yellow flecks in his wife's eyes; this time it had been the fine layer of pale downy hair on his daughter's left forearm.

Cubiak stared into the inky dark. What he'd said earlier at Falcon Tower was only partially correct. True, the elder Wisby brother was the drunk behind the wheel of the car that had run down and killed both mother and child. Legally, the man was guilty; he'd been tried, convicted, and sentenced to what Cubiak considered an insultingly short prison term.

The other half of the story, the rest of the truth, was the part that Cubiak could acknowledge only to himself. That he, also, was responsible for the deaths of the two people he loved most. This personal guilt was a burden he could not escape.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” he'd wept as he cradled the cold, lifeless flesh that had been his wife and daughter. “Oh, my dear Lord, sweet Jesus, why?”

Why?
Cubiak knew why. He'd gotten into an argument with Lauren the morning of their long-planned family trip to Great America. When Alexis called the precinct to remind him about the outing, he lied and told her he couldn't leave after his shift, that he had to stay for an important assignment. In fact, he was too embarrassed to face his wife.

“We'll go to the park another day. Tell your mother to take you for ice cream instead,” he'd snapped at his darling little girl.

Cubiak yanked the covers to his chin. How could he have been so petty, so small-minded? The confrontation with Lauren started after he saw her talking to a neighbor, a good-looking stud of a guy, recently divorced, who owned a string of successful Laundromats that gave him plenty of money and free time.

“What's he sniffing around for?” Cubiak had said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Lauren was incensed. “How dare you,” she said.

Things escalated from there, his anger fed more by his insecurities than by any mistrust of Lauren. In the morning, she offered him a cup of coffee, but he turned his back on her, unable to utter a simple thanks. Too proud to say
I'm sorry. I love you
.

How could he ever forgive himself?

F
ueled by too much coffee and too little sleep, Cubiak headed south to Sturgeon Bay. After a tortured night, he'd risen early and singed his lungs on a grueling five-mile run. Besides alcohol, which helped him forget, physical activity was his only other defense against the remorse that defined his life. He needed to keep moving. At breakfast he finished a stack of Ruta's pancakes and then volunteered to spend the day clearing trails or cutting firewood.

“Bathard and Halverson are meeting at ten at the coroner's office to go over the tower incident. You need to be there,” Johnson said, pushing back from the kitchen table.

“Me? Why?”

“'Cause Bathard asked for someone from the park to come, and I choose you,” the super said as he walked out the door.

Situated on the western edge of Door County, the city of Sturgeon Bay had grown up on either side of a deep fingerling of water that bled off Green Bay into a long, natural harbor. Sturgeon Bay's historic geography matched its contemporary dual personality, with one segment of residents working the shipyards and the other serving the tourists. When Cubiak turned off the highway, the industrial sites were already deep into the first shift while the tourist shops remained shuttered and dark. He drove mindlessly, well above the limit, and braked hard to keep from sliding past the stop sign by the Kozy Kafe, one of the few businesses in town that catered to both tourists and locals. A luxury-edition Mercedes, license JDB-1, hugged the curb outside the restaurant. Cubiak recognized the car. The silver sedan belonged to J. Dugan Beck, a local big wheel and head of the Peninsula State Park citizens advisory board. A few weeks after he arrived on the peninsula Cubiak learned that Beck had pressured Otto Johnson into taking on an assistant. The ranger felt that made him indirectly beholden to Beck for his job and he didn't like that. For that matter, he didn't like the man, period—too slick and pompous. Cubiak scanned the café's breakfast crowd for a glimpse of Beck's distinctive shock of gray hair but came up empty. He was halfway through the intersection when he saw Beck exiting the office of the
Door County Herald
. Close behind was
Herald
editor in chief Floyd Touhy. Cubiak didn't owe anything to Touhy but he didn't like him either.

The weekly newspaper was scheduled to come out the next morning. With the Fourth of July Festival starting in nine days, Cubiak could imagine the discussion that had taken place between the two men. Touhy would suggest that the unfortunate doings at Falcon Tower could not be ignored in the name of journalistic integrity, and Beck would concur, while insisting that, for the sake of the county's reputation, the accident be mentioned in the context of the park's long safety record. Both men would agree to focus the banner headline on the upcoming festival. If Cubiak were a betting man and he had anyone to bet against, he'd lay a wager on it.

The prospect of the festival, with thousands of happy tourists invading the peninsula, depressed Cubiak. He doubted if there were some corner of the park where he could hide from the cheerful families and manic joie de vivre. Maybe the rain would continue and no one would come.

B
uoyed by the thought, Cubiak crossed the old metal bridge to the west side of the bay. There were a couple of upscale condo developments along the harbor but few tourist shops. The west side traditionally represented the nuts and bolts of Sturgeon Bay: the county co-op, two dry cleaners, a hardware store, and businesses that sold appliances and paint. Bathard's office was tucked between an electrical repair shop and a pizzeria and marked by a simple bronze sign. Cubiak followed a narrow hallway redolent with garlic and oregano to a small waiting room outfitted with several spindly zebra plants, a bamboo magazine rack, and four wooden chairs. Opposite the chairs was a pale blue door with another discreet sign. On one side, the world of life; on the other, the universe of things dead and dying. Reluctant to cross the line, Cubiak knocked softly, as if hoping not to be heard.