Death Stalks Door County (32 page)

“You know I didn't.” He paused a moment. “They were all innocent, those people you killed.”

“Dutch was innocent, too. So was I, once.”

“You need help, Ruby.”

“Help! From whom? You?” She clucked scornfully. “You can't even help yourself.”

“Yesterday, in the parade, you walked past Beck wearing a Lakota war symbol. You wanted him to know. Oh, Ruby, why didn't you try and stop yourself ?”

Ruby said nothing.

Cubiak looked past her, toward the massive white funnel spiraling upward over Washington Island. “You should have told Dutch the truth,” he said finally. “He would have forgiven you anything.”

“Would he?”

R
uby stiffened, her features rigid. Only the twitch in her left eye betrayed her internal struggle.

“Dutch was a man of honor,” she said eventually. “You have to remember that he was quite young when all this took place. Life teaches us to forgive, but when you're young . . .” The thought trailed off.

“There'd been a storm late that afternoon and the air was fresh and filled with the scent of pine. I was standing at the back door when the two men arrived,” Ruby said. “It was dusk and they apologized for coming so late. They were new to Door County and had miscalculated the amount of time needed to traverse the length of the peninsula. The drive had taken them nearly an hour longer than planned. They were done up in dress blues, all spit and polish. Parade clothes. Death clothes.

“I'd eaten an early supper, watching the storm, and as the men talked, I had to struggle to keep down the food.

“The words were gibberish, garbage, bullets that split my heart. They told me Dutch was killed in an accident near the DMZ. One of four American soldiers.” Details were sketchy. Dense fog. No man's land. An innocent mistake—if a mistake at all; more likely, an aggressive response to an attack. Grenades thrown. Rockets launched. “I couldn't keep up; there was so much they were saying. They kept telling me I needed to rise to the occasion. The U.S. was still trying to recover from the disaster at My Lai, and the Paris peace talks were underway again, this time with some hope of resolution. The government's hands were tied; the State Department was in no position to make demands; too much hung in the balance. They pleaded with me to see their side of it. Surely, I understood, they said.

“I understood nothing.

“I asked them if it could be a mistake, aware that this was the question everyone in my situation asked and the one the men dreaded most.

“There was no mistake. Their response was firm, resolute. Dutch's death was confirmed. The enemy had provided dog tags.

“I could re-create him with my hands. I knew the ripple of every muscle, the solid bend of his shoulders. I knew they were talking rubbish. Dutch pulverized by a mortar and bullets? It was all nonsense. Dutch can't be dead, I insisted. He couldn't be dead because he was talking to me, his voice was in my ear.”

Ruby faltered, and Cubiak blinked at the mounting sun. He knew. He had lived the same horror and had felt himself go ice cold as she must have.

“They wouldn't stop talking! All I wanted was for them to go away so I could pretend they'd never been there, that it was all a nightmare. But they wouldn't leave. They kept talking. They told me that I had to keep the terrible news a secret. I could not plan a funeral because the remains—I gagged at the word—would not, could not, be released. It might be months, the younger one cautioned. Perhaps it was the older one who spoke.

“It was dark when they finally left.

“Their taillights were like a rat's eyes swimming in ink. I stood in the doorway until the two red dots disappeared, and then I began to shriek and cry. I beat my breast until my fists were numb.

“I had nothing,” Ruby explained. “I had given up everything for Dutch, and now he was gone.

“By morning, I had devised a plan. I left before dawn and drove west to the reservation where I had worked summers during college. In the vast forgotten emptiness of the prairie, I thought I could be disappeared, like Dutch.”

“You've never told this to anyone, have you?” Cubiak said.

Ruby lifted her chin. “No, never,” she said.

“Last week when you came for dinner, I mentioned how Dutch had to drop out of school to operate the family store when his father got sick and how he didn't resent it, because he didn't feel he was entitled to an education.

“He was so different from me in that. I felt entitled to everything. Call it the arrogance of privilege and wealth or youthful naiveté, but . . .” Ruby squirmed on the narrow seat. “It's the way I felt, and there was nothing I could do to change it. When Dutch died, I felt more than grief for a life lost and a love lost. I believed to the very core of my being that I had been cheated, that fate had unjustly stolen the one thing I most wanted and deserved. My rage was absolute. I drank beyond all reason. I fucked every man who crossed my path. My friends on the reservation tried to stop me, but I scorned them and went on day after day, living a life of despair and debauchery.

“The following spring, I found myself pregnant.” Ruby looked at Cubiak and laughed, though there was no mirth in it. “I never even considered the possibility,” she said.

“From somewhere in my moralistic past came the clear directive of what I had to do. Sober up. Stop the degenerate behavior. Figure out a way to make a living and raise the child. I decided to stay out west. I wanted the haunting vastness of the Indian lands to be our home, a bleak world to match a bleak life.

“I bought a second-hand trailer and moved it to a desolate valley near the north edge of the territory. I quit drinking and painted bright colorful clouds on the walls of the tiny living room. I even planted a garden. At night I sat on the wobbly metal steps and listened to coyotes howling in the distance. In the empty landscape, the sound was eerie, but I found it soothing. One day followed another with no change but in the girth of my body. When the baby was due, an ancient midwife came to help. She arrived two days early and camped behind the trailer until it was time. It was not an easy birth.

“Cate was five days old when I had a visitor. A rangy, pockmarked man in pressed jeans and a black bolo tie pulled up to the trailer and handed me a telegram. The envelope was tattered and worn, its seams sealed with cheap tape. I waited until his car vanished over the horizon and the dust settled on the dry, narrow road. Then I tore open the message.

“Dutch was alive.

“I must have fainted. It was the baby's crying that brought me back. Dutch was alive! I screamed and danced. I threw things in the air. There
had
been a mistake! He was badly hurt but safe. All life's blessings were back. I fell to my knees in thanks. And then, I caught myself. Because everything was wrong, and it was my fault. Dutch was coming home to a life I had destroyed.”

In her despair, Ruby admitted, she almost allowed that it would have been better if Dutch had been killed or if she'd terminated the pregnancy as some had suggested, but she defused the notions before they could be fully articulated.

“My husband was alive, and I needed to act.

“I held my infant daughter to my breast and paced back and forth in the constricted space that defined my life. I had to consider my options. I had to think straight.

“I could hide everything I'd done but I couldn't hide the child. If I'd been guilty of a single indiscretion, I could have lived with the consequences. I could have begged forgiveness. But I had debased myself beyond redemption. It came down to the simple fact that I could not name the father. It came down to the realization that I had sullied myself with countless men. It was more shame than I could bear, more forgiveness than I could grant myself or ask from Dutch.”

Trailing her hand in the water, Ruby told Cubiak how she had swaddled the baby into a worn blanket and left the reservation in the middle of the night during a freak spring blizzard. “I drove nonstop through swirling snow and thick darkness. By dawn, I was in Sturgeon Bay, where I presented myself to Beck and asked his help. I provided few details beyond the pathetic story of an unmarried teen I'd befriended and the sad tale of my younger sister who was desperate to adopt, that half of the fable true. ‘I need a birth certificate,' I told him.

“A few hours later, Beck produced the requisite document, one that named Rosalinde and her husband as the parents. The next morning, I went down to Milwaukee and gave my darling Cate to my sister. Then I boarded a plane to Washington, where my hero husband was very quietly being returned home after more than a year as a prisoner of war.”

H
ey! Hey, you guys!” A shout erupted at the top of the stairs.

Cubiak and Ruby looked up simultaneously and saw Cate waving energetically. Ruby turned ghostly pale and lowered the rifle again.

“Tell her to go back. Stop her,” she commanded.

Cubiak moved toward the steps. “Stay there. Wait,” he bellowed up the ridge. But Cate was already on her way down, hurrying, leaping the steps two by two, one hand sliding loosely along the railing, her hair bouncing, cupping her head.

“She mustn't know, for her own sake. Promise me that much. You won't ever tell her,” Ruby said, pleading.

Before Cubiak could reply, Cate was with them, nearly breathless, her face flushed from the running descent. “I can't believe I made it without getting dizzy.”

Neither Cubiak nor Ruby spoke. Cate spied the rifle in her aunt's lap and glanced anxiously from one to the other.

“What's going on? What are you two doing down here?” she said.

They formed an uneasy trio. A human triangle linked by time and circumstance.

Cate stamped her foot. “What's going on?” she demanded again.

“We're talking,” Cubiak said.

Ruby interrupted and addressed Cate directly. “David came to tell me his theory about the recent deaths, the murders. It's an intriguing concept, really, with just a touch of whimsy about it. Especially the notion that the weaving provides proof that I'm the killer.”

Cate gasped and whirled on Cubiak. “What the hell are you talking about?” Her fury erased any trace of intimacy that might have lingered between them.

“I told him it wouldn't wash. But then it's just guesswork on his part about my wanting to derail Beck's latest scheme. The dedicated environmentalist gone mad. A familiar theme.” Ruby went on, steering the story to her purpose. “As it is, I have a theory of my own, which is at least as interesting. There were two killers at large who functioned quite separately from each other.” Ruby fixed on Cubiak. “But you were the one to start the process.” She hesitated, and then went on in a rush. “The first victim was Lawrence Wisby. You knew him, didn't you?”

“I knew who he was,” Cubiak said. He turned toward Cate. “His brother was the man who killed Lauren and Alexis.”

Cate inhaled sharply. “You knew he was in the park?”

“No.”

“He had a campsite!” Ruby said.

“He reserved a campsite at the beginning of March. A month before I arrived.”

“You could've known then, that he was coming to Door County?” Cate said, floating nervously between the two.

“Maybe. But I didn't. I had no reason to look at the bookings.”

Ruby rose to her full sitting height. “Which of us are you going to believe, Cate? Who's telling the truth? Him or me? David, the sometimes dipsomaniac, the man with the troubled past, or sweet Aunt Ruby who gave you piggyback rides up and down those very steps when you were a wee child.”

She banged the butt of the rifle against the floor of the boat. “Stand still and listen to me.” Cate froze. With the attention to detail and pattern that she gave to her work, Ruby talked, pulling together the threads of her tale. How Cubiak hurled Wisby from the tower and then spied Macklin's boat in the bay. He assumed the old man had seen him and then killed him as well. Cubiak was in Fish Creek at the time the
Betsy Ross
exploded.

“I saw him coming out of the post office,” Ruby said.

“Across the street, there was a shortcut to the docks. David could easily have slipped down to the water between the vacant cottages and tampered with the gas tank without being noticed. Probably that would have ended it all, but then Petey killed Alice. Nasty son of a bitch with a temper like his always ends up hurting somebody, usually a woman. After her murder, David figures why not keep the streak going. Petey had already been arrested for Alice's death, and at the meeting of the Conservation League, he heard Otto present his plans for the park and figured he could pin the rampage on the superintendent. When David realized he couldn't target Otto for the killings, he hit on me. I had the means, there's no denying that. He found his motive when he learned that Jocko had told me about Beck's plan to turn Door County into some kind of international playground for his jet-set friends. It's no secret that I have a reputation for standing up to outrage and greed.

“Unwittingly, I played into his hands with the weaving. The back depicts the Tree of Death, not a true reverse of the front, which David interprets as an admission of my culpability.” Ruby paused. “But you know better than that.”

“It's true,” Cate told Cubiak. “For years, Ruby's talked about doing an unconventional double weaving.”

“Then by sticking in tricked-up clues, he planned to make it foolproof,” Ruby added.

Silent until then, Cubiak finally spoke up. “The clues don't mean much. The key is in what Benny told Entwhistle.”

Ruby scoffed. “That he saw someone else on the tower? I doubt Macklin could make out any identifying characteristics from the bay.”

“You're right, he couldn't. I took a boat out there myself and looked. But I checked it the other way, as well. From tower to boat. It's a good distance. A harsh angle. Whoever was up there with Wisby couldn't see enough detail to identify the boat. They had to know that it was Benny's and had to be someone Benny could identify and connect with Wisby's death.”