Death Stalks Door County

by Patricia Skalka

  He told four of the men to round up any injured and take them to the Moravian church. He posted one man by the deserted shops to deter looting and another to keep the curious away from the town center. The rest he assigned to traffic detail, instructing them to open up both lanes of the highway for people streaming south away from the peninsula and to divert northbound traffic around town.

  Cars and vans scraped and bumped against one another as their drivers, the lucky ones who’d reached their vehicles, maneuvered for openings in the flow of traffic. Bottlenecks formed as people tried to move from one part of town to another. A woman with blood streaming from a cut on her arm dragged a young toddler behind as she spun around, disoriented and unsure where to seek refuge.

  On the waterfront, dozens of fishermen and swimmers huddled in chest-deep water under the long piers and watched, ashamed, as a man wearing street clothes thrashed wildly into the water for a frail, young girl—a frightened preschooler with a shocking pink suit and inner tube of dancing mermaids—whom the others had deserted in their selfish haste to find safety beneath the docks.

  Along a slip of white sand, lifeguards from the Chris evacuated guests off the beach; on the hotel’s long expanse of porch, a gaggle of elderly women clutching croquet mallets huddled in a knot and watched as a crush of younger, more vocal patrons shoved through the front doors into the lobby and demanded refunds for their ruined vacations.

  On the steps of his church, Thorenson organized greeters to retrieve lost children and directed visitors into the inner sanctuary for juice and cookies. Having shielded Cornelia from the chaos and by some small miracle pushed her wheelchair into the back room of the Christmas Shoppe where two elderly sisters comforted her, Evelyn Bathard administered emergency first aid in the small dining room of Milton’s. Wielding a garden hose, Ruby Schumacher and Amelia Pechta helped the volunteer fire department water down Village Hall.

  Near the fudge shop Cubiak encountered a teenager with a group of seven youngsters in tow. She looked fragile and terribly young, yet she’d had the presence of mind to tie a length of bunting around the kids’ waists, to keep them together. Incongruously swathed in gaiety, they stumbled after her, faces run with tears and smeared with ketchup and ice cream.

  Cubiak offered to help, and the girl almost wept with relief. They were from Algoma and had been on a church outing, she explained. Their van was parked up the hill—blue with a large sun painted on the side.

  Ten minutes later, Cubiak delivered the van and loaded the children onboard. “Use the back roads,” he urged.

  In town, Cate worked the old pump and offered cups of cold water to passersby. Cubiak waited his turn in line.

  “You okay?” he said when he reached her.

  She nodded, but fear shone in her eyes. “This has to stop, Dave. You have to find who’s doing this and stop them,” she said, her mouth pinched with strain.

  Cubiak squeezed her hand, wishing he could do more for her, for everyone.

  He needed to get to the park. The bike was gone, so he borrowed a police car and steered it into the flow of traffic streaming out of Ephraim. Cars and vans jammed the park entrance. Cubiak pulled under a mulberry tree and went in on foot. The information booth was empty. Twenty yards in, he found Barry Beck directing the exodus from the southern rim.

  Near the day lot, Ruta managed the flow of cars, motorcycles, and bicycles toward the highway. Her tall, commanding figure was made even more formidable by the official ranger’s shirt she’d buttoned over her housedress and the wooden staff she grasped in her right hand. When a car full of teenagers tried to muscle ahead, Ruta smacked the hood with the stick. “You wait your turn,” she ordered and stepped defiantly in the way.

  “Where’s Otto?” Cubiak said.

  “Bluestone Bay. He said to tell you he blocked the north road.” That explained the absence of traffic on the ridge.

  At the station, Cubiak tried and failed to raise Johnson on the radio. He reached Turtle Bay Campground on foot and found it in turmoil. The campers had had to battle outgoing traffic to get back in, and most had just recently made it through. The few veterans were able to disassemble their tents quickly and efficiently, but the majority were soon tangled in tether ropes and outwitted by the yards of fabric they had to reduce to a two- or three-cubic-foot bundle. In their hurry, they tripped over loosely rolled sleeping bags and piles of aluminum cookware. “Stay calm,” one father shouted at his three quivering children. “And hurry up.”

  Cubiak moved through the crowd, doling out reassurance and help. “There’s no reason to rush. It’s all over,” he said.

  “For now, maybe,” a tall, stout man in a green T-shirt countered.

  “We’re sitting ducks here. They could start shooting at us now!” shouted a muscled, young man with a mustache.

  “No. The danger’s past. No one’s going to shoot at you. You can take it easy. I’ll stay and help. In fact, everyone help each other. You’ll get done faster.” The roads were gridlocked, he explained. They might as well use their time wisely.

  Grudgingly the vacationers returned to their tasks, and gradually the tension eased. “Wait’ll I tell the guys at school,” a lanky sunburned teenager said to another. “How many gunmen does it take to ruin a picnic?” a freckled boy teased a younger brother. His mother boxed the older boy’s ears and told him to shut up. The campers wolfed down leftovers, covered ashes with dirt, and slowly stuffed their gear and themselves into their comfort-equipped vans and deluxe four-wheel-drive vehicles before joining the exodus home.

  Cubiak hitched a ride with one of the last families to leave. The man hunched over the wheel had grudgingly allowed him to squeeze into the vehicle. The woman who sat between them clutched her hands and gulped down air in short, anxious breaths.

  “I’m sorry,” the ranger said as they dropped him off near the station.

  “I want my goddamn money back. A whole week’s worth of camping fees.” The driver’s mouth was screwed up in anger.

  Cubiak pulled three crumpled twenties from his wallet and shoved them at the open window. “This is all I got.” The man snatched the bills and peeled out, kicking up dust from all four tires.

  SATURDAY EVENING

  By dusk, a ridge of dark clouds had blown up over Green Bay. The gray gloom blotted out the sunset and cast a pall over the peninsula. The day visitors had fled, along with many of the weekly and long-term guests. Those who hadn’t yet left huddled behind locked doors at their cottages, hotels, and condos. Ephraim was deserted. So, too, were Fish Creek and Sturgeon Bay and the other resort communities that dotted the pristine shoreline.

  The first rampaging tourists had ignited the panic, driving through the streets of the other towns, windows down, shouting inflammatory words—sniper, shooting, madman. The relentless wave of frightened vacationers had fueled the egress, drawing others from their picnics and festivities until they created a vortex of momentum that drained the famed vacation area of all visitors, all gaiety, all hope of pleasure. Many hyped the situation, enlarging their roles in calls and texts to hometown radio stations that replayed the news throughout the day until finally they hit the jackpot with live reports fed to sister stations in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Minneapolis. With its vulture-like appetite, the news media sensed a fresh carcass to be picked clean and assigned reporters to the story.

  Across the peninsula, shops and restaurants were dark. Shades were drawn, windows shuttered. The locals lay low. Bathard gave Cornelia a sedative and put her to bed, gently tucking a soft down quilt around her ravaged body. Afterward, he sat alone in the vaulted living room with a snifter of brandy and brooded over the day’s events. He’d hoped, assumed even, that Cubiak would halt the string of murderous deaths that had plagued the area. Perhaps that was too much to ask of any one man, a stranger at that. Perhaps there was more that he—or any of them—could have done to help.

  In the modest parsonage uphill from the Moravian church, Waldo and Gladys Thorenson sipped hot tea.
Earlier they had tidied the church and meeting hall, and then knelt side by side before the altar in silent prayer. Good souls, they forgave the attacker and beseeched the Almighty for mercy. Later, snuggled in bed, Gladys admitted to her husband that rejecting vengeance was the hardest thing she’d ever done. “Me, too,” he’d whispered as he pulled her into his arms.

  In Sturgeon Bay, a somber Floyd Touhy prepared a special edition of the Herald. He had hard news to report, and some residual trace of the newsman he’d once been kicked into play and reminded him how to do it. He’d had several reporters, a handful of stringers, and three photographers on the scene. “Play up the ‘Death’s Door’ angle whenever you can,” he’d directed them. The page one headline read simply: DOOR COUNTY UNDER SIEGE: TRAGEDY STRIKES PENINSULA.

  At his waterfront mansion, Beck bolted his study from the inside and telephoned Caruthers, who raved drunkenly about lost revenues. Beck cut him short with an order for an early morning emergency meeting of the Tourism Board and then banged the phone down. Slowly he looked around the room. The walls were hung with the documented history of his predecessors’ victories. The conference table held the monument to his own ill-fated wonderland, the project that would have outshone them all. Still in his golf attire, Beck carried the remaining copies of the Paradise Harbor plan to the fireplace and laid a match to the paper and kindling on the grate. As the fire began to take, he ripped the pages from the bound books and slowly fed them to the flames.

  Surrounded by bodyguards, Beck’s international guests waited at the Cherry Valley Airport to begin their trip home. Earlier, the potential investors had allowed Beck’s assistance in acquiring the official approvals needed to remove their companion’s body. Afterward, in a public gesture of humiliation, they had symbolically turned their backs on Beck and walked away in complete silence, relegating the scion of Door County to oblivion.

  In the north end of the peninsula Cate cleared away the remains of the snack she’d hastily prepared for herself and Ruby. Though Cate had forced herself to nibble at the food, her aunt had attacked the meal ravenously and then insisted she couldn’t sleep as her niece trudged upstairs. Cate dropped into bed fully clothed, only vaguely aware of Ruby’s nervous pacing downstairs and the reverberating sound of an Indian chant being played full volume on the old stereo.

  At Peninsula State Park Cubiak watched the last of the visitors leave. Then he sent Barry home, mixed a hot toddy for Ruta, and presented Johnson with a preliminary damage assessment.

  The ranger was under a scalding shower when he remembered Malcolm’s phone call. Damp and bone tired, he found Ruta’s message on his desk. Malcolm had left two numbers. Cubiak dialed the first. A machine took the call, and a crisp voice informed him he’d reached the office of the Door County Welding Company. If he left a message they would get back to him as soon as they were able. Cubiak hung up and tried the second number.

  The call was answered on the third ring. “Hello? Who is this?” a voice demanded.

  “Hello!” Then a click.

  An aching hollowness ballooned in Cubiak’s chest.

  He knew the voice.

  Outside, a cold rain fell.

  WEEK THREE: SUNDAY

  Under a leaden, windswept sky, Cubiak headed north. The roads were empty, the resort towns unnervingly still.

  “I am sick at heart at what I must do now. There is no satisfaction in solving this crime,” Dutch had written in his notebook when he’d identified the killer. The same heavy, unhappy sentiment dragged at Cubiak. Late the previous evening, he’d talked with Johnson and Martha Smithson, then Bathard and even Buddy Entwhistle, whom Ruta had finally located. Cubiak was up past midnight weaving the threads of who and why into a cohesive theory. At five that morning, he dragged Halverson out of bed and had him roust Petey from his cell. The additional details he coaxed from the reluctant prisoner seared the information into a nightmarish knot.

  Burdened by the truth, the most Cubiak could do was drive slowly.

  Even then he was brought up short when he reached the junction at the top of the peninsula. He had no choice, really. He understood this as he crimped the wheel to the right and turned down the narrow blacktop that led him under the by-now familiar arching green canopy toward land’s end. Crawling around the last bend, he cut the engine and coasted into the circular driveway of the house Dutch had built. The yard was empty. Near the house a bed of bright red azaleas sparkled with misplaced gaiety, but beyond the clearing, the dark forest cedars stood mute and guarded.

  Ruby? Cate?”

  The names echoed through the stillness, then faded to silence. Cubiak tried the barn first. The door was locked. He peered through the four-paneled window. The walls had been emptied of their great loops of yarn. The looms were stripped and barren, naked in the thin light.

  The ranger approached the house. The back door was ajar.

  “Ruby? Cate?” he called as he stepped inside, and again, there was no answer. Only the faint sound of classical music from deep inside. Violins. Something melancholy and familiar he couldn’t place.

  He mounted the bare, wooden stairs. A small rear bedroom he assumed was Cate’s was casually thrown together. The other two had the comfortable look of rooms lived in and carefully tended. Downstairs was the same. The living room curtains had been pulled shut. The fireplace swept. A short stack of photo albums sat neatly piled on the coffee table. He flipped through the top two. Pictures of Ruby and Dutch from long ago. A striking pair. In the kitchen, a cup and saucer rested in the drain by the sink. Cubiak ran his finger over the bottom of the cup. Still damp.

  From the front hall, he stepped out onto a wide porch that seemed to open onto the very end of the earth: all trees, water, and sky. He followed a stone path through a yard landscaped with native plants and bushes. The path led to a cliff where a steep staircase plunged down to a narrow dock. A lemon yellow rowboat bobbed alongside the pier. A woman sat in the boat; she faced the water and held a slender brown pole. At first glance Cubiak thought it was an oar. He gripped the handrail and took his time descending the narrow steps.

  “Ruby.”

  No response. Cubiak was about to call out a second time when Ruby lifted her feet and, with the agility of someone half her age, swirled around to face him. As she turned, Cubiak glimpsed a red gas can under the seat.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said.

  Ruby pointed the brown pole at him. The oar became a skeet gun, probably twenty-gauge.

  Cubiak advanced to the middle of the dock. “Target practice?”

  “Maybe.” Ruby balanced the rifle across her knees and took his measure. “Rather early for a social visit.”

  “I have something important to show you.”

  She waited, a mix of amusement and skepticism on her face.

  Cubiak reached across his chest and into his shirt pocket. His hand came out with the fingers tightly clenched.

  Ruby motioned him forward.

  When he was four feet from the boat, she put up her hand. Cubiak halted and slowly opened his fist to reveal four .300 Weatherby Magnum cartridge cases.

  “I found these yesterday in the woods above the golf course. On the rock ledge, to be exact.”

  Ruby’s face was inscrutable.

  “Your father owned a Weatherby, custom-made with gold inlay. I saw it in a picture at The Wood. You were in the same photo with him. You and your sister, Rosalinde. The gun’s gone. I looked.”

  “I’ll have to report it missing.”

  “You learned to shoot with your father’s gun, didn’t you? He taught you everything he knew about hunting and the outdoors.”

  Ruby stroked the barrel of the weapon.

  “You should never have shown me the notebooks,” he continued.

  “You’ve lost me, I’m afraid, David. My mind’s not so quick anymore.” She called him by his full name, as had his mother.

  “Something like this happens, there’s a reason for it,” he quoted Dutch. “You did it, R
uby. You killed all those people.”

  She said nothing.

  Cubiak edged toward the boat. Ruby hoisted the rifle and pointed it at him, and he took two steps back. “I did what Dutch would have done, Ruby. I talked to everyone. I followed all the threads. Some went a little further than others. But they all fell short. Then you answered the phone last night and provided me with the thread that led to the motive. It took some digging but I finally figured it out.”

  “Go on,” she said as if humoring a bothersome child.

  “It began a long time ago, after you had Cate.” He waited for her to react but Ruby remained like stone. “You needed a birth certificate for her and went to Beck for help. He did as asked, but unbeknownst to you he had a second birth certificate forged, one that named him as Cate’s father. That’s the one he used to blackmail Dutch into retiring to protect your name. After that, Dutch was never the same. At the time, you may have suspected that something wasn’t right but you couldn’t say anything. So you decided Dutch was depressed. A plausible notion. He’d had a major life transition. His health was failing. To keep up appearances and give Dutch something to do, you hit on the idea that he should write a book about Door County, never realizing where it would lead.”

  A flicker of recognition swept across Ruby’s countenance.

  “It was worse than you imagined, wasn’t it, Ruby? Having Beck reveal your secret was bad enough, but then for him to claim he was Cate’s father was unconscionable. For six years, your husband was forced to believe the worst—that while he was trapped in some stink hole in Vietnam you were carrying on with his best friend. When he talked to Kingovich, he learned the truth about Cate but maybe more importantly, he learned that you hadn’t been unfaithful to him with Beck. Knowing this should give you some comfort, Ruby. Dutch was driving to Sturgeon Bay when he went off the road. It’s not hard to imagine he was on his way to confront Beck.”