Love and Death in the Sunshine State

by Cutter Wood

  Sabine’s childhood was a difficult and lonely one. When her mother was out, she was left in the care of her brothers, which is to say she was left in her own care. There were the facts of any child’s life: she attended birthday parties, watched television, ran through rainstorms. If she kept a diary, there is no record of it. Where her thoughts went at night, what nightmares haunted her, what games she played to pass the time, and what books she hid in the feathery dust beneath her bed, whether she heard the locomotives in the rail yard—the sequence of clanks, one rapidly following another, as each car lurched forward behind the one preceding it and a train churned slowly off into the night: these are questions for which there are no answers. One item alone seems to shed light on her childhood. On her eighteenth birthday, she received one present, from herself—her first official act upon emancipation—a tubal ligation, thus ensuring that no child of her own would ever live through a youth such as hers.

  Perhaps it was also these experiences that drove her to the aseptic, impersonal world of hotels. Certain depths of misery do seem impossible in a place designed for brief tenancies, and she seemed to find shelter in the life of lobbies, elevators, and en suite baths. She worked her first jobs at hotels around Stuttgart, eventually taking a degree in hospitality, becoming a manager, and at last, finding work as a travel agent. All of her life slowly tilted in the direction of vacations, and it was not so much of a surprise that she finally took one herself. A friend had recommended a little island on the Gulf side of Florida.

  She knew on her first visit to Anna Maria that she would live there, and on her second visit, she found a job as a manager at a hotel. In those first dizzy days of coming to know a place and its people, life went quickly. She built sandcastles, she drank wine at sunset, she adopted a parrot, and though she was afraid of the dark, she sometimes swam at night.

  One day at work, a friend introduced her to Tom Buehler. It was not a lovely surname, but two weeks later, by the action of a single hyphen, it was appended to her own. She had gained citizenship in the union, and it was sometimes speculated that perhaps her intent in wedding Tom had not been entirely romantic. If this was the case, it did not prevent them from developing other aspects of their relationship; not long after, they became business partners, buying a motel from a retired couple and throwing themselves into its operation. In a picture from that time, she is sitting in an office before a computer. Her face washed in its blue light, the rest of the room dark around her, she seems to convey the middle-aged steadfastness of a woman whose secrets, like her passions, are modest and inconsequential, a woman who, despite the bustle of life, has found some comfort. I would have said, had I stumbled on this photograph in another context, that her life appeared too boring for anything bad to happen.

  If any equilibrium had existed, however, it was upset by the entrance of William Cumber. He was younger than Sabine and handsome. He’d worked at the motel briefly a few years before, and when he’d gone to prison on an arson charge, he’d written to Tom asking for money to buy a few necessities: toothpaste, deodorant, soap, anything. Tom hadn’t responded, but Sabine had, and over time she and Cumber struck up a correspondence. Eventually, she would bring him out to the motel each Saturday for his furlough, and not long after this, she confided to her friends, they had become romantically involved. Tom soon discovered them, and asking only that they not pursue the affair at the motel, he forced Sabine to find somewhere else to carry on their relationship. By the time Cumber was paroled on the first of September 2008, she’d rented a small apartment near the tip of the island for them to share.

  Many of her friends wondered what exactly she was thinking; they worried she had fallen into the relationship too fast. Though she had always been a relatively carefree woman, she seemed to have lost some sense of herself around him. At the bar two blocks from their apartment, she was often seen sitting on his lap, her arms wrapped around his neck in a teenaged caricature of love. Two of her friends had tried to speak with her about it, but they hadn’t known what to say.

  What did this all mean? Nothing, or almost nothing. These fragments hardly constituted a person. They were ideas of Sabine, not Sabine herself, and it occasionally seemed like people were looking for someone else entirely.

  The sheriff’s office made no greater headway than those of us who tried to wring our answers from parrots and photographs. The likelihood of finding a missing person drops rapidly with each passing hour. When the sheriff made his first announcement on Friday morning, it had been roughly sixty hours since anyone had seen Sabine Musil-Buehler, and they had little idea where or how to begin looking. They examined her home computer for clues but found only “nude digital images of her alleged boyfriend.” On the motel’s public computer, there was “an abundance of male pornography and images of vehicles” but little else. All day Friday and through the weekend, deputies scoured the county, trying to turn up any information they could. They searched the motel. They searched the house she’d shared with her husband and the apartment she’d shared with her boyfriend. They spoke with friends and family, and they took photographs and buccal swabs. They investigated patterns of trampled grass and confiscated, as though at random, a couch, a pair of shoes, an empty bottle of pinot grigio. Having no other evidence to go on, they spent a day walking cadaver dogs through an undeveloped lot on the mainland. The records from that period are filled with the notation possible blood, but it usually wasn’t.

  When the motel caught fire twelve days after her disappearance, it seemed as though they might be closing in, but this trail also went cold quickly. They still hoped to discover her body at least, and by January, the detectives had turned their sights to a stretch of beach on Anna Maria. There, with the help of a backhoe, a professor of archaeology, and a cadaver dog named Dexter, they’d begun digging, and it was in this position that I first found them: a number of men looking down thoughtfully at a large hole. At a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, they had so far managed to uncover a child’s plastic shovel and a lone leopard-print flip-flop. (The K-9 unit alerted to the presence of protein, but it was determined to be unrelated to the current investigation.) As a deputy glumly admitted to the gathered crowd of tourists, the backhoe laboring behind him, it was like the woman just dropped off the face of the earth.

  4: The Dark Side and the Other Side

  That week on Anna Maria passed quickly. I met with the woman who’d been the first on the scene of the fire. I left polite voicemails for the media representative of the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office, asking to be put in touch with the investigating detectives. Over large plastic cups of lemonade, in the living rooms of Sabine’s friends, I looked at scrapbook after scrapbook, and afterward, in my car, I had hushed phone conversations with those who wouldn’t meet me in person.

  “Tom asked me not to talk about this, but just because he’s innocent doesn’t mean he can tell me who to talk to.”

  “Listen, what you have to realize is that Sabine had a dark side. There was a dark side to her, and then there was the other side. She wrote a one-woman play, and in the end, the woman dies.”

  “After Sabine disappeared, I drove over to the apartment where she was living with that Bill Cumber, and I told him to his face, I said, ‘I know you killed her.’ ”

  Only on my last day did I hear from Tom. It was dinnertime, and the sounds in the background gave the feeling of a meal in the final stages of preparation. He seemed to have spent some time preparing what he was about to say, and he ran through it almost without pausing for breath. “Cutter, it’s Tom Buehler, I thought it over. I thought it over, and I’m not going to speak with you. I just can’t. I’m sorry, I just can’t.” Before I could say a thing, he’d hung up.

  By that time, I had already packed my things. Tom had long since ceased to feature in the story as I understood it. Robert Corona, too, I’d dispensed with. He was still in the county jail at that time, awaiting trial for the theft of the convertible. But by then, he’d become a comi
c side note to the homicide investigation. Shortly after he told detectives that an older white woman had loaned him the car, they returned to question him a second time. They asked him again what had happened, and he repeated his story. Then another detective came to visit him, this one older, with ears that stuck straight out from the sides of his head, and so tall he had to duck when entering the room. This detective asked him to repeat his story one more time, and when Corona had finished, the detective asked his permission to take a buccal swab so they could test his DNA, thanked him, and got up to leave. Then he turned back. He wanted Robert to know that this was a very serious matter. The woman who owned the car had probably been murdered, and this testimony made him the last person to see her alive. “Are you serious?” Corona said. He recanted everything within the hour. He’d been looking for change in the cars parked on Fourteenth, he said then, and there was this white convertible. It was unlocked. The keys were in the ignition. He was just going to take it for a joyride.

  It was around ten o’clock at night when I left Anna Maria and began driving north. That whole winter had been particularly cold for Florida, and that night by chance was the coldest. On the radio, the broadcasts were interrupted by updates from local meteorologists. As I drove past one dark field after another, they broke in to announce that it was now thirty-four degrees, to interview worried farmers, to discuss the crystallization of water, and to remind listeners that more than a few hours at the freezing point would destroy the state’s strawberry crop. Sometime deep in the night, they somberly announced it was now freezing in Florida, and I pulled to the side of the road to try to sleep. But it was a hopeless project in the cold. I lay there half-awake and listened to the hiss of the irrigating machines as they crawled across the fields, spraying the strawberries in a vain attempt to save them, and a little before dawn, I put the car back in gear and continued north, toward Chipley.

  Chipley, Florida, way up in the Panhandle, near Tallahassee, was a long drive from Anna Maria, a drive made longer by the fact that the only reason to go there was the penitentiary. Eventually, the fields gave onto low hills of thin, sickly pine, through which the road was cut as though with a single stroke. In that blue haze before dawn, everything loomed up, appeared for a moment, and just as quickly dissolved back into the fog: a trailer half-hidden in the trees; a town composed of a church and a bar, facing off across the highway; culverts full of tires and refrigerators; abandoned developments; bleached subdivision flags; and, just before the turnoff, the body of a black dog on the shoulder of the road, curled up like it had just then gone to sleep.

  I’d sent a note to William Cumber a few weeks earlier, asking whether I could visit him, and within days, a large white envelope had arrived with a correctional facility stamp on it.

  Mr. Cutter,

  I’m in receipt of your letter. I’m not going to write much because I’m not trusting you all that well right now. Here’s the form that you need to fill out. Make sure you fill it out completely. Also attach a little piece of paper at the upper left hand corner of the application with the name, tape it on.

  So until we meet be good!

  William J. Cumber

  P.S. Write me back also to let me know you mailed it.

  Another letter followed quickly after:

  Mr. Wood,

  I am curious about you. I keep wondering if you’re just out to stab me in my back like the reporters and the media did. My girlfriend’s disappearance is a complete enigma to everyone. Especially me and those closest to her are troubled deeply on her vanishing.

  If we’re to start an interview through letters than someone has to ask the first question. I guess it will be me. What is your true objective? I’m hoping that it’s to put the truth out there.

  You know it kills me knowing the reason why I got all this time. I really think the judicial system sucks. The fact of the matter is I’m innocent of having anything to do with her missing status.

  Whatever she’s doing, wherever she’s at, if she’s still alive, she really needs to let people know what’s up. You know if you come to see me your gonna have to spend at least two days with me. There’s gonna be a lot of confusing statements made and I’m gonna have to explain them.

  Did you know that the motel that her and her husband Tom owned caught on fire 10 days after she was reported missing? Of course I was prime suspect number one. That too they can’t charge me with because I have an alibi.

  It’s hard to write about it. So I’m gonna go. Till I hear from you again.

  Sincerely,

  William J. Cumber

  P.S. I’m sorry if my writing is hard to read. You’re not some kind of investigative reporter are you?

  And a day later:

  Mr. Wood,

  Also I’ve done a little research on you. I know you have a brother and sister that write also. Carol and Stuart. I couldn’t find any books by you though.

  Sincerely,

  William J. Cumber

  I couldn’t say why he finally decided to speak with me. The life of a prisoner is defined so completely by its unrelenting monotony that possibly, debating between boredom and me, he chose me. I had the sense, too, that as he’d once fixated on Sabine, thinking she could rescue him from his circumstances, he’d now turned this focus on his new correspondent. And I felt myself already being drawn into the unfamiliar logic of Cumber’s thoughts. Unable to resist the impulse, I had looked up Carol and Stuart. About the work of Stuart Woods—born 1938, author of seemingly a thousand novels, from Hot Mahogany to Mounting Fears—one could only say, as a reviewer for the Houston Chronicle had, “I try to put Woods’s books down and I can’t.” Carol Wood, working in the medical romance vein, was the author of The Honourable Doctor, The Patient Doctor, and The Irresistible Doctor, along with Back in Her Bed, the Rogue Vet series, and An Old-Fashioned Practice. She believed, according to the brief biography on her publisher’s website, in “the recuperative nature of love.”

  The prison was set back well into the woods, and the trees had been cleared in a circle around it to the distance of a rifle shot. The buildings were low and gray, their windows few and small, and around them ran two chain-link fences, one just a little taller than a man with upstretched arms and, two paces beyond it, another twice as tall. Every few hundred feet was a cement guard tower, and encircling everything—the tops and corners of the fences, the sides of the towers, the roofs of the buildings—were long, looping thickets of concertina wire. A single white van ran a circuit around the complex, paused before the gate for exactly forty-five seconds, and went around again.

  About a month after the fire at the motel, William Cumber decided to leave Florida. He also headed north, but outside Ocala the Florida Highway Patrol pulled him over for driving with expired tags, and having no license, he was summarily taken into custody. It was late, and nothing might have come of this if at some point during the booking process he hadn’t mentioned that he was being framed for murder in Manatee County. One jurisdiction called another. Leaving the county violated the terms of the parole agreement for his arson conviction, and he was quickly brought before a judge. These violations are commonplace—someone is unable to pay a fine or forgets to call his parole officer—and the punishment is usually a return to prison for a period of a month or two. But hoping to buy time for the ongoing homicide investigation, the attorney for the state pushed for the maximum penalty, and Cumber received it. He was ultimately ordered to serve out the full remainder of his sentence, thirteen and a half years.

  By then, his picture had been printed plenty of times in the paper: a strong jaw, broad shoulders, and thick brown hair. Parts of his criminal record had been printed, as well. I’d had the tentative impression that he was equally handsome and violent, and I was more than a little surprised to find a small, listless man waiting for me in the visitors’ room. His head had been shaved; his skin was gray and ashy. All the color had been wrung out of his eyes, and although his face was bloated, it was obvious that
beneath his blue uniform, there was little to him. He shuffled across the floor to meet me, shook my hand weakly, and we sat. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

  “I thought you’d be older,” he said, and when I shrugged in reply, he stood up. “You hungry?”

  Visiting hours ran eight to two. We sat with a pile of microwavable sandwiches and pastries between us, and for the first three of those hours, he spoke cautiously, looking up every so often between bites. He was in for an arson in Bradenton, he told me, not the one at the motel. The detectives had tricked him into confessing to that crime, he said, and now, he was careful about who he did and didn’t talk to.

  But over the course of that first morning, he gave me a rough chronology of his life. He’d been born in the coal town of Ashtabula, Ohio, well after the mines had been worked out. His father had been a mechanic, an immensely strong man, capable of picking up an engine block in his arms, and it was in this posture that he was photographed by an investigator from the insurance company and prosecuted for fraud. His mother had been a pleasant woman, whose affairs led to the end of the marriage. Cumber didn’t know what they were doing now. He’d heard they were still alive, but he had no wish to see them. His childhood lay scattered across the East Coast and included cameos by exasperated relations, well-meaning foster parents, and a German stepmother of singular cruelty. At fourteen, he was in foster care, and at fifteen, a juvenile detention facility. At eighteen, he married and had a son, and not long after this, convinced that his wife was cheating on him, he’d broken into someone else’s home. He wasn’t trying to steal anything, he said; it was just the only way he knew to keep from killing his wife. He wanted to be locked up, and the state of Ohio obliged him. From eighteen to twenty-six, the prime of his life, he’d been in prison.