Death at Gills Rock

by Patricia Skalka

  He was still new to the area when he’d met Cate Wagner, a Milwaukee photographer, and ended up driving her back to the house near the ferry landing where she was staying with her aunt Ruby. He’d been instantly attracted to Cate but had tried to resist her out of loyalty to his dead wife. Cubiak had neither seen nor talked to Cate in a year and a half, not since he’d solved his first case on the peninsula, one that had given her reason both to leave the county and to despise him for his role in the events of that fateful summer. Cate had inherited her aunt’s homestead as well as her grandfather’s neighboring estate, The Wood. More often than he’d like to acknowledge, Cubiak detoured past the two properties, looking for a sign that she’d returned.

  At the same time that he gave in to his yearning to reconnect with her, he dreaded the prospect. How could he make things right between them? Even worse, he’d been entrusted with the heart-wrenching secret about her past. “Are you going to tell her?” Bathard had asked once. “I don’t know,” Cubiak had replied. He still didn’t know.

  Distracted, the sheriff suddenly came upon a blue and white sign for Huntsman’s Plumbing. He braked hard and swerved onto a stretch of rippled blacktop that hugged the low-lying, rocky shore. A bevy of gulls rose from the boulders. The birds were fat and speckled in shades of dirt and coal. As they dive-bombed the jeep, they screeched their annoyance and shattered the heavy morning quiet. Old and new came together along the lane, and the farther from the main road, the more elaborate the houses and the larger the lots. This bit of grandeur was followed by a long stretch of wild forest, trees so thick and tall that the jeep’s headlights switched on. Without warning the forest opened to six small frame houses set in a jagged clearing and separated from each other by long, spindly driveways. Neatly aligned on narrow lots, the identical homes were painted a rainbow of pastel colors and looked like an experiment in community living. All but one were well maintained. The handyman’s special was second from the end, tucked behind a massive weeping willow that nearly overwhelmed the front yard. A mangy German shepherd was tethered to the tree, and as Cubiak rolled past, the barking dog lunged at the jeep. The dog continued howling as the forest closed in again, yielding the faint odor of skunk that trailed the sheriff around a soft curve to a second notch in the woods and a prefabricated white metal barn emblazoned with the logo for Huntsman’s Plumbing. A door marked Office and six blue vans in the small side lot carried the same emblem.

  Big Guy’s homestead was across the road, one of the last pieces of private, waterfront property this side of the county park. Cubiak steered between the two brick columns at the entrance. Twenty feet from the road, the driveway forked, with one narrow leg continuing on through the woods to the Rec Room cabin and the other wider branch bending back toward the yard and the house. The night he’d come to play cards, Cubiak had arrived in the dark and followed the cutoff to the cabin. This time he went the other way and coasted up to the two Door County ambulances from Sister Bay that were parked bumper to bumper in the drive. Cubiak pulled onto the grass alongside, leaving room for the third emergency vehicle, which had been dispatched from Sturgeon Bay.

  The sheriff glanced at the house. Big Guy had done very well, he thought. The house, easily the largest in the area, was a handsome two-story structure built of fieldstone and topped with a slate roof. Several acres of carefully trimmed grass and bushes spread out like a collar around it. A gazebo overlooked the water at one end of the yard; at the other, a freshly painted dock with a power boat rigged for deepwater fishing was tied to the pier and a slick thirty-six-foot cabin cruiser named the Ida Mae hung in a sling alongside.

  The opulence was dimmed by a gunmetal shroud of low-lying clouds, but Cubiak could imagine the splendor that a bright, sunny day would confer.

  He turned his back on the residence and took a few moments to prepare himself before he joined the small crowd that huddled at the rear of the yard.

  Against a backdrop of tall, bare bushes, Bathard and medical examiner Emma Pardy were conferring with Huntsman’s son, Walter. A dozen men formed an awkward semicircle behind them. Probably fishermen and farmers from the area, they had the kind of tanned, leathery faces formed by decades of outdoor work. In a smooth continuous wave, they glanced up at the approaching sheriff and then down again at the three bodies laid out on the damp grass.

  Shock and disbelief hung in the air.

  As Cubiak neared, Walter drifted back toward the onlookers. Pardy said something to Bathard, who listened thoughtfully, nodding and tapping the bowl of a cherry-stemmed pipe on the heel of his hand. When she finished she knelt by one of the victims, notebook in hand, and the former coroner approached Cubiak. Unlike the other men, who were in jeans and faded work clothes, Bathard wore dark tan gabardine slacks and a navy duffel coat. “There was nothing to do. They were gone when I arrived,” he said, slipping the pipe into his pocket.

  “You got here first?”

  “Yes. I was in Sister Bay, breakfasting with friends, when the ambulance went past. Old habits being what they are, I came to see if I could be of assistance. As it turned out, Emma was in Sturgeon Bay, at a soccer match, I believe. So at least one of us was able to get here quickly, not that it mattered in the end.”

  There was no rancor in Bathard’s accounting. The retired physician recognized Pardy’s competence and had supported her appointment to the post when the county shifted from the coroner to the medical examiner system.

  As Pardy rose, the men fell back, one of them grumbling under his breath about how long it had taken her to reach Gills Rock. Pardy offered no sign that she’d heard the comment but Cubiak gave the man a sharp look. He’d seen a similar dynamic at play in the police department with men who couldn’t handle the notion of a woman in a position of authority. Cubiak wondered if it had occurred to any of them that a male counterpart with school-age children would just as likely have been at the soccer games. That it had taken him, the sheriff, the same considerable amount of time to drive the length of the peninsula.

  “Dave.”

  “Emma.”

  Pardy’s firm grip matched her athletic look. She was tall and agile and, dressed in Lycra pants and jacket, looked more like a college student ready for a track meet than a mother of two with a degree in medicine. “So sad,” she said.

  Studying the three men, Cubiak considered both the sentiment and the truth of the comment. Huntsman, Swenson, and Wilkins. The victims were laid out in the same order as they had stood in the Herald ’s page 1 picture.

  “You’ve got photos of the bodies?”

  “Bathard had already taken care of that by the time I arrived.”

  “They were in there?” Cubiak pointed to the log cabin barely visible behind a wedge of tall cedars.

  “Yes.”

  “Who carried them out?”

  A short, bearded man cleared his throat and cautiously flipped his right hand toward his shoulder. “Clyde Smitz. I live just down the road a piece.” He nodded over his shoulder and then shoved his hand into his jacket pocket. “Ida called for help. She was upset, something about trouble at the Rec Room. When I got here, the men were all at the table. I was dragging Jasper to the door when my son Junior came.” Smitz motioned toward a younger version of himself on his left and Cubiak recognized the man who’d uttered the disparaging comment about Pardy. “He got Eric and then between the two of us we got Big Guy out, too. We thought maybe we could revive them. Had to try, ya know. Couldn’t just leave them in there. What if they were still alive?”

  “You carried them all the way over here?”

  “No.” Smitz straightened in alarm. “We started working on them right outside the cabin. When we realized they were dead, it didn’t seem right to leave ’em laying on the gravel, so we brought them here, to the grass.” He rubbed his foot on the lawn as if to demonstrate that it provided a softer, more suitable resting place.

  Cubiak nodded. “Of course.”

  Wilkins was nearest to him. The dead man’s red flannel
shirt hung free of his faded navy work pants, and the leather laces on his boots were untied. He was solid and broad shouldered, with a thick neck, thinning hair, rough hands, and a worn complexion. Cubiak squatted down for a closer look. Death was recent, judging by the skin tone. The same seemed true of the other two.

  The medical examiner waited for Cubiak to stand before she spoke. “Looks like carbon monoxide poisoning. They had an old space heater in there, going full blast. Someone, maybe Walter, shut it off. I’m not sure he had much chance to look further, or if he should.”

  “Who found them?”

  “Huntsman’s wife, Ida.” Bathard took up the story. “I left her in the house with the other spouses and a few of the neighbors. She seems quite stoic, though probably in shock. The other two were hysterical. I had to give them something to calm down. After that I talked to Rowe and called for the other two ambulances.”

  “Either of you have a chance to call Blackwell?” If no one had contacted the district attorney, he’d have to do it.

  Emma looked up. “I did. He asked for an assessment as soon as possible.”

  As they spoke, the third ambulance coasted into the driveway. The EMTs who’d been first on the scene looked to the sheriff.

  “Your call,” Cubiak said to Pardy.

  The sheriff left the two physicians to confer with the medics and went to offer his condolences to Walter. Despite the chill, the man’s face gleamed with sweat, whether from nerves or the need for a drink, Cubiak wasn’t sure. Three or four times during the past year he’d taken his car to Walter’s shop for servicing and more than once had seen him fumble around in an alcoholic fog.

  “Sorry about your father,” Cubiak said, extending his hand.

  Walter clung to the sheriff with the grip of a drowning man. He tried to speak but no words came from his open mouth.

  “It’s okay. We’ll talk later,” Cubiak said.

  He escorted Walter to the gazebo and eased him down on the bench. “Sit here. Rest a bit,” he said and then he waved over one of the EMTs and asked for a blanket.

  As Cubiak draped the blanket around Walter, the medics pulled a gurney from the closest ambulance, secured the wheels underneath, and jounced the stretcher across the lawn. The crowd hushed and fell away. The EMTs took Huntsman first: body bag, zipper, and then the struggle to lift his great weight onto the gurney. While they worked, the silence deepened until the keening wind was the only sound to accompany the dead man on the short ride to the ambulance.

  Cubiak stayed with Walter until the bodies had been removed. After the last ambulance pulled away, the sheriff retreated through the small crowd and walked down the narrow road to the cabin where the men had been found.

  The cabin had a fresh coat of dark brown stain and a new roof with skylights. Just as on his first visit, Cubiak was struck by the unusual construction—rather than logs laid one on the other horizontally, the trunks were split and lined up vertically, a technique that Huntsman had told him allowed for easy expansion.

  The door was open. Cubiak ducked beneath the varnished Rec Room sign over the entrance and crossed the threshold. On his first visit, the cabin had evoked happy memories of evenings spent with his former Chicago cop friends, drinking and watching football games through the haze of cigarette smoke in their paneled basements. This time around, the cabin felt cold and foreign, a room tainted by the chill of death.

  The interior was as he remembered and expected it to be: a masculine enclave steeped in the north woods musk of booze, cigars, and Old Spice and hung with symbols of the outdoors. The head of a nine-point buck hung on one wall; fish of various shapes and sizes and vintage traps were mounted on another. As he looked around, Cubiak imprinted mental images of the room: a pool table and a cue rack on the wall; a pine bar with red vinyl stools, signs for Pabst and Schlitz, and shelves of hard liquor; nearby, a squat black space heater. In one corner, a large TV faced the two sagging couches, and opposite the door an oversize picture window opened to trees and water. A bulky, deer-antler chandelier hung from one of the cedar beams that supported the peaked roof. And dominating the space was an octagonal, professional-style poker table.

  Cubiak pulled a digital camera from his pocket and slowly circled the room, further documenting the contents section by section. Strange, he thought, old friends gathered here regularly, yet the cabin seemed oddly impersonal. No photos, no magazines or books, no memorabilia, unless the stuffed creatures on the walls counted for something. No phone either.

  At the poker table, where Smitz said the men had been found, there was ample evidence of the panicked rescue attempt. The playing table was shoved against the picture window and two of the chairs were overturned. An ashtray and several red plastic bowls lay upside down on the floor, amid a sprinkling of cigar butts, ashes, pretzels, and peanuts. An empty Jack Daniels bottle lay by the wall under the window. Poker chips littered the table and floor.

  Drinks in the table’s built-in holders indicated where the men had been sitting. The playing area stank with whiskey; there was amber liquid in the glasses and damp splotches on the felt surface. A copy of the Herald lay nearby, its front page with the glorious headline stained as well. One of the men had laid out a full house but the rest of the deck was scattered. The cards were decorated with a picture of a leaping stag. Cubiak counted two aces, a couple of sixes and fours, a king and a jack, three eights, and three jokers. The sheriff wasn’t much of a poker player, but as far as he knew there were only two jokers to a deck and no versions of the game that involved jokers. He wondered if the three men made their own rules, if that was allowed.

  When he finished with the rest of the room, Cubiak turned to the space heater. The portable unit was about four feet high and three feet wide and stood between the poker table and the bar, acting as a utilitarian room divider. Cubiak figured it was put there to keep the men warm when they were immersed in either drinking or playing cards. The heater was a heavy-duty, propane-fueled model built to take on Wisconsin winters. He touched the black metal top and sides. The surface was cool. He ran a hand along the pipe that extended from the heater to the wall. It felt solid. He sniffed for fumes. There weren’t any, but with carbon monoxide, there wouldn’t be.

  At the table, Cubiak took the same seat he’d occupied the evening he’d played cards with the men. It’d been cold for days and the heater had been on. Bright orange flames had flickered behind the glass window, mesmerizing him and drawing his attention away from the game. If there’d been a malfunction that night? He grimaced.

  Where had the three men sat? Huntsman, the host, was most likely pouring drinks. The seat nearest the discarded bottle was also the one closest to the space heater. Had Huntsman breathed more of the deadly fumes and been the first to exhibit signs of distress or had his bulk made him less susceptible to the effects of the poison gas? Wouldn’t one of the men have complained of a headache or dizziness, a warning sign that should have caught their attention? Or did the three old friends just slip away, oblivious to the danger that stalked them? He hoped they hadn’t suffered.

  So sad, Cubiak thought, as he rose to his feet. Circling the room again, he closed the windows that had been thrown open to air the cabin. He found nothing out of the ordinary until he lowered the window by the door. One of the panes was smashed. Probably shattered in the confusion of trying to save the men. The hole was large enough for a raccoon to slip through and needed to be covered. Cubiak found an empty beer case and tore off a piece from the end.

  As he jammed the square of cardboard over the opening, he noticed that the shattered pane aligned with the brass lock on the door. He toed the door away from the wall. A typical lock would be equipped with an interior latch; this one had a key. Cubiak turned the key, and a two-inch, steel shaft shot out from the mechanism. It was a dead bolt, the kind he’d often seen in high-crime urban areas.

  No one lived in the cabin. As far as he could see, there was nothing valuable inside. Why a dead bolt?

  Cubiak
flipped the key to its original position, pushed the door closed, and reconsidered the proximity of the lock to the broken pane. Maybe the glass hadn’t been smashed accidentally. If the door was locked maybe the window had been broken in the scramble to get inside and help the men.

  Three men—old friends and war heroes about to be honored for valor exhibited more than a half century earlier—died playing cards in a private north woods hideaway. It made sense that the door would be closed against the cold night air but seemed odd that it had been bolted shut. Why had the men been sequestered behind a locked door? Cubiak wondered.

  SATURDAY MIDMORNING

  Cubiak followed the stone path across the yard to the back door of Huntsman’s house. A stern, stout woman in turquoise sweats answered his knock. Her red hair was short and spiked and she stood arms akimbo, blocking the entrance.

  “Yes,” she said, and though her face was flushed, she spoke with a coolness that matched the weather.

  Cubiak was puzzled. Then he realized she probably wouldn’t know him without his uniform. “Dave Cubiak. I’m the sheriff,” he said.

  “Oh.” Flustered and even more crimson, the woman stepped aside. “Esther Smitz. The neighbor. Clyde’s wife,” she said as she pressed into the wall of the mudroom to make way for him.

  A corduroy barn coat and two rain jackets hung from hooks under a shelf piled with gloves and hats. An orderly row of rubber boots, clogs, and slippers hugged the baseboard; a stack of old newspapers nestled in the corner. Esther pointed the sheriff through a second doorway into the kitchen, a cheerful room painted a soft yellow and furnished with pale oak cabinets and white appliances. Two windows, a large one behind the rough pine table and a smaller one over the sink, looked out toward the water. Coffee was perking on the stove and a hint of cinnamon scented the air. Cubiak wondered if something wasn’t in the oven. From deep in the house came the murmur of voices.