Death at Gills Rock

by Patricia Skalka

  Tim lumbered up off the wall. At a nod from him, the others gathered the trash and tossed it into the basket ten feet away.

  As they dispersed, Cubiak corralled Roger. “I’m headed to the high school for the wrestling match. You want to come?”

  “Get your own fucking date. I’m through with that shit.”

  “You’re a real smart ass, you know.”

  Roger snickered. Then he spun on his heel and hustled after his friends.

  The gym was hot and bright and the tournament underway when Cubiak arrived. He stripped off his jacket and climbed to a spot five rows up behind the home team.

  The crowd cheered as young men stepped up to the mat in pairs and took turns flinging one another to the rubber. Cubiak didn’t understand the sport and amused himself surveying the audience: school friends mostly but quite a few parents and grandparents as well.

  At the break, he bought a donut and cup of coffee from the 4-H stand in the lobby. He was looking over the display cases filled with trophies for football, baseball, basketball, and wrestling when the reporter Justin St. James came up, scribbling in a notebook.

  “I didn’t know you were a sportswriter,” Cubiak said.

  “Just filling in. Actually that’s something I do a lot of at the paper. Comes with the territory. I even take some of the official photos.” He moved toward the wall where Roger Nils’s picture hung with those of other student athletes.

  “Who’s that?” Cubiak said, pointing to a photo of a distinguished-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair, a square jaw, and a thick neck.

  “Bill Vinter. The former coach. I did a piece on him a couple of years ago. He’s the guy who transformed Roger Nils from a pretty good athlete into a star. Made sure he got plenty of action when the scouts were around, too. From what I heard, he even tutored Roger to make him scholarship eligible. And what does that stupid kid do with that golden opportunity? Throws it all away.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  St. James shrugged. “Who knows? Drugs. Booze. Lot of beer flowing on college campuses. But it could have been anything. Maybe Roger couldn’t handle the transition from big fish, small pond to small fish, big pond. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over Roger. He’s not the first kid to flame out.”

  SUNDAY

  When the first alarm rang at 5 a.m., Cubiak groped for the clock in the nightstand drawer and silenced the noise. At 5:10, a second alarm buzzed from the top of the dresser. He ignored the racket for nearly five minutes before he rolled out of bed. Sunrise was still half an hour away but predawn light filtered along the edge of the window frame and cast dim shadows in the room. Somewhere in the woods behind the house a family of crows made ugly sounds, their way of heralding the coming day. In the kitchen, Butch barked, hungry as always.

  Cubiak tended to the dogs and rinsed his mouth at the sink. By the time he stepped outside, the sun had crested the horizon and started to burn off the mist over the water, revealing the cold, rippling surface of the lake. Cubiak slouched down the driveway. At the road he turned south and began running toward the coast guard station, pulled along by the melancholy dirge of the foghorn that warned boaters away from the rocky shoals at the entrance to the Sturgeon Bay canal. He saw no one and no signs of life at the neighboring houses tucked back among the trees. The crows had gone off to seek their morning meal, leaving him alone with the fog that the sun had yet to reach.

  The sheriff had not slept well and it took him several minutes to hit his stride. Even then, he felt lightheaded. Pausing at the end of a driveway, he locked eyes with a deer. For a moment, both man and beast held still. Then the deer flared its nostrils, flicked its white tail, and leapt into the woods.

  Cubiak started off again. Moving through a strip of tall weeds, he watched for loose gravel. No doubt he’d surprised the doe, but in Door County, deer were generally accustomed to people and unperturbed by their presence. He’d frightened the animal. The panic he saw in her eyes was the same kind of fear he’d sensed the previous evening in Timothy’s girlfriend and had seen in Roger Nils’s hard stare. The other punks were defiant, but the girl and Roger were scared. He was sure the girl was intimidated by Tim, but what about Roger? Something had turned that boy on his granddad and soured him on life. What was it? Cubiak wondered. He had his own theory about Big Guy’s gambling activities, and Loggerstone had hinted that Huntsman had been behind a carefully orchestrated blackmailing scheme. But those events had been kept under wraps for decades. Even if Roger had learned of them, would he care?

  Cubiak’s foot came down along the edge of a rock and he pitched forward onto his knees. Cursing his clumsiness, he stood and brushed off.

  The foghorn moaned as Cubiak limped home.

  While coffee brewed, he filled a plastic bag with ice and duct-taped it to his knee. Breakfast was toast with peanut butter consumed while sitting on the floor with the puppies as Butch watched from her station by the door. “Don’t be jealous,” Cubiak said, and held out his hand. The dog hesitated. “Come on.” Pacified, she trotted over and pushed her snout into his palm. Cubiak scratched behind her ears.

  It was late afternoon when he got to Bathard’s. The door to the boat barn was rolled back, and once again Bathard was on the scaffolding alongside the Parlando. A mallet in one hand and a black chisel-like tool in the other, he stared at the skylights and listened to Pavarotti.

  “Ah, here you are,” he said as the tenor’s voice faded. “You know that one, of course.”

  “‘Nessun Dorma.’”

  “Correct.” Bathard pressed a strip of white caulking cloth into a seam and tapped the head of the chisel to wedge the caulking in farther. “I’m ‘paying the cotton’ in case you’re wondering,” he said as he continued working the ropelike fabric into the narrow space between the planks. “Have to be careful not to hammer it in too hard. To seal the gap, it needs room to expand once it goes into the water.”

  “There must be an easier way to do this.”

  “There is. But I prefer the old-fashioned method.”

  After Bathard finished with the length of caulking, he mixed red lead powder into linseed putty. “You want it the consistency of modeling clay so you can roll it into thin strips. Like this”—he rubbed the glop between his palms—“like when you were a kid with a new can of Play-Doh. Then you press it into the seam over the caulking rope and smooth it out with a putty knife so it’s flush with the planks.” Again he demonstrated. “Here,” he said, handing the mixture to Cubiak, “you can start where I finished with the caulk.”

  The CD player had stopped, and slowly the sound of opera was replaced by a different kind of music as the tapping and scraping of the mallet and putty knife took on a rhythm of their own. Finally, the coroner laid down his hammer and motioned his assistant toward the open doorway. “Go on, you can use the air,” he said.

  Bathard followed with coffee for them both. Angling his tall frame against the door jamb, he sighed and closed his eyes to the warm sun. “About our discussion yesterday,” the coroner said after a while. “I contacted my friend and had quite the interesting chat.” He straightened and looked at Cubiak. “Your theory was correct, but only half so. Huntsman et al. were guilty of systematically luring prominent male citizens into compromising situations. But the indiscretions did not involve other men as you surmised, but women.”

  The sheriff nodded and tossed the dregs from his cup at the base of a fir tree.

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “Only because I heard essentially the same story from Bruno Loggerstone. Oldest trick in the book. Stag parties with scantily clad females. Not local women, certainly, but a friskier variety imported from Green Bay. And no photos, as you had suggested. The three of them were far more clever than that. It was very subtly done, something akin to a gentleman’s agreement to become business clients.”

  “So their income came from legitimate transactions.”

  “Precisely. Furthermore, there were never any complaint
s about the services provided.”

  The wind came up and Bathard lifted his collar. “When you think about it, they were damn clever to fall back on the old conceit of plying men with alcohol and women. They’d already concealed their sexual identities behind the façade of marriage. By creating and welcoming others into this kind of bawdy milieu, they projected a macho image that added another layer of obfuscation.”

  “That’s true. But why wasn’t the macho conceit by itself sufficient for their purpose? Why the indirect blackmail?”

  “They wanted money and saw an easy way to get it.”

  Cubiak glanced back toward the Parlando. “Or they needed it for some reason.”

  Inside the barn, Bathard’s phone vibrated on the counter, raising a small cloud of dust. He checked the screen. “Time for tea. Sonja and her granddaughters have been fussing in the kitchen all afternoon.”

  “I can’t…”

  “You must. You’re the guest of honor.”

  Bathard’s fiancée greeted them at the back door. Sonja was tall and willowy and, despite the striped apron snugged around her waist and the dusting of flour on her hands, there was something regal in her appearance. Cubiak had met her shortly after Bathard had started seeing her and was struck by the contrast between her and his friend’s late wife. Cornelia had been subdued and introspective, though how much of that stemmed naturally from her personality and how much had been dictated by the cancer that took her life he didn’t know. Sonja, on the other hand, was robust and outgoing. Through a stream of chatter, she kissed Bathard on the cheek, hugged Cubiak, and introduced her twin granddaughters, Madeline and Sofia.

  The girls immediately took charge of the sheriff and led him off to the dining room, talking about the cookies they’d made that afternoon. The twins were nine, coltish, blonde, and blue-eyed. Even though they looked nothing like Alexis, everything about them reminded Cubiak of his daughter. The girls gave him the water view and then, oblivious to his discomfort, they sat opposite and peppered him with questions about the puppies.

  “Can we come see them, please, Mr. Dave?” Sofia said, her freckled face eager, her hands clasped in supplication beneath her chin.

  “If your parents say it’s okay,” he said, terrified at the thought.

  “Isn’t a kipper a fish?” Madeleine said, or was it Sofia, after he’d told them the puppies’ names.

  “It is, but I… my…”

  Bathard entered with a soup tureen, sparing him from further explaining. The rest of the meal was already laid out on the sideboard: intricate open-faced sandwiches, a selection of fruit and cheese, and a platter heaped with homemade cookies.

  They served themselves. There was lemonade for the girls and white wine for the adults. Cubiak drank more than he meant to as he listened to the girls’ tales of school and scouts and surreptitiously watched the interaction between Bathard and Sonja. The tenderness between them was unsettling and resurrected the gnawing emptiness of his own existence.

  After Sonja took the girls home, he joined Bathard in the living room, drinking dry sherry and watching another spectacular Door County sunset. In the cozy setting, Cubiak’s despondency deepened. Wrapped in the warmth of Bathard’s revived life, he felt overwhelmingly lonely. Silent, he poured another drink, tossed it down, and refilled his glass a third time before sinking back into the sofa.

  “I wish I had your life,” he said, embarrassed by the bitterness in his voice. He’d never before been angry with Bathard but didn’t know how to stop himself. “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your wife dies, you marry another woman, just like that,” he said, with a clumsy snap of the fingers.

  “I think you’ve had too much to drink, Dave.”

  “I don’t think I’ve had enough.” Cubiak started to get up but fell back into the cushions. “Doesn’t matter.” The world beyond the window had gone a bluish-black, matching his bleak mood. “You know what I want to know?”

  “What?”

  “What the hell Cornelia would say about her replacement.”

  Bathard shrank back as if struck. When he finally spoke, he was defensive and curt. “No one can replace Cornelia. No one is trying to. Certainly not Sonja, just as I am not trying to replace her late husband.”

  Cubiak grunted. He wished he could take back what he’d said, but it was too late.

  “We’re two individuals who’ve been given a second chance at happiness. Some people don’t get even one.” The coroner rested his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him, his face in shadows softened. “Cornelia was ill for two years. The long duration of the disease was both a curse because of her suffering and a blessing because it gave us time to talk, difficult as it was. She liked to reminisce about the past, all the good times.” As if lost in memory, Bathard fell silent. “She talked about the future, too. My future. ‘Find someone, Evie,’ she said.”

  The doctor’s voice cracked with pain. Cubiak looked away, embarrassed to have stirred such painful memories.

  After a moment, Bathard went on. “I argued with her. I said I couldn’t imagine such an eventuality. And I meant it. Truth is, I still can’t imagine it even as it’s happening, but I know that Cornelia would understand and be pleased.”

  The coroner looked at Cubiak. “You must have had the same conversation with Lauren, only the other way around. You were a cop, for god’s sake. Every time you walked out the door, she didn’t know if you’d come back alive.”

  Cubiak steeled himself, knowing what was coming.

  “What did you tell her you wanted for her?”

  “You know damn well what I told her.” His anger melted as he spoke.

  Bathard rested a hand on Cubiak’s arm. “I do. I know, son. And I’m not going to tell you any of this is easy, because it’s not. And I’m not going to advise you on what to do, because you have to find your own way in life. And only you can decide what that means.”

  Bathard fixed a pot of strong coffee for Cubiak and then insisted he lie down in the study before venturing home. Cubiak hadn’t meant to fall sleep but he did. The house was dark and quiet when he woke and let himself out. Bathard’s message, imbued with both sorrow and hope, followed him across the peninsula. Intellectually Cubiak knew that his friend was right. But the heart often struggles to embrace what the mind knows is true.

  Cubiak came home to a hungry dog, ravenous puppies, and a floor that needed washing. He sat on the damp linoleum and leaned back against the wall. Scout and Nico shimmied into his lap and then clawed up his chest and licked his chin. Cubiak stared at the kitchen phone. His life had been altered forever but he still had a life. He would take things one step at a time, he decided. He would start by calling Natalie and asking her to attend Bathard and Sonja’s wedding with him.

  After only two rings, Cubiak faltered. His courage gone, he hung up. And only then did he realize that he hadn’t called Natalie. He’d dialed Cate’s old number.

  MONDAY

  Justin St. James was chatting up Lisa when the sheriff arrived at headquarters.

  “I brought that article I did on Bill Vinter, in case you’re still interested,” he said, pulling a manila envelope from a battered canvas briefcase. “The former wrestling coach?”

  “Oh, right. Thanks,” Cubiak said, recalling their conversation from the tournament on Saturday. “You got a minute, come on in.”

  Lisa followed the men with two coffees.

  “You know it’s my cousin she’s marrying,” St. James said as the assistant walked to the door. “Nothing against you but she’s being nice because she wants me to photograph the wedding.”

  Lisa glanced back and rolled her eyes.

  “You’re that good?”

  “The best.” St. James had to be about thirty-five, but his shoulder-length blond hair and the slim physique of a long-distance runner made him look younger. He grinned and spread the article on the sheriff ’s desk. “You weren�
��t here five years ago, were you?”

  “No, something happen?”

  “Fireworks like you wouldn’t believe. Door County High won the state wrestling championship for the fourth year running. I did this sidebar”—he put a finger on the article—“as background about the program. Actually the photo pretty well sums up the history of the whole program. Here’s Huntsman, Walter Nils, Vinter, and Roger Nils. That season Roger wrestled at one-fifty-two and was on the frosh squad.” The three men and the boy were relaxed and smiling. The coach stood between Walter and Roger with his arms around their shoulders. Big Guy was looking at the trio.

  “How come Big Guy and Walter are in the picture?”

  St. James swallowed a mouthful of coffee and coughed. “Sorry. Hot.” He took a quick breath. “Huntsman was pretty much the father of the program. Hell, he’d been funding it for years, started when Walter was a kid. There’s not a whole lot to do up here in the winter and he thought the boys needed something to keep busy when the snow started.” The reporter grinned. “Remember, we’re talking Ice Age here, way before the Internet. At first it was just an informal after-school activity. Eventually Big Guy convinced the district school board for Gills Rock and the other towns up there to take it on as an official school sport.

  “Vinter was the coach when it was started and the first hired by the school district. Naturally, Walter was on the first team. Eventually, Door County High started a squad and lured Vinter down here. Then Roger made the team and won the individual state championship.”

  “One big happy family,” Cubiak said.

  “Some folks are lucky that way.” St. James launched his cup into the trash. “Two points. I’ve got to run. Interviewing the mayor about the new street signs. Call me if you need anything.”

  “I will. By the way, good article today, about the funeral and everything.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s the kind of story that pretty well writes itself.” He stopped in the doorway. “There’ll be more about them later. I’m working on a special feature to run the weekend the new cutter is commissioned.”