Death Stalks Door County (17 page)

“In the middle of the night?” Johnson was incredulous. “Who for? Why?” he demanded.

“Beck. Because of all the people dying in the park. He was supposed to tell you.”

“Well, he didn't. I thought you were through being a cop.”

“This is different.”

“It's always different for him,” Johnson said with marked bitterness. The park superintendent went quiet, and when he spoke again Cubiak heard the note of resignation in his voice. “I'm supposed to believe you? Trust you?”

“Not me. Bathard.”

Johnson snorted and jerked the door open. Instead of the stark hermit's retreat Cubiak had expected, the ranger entered a jumbled room that combined elements of a library and a research lab. Bookshelves filled with science journals and reference books covered two walls while metal file cabinets, stacked four high, lined a third. Most of the interior was taken up by four large tables shoved together to form a massive work island that was littered with microscopes, unopened boxes of slides, and racks of test tubes, most of them empty. A large steel box, lid up, occupied the center spot. Harsh but exceedingly bright lights hung from the ceiling. The only decorative element was a carefully mounted display of
National Geographic
photos near the entrance. Cubiak recognized a few of the animal subjects, but he ventured a guess they all represented endangered species.

“Please,” Cubiak said. “You're going to have to start at the beginning. I don't know anything about what you're doing here.”

A truce had been struck.

“You know how I feel about the desecration of nature and the park?” Johnson said.

Cubiak nodded.

The superintendent gestured around the room. “That's what this is all about.”

Moving from one workstation to another, the old ranger explained the process by which he collected animal blood and tissue and plant sap and seeds from Peninsula State Park. Each specimen was catalogued, then dehydrated and processed in order to preserve the DNA for study, and possible regeneration, in the future.

“Why?” Cubiak said.

“To protect as many species as possible from dying out. Isn't that obvious?”

“And if it doesn't work?”

“It will. It has to.”

“You've been professionally trained to do this?”

“Some. Mostly self-taught. I read a lot.”

Cubiak fished. Who helped him? Bathard?

Johnson said he worked alone.

“I want to see a specimen.”

“I can't show you the actual specimens. Once they're completed, they are stored in vacuum pacs. But I've got these.” From a file drawer Johnson pulled out a thick stack of plastic sheets, each containing a series of photos that documented the specimen preparation process. Each was imprinted with the date and time it was taken. Cubiak sorted through the pile. The dates went back to the previous summer. According to the recent dates—unless the imprints lied—Johnson had been here working when the first incident occurred and the most recent killings took place. If he hadn't shoved Wisby off Falcon Tower and shot the arrow at the lighthouse or strung the wire at Ricochet Hill, there was little reason to link him with the other killings.

“The camera's here?”

Johnson unlocked a tall metal cabinet, pulled a camera from a shelf, and set it on the worktable. The camera reminded Cubiak of his mother's old Brownie, but it was nearly twice the size.

“Bathard special-ordered it from a scientific supply company in The Hague. I got the instruction booklet. You want to see that, too?” the park superintendent said.

Cubiak leafed through the well-worn pamphlet. The first section was in English. He read several pages. Date and time monitors were preset at the factory, at the time of shipping.

“Who besides you and Bathard are in on this?”

Johnson pulled at his chin. “Ruby,” he said after a moment.

“But she voted against you at the meeting.”

Johnson flushed. “Yes, and I don't understand why. Maybe she felt this was enough. Anyway, I haven't talked with her since. You got to understand that Ruby's sometimes got her own ideas.”

“What's back there?” Cubiak pointed to two doors along the rear wall.

Johnson opened the first, revealing a neatly organized supply closet. At the second, he hesitated. “It's where I sleep,” he said.

“Sorry,” Cubiak said and waited.

The bedroom was little more than a cubicle, a monk's cell absent a crucifix above the bed. A muslin curtain covered the one small window. The narrow cot was neatly made, with a rough wool blanket tucked precisely under a thin mattress. A jacket and fresh shirt hung from hooks on the wall. The only decorative item was a small photo of a woman on the simple, pine bed table.
Claire
. Loyal still. Haunted still.

Cubiak shut the door and retreated back into the main room, where Johnson waited. The park superintendent's face was unreadable. “Want to see the sheds?”

The smaller barn housed injured reptiles, garden snakes mostly, that Johnson had scooped up from the paths and roadways of Door County. The larger building was filled with an assortment of mammals in various stages of recovery from accident and injury. Johnson indicated a fat raccoon that he'd found choking on a marshmallow at the Turtle Bay Campground. It would be returned to the park later that night.

“How'd Beck rope you into this?” Johnson asked as the two retraced their way across the yard. Cubiak gave him the version that didn't include Malcolm or the lost girl. The superintendent listened without comment. “Beck's a snake. Be careful,” he said finally.

“I have to see this through.”

“Of course.”

In deepening fog, the two men shook hands.

S
o, Claire died and Johnson's life became anchored in that one tragic moment. Not too unlike his own situation, Cubiak realized, as he tramped through the dark woods to the jeep. The therapist had said people could never change what had happened, but they could learn to live with it and go on from there. We must learn to forgive ourselves our worst sins, he'd said. Those who do have a stab at happiness.

Cubiak's redemption grew out of a chance encounter with a little lost girl. Had there been prior opportunities, which he'd missed? How many prompts did Otto ignore, until there were no more and he withdrew from society and began pouring countless hours and money into a venture of questionable worth? As far as Cubiak could discern, the only good to come of the superintendent's obsession was that it proved him innocent of the murders in Peninsula Park.

A
t Jensen Station, Cubiak found a thermos of hot tea and a plate of cookies on his night stand. Dear Ruta. He slept fitfully and was easily roused by a crash of thunder after midnight. As the storm rolled past, he lay still and listened to the wind-driven rain lash the windows. Despite the deep quiet that followed, he was unable to fall back asleep. Restless, he roamed the empty hallways but the dark house yielded little comfort. He took a beer from the back of the refrigerator and retreated to the familiar worn chair in his office. The yard light had been left burning, and the glow through the window filled the room with soft shadows. When Cubiak finished the beer he opened the middle drawer and pulled out a small, hinged frame. He opened the sides into a V, steadied the frame on the desk, and looked into the smiling faces of his wife and daughter.

The pictures had been taken in the fall, on the deck behind their house. In one, Lauren was seated in a black metal chair. She wore a brown turtleneck, a match for her chocolate hair. She had a gentle face, and the camera caught her in the middle of a careless laugh. If he worked at it, Cubiak could catch a hint of the jasmine perfume on her wrist. Alexis was a pumpkin in her photo, itching for Halloween in the costume her mother had sewn. She stood on tiptoe, brandishing a taffy apple at the camera, one tiny bite missing and her jaws clamped shut around the morsel.

Cubiak was slumped in his chair when the housekeeper found him. Ruta had been awakened earlier as well, disturbed either by the storm or her own night demons, or perhaps by both. Ramrod straight, long gray hair brushed back from her face, she looked over his shoulder at the photos.

“My wife and daughter,” he said, and told her the story.

When he finished, the housekeeper reached into the pocket of her threadbare robe and extracted artifacts from her own past that she laid on the desk. They were sepia prints, dimmed with time and worn on the corners and edges. Photos of people from an era when picture taking was a solemn occasion. The first, her parents, killed during the war, she explained. Next, two boys, golden haired even in the stark black-and-white reality of the image. Her sons. Dead from fever. Last, her brother. He was mustachioed and young. His bearing, regal like hers, overshadowed his too-large and poorly tailored suit. “Borrowed clothes,” Ruta said ruefully. She was quiet a long time. “Secretly, he gave bread to a starving man. One piece only. The Russians said the man was agitator, no-good. So they arrest Simas and send him to a camp.”

“Who told them about the bread?”

Ruta stared at the wall as if history was encoded in the plaster. Her husband had collaborated to get medicine for their sick children, she said, her voice tight. He made the authorities agree Simas would be jailed for only a few days. As a formality, they said. Just to teach him a lesson, they promised. When the soldiers came for her brother, they brought the drug. Such a small bottle, she remembered thinking as they tossed it to her. She forced herself to watch them beat her brother and drag him away. The soldiers were laughing when they left. The medicine, too little, and what was there turned out to be mostly water. Her children died in her arms. Simas died in the camp.

“Your husband, what happened to him?”

Ruta put a hand to her throat. “Gone, too,” she said in a whisper.

T
he rangers were at breakfast when the phone rang. Ruta took the call.

“For you,” she said, handing the receiver to Cubiak.

It was Bathard.

Cubiak moved as far from the table as the cord allowed. “You were right. I was wrong,” he said, conscious of Johnson behind him stirring sugar into his coffee.

The coroner chuckled. “You were just doing your job. That actually wasn't the reason I called.” He coughed quietly. “Rather late notice, my apologies,” he said and went on to invite Cubiak for dinner that evening. It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, he explained, the last chance for a few quiet hours before all hell broke loose the next day. “It's not at our house,” he added; he and his wife had stopped entertaining some time back. “We're getting together at Ruby's.”

“No, thanks.” Cubiak's response was immediate and automatic. The autumn after Lauren and Alexis were killed, he'd suffered through too many painful evenings arranged by well-meaning friends intent on cheering him up. Despite everyone's best efforts, he could do nothing more than sit mute in their midst, heedless of their senseless chatter, offended that anyone thought it possible for him to care about anything other than the fact that while their families thrived, his had been destroyed.

Bathard talked past the refusal. “Cornelia's the guest of honor. She specifically asked that you be included.” The unspoken message was clear.

Cubiak reached for his coffee but Ruta was holding the cup, topping it off for him, her manner crisp and efficient, with no trace of self-pity. As she passed it back, he remembered how he'd rebuffed that simple gesture from Lauren the morning she'd died. Nodding his thanks, he took the mug. What had Ruta said the night before? “We go on because life goes on. We go on because we must.”

Cubiak cleared his throat. “What time?” he said into the phone.

“Six. Around here, that's considered fashionably late.”

C
ubiak returned a handful of calls and e-mails and then went back to the problem of Entwhistle. Remembering Bathard's suggestion, he phoned Thorenson but the reverend claimed not to have seen the old man. Evangeline Davis had been close to Ben Macklin and might know something about his friend. He called the diner three times but there was no answer so he finally drove down to Fish Creek. The restaurant was full. Serving up slices of cherry pie, Evangeline shrugged and said she'd never liked Entwhistle and had never paid him any mind.

Over a pint at Pechta's, Cubiak questioned Amelia. Although Entwhistle had been a regular for years, she, too, knew little about him. He wasn't verbose like so many of her patrons. The more he drank the more withdrawn he became. When he needed to, he'd sleep off a bender on the cot in the back room, as he did the day the
Betsy Ross
blew up. He hadn't been around since. Amelia seemed bothered by the fact she couldn't provide any useful information.

“He's not from around here, you know,” she said as Cubiak was leaving.

“What do you mean?”