“Marilyn Ross?” Cubiak said and introduced himself.
She nodded.
“I’ve disturbed your nap, Mrs. Ross. I apologize.”
“It’s Marilyn, and I need disturbing.” She tugged her checkered housedress into place and then she stepped back and waved him into the dim, overly warm living room, directing him to the threadbare blue-plaid recliner in the corner by the picture window.
“Can’t sit in it myself. Too hard to get up. Afraid I’d be trapped forever.” Marilyn added a weak smile to a pretend laugh as she eased into a worn rocker. Besides a sagging sofa, a small corner table, and a console television, the room was unfurnished.
Just as suddenly, she frowned. “This ain’t about my Stevie, is it? He ain’t got in no trouble with that no-good cousin of his, has he?”
“No. Nothing like that,” Cubiak replied.
“Leeland’s two years older and always been a bad influence on my boy, though we did our best to keep the two apart.”
The sheriff looked around, trying to picture the young New York reporter as a boy in this isolated, pinched house. Where were the books and magazines he might have read as a kid? The music? Cubiak guessed that the house had two bedrooms, and he tried to envision the one that had been Steve’s, tried to imagine it crammed with the messy, noisy stuff of youth.
“I’m here to talk about Fred,” Cubiak said and offered his condolences.
“Fred!” The widow’s mouth quivered. “Why him, Sheriff? He never did a wrong thing in his life. Not like that lousy brother of his,” she said, twisting a handkerchief she’d picked up from the arm of the rocker.
“Tell me about your husband,” Cubiak said.
“Fred was a good man, Sheriff. He worked hard, always did his best for us. A good husband and father and a regular church-goer, too. But like so many, the poor man drank himself to death. Fred was a big man. Weighed over three hundred pounds, and he had everything wrong that a man that size could have wrong: diabetes, weak heart, gout. When you add the whiskey, well . . .”
Like my old man, Cubiak thought, only he’d been skin and bones. All the drink he’d poured down his throat had gone to produce liver toxins rather than fat.
“I am sorry,” Cubiak said.
Marilyn had gotten up and was shoving a picture at him: a younger Fred Ross, hefty and well on his way to being obese.
The sheriff was surprised. “He was such a skinny kid in the photo I saw,” he said.
“Skinny! Well, maybe way back when. That must have been a pretty old picture.”
Cubiak showed her a copy of the photo from Bathard. “That’s Fred and Jon in the back,” he explained.
“Oh my word. Look at that. May I?” Tears formed in her eyes as she reached for the picture. For a moment, she stared at the photo as if lost in thought and then, clutching the snapshot and the framed photo to her sagging bosom, she tottered back to the rocking chair.
“I never seen a picture of Fred so young. What a sweet boy. But that terrible place!”
“The Forest Home? I’ve only heard good things about it. Your husband lived there for a while, didn’t he, with his brother Jon?”
Marilyn gave him a scornful look. “‘Lived’ is a pretty generous term for what those boys endured. Nine worst years of his life.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. Fred didn’t talk about it much but I knew he hated it.”
“Did he ever say why?”
“Not really. I guessed it was maybe his pride. It’s not hard to understand how he’d resent having nothing when those other boys had so much. Family. Education. All the material comforts and advantages you could want. Probably more than someone like us could even imagine. For those boys, the lucky ones, the camp must have been a glorious place. For Fred and the other charity cases, it was a miserable sinkhole.” Marilyn smoothed her faded skirt. “Those are my words, Sheriff, not my husband’s.”
“Did Jon hate it, too?”
Marilyn snorted. “Jon hated everything, still does, so probably he did. Couple of times I overheard Fred trying to get him to talk about what things were like when they were kids, but Jon would just cut him off. ‘Forget that shit,’ he’d say. ‘What’s past is past.’ I think they both wanted to forget, and maybe Jon was able to. But Fred couldn’t.”
She looked up suddenly. “Tea, Sheriff?”
With a shy coyness, Mrs. Ross offered Cubiak her arm and allowed him to walk her into the kitchen. She carried the camp photo in her free hand and once there she laid it on the table. She let Cubiak fill the kettle and set it on the stove before insisting that he sit. Then she got up and measured out several pinches of loose leaves into a small ceramic pot and arranged a platter of butter cookies.
“Nobody comes by much anymore. I have to keep in practice or I’ll forget my manners,” she said.
Cubiak warmed to the lonely woman and regretted his earlier harsh assessment of the kind of childhood he’d envisioned for her son. “It must be nice to have Steve home.”
“It would be if he were ever here.” She sighed and set the platter on the table. “But you know how these young folks are. Always something to do.”
The cookies were bland but the tea surprisingly strong. Sitting across from him, Marilyn wrapped her gnarled hands around her mug and stared at the photo. “I almost married Jon, you know. Had both brothers courting me back then.” She pursed her mouth and then laughed, for real this time.
“And you chose Fred?”
“Yes, the quiet one. I figured I’d have a better life with him than with that bull-headed brother of his.”
Cubiak smiled, encouraging her to go on.
“And I guess that in many ways, I did. Oh, listen to me! I’m starting to sound like one of those women who complain about everything.” She batted her hands at the air. “Of course, I did. Like I said, Fred was a good man who did his best. Not that there weren’t problems—there are always problems. Life brings them and drops them at your doorstep whether you want them or not. Truth is, Sheriff, they were both damaged men. Both of them hard drinkers. The difference was that with Jon, the alcohol primed the pump. That man never had any trouble letting out his anger. For Fred, it was different. He kept his feelings locked inside, and all that the beer and whiskey did was give him something to try and drown himself in.” She looked at him straight and hard. “You tell me, which is worse?”
Cubiak shook his head. “I don’t know.” I’ve only known the one, he wanted to say, but he stopped himself. “I’m sorry. Life can be hard. But there are those who make it harder.”
Marilyn tapped the photo. “That’s Gerald Sneider, ain’t it, the one who owned the camp?”
Cubiak nodded.
“Fred didn’t like Sneider, but who could blame him. The man was praised to high heaven for all the good he did, but he really took advantage of those boys, the needy ones. To hear Fred tell it, things were pretty peachy when the rich summer boys were around needing to be fed and all, but come winter, the other boys were practically starved. They never had enough wood for the stove neither, and they had to work hard all the time. They did their own repairs. They even had to dig new latrines for the summer kids. That’s all what he said about the camp, and, truth be told, there were times I got tired of listening. Most of us had a hard life growing up. I was the youngest of ten kids. Believe me, there was never enough food on the table for any of us.”
She closed her eyes and was quiet a moment, as if reliving the hardships of her own youth. Then she blinked.
“But I always knew there was more. Fred had a nervous tic that would start up and not stop for the longest time. Sometimes he had bad dreams, too. The kind that rattle you awake and leave you lying there in cold sweats. He’d never admit it to me, but I always thought something bad was eating at him from the inside.”
“And you think it had to do with the Forest Home?”
She gave the question due consideration before she answered. �
��I don’t know for certain, but you live with someone for that many years and you get a pretty good notion how they got to be the way they are. There could be other things, of course, and I’m not saying there ain’t, but my gut tells me it went way back to when they were youngsters living at that place. Neither of those boys were ever angels, and probably half the kids there were hellions. I’m sure they got in a pack of trouble. Whatever happened, it troubled Fred to the end. Times I think whatever it was, it may have even helped kill him.”
“Did you ever ask Jon about it after your husband died?”
“Bah! That stubborn old goat hasn’t talked civil to me in years. He’s never forgiven me for marrying his brother instead of him.”
Marilyn pulled the picture closer. “Can I keep this?” she asked.
“Of course.” He waited a moment. “You’ve heard that Sneider’s gone missing.”
She gasped and looked up.
“The story’s been on the news all week.”
“I don’t listen to the news. It’s too depressing,” she said.
“Steve hasn’t said anything to you?”
“No, why would he?” There was fear in her voice.
“I don’t know, something to talk about,” he said.
“I told you. I hardly see my son. He keeps himself busy doing whatever.”
When Cubiak left, Marilyn Ross was sitting at the table with her tea and her memories, wondering if she’d told him more than she should have.
Jon Ross lived just two miles from his late brother’s place. His small, unworked farm sat on a parallel road that might as well have been in a separate universe. Instead of stately pines, he was surrounded by soggy marshland. Instead of a tidy ranch house, he lived in a ramshackle shotgun house from which time and weather had stripped all color. Instead of a faithful wife, he had only the memory of a skittish woman in his bed. His partner was long gone, run off at some distant time past, either lured by a sweeter man or desperate to escape her good-for-nothing common-law husband.
Cubiak had heard the stories whispered late at night with a sneer or shake of the head over the last call for whiskey or beer at one or other of the local bars, and he knew the sad rundown homestead all too well. More than once he’d been called out to break up fights between Jon and his son or one of his unsavory running buddies. There’d been other visits as well and none of them pleasant.
Leeland’s blue pickup was in the yard. Next to it was a red car with New York plates. A large, mangy dog barked and pulled at the chain that kept it tied to a tree. The air reeked, probably from creek water that had overrun the banks and then pooled in a low gully. Voices and banging erupted from the machine shed, and he saw a flicker of bright light. Two men were working and arguing.
The sheriff mounted the sagging steps and knocked on the door. A moment passed and the door swung open just far enough for Jon Ross to slip out. He slammed the door shut before the sheriff could see inside.
Ross yelled at the dog to shut up. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the sheriff. He was a big man, like his brother, with a scowl etched deep into his wide, round face. “Yeah?” he said.
“That your nephew’s car?” Cubiak indicated the vehicle with the out-of-state plates.
“Maybe.”
“He here?”
“What if he is? Ain’t against the law.”
“No. Just asking. I guess besides helping Leeland in the shed, he’s keeping you apprised about things down at the department. Maybe even letting you read what he’s got to say about it.”
Ross said nothing.
“I was in the area and wanted to stop by and tell you that I am truly sorry about your brother,” Cubiak said.
Ross started to dip his head in acknowledgment but caught himself and snickered instead. “My brother passed some weeks ago. You’re a bit late extending your regards.”
“I am, and I apologize for that,” Cubiak replied. He waited. “You going to ask me in?”
“You know I’m not.” The man stepped forward, forcing the sheriff onto the top step.
“Then we’ll talk out here.” Cubiak looked past Ross at the peeling orange paint on the front of the neglected house. Finally he pulled the old camp photo from his inside pocket and held it up, positioning it just far enough away that Ross had to tip forward for a good view.
“Which one are you?” Cubiak asked, pointing to the twin boys.
Ross jerked back as if slapped. His mouth tightened. “Don’t matter, does it.”
“Probably not. But that’s you and Fred in the photo, isn’t it?” Cubiak said as he tucked the picture into his pocket. “You and your brother lived at the Forest Home for nine years. In fact, you were pretty much raised there. From what I’ve heard, it doesn’t sound like a pleasant experience for the charity boys. The summer kids were pampered, but the rest of you were treated like indentured servants, I’m told.”
“We got by.”
“But not an easy life.”
“Like I said, we got by.”
“Never enough to eat. Cold in the winter. Even had to . . .”
Ross interrupted. “I ain’t got time to go rehashing the past.”
“What’s done is done.”
“Something like that.”
“You have much to do with Gerald Sneider?”
Ross turned but not before Cubiak saw the twitch in his eye.
“You know he’s missing,” the sheriff went on.
“Asshole could fall off the earth for all I care,” Ross said and spat over the rail.
“You don’t like him.”
With a smirk, the surviving brother swiped his sleeve across his mouth. “Don’t like people like him.”
“Because he’s rich?”
“Because he’s a mean son of a bitch. Deserves whatever comes to him.”
Like you on both counts, Cubiak thought. He let the comment hang in the air for a moment before he continued. “Your sister-in-law says Fred was obsessed by memories of the camp.”
A smear of pink spread beneath the gristle on Ross’s jowls. “My sister-in-law doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.”
“She thinks that something that happened there worked on him enough that eventually it helped kill him.”
Ross sneered. “Now there’s a silly woman who should keep her foolish notions to herself. Did she tell you she reads tea leaves, too, and that she believes in the nonsense she sees there? She’s just mad that Fred died and I’m still here. My brother and I were twins, but I got all the good stuff, not him. He’s the one who grew up fat and sick and died before his time.”
The so-called lucky twin groped for the doorknob. “That it, Sheriff? I got things to do,” Jon said as he yanked the door open and vanished back into the dim interior.
Cubiak’s refrigerator door held a menagerie of animal magnets—deer, fox, raccoon, squirrel, skunk, and beaver. The magnets stood about two inches high and were arranged in a row near the top of the door. They’d been in place when he moved in, and over time he’d pretty much forgotten them.
Driving back from Jon Ross’s farm, the sheriff found himself thinking about the magnets. After he let the dog out, he pulled the fox magnet off the refrigerator and used it to pin Sneider’s camp snapshot to the door. He wrote the names of the four Ross men on slips of paper and, using the other magnets, arranged them in a circle around the photo: the skunk for Jon, the squirrel for Leeland, the deer for Fred, and the beaver for Steve. On a scrap of paper he scribbled rope and put it off to one side with the raccoon. He wrote bones on another and taped it underneath the rest.
Then he opened a beer and stepped back to consider the makeshift incident board. Cubiak didn’t have much to go on: one tenuous clue, ancient remains that had no apparent connection to anything, the picture of a missing man, the name of a dead man, and three potential suspects.
What now? he wondered.
When Cubiak got back, he’d hoped to find Cate at home. Instead he found a boo
k on the back porch with a note from Bathard that read, “Came across this in the library’s local history room. Thought you’d be interested.”
After he finished with the refrigerator magnets, Cubiak picked up the book. It was a history of America’s golden age of summer camps.
The phenomenon began in the 1920s, when camps sprang up all across the country, a direct result of the prosperity that swept the nation following World War I. The camps for boys were heralded as an antidote to the affluence and the “overcivilization” that were turning young American men into weaklings, while those for girls were meant to prepare young women for the many new opportunities they would find in the postwar world.
Many of the facilities went bankrupt with the crash of 1929, but as the nation slowly recovered from the economic upheaval, the camp movement was revitalized and went strong until World War II. In the fifties, there was another resurgence that lasted nearly a decade. Sneider’s Forest Home opened during that period. The book gave it two full pages. There were photos of boys shooting arrows into targets at the camp archery range and hiking through the camp’s thick woods. Ebullient letters home told parents about thrilling moonlight swims, boat races, and javelin-throwing contests. “We’re learning to be brave,” a young summer camper exclaimed. The author devoted several laudatory paragraphs to Sneider’s charity work but dismissed the needy boys with a few condescending sentences. The sheriff read the single throw-away paragraph a second time and tossed the book aside.
Cubiak had first visited Door County as a charity-case Boy Scout, a distinction, he realized, that gave him something in common with Jon Ross. Had Ross learned to be brave at Sneider’s camp, or was that where he learned to be mean?
It was eleven when Cubiak phoned Rowe. “Sorry for the late call, but I want to go ahead with the dive. How soon can you be ready?”
“Tomorrow, if conditions improve. The lake was pretty rough today. But Friday for sure.”
Despite the three beers the sheriff had nursed through the evening, he had difficulty falling asleep, and once he did he dreamt of Cate. She was one of the privileged girls at an exclusive Door County camp for young ladies where he worked in the kitchen. While Cate and the other girls dined in a spacious room lit by chandeliers, he sat on a stool in a gloomy narrow room surrounded by a high concrete wall and peeled buckets of potatoes. Only a dream but not that far removed from their realities.
Death in Cold Water Page 12
