Death in Cold Water by Patricia Skalka

space for herself at the tiny table.
    â€œWell, since we don’t know that anything’s actually happened to him, no, not at all. But you sound disappointed. Why would you think you were?”
    Babbs laughed. “No reason, just something to talk about,” she replied and took another pull at her drink. “Rich man goes missing, there must be all kinds of theories.”
    â€œBesides being rich, what kind of man is Mister Sneider?”
    Babbs hesitated. “Between you and me, after all, this is my boss we’re talking about, an odd duck I’d have to say. On the one hand a loner and on the other a man who likes a little noise in the house and wants people about. That’s why me and Eva—you know about Eva Carlson the cook?”—she waited until Cubiak nodded—“that’s what we’re there for. That’s my theory, anyway. Eva cooks for a man who only eats mush, and I clean house for a man whose house never gets dirty because there’s never anybody in it. Day after day, Gerald sits in that football room from morning until night, reliving the past. And there I am running around with the vacuum five days a week, and then sitting in the kitchen an hour or two a day talking with Eva. Making noise, like I said.”
    â€œHis son visits.”
    Babbs made a disparaging sound. “If you want to call it that. You ask me, Andrew’s just there for the money, but then who can blame him. It seems there’s plenty of it, and no love lost between the two of them.”
    â€œThey argue?”
    â€œNot so much argue as not talk. Huge silences when the two of them are together.” She drew her calloused hands apart, illustrating the enormous distance between father and son.
    â€œYou clean the bedrooms, too?”
    Babbs’s face clouded. “I do them twice a week, hate it up there. Just goes to show what you can do with money.” The housekeeper glanced around her stingy quarters.
    She’s imagining what she could do with a little of Sneider’s fortune, Cubiak thought.
    â€œWhat about the locked room?”
    Babbs raised both eyebrows. “Ah, the mysterious locked room. You know, in fifteen years, I’ve never so much as had a peek inside,” she said.
    Something in the way she spoke told Cubiak that she was telling the truth. No visitors other than Andrew, no known enemies or disputes with neighbors, occasional phone calls from business associates. The housekeeper confirmed what little information Cubiak had gleaned from the cook. Either both were telling the truth or both were involved in what to this point appeared to be a very amateurish attempt at kidnapping and had synchronized their stories.
    â€œYou’re from around here?” Cubiak asked as he took his leave.
    â€œNot originally. I was born and raised in Manitowoc. Came here for the job at Gerald Sneider’s place.”
    W as it a coincidence that no one on Gerald Sneider’s staff was from the area? His secretary had lived in Nashville before relocating to Green Bay thirty years ago. Both the cook and the housekeeper had been on the peninsula for less than two decades, a blink of an eye compared to the generations by which many long-term residents measured their heritage, as Cubiak knew all too well. The sheriff had lived in Door County for four years but was still pegged as an interloper by the genuine old guard.
    Cubiak doubted that Eva and Babbs were more qualified than most local women to do the work on the estate. So what did it matter that they had come from elsewhere to work on the estate? By the time they moved to Door County, Sneider was already an old man with few needs. By then, his wife had died, his son had grown and moved away, and he’d started to embrace a more solitary existence.
    It was Sneider’s early years that were writ large on the peninsula and that had become the stuff of both fact and rumor. If he hired Eva and Babbs because