Dead Ringer

by Annelise Ryan

  Eventually I grab my cell phone and unplug it from the charge cord; then I slip off the last of the covers and tiptoe my way to the bathroom, hoping not to disturb my husband. He’s a homicide detective here in the Wisconsin town of Sorenson, where we live, and he works long hours a lot of the time. Plus, we are working parents of a teenager and a toddler, so sleep is a precious commodity for us both.

  In the bathroom, I brush my teeth, don a robe against the morning chill, and tame my blond locks as best I can, though a cowlick on one side refuses to stay down, sticking out near my right temple like a broken, wayward horn. I eventually give up on the hair and tiptoe back the way I came, through the walk-in closet, and across the bedroom to the hallway. Our dog, Hoover, is asleep on the floor in front of the fireplace—a fireplace whose warmth I could use right now, though at the moment it’s dark and empty—and the dog gets up and falls into step behind me. I shut the door as quietly as I can, and then Hoover and I pad down the hall toward the bedroom of my two-and-a-half-year-old son, Matthew. I’m surprised he isn’t awake because he’s proven himself to be an annoyingly early riser who is typically anything but quiet. But when I reach his room, I realize he has stayed true to form and is, indeed, awake; he just hasn’t bothered anyone yet. His silence doesn’t bode well, and sure enough I find him standing stark naked, busily becoming the next Vincent van Gogh by drawing on his bedroom wall with an assortment of crayons.

  “Matthew!” I say in an irritable tone that loses much of its effect because I don’t raise my voice. “Why are you drawing on the wall?”

  Matthew looks guilty, but not enough so that he stops the scribble he’s currently making, something that looks like a giant purple cookie. He doesn’t answer me. I shake my head, walk over to him, and take the crayon from his hand, dropping it in a box at his feet that contains an assortment of crayons in all colors and sizes. When I pick up the box and place it on top of his dresser, Matthew lets out a bloodcurdling scream loud enough that a passerby might think he was being physically tortured. Some dark corner of my mind briefly entertains the possibility, before I take a deep breath and slowly release it, coming to my senses.

  “I want crayons!” Matthew screams, pounding his fists on the wall.

  “Hush before you wake up your father!” I rummage through his dresser drawers and grab some clothing for the day, and then take Matthew by the hand and head for the bathroom down the hall. As soon as we reach the hallway, he pulls free of my grip, runs back into his room, and resumes his crayon mantra, growing louder and more infuriated with each rant. I’m about to pick him up and haul him bodily to the bathroom when my cell phone rings.

  “Damn it,” I mutter, taking the phone out of my robe pocket. I swipe the answer icon and back out into the hallway so I can hear above my son’s screeches. “Mattie Winston.”

  “Hey, Mattie, it’s Heidi.” Heidi is a day dispatcher at the local police station.

  “What’s up?” I plug a finger in my free ear to try to block out the sound of my son’s meltdown. I hear the bedroom door open down the hall and see our two cats, Tux and Rubbish, come flying out of the room as if the hounds of hell are on their heels. Behind them, Hurley, or “the hound of hell in our house,” shuffles and rubs his eyes. Hurley hates cats.

  “The ER has a death to report,” Heidi tells me.

  “Okay,” I say, stifling a yawn. “I’ll call them.” I disconnect and give Hurley an apologetic look. “Sorry about the noise.” I walk over and kiss him on his cheek. His morning stubble feels scratchy on my lips, and I note that he, too, has a cowlick on one side of his head. His, however, looks adorable. But then with that dark hair of his and those morning-glory blue eyes, how could he look anything but?

  Hurley looks in at Matthew, who has decided to halt his screams now that his father is here. For some reason, Matthew saves most of his meltdowns for me. “I have to call the hospital,” I tell Hurley. “And your son over there has decided he’s Michelangelo and his bedroom wall is the Sistine Chapel.”

  “I got it covered,” Hurley says, mid-yawn. He ventures into the room barefoot, clad only in his pajama pants, and I take a moment to admire his physique.

  “I pulled some clothes out for him,” I say, setting them on top of the dresser.

  Hurley scoops Matthew up in one arm, props him on his hip, and grabs the clothing with his free hand. The socks that are in the pile drop to the floor.

  “Damn it,” Matthew says, looking down at the socks.

  Hurley shoots Matthew a chastising look. “Hey, buddy, we don’t talk like that.”

  “Mammy does,” Matthew says, using his unique combination of “Mattie” and “Mommy,” fingering me with no hint of guile or guilt.

  Hurley looks over at me, eyebrows raised.

  I flash him a guilty but remorseful smile, and make a quick escape back to the bedroom, where I shut the door and dial the number for the hospital. A minute later, I’m on the phone with a nurse named Krista.

  “Sorry for the call,” she says, “but I have a young girl here in the ER who came in badly banged up. Shortly after arriving, she coded, and we weren’t able to bring her back. She was dropped off by this guy who was acting really weird. He disappeared sometime during the code and hasn’t come back.”

  I close my eyes and sigh. I had hoped the death would be something straightforward, like an older person with a history of heart disease who came in with a myocardial infarction and died. Something like that I could have cleared over the phone after a quick consult with my boss, Izzy, the medical examiner here in Sorenson. But this death sounds like it won’t be a simple one.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. In the meantime, don’t let anyone into the room. If the guy comes back, see if security can get him to stay.”

  “Got it.” She disconnects the call without any further niceties. All business, this dead stuff.

  I strip off my robe and pajamas, and don some slacks and a heavy sweater. The February weather has been harsh of late, and I can hear wind howling through the trees beyond the bedroom window. I head into the bathroom, wishing I had enough time to take a shower and wash my hair. Instead, I wet a comb and attempt once again to make my cowlick lie flat. It refuses until I saturate that section of hair thoroughly, plastering it down to my head with my palm. But a few seconds later, it begins a slow rise again, the Lazarus of cowlicks.

  I shrug it off, knowing I’ve gone out looking far worse. My job as a medico-legal death investigator often requires me to go out on calls in the middle of the night, and there have been times when my sleep-addled brain lacked the ability to accomplish basic tasks during those first few minutes of wakefulness. I’ve gone out on calls with my shirt inside out, wearing mismatched shoes, boasting Medusa hair, and displaying the remnants of makeup smeared beneath my eyes that I was too tired to remove the night before. I’m always fully awake and alert by the time I get into my car and head out, but by then the damage is done.

  I find my boys in the kitchen, Matthew standing next to his father, who is tending to something in the toaster. I have a good guess about what’s in there, since there is a box of toaster waffles on the counter next to him. The smell of freshly brewed coffee hits me, and I take a moment to relish the smell. Then I indulge in what has become a morning ritual for me of late—I look around me.

  Hurley and I have only been in this house for two months, and the newness of it is still a treat for me. We had it built after spending almost two years crammed into his small house in town. As a family of four—Emily, Hurley’s teenage daughter from a previous relationship, also lives with us—his house was crowded and uncomfortable. And for whatever reason, it never felt like my home. The entire time we lived there, I felt like a guest who had overstayed her welcome. Almost nothing in the house was mine, or even anything I’d had a say in picking out. I’m not sure why I felt this way, because when I left my first husband, a local surgeon, I abandoned, with nary a regret, all of the furnishings I had purchase
d and the décor I had chosen. I moved into the small mother-in-law cottage behind the house of our neighbor and my best friend, Izzy, and paid Izzy rent. The place was already furnished, so nothing there was mine, either. But I didn’t share it with anyone and it felt like mine, making it different somehow.

  After bumping around together with Hurley in his house for a year or so, we bought a five-acre parcel of land just outside the city limits and built a house on a bluff that overlooks the countryside. We were able to move in right before Christmas, and while we didn’t have much time to decorate—not to mention an inability to find all the right boxes—I still reveled in our first Christmas here and knew I’d remember it forever. I love our new home; it is a place uniquely ours, a perfect blend of our ideas, tastes, and needs. Despite the fact that it is a large house with an open floor plan, it feels warm, cozy, and comfortable. Part of that comes from the design and décor, but another part of it is the sense of safety and family that it provides for me. Our house is my sanctuary, the place I go to when I need to escape the sadness and the sometimes-hectic pace of my job.

  I step around Hurley so I can pour myself a cup of coffee to go. The hospital has coffee, but it’s rotgut stuff. I know this because I used to work there. I spent six years working in the emergency room and another seven in the OR. I loved working in the emergency room and had it not been for meeting David Winston, the surgeon who would eventually become my first husband, I probably would’ve stayed in the ER. But I made the change to the OR so that David and I could spend more time together. Unfortunately, David eventually decided to spend some very intimate time with one of my coworkers instead, and I caught the two of them one night in a darkened, empty OR. As shocking as this was—and it shocked my life into a state of major chaos for quite a while—the fallout from it led to both my current job and, via a rocky, roundabout trail, to my marriage to Hurley.

  There are times when I regret making the change from the ER to the OR, though I have to admit that the slicing and dicing I learned how to do in the OR was good preparation for the job Izzy offered me when I fled both my marriage and my hospital job. David’s dalliance was well timed in one respect, because Izzy’s prior assistant had just quit. And since Izzy was offering me his cottage to stay in, it benefited both of us for him to offer me a job as well. It’s hard to pay rent when you’re unemployed.

  I will be forever grateful to Izzy for taking a chance on me. I wasn’t trained in the intricacies of the investigative and forensic aspects of my new job, but I’m a quick study. It didn’t hurt that I’m also nosy, and fell into the investigative portion of things quite easily. Now, three years and a number of educational conferences and classes later, I have graduated from my original job as a diener—a term used to describe folks who assist with autopsies—to a full-fledged, medico-legal death investigator, trained in scene processing, evidence collection, and a host of investigative techniques.

  As I reach for the coffeepot to fill my cup, I notice something on the door of the cupboard below. It is yet another of Matthew’s artistic creations, this time in Magic Marker.

  “Matthew!” I say, pointing to the scribbled lines. “Did you do this?”

  Matthew looks at the cupboard door, then at me. Without so much as a blink, or a hint of hesitation, he says, “No.”

  “I think you did, Matthew,” I say. “Who else could have done it?”

  “Hoovah,” he says.

  “Really? Well, I guess I better punish Hoover then. What should I do to him?”

  Matthew’s eyes roll heavenward for a moment, and he sticks his tongue out, a sign that he is thinking. Then he looks over at Hoover, who is lying beneath the table in hopes of a dropped morsel. “Bad dog!” Matthew says, apparently willing to throw Hoover under the bus if it will get him out of trouble. He wags a finger in the dog’s direction and repeats his admonition. “Hoovah bad dog!”

  Hoover looks over at me and sighs, as if he knows the kid has just fingered him for a crime he didn’t commit. I look at my son, trying hard not to laugh. His antics and quick-on-his-feet lies amuse me, but I don’t want him to know it, lest it encourage more such behavior.

  The toaster pops, revealing four waffles, and Matthew’s attention is instantly diverted, his crime forgotten. The kid inherited his father’s dark hair and good looks, but his food fixation is all from me.

  “Awful,” he says, reaching up with one hand and doing a gimme gesture with his fingers.

  Hurley takes one of the waffles out, puts it on a plate, and says, “It’s hot. Go sit at the table and I’ll bring it to you when it’s cool enough to eat.”

  Matthew pouts, mutters, “Damn it,” and walks to the table with a scowl on his face.

  Hurley shoots me a look. I smile and shrug, and then I give him a kiss on the cheek. “Can I beg one of those from you?” Taking a cue from my son’s clever diversionary tactics, I don’t wait for an answer. I snatch a waffle from the toaster, plug it into my mouth, and then head for the coat closet.

  “Tell Richmond I’ll be in around nine if he picks up this, or any other case,” Hurley says to me.

  “I’m sure he’ll be involved with this one,” I say, donning my coat. “Sounds like it may be a case of domestic abuse.”

  I put on boots, gloves, and a hat, tearing off bites of the waffle as I go. It’s not much of a breakfast, but it will do for now. As soon as I’m fully armored against the elements, I walk over and grab my coffee cup from the counter, kiss my husband on his lips, kiss my son on top of his head, and head for the garage.

  I start up my car—an older-model, midnight-blue hearse with low mileage—and hit the garage door opener. Outside, the sky has a heavy, leaden look to it, a harbinger of what is to come. I flip on the radio and listen as the morning-show host tells everyone that a huge winter storm is headed our way, due to hit our area tomorrow afternoon. “This one is going to be a doozy,” he says with a classic Wisconsin accent. “Expect heavy winds, freezing rain followed by snow, with up to a foot or more of accumulation.” Then, after issuing this forecast of gloom and doom, he says in a chipper voice, “Get those snowmobiles tuned up, people. And make sure you stock up on brats and beer.”

  Despite his cheery tone, he’s promising this will be an impressive storm, even by Wisconsin standards. And that’s saying something.

  I hope it’s not an omen for the day ahead of me.