Dead Deceiver

by Victoria Houston

CHAPTER 6

  Osborne punched in his neighbor’s phone number. “Yeah?” said a drowsy voice followed by a thud.

  Osborne waited for the phone to be rescued then said, “Ray? It’s Doc.”

  “Jeez, what time is it?”

  Osborne spoke fast and did not wait for a response. “So I’ll be over to pick you in about five minutes, okay?”

  “Um, hold on a minute,” said Ray. Osborne could hear bedcovers rustling in the background. “Any idea how long this might take? I’m s’posed to audition for that reality show at nine in the morning. Hate to miss that.”

  “Then I won’t pick you up. Meet me at the Merriman Trail trailhead with your lights and camera. That way you can shoot what Lew needs and head straight home. She wouldn’t ask you if—”

  “I know,” said Ray in a resigned tone. “I can use the dough anyway. See ya out there.”

  Osborne backed out of the garage and turned onto the town road. Pellets of snow flew straight into his windshield, stark white against an opaque blackness. To avoid vertigo, he forced his eyes to focus far ahead. His headlights, dimmed by spray from salt on the roads, did a poor job of illuminating the white streaked ribbon that passed for a road. Snow hiding the white lines that marked the shoulder forced him to slow down. This was no night to get stuck in a snow bank.

  As he drove, he mused—as he always did when the Loon Lake Police Chief deputized him to fill in for their reliably errant coroner—on the unpredictability of life. Here he was driving to see a dead body in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night in the middle of a snowstorm—and happy about it! Happy about lots of things.

  A second career as a forensic odontologist? Learning to fly fish at his age—this old musky guy? Getting to spend time with a woman who loves the lakes and the rivers and the streams as much as he does? Who would have thought?

  After all, just three years ago it was the worst of times.

  Career-wise life had hit an all-time low. At his late wife’s insistence he had sold his practice and retired from a profession he loved.

  It was Mary Lee who had added it all up: their investment accounts, the escalating (exponentially) value of their lake home, the money he could make from the sale of his practice (exponential again) and the fact that both daughters were grown and self-supporting. As had happened more than once during their married life, Mary Lee had made a unilateral decision: “Paul, we are well off and it is high time we,” (she really meant I), “enjoy the lifestyle I assumed we would have when I married you.”

  The next thing he knew she was planning trips to Europe, lobbying for a more luxurious house, scheduling dinner parties to entertain her friends and their husbands—and checking the stock market every few hours. Her fixation on their income got so out of hand that their financial advisor fired her. Or, as she said to her friends, “resigned due to his inability to engage with his clients.”

  Well aware that he was risking her ire (though he knew it would be difficult for her to fire him), Osborne had dragged his feet. Rather than read brochures on barge trips through French wine country or go along with their real estate broker to look at lake homes on the pricier Manitowish chain, he would escape in his fishing boat—leaving before breakfast and returning as late in the day as he could.

  One evening when he was lingering in his favorite musky hole up on Third Lake—an attempt to hide out from yet another dinner party—he ran out of gas. His trusty Mercury 9.9 outboard just sputtered and died leaving Osborne marooned so far up the chain that it would take hours to row back.

  Feeling more than a little frantic, he had waved at a passing fisherman who slowed, assessed the situation and was kind enough to offer him a tow. “Yep, I know your boat—you’re Doc Osborne, aren’t you? We’re neighbors now, did ya know? Nice to meet ya, Doc.” It was as formal an introduction as he would ever get to the man who was not only his new next-door neighbor but a man to whom Mary Lee had taken an instant dislike.

  “I abhor that man,” she would say every time she caught sight of Ray’s battered blue pick-up. Osborne would turn away so she couldn’t see the half smile on his face. He still offered prayers of gratitude to all the angels, the saints and the Holy Trinity that night when his gas hit empty.

  Well, ninety percent of the time he gave thanks. The remaining ten percent was dedicated to cursing when Ray would tell a particularly offensive joke or hold Osborne hostage to a commentary peppered with vowels pulled out like chewing gum. Talents unappreciated by Osborne.

  After the rescue that night, they had taken to hollering at one another from their respective lawn chairs, perched over the water on their neighboring docks. But soon they were sitting side by side on Ray’s dock: highly advisable as topics soon took a turn towards the confidential. Osborne knew he had a good buddy when he discovered Ray to be as comfortable discussing life’s adversities as he was debating the best lure for walleyes when the wind is out of the west.

  He found it amusing—even satisfying in a juvenile way—that this friendship irritated the hell out of his wife: “I do not understand why you speak to that man. Just look!” And she would shake an angry finger at the “disgusting view of that house trailer,” which she insisted ruined the vista from her expensive double-paned windows.

  It was Ray who, when Mary Lee insisted Osborne get rid of his patient files, jumped at the chance to help him devise a secret hiding place in the garage. Like kids building a fort they had plotted each detail with care: first the wait for Mary Lee’s weekly bridge game to take place in Minocqua, a good hour’s drive each way plus a guaranteed four to five hours devoted to brunch, cards and gossip.

  Then the hurried construction of a room they hoped to make impossible for a wife to find. Thanks to Ray hiding supplies in his truck, they got an early start and in one afternoon were able to erect a wall of plywood behind Osborne’s stored pontoon and, behind that, install a door opening from the side of the garage into the attached shed where he cleaned fish. The shed was Osborne’s sanctuary; Mary Lee wanted nothing to do with fish guts.

  When they had finished, it was Ray, younger and stronger, who helped him move the three antique oak file cabinets from storage, each drawer packed with years of patient records—records of work that he was proud of, records of more than just teeth and gums, fillings and dentures.

  “Each of these …” said Osborne stepping back after the file cabinets were in place and opening a drawer to pull out a file only to pause in embarrassment, “. well, I look at one and I feel proud … of what I’ve accomplished … I guess.” Ray had nodded. He understood.

  “Mary Lee thinks I’m crazy to hold on to these and maybe I am but—”

  “Doc, your wife saves family photos, doesn’t she?”

  “Of course,” said Osborne.

  “Well … watching your face when you open one of those files, it’s like you’ve a got a real person in your hand. It’s like … when I pick up one of my surface mud puppies, Doc … I remember the night, the moon and the forty-eight inch monster I caught … e-e-e-very moment of the ex-x-x … perience.”

  “You are exactly right, Ray. These aren’t just paper files—these are my memories.”

  Spurred on by the success of that venture and inspired by his neighbor’s outlaw ways, Osborne opted to stage an act of open rebellion by maintaining his membership in the Wisconsin Dental Society. As expected, Mary Lee went ballistic: “Paul Osborne, if you think paying five hundred dollars for an annual membership in an organization of people you no longer have a good reason to see …” She glowered.

  When Osborne reported her response that evening on the dock, Ray had shrugged and grinned and egged him on.

  Keeping that membership in the dental society was a charmed decision. It was not just that he was able to enjoy the camaraderie of the men and women, fellow professionals and colleagues—many of whom he’d known since dental school and several who had become good friends (and frequent fishing buddies) over the years—but the dental society’s m
onthly seminars quickly became some of his most interesting hours.

  Forensic odontology, a focus of several of the seminars, had intrigued Osborne. Having served in the military after graduating from dental school, he was grounded in the basics of dental forensics, which are based on the fact that teeth and dental restorations are the strongest elements in the human body and able to survive the destructive influences of fire and exposure to the elements.

  Over the years that Osborne had practiced dentistry that fact had not changed: pathologists and medical examiners still rely on teeth and dental records to identify the dead. When the seminars turned to covering enhanced uses of dental DNA, Osborne was fascinated, taking notes as avidly as a student and buying all the study materials.

  As entranced as he was by this new avocation, it was of little help when Mary Lee died unexpectedly from bronchitis that turned deadly in the midst of a winter blizzard. She left behind a dangerous void. While she had never hesitated to remind him of all the ways in which he had not quite measured up as a husband, her fussing had given his life structure. When he lost her, he lost a world made safe by how she defined their days.

  That was not a good year: No longer restrained by the pressures of a fulltime dental practice, no longer kept in line by his wife. No longer places to go or things to do.

  Too much loss in too short a time led to too many shots of Bushmills.

  Studying for the seminars forced some sobriety. That, plus a determination not to miss six thirty Mass each weekday, meant his mornings were sober if heavy-headed. But by noon he would be lost. Six months into killing himself, his daughters took over with an intervention that shook him hard: “Dad, do you want to see your grandchildren grow up? Do you?”

  Rehab followed.

  When he had returned from Hazelden, chastened and shaky, it was Ray who watched and waited for the right time to make a move. It was after a good day together in Osborne’s Alumacraft (three walleyes over twenty inches each!) that he persuaded the recovering retired dentist to attend his group (“just this once, Doc”) in the room behind the door with the coffee pot.

  It was an evening as redemptive as the fishing. And so it was that Osborne and Ray made it a weekly habit: an afternoon of fishing in Doc’s boat followed by an early dinner of sautéed catch at Ray’s trailer and a drive to town for an evening session behind that door with the coffee pot.

  Nearing the intersection where he would turn left towards the Merriman Trail, Osborne smiled. Life had its twists and turns, all right, but how could he have anticipated that an uncharacteristic urge to clean his garage would have led to a new career—and the chance to work with the woman with the dark, honest eyes and easy grin. He was a lucky guy.

  It had been a Saturday mid-April two years ago, a morning so warm that in spite of the lake breeze he was able to keep the garage doors open while he swept up dead leaves and mounds of dirt left over from winter parking. That accomplished, he opted to organize his fishing gear.

  After working through four tackle boxes, he checked each of his seventeen spinning rods to see which ones needed new line. Then a short break to fortify himself with an egg salad sandwich before returning to the garage and a jumble of cross-country ski equipment. That done, he saw other stuff that needed sorting.

  He was restacking the eight plastic tubs holding Mary Lee’s holiday ornaments when he discovered a rusty old gym locker hidden behind the tubs. Inside were three empty canvas gun cases and a bamboo fly rod that he vaguely remembered purchasing. It had never been used. On an upper shelf was a small box holding a reel loaded with fly line and two tiny plastic containers of trout flies on which someone had scrawled in black marker: “Woolly Buggers, Size 12.”

  Ah, thought Osborne, the trout flies must have been tied and given to him by a patient. Sitting down on a nearby bench, he examined the trout flies. He couldn’t imagine how else these boxes had come his way. Had he bargained for them? Often over the years, when patients were down on their luck, he would barter for venison chops or fresh-caught fish. Had he done that with these?

  Osborne sat there, tipping the boxes of trout flies this way and that. The trout flies were colorful, exquisite. Like the fly rod, which had not been cheap, they had been acquired before his late wife caught on to his budding interest in a new sport. That he knew because he had a vivid memory of Mary Lee putting her foot down: “Paul, you have enough fishing equipment. I refuse to let you spend another dime of our money—”

  Later that same day he had driven to town and shown the fly rod to the owner of Ralph’s Sporting Goods whom he knew to be an avid fly fisherman. The rod was a good one and Ralph was willing to take it on consignment but he encouraged Osborne to give fly fishing a try first.

  “Doc, if you were interested once, who knows—you might like it. Spin fishing keeps you on the water but fly fishing takes you into the water. A very different experience. I know you love the outdoors and no doubt you own some waders—”

  “Okay, okay, you don’t have to twist my arm, Ralph,” said Osborne, “but how do I get started? I’ve never cast a fly rod in my life.”

  “Tell you what, Doc. I know a real good instructor who can show you a few basics—help you decide if it’s something you want to do …”

  And so he had agreed to let Ralph book him “half day” for a hundred bucks with a guy named “Lou.” Ralph would make money on the booking, of course, but Osborne didn’t mind. He had nothing better to do and why not give the rod and those trout flies a try?

  Turned out to be the best hundred bucks he’d spent in years: “Lou” turned out to be “Lew”—a police officer moonlighting as a fly fishing instructor. Nor was “Lew” a guy. And as Osborne learned to cast a fly rod, Officer Lewellyn Ferris, on getting to know her student, was introduced to the concept of forensic odontology.

  This was a trade that benefited both of them when, weeks later, the Loon Lake coroner was on one of his benders (alleged as always by his wife to be a “last minute vacation”) just as an individual passed away under circumstances that required a signed death certificate before the family could deal with the remains. A certain police officer knew just whom to call.

  “Doc,” Lew had said when she called him the first time, “Pecore is hopeless around booze but there is nothing the department can do. He is appointed town coroner by the mayor and—since the jabone is married to the mayor’s wife’s sister—he’s home free. We have to deal with him.”

  “Isn’t that too bad,” said Dr. Paul Osborne, managing to keep his tone serious even as he was delighted to be deputized to work with her. That occasion was soon followed by others, including the opportunity to ID crime victims.

  When the current chief of police retired, Lewellyn Ferris was promoted to his position. Not only did this enhance her authority to deputize whomever she might need but Osborne’s skills in dental forensics gave her leverage—and a direct benefit to her budget—as she could loan him out to the Wausau Crime Lab, which could not afford a full-time odontologist.

  So it was that Dr. Paul Osborne found himself once again in a position to barter his dental skills: The Loon Lake Police Department could pay for his time or their Chief of Police could continue his fly fishing instructions in the trout stream—at no cost.

  Talk about a no-brainer!

  CHAPTER 7

  “Hey, Doc, I hear the Chief got you out of bed, too, huh?”

  “Almost—I was in my PJs.”

  The face grinning into the open window of Osborne’s car belonged to Terry Donovan, the younger of Lew Ferris’s two full-time officers. “Say,” he said without waiting for Osborne to answer, “I picked up a four-wheeler from the sheriff’s garage and dropped it off at the access road that runs up to the trails. Only way we can get back in there with our equipment. I’ve got Ray staying warm in my car here and thought I’d drive both you fellas back there. But I want you to leave your cars here at the trailhead.”

  “Do I need a helmet?” asked Osborne, reaching for the bl
ack bag in which he carried his notebook, blank death certificates and medical instruments. He peered through the window towards Terry’s squad car where Ray was sitting. Osborne noticed he was wearing a helmet-like ski cap of the type worn by cross-country racers. Odd.

  “Nah, you’ll be fine. But speaking of helmets, what’s with Ray? Last time I saw him he was wearing more lights than a Christmas tree. Tonight he looks, well, normal.”

  “No trout hat, huh?” Osborne was surprised, too.

  Ray’s hat was ubiquitous. Some people swore he slept in it. Even Osborne rarely saw him without the old leather aviator cap resting on his head, the furred flaps pulled down over his ears against the winter wind. Perched on top and hard to miss was a fourteen-inch stuffed brook trout. Draped across the breast of the fish was a double string of multi-colored blinking LED lights.

  “Maybe he’s trying to avoid hat hair,” said Osborne. “He’s auditioning for a TV show in the morning.”

  “No wonder he’s so serious. Seems a little out of sorts, Doc. Got everything,” said Terry, checking his watch as Osborne locked his car. “Sorry, but we gotta hurry. I gave the EMTs directions to that access road and I don’t want them going in ahead of us.”

  “I’m set.” Climbing into the back seat of the cruiser, Osborne looked over at Ray who was sitting with a camera case on his lap. Not only was he hatless but his beard looked recently trimmed. Then it dawned on Osborne: he’d bet anything Ray thought the local TV news crews might cover the story tonight. Any publicity is great publicity—and Ray was determined to land the role on ICE MEN.

  “How did you get here so fast?” said Osborne, “Last we talked you were just getting out of bed.”

  “Took the back way on Jack Pine Drive,” said his neighbor. “You know that shortcut, don’t you?”

  “I would not drive it in this weather. Hard enough to see on the main highway.” Even as Osborne spoke he remembered that Ray had the eyes of a great horned owl: he could find his way anywhere—even in the dark.