Dead Ringer

by Annelise Ryan

  We are ready to head out a little after seven-thirty and Hurley is still on cloud nine. He is whistling, smiling, and has such a lilt to his step that I half expect him to start skipping. Matthew’s mood, on the other hand, has moved to the other end of the spectrum. He has a mercurial temperament and it’s now making itself known as he fusses, pouts, and kicks his legs in irritation as Hurley fastens him into his car seat, whining that he doesn’t like his shoes.

  We are taking Hurley’s pickup truck, since my car, a midnight-blue hearse with relatively low mileage and a reinforced body that rivals the president’s limo, will remain at home. There’s no point in taking two cars, since it’s technically my day off, and my only plans for the day are to go with Izzy and Hurley to the prison and Eau Claire.

  The driving arrangements hadn’t been easy to agree to yesterday. Izzy loves to drive, and he has a beautiful and lovingly restored Impala. Unfortunately, the Impala has a bench front seat, so by the time Izzy has the seat positioned so that his short legs can reach the pedals, neither Hurley, who is six-four, nor I can comfortably fit in the front seat without risking a dislocated hip or a knee colliding with a chin. That meant both of us would have to ride in the backseat. Initially Izzy seemed okay with this idea, but when I started making goo-goo eyes at Hurley, rubbing his arm sensuously, and commenting about what we could do in the backseat of the car, Izzy finally saw the wisdom in letting Hurley drive.

  The drive to Izzy’s house is a little less than ten minutes under good conditions, but even this length of time is too long this morning because Matthew is all about trying my patience. His build takes after both Hurley’s and mine, with his long legs—long enough that he can easily reach the back of my seat with his feet from his spot in the backseat of Hurley’s king cab. The minute he is strapped in, he starts wheedling that he doesn’t like his shoes, and when he sees that he isn’t getting the attention he thinks he should, he starts kicking the back of my seat.

  I try my hardest to ignore him, but his kick is powerful, and his whining grates on my nerves, which seem ultraex-posed this morning. Two minutes into the ride, I snap. “Matthew, stop it!”

  “I can’t,” he whines petulantly. “I hate my shoes.”

  I turn around and glance behind me to see what he’s wearing. He has on a perfectly good pair of children’s athletic shoes, ones he has worn dozens of times before without complaint. “What’s wrong with your shoes?” I ask in that tone of frustrated patience known to parents everywhere.

  “They have green on them,” Matthew says. “I don’t like green.”

  “You do, too, like green,” I tell him. “One of your favorite shirts, the one with the dinosaur on it, is green.”

  This color fixation is one Matthew has demonstrated before. I have no idea what triggers it, which makes it even more maddening because there is no rhyme or reason to it. A color he adores and insists on wearing one day becomes a supervillain the next. The irritation spectrum changes from day to day.

  “Your shoes only have a little bit of green on them,” I say, hoping to rationalize the situation. This is a clear sign of mental illness on my part, because everyone knows toddlers aren’t rational. However, the kicks to my back stop momentarily, and that gives me hope that I’m getting through somehow.

  A minute of silence ensues, and I relax in my seat with a smile, confident the battle has been won, or we’ve at least reached a cease-fire. Silly me. I am about to say something to Hurley when a shoe flies from the backseat into the front. It lands at my feet and I lean forward to pick it up. “Matthew!” I chastise in my best warning voice, uttered through gritted teeth. I turn around to scold him and that’s when the second shoe hits me in the side of the face. The pain it triggers, combined with the simple audacity of the act, makes something inside me snap.

  “Matthew Izthak Hurley!” I yell. “Stop being such a little brat! Do you know how lucky you are to even have shoes? There are kids in foreign countries who don’t have shoes. Maybe I should take your shoes away from you, let you walk around barefoot on gravel for a while and see what that feels like. I’m betting you won’t mind the green when your feet are all bloody and sore.” I shake the shoe I have in my hand at him through the entire rant, functioning on raw, reactive anger, only vaguely aware of what I’m saying and doing.

  Hurley, who has remained seemingly oblivious up until now, sitting in the driver’s seat wearing that dumb-assed grin that’s been stamped on his face ever since he found out I was pregnant, turns his head and looks at me warily. “That’s a bit over the top, isn’t it?” he says.

  I straighten in my seat, lean my head back, and squeeze my eyes closed. I drop the shoe I’m holding and clench both hands into fists so tight that I leave moon-shaped fingernail marks on my palms. My reaction was over the top, and I know it, but I’m too angry and upset to admit it and can’t seem to let go of my ire.

  “Matthew, tell your mother you’re sorry,” Hurley says, his stern voice filling the car.

  “Maffew sorry, Mammy.” He says this hurriedly with a hitch in his voice.

  I open my eyes and turn to look at him. He stares back at me with tears brimming, doubt and a hint of fear on his face. For one second, I think, Good, you should fear me. Then his expression sucks all my anger away.

  “I’m sorry, too, Matthew,” I say. “Sorry I lost my temper.”

  “It’s okay,” he says in a comforting, nurturing tone that breaks my heart and brings tears to my eyes. I feel instantly ashamed, convinced I’m the world’s worst mother.

  Fortunately, Hurley has pulled into Izzy’s driveway, and once he’s parked on the wide paved area behind the house, he wisely gets out and makes quick work of extracting Matthew from the truck.

  As I get out of the truck, I give the cottage a wistful look. The time I spent there was confusing, marking as it did a painful and unsettling period in my life. But it was also a time of growth for me, and was rewarding in many ways. It was my first experience living truly on my own and I discovered that I’m not an easy person to live with. It was the place where I was forced to reevaluate my life, my priorities, and my goals. I discovered my priorities in life weren’t what I once thought they were. It was where I learned that I could be shallow and selfish, that I had an addiction to ice cream and gambling, and that I’d been foolish in trusting my financial future to my husband. It was where I lived when I met Hurley, and it was where I gave birth to Matthew, literally, in the bathtub.

  I miss it, I realize. Or maybe it’s the relative simplicity of my life back then that I miss. Not that my life was all that simple. During that time, I lost my job, my husband, my future, and, in many ways, my identity. Yet, despite all that, the only thing I really needed to worry about, the only person I had to take care of for most of that period, was me.

  Now the cottage is once again a home for Sylvie. I don’t think she’ll be leaving this time, at least not under her own power. Sylvie has always been a small woman, but now she’s a tiny wisp of a thing that looks like she could be blown over by a sneeze. She’s still able to get around on her own, using her walker, a device she also wields surprisingly well as a weapon at times, but she’s much slower than before. More frightening than her physical decline is the mental one. Her mind makes frequent trips back in time to when she was a child or young adult, and often stays there. And lately she’s been witnessed doing things like trying to make a phone call with her hand mixer, loading dishes into the oven instead of the dishwasher, and getting herself out of bed and all dressed up for church at two in the morning on a Tuesday.

  Despite her difficulties, Sylvie has remained stubbornly independent. Any attempts to or even hints at placing her in a nursing home, or having her live with Izzy and Dom, have failed. I think Sylvie would love to live with her son if Dom wasn’t there, though Dom has made remarkable strides in wearing down Sylvie’s bias against him. He checks on Sylvie multiple times during the day, bringing her treats and inviting her over to what she calls the “big hou
se” whenever he can.

  Juliana has had a lot to do with the softening of Sylvie’s heart, and even though Sylvie knows on some level that Juliana is adopted and not Izzy’s biological child, when she’s in the throes of her dementia she makes constant reference to all the physical characteristics Juliana shares with Izzy, referring to him as Juliana’s father and Dom as the “man nanny.”

  Hurley waits for me to catch up to him at the garage door to Izzy’s house and I punch in the code. We make our way through the garage and enter the house without knocking. I’ve known the door code since back when I first moved into the cottage, and now that Dom regularly takes care of Matthew for us during the day, we’ve adopted something of an open-door policy on those days when we’re expected.

  We enter the kitchen and I’m not surprised to see Sylvie seated at the breakfast table with Juliana. Sylvie is still in her pajamas: a top and bottom made of white flannel and adorned with tiny blue flowers. Sylvie will wear these heavy nightclothes all summer long, even on those rare July and August days when the temperature gets into the nineties. The woman has no fat on her body to serve as insulation; simply opening a refrigerator door near her will send her into a spasm of shaking chills. This is the exact opposite of Izzy and me. Both of us possess enough insulation to survive on the frozen tundra sans coats for a good long while. If someone harvested our fat, they’d have enough to deep-fry a whole herd of moose.

  “Good morning,” Dom says cheerily. He is standing in front of the stove cooking French toast from thickly cut slabs of the sourdough bread he baked yesterday. A rasher of cooked bacon is sitting at the back of the stove on a plate lined with paper towels. Dom is who I want to be, if I ever grow up: a great cook, a nurturing spouse, and a loving, capable, patient parent. Dom would never threaten his kid with bloody feet.

  “Want to join us for breakfast before you head out?” Dom offers. “Izzy should be down in a few minutes.”

  The smells of bacon, butter, and cinnamon mix together in a tantalizing aroma that makes me imagine a cartoon miasma wafting toward me that hooks me by my nose and floats me to one of the chairs at the table.

  Being a bit less imaginative, Hurley says, “Thanks, but we already ate.”

  I’m tempted to ask him what that has to do with anything, but I refrain. I try a different tack instead. “If Izzy still needs to eat, it won’t hurt to sit down and have a nibble, will it?”

  “Izzy ate already,” Dom says, and I curse to myself.

  As if on cue, Izzy walks into the kitchen. “Good morning, all,” he says cheerily. He kisses Juliana on top of her head—a smart move, given that her face is covered with syrup—and then walks over and gives Dom a peck on the cheek.

  “Hi, Unca Itsy,” Matthew says. Matthew hasn’t mastered his z-sounds yet, and his version of Izzy is apropos, given Izzy’s short stature. I’ve heard other people use it in the past, either intentionally as a joke or because they thought that was Izzy’s real name, and it never went over well. Izzy has always been quick to correct anyone who uses it—anyone except my son, it seems. He likes Matthew calling him Itsy. Go figure.

  Izzy walks over and gives Matthew a kiss on top of his head and my son beams. “Unca Dom is making friend toast,” Matthew says.

  “I know. I had some earlier. It’s very good.” He looks at us then and says, “Do you guys want to eat before we head out?”

  I’m about to jump at this second invitation, but Hurley again beats me to it.

  “We ate already, and I want to get going, if that’s okay.”

  I give Hurley a disappointed look. Clearly, he has forgotten what I do for a living and the fact that I know all kinds of clever ways to kill someone and get away with it.

  “That’s fine,” Izzy says, and then the two of them turn to leave as if I’m not even there. I pout for a millisecond and consider playing the pregnancy card to get some French toast, but it’s too soon to let that cat out of the bag. Resigned, I kiss Matthew good-bye as my stomach growls in protest, tell Dom we’ll see him later, and then dutifully follow the two men out the door, but not before snatching one slice of bacon along the way.

  CHAPTER 8

  There is a moment of debate about who is going to sit where, but Izzy quickly relinquishes the front seat to me. The backseat of Hurley’s truck has a surprising amount of leg room, not that Izzy needs much, but with Matthew’s seat secured on the passenger side, the backseat rider has to sit behind Hurley, and his long legs require having the front seat pushed back as far as it will go. I could fit behind him, but not comfortably, and Izzy fits just fine.

  Our first stop is the Columbia Correctional Institution, the prison Mason Ulrich, the convicted Eau Claire serial killer, now calls home. The drive takes a little over half an hour, and Hurley fills the time by sharing some of the facts of the case and summarizing the conversation he had yesterday with Barney Ledbetter, Mason Ulrich’s current lawyer.

  “Ledbetter was hesitant to talk to me at first, much less allow us to talk to his client,” Hurley says. “But when I told him we had some new evidence regarding the case, he was at least willing to listen. Once he found out there’s another victim that appears to fit the same MO as all the others, he got very interested.”

  “Did you say anything to him about the flower petals?” Izzy asks.

  Hurley shakes his head. “I didn’t. We danced around the issue the entire time. Ledbetter kept asking me for specifics on the evidence we had and why we felt it was connected to his client’s case. I told him about the wound pattern, the physical resemblance to the other women, and the fact that our victim was a transient, like three of the four women Ulrich is accused of killing.”

  “What was different about the fourth victim?” I ask.

  “She was someone Ulrich knew and dated,” Hurley says. “And not a transient. The working theory was that this woman dumped Ulrich and his anger over that fact made him kill the first three women, who all looked like the woman he had dated. Then they think his anger grew to the point where killing the substitutes no longer did it for him, so he went after the real thing.”

  “What kind of evidence did they have on him?” I ask.

  Hurley gestures toward a large brown envelope on the front seat between us. “There are some summaries in there.”

  I pick up the envelope and open it, sliding out the pages inside. The first thing I find is a police report and I scan it, summarizing it aloud. This is mostly for my own and Izzy’s benefit, since I assume Hurley has already read much of the stuff in the envelope. But I did interrupt him last night, so maybe he wasn’t able to read it all.

  “It looks like they found some evidence near the body of the first victim, Mary Ellen Clark, age thirty-two. Mary Ellen was a transient, homeless, and a drug addict, who was originally from Detroit, but hadn’t been seen or heard from by family and friends for nearly a decade. The body was found along the banks of the Chippewa River, within sight of I-94, on March 9, 2017. The evidence they found was a fishing license belonging to our Mr. Ulrich, but Ulrich said he’d been fishing along that part of the river three days earlier and that he lost his license, presumably when he took a pack of smokes out of his pocket, the same pocket that had the license in it. It was confirmed that Ulrich was fishing in that area, or at least that his phone was in that area three days before the body was found. The cops know this because Ulrich offered up his cell phone and showed pictures of the fish he caught that day. Those pictures clearly show the location.”

  “Did they look at his cell phone data—” Izzy asks.

  “For the day of the murder?” I finish. Hurley looks over at me and smiles. “They did. Ulrich had his GPS turned on and it showed he, or at least his phone, was at home all day.”

  “Convenient,” Izzy says.

  “Apparently, that’s what the cops thought, too,” I say. “They theorized that he purposely left his phone at home during the time of the murder, so it would provide an alibi for him. He received several phone calls durin
g the time of the murder that weren’t answered and went to voice mail. The cops think that’s proof Ulrich didn’t have his phone with him.”

  “What did Ulrich say about the calls?” Hurley asks.

  “He said he was working on a car in his garage for several hours that day, some older-model Mustang that he was trying to restore.”

  This piques Izzy’s attention. He has a love of old cars, particularly the muscle cars of the sixties, and he spent the better part of two years restoring his Impala.

  “He said he never bothers bringing his phone out to the garage because he’s usually too busy, too greasy, or some combination of those things to answer it,” I reply.

  “Makes sense,” Izzy says, shrugging. “What were Ulrich’s connections to the other victims?”

  “Let’s see,” I say, shuffling through some papers. “The second victim was a woman named Jane Doe 03252017.” I pause and look at Hurley. “That’s a big number,” I say.

  “It’s the date she was found, most likely,” Izzy says, and Hurley nods. I look at the report and see that this is correct.

  “Okay, that makes sense, I guess,” I say. “Jane Doe turned up a little more than two weeks after Mary Ellen, and her body was found in a wooded area across the street from a cemetery in Eau Claire. She’d been there for a few days, and since the weather was warm, there was some decomp. That explains why it took a while to ID her—that and the fact that she wasn’t originally from the area, although they did turn up a connection between her and Ulrich. It was a week before they figured out who she was, and that was through a tattoo and a unique scar on her leg that was deep, wide, and twisted. The ID was later verified with DNA and she was identified as Linda Marie Elwood, twenty-nine and from the Green Bay area originally, though she’d been gone from there for at least two years before she died. Her parents said she got involved with a group of drug users, and despite attempts at interventions, they were unable to turn her around.”