Dead Ringer

by Annelise Ryan

  He flips the knife into his other hand, holding it by the handle in a way that suggests he’s ready to stab something.

  “You killed the girls?” I say. “All of them?”

  Stetson grins at me.

  “Why?”

  “They were whores and drug addicts who served no useful purpose.”

  “Caroline Helgeson wasn’t a whore or a drug addict.”

  He makes an equivocal face, bobbing his head from one side to another. “True, but I needed to kill her in order to seal up the case against Ulrich. Fortunately, she had the right look. Rather serendipitous, wouldn’t you agree? It was just her bad luck that she agreed to go out with Ulrich, and my good luck that they then broke up.”

  “You killed Lacy O’Connor, too?”

  “Who?” He looks genuinely puzzled for a few seconds; then enlightenment hits. “Oh, you mean that heroin addict you pulled for a case?” He clucks his tongue. “I suppose I should have gone farther out to find someone, but I really thought this would be far enough. If it hadn’t been for Todd here and his loose lips, no one would be the wiser. So I suppose it’s fitting in a way that he’ll be the next patsy to go down for the crime. The next and the last.”

  I search through my brain for something to say, to stall him, to keep him talking, and I remember something Maggie had said.

  “I’m not a whore or a drug addict,” I say, searching desperately for some line of conversation to keep him talking, to try to reason with him, though I’m certain reason plays no role in his life right now, and probably hasn’t for a long time.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Stetson says with a shrug of indifference. “You wrote your own death certificate, lady, by sticking your nose in where it didn’t belong. Now you know too much.” He pauses and a grin splits his face, a grin that freezes my blood. “And there’s that serendipity again, because you fit the physical parameters, just like Caroline did. It makes it so much easier for me, because I can set things up so that it looks like Todd killed you before killing himself.”

  “Who are you really killing?” I ask. “Who screwed you up, Stetson? Was it your mother? An old girlfriend? Your wife?”

  His eyes widen when I mention his wife and I know I’ve hit on something. “Her hair is red now, but it’s obviously a dye job, and given those two towheads you have for kids, I’m guessing she’s a natural blonde. What did she do? Have an affair?”

  Stetson scoffs at the suggestion. “How pedestrian,” he mutters. “No, she did much worse than that. She killed my mother.”

  I’m shocked by his comment and it must show.

  “I know, surprising, isn’t it?” Stetson says. “She’s a nurse, and nurses are supposed to be compassionate, caring people, not murderers.”

  I’m not sure I can believe what he’s saying. Has the man gone off the deep end? “If she killed your mother, why didn’t you arrest her?”

  “Arrest the pregnant mother of my twin children?” he scoffs. “I couldn’t do that. Kids need their mother. Besides, she said she did it in a way that would be unprovable, undetectable. She knew what to do and how to do it so there’d be no trace and it would look like a natural death.” His face flushes red. “But it wasn’t natural, not at all. And she killed the only woman who has ever truly loved me.” His anger is building, his words coming out with a spray of spittle. “She betrayed me. They all betrayed me. All of them!”

  His voice rises in anger and he walks around the bottom of the bed and comes to stand alongside me, the knife still in his hand. My heart is racing, beating so hard I can see my chest moving with each beat. Stetson runs the side of the knife along his leg, front to back; then he runs it the other way, back to front. He is staring at Todd and suddenly his face breaks into a smile. The quicksilver change of emotions fills me with dread.

  “That idea you had about Todd’s girlfriend in Milwaukee?” he says. “That was a stroke of brilliance on your part. Kudos to you.” He lunges toward my pelvic area and I flinch reflectively, yelling out in anticipation. But rather than stabbing me, Stetson merely positions himself atop my tied-together legs, straddling them. “It turns out that Todd’s old girlfriend was a tall, blue-eyed blonde, just like Todd himself.” He glances over at Todd and clucks his tongue, shaking his head. “He was rather vain, that boy. I think that’s why he went for that type. She looked like him, and he was in love with himself.”

  “And why did you go for that type?” I ask, eager to keep him talking.

  He looks back at me, studying my face, his head cocked to one side. I can’t read him, and I’m afraid he’s going to plunge that knife into my lower belly any second. An image of Matthew, the way he held my face between his hands and told me he loved me, flashes through my mind. An image of Hurley from the other night when I interrupted his reading in bed comes next. And then Emily, sitting at the kitchen table and smiling. A rapid montage of faces follows: my sister, her kids, Erika and Ethan, my father, Izzy, Dom, little Juliana. Was this what it was like when people said their lives flashed before their eyes?

  Tears run from the corners of my eyes and down the sides of my face into my hair. Stetson isn’t answering my question and desperation overtakes me. I get an idea based on something he said, and I figure what I’m about to say next will either buy me more time or be the last words I ever utter. I almost wait too long, as Stetson suddenly raises his arm up, the knife pointing at my lower belly, ready to bring it down.

  “I’m pregnant!” I blurt out, my last gambit.

  It works, at least for the moment. Stetson’s hand freezes in midair and he stares at me, his brow furrowing. I’m breathing so hard and fast that my entire body is heaving, even my legs. Stetson rises and falls with each breath, making it appear as if we’re engaging in a sex act. We remain frozen in this tableau, rising and falling like the waves in the ocean, for what seems like an eternity.

  Then Stetson shrugs and I squeeze my eyes closed and tense my body in anticipation of the pain that is about to come. I pray it will be a quick death. I spare a second to mourn the child within me, the child I’ll never know. And I use what I assume will be my last good breath to let out a bloodcurdling scream.

  There is a loud crashing sound and the bed shakes beneath me. I open my eyes just as another deafening sound echoes inside the room. Stetson is still straddling me, but he’s tipping over to his left, toward Todd. His arm, the one that was holding the knife, is hanging oddly at his side. And then a dark mass comes flying from my left, colliding with Stetson in a cacophony of grunts and smacking flesh. I feel the weight of Stetson briefly lift off me, only to have another heavier weight take its place.

  The next sound I hear is one of the sweetest ever. “Squatch, are you okay?”

  I turn my head to my left and see Hurley’s face inches away from mine. His hands reach up and start scrabbling at the ropes around my wrists. The weight on my legs finally lifts, though the grunting and groaning continues somewhere off to my right. I tune out everything in the room, every sensation I feel, everything except the sight of Hurley’s blue eyes, full of love and concern, staring into mine. And then I burst into uncontrollable, body-wracking sobs.

  CHAPTER 28

  I’m sitting across from Maggie Baldwin, who looks refreshed and content after her whirlwind tour of Europe. I feel tired and haggard by comparison, and Hurley, who is sitting next to me, doesn’t look much better.

  “You need to realize that what happened likely would have happened regardless of how you behaved or reacted to things,” Maggie says to Hurley. She then looks at me. “You need to realize it, too. Sometimes stuff just happens. There doesn’t need to be a causal event and it isn’t necessarily because of anything you’ve done.”

  I nod slowly, and from the periphery of my vision, I see Hurley do the same. On some level, I know that what Maggie is saying is true, but on another more visceral level, I’m not buying it. I suspect Hurley feels the same way.

  “Let’s talk about where you go from here,” M
aggie says. “I think the two of you need to draw up a future plan, separate ones to start with, and then we’ll look at them together and come up with one that both of you can agree on.”

  “It’s hard to think about the future, until we resolve the current stuff,” I grumble. I look at Hurley. “You had me followed. You didn’t trust me. And that hurts me.”

  “It also saved your life,” Hurley grouses, but he looks remorseful. “If that PI hadn’t been on your tail, Stetson would have killed you. We were almost too late, even with that.”

  “I realize that, and I’m not ungrateful. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that you had me followed, night and day, apparently. That’s a huge violation of trust, not to mention an invasion of my privacy. You even had me followed when Brenda and I went to Eau Claire.”

  “How was I supposed to know you were going to Eau Claire?” Hurley counters, throwing his hands up. “The guy almost didn’t follow you there because it was so unexpected! Fortunately, he had associates who could help out with the tailing duty.”

  “Whatever,” I say impatiently. “If you’d answered my phone calls, you would have known what was going on.”

  “I was busy with work, meeting with the chief, helping the county guys with a case they had, and trying to follow up on the Lacy O’Connor case. You could have left messages.”

  “None of which takes away from the underlying fact that you hired a PI in the first place.” I pause, sighing. “Look, I’m forever grateful that your guy was there at the motel. I really am. He saved my life, and I don’t want to belittle that point or seem ungrateful. But if you had just talked to me, asked me questions, and answered my damned phone calls, none of it would have been necessary.”

  “I said I was sorry,” Hurley snaps. Then he sighs with regret, his shoulders sagging. “What was I to think? You were lying to me and—”

  “I didn’t lie to you,” I interrupt.

  “Well, you sure as hell didn’t give me all the facts. That became clear when I discovered you’d come back to see Maggie alone last month, after putting on this big pretense of leaving.”

  “I wanted to talk to her,” I say. “Without you, and about you. About us.”

  “And you couldn’t tell me that because . . . ?” He drags the last syllable out as if he’s drawing a blank for me to fill in.

  “I didn’t tell you about it because I knew that most of the doubt I was harboring was self-doubt, not doubt about you or us. I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily.”

  “Yet you ended up doing just that.”

  “And your first reaction to that is to hire a private detective to follow me around?” I say, my anger building again. “Why didn’t you talk to me?”

  “Clearly, you didn’t want to talk to me, as evidenced by that little subterfuge you pulled here. Granted, I may have overreacted in hiring the PI, but the combination of that episode here with Maggie, and discovering that you had drinks in a bar late at night with some stranger you met at a conference, triggered a jealous streak in me. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. And it didn’t help matters any that the PI not only saw you drive to the Sorenson Motel with that Todd guy, he saw you kissing him after being in his room for a length of time. You came home that night smelling of alcohol, your shirt halfway untucked, and then I get a call from the PI telling me about the motel and the kiss. What was I supposed to think?”

  “You were supposed to trust me, Hurley. I already explained all of that. I misread Todd, and as a result, I may have made some bad decisions. I own that, but it wasn’t intentional. Todd misread things, too. It was all a big misunderstanding and we sorted it out. Nothing happened.” I pause then as a pained realization washes over me. “Well, that’s not totally true. Something awful did happen. Todd paid the ultimate price.”

  “And I feel bad about that,” Hurley says, looking grim. “But none of it would have happened if you’d been more open and honest with me.”

  I give Maggie a desperate look: “Aren’t you going to help me here?”

  “He has a valid point, Mattie,” Maggie says, and I shoot eye daggers at her. I adore this woman and I value her skills, but right now, I’m silently calling her every bad name I can think of. “Why didn’t you share your concerns and doubts with Hurley?”

  “Because my doubts were about the pregnancy. Hurley was clearly so excited about it. Plus, it was my birthday gift to him. How could I tell him that—”

  Maggie holds her hand out toward Hurley, like he’s a showcase on The Price Is Right. “Tell him now.”

  I let out an exasperated breath and turn to face Hurley. “How could I tell you that the one thing that made you so happy, the thing that I had gifted you, was something I wasn’t sure I wanted? How could I tell you that some small part of me wanted to take it all back? How could I disappoint you like that?”

  Hurley’s brows draw together in an expression of pain. “Squatch, I admit I was excited when you agreed to have another child, and over the moon about the pregnancy. But as much as that meant to me, it doesn’t compare to what you mean to me. You will always come first. You have to know that.”

  I feel tears pressing behind my eyes and I struggle to keep them in check. It’s a losing battle. “And now it’s a moot point,” I say. “I can’t help but wonder if I willed this pregnancy to fail.”

  Now it’s Maggie’s turn to be exasperated. “It’s not your fault,” she reiterates. “It’s no one’s fault. Miscarriages happen all the time, especially as we women get older. You know that, Mattie.”

  That was the same thing my obstetrician had said when I called and told her I was bleeding two days after Hurley and his hired PI had rescued me.

  “There isn’t anything I can do to stop this pregnancy from miscarrying if that’s what’s happening,” she told me over the phone. “Most of the time, it happens because there is something wrong with the pregnancy or the fetus. It’s nature’s way of taking care of things. And as you get older, the likelihood of things going wrong increases. We discussed this.”

  We had. On an intellectual level, I knew that everything she’d said was true. But on an emotional level, logic and scientific knowledge held little sway. The miscarriage had done one thing for me, though. It cemented the desire for another child in my heart and mind, eliminating my doubts once and for all. The loss of this pregnancy hit me harder than I expected, and I found myself mourning an imaginary child that never existed. My heart still aches for the lost child that will never be, but it also has plenty of room for another child to move in and secure a spot. It took a tragedy of epic proportions to make me realize this.

  I explain this to Hurley and Maggie, tears running down my cheeks. Hurley reaches over and takes my hand, squeezing it in his. I see tears building in his eyes, and it makes mine come faster and harder. When he leans over and kisses my hand, I want to go to him, curl up in his lap, and rest my head against his chest. Instead, I mouth the words “I love you.” Hurley smiles and mouths back, “And I you.”

  Maggie clears her throat and says, “I have some homework for the two of you. I want each of you to work out a plan for your relationship, and by plan, I mean how you see your interactions and relationship evolving. You can include the roles you see each of you carrying out, and since Mattie has already expressed some concern about feeling overwhelmed by the amount of household tasks there are to do, I want you to each include a list of those tasks and who you see owning them. Include work goals in the plan. Include sex and intimacy in the plan. Include family time—how, where, and when it will occur—in your plan. It’s imperative that you be honest.” She looks at Hurley. “If you know you’re not going to do the laundry on a regular basis, don’t list it as one of your tasks.” She shifts her gaze to me. “If you know you have no interest in cooking meals regularly, don’t list it in your tasks.”

  The woman obviously knows us well.

  “I want you to do these plans separately,” she goes on, “without any discussion between the tw
o of you. No sharing or sneaking peeks before you meet with me next time.” She shoots a pointed look at me when she mentions the peeking thing; for a moment, I’m convinced she really can read my mind.

  “Does it have to be realistic, or can it be our fantasy life?” I say. I’m asking as a joke, but Maggie considers it seriously.

  “For it to be useful, it needs to have some level of practicality,” she says. “It does no good if you put down that you want to be seated on a throne and have Hurley worship at your feet while you eat bonbons all day.”

  “I would never want that,” I say. “It would have to be ice cream, not bonbons.”

  Maggie smiles. Hurley snorts back a laugh and says, “Mainly Cherry Garcia, right?”

  I look at him lovingly. “You know my soft spots well,” I say.

  Hurley arches one brow as his eyes start to smolder. “Yes, I do,” he says in a sultry tone. We share an intense and wonderfully heated moment of nonverbal communication, which is broken when Maggie again clears her throat.

  “Any other questions?” she asks.

  The last few seconds between us have been enough to take my breath away, and I grip the arms of my chair in an effort to recenter myself.

  “Make your plan realistic,” Maggie says, “but feel free to slant it your way. I will be the only one who sees them, and I will use them to come up with future topics for discussion and negotiation, and to determine the areas where we need to work on more compromise. Okay?”

  Hurley and I exchange another look, this one more pedestrian. I kind of like the idea of writing out my ideal plan. It will be the romance novel version of my life. “I’m game,” I say.

  “Me too,” Hurley says, and he sounds genuinely intrigued by the idea.

  “Okay, that’s settled,” Maggie says, glancing at her watch. “Have them for me when we meet again in two weeks.” She smiles and sets aside the notebook she’s been writing in since the start of our meeting. “We have some time left, so let’s switch gears,” she says. “Fill me in on the Ulrich case. I’m dying to hear the details.”