Stiff Penalty (A Mattie Winston Mystery)

by Annelise Ryan

  The changes in my figure weren’t the only problem. People were starting to notice other things, too. In my third month, I was plagued with terrible bouts of morning sickness that had Izzy wondering if I was still suited for the job. It didn’t help that I was assaulted by strange and often nasty smells on a regular basis, everything from formaldehyde to body parts that were long past their expiration dates. I told Izzy it was just nerves, and that I was seeing a doctor about it. He was visibly relieved when I quit having to leave both death sites and the autopsy suite to make a mad dash for the restroom to barf, although this respite only lasted about two weeks. That’s when the child inside me decided that my bladder was a punching bag. Once again Izzy became concerned about my frequent bathroom runs, and once again I assured him I was seeing a doctor about the problem, and that it was probably nothing more than a bad bladder infection. The first part of that excuse was true: I was seeing a doctor. The last part, however, was a lie. I knew it wasn’t a bladder infection that was making me pee every half hour.

  I was also much more cautious about using personal protective equipment whenever I was on-site or in the autopsy room, and Izzy hadn’t missed this change in my behavior, either. Several times I saw him eyeing me with that curious, quizzical expression he often got right before he figured out some deep dark secret of mine that I had hoped to keep hidden. I passed this one off by saying that my eyes had been opened by Jonas Kriedeman’s life-threatening allergies to the chemicals we use. This was an unfortunate situation for Jonas, the person who took my position when I turned in my ill-fated resignation, but a fortunate one for me since it enabled me to get my job back. And it had worked out okay for Jonas, too, because he was able get his old job back, working as an evidence tech for the police department.

  Despite my efforts to hide things, my days of keeping my condition a secret were numbered, and I knew it. I had hoped to keep it under wraps for at least another week or two, because juicy gossip seeps through our town like the scent of manure does in the early spring when the surrounding farmers fertilize their fields. In fact, manure and gossip have many things in common. The more they reek, the better people think they are. The fouler the stench, the faster people want to spread them. And both items tend to linger long after some people wish they were gone.

  Because of this, both Maggie and the OB doctor I was seeing for my pregnancy were in a neighboring town nearly a half hour away. Despite the fact that HIPAA laws are supposed to prevent people from disclosing confidential medical information about the people they care for, certain things have a way of getting around. In fact, people in small towns are masters at innuendo. There is an entire subculture built around the ability to reveal information about someone without actually saying it. Facial expressions and vocal fluctuations are easily interpreted by those familiar with small-town gossip in the same way twins who make up their own language understand one another. The big reveal would go something like this: “Hey, I saw Mattie Winston at the grocery store the other day, and she had such a glow about her.” Then the speaker would arch an eyebrow and in a suggestive tone, add, “You know what I mean?” If asked later, the person who said this could truthfully deny telling anyone I was pregnant.

  I knew Izzy would likely figure things out before anyone else, although his partner, Dom, and my sister, Desi, were equally probable front-runners. My mother, on the other hand, is much too self-absorbed. I’m not sure she’d pick up on the fact that I was pregnant if I was giving birth on her dining room table, an act that would probably give her a stroke, not because I was giving birth, but because of all the germs I’d be distributing across the surface of her table. My mother has issues, and to say that she is a bit of a germophobe is like saying the Pacific Ocean has a bit of water.

  Getting pregnant when I did hadn’t been intentional—no one could have been more surprised than I was—and it happened the first time Hurley and I ever slept together. I was on birth control pills, but while investigating a case with ties to a local casino, I’d gotten caught up in the gambling scene and found myself making frequent trips to the place to play some blackjack or poker. Once inside the casino, day and night became indistinguishable, and I often lost all sense of time. As a result, I didn’t take my birth control pills with the regularity I should have, and apparently that, combined with a course of antibiotics I took for a sinus infection, was the perfect cocktail for conception.

  I was eager for Hurley to return because I didn’t want anyone to find out about my pregnancy before he did, and I didn’t want to tell him over the phone. In order to fully gauge his reaction to the news, I needed to see his face and body language when he heard it. Would he be angry that I hadn’t told him sooner? Would he be angry that I’d let it happen in the first place? Would he feel duped, tricked into something he didn’t want? Would he feel trapped, forced to do the “right” thing?

  These questions circled through my mind constantly, and when I finally learned that Hurley would be coming home, they became a major distraction. I practiced imaginary scenarios in which I delivered the news to him in a hundred different ways. I fretted over his possible responses and agonized over what the future might hold. I obsessed over how things would go, and I think that contributed to what happened. My mind was so focused on Hurley and my situation that I didn’t pay enough attention to my surroundings. Otherwise I might have realized that I was being stalked by someone who wanted to see me dead.

  All my role-playing and fretting turned out to be a giant waste of time because fate wasn’t done forking with my life’s path yet. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined how the moment of revelation would actually go down.

  Chapter 3

  As I try to bring Dr. Naggy up to date, I realize that my original claim about things starting at the beginning of May isn’t altogether true. I think the trouble actually began back at the beginning of March. While Izzy and I were trying to investigate the case we were on at the time, Emily’s mother, Kate, left town for what was supposed to be a few days, leaving Hurley to look after Emily. Through a series of unfortunate events, Emily ended up staying alone at my cottage one evening while Hurley and I tried to carry on with an investigation that had more suspects than the Agatha Christie section of the library. While at my place, Emily got spooked when my dog, Hoover, started barking at windows and prowling restlessly around the house. When Emily saw a strange man actually peeking in through my windows at her, she got much more than spooked.

  Hurley and I hurried back to my place, but whoever had been skulking around outside—and there definitely had been someone because there were footprints in the flowerbeds, and both Emily and Dom had seen the guy—was gone. Emily is a very talented artist, and she managed to draw a sketch of the man, a sketch that seemed vaguely familiar to me. When my mother saw the picture, she identified the man as my father. This left me with a mixed bag of emotions because my father had disappeared from my life just before I started kindergarten, and I haven’t heard or seen anything of him since. I have no idea why he left, and my mother claims not to know either. I suspect her obsessive personality, chronic hypochondria, and overpowering narcissism had something to do with it. Whatever it was, it made Mom mad enough that she threw away all his pictures, tossed out any personal items he had left behind, and refused to ever discuss him with me when I was growing up.

  I didn’t much care what had happened between my dad and my mother. I know she is not an easy person to live with, and given that I spent most of my life waiting for the day when I could get away from her, it was easy for me to understand how she’d managed to go through four husbands so far. The thing I did care about, the thing I struggled to understand, was why my father had left me. Had I done something to earn the same disdain he had for my mother? Or was he just an irresponsible cad who’d buckled under the pressures of fatherhood? Part of me was angry at this vague memory of a man who had abandoned me at such a young age. But another part of me was curious. I wanted to see what he looked like,
hear what he sounded like, and ask him a million questions.

  The idea that my father might have been spying on me intrigued me. Thoughts of him lingered in my mind after that first sighting, but they quickly took a backseat to the news of my pregnancy, the possibility of Hurley leaving me, and obsessive worries about my future.

  The first phone call came two days after Hurley left town. It came on my work cell phone, which did double duty as my private phone since I didn’t have a landline in the cottage. When the phone rang, I hoped it was Hurley calling, but no caller ID came up in the window. I answered it with, “Hi, this is Mattie Winston with the ME’s office,” not knowing if the call might be work-related. All I heard on the other end was the static of an open line for a few seconds and then the quiet nothingness of what I assumed was a dropped call. Thinking the caller might try back right away, I waited a few minutes with the phone in my hand. But nothing happened.

  The second call came a few days after that, and the third about a week later. This time I was at work, sitting in the library space that doubled as my office, finishing up some paperwork. Once again there was no caller ID displayed, and once again I was greeted with the hiss of an open line and another noise that sounded like someone breathing into the phone on the other end. I tried a few tentative hellos to see if anyone answered, but once again the call went dead.

  I happened to mention the odd calls to our office receptionist, Cass, and she shed some light on the mystery. A few days after the spying incident, she had taken a call from a man who claimed to be a lawyer from Milwaukee. He told her he needed to talk to me right away about some testimony I was scheduled to give in a case he was trying the following week. It was a ruse because there was no case—I had yet to testify in court, though Izzy was training me for it—but Cass didn’t know that. She fell for the sound of authority and urgency in the man’s voice and gave him my cell number. When I checked the office phone log to see when the pretend lawyer had called, it turned out to have come in minutes before my first mystery call.

  The calls continued, and they came more or less weekly after that third one, though there didn’t seem to be a pattern with regard to day or time. While I had no proof of the caller’s true identity, in my gut I felt certain it was my father. It was the only answer that made any sense. I pondered the question of why he would call me and then just hang up, like some pranking middle-school kid yearning to play a practical joke on someone. I told myself that it was likely because he was nervous about what he had done, and worried about the sort of reception he might get. Maybe he just needed some time to work up the courage to speak, or to work up a good story to explain his neglect and abandonment. Whatever it was, I was willing to play along for a while, content to let him have as much time as he wanted.

  Things came to a head on a Saturday night at the start of May when I was on call, bored, and having a major jones for some cheesecake or ice cream from one of our local restaurants, Dairy Airs. My torturer, Gunther (I know he calls himself a personal trainer, but I’m not fooled), has made me very aware of just how much exercise is needed to burn off the calories in most of my favorite foods. Granted, most of my favorite foods aren’t on anyone’s recommended list for dieters, things like macaroni and cheese (actually, almost anything with cheese; I am from Wisconsin, after all), pies, pasta dishes, and cakes . . . especially cheesecake, which combines two of my favorite foods: cheese and cake. This leaves me constantly at war with myself, my common sense and newfound awareness of nutrition battling my cravings and my body’s constant efforts to insulate itself against a Neptunian winter.

  Being pregnant has made it easier for me to be good in some ways; I’m not only eating for two, I’m behaving for two. I’ve kept my OB doctor informed on a regular basis, and both she and Gunther have been monitoring my exercise and diet program closely. I’d definitely been striving for more balance in what I ate, and my efforts had garnered me a mere four-pound weight gain by the time I reached my fourth month of pregnancy. But I was also battling some horrendous food cravings, and on this particular day, the enemy won.

  My gym time meant telling Gunther the Torturer that I was pregnant, but I swore him to absolute secrecy. And the fact that he knows the actual weights of most of the women in town leads me to believe he knows how to keep a secret. You’re risking your life if you ever reveal a woman’s true weight, and if the judge hearing the case happens to be a woman, odds are it will be ruled a justifiable homicide.

  Much as I hated to admit it, the gym time was working. My legs and arms were stronger and more toned, my energy levels were up, and I felt better than I had in a long time. I wasn’t losing weight, but I wasn’t gaining tons either, and my OB doc assured me I was right on target. There was one interesting consequence of this newfound body image and energy combined with the hormonal surges of pregnancy: a crazy sex drive. And Hurley, my only outlet for such things at the time, was hundreds of miles away.

  It occurred to me that my food cravings might be substitutes for the carnal yearnings I had. I didn’t think that was the case with my cheesecake jones on the night in question, however, because I had just spent an hour on the phone with Hurley indulging in phone sex. I tried to wait the craving out, thinking the desire might dissipate, but it not only remained persistent, it got worse. After an hour of trying to ignore mental images of every kind of cheesecake one could imagine, I gave up, blamed it on the pregnancy, and got in the car to drive to Dairy Airs.

  I suppose I might have been followed other times before this—in retrospect, I think I must have been—but this was the first time I became aware of it. I’m not sure what it was that clued me in during my six-minute drive to the restaurant. Maybe it was the fact that I had just gotten another one of those mystery phone calls with a ghost on the other end. Maybe it was some hormonal version of paranoia triggered by the headlights I saw in my rearview mirror when I turned onto the road at the bottom of my driveway. Headlights alone wouldn’t necessarily have attracted my attention, but these headlights turned onto the road from a driveway, just as I had. And the driveway they exited from was right next door, the one that led up to the house I used to live in with my ex. It was being rebuilt after a disastrous fire that basically gutted the place, and when it was done, David intended to share it with his new girlfriend, our insurance agent, Patty Volker.

  Given that it was after eight in the evening on a Saturday, and the construction workers weren’t typically there on the weekends, much less this late at night, I wondered if the car behind me might have been David, Patty, or both. I kept glancing at my rearview mirror, expecting to see the car turn off at some point and give me a glimpse of its make and model, but it stayed behind me. Only when I pulled into the parking lot of Dairy Airs did it veer off, and then only after hesitating, as if the driver had considered pulling into the lot but decided against it.

  I did get a glimpse of the car as it pulled away, but it was too dark to tell what make and model it was, or to even be certain of the color. All I knew for sure was that it was a basic sedan, a little boxy in shape, and dark in color. I knew it wasn’t David’s car; he had recently bought himself a new BMW in a pearly gray color to replace the one that was destroyed in the fire. And I knew it wasn’t Patty’s car since she owned an SUV. I saw it the day I discovered her helping David move out of the Sorenson Motel and into her house.

  Given all my rule-outs, I deduced the car either wasn’t following me and I was just being paranoid, or that the car belonged to my father—who was most likely my mystery caller as well—and for whatever reason, he was as yet unwilling to make contact or meet face-to-face.

  I ordered my cheesecake to go and headed back home, hearing the voice of Gunther the Torturer in my mind, lecturing me on how long it was going to take me to burn off those calories. I tried to ignore him, but Gunther was not only annoying, he was persistent. Finally, halfway into my drive, I mentally sat on him to shut him up.

  It was then that headlights once again loomed in my
rearview mirror. I glanced at them and wondered if it might be the same car, but it was too dark to tell. And when I turned onto my street the other car went straight, so I dismissed it from my mind.

  I had barely shut the door of my cottage when my cell phone rang. I saw it was Izzy and knew it was most likely a death call, which meant my cheesecake would have to wait.

  “Hey, Izzy,” I said, answering the call. “What’s up?”

  “I see you just pulled in,” he said. Izzy’s house and mine are quite close given that mine is in his backyard. “We have a call. Your wheels or mine?”

  “Mine,” I said quickly, wondering why he bothered to ask.

  Lately whenever we went out on calls together, I was adamant about driving my car. No doubt Dr. Naggy would interpret my need to drive as some sort of power play or need for control. But it wasn’t the driving I insisted on as much as it was the vehicle, and it wasn’t a power play but rather a simple matter of comfort and survival. Izzy’s car is a refurbished Impala from the sixties, and it has a bench front seat. Since I’m six feet tall and Izzy barely clears five feet, he needs to have the front seat up as far as it will go. Put me in that front seat beside him and the kid in my belly has more room than I do. Of course, I could offer to drive Izzy’s car, but he’d never let me. It’s his baby, and he won’t let anyone else drive it, Dom included.

  Given all that, it made much more sense for me to drive us in my car: a retired hearse in a lovely midnight blue color. It has a bench front seat, too, but I can push it back far enough to accommodate my long legs, which leaves Izzy looking like a toddler in need of a booster seat. Granted it might seem a bit callous to drive a hearse to the scene of a death, but I figure it’s more appropriate than, say, an ice cream truck, which at one time was my dream car, right after I figured out Barbie and her life were a myth.