Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

  They weren’t prepared to pick up two bodies.

  Minutes later, the LaMotte police came careening over the hill in an all-terrain vehicle with tires the size of inflated kiddie pools. In the interim, I had gone back to the house, dressed, and borrowed a pair of boots I found in a closet. Chet and Juergen had both disappeared. Only Patrick stayed outside with me, but several pairs of eyes stared out from windows on the upper floors of the chateau. The police surveyed the situation, pulled out notebooks, scratched down our names, and asked how to open the bunker door. Patrick told them the combination. One of the two policemen stepped inside, glanced around, put a hand over his mouth, and stepped back out, waving his partner back. He stood outside the door staring off toward the distant peaks for what seemed a long time while I waited silently.

  At last, he spoke to me, in accented English. “I must be honest with you, Mrs. Lamb. Neither of us has investigated a homicide before. LaMotte is a peaceful town and the worst thing we ever deal with is a bar fight. And not many of them.”

  The second officer nodded.

  “We are out of our—that is—we are not equipped to investigate something like this. I’m calling the Cantonal Police. They will take it from here.” He closed the bunker door and sent his partner to the big-wheeled ATV to make the call.

  Five

  Detective Kurt Kronenberg arrived by helicopter and ordered his men to work photographing, measuring, and staking out the perimeter with crime scene tape. I slipped into the house, leaving Patrick and Juergen, who had reappeared and was helping Kronenberg with the minutiae of names, times, relationships, etc.

  Lettie and I watched from a bathroom window on the top level of the chateau. At some point, I noticed the bathroom had two doors, the one we had used to enter from a little narrow hallway, and another on a wall perpendicular to the hall. It stood slightly open. I peeked through.

  I saw Chet sitting on the edge of a double bed, his back to me. He was bent forward so that I could see nothing of his head above his shirt collar. I eased the door shut, leaving him to mourn in private.

  Footprints in the snow multiplied until a continuous path of slush connected Gisele’s body and the door to the bunker. At noon, one of the helicopters airlifted both bodies away, swerving around a jagged peak and disappearing in the west.

  * * * * *

  Detective Kronenberg talked to us, one at a time. He and I sat at the dining room table with a silent note-taking policeman seated in the corner. In response to his first question, I explained that I was Chester Lamb’s first wife and Patrick’s mother. Kronenberg’s eyebrows went up, but he said nothing.

  “It was you who found the body of Mrs. Lamb, was it not?”

  “Erin—Miss Toomey—and I. We went in together, but she passed out for a minute, so I guess you could say I was the first to really look at the . . . at Mrs. Lamb’s body.”

  “When was the last time you saw Mrs. Lamb?”

  I had to think. I had heard her in the kitchen when I went out for a walk last night, but I hadn’t actually seen her. “When we were all in the living room after dinner. Mr. Lamb and Mrs. Lamb presented their wedding gift to Mr. Lamb and . . . look. This is going to confuse me. Can we refer to everyone by their first names? We have two Mr. Lambs and two Mrs. Lambs and two Toomeys.”

  “If that will help you, certainly.” He turned to the note-taking policeman for confirmation that he understood the change.

  “The last time I saw Stephanie was in the living room after dinner and that would have been about nine-thirty or ten o’clock.”

  “When was the last time you saw Miss Schlump?” That was the first time I could recall hearing Gisele’s last name.

  “I didn’t actually see her, but she brought us coffee in the living room at about that same time. That is, when Chet was making his presentation. She’s the only one who could have left the coffee tray on the sideboard because it wasn’t there when Chet started talking, and when he finished, it was.”

  “What time did you go to bed?”

  “About midnight, but Lettie Osgood and I stayed up and talked for a while in our bedroom.”

  “Did you, at any time, hear gunshots?”

  “No.”’

  “Did you hear anything unusual? A scream? Any strange noise at all?”

  “No.”

  “On which side of the house is your bedroom?”

  “On the southwest side. I remember seeing the glow of the setting sun out my bedroom window shortly before dinner.”

  “You were on the side that faces the meadow where Gisele’s body was found.”

  “It does seem as though I would have heard a gunshot. Unless the gun had a silencer.”

  “It had no silencer, Mrs. Lamb.” He studied his fingernails. “And you’re certain you did not see either Stephanie or Gisele between nine-thirty or ten and midnight, when you went to bed?”

  “I didn’t see them, but I think I heard them.”

  “Explain.”

  “I took a walk outside sometime after ten. I only walked around the house and sat on a rock for a little while. But when I walked past the kitchen door, I stopped because I heard voices. I couldn’t hear most of what was said, but I’m certain they were women’s voices.”

  “Go on.” The detective leaned forward, his eyes intense.

  “I’m pretty sure one of them was Stephanie< and it was she who said, rather loudly, ‘If you don’t tell him, I will! I swear to God I will!’ ”

  “And the answer?”

  “I didn’t hear an answer.”

  Kronenberg shot me a withering glare.

  “I didn’t. Truly I didn’t. But I did hear something else. Earlier in the day.” I told him about the argument Patrick and I had overheard when, according to Patrick, Stephanie had yelled something like I know what you’re up to. That remark was in German and the response was in a woman's voice.

  * * * * *

  I flew straight to my bedroom after the interview and found Lettie there, cutting her hair with nail clippers. With the door open, I could see Detective Kronenberg’s back as he sat at the dining table, and I could hear most of what was being said. The most important thing I learned was that they were treating this horror, at least for now, as a murder/suicide. It looked as if Stephanie Lamb, for whatever reason, had shot Gisele Schlump and then turned the gun on herself. I gathered nothing from Kronenberg’s interview with Juergen because they spoke in German, but bits and pieces of the interviews with Patrick, Babs, and Erin told me the general direction in which the investigation was heading.

  Kronenberg asked Patrick, who had arrived at the chateau several days earlier than I had, if he knew of any problems between Gisele and Stephanie. Patrick denied knowing any, but he did describe the comment we’d heard Stephanie make to Gisele, repeating it verbatim in German.

  “What do you think she meant by that?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just repeating what I heard, as well as I can remember.”

  “It sounds rather . . . threatening, doesn’t it?” Kronenberg paused, as if he wasn’t sure “threatening” was the right word.

  From where I stood, I could see Patrick’s face beyond Kronenberg’s back. I glanced at Lettie, now sitting on her bed with her hands clasped under her chin, her eyes narrowed in concentration. Lettie is blessed with an amazing memory. She remembers license numbers from her childhood, the color of her children’s third grade lunch boxes, and how many pairs of black socks her husband currently owns. When there’s confusion, it’s good to have Lettie around.

  Patrick paused before answering Kronenberg’s question. “Stephanie, my stepmother, was a direct sort of person. She could be very confrontational, and there are those who thought she was too controlling.”

  “You did not like her.”

  “Oh, no, no, no! I liked her.” When Kronenberg said nothing in response, Patrick added, “If I didn’t like her, would Erin and I have decided to have our wedding here?”

  Kronenberg tossed a cas
ual arm over the back of his chair. “When did you leave the house to pick up Mrs. Lettie Osgood?”

  “It must have been around ten.”

  “And when did you return?”

  “Maybe, eleven? I was gone about an hour, because I had to wait at least a half-hour for Mrs. Osgood’s cab. I drove Juergen’s little cart down to the road so it would be easier to bring her and her luggage back here.”

  “Did you see anything out of the ordinary? Either on your way down or on your way back?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  Lettie whispered to me, “Of course, we wouldn’t have seen anything unusual that early. Juergen talked to Stephanie on the phone after I got here and everything must have been normal then, because they were very calmly discussing Italian wine.”

  “That’s right. So Stephanie was definitely alive after eleven. But what about Gisele?”

  “Juergen thought she might be in the kitchen, remember? He asked you to go down and tell Gisele to make a pot of decaf.”

  “If she was there, but she wasn’t.”

  Lettie put the back of her hand against the side of her mouth and whispered, “I seriously doubt that Stephanie would shoot Gisele and then call her brother to discuss Italian wine!”

  * * * * *

  I sneaked across the landing and down the stairs to the living room, then tried to figure out how to get to the kitchen without letting Detective Kronenberg hear or see me. I liked the idea of eavesdropping from my own bedroom, and I didn’t want to call attention to its proximity to the dining room. By winding down, around, and through the swimming pool room, I found a way. The pool room was warm. A wispy layer of steam drifted on the surface of the water.

  In the kitchen, I slapped mustard and a bit of ham on some pumpernickel bread, added a couple of pickle wedges to two plates and balanced a glass of water on each. I had no appetite, but it was lunchtime and Lettie said she was starving. She claimed to have eaten nothing since breakfast on the plane yesterday.

  Under the telephone on the kitchen wall, a note pad caught my eye. I recognized Stephanie’s handwriting and the sort of morphing figure-eight doodle I had seen her trace absentmindedly. With a jolt, I flashed on a memory of the same doodles she drew all over the margins of a letter in the lawyer’s office while Chet and I banged out the terms of our divorce.

  I tore off the top sheet and tucked it in my pocket. Since these notes turned out to be important, I reproduce them now:

  Back in our room, I handed Lettie one of the plates and checked on the scene in the dining room. Erin had replaced Patrick in the hot seat. Lettie waved me to a corner of the room out of the line of sight from the door.

  “He asked Erin if she knew anything about those things you heard Stephanie say. You, know, ‘I know what you’re up to,’ and ‘If you don’t tell him, I will.’ Remember?” Lettie took a bite of her sandwich and swiped a bit of mustard from the corner of her mouth with the back of her wrist.

  “And?”

  “And she said she didn’t know anything about either of those comments, but Dotsy, she sounded funny when she said it. I think she was lying.”

  Six

  Kronenberg and his assistant climbed the stairs to interview Chet in his own bedroom. I supposed Chet didn’t feel up to coming downstairs. Meanwhile, Lettie and I descended to the living room where Juergen soon joined us. He’d been on the phone for the past hour. I’d seen him pacing the porch outside the living room, a cell phone to his ear. Awkward. If I’d known him better, I would have hugged him. Words were hopelessly inadequate to comfort a man who has just lost his sister and his—his what? His employee? Why did I feel as if she was more than an employee? Had they been lovers? Babs told me he was single, but as far as I could recall, Juergen himself hadn’t said anything about his marital status. Gisele kept a bedroom here. Juergen’s reaction to finding Gisele in the snowy meadow had been painful to watch. And then when he came into the bunker and saw his sister—the sister he’d grown up with and known all his life—lying there, her head a mass of blood.

  A gust of cold air swept in with Juergen as he slid the glass door closed. He nodded to Lettie and me, jammed his fists in his pockets, and cleared his throat. “I need to go to Zurich.”

  The announcement startled me. “Now? Have you told Detective Kronenberg?”

  “He’s with Chet at the moment. I don’t want to interrupt them.” His eyes darted toward Lettie, then me, then back to Lettie. “I suppose I should ask him first.”

  “Yes, I think you should,” I said.

  “I’m not in the habit of asking permission to drive to my own home.” He said this, not angrily but as if he was struggling to sort out a new order. Things had changed. New priorities. New demands.

  “These are not normal times,” I said, with as much kindness in my voice as I could muster.

  “My father—our father—Stephanie’s and mine. He’s ninety-five and in poor health. Very poor. In fact, he could die at any time. He’s bed-ridden and he has a nurse with him around the clock.”

  “I didn’t know your father was still alive.”

  “He hasn’t much more time. But this will be on the television news by evening. I can’t keep it off the air for long. Our family is well known. This will be big news in Zurich.”

  “Don’t they have to wait until the next of kin is notified?”

  “Stephanie’s next of kin has been notified. Chet.” He nodded at the stairway. “He’s upstairs. Gisele’s parents have been notified as well.” Juergen shifted his meaty frame to the sideboard and poured himself a couple of fingers of scotch. He held up his glass to us, offering.

  I shook my head. “No, thanks.”

  “My father’s nurse will turn on the evening news in his bedroom. She always does, but whether he pays attention to it or not, I don’t know. I could call her and tell her to leave the TV off, but that won’t work for long, will it?”

  “Juergen, are you sure he should be told at all?”

  His head jerked toward me.

  “He’s ninety-five and in poor health,” I said. “The death of a child is absolutely the worst pain a parent can endure. Could he endure it? Might it kill him?”

  Juergen walked back to the windows, turning his back on Lettie and me. For a long time, he said nothing, and then, “You are right. I’ll call his nurse and alert her. He must never be told.”

  * * * * *

  I had forgotten all about Brian. He was due to arrive that morning, and if I had thought about him at all, I would have wondered why we hadn’t heard from him. He found his own way up the mountain. Lettie and I, still sitting in the living room, heard his voice.

  “Dad! Stephanie! Where is everybody? What the hell’s going on?”

  I dashed toward the sound of his voice and found him in the kitchen. I hugged and kissed him, then held him at arm’s length. “Awful news. Horrible. Let’s go to the living room. You need to hear this sitting down.” With one arm around his sturdy waist, I steered him to a chair. He had seen the helicopter and the crime tape so I started with the worst. As I told the story, Brian’s face reflected a tumult of emotions.

  “Where’s Dad? I have to see him.”

  “He’s talking to Detective Kronenberg in his room—upstairs, on the top floor.”

  Lettie interjected, “Maybe he shouldn’t just barge in.”

  “He’s Chet’s son. He can barge in.” I stood and gave Brian one more hug before he headed up the stairs to locate his father. Brian, my stalwart son. Just having him here buoyed me up. In the last few years, I knew, Chet had shoveled more and more responsibility for the John Deere dealership onto Brian’s shoulders. Stephanie, as their accountant, maneuvered relentlessly to take over the policy-making end of the business, and Chet couldn’t or wouldn’t stand up to her. Brian told me about this during the Sunday dinners we always shared. He told me that Stephanie’s ideas for business models in general weren’t so bad, but the problem was she didn’t know a thing about farming or farm machinery.
He’d had to be rather blunt with her a couple of times. I pointed Brian toward the correct stairway and moped back to the living room.

  * * * * *

  I heard Kronenberg and Brian in the dining room above us. It sounded as though Brian had taken the same chair at the table the rest of us had occupied—the hot seat. It was hard to hear from this distance. I caught only bits and pieces of Brian’s answers and nothing at all of Kronenberg’s questions.

  “Actually, I spent last night in Geneva—United flight—from Washington. It was late, you know and I didn’t want to barge in after they were all asleep. . . . I’m devastated, of course. . . . Of course not.”

  I motioned to Lettie, pointing up the stairs. As quietly as possible we climbed the stairs to the landing and slipped into our bedroom, casually, so that if either Brian or Kronenberg saw us, we wouldn’t seem to have been sneaking. I left the door open half-way, then moved around the room until I found the spot that afforded the clearest reception of voices from the dining room. I heard:

  “I have never met Gisele Schlump, in fact, I’ve never been to Switzerland before.”

  “Do you know who she was?”

  “I’ve heard Patrick mention her. She lived here, didn’t she? She was their cook. I may have heard Stephanie, my stepmother, mention her a time or two as well.”

  “Did Stephanie and Gisele get along?”

  “I don’t know! Really, I’m not even sure I ever heard Stephanie mention her.”

  “Can you think of any motive she might have had for wanting to kill Gisele?”

  “Absolutely none.”

  “Can you think of any reason Stephanie might have had for wanting to kill herself?”

  “Absolutely not! Stephanie is the last person in the world I’d expect to kill herself.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Stephanie was confident. Sure of herself. Those sorts of people don’t kill themselves!”

  I turned to Lettie and whispered, “Those sorts of people do kill themselves, I’m afraid.”