Juergen pushed a button, and the elevator door slid open. The panel within displayed three more buttons: up, down, and stop. Based on the feel in my stomach, it seemed as if we descended rapidly and a long way. My ears popped about halfway down. When the door opened, I stepped out into a tunnel hacked out of solid rock. A couple of overhead bulbs lit the passage to a door at the far end. Left rough and unpainted, the tube made no attempt to look like anything other than what it was—a hole through a mountain. On the floor beside the elevator door sat a large green canvas tote bag. Juergen unzipped the top. Inside the bag sat several insulated boxes and a cash register receipt. “I ordered bratwurst, potatoes, and some other stuff. I’ve forgotten what else I ordered.” He looked at the receipt more closely. “Ja. Apple strudel.” Juergen slung the straps of the canvas tote over his shoulder and stepped back inside the elevator.
On the ascent, I asked, “So when you want to order food, you call a restaurant and they bring it to the tunnel?”
“Ja. All the local restaurants know us. They bring the food to the elevator entrance, buzz us, and we let them in to deposit the food. The door outside the tunnel is well disguised, so you’d never notice it unless you knew what you were looking for.”
“Another reason not to invade Switzerland. You have a thousand ways to escape.”
Trekking homeward again, we both fell silent and the only sounds were the crunch of snow beneath our feet and the crack of branches heavy with ice. Juergen stopped me when we came to the clearing and
pointed upward. “Orion,” he said. “It gives me great comfort to see the stars. They never change.”
* * * * *
Erin slipped into my bedroom after dinner when everyone else was downstairs. I put aside the page of Stephanie’s notes I’d torn from the pad near the kitchen phone, and patted the bed beside me. Instead, she chose to sit on the side of Lettie’s bed, facing me.
Erin’s round, gamin face was paler than I’d ever seen it, her eyelids pink and puffy. As she sat, her feet left the floor and her black flats slipped, one hitting the floor and the other dangling from her toes.
“Don’t you think you could wear a couple sizes smaller, Erin?” I said, smiling. I intended this as a good-natured tease, not a criticism. When Erin came to know me better, she’d learn how to take my oblique sense of humor.
“These are Mama’s shoes. I only brought wedding shoes and hiking boots. Mama said my boots didn’t go with slacks.” She let the other shoe fall and folded her legs, yoga-style on the bed.
“I see.”
“Have you talked to Patrick today? About the wedding?”
“We discussed it.”
Erin’s eyes seemed focused on a spot to the left of my head. “You want us to postpone the wedding, don’t you, Mrs. Lamb? Please! Patrick listens to you. Please tell him it’s okay to go ahead with it!” She laced her fingers so tightly together, they turned white and red. “We’ve planned this for so long, and Mama has spent everything she can afford on this wedding. I know it’s going to be odd, so soon after Stephanie’s and Gisele’s deaths, but don’t you think they’d want us to go on with it? This was something Stephanie looked forward to and helped me plan for. Surely she wouldn’t want to know she’d caused it not to happen!”
“Think, Erin. When will the funerals be held? And where? Gisele’s will be here in LaMotte, I’m sure. Probably on Wednesday or Thursday. Stephanie’s also. I overheard Chet and Juergen discussing it this afternoon. Juergen doesn’t want his father to discover Stephanie is dead because his health is so fragile. Chet couldn’t possibly attend his wife’s funeral and his son’s wedding in the same town and, very likely, on the same day. That’s unreasonable. For Patrick it would be bury your stepmother and go get married. Boom, boom. Hopefully, with time enough to change clothes between services.”
“But everything is planned! All our old friends are coming!” she whined. Erin and Patrick had met at a summer retreat near LaMotte and had stayed in touch with the young people they’d met there, most of whom were from this part of Europe. The majority of the attendees were to be those friends, our family being few in number.
“If money is the problem, I’m sure Chet and I can both help her out. Wouldn’t it be nice if you two could get married, perhaps later in the summer, at home where our friends and family could also be there?”
Tears ran down Erin’s cheeks. She swiped at them with the palm of her hand. “You don’t understand! I knew you wouldn’t.”
I yanked a tissue from the box on my bedside table and handed it to her. “I do understand, Erin. You and Patrick have your hearts set on your Matterhorn wedding, and now this. It’s heart-breaking, but try to imagine how Patrick’s father feels. Think how Juergen feels.”
Erin gathered up her too-big shoes and left the room. I replayed the whole conversation in my mind and came to a startling conclusion. Erin’s haste to marry Patrick was about something else. Something she couldn’t talk about. Erin wasn’t a whiner and she wasn’t excessively sentimental. There must be another problem. A threat of some sort that had nothing to do with the Matterhorn.
* * * * *
I found Patrick in the bedroom he shared with Brian. Stopping in the doorway, I chuckled to myself. As when they were kids, they’d already divided the room into Brian’s side and Patrick’s side. Brian’s side was a mess of clothes, paperbacks, shoes and boarding passes. A blue Oxford cloth shirt lay crumpled and wet on the floor beneath the boots he’d worn in the snow. On Patrick’s side, three pairs of shoes were lined up, toes against the wall, exactly three inches between pairs. Bed made, luggage stowed, loose change in a little bowl on the bedside table.
“Dad and Brian went out somewhere together,” Patrick said.
I recounted what Erin and I had talked about a few minutes earlier.
Patrick scooted his chair back from the desk where he had been writing in his journal. “I told her I wanted to postpone the wedding until August. I can get a week off then and she can, too. We could have it at Sacred Heart and most of our friends could attend, but Erin doesn’t want to talk about it.”
“Why do you think she’s so adamant?”
Patrick stood up, laced his hands behind his head, and walked to the window. After a full minute, he said, “I don’t know. I really don’t. Erin isn’t normally like this.” He turned toward me, pulled his glasses off and rubbed the lenses with the tail of his sweater. “She’s always so easy to get along with. Sometimes I have to ask her, ‘What do you want?’ She always goes along with whatever I want.”
“Aren’t there any alarms going off in your head, Patrick?”
He didn’t answer me.
“Might she be pregnant?”
Patrick’s shoulders jerked. I think my question caught him off-guard. “No. She isn’t pregnant.” He coughed and stared at the floor. “I’m sure she isn’t.”
Patrick’s discomfort was palpable. I gave him a break and changed the subject. “I’ve been trying to make sense of this note I found. It’s Stephanie’s writing and it may have been the last thing she ever wrote.” I pulled the note from my pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to my son. “I found it on the pad by the kitchen phone.”
“Why did you take it?” He put his glasses back on.
“I’m not sure. I suppose it’s the lack of a suicide note that’s bothering me.” I paused, wondering if that was really it, or if it was something else. Something about the scene in the bunker this morning? Something I’d heard? “Something’s not right. Don’t you feel it, too?”
“Brian said Stephanie was the last person he’d expect to kill herself. I think he’s right, Mom. Yes. I agree with you. There’s something we don’t know, but what?”
“Look at the note.” I pointed to the Au and the Ag.
Patrick squinted at the page and muttered, “Ag, agriculture, agnostic, agent . . . Au, auto, Auburn University, awesome . . . no, that’s Aw.”
“How about chemical symbols? Stephanie studied chemistry
in college, didn’t she? And all the A’s are capitalized, the way chemical symbols are supposed to be written.”
“Brilliant. Sure. Au is gold, isn’t it? What’s Ag?”
“Silver. I looked it up.”
“Silver and gold.” Patrick resumed his seat in the straight-back chair, crossed his skinny legs, and bent over the note in a Sherlockian manner. “You may be right, Mom, but that doesn’t tell us why. Or who she was talking to at the time, or what they were talking about. I assume she was on the phone when she wrote this.”
“I thought maybe jewelry?”
“Possible. I suggest we ask Dad and Juergen.” With his little finger, he pointed to some numbers Stephanie had written off to one side of the sheet. “Looks like a phone number.”
“Too many numbers.”
“Not if it includes a country code. It starts with 001. That’s the U.S.”
“I think we should call it.”
“Okay, but let’s talk to Dad and Juergen first. No hurry.” He turned the paper sideways. “What’s this? It looks like Jo bury or Jo berg.”
“Looks like her pen was skipping. I’d say Jo bury.”
* * * * *
I found Juergen in a small office-like room tucked between the living room and the stairwell. A couple of filing cabinets, a desk strewn with papers, a laptop computer, a swivel chair on a clear vinyl mat. Juergen sat with his back to the open door.
“Knock, knock,” I said.
He was on the phone.
“Excuse me.” I whispered. “I’ll talk to you later.”
* * * * *
Brian and Chet had retreated, inexplicably, to the kitchen with a bottle of Macallan’s Scotch. Brian sat on the counter, his feet crossed at the ankles. Chet sat on a stool at the butcher-block table, hunched over his glass of single malt, neat. It shocked me to see how much larger than Chet Brian was now. Brian was talking about money. Chet may or may not have been listening. I didn’t interrupt them.
* * * * *
Lettie emerged from the bathroom adjacent to our room, dressed for bed, her face smeared with the green wrinkle-reducing goo she’d been using for years. She carried a bottle of lotion to her bed and began slathering her legs.
I was making a copy of Stephanie’s note because I had decided to give the original to Detective Kronenberg. I assumed they’d be back soon because they’d left crime scene tape up.
“Will the police come back in the morning, do you think?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. What do you think now, Dotsy? I’ve been mulling it over in my head all evening. I haven’t heard a word anyone else has said to me.”
“Me, too,” I said, placing Stephanie’s note on top of the dresser and slipping my own copy into a drawer. “I don’t believe Stephanie committed suicide. It makes no sense. She wasn’t depressed. She was picking out wine a few minutes before . . . well, actually I don’t know that. I don’t know how long it was after that phone call to Juergen. It couldn’t have been long though, could it? Unless she came back from the bunker and then went back again later.”
“Were there any footprints in the snow leading to the bunker?” Lettie cocked her head and looked up from her slathering.
I thought carefully. “No. Erin and I were the first to walk over that direction and there were no footprints. Ours were the first. The snow was pristine, I’m sure.”
“So no one entered or left the bunker after it snowed. Wonder what time that was?”
“You know what, Lettie? I think it was someone from outside. Someone from the town, maybe. At first I thought the only way to get here was the long route by the road, but then Juergen showed me the elevator. We talked about the elevator at dinner, remember? How easy would it be for someone to have come up in the elevator, and slipped back down into town without anyone here seeing them?”
“What about Gisele?”
“What about her?”
“Did she have a key to the tunnel? Did she use the elevator?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll bet she did. Her parents live in LaMotte.”
“Who else? Don’t they have a handyman or something?”
“Don’t know.” I kicked off my shoes and flopped down on my bed. “This is rather useless speculation, isn’t it? We haven’t the vaguest idea of a motive—motives. Whoever killed Gisele probably had a different motive for killing Stephanie, assuming the same person did both.”
“One was killed for some unknown reason. The other one saw the murder and had to be killed as well.”
“Either Gisele or Stephanie might have been either one.” I stopped and, reluctantly, brought the grisly bunker scene to the front of my mind. “Why was the gun lying there, beside Stephanie? Why did the killer leave it?”
“So it would look like murder/suicide, which it does.”
I got up again and knelt beside my suitcase, scrambled through it for my moisturizer. “Basically, it could have been anyone in the whole world. And until one of us comes up with a convincing reason someone would have to kill either Stephanie or Gisele, we have nothing to go on.”
Eight
Lights burned later than usual in the forensic lab and in Kurt Kronenberg’s office. The Cantonal Police, like the LaMotte city cops, were unaccustomed to murder, and murder of a domestic nature was even more rare. Most of their work involved traffic. Most premature deaths involved snow—skiing or avalanches. The few murders they did have usually involved illegal immigrants and smuggling. Their last domestic killing had been five years ago when a man shot his wife and didn’t even bother to cover his tracks. Police arrested the husband within hours and had nothing to investigate because he promptly confessed.
The technician in the lab didn’t understand the significance of what she saw. Bullet A, removed in the autopsy from Victim A, was a Winchester 9 mm Luger jacketed hollow point. Bullet B, extracted from the chest of Victim B, was a Remington 9 mm Luger metal case. Kronenberg had brought her only one shell casing, a Remington 9 mm.
She dropped by Kronenberg’s office expecting to find it closed and dark, but he was still there, squinting at his computer screen as if his eyes hurt. “Here’s what I’ve found on the bullets.”
Kronenberg studied the form she handed him, blinked and rubbed his eyes, studied it some more. She turned to leave. “Wait a minute!” He threw up one hand and waved her back. “This can’t be right!”
“I assure you it is,” she shot back. “This wasn’t rocket science.”
“The shell casing I gave you came from inside the bunker. Near the body of Victim A.”
“Okay,” she said, not seeing the problem.
“It matches up with the bullet we took from Victim B.”
“Right.”
Kronenberg placed the ballistics report on his desk and covered his face with both hands. “There was no other shell casing in the bunker. I’m certain. We searched that concrete floor on our hands and knees.”
“So Victim A shot Victim B.”
“We already assumed that. But what happened to the shell casing from Bullet A?”
“Pardon?”
“If Victim A shot herself, what happened to that shell casing? Did she pick it up and throw it out the door? The blast blew most of her head off!” Kronenberg folded his arms on his desk and laid his forehead on them. A second later his head shot back up. “And if Victim A was standing inside the bunker when she shot Victim B, who was standing outside a full twenty meters away, and then shot herself, who closed the door!”
Nine
I heard the helicopter as I stood at the big windows in the living room, cradling my morning coffee in my hands. The unmistakable whump-whump of the rotors, a dragonfly-shaped shadow swept across the meadow outside. I looked at my watch. Eight-fifteen. Why so early? I expected the police to return, but at eight-fifteen in the morning? What time did these guys go to work?
I heard their knock at a door somewhere above and behind me. I still didn’t get the overall plan of this house, and noises were alway
s coming at me from unexpected directions. Wooden stairs creaked and popped beneath a multitude of feet in the stairwell. Juergen entered first, followed by Erin, Babs, Detective Kronenberg, and his sidekick.
“We have to get everyone together,” Juergen announced in his high-pitched voice. It sounded as if he was carefully controlling his tone. “Where are the others?”
I ran upstairs for Lettie while Juergen went to look for Chet. Erin was sent to fetch Patrick and Brian, who were supposedly in their room and probably still asleep. Eventually we all settled in the living room. Kurt Kronenberg spoke to us from a standing position, his back to the windows. I had trouble seeing him clearly, with the glare of the morning sun behind him. He looked like one of those light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-after-death movie scenes. When I thought back on this later, I decided Kronenberg had seized the spot deliberately so he could see our expressions clearly when he broke the shocking news. We couldn’t see his face that well, but he might catch a look of guilt or panic as it flitted across one of ours.
“Yesterday we were called to a scene that looked like a murder and a suicide.” He paused, dramatically. “Today, we have a double murder on our hands.” He paused again.
I felt the color rise in my face. A little squeak from Erin, several gasps around the room, and Lettie, sitting beside me on the sofa, grabbed my elbow and squeezed it. Without being too obvious, I tried to see the faces of the others. Chet and Juergen were standing behind the sofa, so I couldn’t see them at all, but Brian’s head swiveled toward his father, his eyes so wide they showed white all around the irises. Patrick and Erin exchanged looks of shock. Babs looked frozen, as usual.
Kronenberg explained what he’d discovered about the bullets and the shell casing and why it meant, unequivocally, that Stephanie couldn’t possibly have died by her own hand or by that of Gisele Schlump. He had to explain it three times before Lettie, still frowning, nodded.
“We’ll be working here for several days, and I have to set up an incident room. We can move our small van in, but it would be difficult to drive it over the ridge. If you have a room here that we could use, it would make things simpler.”
Death of a Second Wife Page 7
