Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

  Juergen’s words passed over my head. “Bring in your van. I’m sure you can understand the stress all of us are under. We need to talk to each other privately, to comfort one another! I’ve lost my sister and my good friend.” His voice rose an extra octave, trembling. “Chet has lost his wife! These boys have lost their stepmother! We’re all at the breaking point!”

  Kronenberg waited several beats before he answered. “Ja.”

  Brian spoke up. “In the meantime, what do we do? Can we leave? Go into town? Go to Geneva?”

  “Ach, nein!” Kronenberg’s face darkened. “You cannot leave. I will need to talk to you all again. I will . . .” He turned his back to us and jammed his fists into his pockets. When he turned around again he spoke slowly, as if consciously choosing each word. “I do not know how long this will take. Of course, I cannot hold all of you hostage. You will need to buy food, you will need to walk, to exercise. I must ask you to give me your passports. You cannot leave the country and if you are leaving the house, you must tell me where you are going.”

  “But this could take weeks! I have to be back at work next week!” Babs cried.

  “I’m sorry about that, but finding out who murdered these two women is more important.”

  “Sounds like you think one of us did it,” Chet said.

  “Given the isolation of this chateau and the time frame, Mr. Lamb, I’m afraid that’s the most likely answer.”

  The room went silent while we took in Kronenberg’s statement. I glanced around again and caught Babs looking at me. Was she thinking, Dotsy, the woman spurned? The one most likely to have wished Stephanie dead?

  “I assume you have tested both victims’ hands for gunshot residue,” Juergen said. Good old Swiss practicality.

  “We found gunshot residue on Stephanie Lamb’s right hand. None on Gisele Schlump. The absence of residue on Miss Schlump’s hands and clothing tells us she was shot from a distance of more than five feet and did not fire a gun herself.”

  “Have you narrowed down the time any better since yesterday?” Chet asked.

  “I won’t to go into the issue of time right now. I’ll be talking to each of you individually.”

  It seemed significant to me that Kronenberg easily answered the gunshot residue question but balked at the one about time. Why? I said, “We know it happened before it snowed. It must have, because there were no footprints there until”—I nodded toward Erin, sitting meekly beside her mother—“until Erin and I went in the next morning.”

  “I would like to start with Mrs. Lamb.” Kronenberg scowled at me. “Let’s talk upstairs in the dining room. The rest of you can go about your business, but when I call you in, please bring your passport with you.”

  * * * * *

  I handed Kronenberg my passport and the phone pad note in Stephanie’s handwriting. It gave me pause, handing over my only means of leaving the country to a man who looked as if he could hardly wait to sink his teeth into me. Today he wore a coat and tie rather than his uniform and his blond hair was slicked back without a part. His tweed jacket smelled of dry cleaning fluid. His eyebrows slanted up as they stretched from his pale blue eyes to his temples. He flipped my passport open to the photo page, glanced at it and then at me. We both sat in the same positions at the dining table as we had the day before.

  “What’s this?” He frowned at the phone pad note I’d handed him.

  “I thought I’d better give this to you. I was planning to give it to you even before you told us about—what you just told us about.” My voice didn’t sound like it belonged to me. “I found this by the phone in the kitchen. It’s Stephanie’s handwriting. It might be the last thing she ever wrote. I assume she must have been talking on the phone and . . .”

  “How do you know it’s her handwriting?”

  “I recognize the doodles.”

  He studied the note but said nothing.

  “I thought the Ag and the Au might refer to silver and gold. Chemical symbols, you know.”

  “Do you work, Mrs. Lamb? What do you do?”

  “I teach history at a junior college in Virginia.”

  “Not chemistry?”

  “No.” Did the man think you had to be a chemistry teacher to know a chemical symbol when you saw one?

  He put down Stephanie’s note and flipped through a few pages on his own small pad. He nodded to his note-taking assistant in the corner. “Yesterday you said the last time you saw either Stephanie or Gisele, was about nine-thirty or ten o’clock, but you heard them later, through the kitchen window, when you took a walk.”

  “I heard Stephanie. I don’t think I heard Gisele.”

  He flipped back a few pages. “You heard Stephanie say something like, ‘If you don’t tell him, I will. I swear I will.’ Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was anyone with you on this moonlight walk, Mrs. Lamb?”

  “No.”

  “You just decided to go out by yourself and have a little walk around the house?”

  I felt heat in my neck. “I needed to clear my mind. I needed some fresh air.”

  “Why?” His right eyebrow shot upward.

  Oh hell! How did I get myself into this? “We had a roaring fire in the fireplace, and I was a bit overheated. Plus, I’d been riding on trains all day. I was tired of sitting.”

  “You weren’t upset? Angry?”

  “No.” Okay, I was upset because Chet and Stephanie’s wedding present had made mine look paltry, but I didn’t need to tell him that.

  “When did you go to bed?”

  I had to think. Hadn’t he asked me this yesterday? What was my answer? If I gave him a different answer today, Kronenberg would ask me which answer was a lie. If I gave the same answer, it would sound rehearsed. “It must have been about midnight, I think.”

  “Can anyone else verify that?”

  This was awful. “Lettie. Lettie Osgood.”

  “Did you go out again after that?”

  “After I got dressed for bed? No!”

  “Calm down, Mrs. Lamb.”

  There must be a course in detective school called, How to make absolutely anyone lose their cool. I took a deep breath and clamped my hands together under the table.

  “How did you feel about Stephanie Lamb? What was your relationship with her?”

  “We didn’t have a relationship.”

  “She was married to the man you were married to until she came along.”

  “I know that.” I’d regained my composure. He couldn’t shake me now. “That’s all water under the bridge. Stephanie was my children’s stepmother. I neither hated her nor particularly liked her.”

  “And yet you were willing to sleep here, in the same house with her and your ex-husband upstairs.”

  “It was important to my son for all of us to be together.”

  * * * * *

  Kronenberg summoned Juergen to the hot seat after he finished with me. Unable to understand what they were saying in German, I left my bedroom with my cell phone and my copy of Stephanie’s note. Lettie and Erin sat curled up in armchairs in the living room, whispering, their heads inclined toward each other. I left them alone and descended one more level to the kitchen.

  Before I left home, I’d called my cell phone company, and they’d assured me my device would work in Switzerland. I could call the States with no problem. I checked my signal strength and dialed the number on the note.

  “You have reached the Cook County Bureau of Vital Records. Our office hours are Monday through Friday, eight-thirty to four-thirty. If you wish to leave a message . . .”

  I hung up. Bureau of Vital Records? Cook County—Chicago? But there were probably dozens of other Cook Counties across the U.S. Why would Stephanie have been calling the Bureau of Vital Records? They kept records of births, marriages, divorces, and deaths. “Hatch-match-dispatch,” Lettie called it. If I called them back during office hours, would they tell me if Stephanie had requested information? Probably not. How could
I find out what she wanted? I could ask Chet. If I did nothing, Kronenberg might do the sleuth work for me. He had the number because it was on the note I gave him, but he wouldn’t tell me, would he? His prime suspect? Not unless it gave him more ammunition to fire at me.

  * * * * *

  I heard voices. From the kitchen window I spotted three women and a man plodding down the slope outside, the women wearing scarves tied around their hair and each carrying a lunch box or bag. I answered their knock and struggled to understand what they were trying to tell me, all talking at once, in German, Italian, or broken English. They had come to clean.

  Knowing Juergen was in the hot seat, I hesitated, then realized he had to know they were here and Kronenberg might put the skids on cleaning lest their cloths erase latent clues. That’s exactly what Kronenberg did. A few minutes later, the crew left by the same door they’d entered.

  * * * * *

  Passing through the living room again, I interrupted Lettie and Erin’s tête-à-tête. “Lettie, what’s three-twelve the area code for?”

  “Chicago,” she told me with hardly a break in her other conversation.

  Lettie—my own little data bank.

  I recalled that both Erin and Patrick lived in Chicago when they were in college.

  Ten

  After our cold lunch of sandwiches and chips, Patrick grabbed me by the arm. “Let’s go for a walk, Mom.”

  I snagged the coat Juergen had lent me and followed my son outside.

  By this time the police had managed to drive, push, and muscle a little van into a spot not far from the bunker. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Kronenberg picked up his papers and left the house. Of course, he’d still be calling us in to talk to him, but at least we could talk normally inside the house. I felt conflicted—glad to see the back side of Kronenberg, but sorry I’d lost the eavesdropping potential of our bedroom so close to the dining room. The big detective had never discovered I was listening.

  Patrick and I skirted the crime scene tape and headed off toward the west, in the general direction of the spot along the road where the cab driver had deposited me and my luggage. Before we actually reached the road, Patrick pointed north and we walked that way, following a lightly trodden path.

  “I know more about the time now, Mom.”

  “How?”

  “I overheard part of Dad’s interview with Kronenberg.”

  “Good boy.”

  “I wasn’t eavesdropping. I happened to be going up the stairs and I couldn’t help overhearing.”

  I decided not to tell him I’d been shamelessly doing that for the past two days. It was beside the point. I stepped around a half-frozen cow patty in my path. Much of the snow on this side of the hill had already melted, or perhaps it hadn’t received as much snow to begin with. “Kronenberg thinks I did it, you know.”

  Patrick stopped and looked at me. “Uh-uh. He thinks Dad did it. He was giving Dad the third degree. I wanted to run in and tell him to leave my father alone.”

  “Why? My motive is obvious, but why does he suspect your father?”

  “Probably because the spouse is always the number-one suspect.”

  Had Kronenberg learned of their money troubles? Brian told me in confidence about the missing money from the John Deere accounts, so I didn’t want to mention it to Patrick now. Ridiculous! Chet wouldn’t kill anybody. I glimpsed another potential problem. What if Chet and I became suspects one and two? Would I defend myself at his expense? Would he, if he knew something that would throw a bad light on me, do so in order to save himself? I pushed those thoughts back.

  “They found Stephanie’s Blackberry in the bunker.”

  “I remember seeing it there, lying on the floor.” Reluctantly, I recalled the gory scene. The blood, the matted hair, the gun. The Blackberry phone lay a couple of feet away from the body.

  “They checked it and found her call to Juergen was made at eleven thirty-one p.m. It was the last call made from that phone. Kronenberg figures the snow started falling about four a.m. so that narrows it down a bit. Yesterday, all they knew was that it happened between nine p.m. and six a.m.”

  “That makes sense. It was about eleven-thirty when I heard Juergen talking to her. We were in the living room. They were discussing wine, and I sort of figured she was in the bunker.”

  “Could she get a cell phone signal in the bunker? It’s inside a mountain.”

  I thought about it. Patrick had a good point. “She could have stepped outside to make the call.”

  “Maybe she did.” Patrick stopped and looked back over his shoulder. Back toward the bunker and the Chateau Merz.

  “Do you suppose that was when it happened?” I grabbed his arm. “Do you suppose she stepped outside to make the call and saw someone shoot Gisele? Ran back into the bunker?”

  “It had to be after she talked to Juergen.”

  “Of course. Maybe she finished the call, hung up, and then saw the murder.”

  “Ran back inside.”

  “But not fast enough. No time to close the door behind her.”

  I wondered if Kurt Kronenberg had it figured the same way. I thought some more as I walked, following Patrick along the narrow trail. We had left the road behind. The road switched back and down the mountain while our trail swerved the opposite direction into a broadening meadow dotted with flowers and patches of snow. After a couple of minutes, I said, “It won’t work. If it happened like that, the shell casing for the bullet that killed Gisele wouldn’t have been inside the bunker. And the shell casing for the one that killed Stephanie probably would have been.”

  Patrick turned, raised one finger and said, “Plus, they found gunshot residue on Stephanie’s hand.” He resumed his path. “I have to think about it, Mom. Oh, what a tangled web!”

  The path sloped upward to the north, toward a ridge beyond which I couldn’t see. I slowed my pace and Patrick matched his to mine. By this time, I estimated, we had walked more than a mile, maybe two. “This is lovely,” I said, “but where are we going?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been here, either.”

  At the top of the ridge, I saw that the other side was another broad meadow, but to our left the ridge rose higher and flattened out to a plateau. In front of us, the meadow was strewn with brightly colored fabric and a half-dozen people.

  “Paragliders,” Patrick said. “This must be their jumping-off spot.”

  Looking more closely, I spotted a multitude of strings attached to each silk-like swath. The people milled around, straightening, spreading, fluffing, and checking. A young-looking man and woman, apparently lashed together, took off toward the north followed by a billowing cloud of orange and red. The cloud rose, fluttered briefly, and then filled with air as the couple disappeared over the edge of the meadow. My heart skipped a beat.

  “Do you want to try it, Mom?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Another man took off a minute later, followed by a solid red canopy. Then I noticed the chair lift. A pair of taut wires emerged from below, from the chasm into which the paragliders had vanished, extended over the cross beam of a supporting pole and across the meadow to another pole, then up to yet another pole at the top of the plateau. Several empty chairs dangled from the wires, still and silent on their continuous loop. This must be how the paragliders got up here. They probably have a button or something to start and stop the chair lift.

  I looked to the summit of the plateau, into the glare of the afternoon sun. Something white and thin jutted out over the edge. Sunlight glinted off its tip. “What’s that?”

  Patrick squinted up, following my gaze, and shaded his eyes with one hand. “I don’t know. I told you, I’ve never been here before.”

  “Let’s find out.” I started climbing.

  “Mom!” Patrick whined. When I didn’t stop, he started climbing, too, but with enough sighs and groans to let me know he wasn’t real happy with me. I slipped on a patch of ice and had to grab a sapling to keep
from sliding into Patrick and returning both of us to our starting point.

  Patrick blew out an impatient breath and grabbed the sleeve of my coat. “I don’t believe you sometimes! Why are we doing this?” He widened his stance and helped me to my feet.

  It was worth the climb. At the break in the slope, I hefted myself up and looked out onto a paved landing strip. A short one, yes, but an actual landing strip. “Wait till you see this!”

  The thin white thing that had prompted me to climb the slope to begin with loomed directly over my head now. I scrambled onto the tarmac and walked around the most emaciated plane I’d ever seen. It had a tiny bubble-like cockpit with two narrow seats, one behind the other. Elevated tail and long, thin wings tipped up on the outer ends. The wingspan must have been sixty feet or more, but I saw no propeller, no jet engines. “What do you call this thing?”

  Patrick, who by this time had scrambled up and onto the flat asphalt, touched the wing that rested on the tarmac, let his gaze flit up the elevated wing. “It’s a glider.”

  “How do you fly it?”

  “You have to launch it with another plane or something. Cool. They call it soaring. It’s popular here. I’d like to try it myself.”

  From long experience, I knew that Patrick’s mouth was braver than the rest of him. I imagined someone appearing out of nowhere and asking him if he’d like to go for a soar around the Alps. Patrick would stammer and stall until he thought of an adequate reason for staying on the ground. I looked across to the other side of the shortest runway I’d ever seen and spotted a small, metal-sided hangar. A little airplane, the kind that has wings across the top, sat inside the open bay, its propeller sticking out as if it were curious about the two intruders. I didn’t see anyone around and wondered if they’d leave the glider out and the bay open when no one was here. “Do you see anyone?”

  “No,” Patrick said, already picking his way down.

  Back in the meadow, we hung around and watched the paragliders. Patrick struck up a conversation with one of the men. I walked close enough to the jumping-off spot to look down on the bright silky rectangles swinging gently, riding the currents into the valley below, zig-zagging across a ribbon-like stream on the valley floor. A beautiful sight, but I dared not stand too close to the edge. Could I ever get up the nerve to paraglide? With my acrophobia? Not without a double shot of Demerol.