Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

  I jumped at the loud thunk that suddenly came from the lift pole beside me. What was happening? The wires began moving and the dangling chair nearest me jiggled toward the plateau. I expected to see an occupied chair rising up from below but all I saw, ascending or descending, were empty. I turned to Patrick.

  He joined me in looking for some reason the lift had suddenly jerked to life. “Ready to go, Mom?” He waved goodbye to the man he’d been talking to and we headed back toward our trail.

  Something made me look up as I passed beneath the lift support near the base of the plateau. Directly over my head an occupied lift chair on the down-moving side bobbled as its rollers slid over a crossbar. All I could see was a man’s pant legs and his shoes. Cordovan Italian-made shoes with randomly placed patches.

  * * * * *

  I don’t know why I bother snooping. I learn more just walking around and minding my own business. Climbing the stairs to my bedroom following my walk with Patrick, I slipped past the open door of Juergen’s little office behind the living room and overheard his end of a phone conversation.

  “No, no. Not Jo burg airport! Some little airport near Pretoria.”

  Of course. The “Jo burg” on Stephanie’s note was Johannesburg, South Africa. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Friends of mine who went there on safari last year came back talking about Jo burg this, Jo burg that. Like a name you really shouldn’t use unless you’d been there and were on intimate terms with the place. I paused again on a higher step and listened a bit more.

  “They were supposed to have sent twelve.” Twelve what? “How should I know?” Know what? “What else can I do? I have enough to worry about, already.” You can say that again. Don’t we all?

  * * * * *

  Back in my room, I kicked off my hiking shoes and prepared to take a shower. I could see the police van and the southernmost stretch of the crime scene tape from my window. A light still burned inside the van.

  I thought about the phone conversation I’d overheard and about the fact that Juergen was speaking English. That indicated, I thought, that he wasn’t talking to a fellow German-speaker, but it didn’t mean he was talking to someone whose native language was English, either. The accepted language for international dealings, I knew, was English. Aren’t we lucky? When, say, a Dutchman is talking to a Japanese businessman, he’ll probably do it in English. That made me recall the argument in German I’d overheard between Stephanie and Gisele. Stephanie, after all, was born in Zurich and German was her first language, but she spoke English with no accent.

  Wait a minute. The other conversation, the later one when I’d heard Stephanie yell, If you don’t tell him, I will, was in English. So she wasn’t yelling at Gisele, or she’d have been yelling in German. That meant she was yelling at one of us, and I knew it wasn’t me.

  Eleven

  We went to a restaurant in LaMotte for dinner that evening. The eight of us bundled up and tramped to the little elevator hut, across the snow that by now had acquired an ice glaze on top like the sugar crust on a crème brulee. Surprisingly, everyone but Lettie already knew about the elevator. Perhaps Juergen had treated each guest to a guided tour as he’d done for me. Lettie, awe-struck, compared the hut to Alice’s rabbit hole, falling down into another world.

  The restaurant was expecting us, but we weren’t expecting our entry to be as uncomfortable as it was. Maybe Juergen was, but I wasn’t. All heads turned when we walked in. The wait staff seemed to freeze in place. The maître d' conferred discretely with Juergen as he led us toward a table for eight near the center of the rustic dining room. Juergen said something to him and, like so many baby ducks, we turned and followed them to a more secluded part of the restaurant, to a large round table behind a quaint wooden screen. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that we were the subjects of keen local gossip, but we obviously were. LaMotte, after all, was a small town if you disregarded tourists, and we had come in the slack season between skiing and summer hiking. The year-round residents probably wouldn’t number more than five thousand. The Merz family, wealthy financiers from Zurich with a vacation house above the town, had brought this tragedy down upon them. Stephanie, daughter of the patriarch, had shot herself. But far worse, she had killed one of their own. Gisele—daughter of Herr und Frau Schlump, well-respected local couple. The fact that police now knew it was a double murder wouldn’t be generally known yet. The town was in mourning, and, undoubtedly, outraged.

  And here we were.

  When we first entered, the chatter and laughter of patrons had drowned out the music, but now I heard only the piped-in strains of a string quartet and the scraping of our own chairs on the floor.

  I intended to sit as far away from Chet as possible, but it didn’t work out that way. Juergen took the chair nearest the wall and motioned Erin to sit on his right, Lettie on his left. He gently nudged Babs, who already had her hands on the chair next to him, away and pulled Lettie toward him. Brian, maintaining the boy-girl-boy-girl alternation, stepped in beside Erin and pulled out the chair on his right for me. Chet followed and sat on my right. Babs and Patrick took the last two chairs.

  So suave, the way Juergen stage-managed the seating without appearing to do so. Everything about him said “class.” The way his flannel trousers fit just so. The way his hair fit his head without appearing to have been styled. And that watch—that multi-tasking watch with its built-in compass and twirling gears. I wondered how much it cost.

  While Juergen selected the wine and discussed menu selections with the waiter, I studied the faces around the table, trying to see each one as Detective Kronenberg might have seen them yesterday—as if I had never seen them before. Erin, so thin and mousey with her big brown eyes, looked vulnerable. I couldn’t imagine dark passion or rage hiding behind that little round face. Erin seemed oblivious of her own appearance. She wore no makeup and her hair, pulled straight back into a low ponytail, did nothing to amend the basic roundness of her head.

  Juergen sent the waiter off to fetch our wine. I tried to imagine our host in the business suit he’d probably wear on a normal weekday. Tonight, he wore a leather jacket over an edelweiss sweater. He couldn’t leave business behind completely, even in these horrid circumstances, because he had spent a large part of the day in his little office behind the stairs. Each time I walked by, he’d been on the phone, talking business. I wondered how his plan not to tell his aged father about Stephanie’s death was holding up and opened my mouth to ask, then realized now was not the time. The strain of the last two days showed in a tightness around his mouth. In the restaurant’s lamplight, he blinked and squinted as if his eyes hurt.

  Our waiter brought three large carafes of wine and placed them strategically around the table. Sidling up behind Juergen, he waited while Juergen asked us, “How do you feel about a cheese fondue? This place has the best in all of Switzerland.”

  “Oh! It’s been ages since I had fondue.” Lettie clapped her hands and wiggled in her seat. Patrick whispered something to her and she put her hand over his—gave it a small squeeze. Lettie had learned a lot about Babs Toomey since she’d arrived, and she had relayed it all to me while we were getting dressed to come here. When Lettie, with her near-photographic memory, relays information she does a thorough but lengthy job of it. I’ve learned not to ask her anything unless I really want to know everything. Lettie had talked with both Erin and Patrick that day, but separately.

  She told me about Babs Toomey and Mr. Toomey, Erin’s father. It seems they weren’t married long. When Erin was a baby, Mr. Toomey left and took the entire contents of the couple’s bank account with him. His occupation had always been rather hazy, but he claimed to be a pharmaceutical representative. He kept a copious supply of prescription drugs, according to what an aunt had told Erin. Erin, at this late date, had only vague memories of her father. Since Mr. Toomey had managed to obtain an annulment, by long distance and over Babs’s protests, Babs had been engaged three more times, but in each instance the d
eal fell through.

  A young man, passing along the hall behind our table, spotted Patrick and did a quick about face. He dashed over and took Patrick’s hand, bringing my son to his feet. “Patrick, my man! I’ve been trying to call you, but I get nothing but your voice mail.”

  “Ethan, I . . .” Patrick’s face turned red and he choked on his words.

  “The wedding, man! It’s this Thursday, isn’t it?” The young man called Ethan looked across the table and beamed at Erin. “Hey, babes! The bride! Looking good!” He turned back to Patrick, his head jerking backward as soon as he saw the look on Patrick’s face. “It is this Thursday, isn’t it? The hostel is already full. All the old gang is here. We even brought clean clothes. What is it? The wedding’s still on, isn’t it?”

  Patrick took Ethan by the arm and led him away, muttering something the rest of us weren’t meant to hear.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Ethan said, as he disappeared into the hall, Patrick close behind him.

  “Who was that, Erin?” Babs tossed this question across the table, her casual tone and immobile face hiding her private panic, I thought.

  “Ethan. He’s one of the guys we met at the retreat.”

  Poor Patrick. If he told Ethan the wedding was still on, he’d have shocked and outraged Lettie, Brian, and me. We had all told him it would be wrong to have it now. I suspected Chet and Juergen felt the same way, although I hadn’t talked to either of them about it. On the other hand, if he announced the wedding was postponed, Babs would’ve passed out and hit the floor, unless he had already talked to her and received her blessing—and I knew he hadn’t.

  In a family with five children, I suppose one is bound to be left out or at least to feel left out, and it’s often a middle child. Chet and I treated each child as an individual, as we would have done if he or she were the only one. But you can’t always correct for that birth-order thing, and children are born different. Patrick seemed to have been born a shadow child, vague, fragile, illusive. A steady C student. His only sport in high school was track. The high point of his athletic career was when he came in sixth in the high hurdles at a district meet. Our phone at home rang continuously for more than a decade while the brood progressed through middle school and high school, but few of the calls were for Patrick. He had two dates in high school, and I arranged both of them.

  My other four all had something unique going for them. Brian never met a stranger. Most Likely to Succeed, class president, team leader. Charlie, the brain, was valedictorian of his graduating class, now a high school principal and father of three. Jeffrey—biracial, adopted, a natural-born performer, handsome—he had a way of getting down around your heart and warming it. Anne, the baby, the only girl, predictably pampered by her father. I endeavored to counteract Chet’s overindulgence with firmness and thereby earned Anne’s undying resentment, but I still had hopes of bridging the gap between us. I shook myself out of my reverie. Chet, sitting on my right, was already pouring himself a second glass of wine and the rest of us had barely touched our first.

  Patrick slipped back in and took his seat.

  “What did you tell him?” Brian asked.

  Patrick muttered something about meeting up with him later. I assumed he meant Ethan.

  “You’d better man up!” Brian shot this across the table like a slap to Patrick’s face.

  With my left hand, I grabbed Brian’s knee under the tablecloth and squeezed hard. Under my breath, I hissed, “Knock it off!”

  The cheese fondue arrived in two large pots set over ceramic warmers and accompanied by baskets of crusty bread. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had fondue. A Swiss invention, it had a brief run as a fad in the U.S. in the seventies, then sort of died out. Lettie said, “I know there’s an etiquette for eating fondue, but I’m damned if I can remember what it is.” She grinned. “Juergen, before I make a fool of myself, would you refresh my memory?”

  I’d have bet more than one of us was glad Lettie had asked.

  Juergen slid a cube of bread onto his long fork. “It’s not complicated. You aren’t supposed to double-dip. Don’t bite off part of your bread and stick the rest back in.” He demonstrated. “Don’t lick your fork and don’t spit in the pot.” We all laughed, and it felt good. “Try not to drop your bread in the pot, but if you do, don’t go hunting for it. Just leave it.”

  Lesson over, we all dived in. Brian was the first to drop his bread in the pot.

  “Tradition says,” Juergen announced, raising one eyebrow and his wine glass, “if you do drop your bread, you have to buy the next round of drinks.”

  Brian affected indignation, but looked around at our three carafes. The one nearest Chet was nearly empty. Brian signaled the waiter for a refill. I was the next one to lose my bread to the cheese.

  “Jawohl! Another tradition!” Juergen said, and all eyes turned to me. “If a woman drops her bread, she has to kiss the man next to her.”

  Oh, golly! Was this supposed to be funny? Fortunately I had two choices, with men on both sides of me. I turned to Brian, to give him a motherly peck on the cheek, but he was bent sideways, searching for something on the floor. I yanked on his sweater, then felt Chet’s hand on my neck as he pulled me toward him and with his other hand turned my face. He kissed me on the mouth and his lips were not entirely closed, either.

  That irked me to no end. After all, two of my children who had finally made the adjustment to our divorce and Chet’s remarriage, had to sit there and watch their newly-widowed and currently inebriated father, kiss their mother as if this were a stupid game of spin-the-bottle.

  Twelve

  I was the first to spot the moving light inside the pool room.

  The eight of us tramped from the elevator hut back to Chateau Merz in pairs, Juergen and me out in front. Through the night air, crisp and clear, hundreds of tiny yellow lights from houses in the valley and up the slope on the other side, thousands of stars in shades of white, sparkled as if the very air were alive. Juergen pointed out places of interest along the valley floor while I pretended to see what he was pointing to, his outstretched arm barely visible to me as a dark gap in the distant, twinkling lights.

  We had left a couple of lamps burning inside the house, and a flood light attached to the eave at the highest level cast a cone of light down the corner of the house and onto the snow beneath it. I froze in place when my peripheral vision detected movement in the bluish light coming from the lowest level of the house. Looking straight at it, I couldn’t be sure. Maybe it hadn’t moved. Maybe a swaying tree limb or a passing bird had produced the illusion of motion.

  Patrick, a few feet behind me, bumped into my immobile form and said, “Oops. Sorry.”

  The light did move. No doubt about it.

  The pool room, in what might be considered the basement of a normal, vertically-stacked house, was surrounded by large, plate glass windows and sometimes illuminated after dark by underwater lights, but those lights weren’t on now. Instead, a single beam moved to the left, then swerved across the pool water, casting wavy reflections along the far wall, bouncing eerie phantoms off the glass.

  “What’s that?” I pointed, and, one by one, my seven companions zeroed in on the light.

  “Don’t panic,” Juergen said. “It may be Zoltan.”

  Zoltan? Did I hear that right? Wasn’t that the name of an extra-terrestrial or something? Were we about to get beamed up? I remembered the landing strip Patrick and I had discovered that morning and wondered if the next thing we’d hear would be those five notes from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

  The light swerved again. As if attached to a metronome, it swung across the ceiling, down one wall, and back again.

  Juergen strode across the last stretch of snow and downhill to the level of the pool. Brian, my fearless firstborn, dashed ahead and caught up with him. The rest of us kept our distance. Cupping his hands around his eyes, Juergen peered in, rapped on the glass. He shouted something in German.


  “What did he say?” I turned to Patrick.

  “He said something like, ‘You’re scaring the shit out of my friends.’ ”

  Juergen and Brian disappeared around the corner and I assumed they were entering through the door on the far side. A minute later, the overhead lights inside the pool room popped on and Juergen waved us all in.

  Zoltan turned out to be not an alien but Juergen’s local handyman. He lived somewhere to the west and he regularly dropped by, Juergen told us, to do routine maintenance on the house. Under a ragged knit cap, his rheumy eyes surveyed our group with little interest. He carried a coil of rope slung over one shoulder and anchored by a gloved hand. The back of his leather glove glistened with the slug tracks left from wiping his nose.

  Juergen told us Zoltan was only looking for a sweater he had lost. They talked in German for a minute before the handyman left through the door we had just entered, and my heart returned to something like its normal rhythm.

  * * * * *

  “You see, Lettie? Kronenberg’s completely ignoring the most likely scenario.” I pointed my toothbrush at her like a teacher chastising a student.

  Lettie slapped a glob of age-reversing goo across one cheek and looked up at me from the side of her bed, an attentive expression on her green face.

  “I’ve known all along it was most probably an outsider,” I said. “This house is not as isolated as you think. There’s the elevator. Anyone from down below who has a key—and who’s to say Gisele didn’t have copies made?—could zip right up from town. You saw how Zoltan can drop in whenever he feels like it. Has Kronenberg even considered who else, other than us, might have a motive for killing either Gisele or Stephanie?”