Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

  “By yourselves?” He filled both glasses with the house white wine.

  “Yes. We decided to brave it alone because organized tours are so confining, aren’t they?”

  He shrugged, wiped a section of his workspace with a towel. “Be careful. Two ladies alone. There are people who will take advantage.”

  “We know that.” Taking one of the glasses and a couple of napkins, I paused, swiping the bottom of the glass before reaching for the second. “Something I’ve been worrying about, though. Ukraine. I haven’t managed to find out much about Ukraine. Bank machines, for instance. Do they have ATMs? You have them all over Switzerland, of course—and France, too. But Ukraine, I gather, is not so modern.”

  “I think they have bank machines everywhere, now.” He shrugged. “But I’ve never been to Ukraine myself.”

  “That’s just the problem. No one has! I can’t find anyone who’s ever been there. I mean, when was the last time you met someone from Ukraine?”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  I dawdled as long as I could, returning my wallet to my purse, closing my purse, settling it on my shoulder, lifting the two wine glasses, putting them down again and grabbing a couple more napkins. Giving him plenty of time to recall a customer from Ukraine in a red ski jacket. Getting no further response from him, I carried the glasses to our table.

  Lettie took a sip of her wine, looked up and nodded at someone behind me. I turned.

  It was the bartender and he held out a credit card toward me. “You dropped this.”

  I thanked him and took it.

  “Lamb,” he said. “I noticed the name. Odd thing. The cantonal police were in here earlier asking about an American named Lamb.”

  I tried to maintain a look of simple curiosity, as if he wasn’t talking about my ex-husband but someone else with the same last name.

  “They showed me his passport photo and asked me if he’d been in here. I told them I didn’t recall ever seeing the guy before.”

  “Oh dear. I hope it isn’t anything serious.”

  “Would they bother to walk all over town showing his passport if it wasn’t serious?”

  I felt strongly that he knew exactly what it was about. Everyone in LaMotte knew about the shootings at Chateau Merz. Would he realize the two Lambs were probably related? When he left, I tried to recall what Chet’s passport photo looked like. If it was the same one he had before we split, it would be more than five years old by now. Chet had lost weight and his face had grown more haggard in the last five years. Passport photos being what they are, I doubted if the bartender would recognize Chet from that photo even if he had been here.

  Lettie put the back of her hand up to her mouth and leaned over the table. “Do you think it was Chet’s passport, Dotsy? Or Brian’s or Patrick’s?

  “I’m sure it was Chet’s.”

  Lettie balled up her fists and slammed them against her thighs. “What can we do? This is terrible! I mean, what if they arrest Chet or something? Do you think they have any evidence against him?”

  “They don’t believe Chet’s alibi. He says he was here but, as you just heard, the bartender doesn’t remember him. If they check into the John Deere franchise’s books, they’ll find it’s nearly broke. They may even find out that Brian suspects it was Stephanie who was taking their money and putting it into a Merz family business.”

  Now that I started it, I had to tell Lettie the whole thing. But Lettie would never tell anyone else. I could trust her. The story lasted longer than my wine, so I ordered another for both of us. Lettie sat, fidgeting, until I finished.

  “Do you think he did it, Dotsy? You know what? I heard him come in that night. I heard him stumbling up the stairs after we were in bed.”

  “I heard him, too. And no, he didn’t do it! Chet may be a jerk and a spineless egotist, but he isn’t a killer.”

  Lettie stepped to the bar and returned with our fresh drinks.

  “I don’t know what to do, Lettie. I can’t just sit around and let Chet get blamed for murders he didn’t commit. There’s something else going on here, but I haven’t the vaguest idea how to find out what it is. There’s the man in the red shoes. There’s my son’s fiancé, who happens to be already married. There’s her plastic mother. Gliders flying over our heads. Tunnels through mountains. Weird notes on phone pads. Johannesburg. World War Two bunkers with guns and wine bottles and . . .” I let my voice trail off, realizing how far afield my brain had wandered.

  “You know what you should do?” Lettie slapped a pudgy, red-nailed hand on the table.

  “What?”

  “Call Marco!”

  Brilliant! Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  * * * * *

  Lettie and I picked our way from the elevator hut through the trees, then westward toward the Chateau Merz. A crystal clear night with no moon; stars were out by the thousands. To the north, a large mound warped the horizon, dividing starry black above from solid black below and at the top of this mound, a black silhouette. A telescope angled upward on a tripod. A figure, kneeling, with head close to the telescope’s lower end.

  “Juergen?”

  “Dotsy. I thought I heard someone. I’m glad it’s you.”

  “I have Lettie with me.”

  “Come on up. I want to show you. But be careful. I almost broke my leg climbing up here.”

  Feeling the slope with my hands, I began climbing.

  Lettie said, “I’m going back to the house. Give me the tunnel key so I can put it back on the hook.”

  I picked my way up the hill, touching rocky outcrops, feeling around and testing each foot placement before putting my full weight on it. When Juergen’s outstretched hand touched my arm, I smelled the leather of his jacket. He helped me up. “Close your eyes for a minute so they can become dark-adapted.”

  I did as he said.

  When he told me to open them, I saw he had a green laser aimed at the heavens. “Do you know Orion?” He swerved the green beam around the constellation I had always thought looked more like an hourglass than a hunter.

  “Where I live in Virginia, we have a fairly dark sky. I can often see the Milky Way.”

  “As well as this?” He moved his beam along the broad sweep of the Milky Way.

  “It’s never this clear or this bright at home.” For the next half-hour Juergen showed me star clusters, nebulae, and constellations with an eagerness in his voice I hadn’t heard before. He told me about seeing the Southern Cross directly overhead when he was in Antarctica. He fiddled with his telescope and, guiding me to the chair he’d brought out with him, let me sit, twist my neck into a painfully torqued position, and see Saturn—rings and all. His wristwatch had a dark blue face now, and a back-lit crystal that rotated when he moved his arm.

  “I had to escape the house, so I came up here,” he said.

  “Did they tell you about the dust-up this afternoon?”

  “Oh, yes. I could hardly miss it. I came back to the house after you and Lettie had left for dinner and found rooms being switched. Like—what do you call it?—musical chairs. Babs and Erin are moving their things to a room down below, near the pool. Patrick and Brian were discussing moving up to the room the women vacated, but I don’t know whether they did or not.”

  “It’s awkward. Not that I have any sympathy for them. It’s Patrick I feel sorry for, but it’s too bad they can’t leave.”

  “Kronenberg might let them go to a hotel in town. After all, they can’t leave the country as long as he’s got their passports.”

  “That’s what I’d do, if I were in their place. I’d go to a hotel.”

  “You understand, though, that I can’t suggest it, because it would look as if I was throwing them out.” Juergen turned a red light onto a star chart at the foot of his telescope.

  “I can’t suggest it either. Babs and I don’t get along. She already thinks I’m out to get her.”

  His flicked the red light off. “I wish she would stop flirting w
ith me.”

  I nearly choked on a laugh. That came totally out of the blue. “She’s flirting with you?”

  “Watch her. You’ll see what I mean.”

  “Did you stick with your decision not to tell your father about Stephanie?”

  Juergen walked over to a boulder and sat. “Yes. His nurses are censoring the news and warning his visitors to stay off the subject. It’s hard, though. He wants his evening news on the television but the nurses are only allowed to let him watch the weather channel.”

  “I’m sure you’d like to go see him yourself.”

  “Until today, I couldn’t. If I’d seen him, I’d have broken down. Maybe tomorrow I’ll talk to Kronenberg about making a quick trip to see him.”

  Careful not to upset the telescope, I stood up. My dark-adapted eyes saw Juergen dimly, hunched over with his elbows on his knees. I waited for him to go on.

  “I spent most of today with Gisele’s parents in LaMotte,” he said. He sucked in a lungful of air. “I’m afraid they blame me, partially. If she hadn’t been here that night, she’d still be alive.”

  “But didn’t she stay here often? Didn’t she keep a room here?”

  “Right. But she didn’t always stay. Just when . . .” his voice trailed off and I wondered what the end of that sentence would have been. I waited a minute in silence, heard a soft keening moan. He was crying. “She was—she was a good friend.” This came out as a high-pitched whine.

  I wanted to ask, “Did you love her?” Instead, I said, “Such a beautiful woman. I wish I could have known her better.”

  “Beautiful. Yes.” He blew his nose, waited, inhaled deeply. “She was so good—so clean—like the air here.” He paused and cleared his throat. When he went on, his voice quavered and rose to a squeak. “Now that she is gone, I feel as if I should sell this house. I don’t want to come here anymore.”

  I was glad I couldn’t see his face clearly. I wondered if Gisele knew how he’d felt about her. I wondered if she had felt the same. I wondered if Gisele’s parents knew about them.

  From down below came the voice of Babs Toomey. “Juergen? There you are! Everyone’s been asking where you were!” Juergen stood up, stepped over toward me, and whispered, “Don’t leave, Dotsy. Stick with me.”

  Sixteen

  Sergeant Seifert’s head bobbed, warning him he’d fallen asleep again. Sitting the midnight to nine a.m. shift in the police van, his two duties were: 1) keep an eye on the taped-off zone around the bunker door, and 2) watch the videotapes from the security cameras. Kronenberg had forbidden him to use the fast-forward button for fear it might cause him to miss some tiny little movement. A head peeking around a corner for a split second. A shadow dashing across the bottom of the screen. This was not what Seifert had in mind when he decided to become a cop. Since midnight, he’d walked the perimeter of the yellow tape a dozen times just to give his eyes a break, an owl swooping down on a rodent provided the major excitement of the night.

  When Juergen Merz brought these tapes to them yesterday, Kronenberg nearly had a coronary. They had noted the position of the security cameras soon after their investigation began, but the devices had apparently been turned off for months. An antiquated system, rarely used. Herr Merz had apologized for its age, as if the police had a right to expect state-of-the-art surveillance in remote mountain homes. He had he come to them that day with the tapes and told them he had, in fact, turned it on that evening because he was concerned about Gisele. He’d asked her to spend the night so she could start breakfast early for the houseful of guests. Each of the three cameras had recorded over any previous images, running out of tape when Herr Merz forgot to turn them off.

  One camera hung from the northeast corner of the house, one from west end of the upstairs hall, and one from the corner of the deck railing outside the main living room. The first kept watch over the east side of the house, down the slope past the kitchen door and the pool room. The second looked down a hall with several doors, one of which—the door to Merz’s bedroom—had been left open all night. The third pointed in such a way as to see the exterior stairs leading up to the deck as well as most of the living room and the balcony above it. It could see only a sliver of the passage outside the doors of the Toomey women and that of Frau Lamb and Frau Osgood. The bathroom across the hall from their rooms couldn’t be seen at all, but Kronenberg had pointed out a glow cast on the opposite wall when someone turned on the bathroom light or opened its door. All three recorded their vistas dimly, in shades of blue, because, except for the beginnings and ends of the tapes, the only light sources were the halogen flood lights under the eaves.

  Seifert heard the scraping of shoes on the wooden steps outside the door, the turn of the knob, and he felt the van dip toward the south as Kronenberg’s bulk crossed the threshold. The smell of coffee came in with him.

  “Wake up. Breakfast.” Kronenberg plopped two paper bags on his desk. One held a croissant, the other, two cups of coffee. Herr Merz had borrowed one of the precious keys to the tunnel, lent for the duration of the police investigation, from another upslope resident. The coffee, from a restaurant down below, was still warm. Handing over the croissant and one of the coffees, Kronenberg said, “What do we know that we didn’t know yesterday?”

  “Camera one, two-eighteen a.m. Chet Lamb walks around the house from the north, past the kitchen door, past the pool room, and disappears.”

  “Two-eighteen,” Kronenberg echoed. He dragged a chair around and sat beside his junior officer in front of the monitor. “What else?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Damn!” He took a sip of his coffee. “That doesn’t necessarily contradict the story he told us, but it doesn’t back it up, either. If he was in town, as he said he was, and came up from the tunnel, he would have walked down that way, but it seems as if he’d have gone in one of the two doors on that side of the house. It was cold. Started snowing about four. But instead, he walks around the house. Did he go through the door to the pool room? He could have gone up the steps to the deck. But why?” Kronenberg jiggled his foot. “He could have walked across the meadow and up to the bunker. Could have gone completely around the house, looking in windows. Could have seen the bunker door open and a light inside.”

  “I’ve been wondering, sir. Isn’t it rather a coincidence that Herr Merz turned on the cameras on this particular night? Of all nights?”

  “What are you suggesting, Seifert?” Kronenberg barked. “That Herr Merz knew there was about to be a murder and turned on the cameras to catch the action?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t mean that.”

  “Herr Merz has already explained that he turned the cameras on because he was concerned about Gisele.”

  “How would turning on the cameras help?”

  Kronenberg’s foot jiggled faster. A bit of coffee sloshed onto his pant leg. “I wonder if he called down to the village. Called her parents and asked if she was with them. Did I already ask him that question?”

  “I don’t believe so, sir.”

  “What about camera two? The one on the porch? I watched most of that one yesterday before I left. Did you finish it?”

  “No one went up or down those outside stairs all night. The light in the living room went out at twelve thirty-two as you already noticed, and after that, you can’t see anything inside the house except a small flash at the top of the screen whenever someone turned on the bathroom light. I’ve written down those times, sir.”

  “They don’t mean anything. Just women going to the bathroom.”

  “What about camera three?”

  “In the upstairs hall, the door to Herr Merz’s room was open and it stayed open all night. Others stayed closed. Herr Merz’s bed was right in line with the camera and you can actually see him in the bed. He first entered the room at twelve thirty-four, came out, in pajamas, at twelve forty, looked out the hall window for a minute, and went across the hall to the bathroom. Went to bed. Went to the bathroom again at two fif
ty. Do you want me to tell you how many times he rolled over? I wrote down the times.”

  Kronenberg craned his neck toward Seifert’s note pad as if he didn’t believe he’d actually done that. “What about Patrick Lamb?”

  “No sight of him in any of the tapes, sir.”

  Kronenberg sat back and exhaled loudly. “It’s too damned bad none of those cameras was pointed toward the bunker.”

  Seifert picked up his pad and glanced at his notes. “The snow started falling on the east side of the house at four oh-two, sir. On the south porch, not until four oh-three.”

  “That’s very helpful, Sergeant.”

  “And I think an owl caught a mouse about three this morning.” Seifert was making a point: I’m conscientious, I’m smart enough to see the humor in this, and I need more to do.

  “Chet Lamb is our man. We know he was out there even if we don’t know exactly where he came from or went to, outside camera range. Herr Merz is completely accounted for, and we have no reason to think that Frau Osgood, Frau Lamb, Patrick Lamb, Fraulein Toomey, or Frau Toomey were anywhere other than in bed, where they told us they were.”

  “And Brian Lamb hadn’t arrived yet.” Seifert bit into his croissant, swigged his coffee, wiped his mouth on his wrist. “What about that phone pad note Frau Lamb gave you? Anything to that, you think?”

  “That woman needs something to keep her busy. Knitting or something.”

  “And the wedding is off because Erin Toomey may already have a husband.” Seifert lowered his head, careful to make his next statement in a way that didn’t sound insubordinate. “If Stephanie did know about this, then Erin had plenty of motive to kill her. And the Chicago phone number was on the note. In Stephanie’s writing.”

  “I realize that,” Kronenberg shot back. “But I can’t see Erin Toomey wrestling Stephanie Lamb into a head lock long enough to shoot her. Can you?”

  “How about the mother? Babs Toomey was keener to get that wedding over than Erin was.”

  “Babs Toomey wouldn’t have had to use a gun. She could have frozen her with one look.” Kronenberg looked at Seifert as if he realized he should stop belittling the sergeant’s ideas. “But you’re right. Both of the Toomeys may have had motive, and, if so, they’d have had to act quickly before Stephanie told what she knew.”