The glider, one wing-tip touching the asphalt, sat just outside the hangar. A small propeller-type plane peeked out the open hangar doorway. Piles of dirty snow lined the edges of the runway. I walked up to the office door and peered through the window, shading my eyes against the sun. Lights inside. The door opened easily with a little tinkle from its attached bell.
I called out, waited a minute, and was rewarded by the appearance of a grease-smeared man in a dark blue jump suit. I told him I was interested in soaring, and wondered if the glider outside could be rented. I’d never done it before, I told him, but I knew they held two people and thought perhaps a pilot might take people up for a price.
“The glider and the plane belong to Herr Spektor,” he told me, nodding toward the small plane as he wiped his hands on a greasy cloth. “He doesn’t take people up.” The man paused, as if searching for a diplomatic way to put it. “That is to say, he doesn’t take up people . . . the general public. He sometimes takes a friend.”
I nodded but said nothing, leaving it up to him to go on.
“Of course, someone has to fly the launch plane. Or sometimes he flies the plane and someone else goes soaring.”
“Do you fly also?”
“Yes.” He scuffed one boot against the concrete floor. “I sometimes fly the launch plane myself, when he comes here alone or with a friend who wants to go in the glider with him. But it’s his plane.”
“Mr. Spektor, you say? Does he live near here?”
The man reddened. He was obviously uncomfortable with my blatant effort to wangle an invitation. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.
Of course he knew. One plane in the hangar, one glider, one employee on site. How could he not know where the owner lived? I spotted an open logbook on the counter so I simply walked over and looked. It wasn’t privileged information, after all. Marco had told me so. Plus, it was right there, open for anyone to see. It appeared to be not a flight log but a telephone log or something. Date, time, name, message. One name appeared more often than any other: Spektor, and on one line it said Anton Spektor.
Having learned all I could from the man in the jump suit, I tramped back down to the meadow just in time to see Patrick, tethered in tandem to a complete stranger, take off running toward the edge of the cliff. The yellow sail behind them billowed, dipped, and fluttered as the stranger pulled on the strings and my son vanished over the side of the mountain.
Eighteen
In mid-afternoon, the golf cart bounced over the hill and down to our chateau, driven by Zoltan the handyman and piled high with bags of groceries. He brought a passenger as well, a middle-aged woman with frizzy hair and a bratwurst-like torso. She introduced herself as Odile Grunder and explained that Herr Merz had employed her as cook. She was to stay with us for the duration and illustrated her intention to do so by swinging an ancient leather suitcase from the space behind her seat in the cart.
A quick mental scan of the house told me there were at least two, and probably more, currently unoccupied bedrooms. Odile seemed to be familiar enough with the house that she didn’t need my help settling in, so I helped Zoltan carry in the groceries. My questions and comments to him during this process were met with silence or, at most, a grunt. Guessing he spoke no English I said, “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
He answered with another ambiguous grunt.
Odile waddled into the kitchen as I was trying to put the groceries away and pushed me aside. “I take over now,” she said, leaving no doubt as to whether she required my help. Her English was heavily accented and rudimentary. Having been banished from the kitchen, I stepped outside and spotted Patrick running down the slope.
“That was the greatest, best, most exciting, amazing thing I’ve ever done in my whole life! Mom, you have to go paragliding! It’s great!”
“Not likely to happen, Patrick.”
“I’ve signed up to take lessons so I can solo.”
“And how long will that take?”
“Couple of weeks.”
“You think we’re going to be here that long?”
“I hope not,” he said, as if he had only now realized he wasn’t a permanent resident. “I mean—if they let us leave, I can take lessons at home.”
I started to mention paragliding lessons might not be readily available in downtown Cleveland, but I knew Patrick was using this new interest as a necessary diversion. He would need time to work through his pain, because his plans for the rest of his life had been trashed. Erin’s shocking revelation that she had married and might still be married was an open wound in Patrick’s heart. Until he could deal with it, any diversion he could find was better than sitting in his room and staring at the wall.
“Where is everybody?”
“Brian and your dad have gone for a walk. Lettie’s in the living room.”
“I want to talk to Lettie.”
That was good. Lettie had always been a good godmother to Patrick, and she understood him better than almost anyone other than me. Wondering what I could do now that I’d been shoved out of the kitchen and didn’t care to infringe on the conversation in the living room, I headed downhill.
“Hello! Mrs. Lamb?” Odile, the new cook, called to me from the kitchen window. I retraced my path, stepped inside, and found she wanted help with planning dinner. How many of us would there be? When did we want to eat?
When the plans were complete I stayed, sitting on a stool at the butcher-block table. “Is this the first time you have worked here? As a cook?” I talked slowly, enunciating carefully and reminding myself that limited English did not mean hard of hearing.
“I vork here two times vith Gisele . . .” Odile lowered her eyes, clamped her hands together. “Ven beeg . . . lots of people come und der house is full. I help.”
“I see. So you knew Gisele.”
Leaving the refrigerator door open, she pulled out a stool and sat on the other side of the table from me. “Oh, so bad. So bad! I luff Gisele. So pretty. Everybody luff Gisele.” Her face screwed up in pain. I was close enough to the refrigerator door to nudge it closed with my foot and did so without saying anything.
Having started, Odile opened up and talked for almost an hour. Gisele had been her niece, she told me. Gisele’s mother and she were sisters. She went into great detail about Gisele’s childhood mishaps and mischiefs. The whole town of LaMotte was in mourning over the loss of their lovely girl. Who could have done such a thing? The pointed glance I got from her eyes told me: We Americans were their prime suspects.
“Gisele haf a lover, you know.” Odile cocked her head to one side.
I wondered if I’d heard her right. Did she mean Juergen? Obviously not. If she meant Juergen, she wouldn’t have referred to him as a lover. “No. I didn’t know that.”
“Ja. He vork in der post . . .”
“Post Office?”
“Ja.”
“Have you seen him since . . . ?”
“Nein.” Odile shook her head and snuffled. Her face reddened. She turned her gaze to the window and I saw that her eyes brimmed with tears.
“Odile, perhaps I shouldn’t ask, but I’ve been wondering about Gisele and Herr Merz. Did you ever talk to her about him?”
“Ja. She tink he very . . . rich. Very good catch for right voman.”
“But not for her, right?”
“Ach! I do not tink so! Marry Herr Merz? I do not tink so.”
I couldn’t figure what she meant by that. I waited, hoping she would go on, but she simply stared out the window until she jerked to attention and said, “You are Mrs. Lamb? Stephanie Merz was Mrs. Lamb, also. What is your relationship?”
“She was married to Chet Lamb, who was my first husband.”
“Ach! Sorry! I didn’t mean to . . .”
“It’s all right. I’m used to it.” I explained why we were all here and staying in the same house. I felt as if she already knew, as if it the whole story had already made the local gossip circuit. I asked her how well she knew Stephanie.
“I haf not seen her since she was . . .” Odile held her hand out, about shoulder height, then raised it. I took this to mean Stephanie had been a teenager when she last saw her. “She move to America, she vork, she marry. But you know that.” She sighed. “When they were young, Juergen and Stephanie, they did not get along.” She grimaced and shook her head.
“They fought?”
“They come here with their parents sometimes, for skiing. Ve vould see them in town, but never together. People who vork here, at this house, tell us about terrible fights between Juergen and Stephanie.”
“Brothers and sisters often fight,” I said.
“Herr Merz—Juergen—always try so hard to please his father. To make his father proud. But Stephanie, she tear him down. Make him look like a dummkopf—like a foolish boy.”
“I can see Stephanie doing that.”
Odile cocked her head to one side and smiled. “Ja.”
“I’ll understand if you can’t answer this, Odile, but I’d like to know what the people in town are saying. Who do they think killed Stephanie and Gisele?”
“At first ve hear Stephanie shoot Gisele und then shoot herself,” she answered, her words carefully measured. “Then ve hear—no. Someone else shoot both of them.”
“We thought the same thing at first. But now? I don’t know. I’m completely baffled.”
“Some say it vass Stephanie’s husband who did it,” Odile lowered her head and glanced up at me through her eyebrows. “Und some say it vass you.
* * * * *
Odile might have been trying to make a point: Americans go home. The dinner she served, wiener schnitzel, sauerkraut, potato dumplings, and a selection of cheeses—all Swiss—carried with it, I thought, a message. Babs kept her head down except when Chet said something, and I got the impression she’d have stayed in her room if Odile provided room service. Patrick and Erin took turns glancing at each other but avoiding eye contact. Brian, uncharacteristically, ate almost nothing.
I said, “Juergen called a few minutes ago. Did you know?”
Chet said, “Where is he?”
“He’s still in Zurich. His father’s been taken to the hospital and now he’s slipped into a coma. Juergen sounded as if he doesn’t expect him to come out of it.”
Chet set his fork down slowly and reached for his wine glass. Brian glanced sideways at Chet. I wondered what they were both thinking. If old man Merz died, would it have any ramifications for Chet? Was Stephanie in her father’s will? Did Stephanie have a will? Was Chet the beneficiary? But Stephanie had already predeceased her father. What would happen to her share of her father’s fortune in this case? I figured it would depend on how the will was worded. Sometimes they had the phrase “or her heirs or survivors” and the money would be passed along to Stephanie’s beneficiaries, but lacking that phrase it might be distributed to the father’s other heirs.
And the most important question of all, did Chet know?
After a long, rather awkward silence, Erin piped up. “When is he coming back?” She looked at me. “Does Detective Kronenberg know where he is? I thought none of us could leave.”
“Juergen asked permission before he left.”
“Sounds like special treatment to me,” Brian said. “Rich guy gets to leave. What if I went up to the van and told him I had to leave because my father was sick?”
Chet swallowed a gulp of wine and winced.
“I didn’t word that right, did I?”
“Kronenberg has Juergen’s passport,” I said. “Juergen can’t leave the country any more than the rest of us can.”
* * * * *
After dinner Patrick was called to the police van. I watched from my bedroom window as he trudged across the meadow in the rosy twilight. The sun had slipped behind the western ridge, casting the remaining patches of snow in gold, the meadow grass in amber. Patrick’s silhouette, hands jammed into pants pockets, shrank and disappeared into the van. I wondered what this was all about.
I stood at the window for a while longer, scanning the sky for that glider. I still wanted to get the numbers on the bottom of the wing, even though I hardly needed more confirmation that the glider at the airstrip and the one that had been buzzing our house were one and the same. A large bird soared in lazy circles over the meadow. All seemed peaceful.
A man came flying out of the van, shouting, running northward. Seconds later, another man—this one I recognized as Kronenberg—dashed out in the same direction. They soon disappeared behind the rise that blocked my view of the bunker, so I ratcheted my window open with the little handle on the sill. Male voices, excited, angry. Had the first man been Patrick? I had to know.
Skittering down the stairs and through the living room, I took the outside flight of stairs to ground level and from there, up the hill and across the meadow. I stood on the little rise and watched two men escort a third across the area still set off by crime scene tape and into the van. The man twisted, growled, and kicked, but Kronenberg and his assistant had him firmly by each arm. Thank God, it wasn’t Patrick. It was Zoltan, the handyman.
* * * * *
I waited on the porch for over an hour, wondering when Patrick would come back. I was dying to know what was happening inside that van. I figured Patrick must have left before the scuffle with Zoltan and then possibly headed elsewhere for a walk to clear his head. But perhaps he’d seen it all. I hoped he had.
Full dark now, I didn’t see Patrick until his head popped up from the stairs. He grabbed me by the elbow and pushed me to the other end of the porch. “You’ll never believe what’s happened!”
“They’ve got Zoltan, don’t they?”
“How do you know that? Never mind. They caught Zoltan poking around inside the police tape and ran out and grabbed him. They brought him into the van—I was just sitting there—and they threw him down in a chair. He was swearing and spitting and they were holding him down. They started questioning him: What were you doing there? Did you find anything? Did you go inside the bunker? Stuff like that.
“I figured they’d tell me to leave, but they didn’t. Finally, I figured out why. They don’t know I speak German. They probably thought, ‘forget him, he doesn’t know what we’re saying anyway.’ So I stayed.
“When Zoltan did start talking, he told them he thought it was okay to go into the bunker now, because it’s been days since the murders. They didn’t believe him, but Mom, here’s the good part. Zoltan told them he saw Juergen and Gisele somewhere over toward that little shed where they keep the golf cart. On the day of the murders. They were kissing, he said.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Right. And then he said he saw some guy named Milo—this was later the same day—come over the hill and go into the house. Into the kitchen. He came out with Gisele, they walked over toward the bunker and he started yelling at her.” By this time Patrick was so excited, he knocked his own glasses to the porch floor. He snatched them up but didn’t put them back on. “He was yelling, calling her a whore, calling her a bitch. Gisele was crying, he said. Then this guy, Milo, he drew back and swung but Gisele ducked in time so he didn’t actually hit her, but he would have if she hadn’t ducked.”
“Who is this Milo?”
“All I got was that he works at the post office in town. Kronenberg seemed to already know who he was.”
“Gisele’s boyfriend,” I said.
“Anyway, after he took a swing at her, she ran back to the house and Zoltan claims he didn’t see anything else. After that, they looked at me and I was just sitting there, playing with my cell phone like I didn’t know or care what this was all about, and Kronenberg told me I could leave.”
* * * * *
Lettie and I had a lot to tell each other that night. She told me about her talk with Erin, and I filled her in on Zoltan’s exploits, Patrick’s paragliding adventure, and my discoveries at the airstrip. Now I knew who owned the glider and, in all likelihood, who had been soaring over the house at odd hours.
His name was Anton Spektor. What I didn’t know was why.
Lettie, bless her little photographic heart, said, “Déjà vu! Anton Spektor was one of the names on Juergen’s email list.”
Nineteen
“Did you see this?” Seifert, Kronenberg’s junior officer, bent over and picked up a button. Cracking ice with his gloved hands, he pared it down to its original size and showed it to his superior.
Now that the snow had melted except for small patches where the sun couldn’t reach, the two were methodically walking the meadow inside the yellow tape, able for the first time to get a really good look at the ground as it would have looked before the snow, near the time of the murders. Best calculations were that the shootings and the onset of snow were separated by less than four hours. Unfortunately, police boots had trodden the snow into mush all over and created soggy pits in the ground beneath. This was their best chance yet to look for that missing shell casing, the one that would have harbored the powder for the bullet that killed Stephanie. Until now they had only been able to clear and search a circle within a ten-foot radius of the spot where Gisele’s body lay. If they could find that second shell casing, it would tell them where the shooter stood when he or she shot Stephanie.
“Zoltan was messing around, just about this exact spot, yesterday,” Kronenberg said, taking the button from Seifert.
“Do you think he planted it? To throw suspicion on someone else?”
“Nope. Look again. Look where you found it. It was frozen solid in ice under undisturbed snow.” He pointed to the spot now disturbed by Seifert’s glove, some five feet from the bunker door and close to the rock wall. “And look at this. Here’s a print that was made after the snow. It’s a shoeprint. Woman’s shoe. But it was made after the snow fell. See? See the difference?”
Death of a Second Wife Page 14
