Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

  Through the sliding glass doors to the porch, I saw Brian, one foot on the porch railing, also talking on the phone. I filled Juergen in on the afternoon’s events and then asked him to help me locate the couple who helped Chet find his way home early that Monday morning. He returned to his office for his little black book where he kept a list of neighbors and their phone numbers. Four houses in addition to Chateau Merz had access to the elevator, he told me. He went down the list, phoning each one. No answer at the first one. Voice mail picked up at the second. On the third, he talked to someone, then rang off.

  “Ja, that was old Herr Eggenberger. He and his wife are both nearly deaf. I don’t think he understood what I was saying.”

  Calling the fourth house, he talked to a domestic who promised to deliver Juergen’s message.

  “Now what?” I said.

  Juergen looked at his watch with the dancing dials. “We have time to run over to the Eggenbergers’ before dinner. I told Odile we’d eat about eight.”

  “Do you think they’re the ones we’re looking for?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re home, so we might as well talk to them.”

  We tramped eastward, passing the elevator hut in the wood, then climbed over a split rail fence and up a steep slope. Juergen slowed his pace to let me catch up. He wasn’t even breathing hard. “Are you certain about Chet? That he didn’t do it?” he asked.

  “As sure as I can be. I was married to him long enough to know he’s no killer.”

  “I must say, you’re kinder than a lot of ex-wives would be.” He stopped walking and pointed to a house with dark timber siding, then altered his path in its direction.

  “So who’s our best bet now, Juergen? Chet didn’t do it. Who did?”

  “Until today, I’d have said Milo, Gisele’s would-be lover.”

  “Until today? Why until today?”

  “Because I got a call from a friend in town today, about noon. Milo has a perfect alibi.” Laughing, he laid his hand on my shoulder. “He was in jail at the time of the murders.”

  “In jail? What for?”

  “Drunk in public.”

  “So that must have done it for the police. With Milo out of the picture, they figured it had to be Chet.”

  “Kronenberg has been itching to arrest Chet from the very beginning. I thought, when I turned in those tapes, they would clear things up. Chet said he had come in straight from the elevator about two a.m., and I figured the tapes would back him up.”

  “Don’t they?”

  “They show him coming in about the time he said he did, but they don’t show where else he might have gone, either before he came in, or after. Kronenberg says he could have come in and slipped out again.”

  “How do you know all this? You and Odile both seem to know everything at the same time the police do.”

  “We have our ways.” He picked a purple columbine and inserted it into a buttonhole of my cardigan. He stepped back and gazed out toward peaks to the south. “We used to communicate by yodeling from one peak to another. Our voices would carry for miles. Now we use the telephone and email, but we’re just as terrible gossips as we’ve always been.”

  I itched to ask him if he and Gisele had been lovers. There was plenty pointing to it. Zoltan’s statement to the police that he’d seen them kissing. The flirtatious way I’d seen them interacting. The tapes showing Juergen going to the window at intervals, all that night. His anxiety when he couldn’t find her at bedtime. Milo’s anger at Gisele.

  But I couldn’t think of a way to ask.

  After several knocks separated by long pauses, Frau Eggenberger opened the door. Her crinkled blue eyes lit up when she saw Juergen. Shuffling along in quilted bedroom slippers, she led us down a hall and onto a side porch with a breath-taking view of the Matterhorn. Herr Eggenberger started to stand up, but Juergen begged him to remain seated. He asked them to speak in English in deference to the language-challenged American, me.

  For the next few minutes, both Eggenbergers assured us their hearts went out to us in this terrible time. I wondered how they felt about extending sympathy to Juergen and me since, as far as they knew, either of us might be the killer. I got the impression they had known Juergen since he’d been a child, and they might believe they knew him well enough to trust it wasn’t he. But they didn’t know me from Lady Gaga.

  Juergen brought up the reason for our visit. “We are looking for someone who rode up in the elevator Sunday night with . . . with another American guest of mine.”

  Herr Eggenberger looked at his wife. “Gordon and Daphne. Didn’t they say something about a man in the elevator?”

  “Ja. Yes, I remember!” Frau Eggenberger leaned forward, one hand quivering eagerly. “Gordon and Daphne are friends of ours from London. They’ve been staying with us for the last two weeks. They told us . . .”

  Herr Eggenberger interrupted her. “They told us they had to help a man find his way home. He was drunk.” He glanced at his wife as if she might object to this characterization of a friend of ours. “A girl brought him to the tunnel entrance and asked them to look after him. Make sure he made it to where he was going.”

  “That’s our Chet,” I said.

  “They said they followed him until they got close to your house, Juergen, and then they watched him until they thought he had gone inside.”

  Juergen looked at me and nodded. “Are they here now? Can we talk to them?”

  “I’m afraid you have missed them. They left yesterday for Vienna.”

  Rats. The old joke came back to me again: A man falls out of a plane, but he’s wearing a parachute, but the parachute fails to open, but beneath him is a nice soft haystack, but in the haystack is a pitchfork—tines up, etc. “Might you possibly have a number where they could be reached?”

  Frau Eggenberger pushed herself up from her chair. “I do. I have the number of their hotel in Vienna. Excuse me while I go and get it.”

  —but he missed the pitchfork.

  * * * * *

  Chet had well and truly missed the pitchfork. As soon as Juergen and I got back to the house, I called the number for the hotel in Vienna and talked to the English couple. They remembered Chet, said the time of their encounter was about two a.m., and promised to call Detective Kronenberg at their earliest convenience.

  We were seven for dinner. Babs had usurped Stephanie’s old spot at the end of the table opposite Juergen, an act that might have raised everyone’s hackles except for the fact that it eliminated the awful emptiness in that chair. Lettie had enjoyed her day wandering the streets of LaMotte, reading gravestones in a little churchyard there. Patrick had spent most of his day visiting a few friends who were still in residence at the hostel where his and Erin’s former wedding guests had stayed. Babs and Erin told us they’d done the touristy train ride up another mountain for a better view of the Matterhorn. I told them the whole story of Chet’s day on the lam and his subsequent incarceration. Brian and Patrick, at first deeply concerned, lightened up when I told them about my parasailing insanity in pursuit of their father. Juergen described our visit with the Eggenbergers and the phone call from Vienna that would, hopefully, get poor Chet released.

  I secretly hoped the English couple would wait a bit before making that call. A night in jail wouldn’t hurt Chet and it might do him some good.

  Twenty-Five

  Sunday, April 18—a day I will never forget.

  I lay in bed an extra long time that morning, longing for my pillow back home. The one that smelled like me. I could hear Lettie, snoring softly with her mouth open. The comforter on my bed wasn’t wide enough and it slid off sideways, the sudden chill waking me and forcing me to drag it off the floor several times every night. I lay there and rehashed my last dream, in which I’d been serving a dinner to many people at several tables and thoroughly botching the job. Putting gravy on their ice cream, forgetting people until they shrank to skeletons, bashing soft-shelled crabs trying to crawl off the plates. Anoth
er one of my frustration dreams. I tend to have them when life deals me more than I can handle. They’ve happened before.

  Chateau Merz had no cuckoo clocks. I don’t know why that thought flitted through my mind at that moment. Probably because I wished I could find out what time it was without actually opening my eyes. The house was so chopped up, multi-leveled with narrow halls and angled stairs, that kitchen smells didn’t travel as far as my room. I could see light through my closed eyelids, but I couldn’t tell if coffee was brewing yet or not. I wondered if Chet had come in during the night.

  When would Kronenberg let us leave? He couldn’t keep us here forever. Reminding myself to call Marco sometime today, I realized I wanted, more than anything, to talk to Jeffrey and Charlie. For Charlie, in Virginia, it was six hours earlier, wee hours of the morning. Jeffrey’s dance troupe was on a U.S. tour and probably somewhere in the Mountain Time Zone by now. Maybe one o’clock. So Jeffrey might still be up from last night. I could try—how silly. I’d probably scare him to death, calling him at one in the morning.

  I heard Lettie slip out of bed.

  I needed to do laundry. I opened my eyes and greeted the new day the way a child greets the start of the third hymn. I threw on a pair of jeans and the same shirt I wore yesterday, gathered my dirty clothes into my arms and headed for the laundry room on the bottom level.“Dotsy, where are you?” Lettie called from somewhere. I let her find me. Wide-eyed and flushed, she grabbed my arm and said, “Detective Kronenberg wants to talk to you. He’s in the kitchen.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Nine-thirty.”

  “What’s he doing here so early?”

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  My heart did a flip. “Is Chet here? Did they release him yet?”

  “No. I asked Kronenberg about that but he avoided the question.” She looked at my double armload of clothes. “I’ll take those down to the laundry room for you. You go talk to Kronenberg.”

  I hadn’t even brushed my teeth yet.

  * * * * *

  Kronenberg let me grab a glass of orange juice and a piece of toast before leading me to the dining room, where we automatically took the same seats we’d adopted in our earlier sessions. His junior officer, Seifert, whispered something to him, eyeing me none too subtly as he did so. Kronenberg mumbled something back and Seifert left the room.

  “I need to ask you a few more questions about Sunday evening. Let’s start with the time after dinner, about ten o’clock, when you decided to go for a walk.”

  My heart started pounding. We’d been over this. He already had detailed notes on my every move between dinner and the next morning. What was he looking for? I exhaled slowly.

  “It was turning cold at that time. What did you wear when you went out?”

  What did I wear? This sounded really ominous. I had to think about it. “I changed out of my traveling clothes before dinner and freshened up. I wore my pink cashmere sweater and black slacks and my black slides. Gold hoop earrings.”

  “Slides?”

  “Shoes.”

  “No jacket or coat?”

  “Oh. When I went outside, I put on my new tweed jacket.”

  “May I see this jacket?”

  What the hell? I slipped across the hall to my room and yanked the jacket off its hanger. I handed to him. “I seem to have lost one of the buttons.”

  “When did you lose it?”

  “I don’t know. I noticed it the other day, but since it’s warmed up, I haven’t needed to wear it.” So this was something to do with my missing button. What? Had it been found in a place where it shouldn’t be? In the bunker, maybe? I flashed on a mental image of that next morning, dashing into the bunker with Erin, finding Stephanie’s body. That was the first and only time I’d ever been there, and I certainly hadn’t been wearing my new jacket. I’d run out the kitchen door in my robe and slippers.

  “When you came back from your walk, did you take off your jacket or did you continue wearing it while you”—he consulted his notes—“while you visited with Babs and Juergen in the living room?”

  “I’m sure I must have taken it off. It would have been too warm in the living room with my cashmere sweater.”

  “But you don’t actually remember taking it off.”

  “I’m sure I must have.”

  Seifert returned and pulled out a chair for himself. Kronenberg handed him my jacket, somewhat furtively, I thought. He asked the younger man, “What time did Lettie Osgood and Patrick arrive?”

  More note flipping. “About eleven, sir.”

  “And after they did arrive, Herr Merz asked you to go to the kitchen and brew coffee.”

  “He told me to check and see if Gisele was in the kitchen. If she was, I was to tell her to make a pot. If not, he asked me if I would do it.”

  “And about that time he got a phone call?”

  “Yes. From Stephanie. Something about wine.”

  “When you went to the kitchen, were you wearing your jacket?”

  “No! Why would I put on a jacket to go to the kitchen?”

  I shouted this. Frustrated, angry, I failed to use my indoor voice. This brought Brian up the stairs from below and Patrick in from the hallway. They converged on the scene like barroom bouncers on a table of drunks. Brian held his arms clear of his sides the way he does when he’s ready for action.

  Kronenberg and Seifert didn’t appear to be armed, and I prayed they weren’t. I caught the look Kronenberg sent his partner as he threw up his hands, recoiling. “We mustn’t impose on these good people any more, Seifert. We can handle the rest of this interview at the station.”

  Both policemen stood and quickly gathered their belongings.

  Brian, still at threat level orange, said, “You’re taking my mother with you?”

  “I need to ask her a few more questions.”

  “Does she need a lawyer?” Patrick’s gaze darted from me to Kronenberg and back.

  “Not at this point.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “If I think I need a lawyer, Patrick, you can be sure I’ll ask for one.” I gave both my sons my best mother-is-in-control look, now praying only that no fists would fly before we left this house.

  * * * * *

  They had brought the LaMotte police vehicle with the huge tires. I hadn’t seen it since that first morning when the local police had driven it across new snow up from the western road. They put me in the back seat with a partition between me and the two of them in the front. How had it come to this? A half-hour ago, I was innocently taking my clothes to the laundry room.

  * * * * *

  Brian, Patrick, and Juergen beat us to the police station. Having taken the elevator down, they sat in a row on a bench outside, saying nothing but presenting a unified front. Kronenberg took me to an interview room that didn’t look much like the ones I’d seen on TV. The standard recording device, a phone, and a box of tissues sat on a Formica-topped table but the chairs were oak spindle-backs and the window was trimmed with cotton eyelet tie-backs. I felt as if the last suspect interviewed here might have been the Big Bad Wolf. But my mood darkened when I glimpsed an official-looking form on the file cabinet behind Kronenberg’s seat. He punched a button on the recorder and spoke the date, time, and persons present into its plastic face.

  “You didn’t like Stephanie Lamb, did you?”

  “She wasn’t my best friend, but I didn’t hate her, either.”

  “There’s a lot of room between best friend and hate. Tell me more.”

  With the recorder running Kronenberg sat, arms folded, while I endeavored to describe my feelings toward the woman who, some five years before, had wrecked my plans for the rest of my life. I tried to sound sincere without sounding vengeful. “I’ve gotten past that now. I’ve made a new life for myself in teaching. I love teaching. I have my five children, my grandchildren, and a nice circle of friends back home.” I waited for Kronenberg to relieve me of the burden this monologue.
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br />   He merely nodded and said, “Continue.”

  “I don’t know what else to say.” I paused, then softened my voice. “When Patrick and Erin told me about their plans get married here, I assumed we’d all be staying at hotels of our own choosing, but then they told me about Juergen’s chalet and how much it meant to them for us to all be together. Of all my children, Patrick is the one who’s had the most trouble accepting the divorce.” Why am I telling this to policemen? They have no right to know these things. I felt as if I were walking naked through Times Square. “For Patrick’s sake I said okay. So I came here determined that we would all get along—and we did. Until . . .”

  “Yes,” Kronenberg muttered. He consulted his notes. “Let’s go back to the evening of the murders. You all had dinner together. Did you say, when Stephanie Lamb walked past you, ‘Someone is walking on my grave.?’ ”

  “I don’t recall saying anything of the kind.”

  “What did you mean by that?”

  I made note of the fact that my denial was ignored and figured he had certain knowledge I had made that statement. Someone at our table that evening was trying to frame me. Who? Hurriedly replaying what little I remembered about the dinner conversation—Stephanie called to the phone, strange reactions from Babs, from Erin, and from Juergen when Gisele had announced, ‘Telephone, Steph.’ ”

  “Grave. I remember now. I did say, ‘Someone’s walking on my grave,’ but it had nothing to do with Stephanie. I said it when I shivered. A cold breeze must have blown through just then. It’s an old country saying in America. When you shiver for no apparent reason, you say, ‘Someone’s walking on my grave.’ ”

  Kronenberg said nothing. He flipped through a few note pages, raised his eyebrows at something he’d written, and then looked up at me. “Why did you bring me the notes from the telephone note pad in the kitchen? It seems like such a strange thing to do. You wanted to make sure I saw what was on that pad, didn’t you? Why?”