Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

Twenty-Eight

  I called the house and told Odile I was on my way up so she could buzz me in at the tunnel entrance. Stepping out into the sweet pine-scented air above, I indulged in a little Julie Andrews euphoria and hoped no one was watching. As I approached the house I looked to the meadow beyond it and spotted Chet plodding toward me from the direction of the bunker. He quickened his steps when he saw me, then grabbed me, and folded me in a hug. I couldn’t help comparing his embrace to that of Marco’s of a few minutes earlier. Marco’s won. By comparison, Chet’s felt sterile. Cold. Perfunctory.

  “Where have you been?” he asked, now holding me at arm’s length. “We’ve been expecting you for more than an hour.”

  “How did you know I was out?”

  “Odile told us.”

  “Ah, yes. The mountain grapevine.”

  “So you outfoxed them, eh? Something about the buttons on your jacket.”

  “Later. Where’s Patrick?”

  “At the house, I think. He was in his room a little while ago.”

  Over Chet’s shoulder I spotted Juergen just emerging from the bunker. “Have you and Juergen been in the bunker?”

  “He was showing me some old artillery. He has short-wave radio and gas masks from the forties.” His arm still around my shoulders, he steered me toward the house.

  “What was it like yesterday, when everyone heard I’d been arrested?”

  “Patrick and Brian and Juergen came running in, and Patrick was having a fit. Brian was trying to calm him down and he took him off—somewhere. I don’t know. Juergen told me they’d arrested you. Odile got all flustered and ran to the phone. I asked him to tell me more, but that’s all he knew at that point. And listen, Dotsy. I have never felt so helpless in my life. After all you did for me, risking your neck to bring me back. If you hadn’t done that, they’d have launched a manhunt and I’d probably have been killed! And here I was, listening to Juergen telling me about how they’d arrested you, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to help you.”

  You could have done what Juergen and Brian did do. Hire me a lawyer. I said, “Odile ran straight to the phone, did she? Did you overhear anything?”

  Chet stopped dead in his tracks, as if he hadn’t expected the question, and tilted his head to one side. “No. She was talking in German.”

  “Then what?”

  He paused a moment. “I went up to my room. I wanted to think, you know.”

  Yeah, right. You probably wanted to take a nap. “Where was everyone else? How did they find out?”

  We had reached the porch steps. Chet looked at me questioningly. I waited for him to think about it, because I needed to know who knew Kronenberg was coming for my pink cashmere sweater, how they knew and when they found out.

  “Babs was in her room. Lettie was somewhere, because she came running to the kitchen when she heard Patrick. I don’t know where Erin was.” He nudged me up a couple of steps. “Oh, yeah. I remember looking out my window when I got to my room and I saw Zoltan coming toward the house. Then I heard the kitchen door, so I guess he came in that way. Now there’s a weirdo for you.”

  * * * * *

  I found Odile in the kitchen, pounding chicken breasts into thin slabs. She seemed startled to see me, her smile of welcome delayed a second too long. “Something smells good,” I said. “But after my last twenty-four hours, anything other than a jail cell would smell good.”

  “The food was not good?” She pronounced it “goot.”

  I let the small talk work its way around to the LaMotte police station and how much she knew about it. As she finally told me, after much beating about the bush, her sister’s daughter worked in the front office and sometimes, yes—she didn’t mind telling me because there was nothing wrong with it—her niece did call her up from work just to chat.

  Certain that Odile’s quick phone call had been to the police station, I tried to drag out more details about what her niece had told her about my arrest. Had the niece overheard any of the interview? Had Kronenberg or Seifert walked into the front room and talked about it? Specifically, had they said anything about a pink sweater? Of course. Someone had to type up the search warrant that listed the sweater among other items. Would that job have fallen to Odile’s niece? What other items were on the list? I made a mental note to ask Lettie. If she got so much as a glimpse of that warrant, her photographic memory would have recorded it all, right down to the creases in the paper. She’d probably be able to write it out, even if it was in German.

  * * * * *

  Patrick began weeping when he saw me, and I was glad Chet wasn’t there. He had never had much patience with Patrick’s tendency to go soft. I wondered what had happened to that burst of aggressive dynamism he’d shown when he found out about Erin and called off the wedding. When I told him about the extra button shank and the scene in the interview room, he perked up, let out a whoop, and pumped the air. “Go, Mom!”

  “Marco is in town,” I said. “He wants to see you.” I told him where Marco was staying. “Patrick, have you heard anyone mention a pink sweater?”

  His head jerked back. “Pink sweater? No.”

  “Were you here when Kronenberg and Seifert came up yesterday afternoon with a search warrant?”

  He shook his head. “I was outside. Brian told me to take a walk because I was hyperventilating, sort of. When I came back they had left, but Lettie told me about it and showed me the mess they made of your room. I don’t recall her mentioning anything about a sweater, though.”

  Patrick walked to his bedroom window. Since the shifting of rooms following Erin and Patrick’s break-up, he’d been sleeping in the room next door to Lettie and me. Our windows looked out at the meadow, now erupting in yellow bloom, but the bunker door was hidden from our view behind a grassy mound. “The police are here,” he said. “They’re talking to Zoltan.”

  I joined him at the window. Zoltan, Kronenberg, and Seifert stood outside the tool shed at the edge of the meadow, Zoltan fiddling with a leaf-blower and Kronenberg gesturing westward with one arm. “I wonder what they’re talking about.” Zoltan seemed upset, shrugging his shoulders, swinging the leaf-blower this way and that. Could Zoltan have been the one who planted my button outside the bunker? “Patrick, when you were in the van that day and they were questioning Zoltan, did you hear them say anything about a button?”

  “A button? No, not that I recall.”

  “Did they bring in anything else when they brought him in?”

  “Not that I remember. They each had him by one arm, and they sort of threw him down in the chair and Kronenberg started firing questions at him.”

  I remember what Kronenberg had told me: the button had been there before the snow. It was frozen in ice as it would have been if it was lying under the snow, the snow partially melted then refroze, encasing the button. Zoltan’s trespass inside the taped-off area was much later, after the snow and ice had mostly melted. Since then, the weather had been mild.

  A few minutes later, the policemen left Zoltan to his work and disappeared down the path that led west. I thought they might be heading for the road if they had come up here in a vehicle, or they might be heading for the landing strip, as Marco had strongly suggested. To solve their case, Marco told them, they had to follow the gold. And the landing strip with its glider seemed the only connection between Chateau Merz and the shady Anton Spektor. Why was the glider buzzing our house at odd hours? To see who was here? To see if someone in particular was here? Or were they really interested in the bunker? What could they see of it from the air but a rock wall? Was something they wanted inside the bunker, and were they buzzing the place looking for a chance to sneak in unobserved? They’d have to know the keypad combination or else have an accomplice who would let them in.

  Brian and Babs appeared from around the corner of the house and climbed the outside stairs to the deck. I heard a sliding glass door in the living room below open, then close.

  The gold! What if the missing gold
was in the bunker?

  Patrick said something to me, but I shushed him. I had to hold on to that thought. Okay. Suppose the smugglers were using the bunker to stash their gold until they could move it along to their buyers. Suppose some of it got mislaid—left behind when they moved the rest along. That would explain why they were keeping the house under surveillance. They were looking for a chance to pick it up. Using a glider because it made no noise. Wouldn’t draw attention to itself even passing low over the house, whereas an airplane would. A plane or a helicopter flying so low would sound like an invading army inside the house. If this were all true, someone at Chateau Merz would have to be in on it. Working with them. That meant Juergen, Gisele or Zoltan, probably. Stephanie? All the American guests seemed highly unlikely. We’d have had to be in on this longer than any of us had been here. Not likely at all.

  “Mom? Where are you?” Patrick was pushing my shoulder to bring me back to the real world. “I’ve been talking to you for the past five minutes and you haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

  * * * * *

  Babs Toomey’s eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. I found her and Brian in the living room, having an early shooter. I passed on Brian’s offer to fix me one, and sat down. Babs’s shoes were wet from hiking through dew-heavy grass.

  “We’re talking about how much longer we’ll have to stay here,” Brian said. “Babs has big trouble with her job.”

  “I told them yesterday I would be flying back, probably today, and they promised not to fire me. I really thought the whole thing would be over . . . oh, I’m sorry, Dotsy. I don’t mean I was glad they arrested you or I thought you really did it . . . of course, I knew you couldn’t have done it. I . . .” Babs was getting herself in a hopeless tangle.

  “It’s okay, Babs. I hadn’t even thought how this would be affecting your job back home.” Unlike the rest of us who had salaried jobs or owned our own companies, Babs made hourly wages at an insurance company where she hadn’t worked for very long. They might well replace her.

  Brian said, “She called them again a few minutes ago and they told her not to bother coming back to work.”

  * * * * *

  The talk around the dinner table that night centered on one topic: When can we go home? Juergen said he hadn’t heard anything and didn’t know what the standard procedure in a case like this would be. Obviously police couldn’t keep us here forever, but the case hadn’t been solved, and once we left the country extraditing any one of us back would be a lengthy and uncertain process.

  Brian said he intended to take a swim after dinner, Erin and Chet wanted to watch a tennis match on TV. Juergen said he would set up his telescope on the ridge north of the house and invited me to join him. Poor Babs. I recalled how eager she’d been to hang around Juergen and his telescope on the last occasion and thought it insensitive of Juergen to invite only me. Babs had lost her job today, and this was one more blow. One more rejection.

  Rather brightly, she swallowed a sip of Riesling, glanced at her watch and said, “What time is it at home now? Oh, good. I still have time to make a few calls.”

  * * * * *

  Juergen told me to wait at least fifteen minutes for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Meanwhile, I helped him set up by staying out of his way. Against the background of stars, Juergen and his telescope appeared like black paper silhouettes in a Victorian picture.

  “Thanks for hiring that lawyer for me, Juergen. If she sends you a bill, I’ll gladly reimburse you.”

  “Anallese? Right. She’s a very capable woman. I’ve known her since we were children.” He handed me a star chart to hold. “If she sends a bill, she’ll send it to Brian. He’s the one who actually retained her.”

  “I guess you’ve heard about the jacket button and why they let had to let me go.”

  I thought I heard him chuckle. “Odile had to explain it to me a couple of times, but I finally got it.”

  “Odile seems to know a good bit about what goes on at the police station.”

  “I told you, didn’t I? Now that we don’t have to yodel our messages from one mountain to another, news travels even faster by telephone.”

  “Odile has a niece who works at the police station. Did you know that?”

  “Aha! That explains how she knew about the button before we told her.”

  “And my pink sweater. The police came here yesterday with a search warrant and turned my room upside down looking for the pink sweater I told them I was wearing on the night of the murders. I know it was in my dresser drawer the day before, but when the police came in with their warrant, it was gone.”

  “Are you sure you haven’t mislaid it? Taken it down to the laundry room or something?”

  “I’m positive.”

  Juergen opened a folding canvas chair and sat. My dark-adjusted eyes now saw his outline more clearly against the glow from the house lights. “Odile is incapable of keeping her mouth shut. She very well may have told several people about the sweater, whoever was here at the time.” His fancy wristwatch danced and glowed like a digital light show. “Watch out for Babs, Dotsy.”

  “Babs? Why?” The simplicity of this statement and the gravity in his tone startled me.

  “I don’t know anything for sure, but I did notice she was acting strangely when Brian and Patrick and I got back to the house. She was watching us all like a hawk. I’ve seen her and Odile talking . . . whispering, you know . . . more than once.”

  Babs. Babs? I tried imagining that Babs was behind all this. She did have a compelling reason to wish Stephanie dead and she, as well as anyone else, could have slipped out that night and run up to the bunker. That very night, Stephanie had told Erin she was going to tell all about Erin’s marital problem and she could have done it at any time. If Erin or her mother intended to do anything about it, they would have had to act quickly. But the big picture with gliders and spies and gold, if indeed these were part of the picture, was beyond anything I could imagine Babs being involved in. They didn’t fit.

  “Chet said you took him to the bunker today.”

  “Right. We’re allowed to go in now. The police have done everything they need to do.”

  “You have equipment from World War Two in there?”

  “Do you want to see it? I’ll take you there tomorrow.”

  “Thanks. I’d love to.”

  He called me over to the telescope to see Jupiter. Focusing in on the dancing circle in the eyepiece, I saw the planet with its famous Red Spot. Awesome. Juergen explained how to locate Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, but they moved out of the field of vision before I got the hang of it.

  Backing away from the telescope so Juergen could refocus it, I noticed his watch again. “Your watch fascinates me, Juergen. Am I imagining things or does the face change colors? It’s blue now with glowing dots, but earlier I noticed it was white.”

  “You like it?” He unbuckled it from his wrist and turned it over. On the opposite side was another face, white, and with more dials. The blue face side had constellations and a built-in compass that made one part rotate as he turned it.

  “Oh, you Swiss. You do love your timepieces, don’t you? By the way, why are there no cuckoo clocks in the house?”

  “Because I don’t like cuckoo clocks. They drive me crazy.”

  * * * * *

  Juergen and I were lugging our star-gazing equipment back to the house when we passed Brian, heading for the elevator hut. “I’m going to the Black Sheep. See ya,” he said, and kept walking. I helped Juergen stow the telescope in a hall closet and headed toward my room when I heard a sort of “psst” from the stairwell below. It was Brian again. Apparently he had followed us back and come in through the kitchen. I descended to the lower level and found him.

  “I’m going to the Black Sheep to meet up with Francois Bolduc.”

  “Your spy?”

  “Right. He came to town earlier today to talk to Kronenberg and come clean—almost clean.”

  “That�
��s good!”

  “Right. Now I’ve got an alibi just like everyone else. Would you like to come with me, Mom? I’m going to ask him about this other stuff—the landing strip and Anton Spektor and all that. You never know, do you? He’s been looking into the Merz enterprises, so maybe he knows of a connection.”

  I checked my watch. “Sure, I’ll go with you. Let’s take the tunnel key.”

  * * * * *

  Francois Bolduc turned out to be a slick, mustachioed chain-smoker who, in light of the relatively new local ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, preferred to conduct our meeting outside. Brian and I found him at a table on the Black Sheep’s small patio.

  Brian spent the first ten minutes assuring Bolduc that nothing he had told the police would come back to haunt him. They had both told Kronenberg their meeting on that fateful night involved only the farm equipment business and the possibility of expanding into Europe. Neither had mentioned the Merz family. The reason for Brian’s original claim that he hadn’t arrived in LaMotte until the next day, they both said, was simply because Brian wasn’t ready to let his father know about his potential plans.

  I said, “Mr. Bolduc, I have reason to suspect a man named Anton Spektor is involved in the problems the Merz businesses, particularly MWU, have been suffering. Does that name ring a bell?”

  He pulled his cigarette from his lips and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “No. Never heard of him.”

  I decided he was probably telling me the truth. I gave him a brief synopsis of what I knew and why I had mentioned that name, Brian butting in frequently to add or clarify something. Bolduc’s eyes darted left and right as I talked, taking in every stroller past our patio, every window, every little electric car. “I know it sounds crazy but there simply can’t be more than a couple of pairs of cordovan red shoes like these on the planet. I saw them in a store in Capri, on the feet of a man who followed me into a women’s clothing store, and on feet dangling from the chair lift between the landing strip and the valley. It can’t be coincidence. The ones I saw in Capri may still be there, but the pair I’ve seen twice while here must be the same.”