Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (12 page)

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?”

“If anyone did come up from the elevator or from the other direction, the snow would’ve wiped out any trace, like footprints or whatever.”

“Right. Chet came back here sometime late that night and there’s no evidence of that.”

“Maybe they’ll find something when the snow melts.”

“After all their tramping around on top of the snow—helicopters and all—I doubt it.”

Lettie thumbed the lid of her jar of age-reversing goo. “You know what’s bothering me? The way we’re all acting normal. Laughing, dropping bread in the cheese, kissing the man next to you. It’s not right! Two people are dead
.”

“Time out,” I said, making a T with my hands. “I didn’t kiss Chet. He kissed me. I could have slapped him.”

“That’s not what I meant. I know you didn’t start it. What I meant was, it doesn’t seem right that we’re all going along our merry way, all cheerful, and acting like we don’t even care that Stephanie and Gisele are dead.”

I plumped down on the side of my bed, opposite Lettie, our knees nearly touching. “Because we aren’t phonies, Lettie. That’s why we’re acting normal.” My mind flew back to a night ten years ago and a lily-draped casket.
“I remember being embarrassed at my father’s viewing when I realized I was laughing too loud. I’d been crying for two days, dealing with morticians and organists—and my mother. I was cried out. At the funeral home that night, I saw friends I hadn’t seen for twenty years, and we started talking about stupid stuff we did when we were in school. It was still funny, so I laughed. What if I’d refused to laugh? What would that make me?”

Lettie put the back of one hand beside her mouth. “A phony.”

“Don’t you feel sorry for those poor folks they put on TV a couple of days after a tragedy and stick a bunch of microphones in their faces? If they don’t cry, everyone says, ‘They aren’t sad so they must be guilty.’ So they get this kind of forced quiver in their voice. But it’s phony.”

“And people who really aren’t sad do that, too.” Lettie placed her jar of goo on the nightstand. “Did you notice how nervous Chet was tonight?”

I pictured the dinner table, the fondue, the tension between Patrick and Brian. I didn’t recall noticing anything about Chet other than the amount he was drinking. Was he drinking to calm his nerves?

“He got up three times and sneaked a peek around that partition between us and the rest of the room. Twice, he went to the bathroom, but he took the long route, through the restaurant instead of just down the hall. And he kept turning and peeking through the slats of the partition.”

I thought about it. “Maybe he was looking for an alibi.”

“An alibi?”

“Chet was in LaMotte at the time of the murders. Drinking, I’m sure, so he was probably at a bar. Until he finds someone who remembers him, he has no alibi.”

I took my toothbrush and face cleanser across the hall to the bathroom, leaving Lettie alone to think about my last statement. When I came back, her thoughts had moved on to another aspect of the murders. “Who was the real target, Dotsy? Stephanie or Gisele?”

“Assuming one was the original target, and the other was killed because she saw what happened?”

“Is there any other possibility?”

I ticked off a few on my fingers. “Suppose Stephanie killed Gisele, someone saw, and killed Stephanie in revenge. Maybe someone saw her, tried to wrestle the gun away from her, and it went off. Maybe vice versa—Gisele killed Stephanie. No, that won’t work. Gisele’s hands had no gunpowder residue. Maybe a third person killed both of them and left the gun beside Stephanie’s hand to implicate her.” Unconsciously I had stood up and begun pacing the floor.

“Then what happened to the shell casing from the bullet that killed Stephanie?”

“The killer took it because . . .”

Lettie looked at me and grinned. “Yeah. Won’t work, will it?”

For the next half hour, Lettie and I reenacted various scenarios, using my Revlon “Natural” as the shell casing for the bullet that killed Gisele and Lettie’s Clinique “Raspberry Rush” for the one that killed Stephanie. We dragged a couple of chairs around to make a gap representing the open bunker door. We made too much noise, because Babs Toomey, looking like a duck in a yellow T-shirt and with orange toe-spacers on both feet, burst in brandishing a rolled-up
Bride
magazine.

But our work was not in vain. We reached the conclusion that, ba
rring a couple of improbabilities, the police were right. A third person killed both Gisele and Stephanie, and unless someone discovered evidence currently unknown to us, these murders would never be solved.

Thirteen

The next morning, Chet got the third degree from Kronenberg.
His summons to the police van came as we all milled about in the kitchen fending for ourselves—toasting, brewing, and getting in each other’s way. He didn’t return to the house for nearly three hours. When he did, he merely paused on the stairwell landing and looked into the living room where several of us sat, reading or doing things on laptops, but said nothing.

Patrick said, “You’re back. Good.”

Chet didn’t react or respond. He turned and continued up the stairs.

The day was warming up to the point that I opted to wear the jacket I’d bought in town other day rather than the heavy parka Juergen
had lent me. I left by the kitchen door, climbed around the north side of the house and across the slushy meadow to the police van.

I rapped on the door and heard, “
Geben Sie
.”

Kronenberg snapped his feet off the desk and sat up straight. He seemed shocked that one of us would come here unbidden.

“I simply can’t stay quiet any longer,” I said. “While you’re harassing all of us, the murderer is getting away scot-free! You need to be looking for someone who came from outside! Gisele was a local girl. How many people in LaMotte knew her? Was she seeing anyone? Stephanie grew up in Switzerland. How many possibilities does that suggest?”