Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (2 page)

The cab stopped on a curve at a spot that looked frighteningly vulnerable to on-coming traffic. A strange vehicle parked in the field to our right must have had suction cups on its wheels, I thought, given the slope. Rather like a golf cart but with extra-large wheels, it supported a seat big enough for two, a flat cargo space behind, and a canopy over all. Any little shift of the rocks under its wheels
, and it would have tumbled down the slope and into the road.

A barrel-shaped man with thinning grey hair approached and introduced himself. “Juergen Merz,” he said
. “And you must be Dotsy.” He extended his hand and signaled my driver to tote my luggage to the fence. This was Stephanie’s brother. Late fifties, I’d have guessed, with a red face and heavy jaw line set on a sagging neck. He reminded me of a former athlete now gone to seed. I tried to imagine him in lederhosen and knee socks rather than his current polar fleece jacket. Expecting him to sound like an Alphorn, I was startled to hear his high, reedy voice.

Juergen waved off my attempt to pay the taxi driver and dug into his own pocket for Swiss francs. He took my suitcase and heaved it onto the back of his vehicle.
I looked up the hill, tracing the tracks of Juergen’s cart through patches of snow and wet grass. We had a long trip ahead of us and I was glad I’d bought that jacket. I had donned it as soon as I left the store. Even in April, dirty ice and snow still lay under scrub conifers and in the shade of exposed boulders. I climbed into the cart and Juergen handed me a fur wrap for my legs.

“First trip to Switzerland?” he asked. When I nodded, he smiled, then switched the machine on and threw it in gear. We jerked up the hill at about three or four miles an hour, the motor of the little cart protesting as we bounced and swerved around outcrops to the crest beyond which I couldn’t see until we were there. At that point we picked up speed alarmingly, careening down and around, sliding on a patch of snow, up another, even steeper slope and stopped. I gasped. As far as I could tell, we were poised on the head of a pin with the invisible earth far below us. In every direction, nothing but blue sky. I dared not turn my head too far because it seemed as if our perch could be overbalanced by the slightest move.

“Beautiful,
ja
?” Juergen apparently thought I was enjoying this. He threw out both arms in a gesture I feared would tip our delicate balance. “This is the top of the world!”

“I’m scared.” My fingers clamped on the fur leg wrap, I fixed my eyes on the floor of the cart. “Sorry, but I don’t do well with heights.”

Juergen chuckled and took his foot off the brake. We pitched forward and down but somehow didn’t turn over. When my courage built to the point that I could look higher than my own knees, I found we had rolled into a broad sloping glen. Ahead of us, a slate roof marked the edge of another precipitous slope—assuming the roof had a house under it.

A woman popped up out of nowhere. Juergen slammed on his brake and called to her. One long blond braid hung down her back to the waist of her jeans. She carried a coil of rope over one shoulder and slung it onto the back of the cart as she approached us.

Juergen introduced us. “Dotsy Lamb, this is Gisele, our cook.”

Gisele nodded and smiled. I estimated her age as mid-forties, her face somewhat weathered but her body robust and trim. “Cook, he says! Cook! And housekeeper and organizer and social planner and girl who fixes whatever is broken. I wish I had nothing to do but cook! Don’t listen to him!” she glanced at Juergen and winked at me. Her accent sounded German.

“All you do is complain,” Juergen chided her flirtatiously. “Shut up and hop on.” He hooked his left wrist over the steering wheel and turned, waiting for Gisele to settle herself. Juergen’s wristwatch seemed alive. So many wheels and things turning at the same time, it made me dizzy. Giddier than I already was.

Gisele plopped onto the back of the cart beside her rope and rode the rest of the way facing backward, her feet dangling. I wondered where she could possibly have been before she materialized, right beside us. I could have sworn there was no one around for miles.

Chateau Merz turned out to be not much smaller than a hotel. In natural wood and with porches all around, it hugged the slope in multiple levels. Flower boxes, not yet planted with summer flowers, underscored its windows and railings. The lowest level sat on a relatively flat space perhaps a half-acre deep. I was greatly relieved to see that a nocturnal ramble outside the house would not necessarily mean a plunge to one’s death. Swiss mountain homes, with their gingerbread trim and natural wood, never look like mansions no matter how large they are. Instead, they tend to look like a collection of cottages, each of which might hold a cuckoo bird ready to pop from a window. Chateau Merz hugged its slope like a jumbo spill of Lincoln Logs. Inside, it smelled of cedar. Juergen ushered me in on one of the middle levels and to my first encounter with my favorite person, my replacement, the current Mrs. Lamb—Stephanie.

Stephanie had changed her hair. Now swept up and back in a clever counterpoint to the downward pull of gravity on an aging face, it made her look a bit like Cat Woman, I decided. Stephanie was only forty-eight but, like many redheads, had that thin skin that wrinkles early. She led me to a small room fitted out with twin beds and twin dressers. It was on the same level as a large, rustic dining room and an open landing that overlooked a living room strewn with cushy sofas and armchairs.

“I’m putting you next to the dining room so you won’t have to worry about stairs. We do have a lot of stairs, I’m afraid.”

Was Stephanie insinuating I’m too old to climb stairs? I can still dance backward in high heels. I can moon walk, but it’s been years since I was last called upon to do so. I felt the blood rush to my face in a torrent the likes of which I hadn’t experienced since the last time I saw Stephanie. Hard as I tried not to take offense, Stephanie invariably peppered every comment with body slams to my ego. I was the matriarch, the dowager, the mother of everyone—including Chet. Chet
, who had wisely upgraded to a newer model. I prayed for strength because I did not want anything to mar Patrick and Erin’s wedding. If that meant gritting my teeth and smiling through a hailstorm of Stephanie’s slings and arrows, so be it. I could do this.

“Lovely view,” I said, referring to the window between the beds.

“You get first choice of beds because Lettie isn’t here yet.”

“I know. She’ll be getting in late this evening.”

Lettie Osgood, my dearest friend and Patrick’s godmother, was flying from Washington to Geneva and hopping a train from there. So Lettie and I were to be roommates. That was good. I had a feeling I’d need to vent occasionally, and Lettie was a great ventee.

From below, a door slammed and Patrick’s voice rose up from some obscure passage. “Is my mom here?”

I ran out to the landing and looked down. Patrick stood in the middle of the living room looking up, his arms spread wide like Romeo under Juliet’s balcony. “Wait right there! Don’t move!” He clattered up a flight of stairs hidden from my view, popped around a corner and caught me up in a hug. His cheeks and hands were cold.

“Where have you been? You’re freezing.”

“Hiking. I walked down to the church to talk to Father Etienne, the priest who’ll be marrying us. The hike back is five miles and all uphill.” Patrick hugged me again, even more tightly this time. I leaned back and took a good look at his face. New glasses. His new glasses with black, squarish frames added something to his thin, pale face. Patrick’s skin had always had a grey translucency that exposed every vein or the tiniest whisker. The new glasses gave his face a touch of boldness. “Let’s go for a walk. Put on some better shoes first.”

“Give me a minute to unpack a couple of things.”

The first thing I did after Patrick left the room was pull out my now-finished needlepoint, tack it to the rectangular board I’d brought with me, and weight it with a couple of books I found lurking under a night stand. I might need to use a steam iron on it, I thought, before I framed it. I flopped my suitcase onto one of the beds and opened it, pulling out the new dress I planned to wear to the wedding. Gossamer green wool that hung in soft folds. Protective layers of tissue paper floated to the floor as I shook it out. I slipped it onto an empty hanger and hung it from the closet door to air out.

From behind me, a soft contralto voice said, “Dotsy. You’re here.”

* * * * *

Babs Toomey, mother of the bride, stood in the doorway stating the obvious
, as usual. Tall and thin with amber-red hair, Babs, like a champion Irish setter, was beautiful. None of us ever mentioned it, of course, but Babs had taken plastic surgery and collagen injections to the point of complete facial immobility. Lips with no creases, skin like wax. Add to that her habit of saying things like
you’re here
to someone standing five feet away, and the result was a woman you could never feel you knew. Never offensive, never endearing either. A mannequin.

“How do you like the dr
ess I bought for the wedding?” I asked, shaking the hem.

“It’s green. Patrick told me you were wearing peach.”

“The peach dress was too tight, so I bought this one.” I waited for her to say something to indicate it wasn’t the worst dress in the world. “You don’t like it?”

“I do. It’s just that my dress is green, too.” Babs floated over and touched the sleeve. “But it’s a small wedding in a town where nobody knows us anyway. It doesn’t matter if we both wear the same color.”

Wheels turned in my brain. Somewhere in my reading of the arcane literature on wedding etiquette, weighty tomes I had read before my eldest son’s wedding and hadn’t thought about since, there had been a suggestion (actually a sub-suggestion under the heading of Attire for Mothers of the Bride and Groom) that the matriarchs should choose dresses of a formality appropriate to the rest of the wedding. Pastels were nice, and the mothers should not wear the same color as the bridesmaids or
each other.
It was suggested that the mother of the bride had first dibs on color choice since she was the more important personage on this particular occasion.

“If you’re worried about the wedding photos, there’s always Photoshop. Patrick can make our dresses any color you want.”

Babs gave me a blank look. “It’s pretty—but with your coloring, something warmer, I’d think.”

I peered around her and spotted Patrick in the doorway. I laced up my tennis shoes and headed for the hallway, pulling my son along with me. “I’m afraid I’ve committed a
faux pas
. Wrong color dress!”

“Don’t worry about it, Mom,” Patrick whispered as he pushed me down the cedar-scented hall. We exited by a door on the same level and climbed around the outside of the house, passing a porch and a small stoop. The door of the stoop led to a kitchen, I deduced, from the clatter of pans and smell of roast meat emanating from it.

“
Ich sehe, was du tust! Du kannst mir nichts vormachen!”

I recognized Stephanie’s voice. She sounded furious. A female voice, muffled, answered, also in German. Patrick saw the look on my face and offered a translation. “That’s Stephanie. She said something like ‘I know what you’re up to.’ ”

“To whom, Gisele?”

“Probably. Pay no attention, Mom. It’s not our problem.”

* * * * *

Patrick led me along a trail eastward and around a hill where blue and yellow crocuses poked fresh heads through patches of lingering ice and snow. A cowbell clanked in the distance. On our left lay a valley peppered with spiky evergreens, and beyond, a half-dozen snow-capped peaks. The tallest one, glowing gold in the late afternoon sun, had that witch’s hat tilt that could only be the Matterhorn. I gasped when I saw it. Patrick indicated a boulder on the inside of a bend in the trail and I sat, breathing in the clean Alpine air, filing this scene away in my mind to return to and savor again and again.

“Tell me about Babs,” I said, taking Patrick’s hand between both of mine.

“Babs will be my mother-in-law in a few days.” He squinted up at a cloud and took a deep breath. I waited. “But I don’t feel as if I know her. Erin’s afraid of her.”

“Afraid of her? Why?”

“What I mean is . . .”

I waited.

“Babs is into image. Hers and Erin’s. Babs . . . has had plastic surgery . . . and other things done to her. More than once.”

I laughed. “You think I don’t know this?”

“Right.” He grinned and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Erin is a plain, simple girl. She’s honest. Totally honest. That’s what I love about her. She wears no make-up and she loves animals. She loves the outdoors. She’d rather be feeding elephants than re-decorating the house.” Patrick glanced at me as if to make sure I understood. Erin worked at a large Illinois zoo and spent most of her days in muddy boots. She had a master’s degree in animal husbandry. “Babs says Erin is un-feminine. She’s told her, more than once, she’ll never get a man dressed the way she dresses.”

“What does Erin say?”

“Nothing. Erin has lost her father. She’s terrified of losing her mother.”

“Oh, but surely she doesn’t think Babs would disown her over a little thing like that.”

“Erin doesn’t know. How
can you tell what Babs feels or thinks about anything?”