Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (6 page)

“I never did find her last night. If she went home and didn’t tell anyone—” He looked at his watch. “It’s after nine. She normally has breakfast ready by nine.”

Patrick directed him to look out the window.

“Ah. Snow.” Juergen turned to Chet and surveyed my ex-husband’s scruffy appearance, scanning him from head to toe. “Where’s Stephanie?”

“Still in bed, probably.” Chet answered. He looked as if he couldn’t bear explaining again.

“I’ll bet Gisele has gone to the bunker. We keep our extra food stored there.” Juergen turned to Erin, who had finished her cereal and was rinsing the bowl at the sink. “Would you go out and see, love? You know the combination, don’t you?” He turned to me, and said, “We have a combination lock on the bunker door, because in an emergency we might not be able to find the key.”

Erin went to her room for her boots and Patrick followed her. A minute later, they walked back through the kitchen and out the side door. “Snow! Glorious snow!” I heard Patrick exclaim as they shut the door behind them.

Two minutes passed before we heard Erin’s scream. A horrible, trembling cry, it grew louder and louder as she approached the kitchen door. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Come out! Juergen, come out!”

Patrick came down right behind her. “I’m afraid it’s Gisele. Juergen, you need to come out. Mom, I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I’d rather I did.” I dashed out behind Juergen, my bedroom slippers sinking in the new snow. I might as well have been barefoot.

Patrick headed across the fresh white blanket, not toward the rock wall where I thought the bunker was, but to the left, into the middle of the meadow west of the house
and straight toward a splotch of crimson, incongruously marring the pure white all around. Patrick threw his arms out, holding me back as Juergen closed in on the spot and knelt.

I recognized Gisele’s jeans-clad leg and running shoes. An inch or two of snow lay over her and the red stain, near where her chest would be, spread out in a rough circle fading to pink at the edges. Patrick had already pushed back the snow from her face. Milky pale, almost like the snow, her face wore a startled look, the blank blue eyes fixed beneath crystallized, frozen lashes.

Juergen reached out and gathered her up in his arms, rocking silently. A full minute must have passed before he made any sound at all, then it came out as a high-pitched whine. My previous experience with dead bodies and the police urged me forward to pull him back. You weren’t supposed to touch the body. The whole scene took me back, with a sharp pang, to Scotland and the body of a dear young friend—stabbed and wrapped in a blue tarp behind the castle where Lettie and I had been staying.

I couldn’t tell Juergen to leave her alone. It wouldn’t have been right.

“She’s been shot, I think.” Erin said.

“What do we do, now?”

“Call the police.”

“Should we call a doctor first?”

“No need.”

Patrick headed for the house, passing Chet on the way.

“I checked our bedroom,” Chet called up the hill as he approached us. “Stephanie isn’t there.”

Erin and I looked at each other. Her eyes bugged out and I knew what she was thinking.

“Have you checked the bunker yet?” I asked her.

“No. Patrick and I saw Gisele
, and we ran straight back to the kitchen.”

I looked around. The only prints in the snow ran between Gisele’s lifeless body and the house. My feet, now frozen numb, stumbled across the field after Erin. She stopped when she reached the rock face. Now that I knew what lay behind, it was easy to see the outline of the door, painted the same grey as the rock, and an industrial-type touch pad for entry.

Erin punched in four numbers.

I said I’ve dealt with dead bodies before, but never with anything close to what lay beyond that door. I will never forget it. I fear I will never quite get over it.

I saw the feet first, then the blood. Erin fainted dead away and left me with an unobstructed view of the horror. Blood everywhere. Splattered, splashed, streaked across the concrete floor from the door to the walls. Stephanie Lamb lay face up, part of her head blown away, so that nothing but a plum-colored mass of tissue and stringy hair remained on her right side. She lay in an awkward twist, with her right leg folded up under her hips and her torso bent to the left. Her head, what was left of it, lay against her left shoulder.

Within seconds, Chet was on his knees beside me, sobbing. I pulled myself together, took a deep breath of putrid air, and told myself it was up to me. Something, I wasn’t sure what, was up to me. Erin lay crumpled in the doorway, now beginning to stir. Chet knelt beside me, to the right of Stephanie’s body and about two feet from it. His shoulders trembled. I heard Juergen behind me.
“Oh, nein! Ach, nein, nein, nein!”

“Don’t touch anything.” My voice sounded surprisingly strong to my own ears. “Juergen, help Erin. Get her outside. Now.”

I knelt down to Chet, and put an arm across his shoulders. “I’m so very sorry. So sorry.” His hands seemed glued to his face. “Can you stand up, Chet? You can’t stay here. I’ll help you.”

He pushed himself up with one hand, the other still covering his face. “I can walk. Don’t help me.” He stumbled out the door. I couldn’t help feeling as if his main concern was to get out of there. As if he had no desire to cradle the body of his wife. Chet had always had a weak stomach.

I stood for a moment before leaving and tried to take in the whole scene. I could see no sign of a struggle. Shelves arrayed with food, a large floor-to-ceiling wine storage rack along one wall. Ski poles, snowshoes and skis leaned against the opposite wall. A cell phone, it looked like one of the pricey kind that do all sorts of things, lay off to one side. A black handgun lay on the floor, inches from Stephanie’s right hand. I backed out and closed the door.

* * *
* *

The helicopter arrived first.

Patrick had called the police and the police called the rescue helicopter. He told them Gisele was dead, but their procedures called for a swift helicopter pick-up and transfer to the nearest hospital where, if she was indeed dead, she could be pronounced so. The pilot circled, searching for a suitable spot to put down, then settled the chopper, kicking up a cloud of snow and exposing green meadow and early spring flowers beneath.

They weren’t prepared to pick up
two
bodies.

Minutes later, the LaMotte police came careening over the hill in an all-terrain vehicle with tires the size of inflated kiddie pools. In the interim, I had gone back to the house, dressed, and borrowed a pair of boots I found in a closet. Chet and Juergen had both disappeared. Only Patrick stayed outside with me, but several pairs of eyes stared out from windows on the upper floors of the chateau. The police surveyed the situation, pulled out notebooks, scratched down our names, and asked how to open the bunker door. Patrick told them the combination. One of the two policemen stepped inside, glanced around, put a hand over his mouth, and stepped back out, waving his partner back. He stood outside the door staring off toward the distant peaks for what seemed a long time while I waited silently.

At last, he spoke to me, in accented English. “I must be honest with you, Mrs. Lamb. Neither of us has investigated a homicide before. LaMotte is a peaceful town and the worst thing we ever deal with is a bar fight. And not many of
them
.”

The second officer nodded.

“We are out of our—that is—we are not equipped to investigate something like this. I’m calling the Cantonal Police. They will take it from here.” He closed the bunker door and sent his partner to the big-wheeled ATV to make the call.

Five

Detective Kurt Kronenberg arrived by helicopter and ordered his men to work photographing, measuring, and staking out the perimeter with crime scene tape. I slipped into the house
, leaving Patrick and Juergen, who had reappeared and was helping Kronenberg with the minutiae of names, times, relationships, etc.

Lettie and I watched from a bathroom window on the top level of the chateau.
At some point, I noticed the bathroom had two doors, the one we had used to enter from a little narrow hallway, and another on a wall perpendicular to the hall. It stood slightly open. I peeked through.

I saw Chet sitting on the edge of a double bed, his back to me. He was bent forward so that I could see nothing of his head above his shirt collar. I eased the door shut, leaving him to mourn in private.

Footprints in the snow multiplied until a continuous path of slush connected Gisele’s body and the door to the bunker. At noon, one of the helicopters airlifted both bodies away, swerving around a jagged peak and disappearing in the west.

* * *
* *

Detective Kronenberg talked to us, one at a time. He and I sat at the dining room table with a silent note-taking policeman seated in the corner. In response to his first question, I explained that I was Chester Lamb’s first wife and Patrick’s mother. Kronenberg’s eyebrows went up, but he said nothing.

“It was you who found the body of Mrs. Lamb, was it not?”

“Erin—Miss Toomey—and I. We went in together, but she passed out for a minute
, so I guess you could say I was the first to really look at the . . . at Mrs. Lamb’s body.”

“When was the last time you saw Mrs. Lamb?”

I had to think. I had heard her in the kitchen when I went out for a walk last night, but I hadn’t actually seen her. “When we were all in the living room after dinner. Mr. Lamb and Mrs. Lamb presented their wedding gift to Mr. Lamb and . . . look. This is going to confuse me. Can we refer to everyone by their first names? We have two Mr. Lambs and two Mrs. Lambs and two Toomeys.”

“If that will help you, certainly.” He turned to the note-taking policeman for confirmation that he understood the change.

“The last time I saw Stephanie was in the living room after dinner and that would have been about nine-thirty or ten o’clock.”

“When was the last time you saw Miss Schlump?” That was the first time I could recall hearing Gisele’s last name.

“I didn’t actually see her, but she brought us coffee in the living room at about that same time. That is, when Chet was making his presentation. She’s the only one who could have left the coffee tray on the sideboard because it wasn’t there when Chet started talking, and when he finished, it was.”

“What time did you go to bed?”

“About midnight, but Lettie Osgood and I stayed up and talked for a while in our bedroom.”

“Did you, at any time, hear gunshots?”

“No.”’

“Did you hear anything unusual? A scream? Any strange noise at all?”

“No.”

“On which side of the house is your bedroom?”

“On the southwest side. I remember seeing the glow of the setting sun out my bedroom window shortly before dinner.”

“You were on the side that faces the meadow where Gisele’s body was found.”

“It does seem as though I would have heard a gunshot. Unless the gun had a silencer.”

“It had no silencer, Mrs. Lamb.” He studied his fingernails. “And you’re certain you did not see either Stephanie or Gisele between
nine-thirty or ten and midnight, when you went to bed?”

“I didn’t
see
them, but I think I
heard
them.”

“Explain.”

“I took a walk outside sometime after ten. I only walked around the house and sat on a rock for a little while. But when I walked past the kitchen door, I stopped because I heard voices. I couldn’t hear most of what was said, but I’m certain they were women’s voices.”

“Go on.” The detective leaned forward, his eyes intense.

“I’m pretty sure one of them was Stephanie< and it was she who said, rather loudly, ‘If you don’t tell him, I will! I swear to God I will!’ ”

“And the answer?”

“I didn’t hear an answer.”

Kronenberg shot me a withering glare.

“I didn’t. Truly I didn’t. But I did hear something else. Earlier in the day.” I told him about the argument Patrick and I had overheard when, according to Patrick, Stephanie had yelled something like
I know what you’re up to
. That remark was in German and the response was in a woman's voice.

* * *
* *

I flew straight to my bedroom after the interview and found Lettie there, cutting her hair with nail clippers. With the door open, I could see Detective Kronenberg’s back as he sat at the dining table
, and I could hear most of what was being said. The most important thing I learned was that they were treating this horror, at least for now, as a murder/suicide. It looked as if Stephanie Lamb, for whatever reason, had shot Gisele Schlump and then turned the gun on herself. I gathered nothing from Kronenberg’s interview with Juergen because they spoke in German, but bits and pieces of the interviews with Patrick, Babs, and Erin told me the general direction in which the investigation was heading.

Kronenberg asked Patrick, who had arrived at the chateau several days earlier than I had, if he knew of any problems between Gisele and Stephanie. Patrick denied knowing any, but he did describe the comment we’d heard Stephanie make to Gisele, repeating it verbatim in German.