Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (17 page)

When we reached the spot where the path turned north, away from the hairpin turn in the road, Patrick started to talk. “Erin thinks we can get beyond this. We can go home, check things out, discover that she really isn’t married and everything will be hunky-dory. No problem.”

“But it’s not that simple,” I prompted.

“Whatever the case turns out to be, she can probably get an annulment from the church. Then we could get married—legally and with the church’s blessing. But I don’t want to. I’d be marrying a liar! Erin can’t see that.” He stopped walking, clamped both hands on his head and gave out with a cry that might have been heard at the top of the Matterhorn. “She thinks all she has to do is prove to me she’s not married and that fixes everything, but it doesn’t! It doesn’t even
begin
to fix it. She lied to me, flat out. If you married someone a couple of years ago and didn’t mention it to your new fiancé, it’s the same thing as lying. We’ve talked to each other about everything, Mom. Everything! I can tell you who she went out with in high school, I can tell you the name of her first grade teacher, I can tell you every little thing she remembers about her father. She only left out one small detail.
‘Oh! Did I mention I got married?’
That’s lying.”

“And you’re afraid you can never trust her again.”

“Right. I can forgive, but I can’t forget. That’s impossible. To forget, I’d need a lobotomy. Every time I had reason to doubt her, I’d think,
She might be lying.”

“It’s been my experience that people don’t change, basically. They can change their eating habits, but they don’t change something as basic as their honesty.”

We had come to the ridge. A half-dozen people and two or three paraglide canopies dotted the meadow beyond. Beside me, Patrick was dancing with pent-up energy.

“I want to do that.”

“What, jump off the mountain? You don’t know how, Patrick. You need training to do what they’re doing.”

“I’m going to go talk to them.”

Before I could stop him, he trotted off across the meadow toward one of the men. Realizing it would be useless to go with him, I decided to climb up the slope to the airstrip by myself. Patrick was a grown man, supposedly. If he wanted to kill himself, I couldn’t stop him. But that didn’t mean I had to watch him do it.

Turning to the flat-topped hill, I studied its slope. The left side, where I climbed up the other day, wasn’t the only way to go. There was the chair lift, its cables stretching across the meadow from one support beam to the next, angling up the slope, and vanishing at the summit. The lift wasn’t running at the moment. I also spied a concrete structure with a hand rail on the far end of the hill. Stairs? I hurried in that direction, about a hundred yards, and found that there was indeed an easier way up than the hands-and-knees route I’d taken before. A set of steps rose, turned ninety degrees, and continued to the top, ending a few yards from the long building that seemed to be a combination hangar and office.

The glider, one wing-tip touching the asphalt, sat just outside the hangar. A small propeller-type plane peeked out the open hangar doorway. Piles of dirty snow lined the edges of the runway. I walked up to the office door and peered through the window, shading my eyes against the sun. Lights inside. The door opened easily with a little tinkle from its attached bell.

I called out, waited a minute, and was rewarded by the appearance of a grease-smeared man in a dark blue jump suit. I told him I was interested in soaring, and wondered if the glider outside could be rented. I’d never done it before, I told him, but I knew they held two people and thought perhaps a pilot might take people up for a price.

“The glider and the plane belong to Herr Spektor,” he told me, nodding toward the small plane as he wiped his hands on a greasy cloth. “He doesn’t take people up.” The man paused, as if searching for a diplomatic way to put it. “That is to say, he doesn’t take up people . . . the general public. He sometimes takes a friend.”

I nodded but said nothing, leaving it up to him to go on.

“Of course, someone has to fly the launch plane. Or sometimes he flies the plane and someone else goes soaring.”

“Do you fly also?”

“Yes.” He scuffed one boot against the concrete floor. “I sometimes fly the launch plane myself, when he comes here alone or with a friend who wants to go in the glider with him. But it’s his plane.”

“Mr. Spektor, you say? Does he live near here?”

The man reddened. He was obviously uncomfortable with my blatant effort to wangle an invitation. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

Of course he knew. One plane in the hangar, one glider, one employee on site. How could he not know where the owner lived? I spotted an open logbook on the counter so I simply walked over and looked. It wasn’t privileged information, after all. Marco had told me so. Plus, it was right there, open for anyone to see. It appeared to be not a flight log but a telephone log or something. Date, time, name, message. One name appeared more often than any other: Spektor, and on one line it said Anton Spektor.

Having learned all I could from the man in the jump suit, I tramped back down to the meadow just in time to see Patrick, tethered in tandem to a complete stranger, take off running toward the edge of the cliff. The yellow sail behind them billowed, dipped, and fluttered as the stranger pulled on the strings and my son vanished over the side of the mountain.

Eighteen

In mid-afternoon, the golf cart bounced over the hill and down to our chateau, driven by Zoltan the handyman and piled high with bags of groceries. He brought a passenger as well, a middle-aged woman with frizzy hair and a bratwurst-like torso. She introduced herself as Odile Grunder and explained that Herr Merz had employed her as cook. She was to stay with us for the duration and illustrated her intention to do so by swinging an ancient leather suitcase from the space behind her seat in the cart.

A quick mental scan of the house told me there were at least two, and probably more, currently unoccupied bedrooms. Odile seemed to be familiar enough with the house that she didn’t need my help settling in, so I helped Zoltan carry in the groceries. My questions and comments to him during this process were met with silence or, at most, a grunt. Guessing he spoke no English I said,
“Sprechen Sie Englisch?”

He answered with another ambiguous grunt.

Odile waddled into the kitchen as I was trying to put the groceries away and pushed me aside. “I take over now,” she said, leaving no doubt as to whether she required my help. Her English was heavily accented and rudimentary. Having been banished from the kitchen, I stepped outside and spotted Patrick running down the slope.

“That was the greatest, best, most exciting, amazing thing I’ve ever done in my whole life! Mom, you have to go paragliding! It’s great!”

“Not likely to happen, Patrick.”

“I’ve signed up to take lessons so I can solo.”

“And how long will that take?”

“Couple of weeks.”

“You think we’re going to be here that long?”

“I hope not,” he said, as if he had only now realized he wasn’t a permanent resident. “I mean—if they let us leave, I can take lessons at home.”

I started to mention paragliding lessons might not be readily available in downtown Cleveland, but I knew Patrick was using this new interest as a necessary diversion. He would need time to work through his pain, because his plans for the rest of his life had been trashed. Erin’s shocking revelation that she had married and might still be married was an open wound in Patrick’s heart. Until he could deal with it, any diversion he could find was better than sitting in his room and staring at the wall.

“Where is everybody?”

“Brian and your dad have gone for a walk. Lettie’s in the living room.”

“I want to talk to Lettie.”

That was good. Lettie had always been a good godmother to Patrick, and she understood him better than almost anyone other than me. Wondering what I could do now that I’d been shoved out of the kitchen and didn’t care to infringe on the conversation in the living room, I headed downhill.

“Hello! Mrs. Lamb?” Odile, the new cook, called to me from the kitchen window. I retraced my path, stepped inside, and found she wanted help with planning dinner. How many of us would there be? When did we want to eat?

When the plans were complete I stayed, sitting on a stool at the butcher-block table. “Is this the first time you have worked here? As a cook?” I talked slowly, enunciating carefully and reminding myself that limited English did not mean hard of hearing.

“I vork here two times vith Gisele . . .” Odile lowered her eyes, clamped her hands together. “Ven beeg . . . lots of people come
und
der house is full. I help.”

“I see. So you knew Gisele.”

Leaving the refrigerator door open, she pulled out a stool and sat on the other side of the table from me. “Oh, so bad. So bad! I luff Gisele. So pretty. Everybody luff Gisele.” Her face screwed up in pain. I was close enough to the refrigerator door to nudge it closed with my foot and did so without saying anything.

Having started, Odile opened up and talked for almost an hour. Gisele had been her niece, she told me. Gisele’s mother and she were sisters. She went into great detail about Gisele’s childhood mishaps and mischiefs. The whole town of LaMotte was in mourning over the loss of their lovely girl. Who could have done such a thing? The pointed glance I got from her eyes told me: We Americans were their prime suspects.

“Gisele haf a lover, you know.” Odile cocked her head to one side.

I wondered if I’d heard her right. Did she mean Juergen? Obviously not. If she meant Juergen, she wouldn’t have referred to him as
a lover.
“No. I didn’t know that.”

“Ja.
He vork in der post . . .”

“Post Office?”

“Ja.”

“Have you seen him since . . .
?”

“Nein.”
Odile shook her head and snuffled. Her face reddened. She turned her gaze to the window and I saw that her eyes brimmed with tears.

“Odile, perhaps I shouldn’t ask, but I’ve been wondering about Gisele and Herr Merz. Did you ever talk to her about him?”

“Ja.
She tink he very . . . rich. Very good catch for right voman.”

“But not for her, right?”

“Ach! I do not tink so! Marry Herr Merz? I do not tink so.”

I couldn’t figure what she meant by that. I waited, hoping she would go on, but she simply stared out the window until she jerked to attention and said, “You are Mrs. Lamb? Stephanie Merz was Mrs. Lamb, also. What is your relationship?”

“She was married to Chet Lamb, who was my first husband.”

“Ach! Sorry! I didn’t mean to . . .”

“It’s all right. I’m used to it.” I explained why we were all here and staying in the same house. I felt as if she already knew, as if it the whole story had already made the local gossip circuit. I asked her how well she knew Stephanie.

“I haf not seen her since she was . . .” Odile held her hand out, about shoulder height, then raised it. I took this to mean Stephanie had been a teenager when she last saw her. “She move to America, she vork, she marry. But you know that
.” She sighed. “When they were young, Juergen and Stephanie, they did not get along.” She grimaced and shook her head.

“They fought?”

“They come here with their parents sometimes, for skiing. Ve vould see them in town, but never together. People who vork here, at this house, tell us about terrible fights between Juergen and Stephanie.”

“Brothers and sisters often fight,” I said.

“Herr Merz—Juergen—always try so hard to please his father. To make his father proud. But Stephanie, she tear him down. Make him look like a
dummkopf
—like a foolish boy.”

“I can see Stephanie doing that.”

Odile cocked her head to one side and smiled.
“Ja.”

“I’ll understand if you can’t answer this, Odile, but I’d like to know what the people in town are saying. Who do they think killed Stephanie and Gisele?”

“At first ve hear Stephanie shoot Gisele und then shoot herself,” she answered, her words carefully measured. “Then ve hear—no. Someone else shoot both of them.”

“We thought the same thing at first. But now? I don’t know. I’m completely baffled.”

“Some say it vass Stephanie’s husband who did it,” Odile lowered her head and glanced up at me through her eyebrows. “
Und
some say it vass
you.

* * *
* *

Odile
might have been trying to make a point: Americans go home. The dinner she served, wiener schnitzel, sauerkraut, potato dumplings, and a selection of cheeses—all Swiss—carried with it, I thought, a message. Babs kept her head down except when Chet said something, and I got the impression she’d have stayed in her room if Odile provided room service. Patrick and Erin took turns glancing at each other but avoiding eye contact. Brian, uncharacteristically, ate almost nothing.

I said, “Juergen called a few minutes ago. Did you know?”