Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (11 page)

“Let’s find out.” I started climbing.

“Mom!” Patrick whined. When I didn’t stop, he started climbing, too, but with enough sighs and groans to let me know he wasn’t real happy with me. I slipped on a patch of ice and had to grab a sapling to keep from sliding into Patrick and returning both of us to our starting point.

Patrick blew out an impatient breath and grabbed the sleeve of my coat. “I don’t believe you sometimes! Why are we doing this?” He widened his stance and helped me to my feet.

It was worth the climb. At the break in the slope, I hefted myself up and looked out onto a paved landing strip. A short one, yes, but an actual landing strip. “Wait till you see this!”

The thin white thing that had prompted me to climb the slope to begin with loomed directly over my head now. I scrambled onto the tarmac and walked around the most emaciated plane I’d ever seen. It had a tiny bubble-like cockpit with two narrow seats, one behind the other. Elevated tail and long, thin wings tipped up on the outer ends. The wingspan must have been sixty feet or more
, but I saw no propeller, no jet engines. “What do you call this thing?”

Patrick, who by this time had scrambled up and onto the flat asphalt, touched the wing that rested on the tarmac, let his gaze flit up the elevated wing. “It’s a glider.”

“How do you fly it?”

“You have to launch it with another plane or something. Cool. They call it soaring. It’s popular here. I’d like to try it myself.”

From long experience, I knew that Patrick’s mouth was braver than the rest of him. I imagined someone appearing out of nowhere and asking him if he’d like to go for a soar around the Alps. Patrick would stammer and stall until he thought of an adequate reason for staying on the ground. I looked across to the other side of the shortest runway I’d ever seen and spotted a small, metal-sided hangar. A little airplane, the kind that has wings across the top, sat inside the open bay, its propeller sticking out as if it were curious about the two intruders. I didn’t see anyone around and wondered if they’d leave the glider out and the bay open when no one was here. “Do you see anyone?”

“No,” Patrick said, already picking his way down.

Back in the meadow, we hung around and watched the paragliders. Patrick struck up a conversation with one of the men. I walked close enough to the jumping-off spot to look down on the bright silky rectangles swinging gently, riding the currents into the valley below, zig-zagging across a ribbon-like stream on the valley floor. A beautiful sight, but I dared not stand too close to the edge.
Could I ever get up the nerve to paraglide?
With my acrophobia? Not without a double shot of Demerol.

I jumped at the loud thunk that suddenly came from the lift pole beside me. What was happening? The wires began moving and the dangling chair nearest me jiggled toward the plateau. I expected to see an occupied chair rising up from below but all I saw, ascending or descending, were empty. I turned to Patrick.

He joined me in looking for some reason the lift had suddenly jerked to life. “Ready to go, Mom?” He waved goodbye to the man he’d been talking to and we headed back toward our trail.

Something made me look up as I passed beneath the lift support near the base of the plateau. Directly over my head an occupied lift chair on the down-moving side bobbled as its rollers slid over a crossbar. All I could see was a man’s pant legs and his shoes. Cordovan Italian-made shoes with randomly placed patches.

* * * * *

I don’t know why I bother snooping. I learn more just walking around and minding my own business. Climbing the stairs to my bedroom following my walk with Patrick, I slipped past the open door of Juergen’s little office behind the living room and overheard his end of a phone conversation.

“No, no. Not Jo burg airport! Some little airport near Pretoria.”

Of course. The “Jo burg” on Stephanie’s note was Johannesburg, South Africa. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Friends of mine who went there on safari last year came back talking about Jo burg this, Jo burg that. Like a name you really shouldn’t use unless you’d been there and were on intimate terms with the place. I paused again on a higher step and listened a bit more.

“They were supposed to have sent twelve.”
Twelve what?
“How should I know?”
Know what?
“What else can I do? I have enough to worry about, already.”
You can say that again. Don’t we all?

* * *
* *

Back in my room, I kicked off my hiking shoes and prepared to take a shower. I could see the police van and the southernmost stretch of the crime scene tape
from my window. A light still burned inside the van.

I thought about the phone conversation I’d overheard and about the fact that Juergen was speaking English. That indicated, I thought, that he wasn’t talking to a fellow German-speaker, but it didn’t mean he was talking to someone whose native language was English, either. The accepted language for international dealings, I knew, was English. Aren’t we lucky? When, say, a
Dutchman is talking to a Japanese businessman, he’ll probably do it in English. That made me recall the argument in German I’d overheard between Stephanie and Gisele. Stephanie, after all, was born in Zurich and German was her first language, but she spoke English with no accent.

Wait a minute.
The other conversation, the later one when I’d heard Stephanie yell,
If you don’t tell him, I will,
was in English.
So she wasn’t yelling at Gisele
, or she’d have been yelling in German. That meant she was yelling at one of us, and I knew it wasn’t me.

Eleven

We went to a restaurant in LaMotte for dinner that evening. The eight of us bundled up and tramped to the little elevator hut, across the snow that by now had acquired an ice glaze on top like the sugar crust on a crème brulee. Surprisingly, everyone but Lettie already knew about the elevator. Perhaps Juergen had treated each guest to a guided tour as he’d done for me. Lettie, awe-struck, compared the hut to Alice’s rabbit hole, falling down into another world.

The restaurant was expecting us, but we weren’t expecting our entry to be as uncomfortable as it was. Maybe Juergen was, but I wasn’t. All heads turned when we walked in. The wait staff seemed to freeze in place. The maître d' conferred discretely with Juergen as he led us toward a table for eight near the center of the rustic dining room. Juergen said something to him and, like so many baby ducks, we turned and followed them to a more secluded part of the restaurant, to a large round table behind a quaint wooden screen. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that we were the subjects of keen local gossip, but we obviously were. LaMotte, after all, was a small town if you disregarded tourists, and we had come in the slack season between skiing and summer hiking. The year-round residents probably wouldn’t number more than five thousand. The Merz family, wealthy financiers from Zurich with a vacation house above the town, had brought this tragedy down upon them. Stephanie, daughter of the patriarch, had shot herself. But far worse, she had killed one of their own. Gisele—daughter of Herr
und
Frau Schlump, well-respected local couple. The fact that police now knew it was a double murder wouldn’t be generally known yet. The town was in mourning, and, undoubtedly, outraged.

And here we were.

When we first entered, the chatter and laughter of patrons had drowned out the music, but now I heard only the piped-in strains of a string quartet and the scraping of our own chairs on the floor.

I intended to sit as far away from Chet as possible
, but it didn’t work out that way. Juergen took the chair nearest the wall and motioned Erin to sit on his right, Lettie on his left. He gently nudged Babs, who already had her hands on the chair next to him, away and pulled Lettie toward him. Brian, maintaining the boy-girl-boy-girl alternation, stepped in beside Erin and pulled out the chair on his right for me. Chet followed and sat on my right. Babs and Patrick took the last two chairs.

So suave, the way Juergen stage-managed the seating without appearing to do so. Everything about him said “class.” The way his flannel trousers fit just so. The way his hair fit his head without appearing to have been styled. And that watch—that multi-tasking watch with its built
-in compass and twirling gears. I wondered how much it cost.

While Juergen selected the wine and discussed menu selections with the waiter, I studied the faces around the table, trying to see each one as Detective Kronenberg might have seen them yesterday—as if I had never seen them before. Erin, so thin and mousey with her big brown eyes, looked vulnerable. I couldn’t imagine dark passion or rage hiding behind that little round face. Erin seemed oblivious of her own appearance. She wore no makeup and her hair, pulled straight back into a low ponytail, did nothing to amend the basic roundness of her head.

Juergen sent the waiter off to fetch our wine. I tried to imagine our host in the business suit he’d probably wear on a normal weekday. Tonight, he wore a leather jacket over an edelweiss sweater. He couldn’t leave business behind completely, even in these horrid circumstances, because he had spent a large part of the day in his little office behind the stairs. Each time I walked by, he’d been on the phone, talking business. I wondered how his plan not to tell his aged father about Stephanie’s death was holding up and opened my mouth to ask, then realized now was not the time. The strain of the last two days showed in a tightness around his mouth. In the restaurant’s lamplight, he blinked and squinted as if his eyes hurt.

Our waiter brought three large carafes of wine and placed them strategically around the table. Sidling up behind Juergen, he waited while Juergen asked us, “How do you feel about a cheese fondue? This place has the best in all of Switzerland.”

“Oh! It’s been ages since I had fondue.” Lettie clapped her hands and wiggled in her seat. Patrick whispered something to her and she put her hand over his—gave it a small squeeze. Lettie had learned a lot about Babs Toomey since she’d arrived, and she had relayed it all to me while we were getting dressed to come here. When Lettie, with her near-photographic memory, relays information she does a thorough but lengthy job of it. I’ve learned not to ask her anything unless I really want to know
everything
. Lettie had talked with both Erin and Patrick that day, but separately.

She told me about Babs Toomey and Mr. Toomey, Erin’s father. It seems they weren’t married long. When Erin was a baby, Mr. Toomey left and took the entire contents of the couple’s bank account with him. His occupation had always been rather hazy, but he claimed to be a pharmaceutical representative. He kept a copious supply of prescription drugs
, according to what an aunt had told Erin. Erin, at this late date, had only vague memories of her father. Since Mr. Toomey had managed to obtain an annulment, by long distance and over Babs’s protests, Babs had been engaged three more times, but in each instance the deal fell through.

A young man, passing along the hall behind our table, spotted Patrick and did a quick about face. He dashed over and took Patrick’s hand, bringing my son to his feet. “Patrick, my man! I’ve been trying to call you, but I get nothing but your voice mail.”

“Ethan, I . . .” Patrick’s face turned red and he choked on his words.

“The wedding, man! It’s this Thursday, isn’t it?” The young man called Ethan looked across the table and beamed at Erin. “Hey, babes! The bride! Looking good!” He turned back to Patrick, his head jerking backward as soon as he saw the look on Patrick’s face. “It
is
this Thursday, isn’t it? The hostel is already full. All the old gang is here. We even brought clean clothes. What is it? The wedding’s still on, isn’t it?”

Patrick took Ethan by the arm and led him away, muttering something the rest of us weren’t meant to hear.

“Did I say something wrong?” Ethan said, as he disappeared into the hall, Patrick close behind him.

“Who was that, Erin?” Babs tossed this question across the table, her casual tone and immobile face hiding her
private panic, I thought.

“Ethan. He’s one of the guys we met at the retreat.”

Poor Patrick. If he told Ethan the wedding was still on, he’d have shocked and outraged Lettie, Brian, and me. We had all told him it would be wrong to have it now. I suspected Chet and Juergen felt the same way, although I hadn’t talked to either of them about it. On the other hand, if he announced the wedding was postponed, Babs would’ve passed out and hit the floor, unless he had already talked to her and received her blessing—and I knew he hadn’t.

In a family with five children
, I suppose one is bound to be left out or at least to
feel
left out, and it’s often a middle child. Chet and I treated each child as an individual, as we would have done if he or she were the only one. But you can’t always correct for that birth-order thing, and children are born different. Patrick seemed to have been born a shadow child, vague, fragile, illusive. A steady C student. His only sport in high school was track. The high point of his athletic career was when he came in sixth in the high hurdles at a district meet. Our phone at home rang continuously for more than a decade while the brood progressed through middle school and high school, but few of the calls were for Patrick. He had two dates in high school, and I arranged both of them.