Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

  “I’m going to have to tell Kronenberg I lied,” Brian announced in a casual tone, his head lowered.

  I waited, knowing he would explain.

  “I told him I was in Geneva the night I flew in, but I was actually in LaMotte.”

  “Didn’t I tell you you should have told the truth to begin with?”

  “Kronenberg is sure Dad killed Stephanie and tried to make it look like suicide. Probably wrapped her hand around the gun and fired it again to leave gunpowder residue on her hand, then left and ran into Gisele. Gisele saw what happened so he had to kill her, too.”

  “Then how did the casing for the bullet that killed Gisele end up inside the bunker?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just telling you what Dad told me.”

  We cleared the crest of the hill and our trail wound around toward the north, paralleling the road down below for a short distance. By tacit agreement, we stuck to the trail.

  Brian said, “So Dad has no alibi for the time of the murders because he was in LaMotte, drinking at a bar, but he was sloshed so he doesn’t remember anything about the guy he talked to there, except that he wore a red ski jacket and came from Ukraine. The bartender doesn’t remember Dad, and the police can’t find the guy. Not surprising, with no more information than that to go on.”

  “So you were in LaMotte at the time. How does that help?”

  “Because I saw Dad! I saw him and the guy in the red jacket because I was there, too.”

  “But you didn’t speak to them because . . .?”

  “Because I didn’t want Dad to see me. I was talking to the guy who was helping me find out about the Merz business, which, by the way, he called MWU. Stands for Merz-something-something in German.”

  “Where is this guy now?”

  “I assume he left town after he talked to me.”

  “So. You’re in this bar eight thousand miles from home talking to this guy who’s been spying for you. You see your father sitting there talking to another man, but you don’t speak to him?”

  “Dad doesn’t know I was looking into the Merz business dealings, and he’d have been pissed if he found out. He’s sensitive about Stephanie and me getting along. This would be like admitting I didn’t trust her. I kept my back to them while I paid the tab and walked out.”

  “You need to tell Kronenberg before he goes any further with this nonsense.”

  Five white sheep grazed around a rocky outcrop a few feet away from us. They paid us no attention. Brian took his arm from around my shoulders and loped ahead, cracking his knuckles, one hand folded inside the other. “What do I say when Kronenberg asks me what we talked about?”

  “What did you talk about?” I paused, then added, “I know what you talked about, but what did you learn?”

  “MWU went bankrupt last year. Very odd because it seemed to be in sound shape, and then all of a sudden—” Brian made a raspberry sound and a “thumbs down” motion. “The John Deere franchise seems to have lost money just prior to MWU’s declaration of bankruptcy, as if money was being funneled in to prevent the bankruptcy from happening. Looks like Stephanie did it to help out MWU.”

  “How much stock did she have in MWU?”

  “Thirty-three percent. Juergen had thirty-three percent and their father had thirty-four. Juergen has been making the decisions for the company, since old man Merz got too old to do it himself. It’s hard to say how much input Steph had.” Brian jammed both hands in his jacket pockets. “This guy I talked to says it looks like a case of raiding. He had a Russian word for it, but I can’t remember the word. It seems the Russian mafia are in cahoots with various public officials, and they can get an honest company raided and then take it over. Boom! Their records are confiscated, their employees’ retirement plans vanish, their assets evaporate.”

  “This happens in Russia?”

  “Right. But MWU does business in lots of countries, including Russia. It’s hard to pin things down these days. Large businesses operate all over the globe, you know, especially an import-export business. What this guy thinks is that MWU got slammed and tried to fix things with money from wherever they could find it—like our John Deere franchise.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Obviously not. They did go bankrupt. But somehow they’ve reorganized and Juergen is still chairman of the board.”

  “You and your father need to talk to Juergen about this.”

  “I’d like to, but I don’t know where to start. I don’t really know anything for sure and Dad . . . well, you know. What could I say? ‘Hey Juergen, just wondering. Did you and Stephanie take a bunch of our money?’ ”

  I grabbed him by the elbow. “How about, ‘Hey Juergen, how’s business? How’s your import-export company doing these days?’ ”

  “I suppose I could . . .” Brian’s voice trailed off as if he was trying to remember why he really couldn’t. I put myself in his shoes and understood. This was a horrible time to worry Juergen with business, and Chet was stressed to the breaking point.

  “But first, you have to talk to Kronenberg and tell him exactly when you saw your father.”

  A shadow shaped like an X zipped across the rocky slope from north to south. I looked up. A glider, thin and swift and eerily silent, soared overhead, turned left, and passed directly over the meadow to the east and Chateau Merz. I tried to read the numbers under its wing but it was gone in an instant. But I was pretty sure I knew where it came from.

  * * * * *

  When I thought back on it later, I knew Patrick and Erin had been watching us from a window because when Brian and I stepped through the sliding glass doors into the living room, the whole group converged as if by magic. Chet walked in from the kitchen stairwell carrying a mug of something I hoped was coffee. Lettie and Babs were already sitting there, Lettie laying aside her magazine and Babs sitting on one end of the sofa, her hands clamped tightly in her lap. Patrick followed Erin in from the stairs leading down from the balcony near my room. Only Juergen was missing.

  “Mom, Brian, have a seat. Erin and I have something to tell you.”

  Erin took a seat beside her mother on the sofa and Patrick perched on the front edge of the leather chair. Brian waved me into the upholstered armchair not already occupied by Lettie and pulled up an ottoman for himself. Erin’s eyes, so puffy they were nearly swollen shut, leaked tears down her splotchy cheeks. She held a tissue-wrapped forefinger under her red nose.

  “Go ahead,” Patrick told her.

  Erin made a noise, a sort of squeak, then covered her mouth with both hands. “I can’t!”

  “All right, I’ll start,” Patrick said, clearing his throat. “Erin has been married before. I’ve just talked to the Cook County Bureau of Records and asked them to check for anything they had on Erin. Seems she married a guy in August of 2006. In Chicago.”

  A long, anguished moan slipped from Erin’s throat.

  “Oh, God!” Babs growled between clinched teeth.

  “Go ahead, Erin. Your turn.” Patrick said.

  “It was nothing, really! We never actually lived together! Not like a marriage at all.”

  “It was legal. That’s what matters.”

  “And you never told Patrick?” Chet, still standing near the door, craned his neck forward, his eyes dancing with anger.

  “Slipped her mind,” Patrick muttered. “Erin, buck up! Tell the whole story.”

  Babs stood and dashed from the room but I listened for her footsteps on the stairs, heard none, and realized she was still listening from around the corner.

  “I met Rafael when I was in school in Chicago. We went out for a while and he asked me to marry him so I did.” Erin took a deep breath but when she went on, her voice was even shakier than before. “What Rafael actually wanted was a green card so he could stay in the U.S. He was from the Philippines and his visa was expiring. Or maybe it already had expired, I don’t know. We never lived together and, as soon as he got his green card, he disappeared altogether. I haven’t s
een him since. No one seems to know where he is.”

  “So how did you get a divorce? In absentia?” Brian asked. “Divorce by decree or something like that?”

  Erin nodded her head.

  Patrick’s elbow pressed into the arm of the big leather chair, his forehead resting in his hand. Hearing no answer from Erin, he looked up. “Wellll . . . that’s yet to be determined. So far, we haven’t been able to actually find a record of divorce.”

  “Erin?” I said. “If you’re divorced, you must have a divorce decree. Do you?”

  “I don’t know. I have—something at home. A paper or something.”

  I had heard more convincing lies from three-year-olds.

  “So, Houston, we have a problem!” Patrick’s voice suddenly sounded stronger. As if he’d poured a can of spinach down his throat. “Divorce or no divorce, we have no annulment from the church. Without that, no priest can marry us, and I wouldn’t want to anyway!”

  A loud wail from Erin.

  Lettie sat, her head swaying from side to side. She looked as if she wanted to jump up and run to Patrick, to shield him from this pain. I glanced at Chet. He was smiling! Not a big grin of the sort that anyone would notice but just a small upturn on one corner of his mouth, of the sort that an ex-wife could see.

  “That’s right, Dotsy! Go ahead! Gloat!” Babs Toomey rounded the corner from the back hall and smacked her cardigan against the newel post of the stairs. Shattered buttons rattled as they hit the floor. “It’s what you’ve been wanting all along, isn’t it? Can’t stand to see people happily married!”

  My face must have registered shock. I felt her assault as surely as if it had been physical. “Babs, please!”

  “Hey! Watch it!” Brian leaped to his feet.

  I grabbed his wrist. “It’s okay, Brian. Sit down.”

  That made her even madder. “The mere fact that you . . . you kept that note! You’ve been digging for anything you can find to use against my poor Erin, haven’t you? You’ve been hammering away all week to get the wedding canceled!”

  In the steadiest voice I could muster, I said, “What are you afraid of, Babs? Surely you don’t want your daughter to become a bigamist. She could go to jail.” That word didn’t sound right. Bigamy, I knew, means having more than one wife. What’s the word for having more than one husband? Bi-andry?

  Chet stepped toward Babs and gently cupped his hands around her shaking shoulders. At first glance it seemed like a sympathetic gesture, but it wasn’t. Chet was positioning himself to hold her back, should she lunge in my direction.

  “Have you called Father Etienne?” I asked Patrick.

  He nodded.

  I opened my mouth to ask if he’d called the poor florist but decided that would sound impertinent. Like rubbing salt in Erin’s wounds. Instead, I turned to my former future daughter-in-law and said, “I overheard an argument, Erin. On my first night here. Stephanie and someone else were in the kitchen, and I heard Stephanie yell, ‘If you don’t tell him, I will!’ Was it you she was yelling at?”

  Erin nodded and blew her nose.

  Babs crumpled against Chet’s shoulder.

  Patrick’s left leg jittered. His heated face had fogged the bottom of his glasses in two crescents that lay against his cheeks.

  Babs, a few feet behind the sofa, stepped forward and clamped a hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Come along, Erin. Let’s pack our things.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t,” Chet said. “We still have the small matter of a double murder, and Kronenberg has our passports. None of us can leave.”

  Fifteen

  Following the confessional in the living room, tension weighed so heavily on the house I felt I might suffocate, so Lettie and I took the tunnel key from the hook in the kitchen, hurried through the wood to the elevator hut, and descended through the core of the mountain. I tried the key after we stepped through the exterior door of the tunnel to make sure it worked and that we could return home the same way we’d come. Frankly, I didn’t much care if we could or not, because the idea of having to take a hotel room for the night sounded good to me.

  A short walk down a narrow road, across a little stream, past a few residential houses, and we were back at the train station. “This is where I came in,” I told Lettie. We wandered along, dodging the sneaky little silent cars, until we found a restaurant that looked cozy and inviting. We went in.

  * * * * *

  Lettie peered over the top of her menu. “Are you deciding what to order or studying people’s feet?”

  I laughed, not realizing until she mentioned it that I hadn’t been reading the menu at all. “I’m looking for a certain pair of shoes. Red leather, Italian-made, with odd sort-of patches in odd places.”

  “Of course. I should’ve known,” Lettie answered with a straight face.

  I explained about the man whose shoes I’d seen both outside and inside the store where I bought my jacket and how I knew they were Italian and expensive. Relating the story of the glider at the high-altitude landing strip and seeing those same shoes on feet dangling from the chair lift, the next thing I heard was our waiter’s impatient tapping of pen on order pad.

  Lettie ordered leg of lamb and I, having not actually looked at the menu yet, ordered the same. I asked for a glass of orange juice as soon as possible because I was starting to feel a bit hypoglycemic.

  “It’s fantastic, Dotsy! A landing strip that close to our place? I wonder if Juergen ever uses it. Seems like it would be an easy way for him to shuttle between here and his home in Zurich, doesn’t it? If he has access to a plane, and I’ll bet he does, don’t you? He’s rich.”

  “I know, but the strange thing is the glider. Several times, I’ve seen a glider or the shadow of a glider pass over our house. You can rarely tell they’re coming in time to look up and see them because they’re perfectly silent. They have no motors. But I suspect someone is watching us, and I want to know who it is.”

  “The man in the red shoes?” Lettie wiggled in her seat like she does when she’s excited.

  “Maybe so, maybe no. But if you see a glider, Lettie, try to remember the numbers under the wing. That would tell me if it’s the same one Patrick and I saw on the landing strip.”

  “Roger, wilco.”

  The waiter brought my orange juice and Lettie’s wine. Lettie took a sip and said, “So the outburst you heard from Stephanie that evening was for Erin, not Gisele. Have I got that right?”

  “I had assumed it was Gisele because of the argument I heard earlier that day. Obviously Gisele and Stephanie were having some sort of row. But yesterday it occurred to me that if Stephanie was yelling at Gisele, she’d have been yelling in German. As long as we were assuming Stephanie had shot Gisele and then herself, this made sense, but when Kronenberg told us it was definitely a double murder, I started to rethink what I’d heard.”

  “Stephanie was having a bad day, wasn’t she?”

  “She was a domineering woman. I can say that to you, Lettie, because I know you won’t think it’s sour grapes.”

  “Right. If you said that to Kronenberg, he’d say, ‘Aha! You hated her! Did you hate her enough to kill her?’ ”

  “Exactly.” We stopped talking while the waiter deposited our entrées in front of us and asked if we needed anything else. When I was certain he’d gone, I asked, “What do you think, Lettie? If Stephanie had found out Erin was already married and confronted her with the fact, would Erin have killed her?”

  Lettie hesitated, slowly turning the salt shaker. “She certainly had a good motive, but would she have the guts? I don’t think so. I can’t see mousey little Erin committing murder. And would she have known how to get a gun? Where did the gun come from, by the way?”

  “I suspect it was already in the bunker. These bunkers were built for defense so they’d keep weapons in them. Plus, that morning when we discovered the bodies, Erin and I were the first to go in. She already knew the entry code, so she must have been there before. If s
he’d been there before, she might have seen whatever guns they keep inside.”

  “What about Babs? Did Babs know about Erin’s marriage problem?”

  “Oh, I’m sure she did.”

  “Remember when she yelled, ‘Oh, God?’ That sounded like she knew what was coming.”

  “Exactly. And I can see Babs wielding a gun.”

  After our meal, I suggested a bit of barhopping. We ambled down the cobbled main street lined on both sides with ski gear emporia. While passing several bars, I confessed to Lettie that I was looking for one called the Black Sheep. We found it at the far end of town between a Catholic church and a large hotel. In fact, the street ended in a horseshoe-shaped driveway that curved past the front entrance of the hotel.

  I grabbed Lettie’s arm and pointed toward the church. “That’s where the wedding was supposed to be. Tomorrow.” I felt tears rising, my nose burning. “Let’s go, Lettie. I’ll buy the first round.”

  I chose a small table in the back, close enough to the bar to chat with the bartender but with a clear view of most of the other tables. Several patrons sat at the bar, but no one was waiting on tables. You had to place your order at the bar. I walked to the far end of the bar, several feet away from the nearest customer, so the bartender would have to walk down and out of the thick of things to take my order.

  “What a pretty little town you have here,” I said as he slid two wine glasses from the slotted rack over his head.

  “Just got here?”

  “Yes. I’m taking a sort of grand tour—with my friend.” I nodded in Lettie’s direction. “We started in France and we’re making our way through Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.”