Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) by Maria Hudgins Page B

want to call attention to its proximity to the dining room. By winding down, around, and through the swimming pool room, I found a way. The pool room was warm. A wispy layer of steam drifted on the surface of the water.
    In the kitchen, I slapped mustard and a bit of ham on some pumpernickel bread, added a couple of pickle wedges to two plates and balanced a glass of water on each. I had no appetite, but it was lunchtime and Lettie said she was starving. She claimed to have eaten nothing since breakfast on the plane yesterday.
    Under the telephone on the kitchen wall, a note pad caught my eye. I recognized Stephanie’s handwriting and the sort of morphing figure-eight doodle I had seen her trace absentmindedly. With a jolt, I flashed on a memory of the same doodles she drew all over the margins of a letter in the lawyer’s office while Chet and I banged out the terms of our divorce.
    I tore off the top sheet and tucked it in my pocket. Since these notes turned out to be important, I reproduce them now:
    Back in our room, I handed Lettie one of the plates and checked on the scene in the dining room. Erin had replaced Patrick in the hot seat. Lettie waved me to a corner of the room out of the line of sight from the door.
    “He asked Erin if she knew anything about those things you heard Stephanie say. You, know, ‘I know what you’re up to,’ and ‘If you don’t tell him, I will.’ Remember?” Lettie took a bite of her sandwich and swiped a bit of mustard from the corner of her mouth with the back of her wrist.
    “And?”
    “And she said she didn’t know anything about either of those comments, but Dotsy, she sounded funny when she said it. I think she was lying.”

    Six
     
    Kronenberg and his assistant climbed the stairs to interview Chet in his own bedroom. I supposed Chet didn’t feel up to coming downstairs. Meanwhile, Lettie and I descended to the living room where Juergen soon joined us. He’d been on the phone for the past hour. I’d seen him pacing the porch outside the living room, a cell phone to his ear. Awkward. If I’d known him better, I would have hugged him. Words were hopelessly inadequate to comfort a man who has just lost his sister and his—his what? His employee? Why did I feel as if she was more than an employee? Had they been lovers? Babs told me he was single, but as far as I could recall, Juergen himself hadn’t said anything about his marital status. Gisele kept a bedroom here. Juergen’s reaction to finding Gisele in the snowy meadow had been painful to watch. And then when he came into the bunker and saw his sister—the sister he’d grown up with and known all his life—lying there, her head a mass of blood.
    A gust of cold air swept in with Juergen as he slid the glass door closed. He nodded to Lettie and me, jammed his fists in his pockets, and cleared his throat. “I need to go to Zurich.”
    The announcement startled me. “Now? Have you told Detective Kronenberg?”
    “He’s with Chet at the moment. I don’t want to interrupt them.” His eyes darted toward Lettie, then me, then back to Lettie. “I suppose I should ask him first.”
    “Yes, I think you should,” I said.
    “I’m not in the habit of asking permission to drive to my own home.” He said this, not angrily but as if he was struggling to sort out a new order. Things had changed. New priorities. New demands.
    “These are not normal times,” I said, with as much kindness in my voice as I could muster.
    “My father—our father—Stephanie’s and mine. He’s ninety-five and in poor health. Very poor. In fact, he could die at any time. He’s bed-ridden and he has a nurse with him around the clock.”
    “I didn’t know your father was still alive.”
    “He hasn’t much more time. But this will be on the television news by evening. I can’t keep it off the air for long. Our family is well known. This will be big news in Zurich.”
    “Don’t they have to wait until the next of kin is