Death of a Second Wife Read online

  Stephanie had changed her hair. Now swept up and back in a clever counterpoint to the downward pull of gravity on an aging face, it made her look a bit like Cat Woman, I decided. Stephanie was only forty-eight but, like many redheads, had that thin skin that wrinkles early. She led me to a small room fitted out with twin beds and twin dressers. It was on the same level as a large, rustic dining room and an open landing that overlooked a living room strewn with cushy sofas and armchairs.

  “I’m putting you next to the dining room so you won’t have to worry about stairs. We do have a lot of stairs, I’m afraid.”

  Was Stephanie insinuating I’m too old to climb stairs? I can still dance backward in high heels. I can moon walk, but it’s been years since I was last called upon to do so. I felt the blood rush to my face in a torrent the likes of which I hadn’t experienced since the last time I saw Stephanie. Hard as I tried not to take offense, Stephanie invariably peppered every comment with body slams to my ego. I was the matriarch, the dowager, the mother of everyone—including Chet. Chet, who had wisely upgraded to a newer model. I prayed for strength because I did not want anything to mar Patrick and Erin’s wedding. If that meant gritting my teeth and smiling through a hailstorm of Stephanie’s slings and arrows, so be it. I could do this.

  “Lovely view,” I said, referring to the window between the beds.

  “You get first choice of beds because Lettie isn’t here yet.”

  “I know. She’ll be getting in late this evening.”

  Lettie Osgood, my dearest friend and Patrick’s godmother, was flying from Washington to Geneva and hopping a train from there. So Lettie and I were to be roommates. That was good. I had a feeling I’d need to vent occasionally, and Lettie was a great ventee.

  From below, a door slammed and Patrick’s voice rose up from some obscure passage. “Is my mom here?”

  I ran out to the landing and looked down. Patrick stood in the middle of the living room looking up, his arms spread wide like Romeo under Juliet’s balcony. “Wait right there! Don’t move!” He clattered up a flight of stairs hidden from my view, popped around a corner and caught me up in a hug. His cheeks and hands were cold.

  “Where have you been? You’re freezing.”

  “Hiking. I walked down to the church to talk to Father Etienne, the priest who’ll be marrying us. The hike back is five miles and all uphill.” Patrick hugged me again, even more tightly this time. I leaned back and took a good look at his face. New glasses. His new glasses with black, squarish frames added something to his thin, pale face. Patrick’s skin had always had a grey translucency that exposed every vein or the tiniest whisker. The new glasses gave his face a touch of boldness. “Let’s go for a walk. Put on some better shoes first.”

  “Give me a minute to unpack a couple of things.”

  The first thing I did after Patrick left the room was pull out my now-finished needlepoint, tack it to the rectangular board I’d brought with me, and weight it with a couple of books I found lurking under a night stand. I might need to use a steam iron on it, I thought, before I framed it. I flopped my suitcase onto one of the beds and opened it, pulling out the new dress I planned to wear to the wedding. Gossamer green wool that hung in soft folds. Protective layers of tissue paper floated to the floor as I shook it out. I slipped it onto an empty hanger and hung it from the closet door to air out.

  From behind me, a soft contralto voice said, “Dotsy. You’re here.”

  * * * * *

  Babs Toomey, mother of the bride, stood in the doorway stating the obvious, as usual. Tall and thin with amber-red hair, Babs, like a champion Irish setter, was beautiful. None of us ever mentioned it, of course, but Babs had taken plastic surgery and collagen injections to the point of complete facial immobility. Lips with no creases, skin like wax. Add to that her habit of saying things like you’re here to someone standing five feet away, and the result was a woman you could never feel you knew. Never offensive, never endearing either. A mannequin.

  “How do you like the dress I bought for the wedding?” I asked, shaking the hem.

  “It’s green. Patrick told me you were wearing peach.”

  “The peach dress was too tight, so I bought this one.” I waited for her to say something to indicate it wasn’t the worst dress in the world. “You don’t like it?”

  “I do. It’s just that my dress is green, too.” Babs floated over and touched the sleeve. “But it’s a small wedding in a town where nobody knows us anyway. It doesn’t matter if we both wear the same color.”

  Wheels turned in my brain. Somewhere in my reading of the arcane literature on wedding etiquette, weighty tomes I had read before my eldest son’s wedding and hadn’t thought about since, there had been a suggestion (actually a sub-suggestion under the heading of Attire for Mothers of the Bride and Groom) that the matriarchs should choose dresses of a formality appropriate to the rest of the wedding. Pastels were nice, and the mothers should not wear the same color as the bridesmaids or each other. It was suggested that the mother of the bride had first dibs on color choice since she was the more important personage on this particular occasion.

  “If you’re worried about the wedding photos, there’s always Photoshop. Patrick can make our dresses any color you want.”

  Babs gave me a blank look. “It’s pretty—but with your coloring, something warmer, I’d think.”

  I peered around her and spotted Patrick in the doorway. I laced up my tennis shoes and headed for the hallway, pulling my son along with me. “I’m afraid I’ve committed a faux pas. Wrong color dress!”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mom,” Patrick whispered as he pushed me down the cedar-scented hall. We exited by a door on the same level and climbed around the outside of the house, passing a porch and a small stoop. The door of the stoop led to a kitchen, I deduced, from the clatter of pans and smell of roast meat emanating from it.

  “Ich sehe, was du tust! Du kannst mir nichts vormachen!”

  I recognized Stephanie’s voice. She sounded furious. A female voice, muffled, answered, also in German. Patrick saw the look on my face and offered a translation. “That’s Stephanie. She said something like ‘I know what you’re up to.’ ”

  “To whom, Gisele?”

  “Probably. Pay no attention, Mom. It’s not our problem.”

  * * * * *

  Patrick led me along a trail eastward and around a hill where blue and yellow crocuses poked fresh heads through patches of lingering ice and snow. A cowbell clanked in the distance. On our left lay a valley peppered with spiky evergreens, and beyond, a half-dozen snow-capped peaks. The tallest one, glowing gold in the late afternoon sun, had that witch’s hat tilt that could only be the Matterhorn. I gasped when I saw it. Patrick indicated a boulder on the inside of a bend in the trail and I sat, breathing in the clean Alpine air, filing this scene away in my mind to return to and savor again and again.

  “Tell me about Babs,” I said, taking Patrick’s hand between both of mine.

  “Babs will be my mother-in-law in a few days.” He squinted up at a cloud and took a deep breath. I waited. “But I don’t feel as if I know her. Erin’s afraid of her.”

  “Afraid of her? Why?”

  “What I mean is . . .”

  I waited.

  “Babs is into image. Hers and Erin’s. Babs . . . has had plastic surgery . . . and other things done to her. More than once.”

  I laughed. “You think I don’t know this?”

  “Right.” He grinned and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Erin is a plain, simple girl. She’s honest. Totally honest. That’s what I love about her. She wears no make-up and she loves animals. She loves the outdoors. She’d rather be feeding elephants than re-decorating the house.” Patrick glanced at me as if to make sure I understood. Erin worked at a large Illinois zoo and spent most of her days in muddy boots. She had a master’s degree in animal husbandry. “Babs says Erin is un-feminine. She’s told her, more than once, she’ll never get a man dressed the way s
he dresses.”

  “What does Erin say?”

  “Nothing. Erin has lost her father. She’s terrified of losing her mother.”

  “Oh, but surely she doesn’t think Babs would disown her over a little thing like that.”

  “Erin doesn’t know. How can you tell what Babs feels or thinks about anything?”

  “I certainly can’t. But Erin has lived her whole life with her! Surely . . .”

  Patrick took his hand off my shoulder and leaned forward, his elbows digging into his knees. “Erin reminds me, sometimes, of that pathetic little monkey clinging to the wire surrogate mother. The one in all the psych books.”

  “That will be over soon. She can cling to you now. You’re real.”

  “Yeah.” Patrick turned to me, wrinkled his nose, and studied my face through his new glasses, as if he were seeing me clearly for the first time. “And I’m looking forward to that.”

  “How do you like this, Babs?” I employed one of Marco’s Italian gestures to indicate contempt. “You can catch a man without make-up.”

  “So how have you been, Mom? School going okay?”

  “Like everyone else, we’ve been slammed by the recession.”

  The college where I teach ancient and medieval history was on spring break until the end of the week. Patrick and Erin had scheduled their wedding to coincide with Patrick’s and my own time off. “We have a hiring freeze in effect, so natural attrition has loaded up our classes to the exploding point. I’ve had to take on an extra section of European history and we’ve all been forced to take a week’s unpaid sabbatical. That’s why it was so easy for me to get next week off. I can go back to Florence for a few days, but my next pay check will be microscopic.”

  “Sorry, Mom. This trip is a burden on you, isn’t it?”

  “No problem.”

  I diverted my eyes quickly, before Patrick had a chance to study them for clues as to whether that statement was true or not. I had already used a credit card to buy that jacket after vowing to limit myself on this trip to the cash in my wallet.

  Across the meadow north of the boulder where we sat, the trail curved upward and vanished behind a pile of boulders. In the opposite direction, a dense stand of conifers cast the slope in shadow, darkening to black a few yards in, like Hansel and Gretel’s forest. I glimpsed the corner of a brown structure, deep within the trees. A gingerbread house? I asked.

  Patrick stood and shaded his eyes, peering in the direction I pointed. “Believe it or not, it’s an elevator. Juergen and his neighbors have had an elevator shaft dug through the mountain. Down below, it comes out near LaMotte. On this end, it’s disguised as a cutsy-poo little shack.”

  “So that’s how you got up here from the church, you cheater! You didn’t hike up, you took the lift.”

  “Uh-oh. Busted.”

  “Why didn’t Stephanie tell me about this? I had to take a cab up the side of Sheer Terror Canyon.”

  “When we have time, I’ll take you. But it’s complicated the first time you do it. Finding the entrance down below without divulging where it is—you have to know where to look. They don’t want just anybody using it.”

  I had heard the Swiss were clever, but an elevator through a mountain?

  * * * * *

  The landing outside my bedroom door overlooked the living room where everyone had gathered for drinks before dinner. I took in the scene from my lofty perch as I inserted and fastened my hoop earrings by feel. A real fire crackled in the stone fireplace. Upholstered furniture in a maroon plaid and a large leather armchair with a deep crater in the cushion sat angled toward big picture windows along the south side of the room.

  Patrick and Babs stood at those windows with their backs to the rest of the room. They each held a wine glass. Patrick’s free hand swept across the panorama outside. He pointed to something in the distance and Babs’s head turned, following his finger. In profile, her face looked like a cameo.

  At the fireplace, Stephanie was talking to Erin, my future daughter-in-law. Erin’s slight figure, in a loose knit sweater and black slacks, stood facing the fire, her arms folded across her waist, her head down. Stephanie, by contrast, faced Erin directly, her hand on Erin’s shoulder. I watched them for a minute. It seemed as if Stephanie was doing all the talking.

  The third twosome in the room down below was Juergen and—who else—Chet Lamb. They each held glasses, but Chet’s appeared to be an old fashioned glass with amber contents, undoubtedly his usual scotch and soda. Chet looked small from this angle. He had lost weight. His jacket hung awkwardly from drooping shoulders and his cheeks looked flabby. His eyes darted restlessly around, as if he wasn’t paying attention to whatever Juergen was saying.

  Ah, well. Deep breath.

  It was hard not to make a grand entrance with the stairs from my little balcony leading down into the middle of the living room, and heads did turn toward me as I descended. I concentrated on not missing a step. Juergen asked what I wanted to drink and left the room to fetch it.

  “Chet.”

  “Dotsy.” He stepped forward and kissed me on the cheek. “How’s school?”

  I told him the same story I had told Patrick earlier and asked about his business. Chet owns a John Deere franchise in the western part of Virginia, in farming country. Our son, Brian, has now joined him in the business and, I’ve heard, works harder and does more actual managing than Chet does these days. Brian has Sunday dinner with me almost every week, even though it’s a two-hour drive from his home to mine. I see more of him than any of my other four children, and he’s the one I imagine I’ll depend on most if I live long enough to need help. Brian was to be Patrick’ best man but he hadn’t arrived yet.

  “When will Brian get here?” I asked.

  Chet took a mouthful of his drink including at least one ice cube and crunched a bit before answering. “I don’t know. Stephanie probably knows.” Crunch. “Tomorrow, I think.”

  “If only Anne and Jeffrey could be here.” Anne is our youngest child and our only daughter, now living somewhere in the Bahamas on a boat or something. Anne rarely contacts me, and any address I manage to get for her is outdated by the time I get it. Jeffrey is our adopted son, now performing with a famous dance troupe. A biracial child trapped between two cultures and neglected by both dysfunctional parents, he came to us when he was seven. The day we adopted him was possibly best day of my life. Unfortunately, Jeffrey’s troupe was booked solid through the month of April so he couldn’t be here.

  Chet nodded in response to my comment but glanced toward the stairs as if he was distracted. His mind was on something else, I could tell.

  Juergen sidled up and handed me a glass of red wine, his animated watch face dancing as his wrist turned. That’s when I noticed the compass rose built into the watch’s face, swiveling to keep track of north as he moved.

  “I have to ask you something, Juergen,” I said. “Today, when you were driving me here in that little—thing, Gisele popped up out of nowhere. It was so strange. One second, no one was around and the next second, there she was. How did she do that?”

  Juergen grinned, glanced at Chet. “The bunker.”

  “The what?”

  “The bunker. Air-raid shelter. Bomb-proof, weather-proof, impenetrable to nuclear radiation, biochemical attack, you name it.” Juergen straightened his back, his chest expanding.

  “They’re all over Switzerland, Dotsy.” Chet interjected. “The Swiss don’t maintain a standing army because they are historically a neutral country.”

  I decided not to remind him I teach European history.

  “But that doesn’t mean we care to be vulnerable,” Juergen said, waggling a finger at me. “With mountains protecting us all around, we’re geographically insulated, but mountains don’t protect you from an air attack, do they? No. So during World War Two we built bunkers inside the mountains and disguised the entrances so they look like normal mountains.” He gestured toward the vista beyond the room’s picture wi
ndows. “But don’t let that fool you. These peaks can open up in a moment and out will come more artillery—ground-to-air missiles, tanks, guns—than you could ever want to face!”

  “We went through a phase in the United States,” I said, “during the fifties, of building bomb shelters, stocking them with food, and putting school children through horrifying air raid drills. We don’t do that anymore.”

  “Ja. We don’t either.” Juergen ran a wrinkled hand through his grey hair. “After the Cold War, there didn’t seem to be much point, but there they were. We had already built them and it seemed a shame not to use them for something.” He tilted his head to one side. “We use ours to store ski equipment and wine.”

  “So that’s where Gisele came from. I knew there was a simple explanation.”

  “But just because we keep our skis and the family silver in them now, don’t get the idea that you can invade Switzerland and get away with it. We also keep artillery there.”

  “I wouldn’t think of invading Switzerland.”

  “The family silver, eh?” Chet raised an eyebrow as if hinting that the bunker might be ripe pickings for theft.

  “That reminds me.” I set my glass down on the nearest coaster. “I have a presentation to make.” I tripped up the steps, grabbed the box I had gift-wrapped an hour ago and returned, calling for everyone’s attention.

  “I think this is as good a time as any. Patrick and Erin?” They both left their conversations and moved toward me. Erin’s sweater hung on her small bony frame, the sleeves covering most of her hands. Her black flats were too big for her feet, I noticed, forcing her to shuffle across the rug. “This is not exactly your wedding gift from me, but . . . well, open it. It’s self-explanatory.” I had intended to make a little speech welcoming Erin into the family, but I seemed to have skipped that part.

  Erin, her big brown eyes wide, took the package, tore off the wrapping, looked at the needlepoint quizzically, and turned to Patrick. He lifted it and smiled. “Love is the essence of life,” he said, translating from the Latin.