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

telltale edginess that signals the onset of hypoglycemia. I’m diabetic ; I have to eat regularly. “Is there anything like orange juice in the kitchen, Juergen? I need sugar.”
    “I don’t know.” Juergen also didn’t know about my diabetes and probably thought my question was prompted by a simple hunger. “I’ve ordered dinner for all of us. One of us needs to go and pick it up.” He looked at his watch with the dancing dials.
    I stood up, intending to go the kitchen, then stopped, my head spinning. I sat back down. “I’m sorry. Would somebody get me something with sugar in it? I don’t care what.”
    “Oh! I forgot your diabetes,” Erin said, jumping up and heading toward the stairs. “I’ll get you something.”
    “I beat you to it,” Lettie said. She dashed in holding a napkin under a glass of orange juice, the sweet solution to my problem sloshing over the rim.
    Within a minute or two, I rallied. Dinner. What had Juergen said? I’ve ordered dinner? We need to pick it up? How? We were a thirty-minute cab ride from LaMotte. Then I recalled the lift. “Did you say someone needs to pick up dinner? How?”
    “It’s in the tunnel,” Juergen, now wearing muffler, hat, and gloves, stood in the doorway. “You haven’t seen the tunnel yet, have you, Dotsy? Would you like to? Do you feel up to it? Come along, then. Lettie, would you like to come, too?”
    Lettie declined the offer. I climbed the stairs to our room and donned the parka and galoshes Juergen had lent me earlier. He led me out a side door into snow now bathed in moonlight. We’re going to the tunnel to pick up dinner. I couldn’t recall ever saying that before.
    I followed in Juergen’s footsteps, grabbing the back of his jacket now and again when I felt myself slipping. In the dark, it was impossible to know where to step next, but it seemed as if we followed the path Lettie and I had taken earlier, then veered off to the right and downhill across virgin snow. We traipsed through the cedar trees and came to the quaint little house I’d glimpsed the day before. Sided with cedar shakes and topped with slate shingles, it looked like the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel , but smaller.
    Juergen opened the door, flipped a light switch, and waved me in.
    I don’t know what I was expecting, but a shiny, modern elevator wasn’t it. I suppose I thought it would be sort of like Willy Wonka’s “wonkavator.”
    “Oh, you crazy Swiss ,” I said. “This is incredible.”
    “Just because we’re in the twenty-first century doesn’t mean we should forget our past. We’re keeping up appearances, as you Americans say.”
    “This is too much!” I pulled off one glove and touched the gleaming door. It was ice-cold. The distance from the exterior door to the elevator door was, at most, two feet.
    “It goes down through the mountain to a spot on the road at the edge of town. The residents of a couple of other houses and I” —he pointed vaguely in directions where I hadn’t noticed any houses—“own it jointly. Down below there’s a buzzer you have to push if you don’t have a key. The signal comes to our houses. So no one can use it without our permission. Shall we go?”
    Juergen pushed a button, and the elevator door slid open. The panel within displayed three more buttons: up, down, and stop. Based on the feel in my stomach, it seemed as if we descended rapidly and a long way. My ears popped about halfway down. When the door opened , I stepped out into a tunnel hacked out of solid rock. A couple of overhead bulbs lit the passage to a door at the far end. Left rough and unpainted, the tube made no attempt to look like anything other than what it was—a hole through a mountain. On the floor beside the elevator door sat a large green canvas tote bag. Juergen unzipped the top. Inside the bag sat several insulated boxes and a cash register receipt. “I ordered bratwurst, potatoes, and some other stuff. I’ve forgotten what else I