Summary
“Lady in the Lake” forces Alma and Bertram to work together, despite recent revelations, while Rita hatches a new scheme.
This recap of Why Women Kill season 2, episode 3, “Lady in the Lake”, contains spoilers.
The second episode of Why Women Kill’s thus-far excellent second season on Paramount+ added another, albeit inadvertent body to the tally of deathly veterinarian Bertram. Of course, both Bertram and his wife, Alma, are complicit in the death of their next-door neighbor Mrs. Yost, so they both must work together to dispose of her body and her car after she fell to her death while eavesdropping on their argument about… well, death, as it happens.
The body is easy enough – they just bury her in the garden. But the car is another matter. The plan they come up with in “Lady in the Lake” is to create the illusion that she went out of town for a long trip from which she never returned. Simple enough. But, of course, there are complications aplenty, including Alma getting a bit too comfortable in Mrs. Yost’s nice clothes.
Making it look as if Mrs. Yost herself drove the car away – which involves Alma impersonating her for the benefit of the neighbors – is easy enough. But Alma and Bertram are still at odds after the revelations about his unusual hobby, and a chance encounter with Alma’s old high-school sweetheart while out on the road trip complicates matters further. Alma is happy to flirt in full view of her husband since the secrets he has kept are profoundly worse than her keeping the fact she lost her virginity to the prom king under wraps. Eventually, and with a great deal of bickering, they’re able to shunt the motor into the lake, at which point Alma realizes she left her purse inside and Bertram has to dive in to retrieve it. These two are hardly master criminals.
Elsewhere in Why Women Kill season 2, episode 3, Rita continues her crusade against Carlo’s daughter, Catherine, by learning that she was once threatened to be written out of the will if she was caught up in any debauchery and then enlisting poor idiot Scooter to seduce her. If she can get photographic evidence of their liaison, then Rita can get Catherine written out of the will, making it easier to kill Carlo off once and for all. But Scooter is reluctant, and things only erupt between them when Dee, having hired Vern to tail Scooter, confronts the pair of them about their affair. All of a sudden we have some complicated dynamics now. Rita has a serious grudge against Dee, Dee has an obvious affection for Vern, and Scooter is out in the cold, even though Rita obviously needs his services in order to get Catherine out of the picture.
Oh, and Mrs. Yost’s hand is sticking out of the ground in the garden. Something tells me this is all going to go quite badly wrong.
