The Nantucket Diet Murders

by Virginia Rich

  Beth declined a third muffin as soon as Mrs. Potter relayed the news to the two at the breakfast table. She rose decisively, retrieved her fur-collared storm coat and her bright wool hat from the coatrack in the back hallway, and pulled on her warm gloves.

  “Maybe I was there when he was having the attack, maybe even when he was dying,” she said sadly. “I wonder if he ever found my comfrey. I think I’ll go by his house now and see if there’s anything I can do.”

  “But Ozzie doesn’t have any family,” Gussie protested. “You know his wife died years ago, when they still lived on Long Island, and their daughter even before that—when she was in her early teens, I think. There won’t be anything you can do, Bethie, or anybody in the house now. Have another cup of coffee.”

  Beth’s firm round chin was resolute. “I’ll just see,” she said. “Maybe there’s something I can do.”

  7

  “I wonder if Beth remembers it’s our day for Meals on Wheels?” Gussie said after she had left. “Too late to catch her—she’ll be halfway to Ozzie’s by now. If she forgets, you can do the rounds with me, Genia—it’s a lot easier with two. Sometimes parking is almost impossible on some of the narrow little one-way streets, so we take turns, one to drive and the other to carry in.”

  “Love to,” Mrs. Potter assured her. “Even if Beth shows up, as I’m sure she will—I don’t think she’s half as forgetful as she pretends to be—I’d like to go along for the ride, and maybe see some old friends. Is Jimmy Mattoon on your list? He used to be our old handyman, and I think he still lives alone, down on one of those little streets off Orange.”

  “Ozzie is one who should have been on our list,” Gussie said soberly. “I expect he ate miserably, although of course not for lack of money. We accept donations now, you know, from people who can afford to pay, and it’s surprising how many people are glad to pay for a good simple hot meal at noon and a cold one—sandwich and fruit, or whatever—for supper. It’s prepared at the hospital, and of course Helen has it organized like a Swiss watch.”

  “I’ll bet the prospect of a little visit with you or Bethie is as cheering as the food,” Mrs. Potter remarked. “That darling round face of Beth’s, and her crazy bright hats—if I were one of your customers, I’d consider Thursdays the red-letter day in my week.”

  “Oh, the whole crew all week is great for that kind of thing,” Gussie said. “Beth probably is the most fun as a caller, because she’s always so sunny and cheerful. Still, everybody tries to look bright and smartened up for the day of her rounds. Or his. We have men volunteers too, you know.”

  “I hope not Ted Frobisher,” Mrs. Potter replied. “I’d hate to ride with him down all those little streets. As I remember, he’d be too befuddled by noon to find his way around town, or to remember who got what, if he’s still drinking as much as he used to.”

  “I suppose he is,” Gussie said, without great apparent concern. “Ted’s always just a little bit stewed, but he’s never really out of line. Always the same wonderful manners he learned at his mama’s knee in Wellesley; always the same totally proper dress for every occasion—Jules used to call it ‘elderly Yacht Club attire.’ You know exactly what I mean. And he still putters around with his greenhouse. Ted hasn’t completely lost his marbles, Genia. He still keeps his office up above the Pacific Club, right next to Ozzie’s, and he has his connection with the same good Boston brokerage firm.”

  The thought of Ozzie had them both shaking their heads sadly. Poor Ozzie, they both said again, let’s hope he just slipped away peacefully.

  Then, brightening, Gussie crossed to the kitchen door and opened it to look out. Large, soft flakes of snow were falling, then melting in soft dark circles on the cobblestones. The neatly trimmed hedge of yew below the side porch was frosted with white, and the shrubbery beyond the garden in back was sharply outlined.

  “Let’s go down Main Street and see the Christmas trees one last time before they’re taken down,” she urged, “and enjoy the snow before it all melts and gets slushy. It’s too warm for it to last.”

  She closed the door reluctantly. “Oh, and I haven’t told you,” she continued. “I’ve invited some people in, mostly old friends of yours, on Saturday afternoon. And Tony Ferencz, of course. Later, after we’ve had a walk we can take a look in the specialty places for party cheeses and things.”

  As they went up the wide front stairs to dress for the day, Gussie paused, one hand on the gleaming mahogany handrail. “It may seem heartless not to cancel my party because of Ozzie’s death,” she said. “Still, everyone is dying to see you.”

  Resuming her quick, light ascent, she added, “And I want you to have every possible opportunity to know Tony.”

  Mrs. Potter was suddenly reminded of Mary Augusta Baines, college freshman. “I’ve just met the most wonderful new man from Amherst,” the young Gussie was saying, “and I can’t wait for you to meet him.” There had been a number of wonderful new men from a number of colleges, Mrs. Potter reflected, before cousin Theo came on the scene.

  The two met again, shortly, in the upper hall at the top of the staircase, wearing wool trousers and warm sweaters. A large gilt-framed mirror reflected the meeting of the similarly clad figures—one with softly cut, slightly curling hair, lightly frosted in a way not so much disguising its gray as blending it into a new and becoming color; the other gray-blond, her hair smoothly pulled back into the same knot she had worn, although with a period of various changes in between, since their college years together.

  Mrs. Potter drew back in momentary dismay. “I didn’t realize I was getting so fat!” she exclaimed. “There must be something wrong with my scales. Every morning they tell me about the same thing, give or take a pound or two. But look at me! Standing beside you I look absolutely gross.”

  Gussie’s trousers and sweater, nicely fitted, as were Mrs. Potter’s own, were clearly a size—could it be two sizes?—smaller. “You’re not fat, Genia,” she said comfortingly. “In fact you look pretty good by the standards we used to apply to ourselves ten or twenty years ago. I know you may think the fashion of being quite thin is only a fad, or purely vanity, but Tony has convinced me it’s as much for health as for looks.” As Gussie spoke, she turned to look at her full-length profile in the mirror.

  “Don’t do that!” Mrs. Potter begged her. “I can’t bear the comparison!”

  “If you’re serious,” Gussie said, “you may decide to join the club. You know I don’t mean it’s really a club. It’s just that all of us—except Bethie and Dee—are totally committed to Tony Ferencz. His program is different for each of us—we all know that, and he’s asked us not to discuss it with each other. All I can tell you is that all of us who are his regulars think that he’s wonderful.”

  “I saw the change in all the others the minute we were together at lunch yesterday,” Mrs. Potter told her. “I just hadn’t realized how fat I look next to you! Frankly, it’s rather a shock.”

  “Let me ask Tony what he thinks about taking on a new client,” Gussie said doubtfully. “I think he really wants to stay with just the small group of us for individual counseling. He says he only wants people who are permanently on the island for now, although of course that will change once he establishes his foundation. And even that is confidential, so will you please forget I mentioned it? He’s a wonderful man, but some things make him very angry, like discussing his plans, even anything about his methods, with outsiders.”

  Feeling fat, taken aback at the realization that she was now an outsider, at least to Tony Ferencz, in a place she had known and loved and been a part of for so long, Mrs. Potter flattened her stomach muscles, tucked under her behind, and followed Gussie’s slim figure down the stairs.

  Even as she wondered what Tony and his diet and his confidential methods could do for her, Mrs. Potter’s thoughts veered sharply to the two deaths of the previous day. It seemed too much a coincidence that a secretary should die of an allergic seizure at a Wednesday lunch party
and that her employer, Mrs. Potter’s old friend, should die that same evening.

  Nonsense, she told herself briskly. Ozzie was older than the rest of us, and in poor health. It was possible that news of Edie’s death had precipitated his fatal heart attack or whatever it was. The whole thing was simply chance—sad chance, for both of them.

  However, the breakfast conversation had pointed out an uncomfortable fact. The two of them, Ozzie and his secretary, were equally privy to the affairs of all of her friends, it seemed, and probably to those of dozens of others of the island’s winter population as well,

  So it was, that perhaps twelve hours after Oscar deBevereaux’s death, and less than an hour after she had learned of it, Mrs. Potter began to feel vaguely troubled.

  8

  Scarved, wool-capped, and storm-coated, the two women separated moments later to descend to the street by the twin stairs flanking Gussie’s front door. Each brushed the snow from the round brass finial on her side of the stairway, and they smiled at each other in the sunshine.

  Yesterday’s uncertain January patchiness had become a new world of clear blue and white. The red brick of the great houses across the street, one of them Helen Latham’s, showed sharp and clean against the white of small gardens; the heavy wood frame above each window held a ledge of soft white snow; snow-capped iron railings were cleanly defined.

  “If we don’t hurry, it will all melt before we get there to see the trees,” Gussie urged as Mrs. Potter stood looking, unwilling to move. “Come on!”

  “It’s just that this place is so beautiful,” Mrs. Potter said. “You forget, being away, just how perfect it all is, and how real.”

  “It’s real,” Gussie said. “It never changed and it never had to be rebuilt, the way they did when they restored Williamsburg.”

  “Poor old Nantucketers,” Mrs. Potter said. “The bottom dropped out of the whale oil market when somebody drilled an oil well out in Pennsylvania. They couldn’t afford to modernize.” She thought of what those modernizations would have been—fake English timbering and fancy shingle patterns—and how blessedly the island had been spared.

  Suddenly she clutched her hostess’s arm. “Gussie,” she said quietly, “even if you’ve gone down this street a thousand times, you’ve never seen it like this.”

  From Orange Street to their right, the clock on the South Tower struck nine. A few tracks of early cars and trucks had left their marks in the snow on the wide cobblestone street leading down to a glimpse of the harbor, sparkling in the sunshine at the bottom of the hill. A few foot tracks showed on the broad sidewalks, but for the moment not a car was parked on the quiet, snowy street, not another person was in sight.

  For the moment, the world between the big red-brick bank at the head of the street, and the smaller, older red brick of the Pacific Club at the foot was entirely their own, in unbelievable contrast to Mrs. Potter’s summertime memories, when it was thronged with well-dressed strollers and shoppers, with people in shorts walking their bicycles on the sidewalk, with clusters of eager buyers circling bright flower stands or choosing fresh-picked local vegetables from the backs of parked trucks. Now tall Christmas trees marked the front of these two landmark buildings. Along each side of the street were a dozen or more smaller trees. Each of them, large or small, had this morning been returned to its forest beginnings by the magic of the snow.

  “The lights and trimmings were taken down yesterday,” Gussie said softly. “All of the holiday glitter is gone. It’s just snow and trees.”

  As she spoke, a green town truck entered at the foot of the street and parked at the central corner, in front of what Mrs. Potter always called “the paper store.” Two men in heavy jackets and dark, billed caps climbed out of the cab, lit cigarettes, and looked around slowly.

  “We just made it in time,” Gussie said. “They’ve come to take down the trees. Let’s walk on down to Straight Wharf on our side of the street and pretend they aren’t there.”

  The two walked slowly down the hill toward the harbor, scarcely glancing at the old brick storefronts and shopwindows—shops that had been filled with tanned and affluent summer customers the last time Mrs. Potter had seen them. Their displays of books and gifts and antiques and confections and beautiful textiles could wait. For her now, there was only the quiet and the snow and the reborn trees.

  Mrs. Potter broke the silence as they passed the friendly old red bricks of the Pacific Club, discreetly peering in to see if any early morning cribbage players were already at their small tables in the back room. “Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, “that it could have been the Nantucket Tea Party in the history books? Those three ships carrying the tea from England might have come in to Nantucket instead of Boston Harbor. They were owned here, remember? And by the same company that used to have headquarters in this building. Can you see the old Nantucketers painting themselves up like Wampanoags and dumping that tea in the harbor here, rather than pay the king’s taxes?”

  “Highly unlikely,” Gussie assured her. “The ships—what were their names?—belonged to Mr. Rotch all right, and his office might have been up the stairs behind this door, up where Ted’s and Ozzie’s are now, but my guess is that those early Nantucketers were too good merchants to dump valuable tea overboard. Anyway, the island was always really more Tory than otherwise, although nobody talks about that now.”

  “Speaking of merchants,” Mrs. Potter said, “is the Christmas Walk still going strong?”

  This holiday event had begun only a year or two before Mrs. Potter’s last wintertime stay on the island. The annual putting up of the trees on Main Street, their lighting and trimming, had been a tradition for many years before that. Then, sparked by whoever’s bright idea the two could not remember, the merchants of the town had added an embellishment of their own. When the trees went up in December, they designated an evening for this special Christmas event. All of the stores and shops remained open until late in the evening. There was street entertainment with music and carols; there were special Christmas treats and prizes and good things to eat; the shops, bejeweled in their Christmas finery, were a part of a continuing round of small holiday parties, their owners for the evening more hosts than merchants. The Walk had become an off-season tourist attraction, a new tradition on an old cobblestone thoroughfare.

  “Usually I have a cocktail party beforehand,” Gussie said, “and then we all go to the Scrim or someplace for dinner after we’ve done the entire tour. This year, I just didn’t feel like it. Partly because of Gordon’s dying in October, and I hadn’t really begun having people in. And then partly because I had just got such a good start with my program with Tony, and I didn’t quite trust myself with all that liquor and fattening food in the house.”

  “But you’re having people for cocktails Saturday on my account,” Mrs. Potter pointed out. “Are you sure you want to? I mean, you really can’t have a cocktail party without liquor and a lot of things to eat that aren’t on anybody’s diet.”

  “Yes, I do want to, and everybody’s invited, but it’s not a cocktail party,” Gussie said. “To be honest, I expect everyone does think it is. That’s the assumption when an invitation’s for five o’clock. The fun of it is, I’m going to shock the socks off them—they’re coming to a tea party.”

  Seeing the look of mild surprise on Mrs. Potter’s face, Gussie elaborated. Tony was terribly tolerant, of course, except for his special clients, but he was adamant about no liquor for them. (Mrs. Potter had a guilty recollection of proposing drinks at yesterday’s lunch party.) Gussie continued that all of them, all of Tony’s “people,” would find it so much easier if drinks weren’t offered, and anyway she thought it was high time someone came up with an alternative to cocktails for casual hospitality.

  “So nobody’s going to worry about disobeying Tony,” she went on. “We’ll have tea and a lot of really good little things to eat for whoever isn’t dieting, and this will be your coming-back party.”

  “It sound
s wonderful,” Mrs. Potter said. “Of course, I saw all of Les Girls yesterday, and Peter Benson. But there are the other men—I’m eager to see Arnold Sallanger, naturally. He’ll always be my favorite doctor. Ted is fun, in a way, even if he always is a little tiddly. George Enderbridge is nice, if a bit worthy, but of course as a clergyman and retired headmaster he can’t help that. And I suppose Victor Sandys is coming? Is he writing anything these days, and has anybody persuaded him to get a hearing aid?”

  “You forgot Ozzie,” Gussie reminded her. “Poor Ozzie.”

  They walked onto the wharf that encircled one end of the marina, sending hundreds of starlings beneath the heavy planking into twittering panic. “The weather’s been like fall, up to now,” Gussie said. “They’ll take off when it gets really cold. My perennial borders are still halfway green—did you notice?”

  Broken shells crunched underfoot. A gull stalked away as they approached, a scallop shell in his beak, glaring back at them over his shoulder.

  They looked out across the water, now a milky turquoise, toward the houses at Shimmo and Monomoy on the southern rim of the harbor.

  “There’s Mittie’s house,” Mrs. Potter observed. “What a view she has of the harbor from that hilltop of hers.”