The Nantucket Diet Murders

by Virginia Rich

  “Another day we’ll do the full tour of the island,” she continued as they drove down the new road. “Maybe we might even take a picnic lunch to eat on the bench down next to the pond. Wouldn’t that be fun if it isn’t too cold?”

  As they approached Peter’s small house, perched on the edge of the dunes, they could hear the crash of surf beyond the fringe of beach grasses in front. They smelled salt in the winter air, mingled with the fragrance of woodsmoke.

  Gussie parked behind the house (spoken of as a shack only as one might refer to a favorite horse as a nag), finding a place among a half-dozen other cars there. As the two followed the sandy path to the doorway, they were joined by Arnold Sallanger, who had driven the road across the winter-bleached, but yet unfrozen, moors just behind them.

  Peter was waiting for them at the open door, his stout sweatered arms wide in welcome, urging them in by the fire, saying that they could hear the sea from inside where they’d be warm, that there would be time for a beach walk later.

  They entered a room occupied with chattering and ostensibly convivial luncheon companions. It took only a moment to see that the talk and conviviality were taking place in two completely different groups, each ignoring the existence of the other.

  On their ocean side was a long window, its glass slightly frosted by the etching of blowing sands. Outside, the brief rise of sandy dune was topped with coarse tufts of dark dune grass, below a sky filled with scudding clouds.

  Opposite was a large open cobblestone fireplace, its blazing logs giving welcome heat, and beyond that a door leading into what Mrs. Potter remembered as a small bedroom and bath.

  Between sea and fire were two facing sofas—really banquettes, Mrs. Potter thought—each long enough to seat four or five people comfortably. Between them was a huge pine table of coffee-table height, sturdy enough to serve as a bench. As bench it was being used now, by people with backs to each other in a way that divided the room into two corridors.

  In the first, it was easy to see that Tony, Count Ferencz, was the magnet. As he rose to kiss Gussie’s hand and her own, and to brush Gussie’s cheeks lightly with his lips, and as he continued to keep Gussie’s hand, Mrs. Potter saw that Helen and Mary Lynne were sitting at his side. Mittie and Leah sat facing him, perched girlishly on the low center table, their hands around their knees.

  In the second corridor, a flat-brimmed hat and flashing earrings, above a heavy turtleneck sweater and trousers of pale heather beige, declared that Dee, Countess Ferencz, was holding her own court. Rising from their places beside her on the second banquette were George Enderbridge, his dry, smooth cheeks rosy from the fire, and Victor Sandys, wearing a new white Irish fisherman’s sweater, mighty with cables and popcorn-stitch bumps. His wool trousers were what Mrs. Potter knew to be the third tartan plaid she had seen him wear since their first meeting on the post office steps Friday morning. He was wearing glossy new leather boots, she noted later when he stretched them out before him to be admired on the tabletop.

  As she greeted them all, Mrs. Potter again found herself an observer as well as a guest. Again guest of honor, she reminded herself. She must try to be good company even though, as yesterday, she was inwardly troubled. Until she could talk with Beth, she had nothing on which to base these now recurring misgivings. Meantime, she could not keep from watching and wondering, although for what, she would have found it impossible to say.

  Peter, not part of either group, was now busy providing drinks, with Lolly Latham apparently helping him, or at least on her feet and awkwardly apart from the two corridors. It was typically thoughtful of Peter, Mrs. Potter thought, to have included her in this party, as Gussie had done in her tea invitation, a generous impulse on the part of both of them, since she was seldom included in her mother’s social life.

  There was more room in Dee’s camp than in Tony’s, and Mrs. Potter joined her there beside the other two men, as did Arnold Sallanger, without hesitation. Gussie first went to be with Peter at the far end of the room, the area that served as kitchen and bar, before returning to perch on the back of the banquette above Tony’s well-tailored shoulder. “Peter’s wonderful, as always,” she called across to Mrs. Potter. “Wouldn’t you know? Exactly the right drinks for everybody.”

  Dee, Victor, and George had large heavy beakers before them, holding what Mrs. Potter and Arnold rightly assumed to be Bloody Marys, and undoubtedly Peter’s special mix of highly seasoned tomato juice and an equal measure of chilled clam broth. Arnold answered Peter’s question by saying that’s what he’d have too, and Mrs. Potter began to say that’s what she’d like too, only as Peter knew, she’d like hers with gin, if it was handy, rather than vodka.

  At that moment Gussie spoke again, calling across from her perch on the sofa back. “Peter’s brought freshly made vegetable juices from his big extractor at the Scrim,” she said. “He’s got a wonderful new mix I’m going to try for you tomorrow, Genia. Carrot, of course, and then yellow turnip—that’s rutabaga—and parsley—remember, Genia, parsley for your liver?—and all kinds of native Nantucket herbs he’s been gathering. Tell me again, Peter, what has it got?”

  “Calamus root, for one thing,” Peter said. “The old settlers used to make candy with it. It grows along one side of First Bridge on the Madaket road. You have to be careful not to get the root of the wild flag, though, because that’s supposedly poisonous, and it grows on the other side of the bridge. The special taste comes from ground holly. The berries are dry now and that’s the time to gather them . . .”

  “Gaultheria procumbens,” Mrs. Potter heard Lolly whisper.

  “. . . when they have a very nice wintergreen taste,” Peter continued. “But remember, guys, Tony’s head guru around here. All I do is basically what he wants you to do-drink lots of fresh juices of all kinds. Only I try to make it a little fun. Give me a hand, will you, Lolly?”

  Tony inclined his head by way of thanks, and Gussie’s smile was proud.

  Surprising herself, remembering her diet, Mrs. Potter made a choice. “I’d love some juice, too,” she said. Across the table she saw Tony’s questioning glance and Gussie’s nod of approval.

  Everyone was now listening to Peter’s story about the casting for the next little-theater play—his attempt to pull both groups of his guests together, Mrs. Potter thought. Chancing to look beyond the shoulders of those facing her, she saw Lolly at the kitchen counter. She was quickly pouring one of the juice glasses half full of vodka before adding the pale vegetable juice.

  Before Mrs. Potter could believe her eyes, Lolly had rather clumsily brought the tray of filled glasses, a plump forefinger and thumb almost casually encircling the noticeably paler glass, the one Mrs. Potter knew to be mostly vodka. She watched as Lolly made her rounds with the tray until only the pale glass remained, still awkwardly but definitely within her grasp. She continued to watch, from the corner of her eye, as Lolly, in her baggy jeans and too large gray sweater, standing apart from the others, sipped from it steadily, with no visible reaction. Her own first thought was relief that Lolly’s drink had not been her own. Rutabaga juice and native plants were about all she could manage.

  The two groups again divided as Peter finished his story. Conversation on Dee’s side of the table ranged from the frogs and old songs of the evening before to the question of Victor’s new book, which he refused to discuss. “I may have said galley proofs,” he said flatly, “but you may be thinking of a new edition. I’m sure you all remember my Backwards into Night? Remember what the Times said? ‘A new major talent in the world of fiction.’ And you remember the book club review, the one calling it a true breakthrough in the exploration of the subconscious?”

  Those beside him agreed dutifully. “I still think you’ve got a new one up your sleeve and you’re planning to surprise us,” Gussie told him, again speaking across the no-man’s-land of the big coffee table. “See if you can pry it out of him, Genia.”

  The subject turned to Beth’s health.

 
; “I hope you’re keeping an eye on her, Arnold,” George Enderbridge said earnestly.

  “If it were any of the rest of the women here,” Dee said darkly, only half under her breath, “I’d know who to blame.” She stared coldly across the table at her ex-husband, who gave no sign of hearing her.

  In the opposing camp surrounding him, Mrs. Potter overheard similar expressions of concern about Beth. “Did you see those circles under her eyes?” Mary Lynne was asking.

  “Even Lolly spoke about it,” Helen Latham said, “and you know she never notices anything.”

  Gussie spoke up quickly, obviously distressed to hear Helen’s daughter belittled to her face. “Lolly, you were terrific at my tea party yesterday,” she said, turning to where Lolly stood woodenly by the big window, holding her empty glass. “Genia said you were dear helping out in the dining room with the guests, just as Ted was.”

  Lolly flushed unbecomingly, although she did not seem visibly affected by the large amount of liquor she had downed so quickly. She looks just like her father, Mrs. Potter thought, seeing her face blank and expressionless in the cold light from the ocean. Maybe I was right about her slipping away to her room with a handful of cookies or a fistful of candy bars, only instead it may be a retreat into her own world with a surreptitious drink.

  “It’s getting quite late,” Dee said, on her side of the table. “Do you think Beth’s forgotten? She says she’s so forgetful these days. And where’s Ted? He’s always on time.”

  Peter rejoined them to answer the second question. Ted had phoned him before breakfast. Had a spur-of-the-moment decision to take the early plane and visit his mother in Wellesley, and said to tell everyone how sorry he was to miss the lunch party.

  “Ted must have been drunk as a skunk yesterday, knocking over a teapot like that,” Victor said loudly. “Heard him shrieking like a banshee after he did it. Served him right if he scalded himself.”

  Mrs. Potter’s first impulse was to deny this. “He didn’t seem tipsy,” she said. “He was handing around cups and whirling back and forth between the tea table and the parlor and never missing a step. He drank gallons of tea, and he never seemed to be away long enough to have anything else.”

  “Drank a lot, you say?” Victor asked. “Probably nipping all afternoon in the back hall. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  Mrs. Potter sighed, in unhappy, reluctant, unspoken agreement. Ted had to have been drunk. At least she had been the only one to hear his wild accusation of Beth. The words cyanide and poison had not reached the kitchen.

  “The phone here is on disconnect for the winter,” Peter interjected, “or we could check on Beth. She probably got started planning a new garden layout and didn’t notice the time. We’ll go ahead with lunch and I expect she’ll come dashing in any minute now, wearing some wonderful crazy new hat.”

  Brushing aside offers of help, Peter quickly cleared the big low table and placed two old arrowback pine chairs at either end, thus converting it into a luncheon table for twelve. He whisked away the empty glasses and brought a big clean ashtray to replace the one already overflowing in front of Victor Sandys. At each place on the bare, waxed pine, he set a heavy cranberry-glass goblet with a folded homespun napkin and a soup spoon thrust lightly inside, and a large flowered pottery plate. In the center of the table he placed a huge revolving tray of the same satiny pine as the tabletop.

  “Lazy Susan lunch,” he announced happily. “Everybody can reach, and everything’s on picks to eat by hand, so you can choose your own menu. Just start in and keep it turning while I fill the glasses and then bring the stew.”

  Mrs. Potter observed that the goblets on Dee’s side of the table were filled from a carafe of white wine; those on Tony’s side from a pitcher of iced tea.

  The revolving tray bore a varied feast. There were cheeses—Muenster, Edam, and Brie—with accompanying Swedish flatbread. There were neat small chunks of fresh fruits-apple and pineapple on small spears, strawberries and small clusters of black Ribier grapes providing their own handles. Raw vegetables flourished—radishes with tiny plumes of green leaf, crisp cauliflorets, sticks of crisp celery and carrot and green pepper. Chilled shrimp, flavored with the fennel broth in which they had been cooked and cooled, arrived wrapped in green snow-pea pods. And above all this was Peter, urging and inviting, as he brought and placed on each flowered plate a small hot tureen of creamy fragrance.

  “Nantucket bay scallop stew,” he told her as he set the first bowl in front of Mrs. Potter. “Dig in while it’s hot. You’ll never find bay scallops like the ones we get here, Potter, and I couldn’t think of anything you might like better for your welcome-home lunch.”

  Mrs. Potter agreed. Each small scallop, no kin either in size or flavor to those she knew elsewhere, was plump and succulent, the size and color of a small white marble. The judicious amount of creamy elixir surrounding them repeated their flavor without obvious distractions, although Mrs. Potter remembered that Peter added a dash of both celery salt and garlic salt to the butter in which he briefly simmered his scallops before bathing them in hot milk and cream. The result was a dish in which tiny, perfect, tender scallops swam gladly in a small creamy sea, with a coral crest of paprika-dusted melting butter.

  Mrs. Potter felt sure that the scallop stew on Tony’s side of the table was less creamy, and that the basket of toasted Portuguese bread there was also unbuttered. She would ask Gussie later.

  Her enjoyment of lunch was not impaired by an occasional glance at Tony Ferencz, sitting opposite her. Conversation seemed more lively, and eating less concentrated, on that side, while beside her, Dee, George, Arnold, and Victor were primarily occupied with the food in front of them. I can see why Gussie and all of them are quite mad about the man, she thought, meanwhile beaming her compliments to Peter on the perfection of the scallops. Tony Ferencz really is a marvelous-looking man, and the fact that he remains slightly aloof and appears to play no favorites may be part of his undeniable appeal.

  To keep from staring, she turned to Victor, suggesting that they turn the lazy Susan to bring the prosciutto and melon around again, just to clear their palates, so to speak. Busy eating, he did not hear. She turned it herself, whereupon he speared several of these colorful morsels in quick succession and then spread a generous slice of Brie on his toasted bread.

  The two men were in striking contrast—the count tall, spare, elegant, his gray eyes piercing and direct, his smile an infrequent compliment; Victor, rather soft and pudgy, his shape and age accented by his youthful new finery, his skin slightly wattled, smelling strongly of tobacco smoke, and much more interested in himself and his meal than in the company of the women (herself and Dee) on either side of him.

  She thought briefly about man-watching., something she might have discussed with Dee or Gussie with shared amusement, but which she ordinarily would not have admitted. We all do it, she thought, only not quite as often or as openly as men look at women. We probably assess their looks just as appraisingly, and sometimes as appreciatively, although we—at least women of my generation—do it very, very discreetly.

  Peter, and her own sense of party manners, recalled her from these momentary mental wanderings. To her surprise, she found that she was honest in telling him that she really couldn’t eat another spoonful of his bay scallop stew, magnificent as it was, and she hoped he’d permit her to skip the dessert.

  “No problem, Potter,” he assured her. “Dessert is going to be this: everybody into coats and scarves and caps and gloves and out for a walk on the beach!”

  Amid general enthusiastic agreement, only Helen demurred. Seated firmly on the banquette, she thrust forth her thin legs to show dark city pumps. Helen’s feet, like her hands, seemed too large for such brittle stems. “I’ll stay by the fire,” she told Peter decisively, “and Tony isn’t dressed to walk in the sand, either.” She pointed to his elegant English-made shoes. “You all go and we’ll get along fine without you for a bit. Lolly, for heaven’s sake, you
go! After all that lunch, you need a workout if anybody does.”

  Leah offered to stay to keep the two company (she had left with them from the tea party the evening before, Mrs. Potter remembered), but Helen waved this aside, pointing out Leah’s warm checked wool pants, her heavy green sweater, and her walking shoes. Leah, somewhat pettish in defeat, rose reluctantly to join the others, as did Victor, looking doubtfully at his shiny new boots.

  In the fresh clear winter air of the beach, long, crested waves were breaking as they came from the open sea at the south. The sky was capricious in its refusal to stay long with either sunshine or clouds. The party, trying to find the narrow stretch of firm sand between high and low tidelines, gradually strung out in groups of two and three, and Mrs. Potter found herself bringing up the rear with Peter.

  As they walked along in wordless enjoyment of the beach and surf, Mrs. Potter looked up, at one point, to see the crumbling end of the old paved road almost overhead, its ragged ends ready to break off, as they had done before, onto the sand ten feet below. She paused to study the fragility of the sandy turf, bound together only with a network of thick, fine grass roots, of which the island’s surface was composed. She shivered at its vulnerability to the onslaught of the tides and thundering storms.

  Peter had walked on without appearing to notice her brief halt, and she hurried to catch up, suddenly aware that his shoulders were slumping and that he looked tired.

  Thrusting her arm through his, she smiled up at him. “You always make things such fun,” she told him, “and your menu today was inspired, just as your frogs and your music were at the end of the party last night. You’re the one who ought to be the diet expert. I’m sure you know as much about it as Tony does, and you know how to make people happy at the same time.”

  Peter managed a wry grin. “A working stiff like me? I started out as a short-order cook at a greasy spoon back in a little town in Indiana, Potter. None of that glamour stuff for me. Besides, just look at me, and then look at that guy.”