The Nantucket Diet Murders

by Virginia Rich

  Mrs. Potter turned to Gussie and began to stack the books on the table before them. “Thanks, Lolly, for all your help,” she said as they gathered their notes to leave.

  “Everything’s poisonous,” Gussie repeated mournfully as they were walking home in the early dusk. “Everything in your house or your garden is just sitting there waiting to do you in.”

  “It isn’t that bad, and you know it,” Mrs. Potter said. “Lots of plants contain poisonous substances, but honestly, Gussie, how many people actually ever eat them? I just read that castor beans are deadly, five beans for a child, eight for an adult. And yet Grandpa Andrews always planted a great row of them the whole west length of the barn, just: because they were big and showy and easy to grow, and a background for Grandmother’s hollyhocks. Nobody ever told Will and me they were poisonous. I’m sure nobody knew it, or Grandpa wouldn’t have had them on the place.”

  “Did you ever eat a castor bean?” Gussie asked practically.

  Mrs. Potter said that apparently it had never occurred to her or her brother to do so, and that in any case the very word castor would have evoked instant revulsion. “I can’t drink grape juice to this day,” she said, “because that’s the way we had to take castor oil, supposedly disguised in the stuff.” No, they would never have willingly eaten a castor bean, although she clearly remembered the high, rough plants., taller than sunflowers, and the hairy, tough seedpods that contained such deadly poison, unknown to them or their garden-loving grandmother.

  “Remember our oleander hedges at the ranch?” she asked as they continued walking toward home.

  Gussie nodded. “Poisonous. ‘A single leaf may kill within twenty-four hours. Nausea, stomach pains, weakness, abnormal heartbeat, and coma.’ I put that in my notes.”

  Yet, Mrs. Potter continued, while everybody says it’s poisonous to both humans and animals, she had never known a single soul, or heard of a single horse or cow, who had actually even nibbled a leaf or blossom.

  “A real killer here on Nantucket might be green hellebore, and you might mistake that for early skunk cabbage,” Gussie said. “But who’d eat that?”

  “People do eat pokeweed greens around here in the spring,” Mrs. Potter said. “Maybe you should worry about that—shallow breathing, paralysis, spasms, convulsions—but that comes from the root, not the greens. I never pull wild flowers up by the roots, of course, but when I think of the times I’ve cut pokeweed to use for a flower arrangement once the berries are purple, late summer . . .”

  “Nicotiana—I always grow that for the evening fragrance,” Gussie said. “Potent alkaloid, vomiting, slow pulse, respiratory failure. It’s too much!”

  All the way home Mrs. Potter had considered telling Gussie that she knew who had poisoned Edie and Ozzie. She decided it was only fair to wait for further and incontrovertible proof.

  The intensity in Lolly’s voice when she said, “It was just a horrible accident,” had told her two things. Edie and Ozzie were not supposed to have died. And Lolly Latham, for whatever reason or by whatever accident, had been the one to administer the dumb cane and foxglove.

  Accidental poisonings do happen, part of her mind was telling her. Maybe with some frequency, in spite of her own perhaps unusually fortunate experience to the contrary. Nevertheless, the afternoon’s research seemed to show that it would be a gamble, at best, to plan to murder someone that way. A premeditated killing—that is, if the perpetrator had any degree of sophistication in such matters—would employ something more certain, like a knife or a gun or a hypodermic injection.

  If only Tony were not coming to dinner, she thought. Right now, for Gussie’s sake, she must put all this out of her mind for a few hours. After that, she could decide what to do about it.

  It was a relief, once they were home, to find there was no time for exercise, and to sink into a warm and fragrant bath in the long old-fashioned tub. It was even a relief to know she must hurry to dress as she put on what Gussie had told her to wear—a deep-green wool dinner dress, long-sleeved and high-necked, its color a good background for her best but not-quite-emerald earrings. Still thinking of Lolly, she caught a quick look at herself in the long hall mirror before going down, and decided that she might look a little slimmer than a week ago.

  Not that any such thought was related to Tony Ferencz, she told herself as he came across the parlor from where he was standing with Gussie in front of the fire, to bow lightly and kiss her hand. The challenge was there and unmistakable, but she knew her own inner response to be cool. This is not the man for me, she told herself, even if he seems to be for Gussie.

  And for Helen and Leah and Mittie and Mary Lynne. Apparently he was the man for all of Les Girls except for Dee, and even Dee had succumbed to his undeniable appeal when she had married him, even if as much for reasons of ambition as of romance for them both. His taut lean body, his steady gray eyes, his slight accent, even the deep dome of his forehead, were all part of it.

  More than any of these physical attributes there was the exhilarating flattery of his attention. If only just for the moment, she thought, he makes you feel you’re the only woman in the room, in the world. That’s his secret. You’re Eve.

  “Tony’s never seen the town at night from the cupola,” Gussie was saying. “We’ve decided to make a quick trip up to see the view and then come back to have our Perrier here by the fire. Grab a sweater or jacket, Genia, as we go up—it will be chilly up there, remember.”

  Tony was solicitous in wrapping Gussie’s shoulders in a warm handwoven stole before they ascended the wide hall stairway. The radiance of her smile as he did so, looking directly into her eyes, made Mrs. Potter hope he really might be as wonderful as Gussie thought.

  Any disquieting suspicions, she reminded herself as they went up the second, narrower stairway, and the third one to the cupola, are, except for Dee’s derogatory remarks and a few vague and unproven hints, entirely in my own mind. Also I must remember what I realized earlier. Plant poisons would not be the choice of a man who knows as much about both herbs and plants as Tony Ferencz must have learned in his years as a diet authority. The chances are much too heavily weighted on the side of their not being fatal. A killer kills. If Tony were a killer, he wouldn’t administer something likely only to make someone sick for a few hours.

  The lighted moon of the South Tower clock came to meet them through the windows; the town twinkled its lights on the streets below. “Your mirador,” Tony said to Gussie, moving from one windowed side of the small room to the other. “Watchtower for a princess. I correct myself—watchtower for a great queen.” Again his gray eyes fixed Gussie’s.

  She separated herself from his gaze with obvious effort, with the excuse that she just remembered something in the kitchen. Knowing the planned menu—the small roasting chickens in the oven, timed to be ready later, and the dessert of chilled lemon soufflé (“with fresh strawberries,” Gussie had remarked when they came back from the library. “At least they’re not poisonous”), Mrs. Potter could only assume that some other dish required attention. Probably the freshest of vegetables available on the island earlier in the day.

  As she left, saying she’d rejoin them in the parlor, but not to hurry, Mrs. Potter realized that Gussie was giving her a first opportunity to be with Tony alone, a chance to get to know him. “Don’t rush,” she instructed them. “Let Genia point out the sights to you, Tony.”

  Mrs. Potter forced herself to smile at the tall man beside her. “You’ve been on Nantucket for months, and you must know where everything is. Let’s just stand here and look for a few minutes and I’ll spare you the guidebook routine, not that I’m very good at it.”

  “I’m sure you are very good at whatever you are doing,” Tony assured her levelly. “What I am not sure of is what you are doing these days has to do with me.”

  The man is more intelligent and perceptive than I knew, Mrs. Potter thought. She decided to be as forthright as he appeared.

  “All right, I want
to learn everything I can about you,” she said, “everything that tells me what kind of person you are. Gussie is one of my dearest friends and we’ve been part of each other’s lives for forty years. I’ve seen her through three marriages . . .”

  “Please go on,” Tony said, gravely courteous and attentive.

  “The third time was to a man you must have known—Gordon Van Vleeck,” she continued.

  Again Tony nodded politely. “A sad thing he died, then? Maybe so, maybe not.”

  Mrs. Potter turned toward the view of the harbor light. “Gussie’s a very special person and she deserves to be happy. Gordon was—well, frankly, the cowboys on the ranch would have said he was no kiss for Christmas.”

  Mrs. Potter caught the glint of a brief smile as again Tony inclined his head in affirmation. “From what I saw and heard of the man, he wasn’t worth a damn,” he said. “I might have helped him with some vitamin injections, but he wouldn’t let me get near him. Still, that’s not your concern now. What you’re wondering and questioning people about is if I’m the right man to succeed him.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Potter said.

  “You want me to tell you if I would make a good husband for our dear friend?” he continued. “If I say yes, you can assume I am lying. If I say no, that also may be a lie. I fear, Eugenie, darling, there is no way I can help you decide. Am I what your cowboys would call a ‘kiss for Christmas’?” His sudden laughter was unexpected.

  She found herself laughing as well. “Let’s go down and join Gussie, shall we?” For the evening, she told herself, she would forget her misgivings.

  Again he appeared to read her mind. “But you will begin again tomorrow to ask the questions, am I right? No matter. I will try to defend myself.” His smile now was as disarming as his unexpected laughter had been. “Now will you show me the town from the rooftop before we go below?” he asked, indicating the ladder-steep steps to the roof walk. “Let me put my jacket over that light sweater, so . . .”

  His gray eyes were now holding her own.

  Mrs. Potter very well understood her own impulse to yield, to be wrapped in the folds of lovely navy French wool with the sterling silver buttons, to admire the swordsman’s shoulders and lean torso in the impeccably fitted white shirt with its tiny monogram above the right cuff. Perhaps her interest in Tony Ferencz was not as cool as she had thought.

  She also understood the tremor of fear that followed this first primitive impulse of attraction to the man whose jacket was gently but insistently enfolding her.

  “Let’s go up and look at the town together,” Tony repeated quietly. “If I come up directly behind you, I can reach past to open the skylight when we get to the top.”

  Mrs. Potter put a foot on the first step of the ladder-like stairs.

  “It is not so cold, and we will just stay for a moment.” Tony’s hand covered her own, now on the rope handrail. “Let’s laugh together again, Eugenie. Your laugh is lovely.”

  Mrs. Potter remained motionless, ready to take the next upward step. Then she pictured the open platform at the top of the steep stairway, five stories above the street.

  Tony’s hand restrained her momentarily, but turning, she slipped past him quickly to regain the neutral ground of the broader open stairway leading down to the lower floors. With an effort she hoped was imperceptible, she slid neatly out of the jacket.

  “I think it’s too cold and blowy for the roof walk now,” she said. “Let’s go down and join Gussie in the parlor.” She hoped he did not see that she was shaking and that he had been unaware of the sudden panic of her retreat.

  Over Perrier in the parlor, and later at the long mahogany table in the dining room, conversation was remarkably sprightly. To Mrs. Potter, Count Ferencz was friendly and courteous. His attention centered on Gussie, who seemed happily impervious to any undercurrents.

  Trying to take her cue from Tony’s apparent failure to see her descent from the ladder as the terror-struck flight it had been, Mrs. Potter endeavored throughout dinner, as casually as she could, to learn more of his background. Ordinarily one could establish a certain fund of information by knowing about former schools, about possible mutual friends, about places and times of mutual interest. These delicate thrusts were parried with grace and sometimes wit. Schooling? A boarding school in Switzerland, one she’d not be likely to know, run by crazy monks. He was reminded of a funny story about one of them. University? Heidelberg, naturally. Mrs. Potter did not know what naturally implied. The only person connected with the place she could think of was the Student Prince, and she couldn’t even claim to have known Nelson Eddy.

  Mutual friends? Tony’s stories were amusing, affectionate, occasionally deftly malicious, but they all involved people Mrs,. Potter did not know, other than to know of. Princess Grace, Maria Callas, various wives of Greek shipping magnates or of Middle East rulers rich in oil and power. All had one thing in common, beside the fact that Mrs. Potter had never encountered any of them except in the pages of the press: They were all dead. She would never hear what stories they might have told in turn about the charming Count Ferencz who knew so much about health and beauty.

  In vain she tried to think of someone living whom she might know and with whom Tony would claim acquaintance.

  Never before, she realized, had she dined with a man she was afraid of, even though her fears might be groundless in the light of what she now knew about the poison deaths. She was making dinner table conversation with a man she had—at least momentarily—thought capable of pushing her over the low parapet of the roof walk to what would have been her certain death on the cobblestones below,

  26

  “I knew you’d like Tony,” Gussie was saying the next morning. “You just needed a little time alone with him to realize I’m right—he’s a wonderful man!”

  Mrs. Potter had wakened much earlier with a shattering sense of remorse. Gussie’s words now were of no help. I as much as accused the man, at least in my own mind, of trying to murder me, she had told herself. He’s too courteous to show it, but he must have found me unforgivably insulting. Only the ease and urbanity of his dinner table conversation made it seem that he misunderstood (or chose to ignore) the hint of accusation in her flight from the cupola.

  She forced herself to be honest about her fears. Was it that she was afraid, not of Tony but of her own feelings about him? Like Gussie and the others, was she beginning to find him all too compellingly attractive?

  Mrs. Potter wrenched her thoughts away from Tony Ferencz and the cupola.

  She tried to summon a mental picture of Beth in the Providence hospital. Was there a psychiatric ward? Were Laurence and Paula allowed to visit her? Her imaginings showed a quiet woman, her white curly hair beginning to show the need for Larry’s skillful shaping and trimming, a woman possibly heavily sedated, burdened with baseless guilt.

  There was no doubt in her mind now that Lolly was guilty, however much the girl might tell herself it was all a horrible accident. And no matter what had been the reason for the two poisoning deaths, she would never be able to forgive Lolly for what she had done with the old poison bottle.

  She knew, from seeing the furtive drink Lolly had poured for herself at the beach shack picnic, that Lolly was clever in disguising her actions. She could have been just as clever in putting the blue bottle in Beth’s basket at the party. No one ever really noticed what Lolly was doing. The unbelievable part was Lolly’s quick, dark cunning in seeing the possibilities of the old bottle in the first place.

  In spite of herself, her thoughts went back to Tony. There was no escaping one fact, no matter what Lolly had done. None of this had happened before Tony came to Nantucket. She heard Dee’s words again in her mind. You’ll all be sorry.

  Now, as she and Gussie drank their morning juices, Gussie was still speaking happily of her pleasure in the threesome dinner party the evening before.

  “Did I tell you what Tony’s decided as the name for the clinic?” she asked. “He told m
e just before he went home. It’s so perfect you’ll have to agree there’s no possible other choice. It’s going to be Eve, Nantucket. Just that—for his mother, of course. Don’t you love it? And he thinks now he might be in business by July at the latest, although that’s all he’d tell me about the details.”

  Mrs. Potter was shaken. The man reads my mind, she thought. Or maybe I read his. In all honesty, she had to agree that: the name might be a good one, and certainly better than some of the others she’d been hearing. Eve, Nantucket would probably be a tremendous success, wherever on the island and with whosoever’s money Tony was going to get it set up in time for the Nantucket summer season.

  Gussie continued her breakfast chatter. Helen had just called, she reported, and asked her to take one of the new volunteers along on her weekly Meals on Wheels rounds today—one of the nice new widows on the island who had been among the tea party guests. So Genia could beg off, if she liked, or tag along.

  Mrs. Potter elected to beg off. She needed time to think, and she said she would take a walk instead, and then have lunch ready when Gussie got back.

  It was late morning when she returned from a long, fast walk, first to the Jetties to smell the salt air and watch the gulls and eventually to climb the winding stone-paved path to the Cliff Road. Delaying, she made a detour on her way back to Main Street, providing an excuse to send postcards later to the children, reminding them that they, too, had once been on Easy Street.

  On her way home she passed the paper store. Its windows were blazoned with posters. A NEW ROMANCE BY VICKI SANDS! EVEN BETTER THAN Midnight Love! EVEN SPICIER THAN Secret Wife!

  There was a blown-up jacket cover showing a young woman in a bikini, unaccountably depicted in a field of spring flowers, a shadowy male figure striding toward her out of the woods in the background. DON’T MISS Ravished! VICKI SANDS’S LATEST ROMANCE WILL MELT YOUR VERY BONES WHEN YOU ENTER YOUR OWN PRIVATE WORLD, Ravished!