The Nantucket Diet Murders

by Virginia Rich

  At least one question, although not on her list, was answered. Victor Sandys was raking it in as Vicki Sands. She wished that all of her answers were that simple. At least it would amuse Gussie to tell her about it. What was that old song they used to consider so naughty, and used to chant so cheerfully and innocently? “Violate me in violet time,” they would sing, with mock leers, “in the vilest manner you know.” Gussie might remember the rest of the words—she could not, at the moment.

  Then before she returned to the house, she found herself walking with George Enderbridge. George’s route, she observed, often seemed to be from the church, then up Main Street, past Gussie’s, in the direction of Mittie’s house.

  She remembered that George was a clergyman as well as a retired headmaster. “I need some help,” she said impulsively. “Have you ever known a murderer?”

  George seemed unsurprised, and his answer was definite. “Never one who really thought he was,” he said with conviction. “When I was starting out in the church, in a pretty seamy Boston neighborhood, I knew a few people who caused deaths, and they were, in fact, judged guilty of murder. None of them seemed to think he or she was a murderer, or admitted starting out with that intent.”

  George teetered back and forth on his heels, considering the question. “The courts said they were murderers. They just thought they’d figured it wrong. They wanted to get even by hurting someone, but not that much. They thought they’d get someone out of the action temporarily, but not for keeps. All of them, now that I think about it, were honestly surprised once they saw that someone actually died.”

  He looked mildly disappointed when Mrs. Potter thanked him and asked nothing further. Then, with a vague smile, apparently feeling that he had performed his priestly office, and, as always, accepting of the foibles of his friends and parishioners, he went on up the street.

  At lunch in the kitchen, somewhat later, Mrs. Potter’s only mention of her morning’s encounters was that of the bone-dissolving secret world of Ravished, by Vicki Sands.

  “We’ll have a new Barbara Cartland in our midst!” Gussie exclaimed. “Victor will dress like a peacock, not that he hasn’t begun to already, and he’ll give interviews to adoring young reporters as he lolls about in bed until noon, and he may even get a hearing aid and start to be fun again, after all these years of moping.”

  She tasted her soup. “This is good!” she proclaimed. “Sopa de ajo! The last time I had it was with Jules in Mexico years ago. Marvelous for a winter day on Nantucket!”

  Mrs. Potter’s hasty lunch inspiration had been garlic soup, slightly altered from the original Mexican recipe (not that she remembered this exactly) to fit limitations of time and calories. With no time to simmer a rich beef broth, she had begun with two bouillon cubes and two cups of water in a shallow skillet. With the flat blade of a heavy knife, she whacked four fat garlic cloves into instant shedding of their papery skins, whacked them soundly again into total submission, then finished them with brisk, brief chopping. Garlic soup was not for the fainthearted.

  As the minced garlic simmered in the broth, she reminded herself to look up on Tony’s chart in the pantry what garlic was good for. Everything, probably—old folklore claimed miracles for it. The chart would probably just say that it reactivated the spleen, or something equally uninteresting.

  The Mexican recipe called for a generous amount of shredded Gruyère or Swiss cheese. She found neither in Gussie’s refrigerator, but in their stead she measured out a careful half-cup of shredded low-fat mozzarella—far less than the expected quantity, she was sure.

  Just before she called Gussie to the table for lunch, she very gently slid two eggs into the simmering broth, and at the same time put two slices of Portuguese bread in the toaster. When the eggs were softly poached, she transferred each, with the hot broth, into a heavy heated pottery soup bowl, and divided the shredded cheese over them. Each bowl was quickly topped with a round of the toasted bread, virtuously uncheesed and unbuttered.

  The two smiled happily at each other as they savored each spoonful—the texture of the long strands of melting cheese, the firm egg white, the richness released by the soft-cooked egg yolk, the broth-soaked goodness of the firm toasted bread, the heady aroma of garlic.

  “Let’s see how this adds up,” Mrs. Potter said, reaching for a fresh yellow pad, one of which was by now to be found at hand in the kitchen and the library as well as on her bedside table in the guest room upstairs. “Broth, hardly enough to count, six calories apiece for bouillon cubes, I think. Garlic—did you ever see a calorie chart listing garlic? Let’s say a little less than a half of a small onion, which is fifty. Let’s say twenty, shall we—ten apiece? Cheese, a quarter-cup each, maybe three-quarters of an ounce. Oh, let’s make it an ounce and say a hundred calories.”

  “Large egg, eighty calories,” Gussie added. “I’d say seventy-five for that slice of Portuguese toast. I get a total of two hundred and seventy-one, do you?”

  “My feeling is that we could divide a Temple orange for dessert,” Mrs. Potter offered, “and still feel reasonably holy.”

  “We’ll reek of garlic for the rest of the day,” Gussie said comfortably. “I’m glad Tony’s not coming for dinner tonight. He called, did I tell you?”

  Not only had he phoned with thanks for a delightful evening, but he wanted Gussie to know how happy he was to have begun to know her dear Eugenie. “In fact,” Gussie said, “since he seemed so receptive and I knew you wanted to get your own diet program, I made a date for you to see him this afternoon at the Scrim. Aren’t you pleased?”

  27

  I’m going to dress just as I would for an afternoon walk, Mrs. Potter told herself. Ordinarily if she had a doctor’s appointment, she’d make sure to wear a dress she could slip out of easily without disarranging her hair. And, she thought guiltily, a rather pretty slip underneath, preferably of a nice color other than white, so she’d feel more in command of the situation once she undressed.

  Today, she reminded herself, her visit to Tony Ferencz was not an appointment with a doctor, and she had no intention of undressing, for any reason at all. She would dress for a blustery afternoon, and in so doing would encase herself in as many hard-to-take-off garments as possible.

  Over underclothes, she put on a blue jersey turtleneck pullover, and added a pair of ribbed wool knee socks over her usual sleek panty hose. She put on zippered wool pants, gratified to see there was no slight crosswise wrinkle below the waistband in the back, the telltale sign of their being too tight. She added a leather belt with an intricate buckle, ordinarily a little bothersome in its fastening. Over all of this she put on a heavy ribbed sweater, its dark blue matching the trousers. And as an afterthought, she further enclosed her already swathed neck with a firmly tied blue-and-white silk scarf. She put her wool-stockinged feet into sturdy walking shoes and knotted the laces.

  On her head she pulled down a firm white wool beret. And, as she left the house, she added her well-zipped, buttoned, and belted storm coat.

  As if the garlic soup were not enough protection, she thought. The man is not going to try to seduce you. Still, one might as well present as many defenses as possible, and he might have had garlic for lunch as well.

  The day, although blowy, did not justify such warm armor, she found, as she walked to the Scrimshaw in the early afternoon. The ground was still unfrozen to her footsteps as she crossed a bit of soft turf. The only chill she felt was an inner one, the memory of the previous evening.

  Today she would be seeing Tony in one of the two small upstairs suites at the Scrimshaw. Peter would possibly be in the other, his own quarters, next door. Jadine and Jimmy, maybe even very late luncheon guests, would be below in the kitchen and dining room. And yet again today she admitted to herself the combination of fear and fascination she had felt from the first time she met Tony Ferencz. She fought an impulse to turn and flee as she went up the small stairway. Each stair tread showed a hooked rug pattern of a different island
motif—a sailboat, a windmill, a bicycle, a sea gull, a spouting whale.

  Tony was standing at the open door of his sitting room. “Naughty Eugenie,” he said as he took both of her gloved hands. “You have now decided I did not intend to push you off the roof? And that I may not be such a big bad wolf, after all? Let’s forget all that nonsense and concentrate on you.”

  The small room was almost too full of crewel-covered chairs. There was a well polished Governor Winthrop desk of near museum distinction, a long pine settee, a number of cushioned footstools. The pine floor planks, gleaming with age and wax, were nearly covered with more hooked rugs, like that of the stairway runner, in soft faded colors and primitive island designs. It was the coziest and least threatening situation Mrs. Potter could imagine, and it was also very warm.

  She allowed Tony to take her heavy coat, and seated herself, choosing a wing chair that appeared to be well barricaded with candle stand pine tables and footstools.

  “It seems I’m here as a client,” she said, with a new rush of courage and determination. “You’ve worked wonders with all of my friends, and I’m sure I’d be foolish if I didn’t see what you could do for me.”

  Tony looked at her appraisingly. “Naturally, your own special diet first,” he murmured. “Of course. We shall have to see just what it is that your system needs.”

  In answer to what must have been a momentary flash of panic in her face, Tony continued, his voice quiet and matter-of-fact, his gaze drifting past her to the window, then back to the small fire on the hearth. “There will be tests for this later, naturally, and laboratory reports from my staff, but nothing of the sort today. In fact, there will be no general examination of any kind today.”

  Mrs. Potter relaxed slightly.

  “I have found, however, that my clinical experience permits me to make many valid preliminary findings based on a superficial examination of the hands.” Tony’s voice was entirely professional now, and impersonal. Without moving from his own wing chair opposite, he leaned forward and stretched out a long arm and a finely shaped long-fingered hand. “First, the left,” he instructed her, his voice casual and yet authoritative.

  There was nothing alarming about his touch. Actually, Mrs. Potter thought, as she felt his fingers moving her own finger joints, pressing and testing the cushions of her palm, and as she saw him studying the texture of her fingernails and the skin over her knuckles, this is really quite interesting.

  Her right hand followed, and the examination seemed partly gentle massage as Tony’s hands manipulated her own. It felt good—in no way a threat, no suggestion of intimacy.

  Briefly she winced as he probed the base of her index finger. “A little arthritic condition there,” he told her gravely. “Possibly you write a great deal? We shall take this into account.”

  The otherwise agreeable hand-examination ended, almost to her regret, and Tony, with slow courtesy., returned her extended hands to the arms of her chair.

  With the toe of a well-made English boot, he now pushed a low footstool into place at her feet. “And now the feet,” he said quietly. “There is no need to undress—only to remove the heavy shoes.”

  In the warmth of the small room it was good to be free of her walking shoes and the thick woolen knee socks. Mrs. Potter reminded herself comfortably that she was encased in nylon from toe tip to waist, and over that by a pair of well-secured woolen trousers.

  Tony’s fingers gently probed and moved each toe within the nylon-stockinged foot, moved heel and ankle, stroked each area of sole and instep. His touch seemed increasingly more insistent, more deeply pleasurable.

  Again to her regret, the manipulation of her feet was over and Tony was handing her woolen socks and walking shoes, again with the same grave courtesy. She put them back on, almost reluctantly.

  “Now it is only the hair of the head,” he said. “Please to remain seated as you are.” As he spoke, he circled candle-stands and footstools to a position behind her wing chair. Gently, carefully, he removed the white wool beret.

  The touch was impersonal, in no way intrusive, and yet again infinitely agreeable. Tony’s fingers lifted the hair gently from the nape of her neck and ran lightly beneath the over-tight, now over-warm layers of scarf and sweaters at the base of her throat.

  Mrs. Potter could not restrain a tiny sigh of pleasure as she loosened the scarf. Here, she thought, was a man who could really know what you meant when you asked would he please scratch your back. She moved her shoulders slightly, in frank enjoyment, against the crewel-worked back of her chair, as Tony’s fingers explored lightly in a circle about the base of her throat.

  She closed her eyes. From a height above her head and behind her, she heard (later, she was not sure she had heard—or, to her private, half-embarrassed amusement, if she had imagined—words that might have come from a Vicki Sands novel), “Naughty Eugenie. We shall have to punish you a little, I think, before we make you beautiful.”

  There was a brisk rap at the sitting room door.

  “Yes?” Tony asked, his fingers gently following the shape of Mrs. Potter’s skull.

  “Just me” was the response from the hallway as Peter Benson, smiling, half apologetic, pushed open the door. “Thought you’d like to know Carpenter’s downstairs, Tony, old boy, and Latham’s on the house phone. Says your line must be off the hook—she’s been trying to get you.”

  Mrs. Potter stretched easily in the wing chair as Tony excused himself, then started upright in total disbelief. She had come here to find reasons for her mistrust of Tony Ferencz. She had remained to find herself beginning to accept him as what Gussie and the others thought him to be—an authority skilled in diagnosis and therapy and in matters that would eventually relate to her diet, her health, perhaps to her looking younger and living longer.

  She shook herself. Nobody looks better and lives longer because they enjoy having their hands and feet massaged, she told herself severely, or because it feels good to have the back of the neck stroked so lightly. And if Tony has diet secrets, other than eating fresh foods in variety, other than eating less and drinking less, which we all know anyway, I haven’t yet discovered what they are.

  However, Larry had spoken of vitamin injections, and others had hinted at special treatments. This had to be Tony’s secret—vitamins, or some other kind of chemical or hormonal medication. And Peter, bless him, had given her time to break Tony’s almost hypnotic spell, time to look for some real evidence. He had been telling her, as clearly as he could, that he no longer trusted Tony.

  Quickly she crossed the room and lowered the front of the old Winthrop desk. There, in the multiple pigeonholes across its back, were ten—perhaps twenty—syringes of various sizes, filed in neat order. In the center drawer her hasty fingers found sterile packets of hypodermic needles. She remembered the secret, false-bottom drawer that every such desk has. In it was a box of ampoules labeled in a language she was unable to recognize.

  The door to the room closed again briskly before she was able to restore the hidden drawer.

  “So,” Tony Ferencz was saying, “at last you think you have found bad things to use against me with your beloved Gussie?”

  With courage born of knowing that Peter Benson was below and within call, Mrs. Potter managed to regain her beret, to retrieve her coat, and to leave with what she later assured herself was dignity, although dignity in haste. She nearly tripped over the sailboat stair tread as she reached the bottom of the narrow stairway and rushed out into the slightly salty breeze of the small winding street.

  28

  “March is supposed to be trumpery season around here, not January,” Gussie said as she looked up from reading Mrs. Potter’s yellow-pad notes, from which only the mention of Lolly Latham had been removed. Her voice was indignant.

  Local folklore held that Nantucketers, imprisoned on the island through a long winter of limited company and ingrown interests, would enliven the drab days before spring by inventing gossip about their neighbors.
“Trumpery season” had been its designation as far back as anyone Mrs. Potter knew could remember.

  “I didn’t say any of those things about Tony were true,” Mrs. Potter defended herself, “and they’re only for my private speculation. I don’t publish them, and I just decided to let you see them, since I wanted you to know what I’ve been worrying about.”

  “They’re still hateful,” Gussie said. “Honestly, Genia, you’re going too far. And you’ll feel terrible when I tell you this—Tony called just before you got back. He said you’d had a delightful first consultation and he’s already planning his program for you. I don’t know what he thought when you rushed off. He and Peter must have decided you were batty, running down the stairs like that. And I can’t imagine why you went out bundled up that way, just to walk to the Scrim.”

  Gussie grimaced at Mrs. Potter’s notes, to which she had made hasty additions after her return from seeing Tony. In them, she had summed up how Tony Ferencz might be served by his present Nantucket followers. A diet clinic, whatever it was to be called, required more than adulation. There was money, first and foremost. A suitable location. Impeccable references. Dignified promotion in the world of potential clients. Skillful management. Money. More money.

  “First you suspected Tony of poisoning Ozzie and his secretary because of that old story of Dee’s about Ozzie’s daughter,” Gussie told her. “Now you’re trying to prove he’s a fortune hunter, trying to get all of us to support his clinic. To top that off, you seem to think he might have pushed you off my roof walk, and as a last straw you seem to think he was threatening you some way this afternoon in his office.”

  Mrs. Potter was silent as Gussie continued her diatribe. “Genia, use your head! You poked into his desk and found—what? A drawerful of vitamin preparations and the hypodermic syringes for injecting them. Perfectly innocent. Too bad you can’t read Romanian.”