She arranged these carefully on the sofa she had chosen. Perhaps she should not risk even the light of the candle any longer. She felt for the cold, sticky rolls in her shoulder bag. That would be her dinner.
Nibbling slowly, licking her fingers carefully, she settled herself under the lavender fragrance, wondering how it was possible for the cushions beneath her and the wool piled on top of her to be so cold.
Eventually she slept.
Cracks of light around the shuttered windows told her it was morning, and she could hear the muffled sound of the surf. Friday morning, she thought. It seemed she had been in this cold, dark shuttered room much longer. All of her life, she told herself, half in sorrow, half in self-contempt.
Cautiously, she went to the door. A light drift of snow had come in under the outer storm door. Carefully she swung it open, just a quarter of the way. The beach world outside was softly snow-covered. She was safe, just as she’d been told she would be. She went back to her blankets.
Later, hungry and thirsty, she again risked the light of the candle.
The water was turned off at the sink, of course, as she knew it would be. She found an empty coffee can to use as a chamberpot, then decided instead to use the toilet in the small bath off the little darkened bedroom, pleased with herself at thinking to add antifreeze from the plastic gallon container she found there.
Returning to the cupboards, she knew there was no chance of soft drinks or canned foods left to freeze and explode in a winter-closed house. She found crackers in a covered tin, small ones with seeds on them. Her hands groped, in the flickering light, and found the bottle she was looking for. Ah, vodka, and more bottles behind it.
The answer was there to her cold and hunger and her fear, as it had been to all of her problems as long as she could remember. Was I really only ten when I found out it made me forget, she wondered? Vodka, rum, whisky, gin—anything I could find and that no one might miss.
It had been only in later years she had known they were keeping her well supplied. No one ever questioned depleting stores, full bottles becoming empty ones. There were always, miraculously, new bottles in their places in the liquor closet off the kitchen, and nobody ever said a word. Nobody ever called her a wicked girl about that. Only about the cyanide when they thought she was going to kill herself.
She found a glass, and with the bottle in hand made her way back to the nest of blankets on the sofa. There were more bottles in the cupboard. She was safe.
Warmed by the first drink, she began to reproach herself. It had seemed such a simple thing she’d been asked to do. She never had thought that Edie and Mr. deBevereaux were going to be quiet forever, instead of just for a few hours. She hadn’t ever thought that could happen.
She should never have repeated the story Edie had told her. Never. That’s what started the whole thing.
Pouring into the glass in the near darkness was difficult. She would have to drink straight from the bottle. Much easier.
She should never have told anybody what Edie had said about that poor sick little boy, growing up all alone, no father to look after him. She knew just how that little boy must feel. If she hadn’t told, nobody would have asked her to get those keys, and then none of this would have happened.
The drink made her feel a little better. After all, she had done it only with the promise that the little boy would be helped. She squinted at the faint line of daylight around the windows, thinking she was not so sure about that promise now. It bothered her that the poison bottle had been taken away from her, ever so gently, being told it was for her own good. Putting it in Mrs. Higginson’s basket was awful. She was glad she hadn’t done that, anyway. In fact, she hadn’t really thought about that part of it until today, trying to answer all those questions.
She should have known not to tell anybody about anything.
She should have known from the start, back when she was ten. She should have known that some day it was going to happen to her, too.
31
At midmorning, with Gussie at the wheel of her small four-wheel-drive car, a twin of the one Mrs. Potter drove in Maine, the four women began a tour of Mrs. Potter’s favorite spots on the island. She had not found it necessary to explain that these were chosen for a reason other than past affection and happy memories, and in fact the memories returned, at times so vividly she had to remind herself what she was actually looking for on the drive. She had dressed for a long day in the wool caftan, with trousers and heavy socks and shoes beneath, and wrapped overall in one of Gussie’s soft handloomed stoles of richly colored wool. She had tucked the packet of Arnold’s pain pills into her basket. What the others might consider a winter’s day outing was for her, the day after the flash fire at the Scrimshaw Inn, an entirely serious quest.
The feathery snow in the night, they all exclaimed, had again transformed old delights into new ones. The hillside oriental carpet of fall in its rich colors on all sides of Altar Rock was now almost majestic in winter white, dignified to the point of small mountainhood.
Mrs. Potter, in the first of the unplanned jolts of memory, thought of Benjie, serious and intent as a ten-year-old, searching for arrowheads there on sunny summer afternoons. As a joke, she had told him that all of the stones up there looked like arrowheads. Pick up one anywhere, she told him, and call it an arrowhead! Leaning over in the gravelly path of the road by the car, she had blindly picked up a stone, felt its odd smoothness to her fingers, looked at the pattern of its chipped surface, then held it up for her son’s inspection. They had both gasped in disbelieving laughter. She fingered the arrowhead now, still in the bottom of her lightship basket, where she had kept it all these years as a treasure of serendipity.
Their old summer house on ’Sacacha Pond, beyond which lay the open ocean to the east, now gray and flat on a winter morning, was shuttered, quiet, looking larger than Mrs. Potter remembered, the hedges certainly better trimmed. No footprints led to its front door or small barn, and so far in the drive she had seen none leading to any other closed summer dwelling, as well as she could see from the road. Here she thought of Louisa on warm summer evenings at the piano—the weathered old grand piano, its finish crazed by years of neglect and sun. Louisa had surprised them by painting it a rich Venetian red, displaying her artistic skills even more than her less certain musical ones.
The beach at Quidnet was deserted, the only tracks in the snow covering the dunes being those of the gulls and winter seabirds. She thought of small Emily, a sprite in minuscule red bathing trunks; of Emily a few summers later, or so it seemed, in the midst of a throng of chattering teen-agers; and so few years after that, a serene young woman in white coming down the aisle on Lew’s arm at the church.
“Could we manage the road into the Hidden Forest?” she asked Gussie. Skeletal trees, vast silences, dark marshes, surrounded them there. Mrs. Potter now thought about how many secret and hidden places there were on the island, not all so foreboding as this one, but places, unseen and off the beaten track, on tiny rutted roads or game trails. She thought about how much of Nantucket was still wild, uninhabited in winter or summer except by wild creatures, and how easy it would be to disappear there.
They drove to the Haulover, that narrow sandy spit of land separating harbor from ocean above Wauwinet, and there they ate the apples and cheese Gussie had brought for an early lunch, with a vacuum bottle of hot spiced cranberry punch. Mrs. Potter surreptitiously swallowed one of Arnold’s pills.
All the while as Mrs. Potter looked and remembered and thought about wild places, and while they were having their car picnic, the others had been talking and laughing and producing their own summer memories. Those of the present spot, they all suddenly realized, were ones of sorrow, rather than laughter, for Mary Lynne.
“I know you all are trying every bit as hard as you can to talk about other things and not remind me of Bo,” Mary Lynne told them as they finished the punch. “Just be easy about it. I’m all right. We both knew it was coming som
eday, and I’ll always have the comfort of knowing he died doing the thing he loved best—sailing that old Indian.”
They agreed, when Gussie asked them, that the long slow drive on north to Great Light would be better attempted another time and at an earlier hour. There were no car tracks ahead in the light snow and the only life they saw in that direction was a great snowy owl rising from a dune beyond the few deserted beach houses, plus the tracks of hundreds of small scampering creatures on the sand near the water. Gussie drove cautiously as she turned. There were soft patches in the yet unfrozen sand where even this rugged small car might have foundered if she had got off the narrow road, its course now blurred with the snow.
They drove to the top of what Mrs. Potter had always called “the painted hill” on their way back to town along the upper road, another high spot at which Mrs. Potter got out to stretch her legs and to look out over the pale, deserted winter calm of the harbor. Here, all of them saw it in summer blue, an ever-shifting pattern of sailboats on its surface. They thought of summer swimming and picnics and mosquito bites across the harbor on the outer arm of Coatue across the harbor, and Gussie spoke of the day Jules had swum over and back. “Of course, Scott rowed along beside him,” she said, “with me in the boat. He was such a tiger.” Her voice was wistful.
They drove west of town, past Dionis and then around the shores of Long Pond, briefly disturbing a resident colony of winter ducks, and Mittie told them about her favorite haunts for bird-watching there. “Ab was as enthusiastic about birding as I am,” she said, “but he was a passionate duck hunter, too. That may sound like a contradiction, but he didn’t think so. He gave as much to Ducks Unlimited as he spent on his guns, and if I told you, you wouldn’t believe what those English guns of his cost.” Her voice, too, was slightly wistful.
They viewed the many-angled houses that had been built at Madaket, rising high against the horizon, and they drove on to see where the ’48 hurricane had created Esther Island out of what had once been a narrow westerly arm of Nantucket itself. They all were able to remember where they had been at the time of the storm.
On the way back to town they made a quick jog to the south shore, pausing as Mittie spoke of how much of the island had eroded there, in some places in great crumbling chunks, places where old roads had disappeared into the ocean.
Peter’s beach shack was part of the tour. Shuttered, as they knew it would be against the drive of blowing sands, it was, like every other deserted place they had visited, devoid of all prints except those of birds and small mammals and the occasional sharp prints of the island deer.
In late afternoon, just as the early January dark was descending, they returned to the white house on Orange Street, where Mary Lynne gave them tea, to the accompaniment of continuing, suspicious barking from the back of the house.
Outside, the snow had nearly disappeared, as it had the day of Mrs, Potter’s first village walk, melting in the unseasonably warm early winter weather. It would be cold, they all agreed, if you were walking in the wind, and probably frigid inside all the closed summer houses, but there had not yet been a really hard freeze. That, Mittie reminded them, would create its own problems in gardening. “As long as it’s nice for Daffodil Festival weekend,” Mary Lynne said, “it can do anything it wants to in the way of weather now. Shall I bring out little Sen-Sen and her brother now, to show you how cunning they are?”
Gussie looked at Mrs. Potter. “This girl is going to bed,” she announced. “Come on, Mittie, grab your coat, if you’re coming with us as far as my house. I knew I shouldn’t have taken her out today, or kept her out so long.”
Before Mrs. Potter drifted off to an uneasy sleep in the guest room bed under its crewel-embroidered canopy, she could think of many, so many, too many places a frightened person could hide on Nantucket, and of how easy it would be to disappear there just by stepping a few feet away from the road. There was the elephant’s graveyard—a dumping ground of old cars on a blind road not far from the airport, visible only by air or to a determined explorer of back ways. Lolly might be cowering there in an abandoned auto chassis, minus its wheels.
There were places in the deep pine woods, the scene of some of their best summer picnics, when the sun was hot and the depths of the small forest were cool. Only light snow would have drifted to the soft needle-covered carpet there, and Lolly might be burrowing like an animal to find warmth.
Wherever she was, Lolly was hiding. Mrs. Potter knew that now. She was hiding not only from her, Mrs. Potter, her inquisitor, but—and far more dangerous for Lolly—from whoever had asked her to get Ozzie’s office keys.
32
Mrs. Potter, ignoring the discomfort of her bandaged arm, propped the note on the breakfast table. Borrowing the car, she had scribbled. Thanks. Back soon.
She had awakened long before daylight, hearing briefly a spatter of rain on the windows, and had dressed quietly in the same loose warm clothes of the day before. As she left the house now, she was counting on Gussie’s assumption that she was making a return sunrise pilgrimage to the old house on the pond, or perhaps to visit another of the places there had not been time for yesterday. Gussie had deplored the omission of ’Sconset, with its summer contrast of tiny, rose-covered dollhouses with large-scale grand estates. She had not known how carefully Mrs. Potter had eliminated those areas impossible to check on a brief, part-day driving tour.
Now the sweep of the wiper blade, turned on for a moment to wipe away soft morning mist, marked a wider arc of the compass than the pattern that had awakened Mrs. Potter from a troubled sleep. She now headed, in answer to its message, not to the east, as she was sure Gussie would guess, but back to the south shore.
The suddenly recalled pattern in her mind that had shocked her into wakefulness was the arc a storm door would make in soft snow, pushing aside an unassuming, gentle white curve on a wooden doorstep unmarked by footprints.
She rebuked herself. If Arnold’s pain pills had been less potent, she should have been aware of it yesterday afternoon. What she knew now, and should have seen then, was that the outer door of Peter’s beach shack had been opened. It had been opened just wide enough for a look outside, after the snowfall and by someone from inside the small house behind the dunes.
As she drove to the shore, the roads now bare, her headlights still needed, she thought of what she must say. She knew it was Lolly who was there in the house. Lolly had run away from her questioning, probably more in dread of having her mother know about the poisoning deaths than in fear of the law.
Helen must be told now, of course. Between the three of them, mother and daughter and herself, they would figure out the best thing to do. Helen must be made to understand that Lolly had acted out of blind devotion to Tony, the one person who could have persuaded her to get those office keys. Helen would see at once that Tony needed the incriminating documents from Ozzie’s office, to protect his grand scheme for a world-famous clinic.
They could, she and Helen, at least arrange for Lolly’s proper defense.
It was hard to drive with the encumbrance of the stole, and Mrs. Potter’s right arm was stiff and sore. It was awkward to shift gears on Gussie’s small car. She drove slowly and carefully, glancing toward the east to see the first light of the sun. As she neared the head of the pond, she slowed almost to a stop, nearly stalling the motor. What, she asked herself in sudden shock, what if the lighter fluid explosion had not been an accident after all? Not just the result of Jimmy’s using an unfamiliar product, labeled in a language he did not read? What if someone had put the spray can in Jimmy’s hands, or even casually suggested it, as a guest of the inn might do? What if it had been an intentional diversion, seen to be vital at that very moment, to interrupt her questioning of Lolly?
This presumed a degree of evil equal to that of putting the empty poison bottle in Beth’s basket. Two gentle and innocent people, Beth and Jimmy, had been cruelly used and deeply hurt.
She drove on slowly. She had to persua
de Lolly to return and confess. Even more important, she had to get Lolly’s final, certain confirmation of who it was who was capable of this greater evil.
She turned onto the new stretch of road to Peter’s house and pulled into the small parking area in back. A long, shiny station wagon was there before her. She was not the first to find Lolly’s hiding place.
It could be Helen, she thought, in an irrational burst of hope. Then—Helen? There to rescue the daughter whose whereabouts she apparently hadn’t troubled to learn? Not likely. She sat motionless in the car, her eyes fixed on the bare doorstep.
As she sat there, the terror returned. This was the terror she had felt in the cupola, thinking of the open roof walk overhead, five stories above the cobblestones. This was what she felt when she opened the Winthrop desk with its menacing array of hypodermic syringes and needles. If not Helen, it must be Tony, driving the Scrimshaw station wagon. Tony Ferencz had arrived before her, threatening Lolly, perhaps expecting her own arrival, waiting for her, to settle all scores.
She was shaking now from fright and indecision. Then she thought of Lolly, alone and afraid. She might not be too late. Some way the two of them together would escape.
As she forced herself to leave the car, the only sounds were those of the surf on the beach in front of the dune grasses and the harsh cry of a gull overhead in the growing light of the sky.
She took a long breath, approached the step, and pulled open the outer door. “Lolly?” she called loudly as she rapped vigorously on the closed door inside it, still mot sure she had courage to open it. “Lolly, are you there?”
At the same moment as she began to turn the doorknob, she heard two quick clicks, then the sharp, sudden, heart-stopping bark of exploding gunpowder, a shock of sound that held her feet on the doorstep as it registered, not in her mind but in the pit of her stomach.
The Nantucket Diet Murders Page 26
