The door swung inward.
Even before her eyes could accept the sight, she was halted by a smell in the air, a smell that took her instantly to lessons on a half-forgotten rifle range, to times of shooting skeet with Lew, the smell of a just fired gun.
Then, in the faint light from the open door, she saw Lolly Latham, her shattered skull bleeding, her cracked and bloody spectacles askew on what was left of her face, her body sliding slowly, slowly, sidewise against the cushions, held partly upright by the wrapping of blankets around her.
There was a small movement in the darkness behind the banquette, and she froze in her terror. Then she recognized the familiar stocky figure. As Peter spoke, the terror lifted. Whatever had happened, whatever the evidence of her eyes, she would have the comfort of Peter’s presence, and he of hers.
“We’re too late, Potter,” he said slowly. “Seems we both figured out where she might have run to hide, and I got here only just before you did. Then I turned my back for a minute and—I expect you heard the gunshot, even from outside the door. I couldn’t move fast enough to get it away from her.”
“Peter, oh, Peter. I’m so glad it’s you!” Mrs. Potter was nearly incoherent in her relief. “I was sure it was Tony, and when I heard the gun I thought he’d killed Lolly. What has happened is ghastly beyond belief, but at least I know he isn’t the one standing where you are, holding the gun and intending to shoot me next.”
Peter remained where he was, behind the long sofa. “You’re all right,” he said briefly. “Tony isn’t here.”
“It’s too late, isn’t it?” she asked. “There isn’t anything at all we could do now?” A glance at Lolly’s face was her answer.
“Did she bring the gun here to shoot herself? When did you guess where she was? What did she say when you got here? How did she get here from the Scrimshaw?” Mrs. Potter, freed from her terror, could not restrain the almost hysterical flow of her questions.
“I thought she was asleep when I came in. When I turned my back to see about getting some light in here, she shot herself. That’s all I know.” Peter remained motionless behind the banquette, and his voice was unsteady. Mrs. Potter remained, still unable to move, on the doorstep.
“The poor kid was always afraid she’d do this, you know,” Peter went on, his voice now stronger and more confident. “I guess she never got over her father’s killing himself this way.”
“Where’s the gun?” Mrs. Potter asked, unwilling to step into the room. As she spoke, she saw the dull gleam of metal. “You’ve got it!”
More slowly now, she added another question. “How could you have the gun, Peter?”
Even as she spoke, she knew. Even as Peter was saying that he’d taken the gun from Lolly’s fingers, Mrs. Potter knew who had brought the gun to the beach shack and who had fired it.
“Peter, oh, no. Not you, Peter, not you.” She was almost whispering. “It couldn’t be you. You didn’t have any reason.”
Peter stepped forward slightly and his face was visible in the light from around the shuttered windows, the same light that had showed the cold gleam of the gun. “Why did you have to show up now?” he asked, his voice low and despairing. “Everything would have been all right if you’d got here an hour later, or if I hadn’t decided to let her have a day here by herself, so she’d get good and drunk and knock herself out. I didn’t want to have her look at me.”
Mrs. Potter was unable to speak, unable to move.
“Everything would have been all right,” he went on. “First everybody would have said, ‘Poor Lolly, just like her father.’ And then, later on, you’d have figured out Tony shot her, and told all the guys, and even if you couldn’t prove it, their beloved Count Tony Ferencz would have had to leave the island.”
The undisguised hatred in Peter’s voice as he spoke the name provided all the answer Mrs. Potter needed. He did have a reason, then, a reason that had set in motion all of the strange and terrible events of the past ten days.
“You hated Tony,” she said wonderingly. “You were determined to get rid of him. You were jealous, you thought he was taking your place with the others as the center of your little world.”
“It’s my world. It’s my island!” Peter spoke defiantly now, although he did not move from his position in the half darkness. “Nantucket’s my island. I built up the kind of place at the Scrimshaw that everybody loves. The first money I made there went into this shack. Nantucket’s my turf. And then Tony showed up.”
“But people still loved you, Peter. You hadn’t lost your friends.”
“Oh, no?” His reply was scornful. “How do you think I felt, Potter, seeing them fall for that phony? He was just a piece of cardboard. They were falling all over themselves trying to set up the kind of place for him I’d been planning and working for all my life. My Nantucket year-round resort inn. Supposedly for health and beauty, because that’s what the guys want, for losing a few pounds, sure, but fun. My place. My guys.”
Mrs. Potter, still in the doorway, saw a montage of hasty pictures in her mind, all of Peter. Of Peter teasing, amusing, and surprising them. Of Peter’s picnics and little dinners, of Peter’s frogs and of groups clustered around a piano, of Peter providing good food and music and laughter. She could only now glimpse the unknown, unsuspected Peter who demanded undivided adoration in return. He could not share his island. He could not share his guys.
“None of what happened was my fault,” he went on fiercely. “How could I know Lolly would be dumb enough to kill those two, just to get the keys? All I needed were those old papers about that crazy kid of Dee’s and I could have got Tony off the island for good. Nobody would have got hurt at all if she hadn’t been so goddamned dumb.”
Mrs. Potter did not interrupt as he poured out his resentments. “Dee wasn’t going to do anything. She told me so. I had to have those papers in my own hands, not stuck away in some old cubbyhole file at Ozzie’s office.”
He gestured contemptuously toward the slumped body on the banquette in front of him, and again Mrs. Potter could see the metal of the gun, the smooth indentations of its chamber catching a glimmer of light. “She felt sorry for the poor crazy kid after Edie told her the story, and she spilled it out to me. I told her we might be able to help him, if she could just get me the keys for a couple of hours. Then the first thing I knew she’d killed two people and come running to me telling me how sorry she was and how she didn’t mean to do it.”
Mrs. Potter, too, stared at Lolly’s body, closer to the light than Peter’s face. It was no longer visibly bleeding.
“What the hell did I get myself into?” Peter’s voice rose, a shout of bewilderment and anger. “What the hell went wrong? I didn’t ask for any of this mess!” He was now almost screaming.
Mrs. Potter summoned courage for another question of her own. “Could you have saved Edie’s life that day she was choking?” she asked.
“Oh, my God! I didn’t even know then what Lolly had done!” Peter raged. “Do you think I’d have let her pull a crazy stunt like that at the inn?”
Still accusatorial, he returned to the subject of Tony. “I spent all summer trying to make them see he was no good. For a while, after you got back, I thought you’d take the bait and think he’d killed Heidecker’s husband, or maybe that he was using dangerous drugs. I almost had you scared enough with that one.”
Mrs. Potter was again briefly silent, realizing how her suspicions of Tony had been fed. When she spoke, she regretted her words as soon as they were uttered. “You can’t blame Lolly for what you did with the cyanide bottle,” she said flatly. “You knew what that would do to Beth. And what about Jimmy? How badly is he burned? How do you feel about that? What are your guys going to think of you now?”
“They aren’t going to know. You aren’t going to tell them.” The rage in Peter’s voice was cold now, as he stepped forward toward where Mrs. Potter still stood, framed in the doorway against the pale January dawn.
Almost without
thought, she slammed shut the door she was holding. As she did, she heard the heavy sound of Peter falling. She shuddered at the thought of blood-slippery pine floorboards, but she had time to regain the seat and key of Gussie’s small car.
She spun into a quick reverse turn. Almost before she was on the new road leading to the pavement, and then to town and safety, she heard the roar of the heavy car taking off behind her.
There was no way to outdistance its menace. She even knew exactly at what bend, once she was on the main road, Peter would overtake her at the head of the pond. She knew exactly at what spot he could force her car from the road into the ditch, and at what point she would again see the dull gleam of the gun.
There was no escape for either of them. Peter had shot Lolly, and now he would have to shoot her as well.
At the end of the new road from Peter’s shack, she did not hesitate. Instead of following its well-defined turn left onto the road that would lead past the pond and to town, she drove straight ahead, the gas pedal pushed to the floor, across the old intersection, long since blocked off to traffic.
As she hurtled across the ragged pavement edge, already pierced with growth of rough beach grasses, she could see the abrupt ten-foot drop on her right, with the sand of the beach below and the white line of the surf just beyond. The small car faltered on the edge of the drop. She felt the ground give way beneath the right rear wheel, but speed and momentum carried her forward, and she found herself back on the long-abandoned shorefront track she remembered.
Behind her, the heavy station wagon had taken heed of her barely averted plunge onto the beach below the cliffside. Laboring, it was making its own track a few feet farther from the edge. Thus slowed, it remained behind her.
So far, she had gambled successfully on finding and using the old road tracks. It would be only a moment before the car behind would find them too. Ahead, just ahead, had to be the particular stretch she remembered so well. It had to be there still if she was to win.
She shifted into four-wheel drive, forcing herself to accept the painful slowing of speed and aware that now the big car behind her was closing the gap between them. Then, although not as near as she had hoped, she saw the short stretch she had gambled to find—there where she had once, years ago, been entrapped in the old blue convertible, stuck for hours in the hot sun waiting for a tow truck from town.
With a long breath she gripped the wheel and drove Gussie’s car into what she knew was deep, soft sand.
Her wheels spun and began to dig in. She forced herself to accept a snail’s pace. The station wagon behind was closing in fast, and she could imagine Peter’s face, distorted in rage and frustration, judging the distance before his attack. Thinking of his square hand on his recently fired gun, she knew that if she failed he would shoot her here. She would die alongside a deserted Nantucket beach road, and he would be convinced that she was a part of the things that had gone wrong in his life, wrong beyond his intent or his comprehension.
There was one last gamble, that she could manage to get through the sand and the heavier car could not. If they both were stuck there, she would be an easy target for Peter’s .38.
The small car groaned, halted, then pulled slowly forward to firm ground. It was not until then that Mrs. Potter allowed herself a clear look in the mirror at the left of her car door.
The station wagon was no longer the pursuer, but a prisoner. She watched, as she increased the short distance between them, to see the familiar stocky figure step out of the stalled station wagon, now up to its hubcaps in the sand.
She was still near enough to hear Peter’s last wordless scream of rage, like that of a wounded animal. She heard the single gunshot, which she knew, this time, was not intended for her.
To regain the traveled road ahead, Mrs. Potter had to crash through the back of a wooden barrier, one she knew must carry on its other side warnings of erosion and danger, an old sign declaring the road long closed. That was easy—a crash of weathered white-painted splinters. Past small boarded-up cottages, she turned abruptly left, again on a paved town road, to safety.
Her memory of Nantucket back roads had not failed her. Now, shaking as she drove, Mrs. Potter had to make herself remember where the police headquarters building was. The only time she had ever been there was when Benjie at sixteen got his first speeding ticket.
After she left the small building, Mrs. Potter, still several blocks short of Gussie’s house, pulled to the side of a small street, alone in early morning quiet and for the first time again aware of the pain in her right arm and shoulder. Tears streamed down her face as, for a moment blinded, she wept helplessly. Poor little Lolly. Poor Peter, who in his rage to be loved, didn’t know what the hell he had got himself into, or what kind of hell he had made of his life.
33
“Tony?” Gussie asked brightly. “Didn’t you all know? He’s gone to Palm Springs. Really a much more suitable place for his diet center than here on Nantucket—don’t you all agree? None of us was really rich enough for him.”
“I told you he was a bastard,” Dee said in Mrs. Potter’s right: ear. “He’d have figured out a way to look good even if Peter had managed to expose him with those papers of mine. I say good riddance, and I’m certainly not going to file suit against him now. I never intended to, in spite of Ozzie’s urging.”
In answer to Gussie, Mary Lynne nodded emphatically. “Those old Chattanooga skinflint lawyers wouldn’t listen to my buying Mittie’s house for him, anyway, as I guess you all know,” she said. “They’ve got everything tied up tight as a crocus sack, and I’m just plain going to have to get down on my knees to them for every red cent Bo Heidecker left me.” She sounded totally unconcerned. “Now let me tell you about another new idea for the Daffodil Festival.”
It was Monday, the last Monday in January, a little more than, two weeks after Lolly’s death and Peter’s. No one at Gussie’s house, where Les Girls were meeting for lunch, each bearing a sandwich in her lightship basket as they had in years past, had needed to speak of this today. Their shared knowledge and sorrow had been talked out. At least for the moment, they were bravely pretending that Les Girls, as a weekly institution, would some way go on, in spite of their grief. And perhaps, Mrs. Potter thought, it would. Women their age had learned to be both strong and resilient.
Today’s news was that Beth would be back with them soon. Laurence and Paula said she was fine again. Awfully thin, for her, but beginning to get a little appetite back. One of the granddaughters is coming with her to stay for a while, they said, the one who wants to study astronomy and has got a temporary job at the science library.
There was a moment of silence. Poor Lolly was unspoken.
“The news about Helen is about as good as we could hope for,” Leah offered next. “You all know, I expect, that she’s gone off somewhere in New Jersey to study hospital administration, to make a career of it. I don’t think she’ll be back on the island, but at least she’s going to try to make a new life for herself.”
There was another long moment of silence. None of them could yet bear to speak of Peter. The pain was too raw. Each of them felt that she had in some way contributed to his destruction. “We took him for granted,” Gussie had said in private mourning with Mrs. Potter. “We should have seen how jealous he was of Tony, before it was too late.”
They knew that Jimmy’s sight would be somewhat impaired, but they had arranged for his care and for a new job on the island when he returned, as a helper to Hans Muller in the bakery. Jadine was already at work part time behind the counter at The Portuguese Bread Man, in her free time from her training as a bank teller, having announced that she was ready for a new line of work.
All of them had agreed that they had been spared, not the sorrow of Lolly’s death and Peter’s, but the indignity of the public ordeal of the murder trial that would have resulted if Peter had lived.
“The island would have been so crowded with reporters and cameramen it would have sunk
under water,” Mary Lynne said. “We wouldn’t have been able to walk across the street without being interviewed, and heaven only knows what would have been said about us. We were the ones who were there when Edie died. We were the ones who knew Ozzie best, we were the friends of Lolly’s mother, and Peter’s regulars at the Scrim. We’d have been massacred.”
Mrs. Potter privately agreed with this. A trial would have resulted in a public caricaturing of her friends. She felt sure that they would have been shown as shallow, useless, incredibly frivolous women, with their fashionably thin bodies and their big Nantucket houses. They would have been pictured as rich, idle, and useless, with no acknowledgment of their contributions to the life of the island, their hours of hard work in the community, their generosity of spirit and money, their genuine concern for others.
Dee, perhaps even more aware of all this than Mrs. Potter was, insisted on a complete change of subject. “About Mittie’s house,” she said, “there’s no more problem about its being sold, even if Mary Lynne can’t buy it and wouldn’t want to now if she could. I know the name may sound a bit alarming, but a very nice man, a Mr. Ali Akbar, just signed the sales contract this morning. Wonderful price—highest ever paid for anything on the island!”
“I’m delighted, of course,” Mittie said. “Daddy would never let us be intolerant about nationalities. However, I don’t intend to spend any part of the money fixing up the old house on Main Street.” Turning squarely to face Dee, she spoke with youthful insouciance. “Since Dee’s going to be rolling in money with the commission, she’s going to find a place of her own . . .”
Dee’s hat brim nodded agreement, and Mrs. Potter felt a quick hope that the sum would assure Mikai—Mikey—a good many years, perhaps enough years, at Fieldstone Hall.
Mittie had not finished. “. . . so I’m moving into the carriage house apartment and furnishing it with all my favorite pieces of Mummy’s, and moving all Ab’s ducks and stuff into the old house, to help that sell, too, as soon as Dee finds another rich buyer. Now comes the nicest part. With the money, George is going to help me set up my own landscaping and garden service business, with our own greenhouses, as soon as we find the right location on the island. George has a wonderful business head, naturally, after all those years running his school. And we’ve decided on a church wedding in September, as soon as we get the business well started.”
The Nantucket Diet Murders Page 27
