The Nantucket Diet Murders

by Virginia Rich

  As she left the carriage house, a less dreadful and yet long-perplexing question went through her mind. If Dee was reaping an occasional fat commission on real estate sales in Nantucket’s ever-demanding market, why was she polishing those same old shoes—albeit very good old shoes—and cleaning with cornmeal that same old—albeit terrifically becoming—hat? Mrs. Potter thought she took care of her own basically classic wardrobe. However, there always comes a time when things must be replaced. Dee’s reluctance to do so seemed an obsession.

  11

  On her way home, aware that she could meet Gussie’s eleven-thirty deadline without hurrying, Mrs. Potter did as she’d been told.

  Gussie had told her to look across the street to Ozzie’s house. She faced the path leading to his kitchen door, the obvious and easy entrance to his house. According to Beth, this was the one door among those of her friends’ houses that still was left unlocked.

  She sighed. Now it seemed even the church doors were barred except for times of services. It used to be so comfortable when we all could run in and leave a note or a plate of cookies or a marked magazine article for each other, she thought. And once in a while it was so comforting to slip into the small side chapel of the church, softly Lighted and still, at the end of a solitary walk late at night.

  At least her uneasiness about Ozzie’s death suggested no picture of a stealthy figure slipping through that unlocked kitchen door. A sudden heart attack, even if unexpected, was not the work of an intruder. At least not the work of a killer with knife or gun, weapons whose mark would have been unmistakable.

  As she walked a few steps farther, she could look at the front of the house, to which access was only by way of a little-used white wooden gate in a high privet hedge. She saw that the snow had now melted, except for a shaded patch in the front doorway and some ragged white clumps held by heavy bare vines on their lattices, outlining the doorway and nearly covering the front of the quiet house.

  At the corner, she looked left down the street to Leah’s house, another ship owner’s mansion of an earlier age. The Shrine, she smiled, using Gussie’s name for it. Thank heaven, Gussie says she’s letting up a little on dear sainted Fanwell. Someone said she even used to scrub the brick sidewalk in front, just to show the rest of us how a truly devoted widow should behave.

  Then as Mrs. Potter found herself back on Main Street, she passed Mittie’s present house, where there was no sign of activity. Peering down an opening between it and the next house, she could see the sweep of lawn dividing the main house from Dee’s carriage-house apartment at the back of the block. It seemed weed-grown and neglected.

  Renovating that lawn in itself is going to cost a fortune, she thought. It’s all run to sand, which is really the chief part of Nantucket soil, and that means digging it all up and replacing the whole thing with fresh topsoil. Maybe Mittie ought to forget about cherishing Mummy’s furniture and unload the place.

  Then, glancing across the street, Mrs. Potter called to the plump, white-haired man polishing the big brass door knocker of Helen’s great red-brick mansion. “Hi, Walter!” she shouted, crossing the cobblestones to speak to him. “How’s Elna? You two keeping busy? Tell her I’ll stop in to say hello someday soon when I come to see Mrs. Latham and admire your new garden room. I hear it’s pretty splendid.”

  Helen was the only one of the group to have live-in help. She was congratulated on the gleaming perfection of the house, but, in spite of having a cook, Elna’s nominal title, Helen set a poor table. Dinner at her house might be as uninspired as canned beef stew, although it would be presented handsomely by Walter in a huge silver dish. Helen ate without noticing what was set before her, Mrs. Potter remembered, in the same way she ate far better fare at the houses of her friends.

  The thought of food made Mrs. Potter suddenly hungry after the long morning walk. As she returned to Gussie’s doorway, flanked with the twin steps and the two gleaming brass globes, she wondered if Gussie, too, might not be famished, with only that glass of whatever it was, now long ago, for her breakfast.

  “Could we split that last cranberry muffin?” she asked as she met Gussie in the hall. “Before we do anything else? I’ll start this Tony diet of yours tomorrow, if you’ll tell me about it, but I’m not ready for it today.”

  Gussie disregarded the question and her face seemed troubled as she reported a phone message from Beth. “We just hung up,” she said. “She hadn’t forgotten about Meals on Wheels, but she said she just didn’t feel quite up to doing the rounds with me today, if you wouldn’t mind standing in for her. I said of course, but Genia, do you ever in your life remember a time when Beth Higginson didn’t feel up to anything and everything?”

  Gussie continued, clearly puzzled. “She said she’d spent the morning at the science library, of all places, and that she’d probably go back this afternoon, and that Lolly Latham was being a lot of help to her. In fact, she said she thought we’d all underestimated Lolly.”

  Mrs. Potter decided that if Gussie wasn’t going to eat the half muffin, perhaps she had better do so herself so that it wouldn’t be wasted. From the look on Gussie’s face, she felt a certain concern for Beth, and a shared curiosity about the science library visit, but at the same time she was wondering how and when to tell Gussie the story of the three beautiful people on Long Island. The last of the muffin was suddenly tasteless as yet another vexing thought crossed her mind.

  “Tell me,” she asked, “do you think Ted was a little squiffed, even this morning? It’s plain enough to figure out that he’d been drinking at his office yesterday. He was embarrassed when he as much as admitted it, saying he’d fallen asleep at his desk and waked up late at night to hear Ozzie come in. Helen said Arnold found him at home, dead in his chair, at nine.”

  “It gets dark so early these days, I expect Ted just lost track of time,” Gussie said charitably. “Come on now, time to take off if you’re going to do the rounds with me in Bethie’s place.”

  When they returned, after taking the food containers back to the hospital, cleaning and spraying them according to accepted procedure, Mrs. Potter settled with relief into a kitchen easy chair.

  “That was fun, but it’s quite a workout,” she said. They had delivered twelve sets of meals—a small container of hot spaghetti and meat balls, a small salad, a slice of garlic toast, and an apple for midday dinner; an egg salad sandwich and chocolate pudding for supper—to twelve different people. “You’re marvelous, Gussie, to find your way to all of them and to remember all the one-way streets and to whip up and down so many back stairs, and still manage a quick chat with each person.”

  “I ought to know my way—we’ve been doing it long enough,” Gussie said. “Everybody missed Beth, though, couldn’t you see? Let’s call her later and insist on knowing what’s the trouble. I’ve never known her to beg off on anything, all the years we’ve known her.”

  The two now sat at the round table in the kitchen, listening to reassuring sounds of a vacuum cleaner being run in the front parlor. Gussie had set out a bowl of red apples and a round provolone cheese for their own delayed lunch—delayed, at least, according to Mrs. Potter’s usual inner timetable.

  She took a grateful sip of the white wine poured for her, deciding as she did so to postpone further thoughts about Tony and the people in Dee’s story until she was alone and could figure out the best way and time to tell Gussie about it. Somehow she felt there would be other stories told her—perhaps about less beautiful people, perhaps even about her own Nantucket friends—if she continued her attempt to protect Gussie from a too hasty fourth marriage. “I hate to think you opened that bottle just for me” was all she said.

  “No problem,” Gussie assured her. “It’ll get drunk. You may want another glass now and some later in the day.” She returned then, bearing a small beaker, from a quick trip to the big pantry from which Mrs. Potter had seen her emerge when she came down into the kitchen at first daylight.

  “Carrot juice,” sh
e explained, in answer to Mrs. Potter’s questioning eyebrows. “Want to try some? It’s all I have for breakfast, maybe with a cup of tea, and sometimes again with my lunch.”

  Mrs. Potter accepted a small glassful, pronounced it delicious—who doesn’t like the taste of sweet raw carrots?—and cut herself another wedge of cheese and apple. “Any little wheat crackers?” she asked, with the easy assurance of an old friend.

  “Now let’s talk about party food,” Gussie said, after the cheese and apples and while Mrs. Potter sat nibbling a last crisp cracker with a second glass of wine. “I haven’t given a tea party for years, if you want to know the truth, and I’m not quite sure where to begin.”

  Mrs. Potter admitted that, except for occasional callers to be given a casually offered afternoon cup of tea—with which one might produce a bit of toast or the odd cookie, if any such was on hand—it had been years since she, too, had connected the words tea and party.

  “Anyway, Teresa’s accomplished the first step this morning while we were walking,” she said, admiring the gleaming silver tea service, freshly polished, on the kitchen sideboard. “The second one is simply having good tea, and we know how to do that.”

  They agreed that the procedure was quite different when making tea for a lot of people, rather than for two or even six, and that they’d both learned this much from their mothers. One pot of very, very strong tea, which could be made in advance and kept warm, with refills waiting in the kitchen. One pot of very hot water, preferably freshly boiling. A bit of one and a lot of the other in each cup, as the tea pourer received requests for weak or strong, along with answers about sugar, milk, and lemon.

  “That part’s simple enough, then,” Gussie said. “Let’s make a list from here on.”

  From her large crewel bag in one of the big chairs in front of the fireplace, the bag she had placed there the previous day with her current needlepoint for possible future moments of stitchery, Mrs. Potter had already brought out a lined yellow pad. “Tea—Earl Grey, do you think? Check milk. Lemons. Cube sugar? How many are we having?”

  “Oh, a couple of dozen,” Gussie said. “Maybe thirty. As I said, all of the old crowd, plus Tony, of course, and a few others. I just asked people as I ran into them last week, either new people I thought you’d like, or various old buddies. Actually, I think all of them except Peter Benson assume it’s for cocktails. I mentioned tea to him, because I thought he’d be amused seeing people’s surprise. He looked a little doubtful at first, but then he promised he’d get away from the Scrim to be here, no matter what.”

  Gussie continued. “You’ll pour, of course,” she said. “What kind of flowers for the table, do you think? Anything specially good with whatever you’ll be wearing?”

  “What about some long-stemmed anemones if we can get them?” Mrs. Potter asked. “Sort of springlike and cheerful for this time of year. And I’ll wear whatever you say. You saw what I brought.”

  Gussie voted for a banana-colored wool dress she had helped to unpack, saying that she had something rather like it—simple, but dressed-up enough for anything on the island short of a real dinner party.

  Involuntarily, Mrs. Potter sighed. Gussie’s dress, a size—two sizes?—smaller? She finished the last of the wine in her glass hastily, regretting the second glass as she did so, and the extra wedge of cheese, and all those crackers. “Let’s get on with the list,” she said.

  No need to get out cookbooks for inspiration, they decided. They began to remember tea parties they’d given in the past, for various worthy causes, and the tea parties their mothers used to have.

  Little sandwiches were an absolute must, they agreed. Very thin, crusts cut off, and no trouble to make with the very thin-sliced firm bread one could buy nowadays. Cucumber, naturally, and maybe tomato. “If we do tomato ones, we’ll give them a good sprinkle of basil,” Mrs. Potter suggested, “the way Peter did for my salad yesterday. Beth will have some dried from her garden, if you don’t.”

  “How about watercress?” Gussie asked. “We can get that perfect cress right here on the island, and we’ll make little rolled sandwiches with a nice sprig sticking out both ends.”

  Mrs. Potter was writing. “Butter—remember to soften. Mayonnaise, bread, watercress, cucumbers, tomatoes. Basil—Beth?” She laid down her pen. “What about using that great recipe of yours for a parsley dip as a sandwich filling?” she asked. “As a matter of fact, why not have some cocktail party food? How about those great little hot cheese things of yours? I know Teresa doesn’t cook, for you, that is, but she can certainly get those in and out of the oven if we have them chilled and ready. And what about that stuff you do with chopped ripe olives and garlic?”

  The list progressed to possible sweets. More sandwiches, they finally agreed, little open-faced half slices, lightly buttered, using Gussie’s recipe for cranberry cheese bread for one kind. For a second, Mrs. Potter suggested her great-grandmother’s orange bread, claiming she knew the recipe by heart, having made it for so many years.

  “Write it down for me, will you?” Gussie asked, proffering a file card. “Seems to me you once said it had no shortening in it. Maybe some of the dieters will be glad to know.”

  Mrs. Potter wrote quickly, using abbreviations. Peel of 2 oranges, cut in fine slivers. Cover with water, add ½ c. sugar, simmer till tender. Remove peel, cook liquid down to about ⅓ c. In mixing bowl comb, another ½ c. sugar, 2 c. flour, 3t. baking powder, ½ t. salt. Add milk to orange syrup to make ⅔ c. and mix with 1 egg. Stir all tog. with orange peel. Greased loaf pan, 350, 45 min.

  “There!” she exclaimed, looking up. “That’s clear enough. Grandmother Andrews would be proud of me. It was her mother’s recipe, and one of the first things she taught me to make. We’d better bake it and your cranberry cheese bread on Friday, don’t you think? They’ll slice better the next day.”

  It was too soon after the holidays, they told each other, to even think about cookies. Gussie had one big leftover gift fruitcake she hadn’t unwrapped. They’d have a plate of that, sliced very thin, just to make more of a show on the sweet side, and if it wasn’t eaten, Gussie would send the whole thing home with Teresa, which is what she probably should have done with it in the first place. And there was the yet unopened box of burnt sugar almonds Beth had brought to welcome Mrs. Potter.

  “Let’s call her back and see how she is,” Mrs. Potter suggested. There was no answer, although she let the phone ring a few extra times.

  The yellow pad list seemed complete. Then, “just for pretty, “Mrs. Potter suggested that she might pick up a box of old-fashioned pastel bonbons when they went shopping later. “The little paper cups will look as if we’d gone to the proper amount of trouble,” she said. She added this entry to her list, and then began to laugh.

  “I was just remembering bridesmaids’ dresses, and how absolutely sappy we looked in them. Tulle or chiffon or net of some kind, or even worse, taffeta, all in sweet bonbon colors. . ..”

  Gussie protested. “I thought you looked very nice in that pale green with the matching horsehair picture hat as my maid of honor,” she said. “Although I suppose it was all pretty saccharine, with ten bridesmaids in matching shell pink. How many of those dresses do you suppose we all bought—in colors we called ‘peach’ and ‘seafoam’ and ‘aqua’ and ‘orchid’—before we got each other all married off?”

  “And never wore again, although our mothers always expected us to,” Mrs. Potter added. “All those bertha collars and little ruffled sleeve caps . . .”

  “All those dyed-to-match satin pumps,” Gussie reminded her, “and how expensive we thought they were, at six dollars a pair including the dye-to-match. I seem to remember sometimes the bride’s mother shelled out for those as well as buying the hats.”

  “What I seem to recall is that we were all a little bit fatter than girls are now,” Mrs. Potter said. “Not really fat, but I think we’d look that way if our pictures were compared with a modern wedding party.”

 
; “What I seem to remember are ushers,” Gussie said dreamily. “Do you remember that absolutely wonderful man—from Dartmouth, I think he was? At Barbara’s wedding in Montpelier?”

  Mrs. Potter failed to remember that particular wonderful man from Dartmouth, and continued to think how unutterably dowdy she must have looked in seafoam green with a matching horsehair picture hat. She resolved not to stuff herself on tomorrow’s cucumber sandwiches.

  Gussie interrupted these mildly uncomfortable thoughts. “What time is it?” she shrieked. “Genia, don’t bother with those lunch dishes, don’t put your hair up again, or anything. Just jam on your hat—we’ve got to be going! Teresa? Remember you promised me Saturday, too, this week? Genia, let’s go! You’ll miss the surprise!”

  12

  “I can’t remember—do I kiss you?”

  The speaker, slight, fair-haired, his smile eternally boyish in an unlined face, greeted Mrs. Potter with vague cordiality as she and Gussie started down Main Street.

  Mrs. Potter decided to give the question the deliberate consideration the speaker had not, perhaps, intended. “I don’t remember either, George,” she said at last. “Shall we just shake hands and decide what to do about it later?”

  George’s best clerical chuckle covered any possible lapse of memory. “Okay, I think you always used to, George,” she told him forgivingly, “and I just now realized you’ve had to face that problem before. All those trustees’ wives and students’ mothers at your school, and before that all those women parishioners. It would have been dreadful to be kissing when you shouldn’t and maybe even worse not kissing when you should. Yes, you kiss me, but just on one side.”

  “Turn around and walk back down Main Street with us, George,” Gussie urged, with a tug at his elbow. “You can share the big surprise with Genia. Come on, shake a leg!”

  Between the two women, each as tall as he, George Ender-bridge seemed fragile and weightless, as smooth and dry as a leaf clinging to a winter branch. Gussie had taken for granted his willingness to join them, but with a surprising show of firmness he kept them from sweeping him along with them.