The Nantucket Diet Murders

by Virginia Rich

  “I assume you know about Ozzie,” he said, his voice deeper and more resonant than his small frame suggested. “I’ve just been at the parish house to inquire about arrangements for a memorial service. The rector insists the deBevereaux executor has other plans, specified by Ozzie a long time ago. There will be nothing here except a special prayer at morning worship on Sunday, and burial will be on Long Island. His body’s already been flown off-island, and it seems the little charter plane is having a real workout. His secretary’s body was taken home to Ossining, or wherever she came from, earlier this morning, with her brother here to accompany it.” George sounded disappointed, even slightly affronted.

  “We’re very sad about both of them,” Gussie told him. “We all were there, you know, at the Scrim when she had the start of her allergic seizure. Maybe when Ozzie had news of it the shock brought on his heart attack. About the services—I suppose their family ties off-island are the important thing. But I’m sorry, George, honestly, we can’t stay now. Come on now, we’ve got to get moving!”

  George had more resistance than Gussie had expected. He would not, he thought, join them for the surprise, whatever it was. He was expected at Mittie’s to report on the funeral arrangements, or lack of them. Mittie took continuing interest in church matters, he said with approval, although she was no longer president of the Women of St. Paul’s. He would, however, look forward to seeing them both again on Saturday at the cocktail party.

  The sidewalks were now dry in the sunshine. The last of the Christmas trees were gone, with only a few fir sprigs here and there, not yet swept away, as a reminder of their morning splendor in the early snow. Mrs. Potter stopped short in her tracks.

  “I smell fresh bread!” she exclaimed. “Gussie, stop rushing us! Slow down! Gussie!”

  Abroad, triumphant smile was Gussie’s answer. She waved a theatrical arm toward a hanging sign in front of the tiny. shop ahead, a sign Mrs. Potter felt sure had not been there on their morning walk down this same street, hanging above a shop she had not noticed then, nor remembered from the past.

  “‘The Portuguese Bread Man,’” she read in tones of bewilderment. “There’s no bakery on Main Street, Gussie. What’s this all about?”

  The air was filled with the fragrance of freshly baked bread. Around them a few people were pausing, as they were, sniffing the air. Others appeared, converging from all directions, as if drawn by a magnet. In the few steps it took the two women to reach the front of the small shop, they were surrounded by people—a dozen, two dozen, a growing throng.

  The small-paned shopwindow displayed a large hand-lettered Sign. FOLLOW YOUR NOSE TO THE PORTUGUESE BREAD MAN, it read. On the windowed door beside it—the entire shop no more than eight feet across—was a second sign, OPENING FRIDAY.

  Pushed by the growing sidewalk crowd to a position in front of the closed door, Mrs. Potter mounted the single flat stone step and tried the handle. Shrugging, she turned. “Apparently they’re not open,” she explained, apologetically and unnecessarily. “Today’s Thursday. Friday’s tomorrow.”

  Feeling foolish at making such obvious announcements, she stepped down to Gussie’s side. “Somebody’s baking in there right now, and the smell of it’s driving the whole town crazy. Why don’t they just open up and start off with a great box-office smash right now?”

  Gussie lifted a quick, gloved fingertip in a gesture of secrecy. “Let’s go across the street,” she said, “and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “Let’s have a soda at the drugstore, then,” Mrs. Potter proposed. “Actually, I’d love a ginger ice cream cone, if that isn’t too much right after lunch.”

  They went into one of the two old-fashioned drugstores, side by side and so nearly identical in their layout that Mrs. Potter never knew which one she was in without going back outside to see. Gussie took a stool at the short fountain counter, and as Mrs. Potter sat beside her, she ordered decisively for them both. “We’ll have iced tea,” she told the pair of plump, aproned girls behind the counter, interrupting their conversation.

  Chastened, knowing that what she’d really intended to order had been a chocolate frappe (pronounced and often spelled “trap” in Massachusetts, known more prosaically in her Iowa youth as a chocolate ice cream milk shake), Mrs. Potter accepted what seemed to her the unseasonable glass of iced tea meekly. The girls behind the counter resumed their conversation and the store was empty, all of Nantucket’s winter afternoon shoppers apparently still clustering about the front of the little shop across the street, drawn by the ineffable and irresistible fragrance of baking bread. Still, as if fearful of being overheard, Gussie lowered her voice to a whisper as she told the story of the new bakeshop.

  To begin with, she explained, it began when Teresa’s oldest granddaughter, Mary Rezendes, went off to Radcliffe, where she’d graduated, with honors, last June. While she was in Cambridge, she met a young man from St. Louis, Hans Muller, who graduated at the same time from the Harvard Business School. Hans followed her here to the island and spent the summer working for Teresa’s brother.

  Mrs. Potter interrupted. That same pretty girl with the long braid and the head scarf at the Scrimshaw with the softball league?

  Gussie nodded, impatient of interruption. Hans’s father had a chain of bakeries as well as a lot of other interests in St. Louis. He had been a baker’s apprentice himself as a boy, and had insisted that Hans, in turn, learn the trade, as well as go to graduate school in business management, in order to take over the family enterprises later on.

  “So what did he do for Teresa’s brother, if that’s part of the story?” Mrs. Potter asked.

  “You mean you didn’t know? Teresa’s brother is Manny!”

  “I guess it’s coming clear, but not entirely. Mary Rezendes is home from Radcliffe, her Harvard B-school boyfriend spends last summer as a baker’s helper for her uncle—I’ve got that straight. And now, presumably, he or she or they are setting up competition for poor Manny, while he’s gone, in that tiny little hole-in-the-wall space across the street? I’m not sure I think this is exactly cricket. And besides, unless that building runs a whole lot deeper than I think it does, there can’t be room for ovens and supplies and all those big mixers and cooling racks.”

  “Now you’re getting the picture,” Gussie assured her. “To begin with, they aren’t competing with Manny. He’s got a stake in the whole operation, and he taught Hans to make real honest-to-goodness Manny-style Portuguese bread, and Hans will begin baking it tonight or tomorrow morning or whenever it is that bakers bake bread. And he’ll be doing it right there in Manny’s kitchens in the back of Manny’s regular bakeshop.”

  “I still don’t get all of this,” Mrs. Potter said. “I see we’ve got a couple of bright young people setting up in business and I’m glad it’s with Manny’s backing and blessing. I still can’t figure out how the smell of tomorrow’s bread, baking in ovens at least eight blocks away, is wafting out today right across the street from where we sit.”

  “You forgot what I told you about Mary Rezendes,” Gussie reminded her. “Yes, she’s pretty and smart and has her grandmother’s lovely skin and oval face and black hair, and yes, she’s Manny’s grandniece. Besides all that she studied chemistry and neurology and she’s a specialist in olfactology, if you know what that is. She knows all about things called odorants and pheromones. Believe it or not, she’s a specialist in smells,

  “After months of laboratory work,” Gussie continued, “Mary has come up with an absolutely wonderful attar, made of artificial ingredients, that gives out the wonderful smell of yeast and browning crust and to-grandmother’s-house-we-go!”

  Gussie hugged her knees with delight. “The mechanics are simple enough to put the smell out into the street, as the two of them explained it to me. The chemical mixture is warmed in a little heater she contrived, and she rigged up the reverse of an exhaust fan through a grill over the doorway of the shop, which pipes the lovely smell out to the street.”

>   As she spoke, the sleek, biscuit-colored girl with the long dark braid came into the drugstore, followed by a young man, dark, rather stocky, wearing a three-piece suit. “It’s working!” Mary Rezendes whispered as she took the next stool. “We thought we’d sneak out the back way and come out to hear what people were saying,”

  Gussie introduced the two, and at her signal the four heads drew together above the counter, their voices lowered. “Can you imagine what this is going to do when the streets are full of summer people?” Hans asked. “We’ll have special carrying bags with the logo. Every day-tripper going back on the boat to Hyannis will be a walking ad for us. We’ll ship airmail. We’ll be famous all over the world. We’ll have to enlarge the operation and install a computer system.”

  “Let’s wander back on the street,” Mary urged him. “I want to get a few good quotes for our next week’s ads.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Hans said as they got up to leave. “Next week you’ll have your first Portuguese bread lesson, and I’ll show you the new plans for the bakery. We’re programming the software ourselves in our spare time. Hey, Mary, wait up!”

  “Finished your iced tea?” Gussie inquired. “It’s exercise time. We didn’t have time for it this morning and it makes me feel stuffy to miss a day! Tony says you have to listen to your body, Genia, let it tell you what it needs.”

  Somewhat bleakly, Mrs. Potter thought that what her body was telling her was that she needed that chocolate frappe, and that a BLT on toast wouldn’t really be too much to go with it, after an apple and a bit of cheese for lunch, but she rose dutifully from the drugstore stool.

  “All right,” she agreed reluctantly, “but give me a minute first to buy those bonbons for the party. Then where to? I hope you do it at your house and not in some marvelous new little health gym you’ve got tucked away on a side street as another surprise.”

  That will come, Gussie assured her as they walked back up Main Street. “Tony has fabulous plans, but it won’t be in any little exercise club. I can’t tell you about it, or he’d be furious, but what he’s planning will be the most important thing to come to the island since the days of the whaling ships.”

  Later, Gussie, in a long-sleeved purple leotard with matching tights, handed Mrs. Potter a pair of what she assumed were Jules’s or Gordon’s or perhaps young Scott’s old balbriggan pajamas as an exercise suit. “We’ll get you fixed up properly tomorrow,” Gussie promised, “with a quick trip down street. Canary, geranium, or bluebell, madam? You can’t have grape, because I bought that one.”

  Thus attired, the two spent an energetic half hour in a cleared third-floor bedroom. There were exercise mats on the floor, and in the corner an indefatigable record player exhorting them, in a voice sweet but adamant, to bend a little more, stretch a little higher, lift, push, touch inaccessible areas of the anatomy with other impossibly nontouching parts. To breathe, inhale, exhale. Raise, lower, and reach.

  “That’s enough,” Mrs. Potter finally announced. “I still do my same old twenty-minute routine almost every day. Anyway, quite often when I have time, but this is just plain overdoing it.” She stretched out on the thin mat, breathing deeply. After a few minutes, she went on. “I must say it’s rather more fun to do a few new twists with a record to keep telling you how. I see new exercises in magazines and I clip them out, but they’re too much trouble. I have to keep putting on my glasses to check again what to do on count three. The only new idea I’ve had recently is to do the old standbys while I’m watching the morning news.”

  “I tried several of those TV exercise classes,” Gussie said, groaning pleasurably as she, too, stretched and relaxed, “Remember the yoga woman? I can still do the Archer and the Plough, I think, and maybe the Cat—or is it the Cobra I was pretty good at?—but I never mastered the ones with handstands.”

  “The meditation part gave me a lot of trouble,” Mrs. Potter admitted. “I found myself planning meals or thinking of letters I ought to be writing. Anyway, that woman and the class members were simply too intimidating, especially the one with the white hair—there’s always one with white hair and a great figure. She was always too much for me.”

  “I know that one,” Gussie said. “She can breeze through aerobics that would leave the average twenty-year-old gasping.”

  “Remember we want to call Beth as soon as we’re bathed and dressed,” Mrs. Potter continued as the two rolled up their mats and left the back bedroom. “And then did you say we could have our before-dinner drinks in the cupola? I’d love to see the town again at dusk from that height.”

  Later, in the kitchen, Gussie relayed the substance of the just completed call. Beth said she was all right, but she sounded subdued and sort of far away. She had gone to Ozzie’s house after she left them this morning, and they were right. There was no one there and nothing she could do, although she’d found a few ashtrays to empty and she’d washed up the mug she found upstairs by his big chair in his living room. She said she took her jar of comfrey home with her since she knew no one else would be using it there.

  “Darling, practical, energetic Beth,” Mrs. Potter said. “Trust her to be the one who’d find something useful to do, as a last good-bye to an old friend.”

  “What she did this afternoon didn’t make much sense,” Gussie continued. “She told me she went back and spent the afternoon at the science library, even after being there this morning. I asked her for heaven’s sake why, and she really didn’t say. Just repeated something about Lolly’s being there, Lolly Latham. You remember Helen said she had a volunteer job there helping the librarian? And then she said again Lolly was very nice and a lot of help.

  “In fact, she said Lolly even left work early and walked home with her, seeing she was upset—think of Beth’s being upset!—and then came in and made her a cup of tea in her own kitchen and looked at her herb garden layout for next year and at her garden workroom. And she told me she didn’t think any of us has ever given Lolly enough credit. She’s always been in Helen’s shadow, Beth said.”

  “This bothers me,” Mrs. Potter said. “Not about Lolly—that sounds good. But Beth’s no scholar. I can’t imagine her spending the whole day indoors looking up anything, can you?”

  “Something’s wrong,” Gussie answered. “If Beth’s sick, that’s odd enough in itself. She’s never sick. But if she is, or at least what she’s calling upset, why didn’t she call one of us? Why wasn’t she in bed today, for heaven’s sake, instead of going in for all this library stuff?”

  As she spoke, Gussie was putting a small covered container of ice into a large lightship basket, darkened and mellowed with age but still as sturdy as on the long-ago day it had been woven. She added a small squat bottle of mineral water, two stemmed glasses, then looked questioningly at her guest.

  “Name your poison,” she invited. They looked at each other in sudden surprise, but their raised eyebrows made the only comment.

  13

  Following this pause, Mrs. Potter, shrugging, poured gin and a few drops of vermouth into a small glass jar with a snug lid. “Enough for one martini,” she said, feeling oddly apologetic. “Well, and maybe a small dividend while you finish that Perrier.”

  Both now wearing light wool pants and matching sweater tops, each carrying an extra cardigan, they climbed the broad stairway to the second floor; then the narrower one, enclosed, to the third. There were two other square, seldom used bedrooms, Mrs. Potter remembered, in addition to the one in which they had done their exercises. There was a big old-fashioned bathroom with a skylight instead of a window, and beyond it the storeroom.

  She peered in to see the neatly stacked Chippendale dining room chairs she knew Gussie was saving for the time when Marilyn might find time for giving dinner parties as well as providing free legal services for the poor. There were cartons of books, racks of framed pictures and mirrors, old trunks that might hold costume treasures for Scott’s future theatrical productions. There were accumulated treasures of Gussie�
��s past, and those left behind by former generations of occupants of the big white house as well.

  From this level, the two ascended a third flight of stairs, still more narrow and steep, but open at the sides, leading directly into the cupola. There they found themselves high above the bare treetops, high above the streetlights in the late afternoon January dark.

  The cupola room had six windows—two on the sides facing front and back of the house, one on each side. Its size always surprised Mrs. Potter, for seen from the street below it seemed a small, windowed cubicle. In actuality it held two full-length wide benches, one on either side of the open stairwell, their backs a continuation of either side of the wooden stair railing, with plenty of room on all sides to walk around easily.

  Each bench mattress was covered with heavy old brocade in soft, faded colors. (“I used the old parlor curtains,” Gussie explained. “Jules loved those colors so much we couldn’t bear to part with them.”) Each padded bench was firm, perhaps too hard to be comfortable as a bed, except for a group Mrs. Potter felt it was perfect for—a slumber party of pajamaed granddaughters. For sitting, Gussie had made each one comfortable with banks of soft pillows, their coverings also remnants of earlier glory. Flowered linen, silk and chintz and damask intermingled, from other downstairs origins and even from other houses. “You always were a saver,” Mrs. Potter said. “I remember this pink-and-yellow-striped satin from the New York apartment.”

  Turning off the light to see better, and moving from one window to the other, the two had what Jules had once figured to be a 275-degree view of the town below. “In the winter, that is,” Gussie added. “The trees cut off some of that in the summer, even though they’re all below us.”