Mrs. Potter found it reassuring that Laurence was not using the words poison or murder, apparently not even to his wife. Arnold Sallanger had signed two unassailable death warrants. Nothing was going to disturb that official position, and no matter what confessions Beth might offer now, it was vital that they be considered delusions.
’I’d like to talk with Ted,” she said. “Since apparently he did see a poison bottle, I’ve been wronging him in my mind. I thought he was using his perfect party manners, pretending to enjoy the party as a cover-up for spiking his own tea with vodka all afternoon. If he wasn’t having a drunken fantasy, he may be able to shed some light on all this. I’ll try to call him at his mother’s, if I can find her number.
“Let’s see—I remember he’s Tedley, not Edward,” she went on. “Tedley Tennant Frobisher, and as I recall he was a Two or a Three, which means his mother may well be a Mrs. of the same name. I’ll try that 555–1212 information number.”
A Frobisher, T. T., Jr. (not Mrs., of course—cautious widows do not thus expose themselves), was listed at what sounded a likely Boston suburban address, and Mrs. Potter dialed the number.
The conversation was no help at all, she told Gussie when she had finished. Very proper Boston voice, elderly, but also very strong. Used to getting her own way, brisk about cutting off questions. Ted is there (she had said “my son is unable to speak with you now”) and she wasn’t receptive to taking a message. To further quote her, they’re leaving by plane, at noon for the West Coast and from there on a cruise ship to Hawaii. Her son’s accounts will be handled through the Boston brokerage firm he represents on the island. And that was that.
“She may be just covering up for him if he’s gone on a bender,” Gussie said. “Anyway, what you wanted to know is certainly nothing you could ask a Boston grande dame. ‘Did your son thwart a mass murder at my friend Mrs. Van Vleeck’s tea party here on Nantucket last Saturday?’ Or how about ‘At the very least, Mrs. Frobisher, did he see a bottle of prussic acid, which might or might not have been empty, in the open handbag of the guest who was pouring tea?’”
“Let’s take a walk,” Mrs. Potter suggested, “and think about something else for a while.”
The two were just above Monument Corner, the old memorial to the island’s sailors and soldiers, when Gussie stopped short. “The hospital!” she remembered suddenly. “I’m due there at ten. What time is it now?”
“Lots of time,” Mrs. Potter assured her. “It’s not even nine.”
Gussie was on edge. “I almost forgot it, thinking about Beth,” she said. “Helen asked me to report on the volunteer food-delivery program, and I’ve got to put together my notes. Do you mind if I rush back? You know what a demon she is at organization. You go on by yourself, and I’ll be back for lunch.”
Mrs. Potter continued walking slowly, thinking of how to proceed with the inquiries she knew she must make. Her feet slowed, and she, too, reversed her direction. Perusal of the old stones of the graveyard could wait, much as she enjoyed that occasional ritual walk, peering at dates and rejoicing in quirky Nantucket names and epitaphs.
As she turned back, her thoughts went again to Beth. Beth would have awakened this morning in a Providence hospital room, “under observation.” That certainly was going to be no fun, racked with her self-torturing sense of guilt. She thought of Ted, off to Hawaii, undergoing maternal observation of a not dissimilar nature.
She thought again, with recurring shock, that if Beth and Ted were right, there had to be a real poisoner abroad on this small, beautiful island she loved so well. Beth and Ted seemed safe for the moment. But who was not? And what protection could there be? Find out who it is, her mind informed her. That’s the only safety there can be.
The first thing she would do would be to write down her notes on Dee’s story about the three beautiful people on Long Island. Then she’d try to have a good lunch ready for Gussie when she got back from her meeting. They were both on edge, she thought, from all this dieting. She would write on her yellow pad, and then she would cook something.
She wanted to talk again later with Dee, Countess Ferencz, but this would be another conversation she could not easily share with her old roommate. She wanted to talk with everyone she knew to have been a law client of Ozzie’s, and she would have to start with the people she knew best, Les Girls.
There was Mittie, facing the first financial problems of her hitherto secure and sheltered life. There was Helen, rich, independent, but even she had apparently used Ozzie to prepare her tax returns. There was Mary Lynne, bravely widowed and newly rich. There was Leah, emerging from several years of plaintive bereavement.
There was even Peter Benson, the favorite restaurateur of the group. At the moment she did not let herself list the names of their favorite hairdresser, their doctor, their newly prosperous resident author, their boyish little retired clergyman and schoolmaster.
She might find some clue to the two unexpected deaths of the previous week. For Gussie’s sake, she hoped to find reassurance about Tony Ferencz. For Beth’s sake, she had to find out who was guilty.
21
“I just looked over your yellow pad, and I don’t think it means a thing,” Gussie said, after she had returned from the hospital and she and Mrs. Potter were sitting at lunch. “Anyway, thanks for having lunch ready. The soup tastes wonderful—how’d you make it?”
Mrs. Potter hesitated. She had not intended Gussie to see what she had written about Dee’s story of the deBevereaux tragedy and Tony’s part in it. She’d stick to talk about the soup. “There was that nice fresh bunch of leeks in the refrigerator,” she began, and then halted. To say that she had not exactly looked forward to a next-day breakfast of raw juice of leek did not seem quite tactful.
Gussie finished her sentence. “And you were afraid you’d have to drink it in juice,” she said. “Honestly, Genia, you should know me better than that.”
Remembering what had seemed a raw breakfast borscht, with beets and cabbage, Mrs. Potter was not so sure. At any rate, she had made a low-calorie leek and potato soup that did seem comforting on a January day, and a welcome change from cottage cheese and raw apple slices.
“It isn’t as fattening as it tastes,” she explained meekly. “I sliced and minced all the tender parts of the leeks after I washed out all the sand, and I cooked them down gently in butter, to start with. Except I used exactly one teaspoon of butter, instead of the three or four tablespoons one might use. When they were wilted, I put in a small potato, peeled and diced rather fine, and an undiluted can of chicken broth. When the vegetables were simmered soft, I added a cup of milk. Skim milk, honestly, Gussie. I didn’t puree it in the blender—I hope you like it this way.”
Privately she was thinking that part of her enjoyment of their lunch was in the hot and slightly chunky substance of the soup, and the chewing of the slice of unbuttered toasted Portuguese bread she had served with it.
“All right, I expect it’s not a bad diet lunch,” Gussie said, “although I can’t remember how many calories leeks have, can you? What I want to get back to is what you wrote on your yellow pad. Dee says Tony was negligent in the death of Ozzie’s child. She implied that he was criminally negligent. I think Dee has reasons of her own to be vindictive about Tony. Besides, the story seems quite vague to me, and it’s really ancient history.”
Mrs. Potter tried to explain that Dee had seemed to be trying to be fair. “She said Tony might not have realized what he was doing to the child,” she said carefully. “She even seemed to feel she herself was partly to blame by helping her new husband launch his career with favorable publicity in Éclat.”
Mrs. Potter did not mention Dee’s saying that the name of Countess Ferencz had been useful in advancing her own magazine career. No one, not even the dear friend sitting across from her at the lunch table today, would ever hear from her lips the name Dora Stell Grumbley.
“Besides, what if Ozzie did think Tony had been responsible for the death o
f his daughter?” Gussie asked practically. “What if he was enraged by having Tony turn up here on the island, after all these years? What could he do now that he didn’t do then?”
“Ozzie could have said, ‘This man is a charlatan,’” Mrs. Potter replied. “He could have said, ‘This man’s carelessness killed my daughter.’”
“That was years ago,” Gussie said heatedly. “Even if you grant that Tony might have been negligent then, as a young man just starting out in practice, any revelations of Ozzie’s now wouldn’t seem very important. Genia, be honest. Would they?”
Mrs. Potter was briefly silent and Gussie continued her defense. “And, I ask you, why should Ozzie just last week suddenly seem such a dreadful threat to Tony? After all, he’s been on the island ever since the first of last summer. The idea that Ozzie and his secretary might have been poisoned all this time later, to keep them from talking about an old tragedy, seems crazy.”
Mrs. Potter sighed. “All right,” she said wearily. “It doesn’t make much sense. Nothing makes sense. Except two people died and Beth Higginson believes that she poisoned them.”
“Don’t forget she put a bottle of poison in her bag before she came to my party,” Gussie said, still defensive. “Only she says it was empty. I say it again—Beth has just slipped a cog and that’s all there is to it, sad as it may be.”
Mrs. Potter was silent. When she spoke, it was with an amiable question. “Why don’t I amble down street and buy some more Portuguese bread?” she asked. “You probably have more letters to write or something, and need a little time to yourself. I’ll be back in time to exercise by four, and I promise not to eat a ginger ice-cream cone.”
22
“I’ll use the excuse of seeing if she wants a loaf of Portuguese bread too,” Mrs. Potter decided as she approached Mittie’s door after lunch. Not that she needed an excuse. Les Girls popped into each other’s houses easily and often, just to say hello. The difference now was that the doors were locked.
Bundled to the ears in a bright pink turtleneck sweater, Mittie answered the old-fashioned doorbell. She was delighted to see Genia. No, no, she was not about to go out. Actually, she was in the midst of preparing a stew for herself and Dee for dinner later, and if Genia would come in and sit in the kitchen rocker, she’d be able to keep an eye on the browning lamb.
The old kitchen—a cook’s kitchen, Mrs. Potter thought, arranged for the probable series of Irish cooks and maids who had accompanied Mittie’s parents every summer to the island—was slightly warmer than the chilly front hall and dining room through which Mittie had led her. The temperature of the adjoining side parlors, she felt sure, was even lower. Like most kitchens whose former occupants have been old-school servants, it was large, colorless, and uncognizant of labor-saving devices. It was separated from the dining room by an equally bleak and inconvenient butler’s pantry, its walls lined to the ceiling with glass-doored cabinets. Inside, Mrs. Potter knew without even looking, were good but mismatched sets of china and slightly dusty unused glassware, the pullout drawers below crammed with yellowing table linens.
The big commercial-size gas range, at which bountiful meals had been prepared for several generations of Mittie’s family, was cold and slightly rusted. Mittie’s lamb riblets were browning in a pot over a small electric hot plate.
“It’s the flavor of lamb that counts,” Mittie told her earnestly, “to bless the potatoes and onions and carrots, as old Reba used to say. Of course, she’d cube a whole leg of lamb for what she considered a proper stew for the family. For the two of us, I decided to try these riblet things. No sense in having a lot of leftovers. I’m going to add a diced parsnip, too, the way Reba used to.”
“Gussie gives me parsnip juice along with other rather surprising things for breakfast,” Mrs. Potter told her. “I suppose you’re a juice addict, too, since Tony Ferencz came to the island.”
“Tony’s wonderful,” Mittie assured her. “I don’t have a juice extractor, but I’m sure it’s a great idea.”
Mrs. Potter, comparing the cost of the small bony bits in the pot with that of good stewing lamb, could very well guess why there was no expensive new machine in the old kitchen. She did notice, however, a small portable electric sewing machine on a table in the corner, and beside it, a strip of black-and-white-plaid wool. It had been a skirt she remembered, then, at the tea party, altered to fit Mittie’s new waistline.
“The next step in Tony’s program is supposed to be my skin,” Mittie went on, “but I can’t talk about it now. He doesn’t like to have us talk about what he’s doing.”
“I hear mention of a foundation or clinic of some kind,” Mrs. Potter said quickly. “Tell me about it.”
“Oh, that’s a secret, too. The Ferencz Institute of Beauty and Longevity,” Mittie replied solemnly. “A temporary residence center. He likes the slogan I suggested: Tor people who want to enjoy long life, happily and beautifully.’ Don’t you really like that, Genia? Wouldn’t you want to come to a place like that?”
“It suggests quite an institution,” Mrs. Potter said, suppressing immediate distaste for the idea. “I suppose that means a staff and a facility of some kind other than where he is now, as I understand it, in that small bedroom suite upstairs at the Scrimshaw Inn.”
Oh, no, it would be something quite comfortable, Mittie assured her, and very exclusive. Rooms for no more than six or eight guests. “Now, promise you won’t tell,” she went on, “but he thinks Nantucket is the perfect place for it, one that would attract exactly the clientele he’d like to serve.”
“Good heavens, where?” Mrs. Potter asked, in secret and immediate fear that Gussie’s beautiful house would suggest itself as an ideal setting.
“It’s out of the question here in the Historic District,” Mittie went on, as if in answer, “otherwise I’d love to turn over this house for it, as I expect Leah might with hers. All of us have houses big enough to be turned into quite nice residential centers. For either Leah or me, it might be rather nice to have some kind of foundation take over the taxes and overhead.”
“Not Mary Lynne?” Mrs. Potter asked.
“Mary Lynne’s coming into quite a lot of money,” Mittie said hesitantly, “and not just insurance, although that seemed whopping to me. Bo’s company—oil and gas and coal and things—was bought right after Bo died last summer by a big conglomerate of some kind. She’s going to rake in scads and scads. He was the chief stockholder, she said, even though he was pretty much retired.”
“I suppose Ozzie handled Bo’s affairs, as he did everyone else’s?” Mrs. Potter inquired.
“Mary Lynne just found out this morning she’s going to be in the same boat with the rest of us, with everything doled out by a trust—with all of us but Gussie and Helen, that is,” Mittie said. “Until today I guess she thought she could do as she liked with the money. Naturally, she’d have counted on Ozzie’s help. He was there at the Wauwinet House the day Bo died. First I thought that must have been a comfort to her, but, on the other hand, the way I heard it from Peter, he really wasn’t much help. Tony tried to revive him, you know, and Peter told everybody not to pay any attention to what Ozzie was saying that day.”
Mrs. Potter was mystified, not sure she was following all this. “Was Tony sailing with Bo and Mary Lynne?” she asked. “I thought she brought the boat by herself. I didn’t know Tony was there, or that Ozzie was.”
Everyone was there, Mittie told her. Well, she herself had not been, and of course Peter had been busy in the summer season at the Scrimshaw. But Tony, most providentially, had been there when Mary Lynne beached the boat. He was having lunch there with Helen, as a matter of fact, and Ozzie had also been there, with Edie along, looking over some property with Dee and a client.
“I’ll miss Ozzie, in a way,” Mittie said, going back to her own concerns. “I had been furious with him lately because as my trust officer he absolutely refused to let me dispose of the Shimmo place the way I wanted to, but in the end I reall
y had to admit he was right. The place would be perfect for Tony for the foundation, but there’s no way I can afford to give it to him. He couldn’t possibly buy the place himself—naturally he has everything invested in research and equipment. Just please forget I said anything at all about it. He’d be furious if he knew.”
“That beautiful big house and all that land of yours must be tremendously valuable now,” Mrs. Potter said. “What does it have—four or five acres right on the harbor? And, good heavens, how many bedrooms?”
“Six,” Mittie said. “That is, with bathrooms. There are a couple of odd rooms that could be used to make suites, and then there are the servants’ rooms—three and a bath over the garage. I always wished Daddy and Mummy had made it a little smaller when they had it built for our wedding present, but it would have been perfect for Tony,”
Mittie was busy now peeling potatoes and scraping carrots to go into the stew with the few bony lamb bits. “Whatever I do with the place,” she continued, “at least I don’t have to feel guilty about the children. They couldn’t possibly afford to keep it up, and besides they want to bring up their families in what they call ‘a different life-style.’ Can you imagine that, Genia? Whatever kind of life-style could compare to the kind of summers they had growing up here on the island?”
Mrs. Potter agreed that Mittie’s children and the others of their generation, her own included, had been almost the last to enjoy long carefree teen-age summers and conventional long family vacations. Their successors had elected summer jobs, often the lowliest, or cross-country travel by motorcycle or bus, or youth hostels abroad. They had eagerly and gladly shed the restrictions of the parental roof, of madras jackets and Top-Siders, of chaperoned junior dances at the Yacht Club. There was something to be said on both sides.
The Nantucket Diet Murders Page 18