The Nantucket Diet Murders

by Virginia Rich

  Mrs. Potter thought wildly that Mittie was about to ask them all to be bridesmaids, in chiffon and maline. Clearly, Gussie had the same flight of fancy. They grinned at each other companionably, sure that this, at least, would not happen.

  Mittie still had not finished. “. . . Before that, next week, as a matter of fact, I’m going to Boston for a few weeks. When I come back, I expect you all to say I look wonderfully rested, the thing people say when they know someone’s had a facelift. That’s another part of Tony’s program for me I couldn’t afford before.”

  Mrs. Potter controlled an inward shudder. She had once, hoping to counteract the effects of the Arizona sun, consulted a plastic surgeon herself, about what her friends assured her was a comparatively simple operation. When she found out what it actually entailed, she had left his office in horror. Horror compounded later, she recalled, by his bill just for describing the procedure. Still, this was Mittie’s business, and those clear young eyes belonged in a younger-looking face.

  “I think we should drink a toast to George and Mittie,” Gussie said. “I squeezed fresh juice for us, but how about a glass of white wine first? I’ll be right back.”

  “Let’s toast me a little bit, while we’re at it,” Leah said. “I’ve got a job too, more or less. Victor’s such a fine writer—you all know that—and he’s selling his new novels as fast as I can think up the plots for him. The movie people were even here talking with us—remember, at the Scrim, the day of the fire, Genia? We may even have a new slogan. ‘Victor Sandys, the man who put man in romance!’ Don’t you love it? And he won’t have to be Vicki Sands anymore.”

  Mrs. Potter thought of Peter’s description of Tony as a cardboard man. He had never been anything but that, even to Gussie. Just a cardboard figure in a romantic novel.

  “Speaking of diets,” she said, although they were not and it was only the thought of Tony that made her bring it up, “I lost eight pounds this month, with all this Nantucket dieting. I think I should be toasted too, particularly since I figure roughly that I’ve lost eight pounds every two years for the last forty years, then spent the next two gaining it back again. That comes out to one thousand, six hundred pounds—right, Gussie? I have lost more than three-quarters of a ton, and I expect to round that out to a full two thousand if I live that long., which I fully intend to do. Aren’t you proud of me?”

  “Not of your arithmetic,” Gussie told her. “Get out your yellow pad. You always were shaky on zeroes.”

  Dee spoke up suddenly. “You know who are the best diet authorities in the country?” she asked. “Us! We are! We got in on the whole thing at the start, when we were about twenty! I’m not sure calories were ever talked about before then—does anybody know? Our mothers and grandmothers didn’t diet . . .”

  “Maybe they were more concerned with having enough to eat,” Leah said unexpectedly.

  “Well, maybe,” Dee conceded. “The thing is that we’re the ones who have lived through the whole history of modern dieting. I’ve got to look that up—when the word began to mean eating to get thinner!” Her enthusiasm for the topic was mounting. “Remember the milk-and-banana diet? That’s the first one I ever tried. Three bananas a day, and three glasses of skim milk. You alternate them, spaced out in six so-called meals through the day.”

  “How about the grapefruit diet?” Mittie asked quickly. “I can’t remember what the actual meals were, but you ate a half grapefruit before each one, and that was supposed to do the trick.”

  “Remember the micro-macro thing?” Leah said. “We ate all we could hold of unsalted brown rice, and decided everything as to whether it was Yin or Yang.”

  “Remember the three-day one with cottage cheese and sliced canned peaches for every meal?” Mary Lynne asked. “You got a toasted RyKrisp with it if you felt too awfully deprived. I could lose five pounds in those three days every time.”

  “The real crash was the airline pilots’ diet,” Gussie recalled. “I can’t remember much about it except that it was a killer and you only had three or four hundred calories a day. That was for when you absolutely had to be ten pounds thinner by Saturday, to fit into something or other.”

  “Tiger milk!” Mrs. Potter exclaimed. “That was the forerunner of all the Metrecal things, only you mixed it up yourself. Instant dried milk and eggs and salad oil and whatever else I can’t remember. It was drinkable, but a terrible bore. After a day or so you began to think you’d beg on the streets for something to chew.”

  “Another one I used to fall for,” Mary Lynne admitted, “was the one where if you were absolutely dying for one particular thing, like a hot fudge sundae, it was all right to have one. You just had a hot fudge sundae, nothing else, for one meal. After that supposedly you were calmed down enough to go back to the lettuce and carrot sticks.”

  “Remember the Drinking Man’s Diet?” Gussie asked. “Genia and I thought that was a dandy for a while.”

  “Sort of like the Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss, wasn’t it, except with a martini before dinner?” Mrs. Potter said. “It was mostly proteins, which Lew thought was great for the cattle business and the ranch. Breakfast could be a big cheese omelet as long as you didn’t have any toast with it; lunch could be all kinds of cold meats and mayonnaise and a handful of salted nuts; dinner, lots of steak and not much else. Maybe you got a little jaundiced after a week or so, but you could count on losing ten or twelve pounds in two weeks on that one.”

  “Until the next two weeks, when it started coming back pretty fast,” Gussie recalled cheerfully. “My choice was the one with sherry and prunes—remember, Genia?”

  “A glass of sherry with every meal,” Mrs. Potter said, “including breakfast. I can’t remember which meal was which— one was six stewed prunes, one was two hard-boiled eggs, and one was a small steak. I suppose it didn’t much matter.”

  “The Scarsdale Diet wasn’t bad, do you think?” Leah asked. “One of the restaurants here on the island made quite a good thing of that for a while. It was really my favorite for a long while, although I certainly didn’t like Dr. Tarnower.”

  “You know, I’m going to do an article on all this and see if Éclat will buy it,” Dee said. “A sort of summing up of all the diets we’ve lived through—the works. While I’m at it, I might include everybody’s favorite all-time diet tips.”

  “Mine would be simple,” Gussie said. “Don’t eat anything out of the package, and don’t eat standing up. Put it on a plate, look at it, and then sit down to eat it nicely, if you’re going to eat it at all.”

  “Always say you don’t eat candy unless it’s white,” Leah offered. “That’s almost foolproof. How often do you see divinity these days, anyway?”

  Mrs. Potter interrupted. “That sort of contradicts another diet I just remembered,” she said. “One of those calories don’t count ones. You ate pretty much what you wanted to as long as you didn’t eat anything white. Or anything that had any white ingredients—flour, sugar, milk, rice, bread, pasta. Remember that one?”

  “I’ve learned to cut a sandwich in thirds, drugstore style,” Mittie said, returning to the subject of diet lips. “You cut off one corner to make a triangle. Then you put your knife on the opposite corner and cut the rest in two. Plain halves never look like much, and four quarters look like four bites. This way you’re convinced you’ve got a sandwich and a half.”

  Mary Lynne spoke soberly. “We’ve got to remember that we’re going to slip once in a while. My advice is this—don’t finish it, just because you started. The very minute you can stop gobbling, throw the stuff out, whatever it is, or drown it under cold water in the sink. You’ll have to feel guilty about a few hundred little old calories, maybe, but not about thousands.”

  Mrs. Potter saw that Dee was looking at her expectantly. “The best thing I know is to brush my teeth three times a day, just as soon as I can after every meal,” she said. “My dentist is very happy with me, and he says I’m probably saving myself some expensive periodontal work la
ter on. It’s the best safeguard I know against eating between meals—it simply makes it too much trouble.”

  She looked at Dee. “And what’s yours?” she asked. “Although I can’t believe you ever needed to diet.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Dee replied. “I learned mine the hard way, too, and a long time ago. It’s just this: Don’t eat when you aren’t hungry. If you think you are, maybe you’re just thirsty—drink a glass of water. Maybe you’re just tired—do something else, like taking a walk if you’ve been working at your desk. You may just need to go to the bathroom—go. You might be putting off something you should be doing—do it. Just don’t get mixed up, that’s all I say, about what’s sending you signals.”

  “That one’s great,” Gussie said. “Now, how about a glass of wine?”

  As she passed the tray of filled glasses, she momentarily offered a new topic. “Did we tell you all that we finally showed up for our Portuguese bread lesson?” she asked. “You’ll love it! There we were, Genia and I, on a couple of straight chairs in the middle of the big bakery kitchen. Standing up in front and obviously expecting us to take notes, was our young Harvard MBA.”

  “With a lecture on the action of yeast and gluten,” Mrs. Potter added. “This came after we’d been shown all the giant commercial mixers and the big bake ovens and the cupboards with specially controlled humidity. For what he called ‘proofing,’ which is what we call letting the bread rise.”

  “We acted terribly interested, of course,” Gussie continued, “since Hans had been nice enough to make time for us. I mostly just enjoyed watching Mary Rezendes. She sat in a chair beside where Hans was standing, and she kept beaming up at him and once in a while patting his hand.”

  “It was rather warm,” Mrs. Potter went on, “and I found myself pressing my fingernails into my palms trying to keep from nodding.”

  “The only really interesting part was that Hans’s father came in at the end,” Gussie said. “He’s here on a visit from St. Louis to look over the operations. I could see he’s delighted with everything. In fact, he seemed to be fascinated by Nantucket, and I think he may be staying on for a bit.”

  Mrs. Potter was inwardly groaning at the thought of another wonderful man in Gussie’s life. If Gussie became Mrs. Klaus Muller (it was possible—Helen had said he was a widower), she would become Hans Muller’s stepmother. If Hans and Mary got married, she would be Mary’s stepmother-in-law. Stepmother-in-law to her cleaning lady’s granddaughter, and step-something to Manny, when he got back from his Fort Lauderdale condominium in the spring. Only Gussie could manage this social tangle gracefully. She would always bet on Gussie. And Teresa.

  “That ends the chapter on learning to bake Portuguese bread,” Mrs. Potter said, trying not to think about these complications. “There’s one other piece of news. February is time to prune roses at the ranch. Gussie already knows—I’m leaving tomorrow on the early plane for Boston, and then to head west.”

  As she spoke, she thought of mountain valleys of pale winter topaz, of blue cloudless skies, of mountains holding violet shadows at sunset, of cold nights and dry, bright sunny days. She could hear the morning question of the Mexican doves in the tall pine trees around the ranch house. Who cooks for you? they’d be asking. Who cooks for you?

  What Mrs. Potter did not know was that the Gulf Stream was bringing a Tuesday of fog, grounding all planes from the island. Gussie would be waving at the morning boat as it rounded Brant Point, and she would be scrabbling in her lighthouse basket for pennies.

  PETER’S SCRIMSHAW INN RUM PIE

  Combine 1 ¼ c. milk, ½ c. sugar, and ¼ t. salt and bring to boil. Mix ⅜ c. milk, 3 T. flour, 2 T. cornstarch, and 2 egg yolks and add boiling mixture slowly. Return to saucepan, cook slowly, stirring until thick. Cook slightly, beat in ½ t. vanilla, 3 T. butter, and 2 T. dark Myers’s rum. Turn into baked 9” graham cracker crust and chill. Top with whipped cream and grated bittersweet chocolate.

  GUSSIE’S CRANBERRY CHEESE NUT BREAD

  Chop 1 c. cranberries. (Freeze quickly first, put through coarse chopper blade.) Cream 2 T. shortening, beat in 1 egg and ¾ c. orange juice. Sift and add 2 c. flour, 1 c. sugar, 1 ½ t. baking powder, ½ t. soda, and ½ t. salt. Stir in cranberries, 1 c. grated cheddar cheese and ½ c. chopped walnuts or pecans. Turn into one large loaf pan or two smaller, bake 40–60 min. at 350°. Cool, slice with sharp knife.

  BO HEIDECKER: TENNESSEE MOUNTAIN STICKIES

  Melt 5 T. butter in a heavy 10” skillet (in an “iron spider” on Lookout Mountain) with 1 ¼ c. brown sugar. Prepare dough, using 2 c. biscuit mix and ⅔ c. milk. Turn out on floured board, knead lightly, roll to rectangle about 8 × 12. Spread with most of sugar mixture, roll as for jelly roll, cut in 1” slices. Arrange in same skillet and pour boiling water to barely cover. Bake uncovered for 30 min. at 350° until brown and bubbling. Serve hot or cold, without cream, in cereal or berry bowls.

  JULES BERNER: GUSSIE’S SOUR CREAM APPLE PANCAKES

  Peel and thinly slice 2 firm tart apples and brown gently in 2 T. butter. Whisk together ¼ c. milk, 2 T. sour cream, ¼ c. flour, ¼ t. salt, and 2 egg yolks; fold in 2 egg whites, stiffly beaten. Arrange a fourth of apple slices with 1 t. butter on hot griddle or skillet at 375°, and cover with a fourth of the batter. Fry until golden, turn carefully. Sprinkle with sugar and keep warm until all are cooked. Serve with additional sour cream.

  NANTUCKET CRANBERRY CUP PUDDINGS

  Mix 1 c. sugar with 2 c. flour sifted with 2 ½ t. baking powder. Stir in ⅔ c. milk, 1 egg, and 3 T. melted butter, then 2 c. cranberries. Fill 12 greased muffin cups, bake 20–25 min. at 350°. Serve hot (or reheated) with old-fashioned pudding sauce: Heat in double boiler ½ c. butter, ¾ c. cream, and 1 c. sugar; add brandy to taste.

  LEW POTTER: MOCHA WALNUT TORTE

  Beat 6 egg whites and ½ t. cream of tartar to soft peaks, gradually beat in ½ c. sugar; set aside. Combine 6 egg yolks, 6 T. strong cold coffee, and 1 t. vanilla. Gradually add sifted dry ingredients: 1 ½ c. flour, ½ t. salt, 1 t. baking powder, and 1 c. sugar. Beat well. Gently fold into beaten whites, along with 1 c. broken walnuts. Spoon into ungreased 10” tube pan, bake 40–45 min. at 375°. Invert until cool, remove from pan. Slice in thirds crosswise, fill and frost with 2 c. cream, whipped, flavored to taste with chocolate syrup.

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1985 by Virginia Rich

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-57491-6

  April 1986

  v3.0

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30
>
  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Copyright