The Nantucket Diet Murders

THE COOKING SCHOOL MURDERS
THE BAKED BEAN SUPPER MURDERS

Books by Nancy Pickard based on
the characters and story created
by Virginia Rich

THE 27-INGREDIENT CHILI CON CARNE MURDERS

THE BLUE CORN MURDERS

THE SECRET INGREDIENT MURDERS

The island, the town, and some of the houses are real. The Scrimshaw Inn and the characters are real only to the author. The recipes on the book’s last page and inside back cover are deliriously real.

Oscar deBevereaux painfully eased his sagging flesh, his aching bones, into the high old-fashioned tub.

“Hell of a way to end the day,” he said to himself, thinking of long-ago late afternoon parties on Long Island, when Bunny had been alive, of tea dancing at the Plaza in even earlier happy days.

Then, as he knew they would, came memories even more painful than the torment of his arthritic hips and knees. He thought, as he knew he would, of Marthé, his plump and beautiful little Marthé, riding her fat pony in late afternoon Long Island sunshine. Then, of an older Marthé playing tennis with laughing, long-legged boys on the tennis courts in the lower garden, of a white-aproned maid carrying great trays of milk and lemonade and sandwiches and cakes to hungry young friends, their golden arms and legs glowing in the light.

He thought of his daughter, as round and sleek as a young seal, making her neat trim dives into the pool beyond the house. He saw her joining her schoolmates in field hockey.
“Yea, Martie!”
he heard girls in school uniforms cheering from the sidelines.

Again he could hear her say, at first cheerfully, and then in later times plaintively, “But I’m just too
revoltingly
fat!”

He and Bunny had remonstrated, he remembered, and he could still see Marthé’s firmly set, square little jaw. She was still saying the same words when her emaciated body had to be carried upstairs for the last time to her girlhood room in the big Long Island house.
“Too revoltingly fat.”

How light the burden of that coffin must have been, Oscar deBevereaux thought again, as it carried the wraith, the caricature, of that once beautiful, sturdy little body.

The sorrow was as new as it had been that day, and so was the rage that had been its companion for all these years. Soon, he told himself grimly, he would be able to act. At long last he was now building a case, in the eyes of the law he served and respected, that would begin to avenge his daughter’s death, although a case that involved another child and a tragedy of a different kind.

He groaned, perhaps from the slight relief of the hot water as he soaked his aching joints. Was that someone at the kitchen door downstairs? He heard a woman’s voice, the words unintelligible, then the door’s closing. Never mind, he told himself, he could never have got there in time anyway, and what deuced difference could it make? People were always coming in and out his back door, and one reason it was left unlocked was so he wouldn’t have to disturb himself coming up and down stairs. His bath, his bedroom, his comfortable living room, were on the second floor of his Nantucket house, a remodeled small barn in the center of town. The kitchen, a small guest room and bath, and the large dining room that doubled as a downstairs sitting room were on the first.

Half dozing now in the cooling water, he roused at the thought that for a second time the kitchen door downstairs had been opened and closed, but this time he heard no call of greeting.

Maybe it was Edie, with something from the office. He’d given her the afternoon off for some kind of softball girls’ do at the Scrimshaw. She’d told him it was her birthday; it
seemed only three months since her last one, he thought irritably. Anyway, he’d see her in the morning, whenever he managed to get down. Today, with no secretary in the office, he had taken the afternoon off himself, had removed the phone from the hook and settled down with a book in front of the upstairs fireplace.

About to turn on a fresh stream of hot water, he reconsidered. Slowly he hoisted his now waterlogged and wrinkled body out of the high, claw-footed tub. Awkwardly he toweled his softened skin and eased his arms and shoulders into a gray flannel bathrobe. He’d go down to the kitchen and make himself a cup of tea, at least, even if he didn’t feel much like dinner. Maybe, if it was there, he’d even try some of that comfort-comfrey stuff, whatever it was called, that Beth Higginson had said she’d leave for him, see if
that
would help this damned arthritis.

A tin canister on the kitchen table next to the back door was neatly labeled
Comfrey Tea
in Beth’s familiar hand. The wilted clumps of half-green leaves it contained looked unpromising, but he told himself Beth was the authority on herbs, not he. He boiled water in a saucepan, added a small handful, and let it simmer for a minute or two, a procedure that seemed vaguely suitable for extracting its virtues, if any.

The resulting pale liquid seemed too anemic in color and aroma to suggest it would be an effective remedy for anything at all. He decided to let it simmer a little longer while he looked for a possible message from a second caller. Finding none, he decided he had only imagined the second opening and closing of the kitchen door.

When he thought the tea must be sufficiently brewed (it was no darker and no more aromatic now), he filled his big tea mug. Then, neat as always in his bachelor kitchen, he rinsed the sodden leaves into the garbage disposer in the sink. As they flushed away, he rinsed and dried and put away the saucepan.

With mug in hand, he made his way back upstairs to his big chair in front of the fire. It was only good manners to try the stuff, and its taste was not too disagreeably grassy. After all,
an old friend had gone to the trouble of bringing it to him. He’d drink it now before it got cold, then call to thank her in the morning. Tell her he felt better, whether he did or not.

The grip of sudden pain in his chest, when it came, made him forget his aching bones, even the sharper hurt of old memories. His head was splitting, and so, in a great revulsion of nausea, were his stomach and bowels, a red flood of pain engulfing him in continually increasing rhythm.

Through glazed eyes, Oscar deBevereaux saw the curl of surf on his own beach on the Long Island shore, each crest flaming in the sun, a red ebb and flow commanding his entire attention. Finally there was no pain, but the ebb and flow of each crested wave continued, now blue in the fading light. Then, at the last, there were only soft murmurs of gray water and white spindrift along the sand.

“You’re all so gorgeously
thin!”

These, Mrs. Potter’s first words of greeting to a reunion of old friends, were spoken only minutes after her return to the island of Nantucket and less than nine hours before Oscar deBevereaux’s death. It was to be nearly twenty hours before she would learn this sad news of yet another old friend of her many years on the island, and perhaps twenty-one before she began to feel uneasy about the cause of his death.

This day, a Wednesday, at noon, her smile embraced all of the seven women gathered at the round luncheon table. At that early hour theirs was the only party in a room that in summer would have been crowded with tables and the murmur of well-bred voices. Today the pine-paneled room was quiet, warm and welcoming, filled with good smells, with growing plants, with masses of pink poinsettias left from the holidays just past. The bay window enclosing the round table was bright with moving patches of January sunlight. A small fire sputtered gently in the old center fireplace.

“How do you do it?” she asked. “We all went on the same diets, off and on for years, without really changing very much. And now
look
at you!”

Mrs. Potter’s hostess, one of her dearest and oldest friends and the reason for this return visit to the island, was first to answer. “Oh, I haven’t lost much yet,” Gussie told her, with an affectionate squeeze of her arm. “Less than ten pounds. The others started earlier—aren’t they wonderful?”

Gussie’s smile was as bright and engaging as it had been forty years ago. With no pretense of being younger than she and Mrs. Potter both were, her face showing light lines of both laughter and sorrow, Gussie seemed even more radiantly beautiful now than she had been at eighteen.

“Speaking for myself, I weigh exactly what I did when I last saw you, and thirty years before
that,”
Dee said, at Mrs. Potter’s right, with a shrug of her elegant shoulders. “You look pretty marvelous yourself with that Arizona tan. Particularly since your hair is as much gray—let’s say
silver
—as blond now. Nice effect.” The last was spoken with careful and professional approval. “We look good because you’re glad to be back.”

“I’m serious,” Mrs. Potter persisted. “Of course I’m overjoyed to be back with Les Girls, and you always look wonderful, Countess. So does Bethie. You two are unchanged, which is perfect. But the rest of you—what
are
you all doing to yourselves?”

Mrs. Potter’s gaze went around the table. First there was Dee, Countess Ferencz, the youngest and newest member of the group, whom she had proclaimed unchanged. Mrs. Potter did not quite remember when or why Dee had come to the island, but she gradually had become part of the group in the past ten years. Nearly six feet tall, showing more strong bones and white teeth in her face than the others, Dee was wearing her familiar trademark hat: firm, straight-brimmed, dark brown, placed squarely on her head over dark, ungraying hair pulled back into a great braided chignon. Her heavy gold-and-silver earrings, so large they would have overpowered any other face around the table, were the same ones Mrs. Potter remembered. Dee needed no change. She looked like what she was—a former fashion editor, one who had early learned her own style.

Next to Dee was Bethie—Beth Higginson—whose solid plump comfort, an exception to the new and remarkable thinness of the others, had a beauty of its own order. Beth’s pleasant, quizzical brown eyes beamed back at Mrs. Potter from a firm and rosy face, framed in a wreath of nicely cut curly white hair. Her Tyrolean hat was scarlet, with an extravagant cockade of feathers.

“Now don’t look at
me,”
Beth implored. “I’m going to make an appointment with the man next week or the week after that, I promise you all. Only you’ve got to agree I can’t possibly start a diet this minute. I made a dilled fish mousse yesterday, and there’s that to finish. Then I
can’t
throw out the last of the Christmas fruitcake little Mary Bee sent me—she made it herself from Grandmother Higginson’s old recipe. Or was it little Beth Ann Cox who made it? Anyway, before I start any new diet I have to finish up the last few of my holiday burnt sugar almonds—they’re lovely chopped and sprinkled on vanilla ice cream. I remember you used to like them, Genia, and there’s a little box of them waiting for you at Gussie’s.

“Speaking of dieting,” Beth went on, before Mrs. Potter could do more than smile appreciatively in reply, “I have to tell you about a marvelously light cranberry dessert I just remembered. Jim used to love it. You put raw cranberries and some chopped apple and pecans in the blender until they’re sort of a mush, then you fold in some marshmallows and whipped cream. It’s just a froth, really, and so refreshing. You all must try it for your diets as soon as I locate the recipe again.”