The Nantucket Diet Murders (11 page)

“Nice,” was Mrs. Potter’s comment. “I like that—it must have been fun.”

“It helped,” Dee admitted. “Still, even when I got the job at the magazine, and the top job five years later, I was still pretending to be a lot more assured than I felt You can put together this part of the story pretty fast. Ambitious young foreign aristocrat on the make. Ambitious young editor just as much so. Dee St. Germain becomes Countess Ferencz, which gives her a real title and a feeling that she’s at last part of the international high society her magazine is written for.”

She went on. “Tony Ferencz is launched as a sensational, successful, world-famous authority on health and beauty. Society women are falling all over themselves to become his first American clients.”

On the floor beside Dee’s chair, on a spread newspaper, were two pairs of shoes, a tin of clear shoe wax, and a polishing cloth. She touched a shoe tentatively, found it dry, picked it up, and began to rub it briskly. Mrs. Potter knew instinctively that the plain dark leather pumps and the English walking shoes, clearly not new, were intended to remain in service for more years to come.

Dee continued as she polished each shoe in turn. “Sorry about the background soap opera,” she said lightly. “I’ve
never told anyone this before, except to say Tony and I were once married. The story I started to tell you was about the three beautiful people on Long Island—the; young lawyer and his wife and their darling, but ever so slightly chubby, daughter Marthé.”

Mrs. Potter found herself continuing the story. “Fashionable new young foreign authority attracts the attention of the young wife, along with her friends,” she told Dee slowly. “Daughter persuades herself that, as her mother and her mother’s friends say, ‘you can’t be too rich or too thin.’ Am I right?”

“To put the most generous possible interpretation on it, Tony didn’t know as much about diet then as he may know now,” Dee said. “Maybe he wasn’t aware of the fact that the child was actually ill—anorexia nervosa, of course. No matter how thin they get to be, young girls especially, they’re convinced they’re still overweight, even when they’re down to matchsticks.”

“Tony did that to Ozzie deBevereaux’s daughter?” Mrs. Potter asked somberly.

“He
should
have known. Whether in stupid ignorance he killed her with a terrible diet, or whether he neglected proper treatment once she was really ill, I don’t know. I don’t imagine the distinction was important to Ozzie and Bunny once Marthé had passed the point of no return.”

Mrs. Potter recalled Gussie’s earlier words. Ozzie’s wife and daughter had both died years ago.

Dee forestalled her question. “Bunny died of heartbreak, I think. She always felt it was her fault, just as I’ve always known it was partly mine, for having launched Tony in his career.”

“And Ozzie—how did he feel?” Mrs. Potter asked. “About blame, that
is?”

“There’s no doubt about
that
part of the story,” Dee said flatly. “In Ozzie’s mind, Tony Ferencz was a murderer. First of his child, indirectly of his wife. It’s just lucky for Tony that poor Ozzie is dead. Anyway—so now you know the story. It’s
just one of the reasons I say everybody is going to be sorry Tony ever came here.

“Now let me scrub my hands,” she said, “and put away these shoes. I’ll show you the kitchen and the rest of the apartment.”

In Dee’s small, rather bare kitchen Mrs. Potter saw the trademark dark brown felt hat on a newspaper, its brim covered with yellow granules. “Cleaning it with cornmeal, the way my mother taught me,” Dee explained. “I’ll have to brush it now, if you’ll forgive me for going on with my various jobs. I do have to meet my clients soon. They’re staying at the Jared Coffin and they’ve asked me to lunch there before we start looking at property.”

Mrs. Potter made the expected quick tour of the rest of the apartment—two small bedrooms and a new and quite elegant bathroom. “It all looks exactly like Mittie,” she remarked as she prepared to leave. “All her favorite colors, even to the bright pink of the towels and the pink-and-green-flowered shower curtain.”

As she left hastily, to allow Dee time to make her appointment, she remembered that she had referred to yet another and perhaps even more disturbing story about her former husband. For now, there was no more time and she had enough to think about. If Ozzie and his secretary had died because of their knowledge of this past, unhappy secret—a preposterous thought—it was clear that Tony would be the prime suspect. Gussie was not going to like this at all.

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.

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,” she 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.