The Nantucket Diet Murders (12 page)

“That part’s simple enough, then,” Gussie said. “Let’s make a list from here on.”

From her large crewel bag in one of the big chairs in front of the fireplace, the bag she had placed there the previous day with her current needlepoint for possible future moments of stitchery, Mrs. Potter had already brought out a lined yellow pad. “Tea—Earl Grey, do you think? Check milk. Lemons. Cube sugar? How many are we having?”

“Oh, a couple of dozen,” Gussie said. “Maybe thirty. As I said, all of the old crowd, plus Tony, of course, and a few others. I just asked people as I ran into them last week, either new people I thought you’d like, or various old buddies. Actually, I think all of them except Peter Benson assume it’s for cocktails. I mentioned tea to him, because I thought he’d be amused seeing people’s surprise. He looked a little doubtful at first, but then he promised he’d get away from the Scrim to be here, no matter what.”

Gussie continued. “You’ll pour, of course,” she said. “What kind of flowers for the table, do you think? Anything specially good with whatever you’ll be wearing?”

“What about some long-stemmed anemones if we can get them?” Mrs. Potter asked. “Sort of springlike and cheerful for this time of year. And I’ll wear whatever you say. You saw what I brought.”

Gussie voted for a banana-colored wool dress she had helped to unpack, saying that she had something rather like it—simple, but dressed-up enough for anything on the island short of a real dinner party.

Involuntarily, Mrs. Potter sighed. Gussie’s dress, a size—two sizes?—smaller? She finished the last of the wine in her glass hastily, regretting the second glass as she did so, and the extra wedge of cheese, and all those crackers. “Let’s get on with the list,” she said.

No need to get out cookbooks for inspiration, they decided. They began to remember tea parties they’d given in the past,
for various worthy causes, and the tea parties their mothers used to have.

Little sandwiches were an absolute must, they agreed. Very thin, crusts cut off, and no trouble to make with the very thin-sliced firm bread one could buy nowadays. Cucumber, naturally, and maybe tomato. “If we do tomato ones, we’ll give them a good sprinkle of basil,” Mrs. Potter suggested, “the way Peter did for my salad yesterday. Beth will have some dried from her garden, if you don’t.”

“How about watercress?” Gussie asked. “We can get that perfect cress right here on the island, and we’ll make little rolled sandwiches with a nice sprig sticking out both ends.”

Mrs. Potter was writing. “Butter—remember to soften. Mayonnaise, bread, watercress, cucumbers, tomatoes. Basil—Beth?” She laid down her pen. “What about using that great recipe of yours for a parsley dip as a sandwich filling?” she asked. “As a matter of fact, why not
have
some cocktail party food? How about those great little hot cheese things of yours? I know Teresa doesn’t cook, for you, that is, but she can certainly get those in and out of the oven if we have them chilled and ready. And what about that stuff you do with chopped ripe olives and garlic?”

The list progressed to possible sweets. More sandwiches, they finally agreed, little open-faced half slices, lightly buttered, using Gussie’s recipe for cranberry cheese bread for one kind. For a second, Mrs. Potter suggested her great-grandmother’s orange bread, claiming she knew the recipe by heart, having made it for so many years.

“Write it down for me, will you?” Gussie asked, proffering a file card. “Seems to me you once said it had no shortening in it. Maybe some of the dieters will be glad to know.”

Mrs. Potter wrote quickly, using abbreviations.
Peel of 2 oranges, cut in fine slivers. Cover with water, add ½ c. sugar, simmer till tender. Remove peel, cook liquid down to about ⅓ c. In mixing bowl comb, another ½ c. sugar, 2 c. flour, 3t. baking powder, ½ t. salt. Add milk to orange syrup to make ⅔ c. and mix with 1 egg. Stir all tog. with orange peel. Greased loaf pan, 350, 45 min
.

“There!” she exclaimed, looking up. “That’s clear enough. Grandmother Andrews would be proud of me. It was her mother’s recipe, and one of the first things she taught me to make. We’d better bake it and your cranberry cheese bread on Friday, don’t you think? They’ll slice better the next day.”

It was too soon after the holidays, they told each other, to even
think
about cookies. Gussie had one big leftover gift fruitcake she hadn’t unwrapped. They’d have a plate of that, sliced very thin, just to make more of a show on the sweet side, and if it wasn’t eaten, Gussie would send the whole thing home with Teresa, which is what she probably should have done with it in the first place. And there was the yet unopened box of burnt sugar almonds Beth had brought to welcome Mrs. Potter.

“Let’s call her back and see how she is,” Mrs. Potter suggested. There was no answer, although she let the phone ring a few extra times.

The yellow pad list seemed complete. Then, “just for
pretty
, “Mrs. Potter suggested that she might pick up a box of old-fashioned pastel bonbons when they went shopping later. “The little paper cups will look as if we’d gone to the proper amount of trouble,” she said. She added this entry to her list, and then began to laugh.

“I was just remembering bridesmaids’ dresses, and how absolutely sappy we looked in them. Tulle or chiffon or net of some kind, or even worse, taffeta, all in sweet bonbon colors. . ..”

Gussie protested. “I thought you looked very nice in that pale green with the matching horsehair picture hat as my maid of honor,” she said. “Although I suppose it
was
all pretty saccharine, with ten bridesmaids in matching shell pink. How many of those dresses do you suppose we all bought—in colors we called ‘peach’ and ‘seafoam’ and ‘aqua’ and ‘orchid’—before we got each other all married off?”

“And never wore again, although our mothers always expected us to,” Mrs. Potter added. “All those bertha collars and little ruffled sleeve caps . . .”

“All those dyed-to-match satin pumps,” Gussie reminded
her, “and how expensive we thought they were, at six dollars a pair including the dye-to-match. I seem to remember sometimes the bride’s mother shelled out for those as well as buying the hats.”

“What I seem to recall is that we were all a little bit fatter than girls are now,” Mrs. Potter said. “Not
really
fat, but I think we’d look that way if our pictures were compared with a modern wedding party.”

“What I seem to remember are
ushers,”
Gussie said dreamily. “Do you remember that absolutely wonderful man—from Dartmouth, I think he was? At Barbara’s wedding in Montpelier?”

Mrs. Potter failed to remember that particular wonderful man from Dartmouth, and continued to think how unutterably dowdy she must have looked in seafoam green with a matching horsehair picture hat. She resolved not to stuff herself on tomorrow’s cucumber sandwiches.

Gussie interrupted these mildly uncomfortable thoughts. “What time is it?” she shrieked. “Genia, don’t bother with those lunch dishes, don’t put your hair up again, or
anything
. Just jam on your hat—we’ve got to be
going! Teresa?
Remember you promised me Saturday, too, this week? Genia, let’s
go!
You’ll miss the surprise!”

“I can’t remember—do I kiss you?”

The speaker, slight, fair-haired, his smile eternally boyish in an unlined face, greeted Mrs. Potter with vague cordiality as she and Gussie started down Main Street.

Mrs. Potter decided to give the question the deliberate consideration the speaker had not, perhaps, intended. “I don’t remember either, George,” she said at last. “Shall we just shake hands and decide what to do about it later?”

George’s best clerical chuckle covered any possible lapse of memory. “Okay, I think you always used to, George,” she told him forgivingly, “and I just now realized you’ve had to face that problem before. All those trustees’ wives and students’ mothers at your school, and before that all those women parishioners. It would have been dreadful to be kissing when you shouldn’t and maybe even worse not kissing when you should. Yes, you kiss
me
, but just on one side.”

“Turn around and walk back down Main Street with us, George,” Gussie urged, with a tug at his elbow. “You can share the big surprise with Genia.
Come on
, shake a leg!”

Between the two women, each as tall as he, George Ender-bridge seemed fragile and weightless, as smooth and dry as a
leaf clinging to a winter branch. Gussie had taken for granted his willingness to join them, but with a surprising show of firmness he kept them from sweeping him along with them.

“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.