The Nantucket Diet Murders (21 page)

Dee and Mittie arrived and the lunch table held only one vacant chair. “We may just as well have our juice before Beth comes,” Helen announced, denying any possibility of opposition. “She won’t want any, anyway.”

The door to the private dining room was closed today, and there were no sounds of merriment. To cover the sudden silence as they all thought of Edie Rosborough’s death, they began talk of choices for a new lawyer to handle their affairs. Mittie wondered if they knew the new young lawyer, Jonathan Silverstein. “After all, he’s Harvard,” she said.

They spoke of the instant and crazy success of the Pied Piper fragrance of the new bakeshop. They spoke of frogs and the comments they’d heard from other
guests
at Gussie’s tea party. Frog lovers, predictably, included only those who liked beer, bourbon (neat), and oysters (raw).

There was unanimous agreement that the excitement of the tea spill and the consequent flurry of mop-up operations had really turned the tide of the party. Mrs. Potter speculated privately on how to stage a minor disaster for any future party at the ranch that had got off to a chilly start.

“Nobody heard what Ted was squealing about,” Leah remarked, “but he must be all right, if he flew off-island to visit his mother yesterday. Let’s hope we see Beth looking more like herself today when she gets here.”

They had almost decided to proceed to the salad bar for their luncheon choices when Beth came into the room. Her face was white and drawn, she was hatless, without a coat, her curly white hair tousled, the purple shadows under her eyes alarming.

Peter, who had taken his place at the miniature herb garden, scissors in hand, rushed to meet her. “Hey, guy, you missed my picnic yesterday,” he told her, one arm around her shoulders in an affectionate, forgiving squeeze.

Beth appeared not to hear him. Pushing aside his embrace, and without glancing at the friends awaiting her arrival, she went to the salad bar. She peered for a long minute at the hydroponic tank and the various herbs growing there, then, even more closely, at the display of color and greenery in the ornamental plants behind and around the salad table.

Without a word she turned, her body sagging, her face gray and expressionless, and walked slowly out of the dining room. As they heard the heavy old front door of the inn close, Mrs. Potter and Gussie rose to their feet.

“We’ll catch her,” Gussie told the others at the table. “Go ahead with lunch. Genia, grab your coat!”

Beth seemed to be walking blindly on the narrow brick sidewalk, almost grazing an old horsehead hitching post,
stumbling, slowing, then rushing on in the direction of her own house.

“Where’s your coat?” Gussie demanded as they caught up with her. “It’s raw in this wind, Bethie. Here, take mine and we’ll all huddle together and get back to the Scrim.”

Mrs. Potter looked carefully at Beth’s face and the unfocused stare in her eyes. “Look, we’ll make a cape of both our coats,
so
, “she said, “with Beth in the middle, and we’ll all go to her house.
Now.”

Samson’s hollow bark greeted them as they opened the door of the house on India Street, and his agitation was frantic as they entered. “Down, Samson,
good dog,”
Mrs. Potter said, hoping to calm him. Then as they saw the disarray confronting them, the two women swung into action.

“Genia, you put Samson on leash and take him out for a minute,” Gussie directed. “After that I expect he may be ready for his dinner.”

The tact of this remark seemed lost on Beth. It was apparent that Samson had not been walked and that he had not been fed.

“I’ll just make us all a cup of tea and a sandwich,” Gussie continued as she gathered up a cold mug, half filled with coffee, a thin milky film congealing on its surface, ignoring the crusty ring it left on the old pine of the table. Quickly she cleared crumpled papers from the chairs and floor. She turned off lamps, opening chintz curtains to let in the winter sunshine.

“Come on, Beth,” she said gently, “come show me what we three can rustle up for lunch. And it’s cold in here. Where’s the thermostat? I’ll turn up the heat.”

Docile but unhelpful, Beth allowed herself to be led to her own kitchen, where the disorder was less apparent, except for long gashes, claw marks, clearly new, on the soft pine of the frame of the back door, showing Samson’s earlier panicked attempts to get out.

“Soup,” Gussie decided after a quick look at the kitchen stores, as Mrs. Potter and Samson returned. “Soup for us, and Samson’s dinner—I found cans for both in the pantry.”

Samson’s voracious hunger was quickly appeased and he settled himself amiably enough on a rug in the corner. Beth took a few listless spoonfuls of hot soup, then appeared to lose interest.

“I mixed cream of tomato and green pea and added a little curry powder,” Gussie said, hoping to tempt her. “Come on now, Beth. See, Genia’s eating hers and it’s
good
. Now a bite of cracker—that’s fine. And a little more soup, while it’s hot.”

Finally able to coax Beth to eat, they were less successful in persuading her to talk. Mrs. Potter put a sympathetic arm around her plump shoulders. “What’s the trouble, Bethie?” she asked again, as they both had done before.

The three sat in silence for several minutes before Beth began to speak. “I’m a murderess,” she told them slowly, her voice low and unemphatic. “I poisoned Ozzie deBevereaux, and before that I poisoned his secretary. And Ted Frobisher thought I was going to poison him and a lot of other people at Gussie’s party, and he knocked over his cup of tea and the teapot to keep me from doing it.”

Gussie’s eyes widened, at first in horror, then in complete disbelief. Beth munched another cracker.

“You couldn’t have murdered
anybody,”
Gussie told her. “Edie Rosborough died of an allergic reaction. Don’t you
remember? And
Ozzie died of a heart attack. Arnold said so.”

As a clinching argument, Gussie assured her that Ted was
fine
. (He had drunk too much at the party, Mrs. Potter added, and said crazy things, but he’d recovered. He’d even flown off-island to visit his mother.) “You didn’t poison anybody, Bethie,” Gussie told her over and over, “you couldn’t have.”

Mrs. Potter again put her arm around Beth’s now shaking shoulders. “Just talk to us about it,” she implored. “We know you’re sad about Ozzie and Edie Rosborough. We all are, but
you
didn’t have anything to do with their dying.” No matter how things look, she told herself.

Beth slowly ate another cracker before she spoke, and her voice was thick and mechanical. “The last proof was at the Scrim today,” she said, “although I knew, of course, what it had to be. You both know what dumb cane is, don’t you?”

“Yes, dieffenbachia,” Gussie replied promptly. “Everybody has a plant or two around, I suppose. It’s a popular house plant, easy to raise.”

“Do you really know why its common name is
dumb cane?”
Beth persisted. “Because that’s what it
does
, that’s why. There are little needles of a crystalline stuff in it, and worse than that, a kind of enzyme in the leaves that causes swelling in the tongue and gullet. And it can
kill
people that way, just as it—just as I—killed that poor girl, Edie. You’ll find my notes about it on the table in the living room.” Her voice was clearer now, and almost matter-of-fact.

Gussie hastily retrieved the crumpled papers she had gathered earlier and had crammed into a chintz-covered waste-basket. Smoothing them uncertainly, she found one with the heading
Dieffenbachia
written in Beth’s neat round script.

“
‘D. sequine (Jacq.) Schott,’”
she read. “That’s just a kind of shorthand for the botanical description, Genia. Here’s what Beth wrote down after that. “Poisoning: severe burning in the throat and mouth caused to some extent by numerous needle-like crystals (raphides) of calcium oxalate, but primarily by a protein (enzyme) aspargine.’ And then she wrote down her source—
Human Poisoning from Native and Cultivated Plants
, second edition, James W. Hardin and Jay M. Arena, M.D.”

“I found another one,” Mrs. Potter said. “‘Members of the arum family grown as house plants include pothos, window leaf
(Monstera
sp.), elephant’s ear, caladium and dumbcane. Poisonous properties. Swelling of mouth, tongue and throat may interfere with speech, swallowing and breathing. In severe cases can cause death by choking.’ After that she wrote
‘Plants that Poison
, Ervin M. Schmutz and Lucretia Breasdale Hamilton.’”

Gussie searched through the crumpled papers. Beth halted her. “There’s only one more on that murder,” she said. “Find the one from the book
Deadly Harvest.”

“Here it is, by John M. Kingsbury,” Gussie said. “‘Some think practical jokes with these plants are funny but the truth is that more than one person has lost his life when tissues
about the back of the tongue swelled up and blocked breathing as a result of taking a mouthful.’”

Beth ate another cracker. Samson snored on his rug.

“You think Edie died from eating dumb cane,” Mrs. Potter said slowly, “and you seem to think you were responsible. Then how did it happen, and why?”

“They all came back for second plates of salad,” Beth said dully. “You remember, Peter asked me to cut some of the herbs for a while? He had to go to the kitchen and Count Ferencz had gone away someplace.” She paused, methodically crunching another cracker.

Prompted by Gussie’s
“and then?”
she continued. “One of Peter’s flowering begonias needed pinching back, and it was a variety I wanted a cutting from,” she said slowly. “I don’t think I took one—at least I didn’t have it when I got home. What I did, and you can’t escape the truth of it, no matter how you try . . .”

Mrs. Potter’s arm tightened around Beth’s shoulders, which began again to tremble.

Beth swallowed. When she went on, her voice was again measured and monotonous. “What I did was to cut a leaf of dieffenbachia instead. It’s perfectly clear. I snipped up a green leaf of
dumb cane
over Edie Rosborough’s salad, and she died.”

Before either Gussie or Mrs. Potter could speak, she continued. “I had to look today to be sure,” she said. “And there it was, as plain as day, the place where I cut the leaf from the plant.

“And now I suppose you want to know how I murdered Ozzie?” she asked calmly. “I took him foxglove leaves, thinking they were comfrey. Just see my notes on foxglove there someplace.”

“We’ll read them later,” Mrs. Potter said. “We know foxglove contains digitalis.”

“See Mr. Kingsbury again,” Beth insisted. “He says it’s a poisonous glycoside, that it’s used to strengthen the beat of a weakened heart, but in larger amounts it can be fatal. Especially for someone who isn’t already used to taking a little of it
in regular doses in medicine.” She pointed toward the remaining papers. “Now look for the one from
The Poison Trail
The author’s named William Boos. I’ve got them all memorized.

“So that’s how I killed Ozzie,” she said, rising to her feet and shaking herself free of Mrs. Potter’s arm; “I didn’t know it until Thursday morning when I went over there from your house, Gussie, and after I brought home what I thought were my dried comfrey leaves. As soon as I opened the jar, I saw I hadn’t filled it with comfrey at all. I don’t remember doing it, but I’d taken him foxglove leaves, still half green, as mine are, growing along the side path by the house.

“That’s when I went right to the science library. I vaguely knew foxglove was poisonous, but I didn’t know how it worked or how deadly it could be.”

Gussie and Mrs. Potter were silent as Beth continued. “Once I’d read enough to know I’d poisoned Ozzie, it was only natural to wonder about the girl’s death, too,” she said. “And I told you what a help Lolly was, once she knew what I was looking for.”

Gussie and Mrs. Potter looked at each other. Could Beth Higginson, however unintentionally, have caused
two
poisoning deaths? It was all the more implausible that the two, the same day, should have been caused by the most ordinary, commonplace plants of house and garden.

“There’s got to be another explanation,” Mrs. Potter finally told her. “Besides, you know there’s no way in the world you could or would have poisoned Ted.”

“That part’s the worst,” Beth said, her voice still a monotone. “When I opened my basket for my sweetener pills, Ted and I both saw what I had there. He knew it was cyanide the second he saw it—he’s got an old potting shed, too.”

Mrs. Potter stared at her uncomprehendingly.

“You don’t have one,” Beth explained tiredly. “Lots of people here do. When we bought this house, all the old tools and garden supplies had been left behind, for who knows how many years.”

Mrs. Potter quietly removed the basket of crackers from
the table, even as Beth was reaching, unseeing, for another. In its place she set a glass of milk.

Beth took a sip, then set it aside decisively. “You thought Ted was drunk,” she said, with no show of emotion. “But I saw the bottle, too. It wasn’t any hallucination.”

“Cyanide!” Gussie
was incredulous. “You had
cyanide
here in your house?”

“People used it all the time in the old days,” Beth answered easily. “Prussic acid, that’s what we’re talking about, hydrogen cyanide. An insecticidal fumigant, it says on the label. Ted said he used to have some, too, in that old corner of his basement. You probably have a bottle, too, Gussie, out in the garage or wherever the old garden stuff at your house was left behind when you bought the place.”

For the first time, Beth almost smiled. “How I got my prussic acid—cyanide, Ted called it, same thing—from my house to your tea party is rather a blank to me,” she said sweetly. “But I did, because it was there in my basket.”

She now beamed more confidently. “Ted knew, of course, when
he
saw it. That’s why he upset things and made such a mess. Ted wasn’t going to let me poison any more people.”

“Can you show us the bottle now?” Mrs. Potter asked gently.

“Here it is, in the corner cupboard,” Beth said, now quite cheerful. “Naturally I couldn’t let anyone at the party see it—it would have frightened them.”