The Nantucket Diet Murders (22 page)

She took it down from the shelf. “It was empty, you know, but of course Ted didn’t know that,” she said, in tones of offering a reasonable explanation. “Jim checked it years ago, in case one of the grandchildren found it. He just wanted to keep it as a curiosity. When I got home, I made
sure
it was safe. I scrubbed it inside and out until the label came off.” She smiled. “It’s really quite a pretty old bottle., don’t you think? Don’t be afraid to touch it—it’s clean.”

“Is that the canister up there in the cupboard, too?” Mrs. Potter continued.

Beth lifted it down and set it on the table. “The foxglove leaves went out in the trash,” Beth said, “and I washed it very
carefully, too, so it’s perfectly all right to use again if you need it for anything.”

Mrs. Potter looked at the sparkling blue glass on the table, next to the clean tea canister. “How did you happen to take the old bottle to Gussie’s party, anyway?” she asked in a casual tone.

Beth’s face clouded, and the deep circles under her eyes seemed even darker. “That’s one of three things I can’t remember,” she answered slowly. “One is how I could have happened to cut up dieffenbachia leaves on Edie’s salad. Two is how I took a great wad of half-green foxglove leaves to Ozzie when I meant to fill the canister with dried comfrey. And three is why
ever
would I have put that dusty old bottle in my basket when I got ready for the party. I can’t even remember taking it down from the shelf, although I think I remember seeing it out there in the shed not long ago.”

Beth abruptly sat down on the braided kitchen rug and put her arms around her knees. “Those are the three things I can’t remember, no matter how hard I try. Even when I finally get to sleep at night, I wake up every few minutes trying to
make
myself remember.”

Samson pushed his nose against Beth’s cheek, nudging her for attention, but she pushed him away without appearing to notice. “Anyway, I’ve decided what to do,” she said dully. “I’m going to tell everybody and make a public confession. Don’t you think that would be best?”

Gussie was at the telephone, casting a quick eye down Beth’s list of numbers on the living room desk.

“Mr. Laurence Higginson,” she said. “Please tell him I’m a friend of his mother’s, Augusta Van Vleeck, calling from Nantucket.”

There was a pause. “Yes, Laurence, I
do
understand that it’s the middle of a busy day and you have an important client you’re about to take to lunch—you’d like to call me back later? Forget about later, Laurence. Your mother needs you. Yes, right
now
. Yes, charter, by all means, and hold the plane to go back. Just get here, and Mrs. Potter and I will hold the fort until you come.”

By the time her son arrived, Gussie and Mrs. Potter had persuaded Beth in and out of a warm bath and into suitable travel clothes. They packed a bag for her with a warm woolen robe and slippers, several pairs of bright winter pants and sweaters, underthings, a neatly polished pair of penny loafers, and her toiletries. They had called another number on Beth’s telephone pad and the veterinarian’s assistant from the animal hospital was on his way to collect Samson.

“Glad to keep him, Mrs. Van Vleeck,” he had said. “Mrs. Higginson brings him out often, and Samson’s a doll. Finest kind. Just let us know when she wants him back.”

Beth, now oddly calm and untroubled, left with her son. Reassured by his promise to telephone as soon as the family doctor had been consulted, Gussie and Mrs. Potter gathered up Beth’s crumpled notes, turned the thermostat down to fifty, and went home to Main Street in the: early dusk of the January afternoon.

“We’d better call Helen. She’ll want to be the one to let the others know,” Gussie said as they reached her door.

“Only that Beth
is
ill and going to spend a few days in Providence,” Mrs. Potter added quickly.

The three had already agreed that no one else would learn of Beth’s self-accusations or erratic behavior. Arnold Sallanger had held Edie’s death to be an allergic reaction, which indeed it was. He had declared Ozzie’s death to have been caused by a heart attack, which it was. To hint at intentional use of poisonous plants in the two deaths; could only make things worse for Beth now.

“But suppose Beth is
right?”
Mrs. Potter asked wearily, stretching her legs in the direction of the last embers in the library fireplace. “About
everything?
It’s one last thought, Gussie.”

“What do you mean, suppose Beth is right?” Gussie asked, yawning. “We’ve sat here talking about Beth and worrying about her ever since she and Laurence took off for Providence. It’s almost midnight. We’ve both probably done more square inches of needlepoint tonight than in the last two months, and the one thing we’ve agonized about is that dear, happy, feet-on-the-ground Beth has gone off her rocker. She’s
not
right. She’s about as wrong as anybody could be.”

Mrs. Potter nodded in reluctant partial agreement. “She’s off the tracks,” she said. “She’s been neglecting her dog, forgetting to eat or sleep. She sounds crazy as a hoot owl. She says she’s poisoned two people and that only Ted Frobisher, our favorite island alcoholic, saved her from poisoning him and maybe everybody else at your tea party Saturday. Using an
empty
bottle that
used
to hold cyanide.”

“We’ve been over this too many times,” Gussie said. “Time for bed. Come on, now—I’m not used to these late hours.”

“Neither am I,” replied her guest, “but just you sit down again one more minute. I asked you this—suppose Beth is
right?
Suppose Ozzie and Edie Rosborough both
were
poisoned. While you’re at it, you can even suppose somebody
was
trying to poison somebody else right here in your own dining room Saturday.” She paused. “Or was at least trying to make it look that way.”

“The part about cyanide still seems like pure hysteria,” Gussie said doubtfully.

“Shared hysteria, then,” Mrs. Potter reminded her. “I told you what Ted was screaming. You all couldn’t hear him in the kitchen—even Tony was out there then. I was bringing up the rear and no one else but me heard him, except Victor, and he didn’t get it, of course.”

Gussie yawned again as Mrs. Potter repeated the story of Ted’s accusations. “Well, Beth couldn’t have done a better job of getting rid of the evidence if she’d been as guilty as she says she is,” she said. “We don’t even know for sure if what she took Ozzie was comfrey or foxglove. Same thing with the cyanide. If the bottle was empty, why did she wash it out?”

“What if somebody was trying to make Beth believe she was crazy?” Mrs. Potter asked.

“That’s terrible,” Gussie said. “Why would anyone do that to Beth Higginson?” She sat down again abruptly and stared at the fast-graying embers.

“Let’s turn the whole thing around,” Mrs. Potter said, trying to summon new vigor. “We both know, and we’ve said over and over this evening until we’re both half asleep, that Beth would scarcely swat a fly, let alone kill another human being. Even if an assassin with a drawn dagger came to her door, she’d invite him in for a good lunch and try to reform him with kindness and cookies.” As she spoke, she, too, found that she was yawning and the library was growing chilly.

“If you want to turn it around, we’ll do it in the morning,” Gussie announced. “I’m going to bed.”

When Mrs. Potter awoke, as usual with the first light of day, she found she had carried her needlework in its big crewel-patterned
linen bag with her to the guest room. Reaching out a nightgowned arm, she pulled from it a lined yellow pad.

She pulled the soft coverlet over her shoulders. The ballpoint scribbled, half under the silky down puff, writing the question she had put to Gussie last night before they were both too sleepy to think.
Suppose Beth is right? About everything?

Suppose, first of all, that Edie had not died from an unexpected allergy to one of the herbs at the salad bar but, as Beth insisted, by a chopped leaf of dieffenbachia, dumb cane?

Still possible accident
, she wrote, remembering the press of young women around the salad bar and the banked ornamental plants behind and around it.

Who had scissors?
Officially, only Peter Benson and Tony Ferencz, but actually, Beth and most of the others of their lunch party. None of these, all knowledgeable of plants and herbs, could have been likely to make such a wild and weird mistake.

It was possible that one of the softball league might have been playing a trick on the team captain without realizing its possible serious effect. She decided to reserve judgment on this entry, the question
Practical joke?

She’d go on to Ozzie and come back to his secretary and the dumb cane later.

Ozzie’s heart attack really murder? her
pen inquired next. It could have been, she answered herself. Beth’s notes on digitalis, which she and Gussie had studied in the library last night, made it clear that the drug might have acted in a way not only simulating a heart attack but actually causing one.

Mrs. Potter paused and peered back over her few notes, still trying to keep her arms and shoulders warm in the chill air of the bedroom.

There it was. She was going to believe that Beth was right. Oscar deBevereaux and Edie Rosborough had been poisoned. (Not by Beth, her mind cried, not by
Beth.)
She would believe that there had been a poison bottle in Beth’s basket at the tea party, that both Beth and Ted had seen it, and that Beth believed it had been empty.

And that, for the moment, was
all
she would believe.

She slid out of bed and opened her bedroom door. “Gussie,” she called down the long upstairs hall, “are you up? Yes, please,
get
up! I’m going to the kitchen to put on the kettle for tea and you and I are going to talk about Beth’s story in a whole new light.”

Gussie’s initial reaction was skeptical. “We don’t know
what
to believe,” she said. “Beth just isn’t making sense.”

“I think she is,” Mrs. Potter said. “Look at it this way. Suppose everything Beth told us yesterday is true, except for her being the one to be poisoning people. And while you’re granting that possibility, don’t forget which two people died.”

Gussie was thoughtful. “A man and woman who were trusted with the affairs of nearly everyone on the island. At least of all of
us,”
she said at last. “Two people who might have had highly confidential information someone either wanted to get, or couldn’t afford to have revealed.”

“You might as well squeeze us some kind of breakfast,” Mrs. Potter said as they looked at each other with dismay. “Maybe one of your concoctions will help us figure out what’s behind all of this.”

As Gussie started toward the pantry, Mrs. Potter offered a dark comment. “I’ll bet I could find foxglove leaves in your garden right now, if I went out and started poking around there, or in practically any garden in Nantucket.”

The whirring of the juice extractor kept Gussie from hearing the ring of the telephone, and Mrs. Potter rose to answer it.

“That was Paula, calling from Providence,” she reported as the two women sat again at the breakfast table, glasses of pinkish juice before them. “Paula—Laurence’s wife. I remember her slightly, but I really never got all of the Higginsons straight in my mind, daughters and daughters-in-law.”

“Neither did Beth, sometimes,” Gussie said. “I wish I could laugh about that now.”

The family doctor had come to the house as soon as Laurence got his mother home yesterday, Paula had reported.
He said she was totally exhausted, that she had not been eating or sleeping. The doctor was concerned that she was deeply troubled by something she refused to talk to him (or even to her, Paula) about, and he seemed worried at the depth and suddenness of her apparent depression. He wants her in the hospital for a few days of rest and proper diet and observation, Paula said. She’d let them know as soon as there was anything more to report.

Mrs. Potter found it reassuring that Laurence was not using the words
poison
or
murder
, apparently not even to his wife. Arnold Sallanger had signed two unassailable death warrants. Nothing was going to disturb that official position, and no matter what confessions Beth might offer now, it was vital that they be considered delusions.

’I’d like to talk with Ted,” she said. “Since apparently he did see a poison bottle, I’ve been wronging him in my mind. I thought he was using his perfect party manners, pretending to enjoy the party as a cover-up for spiking his own tea with vodka all afternoon. If he
wasn’t
having a drunken fantasy, he may be able to shed some light on all this. I’ll try to call him at his mother’s, if I can find her number.

“Let’s see—I remember he’s Tedley, not Edward,” she went on. “Tedley Tennant Frobisher, and as I recall he was a Two or a Three, which means his mother may well be a Mrs. of the same name. I’ll try that 555–1212 information number.”

A Frobisher, T. T., Jr. (not Mrs., of course—cautious widows do not thus expose themselves), was listed at what sounded a likely Boston suburban address, and Mrs. Potter dialed the number.

The conversation was no help at all, she told Gussie when she had finished. Very proper Boston voice, elderly, but also very strong. Used to getting her own way, brisk about cutting off questions. Ted
is
there (she had said “my son is unable to speak with you now”) and she wasn’t receptive to taking a message. To further quote her, they’re leaving by plane, at noon for the West Coast and from there on a cruise ship to Hawaii. Her son’s accounts will be handled through the Boston
brokerage firm he represents on the island. And that was that.

“She may be just covering up for him if he’s gone on a bender,” Gussie said. “Anyway, what you wanted to know is certainly nothing you could ask a Boston
grande dame
. ‘Did your son thwart a mass murder at my friend Mrs. Van Vleeck’s tea party here on Nantucket last Saturday?’ Or how about ‘At the very least, Mrs. Frobisher, did he see a bottle of prussic acid, which might or might not have been empty, in the open handbag of the guest who was pouring tea?’”