The Nantucket Diet Murders (26 page)

“What happened when you came ashore on the beach?” Mrs. Potter asked. Now she must concentrate on the information she had come for.

“The boat just coasted right up on the sand,” Mary Lynne concluded her story, “and I started screaming for help. And you won’t believe it, but Tony Ferencz was the first one out of
the hotel, and everyone said how providential that was, with his medical knowledge, so that if anything
could
have been done for Bo, there wouldn’t have been any delay. But of course he was already gone. I’m sure he died instantly.”

“He was dead, then, by the time you came ashore,” Mrs. Potter repeated sadly. “You know how sorry we all were, Mary Lynne. I’ve written you several times and I want to say it again now. But until today I hadn’t really been able to imagine what a terrible ordeal you’d gone through.”

Mary Lynne’s voice took on a touch of indignation. “Ozzie deBevereaux was there, too. He and that secretary of his came rushing down from the veranda, and he was worse than no help at all. He just kept hopping up and down and saying, ‘Get that man away from him!’ and ‘Call a doctor, Edie!’ and trying to push in beside Tony. As if
he
knew anything about it!

“The comforting part about that,” she continued, “was that somebody told Peter later on that Ozzie had been yelling at Tony, practically accusing him of not knowing what to do for Bo, and Peter was wonderful. He told everybody he didn’t know what Ozzie must have been thinking of.”

The old clock ticking on the mantel showed three forty-five. “Gussie’s expecting me,” Mrs. Potter said reluctantly. “She’s a stickler for exercise time. I hope you enjoy the Portuguese bread, but give it away if it’s any threat to that diet of yours. You really look beautiful at that weight, and you’re a great advertisement for Tony, just as Gussie is.”

Mary Lynne sounded uncertain. “I’ve been hoping Tony’s program and treatments could help a lot more people in the future,” she said as Mrs. Potter reached the door. “I thought it would be simply marvelous if we all could help him set up a world-famous center for beauty and rejuvenation here on the island. He plans to call it ‘Daffodil House’! Isn’t that perfect?”

Mary Lynne’s brush of cheeks, saying good-bye, was scented with chocolate and peanuts, and Mrs. Potter left wondering whether it might have been the awareness of trust limitations on spending, the cancellation of the four
o’clock appointment, or a combination of both, that had been the reason she had gone off her diet.

One more brief encounter, this by chance, was to provide speculation for even more yellow-pad notes later on. As Mrs. Potter hurried across her shortcut path to the church parking lot and came out on Fair Street, she found Leah leaving the church.

“I wish we could chat a minute,” Mrs. Potter said, “but I’ve got to get home. May I stop in for a cup of tea someday soon? I’d love to have a visit, just the two of us.”

Leah seemed flushed and in some way embarrassed.

“I don’t mean to be a nuisance,” Mrs. Potter said easily. “Just give me a ring some day.”

Leah was quick to insist her eagerness for just such a chat, but she still seemed ill at ease. In what seemed an irrepressible burst of confidence, she explained that she, too, was in a hurry.

“Tony’s expecting me at the Scrim at four,” she said. “He just called and said he had found himself free, and that he’s going to begin a new series of treatments for me. Don’t you say a word about this to Gussie or anybody, will you? He’d be furious if he knew I even mentioned it.”

Leah’s retreating back as she hurried down the street looked very young. She was wearing leather boots to the knee, and above these her pleated wool skirt swung as jauntily as a teen-ager’s below her dark reefer.

She looks and sounds like a woman on her way to a lovers’ tryst instead of an appointment with a diet doctor, Mrs. Potter found herself thinking. Leah—the world’s greatest widow? Leah, with new green sparkle in her eyes and a swing in her step?

Since she was thinking of him, it came as only a small surprise to have Gussie speaking of Tony when she returned to the house.

“I asked him to join us for dinner, just the three of us,” Gussie was saying. “You know I’m dying to have you two know each other better, and I certainly don’t want you to go on believing bad things about him just because of a dubious
story about Ozzie deBevereaux’s daughter all those years ago.”

“What time is he coming?” Mrs. Potter asked, tired after her afternoon rounds, thinking that if she was going to exercise a half hour every day, she’d rather do it in the morning than at four in the afternoon, and wondering if she really wanted to see Tony Ferencz this evening.

“Oh, he’s
not,”
Gussie said, with obvious disappointment. “I said I
asked
him. But he’s tied up with a business appointment this afternoon at four and he felt it might go on into the evening, so we made it for tomorrow night instead.”

“That’s fine,” Mrs. Potter said, with what: she hoped was not obvious relief. “You and I were up too late last night worrying about Beth. Let’s make this Health Night, shall we, and go to bed early? I challenge you to one game of cribbage after dinner. Loser runs the dishwasher and turns off the lights.”

She knew she couldn’t wait to get back to those yellow pages, and there was nothing in today’s notes that she could possibly share with Gussie.

One of these, she knew, would have to do with Tony’s possibly prolonged business appointment. She now knew that he was, in various ways, playing the field, although Helen and Gussie appeared to hold top priority. This made him seem less and less a suitable candidate for Gussie’s fourth husband.

Another note, even more serious, would be how she could make sure Tony had not withheld lifesaving emergency treatment from Bo, even though Peter, who must have known Ozzie very well, had assured everyone that Ozzie’s apparent suspicions were not to be taken seriously.

She wanted to write down Walter’s doom-filled reason for leaving and Elna’s parting admonition about liquor, with an added note of how little Helen knew about her daughter.

She wanted to ponder whether anyone would murder a
trust officer for refusal to let her give away property that represented her only security.

It seemed a lot to think about until she reminded herself of Beth.

At breakfast the next morning—fresh juice of celery and carrot, with the usual handful of parsley added, and today for a special fillip, raw turnip, its small crest of top leaves included—Gussie returned to the subject of Beth’s sudden deep depression and alarmingly erratic behavior.

“I’m going to call Paula and Laurence as soon as I think they’ll be up,” she said. “Certainly seven thirty can’t be too early. They have young children and Laurence is a hardworking lawyer. He probably gets to his office by nine.”

The report was brief. Beth was still resting quietly at the hospital and the doctor preferred that she not have visitors for a few more days. Whether that sounded bad or good, it was hard to tell.

Listening, Mrs. Potter sipped a second cup of breakfast tea, which she found restorative while her system absorbed the calcium Gussie assured her the turnip juice was pouring into her teeth and bones.

“I think we should go to the science library this afternoon and check Beth’s notes on poisonous plants,” Gussie said, Beth still on her mind.

“There are probably a lot of others,” Mrs. Potter prophesied soberly.

Earlier she had reexamined the crumpled pages of Beth’s notes. “These look pretty detailed and complete once you get them all laid out,” she said. “Still, you’re probably right about more research. If it suits your morning plans, I think I’ll go out for a bit now.” She headed for the back hall coatrack. “Be back to go to the library with you later. I’ll have lunch out before then and give you a rest.”

“Fine,” Gussie called back cheerfully from the library. “Ozzie’s nephew is on the island to distribute his clients’ files, and he’s coming with mine at eleven. Meantime I’ll organize things for dinner when Tony comes tonight. Don’t forget your diet, and I expect a full report on everything you eat and drink. Shall we count on doing the library about two thirty?”

Arnold Sallanger first, Mrs. Potter decided as she started out into the January sunshine, only slightly muted by a fine white film overhead between island and sky. He used to have morning office hours after his hospital rounds. If Jenny Spicer is still his office nurse and receptionist, maybe she’ll squeeze me in for a quick few minutes with him, just to say hello.

A very pregnant young woman was coming out of the small neat brick building, whose doorway plaque was engraved in script with the name
A. R. Sallanger, M.D
.

“Mrs. Potter!”
Jenny greeted her with affectionate surprise as she entered the small waiting room. Jenny’s hug and kiss were warming, and Mrs. Potter thought how much this happy, energetic little woman, no longer young, contributed to Arnold Sallanger’s practice of medicine. Maybe some people only need that hug and kiss to feel better, she thought, and maybe Arnold is the one doctor in the world with enough humor and humility to admit the possibility.

“Doctor’s still at the hospital,” Jenny told her. “Seems to be baby season. I’m trying to persuade him to bring in a partner, a young OB. This day-and-night stuff is too much at his age. Not that he’s
old,”
she amended hastily, “any more than I
am. But all these new young Navy wives on the island are keeping him busier than one man ought to be.”

“He’d have enough to do just looking after all his old patients, I’d imagine,” Mrs. Potter said. “Although the ranks are getting thinner, like losing Ozzie deBevereaux last week. Ab Leland and Fan Carpenter died before I left, but there was Gordon Van Vleeck last fall. Not to mention Bo Heidecker last August. He was a patient too, wasn’t he?”

The waiting room was unoccupied and Jenny moved about as she spoke, rotating the bowl of flowering narcissus on her desk against the sun, plucking off a dead leaf or two from the plants on the front windowsill, reaching up with a practiced finger to test the moisture of the hanging pot of Swedish ivy.

“That was a hard one for Mrs. Heidecker,” she remarked. “I suppose you know the story of how he died out in the sailboat.”

Mrs. Potter nodded. “Awful for her,” she agreed, “particularly if his heart attack was as unexpected as Mr. deBevereaux’s. Or had he had warnings?”

“Oh, he’d been a patient of Doctor’s for quite a time for it,” Jenny said, debating whether to snap off a flowering red geranium head, still colorful but beginning to shed a few petals, like great drops of blood, on the waiting room carpet. She snapped it. “The reason he retired when he did was a first heart attack back in Tennessee—I thought you’d have known. None of my business to mention it, but I still think if he hadn’t taken up smoking again, and hadn’t put on so much weight, he might never have had that second one out in the boat.”

Jenny had provided part of the information Mrs. Potter was seeking. Bo’s fatal heart attack was not unexpected. Her brief, unhappy suspicions on that score seemed groundless. “I suppose he died instantly, then,” she said, “the way most people say they want to go, doing something they really love, as he loved sailing.”

“Nobody knows if it was
instant
, “Jenny said, striving for professional accuracy. “Doctor thought so. That new Count Tony, whatever his name is, administered CPR, so they said,
but it was apparently way too late. The funny thing was that Mr. deBevereaux asked me that same thing, the next day, and so did Peter Benson, the man who owns the Scrimshaw. All I could tell them was that a half hour later, when they got him in town to the hospital, the general agreement was he’d been dead maybe an hour.”

So both Ozzie and Peter had been suspicious of Tony, just as she, instinctively, had been when she found out he’d been the first one to reach Bo’s body in the sailboat. It was a relief to find that the three of them had been wrong about this, chiefly because Mary Lynne need not face the added sorrow of thinking something might have been done to save his life.

After a few exchanged inquiries about each other’s families, Mrs. Potter left, saying she’d try to schedule a checkup for herself while she was on the island. I think I’ll lose a few more pounds before I do, she decided. I don’t want Jenny Spicer, much as I love her, looking up old records until I’m sure the scale won’t show any added pounds since my last visit.

She walked briskly, rehearsing notes for the yellow pad when she got home. A quick stop to see Larry, the hairdresser, had to be next on her list. Disliking herself for the subterfuge, she would use the pretext of consulting him about having her hair cut.

Fortunately the only customer in the small shop was an elderly woman Mrs. Potter knew to be deaf, asleep under the dryer. Predictably, Larry recommended a new hairstyle. Mrs. Potter studied the illustrations he showed her in a glossy trade publication, and actually looked with some interest as Larry unpinned her hair, tousled and lifted it, showed her—almost convincingly—that she could look younger and better if he took her in charge.

“I’ll have to think about it a little longer,” she told him. “All my friends look so much better these days. I’m sure you deserve a lot of the credit, but of course it all seems to have begun when Count Ferencz came to the island.”

Larry apparently had no reservations about Tony. “The man is great,” he said. “All my rich widows—excuse me, all
my best clients—look better. Better hair, better figures. I think he gives them vitamin shots.”

He brushed Mrs. Potter’s hair into an approximation of cotton candy of a flavor she could not define. An anemic taffy, she decided. “All my regulars are eating out of his hand,” he went on. “Even the Latham girl, not that she ever comes here to the shop, seems to be gone on him, the way I saw her looking at him on Main Street the other day. Not that he’d bother with
her.”

Mrs. Potter was torn between the wish to learn more from Larry and the embarrassed realization that she had stooped to exchanging gossip with her friends’ hairdresser.