The Nantucket Diet Murders (8 page)

“Don’t
do
that!” Mrs. Potter begged her. “I can’t bear the comparison!”

“If you’re serious,” Gussie said, “you may decide to join the club. You know I don’t mean it’s really a
club
. It’s just that all of us—except Bethie and Dee—are totally committed to Tony Ferencz. His program is different for each of us—we all know that, and he’s asked us not to discuss it with each other. All I can tell you is that all of us who are his regulars think that he’s wonderful.”

“I saw the change in all the others the minute we were together at lunch yesterday,” Mrs. Potter told her. “I just hadn’t realized how fat I look next to you! Frankly, it’s rather a shock.”

“Let me ask Tony what he thinks about taking on a new client,” Gussie said doubtfully. “I think he really wants to stay with just the small group of us for individual counseling. He says he only wants people who are permanently on the island for now, although of course that will change once he establishes his foundation. And even that is confidential, so will you please forget I mentioned it? He’s a wonderful man, but some things make him very angry, like discussing his plans, even anything about his methods, with outsiders.”

Feeling fat, taken aback at the realization that she was now an outsider, at least to Tony Ferencz, in a place she had known and loved and been a part of for so long, Mrs. Potter flattened her stomach muscles, tucked under her behind, and followed Gussie’s slim figure down the stairs.

Even as she wondered what Tony and his diet and his confidential methods could do for
her
, Mrs. Potter’s thoughts veered sharply to the two deaths of the previous day. It seemed too much a coincidence that a secretary should die of an allergic seizure at a Wednesday lunch party and that her employer, Mrs. Potter’s old friend, should die that same evening.

Nonsense, she told herself briskly. Ozzie was older than the rest of us, and in poor health. It was possible that news of
Edie’s death had precipitated his fatal heart attack or whatever it was. The whole thing was simply chance—sad chance, for both of them.

However, the breakfast conversation had pointed out an uncomfortable fact. The two of them, Ozzie and his secretary, were equally privy to the affairs of all of her friends, it seemed, and probably to those of dozens of others of the island’s winter population as well,

So it was, that perhaps twelve hours after Oscar deBevereaux’s death, and less than an hour after she had learned of it, Mrs. Potter began to feel vaguely troubled.

Scarved, wool-capped, and storm-coated, the two women separated moments later to descend to the street by the twin stairs flanking Gussie’s front door. Each brushed the snow from the round brass finial on her side of the stairway, and they smiled at each other in the sunshine.

Yesterday’s uncertain January patchiness had become a new world of clear blue and white. The red brick of the great houses across the street, one of them Helen Latham’s, showed sharp and clean against the white of small gardens; the heavy wood frame above each window held a ledge of soft white snow; snow-capped iron railings were cleanly defined.

“If we don’t hurry, it will all melt before we get there to see the trees,” Gussie urged as Mrs. Potter stood looking, unwilling to move. “Come
on!”

“It’s just that this place is
so
beautiful,” Mrs. Potter said. “You forget, being away, just how perfect it all is, and how
real.”

“It’s real,” Gussie said. “It never changed and it never had to be rebuilt, the way they did when they restored Williamsburg.”

“Poor old Nantucketers,” Mrs. Potter said. “The bottom dropped out of the whale oil market when somebody drilled an oil well out in Pennsylvania. They couldn’t afford to modernize.” She thought of what those modernizations would have been—fake English timbering and fancy shingle patterns—and how blessedly the island had been spared.

Suddenly she clutched her hostess’s arm. “Gussie,” she said quietly, “even if you’ve gone down this street a thousand times, you’ve never seen it like this.”

From Orange Street to their right, the clock on the South Tower struck nine. A few tracks of early cars and trucks had left their marks in the snow on the wide cobblestone street leading down to a glimpse of the harbor, sparkling in the sunshine at the bottom of the hill. A few foot tracks showed on the broad sidewalks, but for the moment not a car was parked on the quiet, snowy street, not another person was in sight.

For the moment, the world between the big red-brick bank at the head of the street, and the smaller, older red brick of the Pacific Club at the foot was entirely their own, in unbelievable contrast to Mrs. Potter’s summertime memories, when it was thronged with well-dressed strollers and shoppers, with people in shorts walking their bicycles on the sidewalk, with clusters of eager buyers circling bright flower stands or choosing fresh-picked local vegetables from the backs of parked trucks. Now tall Christmas trees marked the front of these two landmark buildings. Along each side of the street were a dozen or more smaller trees. Each of them, large or small, had this morning been returned to its forest beginnings by the magic of the snow.

“The lights and trimmings were taken down yesterday,” Gussie said softly. “All of the holiday glitter is gone. It’s just snow and trees.”

As she spoke, a green town truck entered at the foot of the street and parked at the central corner, in front of what Mrs. Potter always called “the paper store.” Two men in heavy jackets and dark, billed caps climbed out of the cab, lit cigarettes, and looked around slowly.

“We just made it in time,” Gussie said. “They’ve come to take down the trees. Let’s walk on down to Straight Wharf on our side of the street and pretend they aren’t there.”

The two walked slowly down the hill toward the harbor, scarcely glancing at the old brick storefronts and shopwindows—shops that had been filled with tanned and affluent summer customers the last time Mrs. Potter had seen them. Their displays of books and gifts and antiques and confections and beautiful textiles could wait. For her now, there was only the quiet and the snow and the reborn trees.

Mrs. Potter broke the silence as they passed the friendly old red bricks of the Pacific Club, discreetly peering in to see if any early morning cribbage players were already at their small tables in the back room. “Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, “that it could have been the Nantucket Tea Party in the history books? Those three ships carrying the tea from England might have come in to Nantucket instead of Boston Harbor. They were owned here, remember? And by the same company that used to have headquarters in this building. Can you see the old Nantucketers painting themselves up like Wampanoags and dumping that tea in the harbor here, rather than pay the king’s taxes?”

“Highly unlikely,” Gussie assured her. “The ships—what were their names?—belonged to Mr. Rotch all right, and his office might have been up the stairs behind this door, up where Ted’s and Ozzie’s are now, but my guess is that those early Nantucketers were too good merchants to dump valuable tea overboard. Anyway, the island was always really more Tory than otherwise, although nobody talks about that now.”

“Speaking of merchants,” Mrs. Potter said, “is the Christmas Walk still going strong?”

This holiday event had begun only a year or two before Mrs. Potter’s last wintertime stay on the island. The annual putting up of the trees on Main Street, their lighting and trimming, had been a tradition for many years before that. Then, sparked by whoever’s bright idea the two could not remember, the merchants of the town had added an embellishment
of their own. When the trees went up in December, they designated an evening for this special Christmas event. All of the stores and shops remained open until late in the evening. There was street entertainment with music and carols; there were special Christmas treats and prizes and good things to eat; the shops, bejeweled in their Christmas finery, were a part of a continuing round of small holiday parties, their owners for the evening more hosts than merchants. The Walk had become an off-season tourist attraction, a new tradition on an old cobblestone thoroughfare.

“Usually I have a cocktail party beforehand,” Gussie said, “and then we all go to the Scrim or someplace for dinner after we’ve done the entire tour. This year, I just didn’t feel like it. Partly because of Gordon’s dying in October, and I hadn’t really begun having people in. And then partly because I had just got such a good start with my program with Tony, and I didn’t quite trust myself with all that liquor and fattening food in the house.”

“But you’re having people for cocktails Saturday on my account,” Mrs. Potter pointed out. “Are you sure you want to? I mean, you really can’t have a cocktail party without liquor and a lot of things to eat that aren’t on
anybody’s
diet.”

“Yes, I do want to, and everybody’s invited, but it’s not a cocktail party,” Gussie said. “To be honest, I expect everyone
does
think it is. That’s the assumption when an invitation’s for five o’clock. The fun of it is, I’m going to shock the socks off them—they’re coming to a tea party.”

Seeing the look of mild surprise on Mrs. Potter’s face, Gussie elaborated. Tony was terribly tolerant, of course, except for his special clients, but he was adamant about no liquor for
them
. (Mrs. Potter had a guilty recollection of proposing drinks at yesterday’s lunch party.) Gussie continued that all of them, all of Tony’s “people,” would find it so much easier if drinks weren’t offered, and anyway she thought it was high time someone came up with an alternative to cocktails for casual hospitality.

“So nobody’s going to worry about disobeying Tony,” she went on. “We’ll have tea and a lot of really good little things
to eat for whoever isn’t dieting, and this will be your coming-back party.”

“It sounds wonderful,” Mrs. Potter said. “Of course, I saw all of Les Girls yesterday, and Peter Benson. But there are the other men—I’m eager to see Arnold Sallanger, naturally. He’ll always be my favorite doctor. Ted is fun, in a way, even if he always is a little tiddly. George Enderbridge is nice, if a bit worthy, but of course as a clergyman and retired headmaster he can’t help that. And I suppose Victor Sandys is coming? Is he writing anything these days, and has anybody persuaded him to get a hearing aid?”

“You forgot Ozzie,” Gussie reminded her. “Poor Ozzie.”

They walked onto the wharf that encircled one end of the marina, sending hundreds of starlings beneath the heavy planking into twittering panic. “The weather’s been like fall, up to now,” Gussie said. “They’ll take off when it gets really cold. My perennial borders are still halfway green—did you notice?”

Broken shells crunched underfoot. A gull stalked away as they approached, a scallop shell in his beak, glaring back at them over his shoulder.

They looked out across the water, now a milky turquoise, toward the houses at Shimmo and Monomoy on the southern rim of the harbor.

“There’s Mittie’s house,” Mrs. Potter observed. “What a view she has of the harbor from that hilltop of hers.”

“I think she told you she’s moved into town for the winter,” Gussie said. “It’s nice having her nearby, but I think she misses her gardens out there, and that beautiful house. The problem is money—we’re afraid she may be having a little trouble.”

Mrs. Potter remembered the Main Street house very well from visits when Mittie’s parents had been alive. She could not help wondering if it also wasn’t pretty expensive to keep up, maybe as much as the house at Shimmo. It undoubtedly cost a great deal to heat and a fortune to have repainted every few years.

“At least she has a nice stretch of lawn for an eventual
garden behind the house,” Gussie said, “if she sells the Shimmo place. Her ace in the hole was going to be the rental of the apartment over the old carriage house in the back of the property. It’s really charming, and it should bring a nice amount for a summer rental. The living room looks out over the lawn between it and her parents’ house, remember? The property goes all the way through the block, so Mittie’s on Main Street and Dee’s at the back. The apartment is almost across from Ozzie’s house—I’m sure you know the place.”

Mrs. Potter remembered very well, but the reference to Dee was puzzling. “I thought Dee had a tiny place on Milk Street, or was it Vestal?” she said. “She’s living in Mittie’s carriage house? I can’t see that’s going to help Mittie’s financial picture, Dee being as, well, hard up—I almost said penurious—as she always seems to be.”

That was the problem, Gussie explained as the two walked around the marina. “Mittie has always taken having money as a matter of course, so when Dee had to leave her little rented place, she invited her to move in for the winter. And now I think she’s embarrassed to suggest that Dee pay her any rent, and she has the expense of extra utilities, and she’s probably agonizing over telling Dee that she wants to let the agents line up a good profitable summer rental for her.”

“I can’t believe it!” Mrs. Potter exclaimed. “Mittie is always so sure of herself. I can’t imagine that she won’t simply tell Dee the whole thing: that she can’t afford to keep her on as a nonpaying guest, and that she needs and expects the several thousand dollars—four or five at the least, maybe ten, the way things are going now—that some nice summer people would pay for the place for the season.”

“Mittie does seem totally assured, socially,” Gussie said. “It’s just that talking about money is something she can’t do. Or maybe her pride keeps her from admitting she made a too hasty invitation and that she regrets it. To Mittie, that would be the worst possible manners.”

The two had made their way around the pattern of the wharves of the marina. “Shall we step it out a little and go all
the way to the circle?” Mrs. Potter asked. “There’ll never be a prettier day, and we’re both dressed for it.”

They walked briskly, delighting in the blue of the harbor as the sun rose higher in its restricted southern arc of New England winter. Meanwhile, Mittie’s move into town had reminded Gussie of another one of the group of women who lunched together weekly. “It’s quite different for Helen, of course,” she said. “In money problems, I mean. She’s spent a fortune on that house and, recently, on her new garden-room addition. She and Lester used to come summers years ago to that big house they rented on the Cliff, remember? And then we were all so proud of her when she had gumption enough to buy one of the bricks and came here to stay on the island, a few years after he died.” Gussie was musing now. “She was the first of us to be widowed.”