The Nantucket Diet Murders

  Rave Reviews for Virginia Rich’s

  Mouth-watering Whodunits!:

  “For midnight readers and eaters.”

  —Daily News (New York)

  “A case of delicious homicide.”

  —House & Garden

  “A rich concoction of culinary expertise and homicidal horrors.”

  —Booklist

  “Virginia Rich has a keen sense of social satire and an ability to evoke the precise character of life in a small New England town. But what I enjoyed most was eavesdropping on Mrs. Potter’s culinary ruminations. Good food … an inquisitive mind, and a keen appreciation of how eating well contributes to the quality of life.”

  —Richard Sax, Cuisine

  Also by Virginia Rich

  THE COOKING SCHOOL MURDERS

  THE BAKED BEAN SUPPER MURDERS

  Books by Nancy Pickard based on

  the characters and story created

  by Virginia Rich

  THE 27-INGREDIENT CHILI CON CARNE MURDERS

  THE BLUE CORN MURDERS

  THE SECRET INGREDIENT MURDERS

  The island, the town, and some of the houses are real. The Scrimshaw Inn and the characters are real only to the author. The recipes on the book’s last page and inside back cover are deliriously real.

  To the Sandwich Girls of Nantucket

  and the Tight Little Group of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia;

  to several special others in both places;

  to some of their mothers

  and all of their daughters.

  1

  Oscar deBevereaux painfully eased his sagging flesh, his aching bones, into the high old-fashioned tub.

  “Hell of a way to end the day,” he said to himself, thinking of long-ago late afternoon parties on Long Island, when Bunny had been alive, of tea dancing at the Plaza in even earlier happy days.

  Then, as he knew they would, came memories even more painful than the torment of his arthritic hips and knees. He thought, as he knew he would, of Marthé, his plump and beautiful little Marthé, riding her fat pony in late afternoon Long Island sunshine. Then, of an older Marthé playing tennis with laughing, long-legged boys on the tennis courts in the lower garden, of a white-aproned maid carrying great trays of milk and lemonade and sandwiches and cakes to hungry young friends, their golden arms and legs glowing in the light.

  He thought of his daughter, as round and sleek as a young seal, making her neat trim dives into the pool beyond the house. He saw her joining her schoolmates in field hockey. “Yea, Martie!” he heard girls in school uniforms cheering from the sidelines.

  Again he could hear her say, at first cheerfully, and then in later times plaintively, “But I’m just too revoltingly fat!”

  He and Bunny had remonstrated, he remembered, and he could still see Marthé’s firmly set, square little jaw. She was still saying the same words when her emaciated body had to be carried upstairs for the last time to her girlhood room in the big Long Island house. “Too revoltingly fat.”

  How light the burden of that coffin must have been, Oscar deBevereaux thought again, as it carried the wraith, the caricature, of that once beautiful, sturdy little body.

  The sorrow was as new as it had been that day, and so was the rage that had been its companion for all these years. Soon, he told himself grimly, he would be able to act. At long last he was now building a case, in the eyes of the law he served and respected, that would begin to avenge his daughter’s death, although a case that involved another child and a tragedy of a different kind.

  He groaned, perhaps from the slight relief of the hot water as he soaked his aching joints. Was that someone at the kitchen door downstairs? He heard a woman’s voice, the words unintelligible, then the door’s closing. Never mind, he told himself, he could never have got there in time anyway, and what deuced difference could it make? People were always coming in and out his back door, and one reason it was left unlocked was so he wouldn’t have to disturb himself coming up and down stairs. His bath, his bedroom, his comfortable living room, were on the second floor of his Nantucket house, a remodeled small barn in the center of town. The kitchen, a small guest room and bath, and the large dining room that doubled as a downstairs sitting room were on the first.

  Half dozing now in the cooling water, he roused at the thought that for a second time the kitchen door downstairs had been opened and closed, but this time he heard no call of greeting.

  Maybe it was Edie, with something from the office. He’d given her the afternoon off for some kind of softball girls’ do at the Scrimshaw. She’d told him it was her birthday; it seemed only three months since her last one, he thought irritably. Anyway, he’d see her in the morning, whenever he managed to get down. Today, with no secretary in the office, he had taken the afternoon off himself, had removed the phone from the hook and settled down with a book in front of the upstairs fireplace.

  About to turn on a fresh stream of hot water, he reconsidered. Slowly he hoisted his now waterlogged and wrinkled body out of the high, claw-footed tub. Awkwardly he toweled his softened skin and eased his arms and shoulders into a gray flannel bathrobe. He’d go down to the kitchen and make himself a cup of tea, at least, even if he didn’t feel much like dinner. Maybe, if it was there, he’d even try some of that comfort-comfrey stuff, whatever it was called, that Beth Higginson had said she’d leave for him, see if that would help this damned arthritis.

  A tin canister on the kitchen table next to the back door was neatly labeled Comfrey Tea in Beth’s familiar hand. The wilted clumps of half-green leaves it contained looked unpromising, but he told himself Beth was the authority on herbs, not he. He boiled water in a saucepan, added a small handful, and let it simmer for a minute or two, a procedure that seemed vaguely suitable for extracting its virtues, if any.

  The resulting pale liquid seemed too anemic in color and aroma to suggest it would be an effective remedy for anything at all. He decided to let it simmer a little longer while he looked for a possible message from a second caller. Finding none, he decided he had only imagined the second opening and closing of the kitchen door.

  When he thought the tea must be sufficiently brewed (it was no darker and no more aromatic now), he filled his big tea mug. Then, neat as always in his bachelor kitchen, he rinsed the sodden leaves into the garbage disposer in the sink. As they flushed away, he rinsed and dried and put away the saucepan.

  With mug in hand, he made his way back upstairs to his big chair in front of the fire. It was only good manners to try the stuff, and its taste was not too disagreeably grassy. After all, an old friend had gone to the trouble of bringing it to him. He’d drink it now before it got cold, then call to thank her in the morning. Tell her he felt better, whether he did or not.

  The grip of sudden pain in his chest, when it came, made him forget his aching bones, even the sharper hurt of old memories. His head was splitting, and so, in a great revulsion of nausea, were his stomach and bowels, a red flood of pain engulfing him in continually increasing rhythm.

  Through glazed eyes, Oscar deBevereaux saw the curl of surf on his own beach on the Long Island shore, each crest flaming in the sun, a red ebb and flow commanding his entire attention. Finally there was no pain, but the ebb and flow of each crested wave continued, now blue in the fading light. Then, at the last, there were only soft murmurs of gray water and white spindrift along the sand.

  2

  “You’re all so gorgeously thin!”

  These, Mrs. Potter’s first words of greeting to a reunion of old friends, were spoken only minutes after her return to the island of Nantucket and less than nine hours before Oscar deBevereaux’s death. It was to be nearly twenty hours before she would learn this
sad news of yet another old friend of her many years on the island, and perhaps twenty-one before she began to feel uneasy about the cause of his death.

  This day, a Wednesday, at noon, her smile embraced all of the seven women gathered at the round luncheon table. At that early hour theirs was the only party in a room that in summer would have been crowded with tables and the murmur of well-bred voices. Today the pine-paneled room was quiet, warm and welcoming, filled with good smells, with growing plants, with masses of pink poinsettias left from the holidays just past. The bay window enclosing the round table was bright with moving patches of January sunlight. A small fire sputtered gently in the old center fireplace.

  “How do you do it?” she asked. “We all went on the same diets, off and on for years, without really changing very much. And now look at you!”

  Mrs. Potter’s hostess, one of her dearest and oldest friends and the reason for this return visit to the island, was first to answer. “Oh, I haven’t lost much yet,” Gussie told her, with an affectionate squeeze of her arm. “Less than ten pounds. The others started earlier—aren’t they wonderful?”

  Gussie’s smile was as bright and engaging as it had been forty years ago. With no pretense of being younger than she and Mrs. Potter both were, her face showing light lines of both laughter and sorrow, Gussie seemed even more radiantly beautiful now than she had been at eighteen.

  “Speaking for myself, I weigh exactly what I did when I last saw you, and thirty years before that,” Dee said, at Mrs. Potter’s right, with a shrug of her elegant shoulders. “You look pretty marvelous yourself with that Arizona tan. Particularly since your hair is as much gray—let’s say silver—as blond now. Nice effect.” The last was spoken with careful and professional approval. “We look good because you’re glad to be back.”

  “I’m serious,” Mrs. Potter persisted. “Of course I’m overjoyed to be back with Les Girls, and you always look wonderful, Countess. So does Bethie. You two are unchanged, which is perfect. But the rest of you—what are you all doing to yourselves?”

  Mrs. Potter’s gaze went around the table. First there was Dee, Countess Ferencz, the youngest and newest member of the group, whom she had proclaimed unchanged. Mrs. Potter did not quite remember when or why Dee had come to the island, but she gradually had become part of the group in the past ten years. Nearly six feet tall, showing more strong bones and white teeth in her face than the others, Dee was wearing her familiar trademark hat: firm, straight-brimmed, dark brown, placed squarely on her head over dark, ungraying hair pulled back into a great braided chignon. Her heavy gold-and-silver earrings, so large they would have overpowered any other face around the table, were the same ones Mrs. Potter remembered. Dee needed no change. She looked like what she was—a former fashion editor, one who had early learned her own style.

  Next to Dee was Bethie—Beth Higginson—whose solid plump comfort, an exception to the new and remarkable thinness of the others, had a beauty of its own order. Beth’s pleasant, quizzical brown eyes beamed back at Mrs. Potter from a firm and rosy face, framed in a wreath of nicely cut curly white hair. Her Tyrolean hat was scarlet, with an extravagant cockade of feathers.

  “Now don’t look at me,” Beth implored. “I’m going to make an appointment with the man next week or the week after that, I promise you all. Only you’ve got to agree I can’t possibly start a diet this minute. I made a dilled fish mousse yesterday, and there’s that to finish. Then I can’t throw out the last of the Christmas fruitcake little Mary Bee sent me—she made it herself from Grandmother Higginson’s old recipe. Or was it little Beth Ann Cox who made it? Anyway, before I start any new diet I have to finish up the last few of my holiday burnt sugar almonds—they’re lovely chopped and sprinkled on vanilla ice cream. I remember you used to like them, Genia, and there’s a little box of them waiting for you at Gussie’s.

  “Speaking of dieting,” Beth went on, before Mrs. Potter could do more than smile appreciatively in reply, “I have to tell you about a marvelously light cranberry dessert I just remembered. Jim used to love it. You put raw cranberries and some chopped apple and pecans in the blender until they’re sort of a mush, then you fold in some marshmallows and whipped cream. It’s just a froth, really, and so refreshing. You all must try it for your diets as soon as I locate the recipe again.”

  “Your idea of light food and diets is fantastic, Beth,” Gussie said. “I suppose there’s whipped cream in that light fish mousse of yours, too?”

  Another voice spoke from across the table. “I happen to know you think crème brulée made with light cream instead of heavy is a real Weight Watchers special.”

  “I’ve been spoiled,” Beth admitted happily. “Jim wasn’t a very big man, as you all remember.” (Mrs. Potter thought of Jim Higginson—compact, dark, tough and feisty, a good newspaperman.) “In spite of not being very big himself, Jim said he liked having a wife who was what he called ‘a fine figure of a woman.’ And now the only other man’s opinion that counts with me is Arnold Sallanger’s. He says my health is superb, but I do think he made a little point of having his nurse weigh me a second time, with him watching, on my last checkup.”

  She paused and shook her head, with a flourish of the feather cockade, her smile rueful. “So I really am going to make that appointment, honestly, I promise. Next week. By the end of January at the latest.”

  Mrs. Potter’s regard continued around the table. It was actually of the other four that her wonderment had been spoken. Like Beth, they were women who had known each other for many years.

  Their friendship, that of the original core of the group, had begun in long-past Nantucket summers. In those years they came to the island for a month or a season, and most of their husbands commuted for weekends from city offices elsewhere.

  With one exception, their children had grown up together, learned to sail together, to drive cars, to play tennis, and had in a few instances become briefly but inconclusively engaged to be married. They and their families had picnicked and birthday-partied together, had eaten and drunk at each other’s houses for years. As the years went on, these women had shared the sorrow of their husbands’ deaths, two of these within the last year. Through all of this time they had kept up an informal getting together, in a way that eventually evolved into a weekly lunching event. They knew and accepted each other’s foibles, they worked together for the community good, and they were proud of each other’s accomplishments.

  She could not remember when they had begun to call themselves “Les Girls.” Over noontime sandwiches at the Yacht Club, she thought, when some of them—those beyond bicycling range—were still chauffeuring their young to their days on the courts or the harbor. With a few inevitable dropouts over the years, with the return to the fold of Helen Latham after several years’ absence, and with the more recent addition of Dee, the group had remained remarkably cohesive—even more so now that they all, in spite of punitive Massachusetts state income tax laws, had declared the island their year-round home.

  Mrs. Potter felt herself quite as much of the group as ever, even though the ranch in Arizona and the cottage in Maine had taken the place of the Philadelphia and Nantucket houses that had been home before that. They had all kept more or less in touch through phone calls and letters, and regularly so in her own case with Gussie, whose friendship antedated even their early summerings on the island.

  Now, after her absence of nearly two years, although Dee and Beth seemed unchanged (and to Mrs. Potter, Gussie was changeless), four of these old friends appeared almost like tiny strangers.

  Leah, next to Beth, kissed her fingertips in a graceful wave, a gesture of thanks for the implied compliment of Mrs. Potter’s questions. “Do we really look all that much better?” she asked, her rings and bracelets jingling musically. The lift of her eyebrows said she was confident of the answer.

  Mrs. Potter looked at Leah’s small pointed face and the pale fluff of hair above it. Memory showed a certain roundness, below a heavy fringe of ban
gs—once brown, then streakily buff. After Leah’s widowhood several years ago, this fringe had been maintained at a sober, unrelieved shade of oxford gray by Larry, Les Girls’ favorite island hairdresser. Now the newly soft bangs were almost platinum above Leah’s green eyes, which she did not remember as being slightly slanted. The green reflected the vivid green of Leah’s sleek wool sweater and trousers. Her fine-boned hands were smooth, her small bright nails were well shaped. Mrs. Potter definitely remembered Leah’s hands as being forever work-worn in the years after her husband’s death—in no way of necessity, but by what seemed constant and compulsive polishing of silver and furniture and washing of windows in slavish dedication to the big house in which she had been widowed.

  What had happened to about twenty pounds of Leah Carpenter? And how had a rather nondescript gray tabby—a good woman dedicated to perfect widowhood, a woman whose only dramatics had been occasional indulgence in self-chosen martyrdom—become this small purring kitten?

  “You know you look completely different, Leah,” Mrs, Potter told her, “and you’ve got to tell me the secret.”

  Mary Lynne, next to Leah, replied instead, her honey-smooth voice making every sentence end in a soft, deferential question mark. “Genia, honey, hasn’t Gussie told you? That the most marvelous man has come to the island? Not that we all don’t have more than enough men to go around these days, which has to be a pure miracle from heaven in a place with so many of us widows. Isn’t it amazing? Right here in town as many unattached men as women?”

  Mary Lynne’s soft southern voice was familiar. The sharp cheekbones were not, nor the flat planes under Mary Lynne’s long strand of pearls, under her loose-fitting beige jersey and matching pants. Mary Lynne’s statuesque beauty had been trimmed to the bone. Suddenly Mrs. Potter saw the Tennessee homecoming queen, lithe, active, auburn-haired, confident, yet by ingrained tradition claiming an air of helplessness they all knew was totally unmerited.