The Nantucket Diet Murders Page 3

  There were husbands then. An album of snapshots flashed through her mind. Jules Berner, basking in Gussie’s admiration, shaking himself like a slightly grizzled water dog after swimming the harbor from Coatue to Abram’s Point. Bo Heidecker awarding bright pennants to prizewinning juniors at the Yacht Club. Les Latham, pale, plump, and serious, cackling in unwonted hilarity in a bright-flowered shirt at a beach club luau. Ab Leland with Mittie and their two blond sons at St. Paul’s, their voices clear and true, the music and words so familiar—a tribute to compulsory chapel at the best prep schools—that they scarcely glanced down at their hymnals.

  There was Fan Carpenter, the night Gussie gave him the nickname, from then on known to everyone except Leah as “Fannypatter.” There was Jim Higginson whirling and pivoting Beth on the dance floor in a spirited foxtrot that turned into an unabashed tour de force jitterbug finale. Beer and Bloody Marys and gin and tonic; husbands, weekends, and laughter. Lew, with one arm thrown across her shoulder, driving home in the honeysuckle-scented darkness, in the old blue convertible.

  Mrs. Potter roused herself as Leah repeated her words, “So many memories . . .”

  “We know, Leah,” Dee reminded her briskly. “We’re all women alone. Only some of us are more alone than others, aren’t we?”

  Gentle interior rumbling, reminder of the hours since her early breakfast, directed Mrs. Potter’s attention to the salad bar. Taking up one long wall of the paneled, low-ceilinged room, it was flanked on both sides with plant stands and hanging baskets bearing a profusion of exuberantly thriving green plants. Philodendrons, ivies of many kinds, many-hued begonias, peperomias, dieffenbachias, sansevierias, bright pots of impatiens and nasturtiums, plus the soft pink and strong green foliage of the holiday poinsettias, all glowing under softly focused light.

  As she gazed, the owner of the inn came toward them from the kitchen and bent quickly to kiss her cheek. “Potter, old dear, how wonderful to have you back!” Peter Benson exclaimed. “We’ve missed you! I adore my girls—how would I exist without you all?—and now the circle is complete again! How long will you be here?”

  Before she could answer, he continued rapidly. “Now let’s see, may I give a little dinner for you soon? No, let’s make it a Sunday breakfast at the beach shack instead, shall we? You love picnics, Potter, and winter ones are the best. No sand, no bugs, everything cozy by the fire.” He turned to the others. “Now all of you promise to come help celebrate Potter’s return. You hear me, guys? Nobody says no to this party!”

  “Nobody ever says no to any of your invitations, Peter,” Mrs. Potter said. “Are we free Sunday, Gussie? I’d love it.”

  Gussie’s assent seemed to be taken for granted as Peter spun Mrs. Potter around to a view of the dining room.

  “Did you see what we’re doing?” he demanded. “Those are fresh herbs growing in that hydroponic tank by the salad bar—can you believe it? Even in the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center in New York there isn’t anything better. Some good places grow their own herbs this way in the kitchen, or so they tell you, but mine are right out here where you can feast your eyes as well as your greedy little tummies. Edible decor, my darlings!”

  “You know Tony really inspired the idea,” Leah put in.

  “Now, Carpenter,” Peter replied promptly, “Tony is staying here at the inn for the winter, as you all well know, and I’m the most loyal fan he’s got around here, but nobody knows what’s good for you better than old Uncle Peter. I spent more than two thousand dollars for that herb garden tank, and the idea was mine.”

  He turned to Gussie. “So what do you say, Van Vleeck? Is it a party for Sunday, say one o’clock at the shack?”

  As Peter bent, affectionate, brotherly, to kiss Mrs. Potter a second time, she thought, as she often had before, that Peter treated them all like little boys—like eager, active little schoolboys, to be gently teased and chivied and ordered about. It was his special magic that he only ordered them to do those things that would prove to be fun (and often good for them as well), and he went to a great deal of trouble to arrange his amusements for them.

  Peter left to return to the kitchen, but his path was momentarily blocked by a plump, scurrying figure in a tan gabardine raincoat and matching small-brimmed round hat, carrying a large shapeless bag over one shoulder. The pair made an awkward two-step, dodging from left to right, until Peter stepped firmly aside, propelling the newcomer gently into the private dining room, where the shrieks of laughter and applause were steadily increasing.

  “Was that Lolly?” Mrs. Potter asked. “I haven’t seen her for so long I couldn’t be sure.”

  Helen Latham replied. “I don’t know why she couldn’t have come over to speak properly to her own mother, and certainly she should have greeted you properly, Genia. Sometimes I give up.”

  “I’m sure she was in a hurry to join her party,” Gussie explained good-naturedly. “I saw her with Edie Rosborough the other day and they were so busy talking they didn’t even see me.”

  “Oh, Edie,” Helen said carelessly. “I suppose I should be glad she seems to have found a girl friend at last—you know Lolly never really has fit in with people we all know. Since she met the girl, it seemed they asked her to join this little Softball group, and she even got her first job a while back. She’s a volunteer assistant at the science library. Not much of a job, but it’s something for her to do.”

  Mary Lynne’s conciliatory voice quickly tried to cover up Helen’s disparagement of her daughter. “When the playing season is over, these girls are all too busy with their jobs around town for a celebration, Linda Peaseley told me. So they save up their dues and wait until now, when things are a little slack. The natural science library is closed today, I think, and the Peaseley travel agency where Linda works for her father has got everybody scheduled for whatever winter trips they’re taking. Not that any of us is considering such a thing right now. Lord love a duck, Genia, you couldn’t pay any of us to leave now that Tony’s here.”

  “Ozzie told me things are quiet in his law office now, before he starts on our tax returns, so I suppose this is a good time for Edie to take the afternoon off,” Mittie added. “Besides, I think someone said it was her birthday.”

  “Listen to them!” Mary Lynne marveled. “Did you ever hear such a-whooping and a-hollering? They’re having themselves a high old time today.”

  On a fresh wave of laughter the team members burst into the dining room. Lolly Latham waved uncertainly toward their table, following the young woman Mrs. Potter now remembered from past visits to Ozzie deBevereaux’s law office, where she had for some years run his affairs with single-handed competence. Mrs. Potter remembered other familiar faces—a teller from the Pacific Bank; a perky and pretty librarian from the Atheneum; a dependable alto in the choir at church. Others were new to her. All were attractive, fresh-faced young women in their twenties and thirties. Their laughter abated slightly as they straggled into a semblance of a line.

  Among them was a tall girl with an oval face, biscuit-colored skin, and softly rounded features, her black hair in a single braid down the back, wearing a bright head scarf tied Indian fashion. She waved energetically at Gussie.

  As she waved back amiably, Gussie leaned toward her houseguest. “Tell you about her later,” she whispered. “She’s our secret weapon.”

  As members of the team surveyed choices of salad greens, of cheese and chicken and beef and vegetables, of ham and bacon and croutons, of condiments and salad dressings, Peter Benson appeared at the side of the hydroponic tank at the end of the long table.

  With small shining scissors in hand, he seemed ready to harvest a sprig of one or another of the green herbs as a final, fresh-snipped salad topping. Mrs. Potter could hear him reciting the choices—salad burnet, lemon thyme, chervil, basil, tarragon, chives—identifying as he spoke, charming each guest with his attention.

  With this group, Mrs. Potter saw that Peter’s attitude was quite different from the affecti
onate and irreverent chaffing he accorded her own friends. To the softball girls he offered the flattering attention of a respectful courtier. They responded with sudden grace, becoming for a moment a pageant of young queens. Even Lolly Latham, lumpy and graceless, seemed to glow as he spoke to her.

  “I wish she’d find a boyfriend her own age,” her mother said forcefully to her own group. “Every time an older man like Peter pays any attention to her, she acts like an idiot. You should see her when Tony comes to the house! I can’t tell her they’re only being nice to her on my account.”

  Helen’s sigh seemed more exasperated than sorrowful. “I keep hoping this new friend of hers, Edie Rosborough—she’s Ozzie’s secretary, you know—will find her somebody more suitable. One of the locals, if there are any single ones. You know I’ve never gotten her to snap out of it since Lester’s death.”

  Mrs. Potter suddenly remembered the shocking story that must have shaped the life of Lolly the child. Helen’s plump pale husband had died a suicide, almost twenty-five years ago, in Chicago. The ten-year-old Lolly, she now recalled, had been the one to be awakened by the gunshot, and had been the one to find her father’s dying body on the living room sofa. It was no wonder Lolly Latham was shy and retiring. Walter and Elna, Helen’s cook and butler of many years, had once begun to describe the scene for Mrs. Potter, until she had firmly changed the subject. Unbidden, the picture came back to her now—the shattered skull, the warm wet blood still flowing on the cushions—the picture that might still be seen in unspeakable horror behind Lolly’s light blue eyes.

  She looked again now to see Peter Benson drape a casually affectionate arm over Lolly’s shoulders and to see Lolly’s upward glance, nearly smiling, almost trustful. Peter’s tact and kindness were unfailing, as always, in any group.

  Then another gentle rumble beneath her cashmere sweater and her soft tweed travel suit reminded Mrs. Potter that her airport breakfast at Logan had been a long time ago. She looked around to see if anyone else at the table was as ready as she to have lunch. Peter’s shining scissors were beckoning.

  As she prepared to suggest following the young women in quest of food, a soft gasp came from several throats at her own table.

  “There he is,” Leah breathed. “There’s Tony.”

  “Now you’ll see what we’re talking about,” Gussie said softly in Mrs. Potter’s left ear.

  “Now you’ll see what I mean,” hissed Dee at her right.

  4

  The young queens of the softball league became giggling schoolgirls, stumbling and bumping each other’s elbows, and Lolly Latham’s face seemed deeply flushed, far beyond the faint pinkness Mrs. Potter had noticed when Peter Benson was speaking with her.

  The group at the round table sat erect, stomachs pulled in and chests lifted. Then, following Helen Latham’s lead, they rose and propelled Mrs. Potter toward the center of the room.

  “Tony, you must meet the new girl in town,” Gussie said as the tall man strode across the room toward them and raised her hand to his lips. “I told you that my dearest old friend was coming, and here she is. Genia, this is Tony, Count Ferencz.”

  Tony was enchanted to meet the dear Eugenie of whom he had heard so much. Mrs. Potter was enchanted, although she did not say so, to have her hand kissed with an air of admiring respect that at the same time held a hint of challenge. There were very few men who kissed one’s hand at the ranch, and she adored being called Eugenie.

  Each hand in the group was kissed in turn—Leah’s small pointed fingers, almost clawlike in her new thinness, bejeweled, in constant flashing motion; Helen’s hands, like her heavy features, seeming a little too big for her thin arms; Mary Lynn’s fingers, creamy, square-tipped, and firm, their obvious competence belying the soft languor of her speech; Mittie’s hands, small, tanned, childlike; finally Beth’s, each as plump and smooth as a dove.

  Each face in turn seemed to shine with new light, reflecting the flattering intensity of the gray eyes and the moment of undivided attention.

  Only Dee had remained at the lunch table, where she was spreading another cracker with cheese, she and her former husband apparently disregarding each other’s presence. This must create a continuing social problem, Mrs. Potter thought, since Dee was firmly a part of the group that now appeared to acclaim Tony as—what had Mary Lynne said?—”someone to give direction to their lives.”

  As the Softball girls fluttered around the edge of the small circle of Mrs. Potter’s friends, newly animated, centering about Count Ferencz, as Peter waved and beckoned them on to the salad bar with his silver scissors, the room seemed very full and confused. Her friends seemed to be competing for the tall man’s attention, and he, with effortless grace, seemed to be managing a special smile or special word for each one.

  “Simply marvelous, Gussie,” she was close enough to hear him say. “You’re a star pupil and I’ve decided you’re about ready for the next step. Very soon.”

  Then he bent to hear some question of Leah’s, the words lost in the voices around them and in the sudden jingle of Leah’s bracelets. Mrs. Potter’s thoughts took a wild leap into what she knew of fencing terms: swordsman, rapier, thrust and parry. The lean, flat-muscled body moved with a fencer’s grace. The slightly hooded gray eyes, the narrow lips, the controlled, sharply modeled features, even the high, domed forehead above a slightly receding hairline, all appeared to her as a kind of guard, a fencer’s mask.

  “Tony, can you give me a hand?” she heard Peter Benson call from his station at the hydroponic garden. “Something I have to see to in the kitchen.”

  The softball bevy milled together in happy confusion as the swordsman’s figure crossed to the salad bar. Only Lolly Latham remained on the sidelines, awkward and apart, until one of the girls pulled her into the circle. “My dear young ladies,” Mrs. Potter heard him say, “do give me the honor of prescribing the right herb for each of you. I must observe you closely to do this. Let me begin with this charming person. Your name, chérie?”

  Edith Rosborough, the birthday girl, flushed with pleasure.

  “And what is it that you do, besides playing the ball game and decorating our day?” the count inquired. “Ah, law secretary, is it? I must look at your eyes now, and the palms of the two lovely hands that do this law typewriting.”

  After considerable time, when the softball group had disappeared into the private dining room with full plates and in a state of ecstasy, Mrs. Potter’s party proceeded to the buffet. Peter Benson had returned to the dining room, relieving his guest from his temporary post at the herb garden, and the two stood side by side. “I’ll let you take over with the small fry,” Mrs. Potter heard Peter say, “but I’m not sure I trust you with my guys.” Peter’s square and solid bulk, his open face and ready smile, seemed to exaggerate the tall elegance beside him, and his slightly baggy tweed jacket and flannel trousers were equal contrast with Tony’s closely fitted continental tailoring.

  When it came time to make her own lunch selection, Mrs. Potter was happily deliberate, even as she realized that she appeared embarrassingly greedy as judged by the restrained choices of her friends.

  The enticements were many. From them. Mrs. Potter assembled for herself a bed of buttery Boston lettuce with a few pale spears of endive, both of these a treat often unobtainable at her nearest Arizona market. She added a few sprigs of dark green native watercress, which she felt sure had come from watery beds in Quaise, east of town. For color she added some crisp radish slices and several wedges of bright (but undoubtedly tasteless, she knew) Florida tomatoes. Then, even though she saw that her friends were forgoing the heartier items, she decided not to feel guilty about her level of near starvation. She served herself generously with julienne strips of rare roast beef. She added a few neat matchsticks of Swiss cheese. With a rueful grimace at Gussie, her hostess, she added several rings of crisp red onion. Then, with a mental apology to all doctors of diet and health and beauty, she topped the whole thing with a good spoonful of r
ich blue cheese dressing.

  “Now, Peter, what does this call for?” she asked her restaurant host. “I’m embarrassed at what an enormous plateful I have and how hungry I am—but doesn’t it look wonderful?”

  “Couldn’t be improved,” Peter told her, “except for this snip of fresh basil to give flavor to the tomatoes. Pitch in now, Potter, and I’ll have Jadine bring some rye bread for you. That’s all it needs.”

  When Mrs. Potter returned to the window table, Beth was eating her even heartier fare with untroubled enjoyment. Dee was drinking tea, and Beth’s roll basket was being steadily depleted.

  “Did you notice if Peter has any lovage up there?” Beth asked as she surveyed the fresh fruit plate she had ordered along with her hot chicken pie. “This has a good cream cheese dressing, but it needs a little something. One thing I added to my own herb garden last year was lovage, and it’s awfully nice with fruit. I think I’ll just go up and take a look.”

  The others at the table were slowly, almost painfully so, it seemed to Mrs. Potter, squeezing wedges of fresh lemon over salad greens, over cucumber and raw mushroom slices, over chopped raw zucchini and cauliflower. They had elected a variety of herb choices, including that of fresh nasturtium blossoms on Mary Lynne’s leafy platter. No one else had succumbed to the lure of an oily dressing.

  Her own group had barely begun before various softball girls were returning for second platefuls. Jadine was rushing about, moving between the guests with fresh plates and replenishments for the long table.

  Mrs. Potter remembered later, when it seemed necessary to do so, that Peter had called, “Higginson, could you or somebody spell me for a minute? Tony’s taking a breather and I’m needed for a jiffy in the kitchen. You guys know as much about herbs as I do anyway.” They had all, except for herself and Dee, briefly served a turn at the hydroponic garden, It seemed Peter’s way of honoring their garden club expertise and of involving them all in the ritual, one of his ways of keeping them all entertained and amused.