The Nantucket Diet Murders Read online

  When Beth took her turn, she had turned to Mrs. Potter in explanation. “Peter knows I’m an herb gardener,” she said. “Most of us are, actually. Anyway, he knows I’ve suggested comfrey tea to Ozzie deBevereaux for his arthritis, and he says at least it won’t hurt him.” Then, spotting Edie at the buffet, she called out, “How is the boss today? Taking the day off too? I’ll stop in with the comfrey and say hello before dinner.”

  The return of Count Ferencz caused new excitement, she recalled, and whoever was then in charge relinquished the herb-cutting scissors. After that she only remembered Beth’s decision about dessert, which proved to be the rum pie, after all. It had been, she said again apologetically, a favorite of Jim’s.

  “That’s ridiculous, Beth,” Helen told her. “Everybody’s husband loved desserts. Order the pie if you want to, for heaven’s sake, but don’t blame it on Jim.”

  Mary Lynne’s voice was placating. “Bless their dear little old hearts, they did love desserts, didn’t they? Bo’s mother copied out a whole book of his favorites for me as a present when we got engaged. And I swear to goodness, her darling boy could tell, forty years later, if I changed anything by a quarter of a teaspoon.”

  There was sympathetic laughter, and conversation continued at the round table. In the next room there was clearly speechmaking, punctuated by bursts of laughter and loud applause.

  Both groups were momentarily stilled when Jadine came in bearing a tray with a large decorated cake, slowing as she went through the door of the private dining room to shield the flame of its single tall pink candle. Then the expected chorus of feminine voices began, most of them singing in lower register to lend strength to the sentiment.

  The chorus grew stronger as one key was agreed upon. “Happy birthday to you . . .”

  The singing continued, then wavered, faltered. As the words dear Eeeee-dy were reached, it dwindled from a few uncertain voices to total silence, a silence far louder than all of the laughter and clapping and shrieking of the preceding hour.

  The thud of an overturned chair broke the silence, and there was a small clatter of china, as Linda Peaseley appeared in the doorway, her napkin still clutched in her hand. “Get Mr. Benson,” she said loudly. “Edie’s choking. She can’t get her breath.”

  Before anyone could speak or move, the girl with the smoothly rounded face and the long braid appeared beside Linda. “Does anybody here know the Heimlich maneuver?” she called sharply. “One of the girls is choking on a last bite of salad or something. She can’t get her breath.”

  Gussie jumped to her feet. “I’ve practiced it,” she said. “I’ll try, if no one else knows. Get Mr. Benson, Jadine.”

  Peter was out from the kitchen and into the private dining room before Gussie could get there. Edie, unable to speak, stood before her place at the table beside her overturned chair her eyes wide in a frantic gaze, pointing helplessly toward the pink-lipsticked circle of her open mouth.

  Peter approached her quickly from behind as Mrs. Potter’s party crowded into the doorway. The softball girls, except for Linda and the girl with the braid, still sat in their places at the table, staring in disbelief.

  “No, pound her back first,” Gussie called out. “That’s the first thing, the Red Cross says.”

  Peter had already encircled Edie’s waist and clasped his hands above her midsection. He administered a convulsive squeeze. “I learned it this way,” he grunted. “Doesn’t waste time.”

  Edie’s eyes grew even wider. An incoherent, almost soundless appeal came from the roof of her straining mouth. The young women at the table and the group in the doorway watched in horror as her face grew red, then purple. Peter repeated his firm, sudden squeeze.

  He released her quickly; his deft, square fingers explored the open mouth. “No chunk of food,” he said abruptly. “Can’t get my fingers in her gullet, but her tongue’s not turned back.”

  He grasped the girl’s stiff body again in a spasmodic embrace and, as he did, shouted over his shoulder, “Call the hospital, Jadine.”

  Helen Latham was already at the telephone in the front hallway. “The ambulance is on its way,” she told them calmly. “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine.”

  “Shall I get her coat and things?” Lolly asked timidly.

  “Hurry up, then,” her mother said. “I’m going to follow the ambulance in the station wagon to be sure everything’s under control, and you might as well come along.”

  “She didn’t get a chance to make her birthday wish,” Jadine said as, seconds later, they heard the approaching siren. “Look, will you, the candle’s still burning.”

  5

  “Want to turn on the local news while I do something about our dinner?” Gussie called from the kitchen.

  Mrs. Potter struggled to her feet from the depths of a soft old leather sofa in the library, where she and her old friend had, for the past hour, continued their catching up on family news.

  Earlier she had unpacked her bags with Gussie’s assistance, in the casual intimacy of former roommates. As they moved together putting things away for what was to be a stay of several weeks, Gussie came to the bottom of one bag and let out a shout. “Yellow pads! Does this take me back! Are you still making lists and notes and settling all the problems of the world with these things?”

  Not bothering to reply, Mrs. Potter took the small stack of lined yellow legal pads and set them on a small desk before a window. She looked down happily at the small part of the garden at the side of the house, admiring the now rusty brown clusters of hydrangea on a bush she had long loved in its blue-violet summers.

  “I remember all the nutty things you used to write down,” Gussie continued. “Dates, of course, and notes about exam schedules, and even things no one in her right mind would have to write down, like wash hair, write home, study library. I always thought you were going to write get up or go to bed. As far as I could see, you never looked at the lists again and they were all things you’d have remembered just as well without them.”

  “I did too look at them,” Mrs. Potter replied with dignity. “I crossed those things off when they were done. Besides, I always find I can think better, about lots of things, if I write them down.”

  “I know—they weren’t all just reminder lists, even then,” Gussie said. “Who was that beau of yours from MIT—you know, the one you fell in love with our sophomore year?”

  Mrs. Potter resented the fact that her face was suddenly warm, and she turned again to the window to look at the hydrangea. “Well, yes,” she admitted. “I think I fell in love with his Boston accent, actually, on our first date. It sounded so elegant, so classy.”

  “What I remember is your deciding how you felt about him by writing down a whole list of his good points and his not-so-good ones,” Gussie persisted.

  “I cannot believe you read my private notes,” Mrs. Potter retorted. “That’s disgusting. Anyway, even if you did, or if I showed them to you, I’m certain neither of us can remember what went in which column, except for that wonderful accent. I would simply melt when he’d say things like ‘pa’k the ca’ behind the apa’tment.’”

  Suddenly she, too, was laughing. “How many years since I’ve seen him, I wonder?” she said, although something told her she could add that number rather quickly if she chose to do so. “He’s probably a cranky, arthritic old scientist somewhere, married to a proper Vincent Club Boston woman who takes that absolutely swoon-making accent of his quite for granted.”

  The unpacking accomplished, at Gussie’s insistence Mrs. Potter had gratefully agreed to a nap in the big four-poster bed, suddenly too sleepy to accord more than a brief glimpse of admiration at the handworked crewel of the canopy over her head. Later, further refreshed by a bath in the huge, claw-footed tub, and comfortable in a long jade-green wool caftan, she had joined her hostess in the library.

  They had not spoken of the day’s lunch party. Mrs. Potter had once voiced her concern about the secretary’s bout of choking, but Gussie
, with her usual practical common sense, had quickly reassured her. “Someone would have called us if she weren’t quite all right,” she had said. “Now tell me, is Benjie still in San Francisco? And what’s new with the girls?” She named and inquired for each of them and for each of Mrs, Potter’s precocious and beautiful grandchildren. She reported on her own daughter’s new job as a volunteer lawyer for Legal Aid. She told of her son Scott’s internship with the Santa Fe Opera, after his late return to college and his recent graduation with a master’s degree in performing arts administration.

  Mrs. Potter hadn’t known there was such a thing, although it sounded reasonable enough. “I hope he majored in fund-raising,” she said. “If not, he could take a few lessons right here on the island from Helen. She’s superb at it. Isn’t it interesting that people always seem to give more to a rich solicitor? I suppose they hate to look cheap in front of their rich friends but can think of lots of excuses to make to their poor ones. Anyway, the move sounds perfect for Scott, and I’m sure Louisa and her husband know all about it.”

  The two Berner and three Potter children had known each other nearly all their lives. In their growing-up years they had turned up at each other’s family dinner tables without notice, and they still saw each other often. Scott was a godfather for one of the children of Louisa, Mrs. Potter’s eldest. Marilyn, the lawyer, and her husband were friends and now neighbors of her younger daughter, Emily, in Philadelphia.

  Now, in answer to Gussie’s suggestion, Mrs. Potter snapped on the local island TV station. The reception seemed a bit fuzzy and the hand-lettered local advertisements, endearingly amateurish, reminded her of those flashed on the screen in the old movie house of her Iowa youth, shown between the news of the world and the comedy, and again before the main feature.

  “What’s this new shop that’s opening Friday?” she called to Gussie through the open kitchen door. “They keep showing a picture of a lot of noses. And who’s Mary Rezendes?”

  “Tell you later,” Gussie shouted back. “It’s part of my secret!”

  “Fog tonight, maybe light snow by morning,” she called in turn as the Nantucket weather station report followed. “Good thing I got in today before Logan weathered in. Of course, I could have taken the bus to Woods Hole and then the boat, unless the fog was impossible, but this way I got back in time for our lunch at the Scrim. I can’t tell you how good it is to see everyone again, and everyone looking so great!”

  Gussie returned to the library and pointed toward the open doorway leading to the front hall, which in turn opened into large connecting parlors on the other side of the house. “Want a drink?” she asked. “You remember where the liquor closet is in the back parlor—I’m sure there’s everything there,”

  “I’ll get myself a light Scotch and water,” Mrs. Potter declared promptly as she rose to cross the hallway. “As long as you aren’t letting me help in the kitchen tonight, this will give me a chance for a real look at the other side of the house while I’m getting it I know you’ve bought some new paintings since I was here last.”

  The two rooms, each with its high ceiling centered by white plaster garlands and whorls and rosettes, each with its white marble-faced fireplace, above which hung a great gold-framed mirror, each with tall windows with white interior wooden shutters folded back into deep window recesses, were open as one. The sliding double doors, their hardware of heavy silver, as were those of the window shutters, were seldom closed, and the rooms were carpeted as one with thick pale gold.

  Heavy off-white damask covered big chairs and comfortable sofas, further softened with needlepoint-covered pillows of Gussie’s own design and execution. The white walls were covered with framed paintings, large ones alone or smaller ones grouped together, some modern, chiefly French Impressionist. The warmth of their colors, with that of the needlepoint, gave the long double room vitality and warmth.

  Certain familiar objects reminded Mrs. Potter of how long she and Gussie had been friends. First of all, there was the house itself. Soon after their college graduation Gussie’s first marriage had been to Mrs. Potter’s favorite cousin, Theo Andrews, and it was he, to celebrate his sudden success in business, who had bought the big Main Street mansion. There, the two had happily planned a lifetime of summers together.

  The grand piano had been Jules Berner’s, Mrs. Potter remembered, and it was there that he used to entertain them all with wild and brilliant improvisations. By then Gussie, a richly adored young wife, had married Jules, a successful New York investment banker. It was through the years of their summers here that the two families, the Berners and the Potters, had maintained their long friendship.

  A stiff, but bright and engaging, painting of Dutch burgher houses caught her eye. This had been her and Lew’s third wedding present to Gussie as a bride. A year after Jules’s fatal heart attack four years ago, Gussie had again remarried, this time to Gordon Van Vleeck, a Nantucket-summering bachelor from Schenectady. They knew that Gordon was inordinately proud of his Dutch ancestry, and hoped that the small painting would please them both.

  She and Lew had not really liked Gordon, and had done everything they tactfully could do to discourage Gussie’s remarriage after what seemed to them such a short time.

  “I think our Gussie’s a gal who just has to be married,” she remembered Lew’s saying. “She’s not as independent as you might be, Genia. . ..” Lew then could not have known how independent she was going to have to prove herself. It was a help at times to remember his confidence in her.

  There was nothing to be gained now by wishing that they had been able to talk Gussie out of what had been an unfortunate third marriage. And she certainly had not come to Nantucket now to share any further mourning over Gordon’s death. She went to Jules’s piano and dashed off a quick double-time version of Chopsticks, just to let Gussie, presumably still busy in the kitchen, know how glad she was to be back on the island.

  Drink in hand, she returned to the library to find her sitting comfortably in a wing chair with a glass of soda water. “I think it’s great you aren’t drinking,” Mrs. Potter told her. “Calling it Health Week after the holidays, are you?”

  Ignoring the television set in the corner, the two began to recall all those times in their shared past when they had declared Health Week. Early to bed for a week, they would vow (it never took more than one night, actually, to catch up then), after the red-rimmed eyes and exhaustion of exams or after a particularly strenuous weekend. No desserts for a week, they would decree, as penance for an after-hours orgy of ice cream and pretzels and sardines. No smoking for a month, just to be sure they weren’t getting the habit. They now agreed that the no-smoking times had become more and more difficult in the years that followed.

  “Matter of fact, I never did entirely quit until last fall,” Gussie admitted, “but Tony says it’s terribly aging to the skin.”

  “Your skin looks great,” Mrs. Potter told her. “I’m not sure that quitting has done that much for mine, even though I stopped years ago. Anyway, it’s wonderful to know that the insides of lungs do really restore themselves after a few years, and it’s great not to cough, and of course to be able to really smell things. Nice things, at least.”

  “Like fresh-baked bread,” Gussie added. They smiled at each other across Mrs. Potter’s glass of Scotch and Gussie’s of Perrier.

  “Again, it’s Tony,” Gussie said diffidently, returning to the subject of liquor. “I suppose you could call it Health Week, only it’s much more than that. What he’s doing for me is so wonderful. Part of it, of course, is his diet. He prescribes this for each of us individually. There’s lots more to his program than that, only I haven’t progressed that far yet. Leah and Helen are much more advanced. So far I’m just doing his diet plan for me, and he’s very firm about not drinking, not for any of us.”

  “Which brings me back to why haven’t you told me about Tony before,” Mrs. Potter began, when the continuing voice from the television altered in pitch and
volume, announcing the start of the local island news.

  “Edith Rosborough, secretary to the well-known Nantucket attorney Mr. Oscar deBevereaux, died early this afternoon at the Nantucket Cottage Hospital,” the voice told them as the picture on the screen showed a large white building.

  “Miss Rosborough celebrated a birthday lunch today in company with members of the Nantucket Ladies Softball League, of which she is president. Apparently choking on a morsel of food, she was rushed unconscious to the hospital from the Scrimshaw Inn, where the birthday luncheon took place. A hospital spokesperson says that an allergic reaction may have caused the strangulation.”

  The two women stared at the blurred screen, then at each other, in compassionate and shocked disbelief. “Oh no, “Gussie exclaimed. “They were having such a wonderful time, the bunch of them.”

  “Ozzie will be shattered,” Mrs. Potter thought to say. “Shouldn’t we call him? Or shall we go over? It’s just a step.”

  “Let’s wait until morning,” Gussie decided. “The poor guy is in terrible shape these days. Let’s just hope he’s sitting in his hot bath now, as he says he always does at the end of the day to ease his joints, and then popping into his warm bed, poor old dear.”

  6

  Mrs. Potter awoke, on the first day of her return to Nantucket, rested and happy. She stretched, catlike, in the canopied bed. Faint light in the windows told her that January dawn was approaching the island, and the muffled sound of an early truck on the cobblestones told her it had snowed in the night. She snuggled down again in smooth, fragrant old linen sheets, beneath a silk-covered down comforter.

  At last she reached with a toe for the slippers beside her bed and slid out of the luxurious cocoon of the guest room bed. She crossed the room, her step soundless on the old oriental scatter rugs spaced on the polished, wide-planked floor. She splashed water on her face and brushed her teeth at the enormous marble washstand in the big bathroom and put on a warm pink robe.