The Nantucket Diet Murders Read online

  Quietly she descended the wide stairway, its cushioned carpeting soundless under her feet, one hand on the smooth mahogany stair rail to assure her safe passage toward the pale light showing through heavy leaded-glass sidelights flanking the big solid front door.

  Familiar with every inch of her old friend’s house, Mrs. Potter now doubled back past the long low chest in the hall, glad to see that it still bore the huge Chinese vase and the heavy brass candlesticks she remembered, as she headed for the kitchen at the back of the house.

  Outside in front, Mrs. Potter knew, was an imposing facade, presenting a double set of granite steps to the cobble-stoned street. Their twin curves of iron railing ended in shining globes of polished brass, matching the gleam of the heavy knocker on the door above.

  She also knew that Gussie’s first question on interviewing a prospective new cleaning woman was “How do you feel about brass?” Once a week, summer and winter, someone had to polish these glories of an earlier age. Gussie occasionally had to remind a reluctant helper, “It has to be done; there are just you and me; you might as well know which of us I elect for the job.” It would have been unthinkable for Gussie to let the brasses, indoors or out, become dull and neglected, even if she herself sometimes proved to be the only one to do the polishing.

  “I shouldn’t be allowed to live in this house if I don’t intend to keep it up,” Gussie always said. “I love it, and also it’s kind of a public trust, in a funny way. Theo felt the same way about it from the first, and we decided that if we couldn’t afford to take care of the place, we shouldn’t buy it.”

  Gussie had continued to live in the house in her days as Mrs. Jules Berner. It had been their summer home for the thirty years of their marriage, alternating with winter city headquarters in a ten-room duplex apartment high above the East River.

  During those years, Mrs. Potter and Lew had occasionally stayed in the same elegant old guest room when their own house on ’Sacacha Pond was not yet open for the summer. They and their children had come there over the years to dinner parties and breakfasts and lunches and holiday gatherings, just as Gussie and Jules and Marilyn and Scott had come to Quidnet. As parents they had shared numberless cups of tea or coffee in the big old kitchen, either in the sunny corner looking out onto the big garden in the back, or cozy in soft chairs in front of the kitchen fireplace. Their children knew in both houses where to find Nabiscos or peanut butter, and in later years where they were expected., on occasion, to find a bed and, if necessary, the sheets for it. She knew her way to the pantry, the liquor closet, the garden, the books in the library.

  This morning she was sure she made no sound as she came to the old swinging doors at the back of the hallway leading to the kitchen. It was wonderful, she thought, to be visiting in a house where she felt free to get up at her usual ranch hour, knowing she could make her early morning tea without wakening or inconveniencing the household.

  The kitchen was dim, as had been the front hall as she slipped through the quiet door, but a light from the big pantry, off at her left, made her stop short.

  “Caught you!” Her hostess appeared in the lighted doorway. “Thought you’d sneak down for your tea, did you? Didn’t know I get up early these days too? Well, you’ll know when you learn more about Tony’s program. I was expecting you—the kettle’s just ready to boil.

  “Cranberry muffins sound good?” she continued as Mrs. Potter was making the tea. “I wish I could toast some Portuguese bread for you, but for now you’ll have to make do with these, hotted up from the freezer. I made them before I began Tony’s diet.”

  Slightly surprised to know that Gussie’s own breakfast was to be only the glass of pale juice she had carried in from the pantry, Mrs. Potter assured her that homemade cranberry muffins would be a great treat. The two were still sitting comfortably in bathrobes and slippers when they heard a light stamping of snow boots at the kitchen door opening to the side porch of the house.

  “You’re out early, Bethie!” Gussie exclaimed. “How about a hot muffin? I’ll make you a cup of coffee—I know you prefer it in the morning, but Genia likes her tea and Tony has ruled out coffee for me, so I’m afraid it will have to be instant.”

  Instant suited Beth very nicely, and she’d love a cranberry muffin. From the pocket of her coat she produced a small vial holding artificial sweetener. “Aren’t you proud of me?” she asked. “I’m really going to get serious about this diet idea, and I thought I’d begin right away, even before I go to see your miracle man.” She was out for a morning walk, something she and Jim had always done together, even back in his Boston newspaper days.

  “Not a soul out yet in this lovely light snow when I came down India Street,” she said. “I don’t know when it started. It hadn’t begun when I walked down to Ozzie’s at the end of the day yesterday, shortly after dark, right after I heard the TV news about Edie Rosborough. Isn’t that dreadful? That poor girl—and I kept thinking of Helen’s Lolly, too. Helen said she was Lolly’s first real friend. She must feel so sad.”

  Beth sighed. “Anyway, after I heard the news I thought I’d try to cheer Ozzie up a little, or at least tell him how sorry I was, and then I remembered I was going to take him some of my dried comfrey. To make tea for his arthritis, you know, and for whatever else is ailing him.”

  She sighed again. “I couldn’t rouse him, though. Maybe he was soaking in his tub, or he may have been at the hospital making arrangements about Edie, although there were lights on upstairs in his living room.”

  As she broke open a hot, crusty brown muffin and lavishly buttered the first morsel, she exclaimed with pleased surprise, momentarily forgetting Oscar deBevereaux and the comfrey. “Whole cranberries!” she marveled. “They’re delicious—but I thought you always had to chop them up for muffins. I always do.”

  “Aren’t they pretty?” Mrs. Potter agreed. “I haven’t seen whole cranberries used like this since my Grandmother Andrews made individual steamed puddings with them.”

  “You might find them a bit tart,” Gussie warned them, “except that the bran muffin part seems sweet enough to me to temper the bite. Probably your grandmother’s puddings had a sweet sauce that did the same thing.”

  “A fluffy hard sauce, as I remember,” Mrs. Potter said. “I can taste it now. Cool and rich, vanilla-flavored, with a sort of slippery feeling on the tongue.”

  “I’d love both recipes,” Beth told them, buttering another morsel of muffin. “Don’t you adore cranberries! Do you think they’re Nantucket’s most special native food?”

  Nothing more Nantuckety, they agreed. Cranberry sauce and cranberry conserve, lattice-topped cranberry pie (“Mock cherry, they used to call it,” Gussie said), cranberry nut bread and molded cranberry salad and even cranberry dumplings.

  “Cranberried sweet potatoes,” Beth said yearningly, “cranberry cake, cranberry cobbler, cranberry pecan pie. And my cranberry fluff, if I can ever find that recipe.”

  “Would you believe cranberry soup?” Gussie asked. “It’s delicious—sort of a cranberry borscht, with beets and chicken broth. It was in that New England cookbook Mary Allen Havemayer did, when they had the Book Corner, remember? She was a wonderful cook.”

  “How about Swamp Fires?” Mrs. Potter put in unexpectedly. “I’m not much for vodka myself, but it’s a terrific party punch. We served it at our ranch Christmas parties—at first just with the thought of offering something new to our Arizona neighbors, and then after that almost by popular request. It got to be quite a ranch tradition. Cranberry juice, vodka, and champagne—that was the general idea of it.”

  “Trust you to think of Swamp Fires, Genia,” Gussie said. “Always ready for a drink.”

  “Reformed characters are always so holy,” Mrs. Potter retorted. “I’m sure we got that punch recipe from you. And I know we learned to make beach plum slivovitz right here in this very kitchen. You fill a quart jar with whole, washed beach plums, add a teaspoonful of sugar, and pour in good 151-proof rum to th
e top. Then you set it away and forget it for a year, at least. Am I right?”

  Gussie rose, rather grandly, to put on the kettle for fresh tea and coffee. “Be that as it may,” she said, “we’re talking about whether cranberries are the food most people associate with Nantucket.”

  “No,” Beth asserted positively. “Nor bay scallops, superb as they are, nor beach plums. There’s only one food that’s really Nantucket, and that’s Portuguese bread.”

  Ignoring the truth that Cape Cod might make the same claim, or New Bedford, or other places on the coast where Portuguese sailors and fishermen had settled, the three nodded in complete agreement. Portuguese bread was, for most residents and visitors to the island, Nantucket’s most special and memorable gastronomic delight. Pale and crusty on the outside, each small round loaf was unbelievably creamy and long-lasting within. Delicious fresh from Manny’s ovens, it still tasted fresh for two days, if it ever lasted that long. After that, it became a new delight, sliced and toasted.

  There had been a time when Mrs. Potter had worked hard at trying to duplicate, or even approximate, Manny’s Portuguese bread, once the bakeshop was closed for the winter. She collected every recipe she could find for French bread, Cuban bread, Puerto Rican bread, all of which, the cookbooks assured her, were the same thing as Portuguese. They were not.

  Those formally called Portuguese bread were invariably of the sweet, egg-bread, Easter-bread variety. Nice, but totally unrelated to the unprettied goodness of real Nantucket Portuguese bread.

  Mrs. Potter had approached proper, black-clad Portuguese great-grandmothers on the island and on the Cape and had filled her notebooks with their claims to the one and only authentic recipe. (Younger Portuguese descendants denied any bread-making knowledge or interest.) Her friends had been periodically invited to lunch or dine to sample each latest attempt, then pressed into accepting foil-wrapped loaves for their freezers. Some of these breads were fair, some were awful, but even the best had never been Portuguese bread—not the bread Manny turned out in dozens and dozens of firm round blond loaves each day from late spring to late fall.

  There came a day each November when Manny declared bastante. He pulled down the bakery blinds. He took himself off to his own condominium in Fort Lauderdale, where, as they all knew, he had genuine crystal chandeliers. There, everyone felt sure, he stuffed himself comfortably all winter with soggy pizza, stale hamburger buns, and soft white sandwich bread, with an occasional cold, hard bagel to exercise his dentes.

  “But to go back to Ozzie,” Beth reminded them, sighing. “I wonder how he’s taking the news about Edie.”

  “Her death will be a terrible loss to him, I imagine,” Mrs. Potter said. “Didn’t she really run the office? And, just between the three of us, has Ozzie been completely on the ball as a lawyer for years?”

  “Oh, yes, he’s sharp enough, and we still all go to him,” Gussie said. “He handles Mittie’s affairs as a trustee, and Leah’s. I don’t know about Mary Lynne, since Bo’s estate is still in probate in Tennessee. Dee goes to him for real estate contracts, and even Helen has him make out her tax returns, although she seems to be an absolute whiz at managing her own investments. I sometimes wonder if she wishes she were still running the company back in Chicago—she did for a while, you remember, after Lester’s death. She’s the only one of us, I guess, besides me, who doesn’t have everything all neatly tucked away in a trust.”

  “My son Laurence takes care of everything for me,” Beth said. “Such a help, and a saving, too. We try to keep everything in the family.”

  This seemed reasonable, since Beth’s was a large tribe, most of them living within close range, in and around Providence. Among them they maintained several big Nantucket summer houses on Hurlbut Avenue, their sandy beaches adjoining. There all the Higginson grandchildren spent the summer, seemingly distributed impartially among whichever of the aunts and uncles Were currently in residence. They all sailed, they all played tennis, the Yacht Club was their second home, and they all won prizes at everything they did, following the lead of their energetic and athletic grandmother.

  The talk reverted to widowhood (as it often did, Mrs. Potter reflected) and to whether it was a comfort to have had one’s husband arrange for a supposedly all-wise, permanent, fatherly trust department—a law firm or a bank—to be in charge of one’s worldly goods.

  “I always thought it was the slightest bit presumptuous of Lew,” Mrs. Potter confessed. “I suppose it’s good not to have to think about investments and the like, not that I have nearly as much to think about as Helen does, or as you do, Gussie. Still, it did irk me a little, and I asked him once, after reading some new wills he’d had drawn up for us, why there was a trust for me if he died first, but not for him if I did. He muttered something about ‘women sometimes get carried away by their emotions, especially as they get older.’ That, from Lew! And about me! I told him I thought he was just as likely to get wacky in his old age as I was.”

  “There have been times when I wished Theo and Jules had done that,” Gussie confided. “Leave things for me in a trust, that is. But Theo and I were so young when he died, and he’d made so much money in a hurry with that invention of his, and then he was killed so suddenly . . . ”

  Mrs. Potter had a sharp recollection of the day she heard the news of the hunting accident in the Vermont woods. How awful it must have been for Gussie, she thought, as she had so many times since then. Each of them hunting alone—the four of them—Theo, Gussie, and another couple, the husband a friend with whom Theo had gone deer hunting since the two men’s college days together. The stray shot from somewhere, never determined. Theo’s body, bloody and already lifeless on the brown carpet of the woods floor before any of them had found him.

  Gussie went on, after her brief pause. “You’d think that of all people Jules Berner would have set up a trust, wouldn’t you? After handling other people’s money all his life, and always having all we possibly needed ourselves? Jules was a wonderful husband, as you two both remember, but he couldn’t bear the thought of being that much older than me. Remember how he always had to outplay everybody at tennis and outdance everybody on the floor and outswim everybody at the beach club? His lawyers told me after his death that he’d been putting them off, saying he’d get around to a proper trust in good time, that sort of tiling. Through his partners I’ve always had wonderful people to advise me, and I usually do what they suggest, but actually I’m quite free to do as I like. I could set up a home for cross-eyed cats, if I wanted to.”

  Again, Gussie paused. “I guess everybody knew what was happening with Gordon. He lived on my money, and it was a good thing there was enough, considering his medical bills. There certainly wasn’t anything for him to leave, or to set up any trust with.”

  “We all thought the Van Vleecks had oceans of money,” Beth said, surprised. “He and his mother had come to the island starting with the year one, and they seemed very well off, I always thought.”

  “Mama Van Vleeck had it,” Gussie said flatly, “but she certainly didn’t part with any of it for Gordon when we got married. She was furious about that—do you remember?”

  Mrs. Potter did indeed remember. “She was a holy terror, no doubt about it,” she said. “And she’d counted on Gordon for so many years to be a darling and dutiful son that she probably felt deserted. Or maybe she just thought he didn’t need it when he married you. After all, Gussie, no one ever thought that you had to worry about money, and she knew he’d be well taken care of.”

  All three women then agreed that, no matter how their financial futures were arranged, or even how apparently secure, inflation had made changes in their lives.

  “That’s one of the things different on the island,” Beth told her. “Everybody feels the pinch a little if they live on a fixed income, even if it’s quite a decent one, I suppose. None of us really lives extravagantly.”

  “I think Mittie may be a little pressed these days,” Gussie said, “although
she’s too proud to admit it. And Dee, of course—it’s crazy, but she always seems to be living on the brink of total poverty in spite of all her big real estate commissions and special discounts.”

  “Another change—we all lock our doors,” Beth said. “We never used to. And I even have a big dog. Samson would make a terrible watchdog, but I hope nobody but me knows that. He’s big, anyway, and he barks a lot. I left him at home to guard things now, even though I’m sure I left the door locked, too. I even went back to check when I was halfway down the block. Is anybody as forgetful as I am, I wonder?”

  The other two assured her they were, out of politeness and also perhaps from awareness of the occasional blank drawn in place of a familiar word or name.

  “So we all lock our doors, and Helen even has a security system that rings at the police building,” Gussie said. “She wouldn’t have a gun in the house, of course, after what happened to Les, but I think the rest of us all have one stuck away somewhere that we refuse to admit and would be afraid to shoot.”

  “Ozzie doesn’t lock his doors,” Beth remarked. “I told you I was there late yesterday afternoon? When he didn’t come to the door, I just shouted upstairs to him from the kitchen and left the comfrey.”

  The telephone rang. “Answer it, will you, Genia?” Gussie asked. “I want to get this round of muffins out of the oven for you and Beth.”

  Helen Latham’s voice was calm and controlled. “Oh, yes, Genia. Yes, I can speak with you just as well. You both must know by now about poor little Edie Rosborough, and I wanted you to know they were wonderful at the hospital. Arnold was called in at once, and he tells me the girl apparently had a violent allergic reaction to some sort of vegetable matter, possibly one of the herbs at the salad bar.”

  Mrs. Potter expressed dismay, but Helen cut her short. “What I really called about is that I’m here at the hospital again now for an early conference with the administrator, and there’s even more shocking news. At least shocking to all of us. Ozzie deBevereaux died last night. At home. Apparently a sudden heart attack. Arnold stopped by his house about nine to tell him about their not being able to do anything for Edie. Of course, he thought Ozzie knew about her dying, and I expect he did, although I tried to phone him earlier and the line was always busy—phone probably off the hook. Anyway, Arnold found the lights on, went upstairs, and there he was, in his big chair in front of the fireplace. I suppose it wasn’t entirely unexpected, in Ozzie’s state of health, although the heart trouble hadn’t shown up before. Terrible, isn’t it?”