The Nantucket Diet Murders Page 8

  “If we’re going to go past everyone’s houses without going all the way around by Main Street,” she said after Ted had gone on, “let’s take my shortcut.”

  This, apparently unknown even to Gussie, led them back a few doors down Orange Street, then along a nearly obscure path (really too close to someone’s house for daytime use, Mrs. Potter realized, which meant she must: have used it as a quick way to reach some Orange Street friend’s house in the evening) through a small jagged break in a tall hedge and hence into the parking lot of St. Paul’s, and from there out into Fair Street.

  Gussie, while applauding the footwork, vetoed a second suggestion: that they stop at the church to admire the Tiffany windows. Instead, she led Mrs. Potter to the front of the church, where the lettered wooden sign proclaimed the hours of worship. “See anything different?” she asked.

  It took only a moment for Mrs. Potter to see what was missing. “It used to say ‘Enter, Rest, and Pray,’” she said, “and there was something about being open twenty-four hours.”

  “Beth told you you’d find changes,” Gussie said.

  As she spoke, a tap on the window in the adjoining parish hall caught their attention. “Come on in,” mouthed the kitten face below the pale fluff of hair. She beckoned, then with difficulty pushed up the old wooden window sash.

  “Terrible about Ozzie,” Leah said, now audible. “Helen called. She’s been trying to get Mary Lynne to tell her, too, but her phone was busy as usual. I wonder if she knows?”

  Gussie and Mrs. Potter nodded emphatically.

  “I’m about to demonstrate basic altar arrangements for our new members—want to watch?” Leah asked, drawing back from the window, her hands sheltering her hair from the breeze.

  Gussie was pleasant but definite, as she had been with Mary Lynne. “Wish we could—haven’t time,” she called back. “Meals on Wheels day for me and Beth, remember?”

  A bearded young man in a sweat shirt appeared at Leah’s side and helped close the window, waving genially at Gussie as he did, and peering questioningly at Mrs. Potter.

  “New rector,” Gussie explained. “You’ll meet him Sunday. About Leah—she’s an expert on altar flowers, you remember. The new members of the Altar Guild are lucky to have her showing them how. It’s a very special art. It was the one thing she did keep on doing, all these years she’s been widowed, other than take care of that house of hers. Of course, you could see for yourself yesterday how she’s changed since she started going to Tony.”

  “I agree with Beth about all the changes around here,” Mrs. Potter said, “but at least the names of the streets are the same.” They entered a small lane across from the church. “I love this one, ‘Lucretia Mott.’ One of the Coffins, wasn’t she? Early feminist? Reformer? Anyway, a heroine. And now this darling little one-block lane named for her.”

  She began to laugh. “If they ever name one for you, it’s going to have to be longer than this just for the street sign. How’d you like to be remembered for ‘Mary Augusta Baines Andrews Berner Van Vleeck Street’?”

  Gussie said she did not find this even slightly amusing. Instead, she pointed down the next street toward the old carriage house once belonging to Mittie’s parents, now remodeled and presently occupied by Dee.

  “I can’t believe Dee’s being so downright unpleasant and spiteful about Tony,” she said. “Just because they couldn’t make a go of their marriage when they were both young and had very demanding and separate careers, she’s going out of her way now, it seems to me, to say horrid and belittling things about him. It isn’t like her.”

  It also was not like Gussie to sound so critical. She knew, as well as Mrs. Potter did, that Dee—former fashion editor and now successful and independent in real estate sales—was adored by everyone on the island, from the greasiest garage mechanic to the starchiest summer headwaiter. She was beloved of every shop owner, every visiting artist and musician and actor. She was popular with several different sets of fashionable summer people as well as with the established winter and year-round society of which Les Girls were a part.

  In fact, Mrs. Potter was tempted to remind Gussie of all this, simply by comparing Dee’s position in the community with Helen Latham’s. Helen’s managerial skills were legendary, she was skilled at pointing wealthy donors in the direction of worthy causes, she carried her own impressive aura of wealth. Yet more people liked and trusted Dee.

  At the same time, Mrs. Potter also privately wondered, as she often had in the past, not speaking her thoughts aloud for fear of adding fuel to Gussie’s ire, why it was that this chic, well-dressed, successful woman—charming, talented—was what the Potter children would only have described as a mooch?

  As they neared the carriage house, Mrs. Potter knew she must seize this chance for a talk with Dee. “Mind if I run up and see the place for a minute?” she asked. “Dee’s little car is in the drive, so I expect she’s home. I’ll be home in—half an hour, all right?”

  “Don’t forget this was your getting-acquainted-again walk,” Gussie reminded her. “Pay attention to Ozzie’s house across the street when you leave Dee’s, and then be sure to look down Pleasant Street at the Shrine.” She pointed, with a glint of amusement, in the direction of Leah’s big house. “Thank heaven she’s letting up on dear sainted Fanwell. And you’ll go by Mittie’s house and Helen’s as you come down Main Street. But be back by eleven thirty—you hear me?”

  10

  “I should have called you first,” Mrs. Potter apologized when Dee opened the door at the top of the outside stairway. “Do you want a morning visitor for about fifteen minutes?”

  “Come in! Welcome to the new chez Ferencz,” Dee said, with a wide flash of white teeth. “No, with Tony on the local scene, I can’t say that. This is most definitely chez moi and moi alone. This is a great time, and I have a half hour before I show some property out beyond Dionis.

  “And, yes, I know about Ozzie’s heart attack,” she continued. “Helen called me. I wish I’d run over last evening to check on him after I heard the evening news and knew his secretary had died. Anyway, come on in and see what you think of the place.”

  The apartment spoke more of Mittie the owner than of Dee the tenant. Its furnishing was a monument to the tastes and hobbies of Ab Leland, Mittie’s late husband. Ab’s collection of old wooden decoys was displayed on open shelves everywhere, or had been made into bases for table lamps. Ab’s tennis trophies ranged on the living room mantel. Prints depicting ducks and geese in flight, hunting dogs, horses, and boats under full canvas covered the walls. A full-rigged ship’s model topped the television set. A ship’s sextant had its place among the decoys in the bookshelves, and a brass ship’s clock was striking the hour.

  “Six bells, eleven o’clock,” Dee announced, with an air of resigned amusement. “Mittie furnished this place with a lot of Abbott’s special treasures and she thinks it’s perfect, of course. I sometimes wonder why she didn’t make room for them in the ancestral house up front.” She pointed across the stretch of lawn to the back of the old house.

  “I think it’s all quite perfect for what she first had in mind,” Mrs. Potter said boldy. “Summer rental, wasn’t it? It’s charming for that, but I can see that it might be a bit much for really living in, and it doesn’t seem your sort of place at all.”

  Dee shrugged. “I shouldn’t complain. At least the price is right—zilch. Mittie asked me to use the place as a favor to her, you know. I think she’s timid about being alone since Ab died, and it seems to be a help to her to have a friend in the apartment. I go across to have dinner with her every night I can—every night I’m home. She says it’s easier to cook for two than for one, and my contribution is washing the dishes, since we all know I can hardly boil water.”

  Varying viewpoints, Mrs. Potter reflected. A generous and now regretted invitation from Mittie, or Dee’s generous concern for a possibly lonely friend?

  In the case that Beth (or was it Gussie?) had been right
about Mittie’s need for money, Mrs. Potter ventured another comment. “You’re so good at finding the right tenants for people,” she said. “Maybe by summer Mittie won’t need so much bolstering, and when you find a place that seems more like you, you can help her with renting this apartment.”

  Dee was silent. I’ve gone too far, Mrs. Potter thought abjectly. We all know Dee is a penny pincher and we love her in spite of it. Now I’ve appeared to accuse her of sponging, and that’s not at all the reason I came to see her. I’m going to change the subject immediately, although what I’m asking may prove awkward too.

  “Dee, remember the first day I was back?” she said, interrupting a perceptible moment of silence. “Everyone was singing the praises of your former husband, and you told them something I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. ‘You’ll all be sorry,’ you said, or something like that.”

  Dee’s questioning eyebrows were her only response.

  “Why do I want to know?” Mrs. Potter answered the eyebrows. “You’ve certainly seen that all of our friends have—what’s the expression?—have flipped their wigs over your Tony.”

  “I told them, and I told you, Genia, not my Tony. We separated long before the two years we were married.”

  “I’m not prying just for gossip,” Mrs. Potter persisted. “What worries me is that Gussie may be really falling for the man. She’s a wonderful person, Dee—you know that. And she’s awfully vulnerable. She needs being married, she needs someone to cherish and look after and look up to, all at once. It’s what she was born for, and she was absolutely wonderful for all three of the men she was married to—Theo, then Jules, and finally even Gordon Van Vleeck.”

  “Who was a total disaster,” Dee remarked. “He lived like a leech on Gussie’s money, and he was a bore and a complainer and a terrible hypochondriac.”

  “She didn’t know enough about him before they were married,” Mrs. Potter said, meanwhile reminded by the word leech that Dee was, in spite of her disclaimer about being there for Mittie’s sake, not only living rent free but apparently also as a freeloading nightly dinner guest.

  “You want to know about Tony before Gussie gets in too deep?” Dee asked wryly. She paused. “There are a lot of things I could tell you, and one in particular I probably should, but won’t. I think I’ll just tell you a story about three beautiful people, quite a long time ago.”

  Mrs. Potter waited expectantly.

  “Let’s say there was a rising young lawyer and his beautiful wife and they lived in a beautiful house on its own beautiful beach on Long Island, and they were very rich. Everyone thought they had everything in the world to live for. And they thought so too, particularly since the third person was their beautiful daughter—cute as a button, bright and popular, and the joy of their lives.”

  Mrs. Potter felt a sudden cold lump in her midsection. This was not going to be a happy story.

  Dee continued. “The rich young lawyer and his beautiful wife thought the sun rose and set on their beautiful child. She was blond and tanned and a natural athlete, but, as young teen-agers are likely to be, a little—shall we say, chunky? Not fat, mind you, except the way a puppy is fat, or maybe a young seal or a little bear.”

  Mrs. Potter’s sense of foreboding increased.

  “I did tell you that our rich young lawyer and his beautiful wife were fashionable people, didn’t I? Their pictures were in the flossiest magazines, Éclat among them. They were trend setters, and also, I suppose, trend followers.

  “About that time a young man arrived in New York. Tall, handsome, aristocratic. A touch of European accent. A way with women that had them all hanging on his every word, and a plan for getting rich by letting them listen to him. ‘Do what I tell you, lovely ladies,’ he said to them in effect, ‘and I will make you more beautiful than you ever dreamed and I will keep you that way forever.’”

  Mrs. Potter listened, seeing that tall young swordsman’s figure.

  “To make his plan successful, this young man—the newcomer with the air of an aristocrat, the appeal of a tomcat,” Dee spat out the words, “this young man had to become known to the women of society. He had to make himself fashionable.

  “And what was his road to acceptance? His picture must appear in the right magazines, he must be interviewed by the right people, he must be seen with the right people. And who could better help him with this than an ambitious young woman who had just been made editor of Éclat?”

  Dee abandoned the role of storyteller. “Oh, damn it, Genia, I was insecure and lonely, and afraid somebody in New York would find out what a small-town hick I really was. I looked like a fashion editor ought to look—I was born with the right bones and my mother had been a dressmaker who made all my clothes and taught me how to wear them. I studied journalism in college and I learned something about the trade in a good department store, working summers, I’d written about fashions and women’s features on my hometown newspaper. Most of all, I worked very hard. But inside, if you can believe it, I was still scared.” She paused. “Now I’ve never told this to anyone else before . . .”

  Mrs. Potter slowly nodded, the gesture her promise that Dee’s confidence would be safe.

  “What nobody knows,” Dee went on, “is that five years before all this happened, I got on a plane in Altoona as Dora Stell Grumbley. After two free airline drinks I decided one thing. Dora Stell Grumbley wouldn’t make it. When the plane got to La Guardia, it was Dee St. Germain who got off.”

  “Nice,” was Mrs. Potter’s comment. “I like that—it must have been fun.”

  “It helped,” Dee admitted. “Still, even when I got the job at the magazine, and the top job five years later, I was still pretending to be a lot more assured than I felt You can put together this part of the story pretty fast. Ambitious young foreign aristocrat on the make. Ambitious young editor just as much so. Dee St. Germain becomes Countess Ferencz, which gives her a real title and a feeling that she’s at last part of the international high society her magazine is written for.”

  She went on. “Tony Ferencz is launched as a sensational, successful, world-famous authority on health and beauty. Society women are falling all over themselves to become his first American clients.”

  On the floor beside Dee’s chair, on a spread newspaper, were two pairs of shoes, a tin of clear shoe wax, and a polishing cloth. She touched a shoe tentatively, found it dry, picked it up, and began to rub it briskly. Mrs. Potter knew instinctively that the plain dark leather pumps and the English walking shoes, clearly not new, were intended to remain in service for more years to come.

  Dee continued as she polished each shoe in turn. “Sorry about the background soap opera,” she said lightly. “I’ve never told anyone this before, except to say Tony and I were once married. The story I started to tell you was about the three beautiful people on Long Island—the; young lawyer and his wife and their darling, but ever so slightly chubby, daughter Marthé.”

  Mrs. Potter found herself continuing the story. “Fashionable new young foreign authority attracts the attention of the young wife, along with her friends,” she told Dee slowly. “Daughter persuades herself that, as her mother and her mother’s friends say, ‘you can’t be too rich or too thin.’ Am I right?”

  “To put the most generous possible interpretation on it, Tony didn’t know as much about diet then as he may know now,” Dee said. “Maybe he wasn’t aware of the fact that the child was actually ill—anorexia nervosa, of course. No matter how thin they get to be, young girls especially, they’re convinced they’re still overweight, even when they’re down to matchsticks.”

  “Tony did that to Ozzie deBevereaux’s daughter?” Mrs. Potter asked somberly.

  “He should have known. Whether in stupid ignorance he killed her with a terrible diet, or whether he neglected proper treatment once she was really ill, I don’t know. I don’t imagine the distinction was important to Ozzie and Bunny once Marthé had passed the point of no return.”

  Mrs. Pot
ter recalled Gussie’s earlier words. Ozzie’s wife and daughter had both died years ago.

  Dee forestalled her question. “Bunny died of heartbreak, I think. She always felt it was her fault, just as I’ve always known it was partly mine, for having launched Tony in his career.”

  “And Ozzie—how did he feel?” Mrs. Potter asked. “About blame, that is?”

  “There’s no doubt about that part of the story,” Dee said flatly. “In Ozzie’s mind, Tony Ferencz was a murderer. First of his child, indirectly of his wife. It’s just lucky for Tony that poor Ozzie is dead. Anyway—so now you know the story. It’s just one of the reasons I say everybody is going to be sorry Tony ever came here.

  “Now let me scrub my hands,” she said, “and put away these shoes. I’ll show you the kitchen and the rest of the apartment.”

  In Dee’s small, rather bare kitchen Mrs. Potter saw the trademark dark brown felt hat on a newspaper, its brim covered with yellow granules. “Cleaning it with cornmeal, the way my mother taught me,” Dee explained. “I’ll have to brush it now, if you’ll forgive me for going on with my various jobs. I do have to meet my clients soon. They’re staying at the Jared Coffin and they’ve asked me to lunch there before we start looking at property.”

  Mrs. Potter made the expected quick tour of the rest of the apartment—two small bedrooms and a new and quite elegant bathroom. “It all looks exactly like Mittie,” she remarked as she prepared to leave. “All her favorite colors, even to the bright pink of the towels and the pink-and-green-flowered shower curtain.”

  As she left hastily, to allow Dee time to make her appointment, she remembered that she had referred to yet another and perhaps even more disturbing story about her former husband. For now, there was no more time and she had enough to think about. If Ozzie and his secretary had died because of their knowledge of this past, unhappy secret—a preposterous thought—it was clear that Tony would be the prime suspect. Gussie was not going to like this at all.