The Nantucket Diet Murders (2 page)

“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 bangs—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.

“Oh, we have
men
, Mary Lynne, such as they are,” Dee said, with a touch of acidity. “Our old lawyer, our old doctor, our old lush of a stockbroker, our nonwriting author-in-residence, our pet poodle retired clergyman. And of course Peter, here at the Scrim.” Dee lowered her voice. “Peter is the exception, as you well know. The rest of them are pretty much on their last legs, if you ask me.”

“Dee, honey, the
health
of our dear boys is not the
point,”
Mary Lynne went on. “It’s just
how many
of them there are.” Her voice never lost its tentative, questioning lilt. “Most places there aren’t half as many men as women our age, don’t you know, Dee? Lordy, back in Chattanooga there are never
enough to go around, my friends write me, of any age or state of debility whatsoever.”

“Get back to the new man, Mary Lynne. I know the old ones,” Mrs. Potter prompted. “And what does he have to do with how thin you all are? I can’t believe you’re all wasting away in unrequited love, at our age, at least not all for the same man.”

There was a perceptible pause, and then Leah spoke, the pale fluff of her hair still a shock, as was the green sparkle of her slanted eyes. “It’s unbelievable, Genia,” she said. “Everything’s different since Tony came. That was last June, and now he’s staying all winter. It’s a miracle.”

“Leah calls him the
Master
, “another member of the group put in unexpectedly. Mittie’s clear, slightly nasal New England voice was flat and self-assured. “She says she’s joking, but she really
does
. I think that’s sacrilegious, and incidentally, Leah, so does George Enderbridge. The Altar Guild was a little bit shocked, too, to hear you’d said that, and I think you should know.”

“Don’t be silly,” Leah said. “Until I began to call him Tony, I just said ‘Doctor.’ He prefers that to his real title, he told me so.”

“Oh, a new
doctor,”
Mrs. Potter said. ‘’How does dear Arnold feel about that? What does he say about a new man coming in and taking over his patients? Or is Arnold ready to retire?”

“Tony isn’t a
doctor
doctor,” Mittie assured her quickly. “He’s frank with me about this, naturally, knowing of Daddy’s former standing in the academic world. Tony’s degree is Ph.D., and he studied at Heidelberg. Anyway, you don’t go to him for the flu or a broken leg. His field is health and beauty.”

Mittie’s light brown hair was smoothly turned under in the same pageboy style she had worn for years. The bright pink scarf, high on her throat above her pastel-striped wool pullover, exactly matched the pink of her well-fitted wool pants, both garments looking exactly like those—except for being much smaller—Mrs. Potter thought Mittie might have worn two years ago, when she last saw her.

Mittie, like the others, had never been really fat (although Mary Lynne had been close to it, Mrs. Potter recalled), but her gently settling shape had been that of one who had given up the sports of her proper New England upbringing—tennis, sailing, skiing, swimming—for bird-watching and needle-Work. Her love for gardening was in landscape design, not in stooping and bending and digging. While her life had become more sedentary, the years of outdoor sports, of sun and wind, had left their mark on Mittie’s fair skin, etching it with a network of fine lines, which now seemed more deeply wrinkled.

Mary Lynne’s soft, questioning voice continued her place in the talk. “You
know
, Genia, honey,” she said seriously, “that we’ve all tried pretty much to keep ourselves up to the mark?” Mrs. Potter nodded expected agreement. “The thing is, now we have someone giving
direction
to our lives.”

“This is absolute rubbish,” Dee, Countess Ferencz, whispered into Mrs. Potter’s right ear.

Helen Latham’s clear midwestern voice, used to authority, now took firm command. “What everyone is trying to tell you, Genia, is that a remarkable man has come to the island, and I can’t imagine why Gussie hasn’t told you all about him. I met him first—he came here visiting old New York friends at the start of last summer—and he insisted on taking a personal interest in my case from the start. I see a great future for him here.”

“Whatever he’s doing, you’re the thinnest of all,” Mrs. Potter said. She remembered Helen’s undefined and unremarkable square shape, her somewhat heavy jaw and features, her stiffly set dark hair. Presiding at a committee meeting, Helen always made Mrs. Potter think of a Roman emperor. No, better yet, of Mussolini, one hand upraised to command instant silence and attention.

Helen today was a tiny, rigid doll whose dark fluff of hair seemed a—chocolate? no,
cocoa
—version of the pale lemon-vanilla cotton candy on Leah’s head, or Mary Lynne’s of spun maple syrup. Cotton candy, fragile and full of air. Larry was
clearly outdoing himself with his newly and fashionably thin year-round regulars.

Mary Lynne’s soft voice again regained the floor. “You can see we’re all learning so
much
, Genia, darling,” she said. Mrs. Potter nodded expectantly. Her friends smiled back at her.

Impatiently, she broke the silence. “I can’t stand this any longer,” she told them. “Gussie, you’re responsible for my being back on Nantucket. If you expect me to unpack my bags at your house after lunch, tell me.
What’s going on with you all?”

Mrs. Potter’s hostess squirmed. “I was going to give you the full rundown later,” she said, “but since you’ve brought us this far, with your usual nose-poking”—and she gave Mrs. Potter’s arm another affectionate squeeze—”you might as well hear the whole story about our wonderful new celebrity on the island. I can’t wait for you to meet him.”

“Celebrity, my foot,” Dee said flatly. “Resident, yes, and you all think you have a wonderful new magic man, and yes, you’re all certainly
thin
. What Genia has to know is that the miracle man is Count Valerian Mikai Alexander Antonescu Ferencz, no less. It’s Tony, Genia,
my
Tony. At least he was my Tony for two years, which was exactly twenty-three months too long. We got married just when I landed the job as editor
of Éclat
and Tony was beginning to make a name for himself in the diet and beauty racket.”

Dee looked steadily around the table, her gaze level beneath the stiff dark brim of her hat. “I’m not saying he doesn’t know his business, my dears, and apparently he’s learned a few more tricks since he started out. All I want Genia to know is what I should have warned you all as soon as he set foot on the island. Tony Ferencz is a complete and unmitigated
bastard
, and you’ll all be sorry before this is over.”

The table was silent. Lips were closed in resolute smiles. Eyes glanced about the room in a bright, polite way, indicating that there would be no unseemly disagreements among friends. Quickly, with her usual composure and grace, Gussie spoke up. “Shall we think about lunch? Genia just got in on the late morning plane from Boston, remember, and we came directly here to the Scrim from the airport. I’m sure she’s starved.”

As she spoke, a light babble of voices came from the doorway of a private dining room, open to the main room in which Les Girls of Nantucket were seated. Occasionally a high shriek of feminine laughter broke the ripple of sound.

A stout middle-aged waitress came in from the kitchen bearing a heavy tray of drinks and disappeared into the doorway. Moments later she was back in the main room and at Mrs. Potter’s side, giving her a familiar and friendly pat on the shoulder. “Glad to see you back,” she said. “Seems like old times to have all you gals together again. A real reunion. What’ll it be, ladies?”

“I’m ready to order, Jadine,” Beth answered promptly. “The Yankee bean soup, please, and then I think the individual
chicken pot pie and the fresh fruit salad plate with cream cheese dressing. I’ll decide about dessert later. I see your Scrimshaw Rum Pie is on the menu, but this might be a good day for a hot mocha fudge sundae.”

She faced the others apologetically. “I played paddle tennis on the outdoor court most of the morning,” she explained, “and I’m planning to walk the beach at Eel Point after lunch. I need my strength.”

Dee set the handwritten menu aside with a brisk, dismissing gesture. “Just a pot of tea for me, please, Jadine.” Turning to Mrs. Potter, she spoke beneath her breath. “You wait and see about Tony.”