The Nantucket Diet Murders (25 page)

Remembering Gussie’s promise that they would learn to make Portuguese bread, and Hans’s assurance that he would be their teacher, Mrs. Potter again sent her compliments to the baker, whose work had been done hours earlier and at least eight blocks away. “We’ll give you time to get all this going,” she told Mary, “before we take you up on those lessons. We’ll wait until things settle down a bit for you.”

And for me, too, she thought. “For now,” she said, “you’d better give me six loaves. Two each, one sliced and one not, in three separate bags, if that’s not a nuisance.” She looked at her watch. There would be time to take one bag to Mary Lynne with the hope of finding her home for a quick visit, then to deliver another as promised to Mittie’s door, although
not time to buy a new colored leotard. She’d have to exercise in the old balbriggan pajamas another day.

As the crusty round loaves went into bags, she was able to voice a question, even though it was one she had intended to dismiss. “You know chemistry, Mary,” she said. “I’ve read old mystery novels about cyanide being used in greenhouses once upon a time. I don’t suppose you’d know anything about it?”

“Well, Uncle Manny’s older brother used to be a gardener on the island, years ago,” Mary said, “and I’m sure he told me potassium cyanide was used fairly commonly then. Of course, it was tricky to handle and you had to know what you were doing.”

“I suppose it’s illegal now?” Mrs. Potter asked. “I mean, it really
is
deadly poison, isn’t it?”

Mary made an effort to speak as a Radcliffe honors graduate. “Oh, yes, it’s deadly,” she said. “The Food and Drug people outlawed it for general use years ago. I remember it’s used commercially in electroplating metals and in photography, but I’m sure only with the strictest kind of controls.”

Another customer entered the shop before Mrs. Potter could ask Mary Rezendes about old containers and how long old poisons remained lethal. She wondered, as she left the shop, how many dangerous and now illegal substances might be in her own garden cupboard at the ranch. DDT—could there be any of that left, on the back of a shelf? And what was it they had once used to sprinkle the gravel of the parking area to kill the hardy desert weeds? She had a sinking feeling that its other name might be Agent Orange. What was the only thing really effective against the Arizona ant colonies that made great barren circles around their central burrows, big enough to be seen from a plane thousands of feet in the air? That stuff was also a killer for the ferocious small red ants whose bites could be a stab of fire under your pants leg, just above your boot top.
Chlordane
, that’s what it was. She knew there was still some of that around, even though they could no longer buy it. Was dieldrin off or on the approved list? Malathion? Her own shelves would not date back to days of
prussic acid, but they still might hold a threat she hadn’t ever really worried about.

Her reflections had led her down Orange Street to Mary Lynne’s handsomely columned white house, another well-preserved mansion from the island’s whaling past.

A quick yapping of small dogs responded to her rap on the brass knocker. Mary Lynne’s surprised greeting, “Why,
hello
there, Genia!” as she answered the door, carried powerfully, unmistakably, almost overwhelmingly, a breath of chocolate and peanuts.

We all go off our diets once in a while, Mrs. Potter thought as she presented her gift of Portuguese bread, aware of Mary Lynne’s split second of delay before her invitation to come in. It’s a fact of life. No matter how well we’re doing, we slip now and again—possibly because of an unresolved problem, anger, anxiety, sometimes it seems out of pure perversity.

If Mary Lynne was eating what she thought—the Goo Goo Clusters of her Tennessee youth—she was probably reacting to temporary stress, perhaps the responsibility of the new island tradition of the spring Daffodil Festival.

Once at Mary Lynne’s urging in the past, Mrs. Potter had eaten a Goo Goo, a mound of chocolate, peanuts, caramel, and marshmallow apparently beloved by all who grew up south of the Mason-Dixon Line. She calculated the depth of Mary Lynne’s probable remorse tomorrow, as she followed her into the high-ceilinged parlor, noting again how much weight she had lost and how lightly she moved.

To keep herself at this slim weight, Mary Lynne, a woman of medium height, not given to active sports, was likely to have a maintenance calorie limit, to be generous, of not more
than fifteen hundred calories. It wouldn’t take many Goo Goos to blow that sky-high.

Mary Lynne led her to a curved Victorian love seat, and as she did so, Mrs. Potter noticed that by a slight nudge of the toe she had at the same time pushed a flat box, lying on the floor, under the skirt of a yellow damask-covered wing chair.

Two small dogs, yapping rather crossly, rushed back and forth across the room, first glaring at her with unconcealed dislike, then back to sniff, questioningly, at the base of the yellow chair.

“You’ll have to forgive my babies,” Mary Lynne said quickly, picking up a small multicolored dog under each arm. “You haven’t learned your party manners yet, have you, lambies? Mother’s going to put you in your pretty bedroom now, and we’ll have us a good little romp later. ’Scuse me a minute, Genia, honey? Incidentally, whatever happened to that beautiful Weimaraner of yours?”

Mrs. Potter was able only to murmur, “He’s dead now,” in a tone that invited no further inquiry.

“I remember he had such a nice name,” Mary Lynne continued, still holding a dog under each arm. “This little girl is Sen-Sen, but I haven’t got the right name yet for brother.”

“Sen-Sen?” Mrs. Potter asked. “You mean that pinhead-size dark stuff—licoricish and peppery—the bad boys used to chew to cover up the smell of cigarettes on their breath?”

“Or moonshine,” Mary Lynne said wisely. “I think it sounds so oriental, don’t you? And spicy and lively? Just like her. But I can’t get the absolutely perfect right name for my boy. You and Gussie put your minds to it and help me think of one.”

As Mary Lynne left with the small dogs, still noisy in their excitement, Mrs. Potter noticed that her toe gave a second small nudge to the box, with which it disappeared completely from sight beneath the skirted chair.

The absolutely perfect name for little brother is obvious, she decided, but this is not the time to suggest it. I’m glad Mary Lynne didn’t mention it, and even more grateful that
she didn’t offer me any. She was not sure whether the idea of a binge with Goo Goos was terribly funny or totally revolting.

When Mary Lynne rejoined her a few seconds later, sharp complaints continued from the two little dogs somewhere in the back of the house.

Ignoring them, Mrs. Potter issued a reassuring bulletin, as she had done with Helen over the phone the evening before. Beth was slightly under the weather, she said, but everyone felt sure that after a few days with Laurence and Paula in Providence, she soon would be fine again. As soon as she could, she began in a roundabout way to approach the subject of Mittie’s casual allusion earlier in the afternoon. She wanted to know about Tony’s being on the scene when Bo died.

“Everyone’s so proud of you, Mary Lynne,” she began.

“You mean the festival?” Mary Lynne asked. “You know just as well as you’re sitting here on my love seat, Genia Potter, that there’s no way in the world I could run that whole great big whoop-te-do by myself if every single soul on the island wasn’t helping me with it, night and day.”

“I’m very sure not only that you could run the whole show very competently,” Mrs. Potter replied, “but that you’re actually doing so, in spite of all this modesty. Come on, Mary Lynne, don’t play helpless southern belle with me. We’ve known each other too long.”

Mary Lynne’s wide smile pursed into a small grimace, the gesture of a child caught in an innocent prank.

“I wasn’t thinking of the festival,” Mrs. Potter continued. “I know it will be a huge success again this year and that you know exactly what you’re doing, as you always do. I hope to be back for it. What I’m talking about is how you managed as you did in the sailboat when Bo was taken ill. Forgive me if it’s painful to talk about it, but ever since Gussie called to tell me last summer—was it August?—I’ve been marveling at how you were able to handle that big sloop alone and get back for help.”

“You don’t want to hear that old story again, Genia,” Mary Lynne protested. “Honest to gracious goodness, everybody’s
made too much of it. Bo had his attack when we were sailing, that’s what happened, when we were way up the harbor on the Coatue side, past the Five Fingers and just off Coskata. He was the one that was wonderful, not me.”

“Gussie said all the other boats were out of hailing distance,” Mrs. Potter went on. “To think that the harbor was full of boats, as it would have been at that time of year, but none of them close enough to hear you call for help.” She was suddenly aware of how really awful it must have been.

“It was just plain the worst thing that ever happened in my whole entire life,” Mary Lynne replied. “There was Bo sailing along, merry as a Tennessee cricket, saying how glad he was to get me to go out sailing with him, which, honestly Genia, I tried to get out of whenever I could. I’m not used to boats and usually I’m scared out of my mind and sick as a pup. But that day was bright and calm and he talked me into it.”

“And then he was suddenly taken ill?” Mrs. Potter asked, shaken. She had come to find out how Tony Ferencz and Ozzie deBevereaux were involved in the rescue, but she knew that until now she had not fully understood Mary Lynne’s ordeal.

“I’m not much of a saltwater sailor myself,” she went on. “I grew up with canoes and rowboats and outboards, and some of us had small sailboats, but here I didn’t go out in our old Indian alone. The children did, but I know it meant using both arms and legs, right down to both big toes, to do it. It was like yours, I think—twenty-two feet, wood hull, Marconi rigged, with a centerboard? Anyway, the three of them were all such good sailors and so were their friends that usually all I had to do was enjoy myself and remember to duck when someone called ‘Ready about,
hard alee!’
That, and to bring the sandwiches and Cokes. I’m sure I couldn’t have taken over and sailed it all by myself as you did.”

“Yes, an Indian,” Mary Lynne said vaguely. “I gave it to the Yacht Club later and I don’t know what happened to it. Anyway, it had a little triangle sail in front—that’s called the jib, Genia—and a big triangle sail with a long stick across the bottom, and that stick is the boom.”

“Yes, I know,” Mrs. Potter said.

“And I knew about the centerboard,” Mary Lynne continued. “Bo pulled it up in shallow water that day, near shore, and then let it down again as soon as we were back where the water was deeper. He’d explained all this to me before, too, but honestly, I never paid a bit of attention. I just thought about other things and said, ‘Oh, I
see.’
That day I was just riding along, and for the first time in my life, honest-to-goodness almost enjoying it.”

“Tell me what happened,” Mrs. Potter urged, wondering how she might have acted in Mary Lynne’s place.

As Mary Lynne spoke, she could visualize the far reaches of the harbor in summer, dancing blue in the sun, dotted with sails, and she heard Mary Lynne’s story as if it were taking place before her eyes.

The big man, laughing and talking, at ease in his boat in the late morning sun, suddenly felt a pain in his neck and shoulder.

“Come back and sit by me,” he asked his wife in a strained voice. “See if you can steer for a bit. I’ll tell you what to do.”

He showed her how to pick a spot on the horizon and tried to explain how to hold the boat steady on course for it. “That’s it,” he said. “The Wauwinet House. It’s big enough to see.”

The pain increased. “That’s good,” he encouraged her. “Just: hold her steady.”

Then without speaking again he fell forward on his face, lying heavy and motionless on coiled lines and damp floorboards, dislocating a plastic bailing bucket, which rolled forward slowly, making a dull clatter.

The woman dropped her grasp of the tiller and dropped to his side, but found herself unable to lift him or even to squeeze herself into the space directly beside his bulk and the centerboard. He did not answer when she spoke to him, her cries and entreaties increasing, unheeded.

A flat paddle lay at her side, and she seized it and began to wave it aloft, shouting now for help to other sails in the distance. No one saw her or heard her.

The breeze freshened and the big sail, now swinging free, threatened to knock her off her feet. She crawled back to the tiller, beneath the wildly careening boom, trying frantically to remember what she had been doing before, when she had been told to keep her eye on the big hotel across the harbor.

Now the sloop regained headway and the swinging boom was no longer a danger as long as she held her course with the following wind. The man in the bottom of the boat was silent and motionless.

The wind changed slightly and with a sickening thud the heavy boom now swung to the other side. She was only just able to duck as it passed her head. The boat seemed to be moving faster now in the water, and she desperately wished she knew how to make it slow down so that she could go back to the motionless figure, facedown, just beyond her feet.

At last the beach of the summer hotel was ahead. The boat approached it rapidly, head on, until the woman heard and felt its rough scraping on the sandy bottom in the shallow water. Again the boom went wild. The woman knew the boat would overturn, until she remembered how she had been shown to raise the centerboard. Then, at last, she saw too how to release the line to lower the straining, threatening sail.

Mary Lynne took a deep breath, as if in an effort to regain her calm, and again the rich smell of chocolate and peanuts came across the space between her chair and the Victorian settee.

“Sorry if I seem upset,” Mary Lynne apologized. “Of course, I get stirred up remembering all this again, but besides that I had some news this morning that makes a difference in my future plans. And beside
that
, I had an important appointment canceled for four o’clock, and that’s what’s really bothering me at the moment.”