The Nantucket Diet Murders (31 page)

“There had to be more on your mind than a teen-ager’s falling for a diet fad, even though it proved fatal for her and tragic for her parents,” Mrs. Potter said. “There had to be
more about Tony that only you know, to malice you speak out as strongly as you did that day at lunch.”

“I told you about Dora Stell Grumbley, for Gussie’s sake,” Dee said reluctantly.

“And you know I’ll never repeat it,” Mrs. Potter replied.

“I know,” Dee replied, “and I also know
you’ve
found out that Tony is a bit of a shit, as our English cousins would say. He’s not above making love to some of his ladies to get their adoring support, and Peter even thinks he may be using some illegal drug injections from his mother’s old clinic in Europe. I doubt it. I think he’s too smart for that. He probably just lets them believe he’s got secret stuff so miraculous the Food and Drug is afraid to approve it.”

Be that as it may, Mrs. Potter decided. Now it was her turn simply to be silent and nod, and to realize that this was very good champagne.

“If I didn’t trust you, or if I weren’t so fond of Gussie, I’d never tell you,” Dee continued as she rose to leave the room. Returning quickly, she put a silver-framed photograph on Mrs. Potter’s lap.

The picture, that of a handsome dark-haired boy—perhaps fourteen, Mrs. Potter thought—held her in shocked disbelief as she saw the intensity in the wide gray eyes. “Your son?” she asked incredulously. “Yours and Tony’s?”

“Mikai will be twenty-eight next month,” Dee told her. “He looks younger, of course. Mikey—that’s what they call him at Fieldstone Hall—is never going to grow up. He’s beautiful, yes. He’s gentle, most of the time, and he’s quiet. In fact he never spoke at all until he was nearly twelve. But Mikai is in most ways a four-year-old. He’s subject to a four-year-old’s tantrums and rages, in a body as strong as a man’s, and there’s no way he can live anyplace except in a very carefully controlled and guarded environment.”

Mrs. Potter’s impulse was to embrace Dee in shared sorrow, but her friend’s bearing rejected any show of sympathy.

“He’s been everyplace,” Dee continued, almost cold in her dignity. “He’s had the best doctors, the best diagnosis, the best treatment money could buy. At least I don’t have to bear
the pain of knowing he could have been helped. He’s had the best.”

“And you’ve had the anguish and expense of all these years of doctors and special hospitals,” Mrs. Potter said slowly.

“The magazine salary, good as it was, couldn’t pay for it,” Dee said. “I did double stints for a long time, keeping on with my job there and at the same time cranking out those awful romance novels Leah reads. You know—imperious but virginal young woman carried off by hypnotically fascinating, experienced older man. And then he turns out to really love her and they get married and everything is hunky-dory. I could do it in my sleep, and for a while I think I did, trying to run a good fashion magazine daytimes and making enough on the side writing romances every night.”

She poured another glass of wine for them both and added another log to the fire. “Finally I broke down myself,” she said, “and Peter Benson, bless him, loaned me his beach shack as a place to stay here on the island while I was getting myself together again. He’s the only person I ever trusted enough to tell him the story about Mikai, until today. I’d known Peter from his restaurant days in New York, and by then he’d come here and started up the Scrimshaw.”

“And eventually you got into selling real estate, and that’s where things stand now,” Mrs. Potter continued the story for her. “Is Mikai all right? I mean, is he in a place you’re satisfied with?”

“Fieldstone Hall is perfect,” Dee said, “if anyone can use that word for what has to be a completely unnatural world. The place is beautiful, it’s safe, and Mikai is happy there.”

“And it costs a small fortune every month,” Mrs. Potter said soberly. Selling real estate was a chancy business at best, she thought, in spite of an occasional big windfall of commissions. Only by rigid economies and by using her wits in every way to earn extra money could Dee have paid all the years of such bills.

“Why isn’t Tony taking his share of this?” she asked suddenly. “There’s no doubt whose son he is. Clearly his age says he was born during your marriage—”

Dee interrupted. “Two months before I filed for divorce. Mikai is Tony’s and my son. Tony refused to share any part of the responsibility, and when we learned that Mikai could never be normal, he took off for Europe, just to escape.”

Mrs. Potter was puzzled. Weren’t there legal ways of insisting on child-support payments, especially in a case like this?

“I told you Tony Ferencz was a bastard,” Dee said, her voice icy. “What he threatened then was a countersuit so unbelievably messy, although a complete lie, I decided to take care of Mikai on my own.”

She shrugged, an indication of the end of the discussion. “It was only a couple of weeks ago, when tilings were again pretty tight for me, that I thought I might do something about it. Tony was on the island, and he seemed on the way to making a good thing out of it here. So I asked Ozzie what he thought, and he insisted I get all the necessary documents together for him. Marriage license, Mikai’s birth certificate, doctors’ reports, hospital receipts over the years, the whole thing. He thought we should start an action now, although I told both him and Peter I’d probably never go through with it.”

Mrs. Potter’s sympathy and concern were real. “I suppose you got all that stuff back from Ozzie’s nephew when he was returning clients’ files,” she said. “You can turn it all over to another lawyer if you decide to, later on.”

“That’s the odd thing,” Dee said. “All the; copies of old real estate contracts were there in my file, ever since I came to the island. The papers on Mikai were missing.” She paused. “Maybe it’s just as well if they’ve been destroyed. Tony would have weaseled out some way, or else would have made up such a scandal I’d lose more than I gained.”

Mrs. Potter was silent. Here was the one thing she knew that could destroy Tony’s plans for a diet clinic, his Eve, Nantucket. None of her friends, she knew, no matter what the degree of their infatuation or involvement, would lend support to a man who had abandoned his wife and mentally disturbed child, and who refused to take any responsibility for his care.

Dee followed her thoughts. “Now you know what I mean about Tony,” she said, “and how he’s capable of using people. He worked on Leah first, I think, before he found out that the Shrine, being in the Historic District, couldn’t be used for the clinic he wants to start. He still probably has hopes she’ll sell it and give him the money instead.

“He gave up on Mittie when Ozzie put his foot down on her giving him the Shimmo house, but then he played Mary Lynne along, hoping she’d buy it for him with all her new money. Then it turns out that’s all controlled by a trust officer, too.

“The game for him now is where it really has been from the beginning, between Gussie and Helen, because they can be the most help to him. They’re equally rich, I suppose. I think he intends to use them both, but if anything, Helen may have the edge. She could be wonderful help to him in getting the clinic established and managing the place, raising money, that sort of thing, and he’d get all of that besides her money. Gussie’s charm and warm heart wouldn’t weigh very heavily in that decision.

“Knowing Tony, I think he’ll try to get Helen’s money and Gussie’s, too, but he hasn’t the slightest intention of marrying either of them, I can promise you that. He knows he’s much too attractive just as he is to all the other rich widows who’ll be flocking to Nantucket for an expensive stay later on. Then he’ll put them on diets anybody could get in a book, give them some placebo injections, get them to exercise, and look into their eyes and kiss their hands.

“Can’t you see it? What Tony has to sell is
Tony
, not any magic diet program. Tony the man—the handsome aristocrat, slightly aloof, yet attentive enough to persuade any of the ladies she’s the one he secretly prefers above all the rest.

“He’s not going to marry any of them,” Dee concluded. “He’d lose his best, maybe his only, asset—the challenge and chance of a grand romance.”

At the risk of appearing sentimental, Mrs. Potter kissed Dee good-bye as she left the carriage house.

Then, as she went down the outdoor stairway, she thought
of Mikai’s story, now not in relation to her sympathy and admiration for Dee, but as the crucial bit of evidence that would have killed Tony’s plans for Eve, Nantucket.

Who most wanted it to succeed? Presumably the whole island would be delighted with it. Prestigious, exclusive, nonpolluting, it would bring a few carefully screened rich women at a time to the island. Some of them might return as futrure residents and contributors to the good life there. In any case, all of them would add considerably to the island economy during their stay.

Everyone she knew seemed to want Tony’s diet center. Even Larry, hoping to be the official hairdresser; perhaps, in spite of his professed doubts, even Peter, to display his skills in the kitchen. Helen might want it most fiercely, as an outlet for her executive talent and ambition, to run what she had called the “Latham Foundation,” with Tony as her star attraction.

There wasn’t anybody, as far as she could see, who did not want it, and thus no one was above suspicion in the removal of Dee’s papers from her files. But there was no one, she felt sure, who had a better reason to want them than Tony himself, although he might have used someone else to clear the way for him to get them.

As she reached the corner of Main Street, instead of turning toward Gussie’s house, Mrs. Potter made an abrupt left and headed toward the science library. By the streetlight in the winter dusk, she peered at her watch. With luck, she’d be there by closing time, to walk Lolly home.

Under the next streetlight she recognized the scurrying, plump figure in the tan raincoat and round brimmed hat, the shapeless tan plastic bag dangling from one shoulder. Lolly was already on her way home. At that moment Mrs. Potter had an even better idea for her intended conversation.

“Come to the Scrim with me for a cup of tea, Lolly,” she urged in a friendly invitation, fighting her own reluctance to go back where she might encounter Tony again. At least in the dining room Peter would be nearby at this time of day.

“Yes, please, this is important,” she said kindly. “What you and I have to talk about we can do privately there, just the two of us, or we can go to your house and discuss it as a threesome with your mother. Which would you rather?” Lolly’s face was expressionless, her nod of acceptance scarcely more than the blink of her eyes under the hat brim. Mrs. Potter took her gently by the arm as they turned back toward the small inn.

There, she chose a small table by the wall next to the fire, the length of the room between it and the big round table in the bay window, Les Girls’ usual table, where Peter was serving cocktails and chatting with a group that looked to be
businessmen from off-island, and one woman, whose blond head was facing the window.

“Just tea, please, Jadine,” she said to the waitress, at the same time waving to Peter in a way calculated to tell him to stay where he was and that she wanted to be alone with Lolly. “I think it’s too near dinner to have anything with it.
No
, change that, please. I think we’ll have some of whatever’s sweet. The little cinnamon rolls, Jadine, cookies, cake, whatever.” Something told her Lolly would be able to talk more easily if there was food before them.

They sat quietly, Lolly apparently staring at the fireplace behind Mrs. Potter’s shoulder, until Jadine reappeared.

When the tea and tiny cinnamon rolls were set before them, Jadine remained, poking ineffectually at the fire, which was clearly refusing to burn. “Green wood,” she muttered.

“Never mind,” Mrs. Potter told her, turning to look. “It’ll catch. Just give it time.” She didn’t want Jadine or anyone else to hear the words she had already framed in her mind.

“I know the whole thing, Lolly,” she began, after Jadine had given the logs a few resentful jabs and retired, still muttering. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know how your friend Edie and Mr. deBevereaux died.”

Lolly stared into her teacup, then reached slowly, almost absently, for a cinnamon roll.

“I know you didn’t really plan to poison them, Lolly. You just knew a little about what those plants would do, reading about them at the library. You thought you could make both of them sick for a few hours, long enough for you to get Edie’s keys”—she suddenly remembered Lolly’s offer to take Edie’s things to the hospital—”and long enough for you to get something from the office that night.”

Lolly shook her head in a definite negative, but her eyes were downcast as she spread butter on another bit of the sweet roll.

Mrs. Potter took a quick guess.
“You
didn’t go to the office? You gave the keys to someone else?”

Lolly’s eyes were those of a stubborn child, now apparently fixed on the smoldering logs behind Mrs. Potter’s shoulder.

“You were terribly surprised and shocked and sorry when both those two people died, weren’t you, Lolly? You had been so sure they would just be a little upset for the rest of the day and evening.”

Then, for the first time, Lolly spoke. “It was an accident, a horrible accident,” she said thickly, repeating her earlier words.

“Then the next day Mrs. Higginson came to the library, first for a while in the morning, then back in the afternoon,” Mrs. Potter went on. “You could see how distressed she was, and you knew she was looking up the possible effects of the same two poisonous plants you’d given to Mr. deBevereaux and Edie. You knew she believed the whole thing was her fault because she was the one to take the comfrey to him.”

Her voice was suddenly colder. “You figured out that switch in a hurry, it seems to me, just as soon as you heard her say, right here in this dining room, that she was going to take him the comfrey tea. It must have seemed so easy to you. You knew his door would be unlocked. You knew you could slip in and put foxglove leaves in Mrs. Higginson’s jar instead, and that he’d never know the difference.”