The Nantucket Diet Murders (33 page)

It had been a long cold walk to the south shore. Luckily she had dressed warmly in the morning before she went to work, and luckily there was enough light in the sky, as the mist-circled moon appeared, to find her way on the road beside the pond. She was pleased with herself for thinking to snatch the remaining cinnamon rolls from the table, cramming them into her shoulder bag, when she had been told she must go, and where. There had not been time for more than a few words.

Luckily, too, she was now able, after a little fumbling, to find Peter’s key, just where she remembered. Peter had been so nice about asking her to his lunch party last Sunday. She would be safe in Peter’s house, safe from all the questions and from her own fears.

She remembered the two long facing sofas. Groping, she made her way to the farther one, the one facing the door. The cushions were soft, but the room, in the silent, lifeless chill of a closed house, seemed even colder than it had been outside.

As soon as she had rested, she found the matches and candle she remembered on the long rough mantel. She could not risk a fire. Its smoke would be a certain signal of her
presence there if anyone should be watching. The light of the candle seemed safe behind the shutters. She found blankets, a deep drawer full, smelling of lavender.

She arranged these carefully on the sofa she had chosen. Perhaps she should not risk even the light of the candle any longer. She felt for the cold, sticky rolls in her shoulder bag. That would be her dinner.

Nibbling slowly, licking her fingers carefully, she settled herself under the lavender fragrance, wondering how it was possible for the cushions beneath her and the wool piled on top of her to be so cold.

Eventually she slept.

Cracks of light around the shuttered windows told her it was morning, and she could hear the muffled sound of the surf. Friday morning, she thought. It seemed she had been in this cold, dark shuttered room much longer. All of her life, she told herself, half in sorrow, half in self-contempt.

Cautiously, she went to the door. A light drift of snow had come in under the outer storm door. Carefully she swung it open, just a quarter of the way. The beach world outside was softly snow-covered. She was safe, just as she’d been told she would be. She went back to her blankets.

Later, hungry and thirsty, she again risked the light of the candle.

The water was turned off at the sink, of course, as she knew it would be. She found an empty coffee can to use as a chamberpot, then decided instead to use the toilet in the small bath off the little darkened bedroom, pleased with herself at thinking to add antifreeze from the plastic gallon container she found there.

Returning to the cupboards, she knew there was no chance of soft drinks or canned foods left to freeze and explode in a winter-closed house. She found crackers in a covered tin, small ones with seeds on them. Her hands groped, in the flickering light, and found the bottle she was looking for. Ah, vodka, and more bottles behind it.

The answer was there to her cold and hunger and her fear, as it had been to all of her problems as long as she could
remember. Was I really only ten when I found out it made me forget, she wondered? Vodka, rum, whisky, gin—anything I could find and that no one might miss.

It had been only in later years she had known they were keeping her well supplied. No one ever questioned depleting stores, full bottles becoming empty ones. There were always, miraculously, new bottles in their places in the liquor closet off the kitchen, and nobody ever said a word. Nobody ever called her a wicked girl about
that
. Only about the cyanide when they thought she was going to kill herself.

She found a glass, and with the bottle in hand made her way back to the nest of blankets on the sofa. There were more bottles in the cupboard. She was safe.

Warmed by the first drink, she began to reproach herself. It had seemed such a simple thing she’d been asked to do. She
never
had thought that Edie and Mr. deBevereaux were going to be quiet forever, instead of just for a few hours. She hadn’t
ever
thought that could happen.

She should never have repeated the story Edie had told her. Never. That’s what started the whole thing.

Pouring into the glass in the near darkness was difficult. She would have to drink straight from the bottle. Much easier.

She should never have told
anybody
what Edie had said about that poor sick little boy, growing up all alone, no father to look after him. She knew just how that little boy must feel. If she hadn’t told, nobody would have asked her to get those keys, and then none of this would have happened.

The drink made her feel a little better. After all, she had done it only with the promise that the little boy would be helped. She squinted at the faint line of daylight around the windows, thinking she was not so sure about that promise now. It bothered her that the poison bottle had been taken away from her, ever so gently, being told it was for her own good. Putting it in Mrs. Higginson’s basket was awful. She was glad she hadn’t done
that
, anyway. In fact, she hadn’t really thought about that part of it until today, trying to answer all those questions.

She should have known not to tell anybody about
anything
.

She should have known from the start, back when she was ten. She should have known that some day it was going to happen to her, too.

At midmorning, with Gussie at the wheel of her small four-wheel-drive car, a twin of the one Mrs. Potter drove in Maine, the four women began a tour of Mrs. Potter’s favorite spots on the island. She had not found it necessary to explain that these were chosen for a reason other than past affection and happy memories, and in fact the memories returned, at times so vividly she had to remind herself what she was actually looking for on the drive. She had dressed for a long day in the wool caftan, with trousers and heavy socks and shoes beneath, and wrapped overall in one of Gussie’s soft handloomed stoles of richly colored wool. She had tucked the packet of Arnold’s pain pills into her basket. What the others might consider a winter’s day outing was for her, the day after the flash fire at the Scrimshaw Inn, an entirely serious quest.

The feathery snow in the night, they all exclaimed, had again transformed old delights into new ones. The hillside oriental carpet of fall in its rich colors on all sides of Altar Rock was now almost majestic in winter white, dignified to the point of small mountainhood.

Mrs. Potter, in the first of the unplanned jolts of memory,
thought of Benjie, serious and intent as a ten-year-old, searching for arrowheads there on sunny summer afternoons. As a joke, she had told him that all of the stones up there looked like arrowheads. Pick up one anywhere, she told him, and
call
it an arrowhead! Leaning over in the gravelly path of the road by the car, she had blindly picked up a stone, felt its odd smoothness to her fingers, looked at the pattern of its chipped surface, then held it up for her son’s inspection. They had both gasped in disbelieving laughter. She fingered the arrowhead now, still in the bottom of her lightship basket, where she had kept it all these years as a treasure of serendipity.

Their old summer house on ’Sacacha Pond, beyond which lay the open ocean to the east, now gray and flat on a winter morning, was shuttered, quiet, looking larger than Mrs. Potter remembered, the hedges certainly better trimmed. No footprints led to its front door or small barn, and so far in the drive she had seen none leading to any other closed summer dwelling, as well as she could see from the road. Here she thought of Louisa on warm summer evenings at the piano—the weathered old grand piano, its finish crazed by years of neglect and sun. Louisa had surprised them by painting it a rich Venetian red, displaying her artistic skills even more than her less certain musical ones.

The beach at Quidnet was deserted, the only tracks in the snow covering the dunes being those of the gulls and winter seabirds. She thought of small Emily, a sprite in minuscule red bathing trunks; of Emily a few summers later, or so it seemed, in the midst of a throng of chattering teen-agers; and so few years after that, a serene young woman in white coming down the aisle on Lew’s arm at the church.

“Could we manage the road into the Hidden Forest?” she asked Gussie. Skeletal trees, vast silences, dark marshes, surrounded them there. Mrs. Potter now thought about how many secret and hidden places there were on the island, not all so foreboding as this one, but places, unseen and off the beaten track, on tiny rutted roads or game trails. She thought about how much of Nantucket was still wild, uninhabited in
winter or summer except by wild creatures, and how easy it would be to disappear there.

They drove to the Haulover, that narrow sandy spit of land separating harbor from ocean above Wauwinet, and there they ate the apples and cheese Gussie had brought for an early lunch, with a vacuum bottle of hot spiced cranberry punch. Mrs. Potter surreptitiously swallowed one of Arnold’s pills.

All the while as Mrs. Potter looked and remembered and thought about wild places, and while they were having their car picnic, the others had been talking and laughing and producing their own summer memories. Those of the present spot, they all suddenly realized, were ones of sorrow, rather than laughter, for Mary Lynne.

“I know you all are trying every bit as hard as you can to talk about other things and not remind me of Bo,” Mary Lynne told them as they finished the punch. “Just be easy about it. I’m all right. We both knew it was coming someday, and I’ll always have the comfort of knowing he died doing the thing he loved best—sailing that old Indian.”

They agreed, when Gussie asked them, that the long slow drive on north to Great Light would be better attempted another time and at an earlier hour. There were no car tracks ahead in the light snow and the only life they saw in that direction was a great snowy owl rising from a dune beyond the few deserted beach houses, plus the tracks of hundreds of small scampering creatures on the sand near the water. Gussie drove cautiously as she turned. There were soft patches in the yet unfrozen sand where even this rugged small car might have foundered if she had got off the narrow road, its course now blurred with the snow.

They drove to the top of what Mrs. Potter had always called “the painted hill” on their way back to town along the upper road, another high spot at which Mrs. Potter got out to stretch her legs and to look out over the pale, deserted winter calm of the harbor. Here, all of them saw it in summer blue, an ever-shifting pattern of sailboats on its surface. They thought of summer swimming and picnics and mosquito
bites across the harbor on the outer arm of Coatue across the harbor, and Gussie spoke of the day Jules had swum over and back. “Of course, Scott rowed along beside him,” she said, “with me in the boat. He was such a tiger.” Her voice was wistful.

They drove west of town, past Dionis and then around the shores of Long Pond, briefly disturbing a resident colony of winter ducks, and Mittie told them about her favorite haunts for bird-watching there. “Ab was as enthusiastic about birding
as
I am,” she said, “but he was a passionate duck hunter, too. That may sound like a contradiction, but he didn’t think so. He gave as much to Ducks Unlimited as he spent on his guns, and if I told you, you wouldn’t believe what those English guns of his cost.” Her voice, too, was slightly wistful.

They viewed the many-angled houses that had been built at Madaket, rising high against the horizon, and they drove on to see where the ’48 hurricane had created Esther Island out of what had once been a narrow westerly arm of Nantucket itself. They all were able to remember where they had been at the time of the storm.

On the way back to town they made a quick jog to the south shore, pausing as Mittie spoke of how much of the island had eroded there, in some places in great crumbling chunks, places where old roads had disappeared into the ocean.

Peter’s beach shack was part of the tour. Shuttered, as they knew it would be against the drive of blowing sands, it was, like every other deserted place they had visited, devoid of all prints except those of birds and small mammals and the occasional sharp prints of the island deer.

In late afternoon, just as the early January dark was descending, they returned to the white house on Orange Street, where Mary Lynne gave them tea, to the accompaniment of continuing, suspicious barking from the back of the house.

Outside, the snow had nearly disappeared, as it had the day of Mrs, Potter’s first village walk, melting in the unseasonably warm early winter weather. It would be cold, they all agreed,
if you were walking in the wind, and probably frigid inside all the closed summer houses, but there had not yet been a really hard freeze. That, Mittie reminded them, would create its own problems in gardening. “As long as it’s nice for Daffodil Festival weekend,” Mary Lynne said, “it can do anything it wants to in the way of weather now. Shall I bring out little Sen-Sen and her brother now, to show you how cunning they are?”

Gussie looked at Mrs. Potter. “This girl is going to bed,” she announced. “Come on, Mittie, grab your coat, if you’re coming with us as far as my house. I knew I shouldn’t have taken her out today, or kept her out so long.”

Before Mrs. Potter drifted off to an uneasy sleep in the guest room bed under its crewel-embroidered canopy, she could think of many,
so
many,
too
many places a frightened person could hide on Nantucket, and of how easy it would be to disappear there just by stepping a few feet away from the road. There was the elephant’s graveyard—a dumping ground of old cars on a blind road not far from the airport, visible only by air or to a determined explorer of back ways. Lolly might be cowering there in an abandoned auto chassis, minus its wheels.

There were places in the deep pine woods, the scene of some of their best summer picnics, when the sun was hot and the depths of the small forest were cool. Only light snow would have drifted to the soft needle-covered carpet there, and Lolly might be burrowing like an animal to find warmth.