The Nantucket Diet Murders (34 page)

Wherever she was, Lolly was hiding. Mrs. Potter knew that now. She was hiding not only from her, Mrs. Potter, her inquisitor, but—and far more dangerous for Lolly—from whoever had asked her to get Ozzie’s office keys.

Mrs. Potter, ignoring the discomfort of her bandaged arm, propped the note on the breakfast table.
Borrowing the car
, she had scribbled.
Thanks. Back soon
.

She had awakened long before daylight, hearing briefly a spatter of rain on the windows, and had dressed quietly in the same loose warm clothes of the day before. As she left the house now, she was counting on Gussie’s assumption that she was making a return sunrise pilgrimage to the old house on the pond, or perhaps to visit another of the places there had not been time for yesterday. Gussie had deplored the omission of ’Sconset, with its summer contrast of tiny, rose-covered dollhouses with large-scale grand estates. She had not known how carefully Mrs. Potter had eliminated those areas impossible to check on a brief, part-day driving tour.

Now the sweep of the wiper blade, turned on for a moment to wipe away soft morning mist, marked a wider arc of the compass than the pattern that had awakened Mrs. Potter from a troubled sleep. She now headed, in answer to its message, not to the east, as she was sure Gussie would guess, but back to the south shore.

The suddenly recalled pattern in her mind that had
shocked her into wakefulness was the arc a storm door would make in soft snow, pushing aside an unassuming, gentle white curve on a wooden doorstep unmarked by footprints.

She rebuked herself. If Arnold’s pain pills had been less potent, she should have been aware of it yesterday afternoon. What she knew now, and should have seen then, was that the outer door of Peter’s beach shack had been opened. It had been opened just wide enough for a look outside, after the snowfall and by someone from inside the small house behind the dunes.

As she drove to the shore, the roads now bare, her headlights still needed, she thought of what she must say. She knew it was Lolly who was there in the house. Lolly had run away from her questioning, probably more in dread of having her mother know about the poisoning deaths than in fear of the law.

Helen must be told now, of course. Between the three of them, mother and daughter and herself, they would figure out the best thing to do. Helen must be made to understand that Lolly had acted out of blind devotion to Tony, the one person who could have persuaded her to get those office keys. Helen would see at once that Tony needed the incriminating documents from Ozzie’s office, to protect his grand scheme for a world-famous clinic.

They could, she and Helen, at least arrange for Lolly’s proper defense.

It was hard to drive with the encumbrance of the stole, and Mrs. Potter’s right arm was stiff and sore. It was awkward to shift gears on Gussie’s small car. She drove slowly and carefully, glancing toward the east to see the first light of the sun. As she neared the head of the pond, she slowed almost to a stop, nearly stalling the motor. What, she asked herself in sudden shock, what if the lighter fluid explosion had not been an accident after all? Not just the result of Jimmy’s using an unfamiliar product, labeled in a language he did not read? What if someone had put the spray can in Jimmy’s hands, or even casually suggested it, as a guest of the inn might do?
What if it had been an intentional diversion, seen to be vital at that very moment, to interrupt her questioning of Lolly?

This presumed a degree of evil equal to that of putting the empty poison bottle in Beth’s basket. Two gentle and innocent people, Beth and Jimmy, had been cruelly used and deeply hurt.

She drove on slowly. She had to persuade Lolly to return and confess. Even more important, she had to get Lolly’s final, certain confirmation of who it was who was capable of this greater evil.

She turned onto the new stretch of road to Peter’s house and pulled into the small parking area in back. A long, shiny station wagon was there before her. She was not the first to find Lolly’s hiding place.

It could be Helen, she thought, in an irrational burst of hope. Then—Helen? There to rescue the daughter whose whereabouts she apparently hadn’t troubled to learn? Not likely. She sat motionless in the car, her eyes fixed on the bare doorstep.

As she sat there, the terror returned. This was the terror she had felt in the cupola, thinking of the open roof walk overhead, five stories above the cobblestones. This was what she felt when she opened the Winthrop desk with its menacing array of hypodermic syringes and needles. If not Helen, it must be Tony, driving the Scrimshaw station wagon. Tony Ferencz had arrived before her, threatening Lolly, perhaps expecting her own arrival, waiting for her, to settle all scores.

She was shaking now from fright and indecision. Then she thought of Lolly, alone and afraid. She might not be too late. Some way the two of them together would escape.

As she forced herself to leave the car, the only sounds were those of the surf on the beach in front of the dune grasses and the harsh cry of a gull overhead in the growing light of the sky.

She took a long breath, approached the step, and pulled open the outer door. “Lolly?” she called loudly as she rapped vigorously on the closed door inside it, still mot sure she had courage to open it. “Lolly, are you there?”

At the same moment as she began to turn the doorknob, she heard two quick clicks, then the sharp, sudden, heart-stopping bark of exploding gunpowder, a shock of sound that held her feet on the doorstep as it registered, not in her mind but in the pit of her stomach.

The door swung inward.

Even before her eyes could accept the sight, she was halted by a smell in the air, a smell that took her instantly to lessons on a half-forgotten rifle range, to times of shooting skeet with Lew, the smell of a just fired gun.

Then, in the faint light from the open door, she saw Lolly Latham, her shattered skull bleeding, her cracked and bloody spectacles askew on what was left of her face, her body sliding slowly, slowly, sidewise against the cushions, held partly upright by the wrapping of blankets around her.

There was a small movement in the darkness behind the banquette, and she froze in her terror. Then she recognized the familiar stocky figure. As Peter spoke, the terror lifted. Whatever had happened, whatever the evidence of her eyes, she would have the comfort of Peter’s presence, and he of hers.

“We’re too late, Potter,” he said slowly. “Seems we both figured out where she might have run to hide, and I got here only just before you did. Then I turned my back for a minute and—I expect you heard the gunshot, even from outside the door. I couldn’t move fast enough to get it away from her.”

“Peter, oh,
Peter
. I’m so glad it’s you!” Mrs. Potter was nearly incoherent in her relief. “I was sure it was Tony, and when I heard the gun I thought he’d killed Lolly. What has happened is ghastly beyond belief, but at least I know
he
isn’t the one standing where you are, holding the gun and intending to shoot me next.”

Peter remained where he was, behind the long sofa. “You’re all right,” he said briefly. “Tony isn’t here.”

“It’s too late, isn’t it?” she asked. “There isn’t anything at all we could do now?” A glance at Lolly’s face was her answer.

“Did she bring the gun here to shoot herself? When did
you guess where she was? What did she say when you got here? How did she get here from the Scrimshaw?” Mrs. Potter, freed from her terror, could not restrain the almost hysterical flow of her questions.

“I thought she was asleep when I came in. When I turned my back to see about getting some light in here, she shot herself. That’s all I know.” Peter remained motionless behind the banquette, and his voice was unsteady. Mrs. Potter remained, still unable to move, on the doorstep.

“The poor kid was always afraid she’d do this, you know,” Peter went on, his voice now stronger and more confident. “I guess she never got over her father’s killing himself this way.”

“Where’s the gun?” Mrs. Potter asked, unwilling to step into the room. As she spoke, she saw the dull gleam of metal. “You’ve got it!”

More slowly now, she added another question. “How could
you
have the gun, Peter?”

Even as she spoke, she knew. Even as Peter was saying that he’d taken the gun from Lolly’s fingers, Mrs. Potter knew who had brought the gun to the beach shack and who had fired it.

“Peter, oh, no. Not you, Peter,
not you.”
She was almost whispering. “It couldn’t be you. You didn’t have any
reason.”

Peter stepped forward slightly and his face was visible in the light from around the shuttered windows, the same light that had showed the cold gleam of the gun. “Why did you have to show up now?” he asked, his voice low and despairing. “Everything would have been all right if you’d got here an hour later, or if I hadn’t decided to let her have a day here by herself, so she’d get good and drunk and knock herself out. I didn’t want to have her
look
at me.”

Mrs. Potter was unable to speak, unable to move.

“Everything would have been all right,” he went on. “First everybody would have said,
‘Poor Lolly, just like her father.’
And then, later on, you’d have figured out Tony shot her, and told all the guys, and even if you couldn’t prove it, their
beloved Count Tony Ferencz would have had to leave the island.”

The undisguised hatred in Peter’s voice as he spoke the name provided all the answer Mrs. Potter needed. He did have a reason, then, a reason that had set in motion all of the strange and terrible events of the past ten days.

“You hated Tony,” she said wonderingly. “You were determined to get rid of him. You were jealous, you thought he was taking your place with the others as the center of your little world.”

“It’s my world. It’s my island!” Peter spoke defiantly now, although he did not move from his position in the half darkness. “Nantucket’s
my
island. I built up the kind of place at the Scrimshaw that everybody loves. The first money I made there went into this shack. Nantucket’s
my
turf. And then Tony showed up.”

“But people still loved you, Peter. You hadn’t lost your friends.”

“Oh,
no?”
His reply was scornful. “How do you think I felt, Potter, seeing them fall for that phony? He was just a piece of cardboard. They were falling all over themselves trying to set up the kind of place for him I’d been planning and working for all my life. My Nantucket year-round resort inn. Supposedly for health and beauty, because that’s what the guys want, for losing a few pounds, sure, but
fun. My
place.
My
guys.”

Mrs. Potter, still in the doorway, saw a montage of hasty pictures in her mind, all of Peter. Of Peter teasing, amusing, and surprising them. Of Peter’s picnics and little dinners, of Peter’s frogs and of groups clustered around a piano, of Peter providing good food and music and laughter. She could only now glimpse the unknown, unsuspected Peter who demanded undivided adoration in return. He could not share his island. He could not share his guys.

“None of what happened was my fault,” he went on fiercely. “How could I know Lolly would be dumb enough to
kill
those two, just to get the keys? All I needed were those old papers about that crazy kid of Dee’s and I could have got
Tony off the island for good. Nobody would have got hurt at all if she hadn’t been so
goddamned
dumb.”

Mrs. Potter did not interrupt as he poured out his resentments. “Dee wasn’t going to do anything. She told me so. I had to have those papers in my own hands, not stuck away in some old cubbyhole file at Ozzie’s office.”

He gestured contemptuously toward the slumped body on the banquette in front of him, and again Mrs. Potter could see the metal of the gun, the smooth indentations of its chamber catching a glimmer of light. “She felt sorry for the poor crazy kid after Edie told her the story, and she spilled it out to me. I told her we might be able to help him, if she could just get me the keys for a couple of hours. Then the first thing I knew she’d killed two people and come running to me telling me how sorry she was and how she didn’t mean to do it.”

Mrs. Potter, too, stared at Lolly’s body, closer to the light than Peter’s face. It was no longer visibly bleeding.

“What the
hell
did I get myself into?” Peter’s voice rose, a shout of bewilderment and anger. “What the
hell
went wrong? I didn’t ask for any of this mess!” He was now almost screaming.

Mrs. Potter summoned courage for another question of her own. “Could you have saved Edie’s life that day she was choking?” she asked.

“Oh, my
God!
I didn’t even know then what Lolly had
done!”
Peter raged. “Do you think I’d have let her pull a crazy stunt like that at the
inn?”

Still accusatorial, he returned to the subject of Tony. “I spent all summer trying to make them see he was no good. For a while, after you got back, I thought you’d take the bait and think he’d killed Heidecker’s husband, or maybe that he was using dangerous drugs. I almost had you scared enough with that one.”

Mrs. Potter was again briefly silent, realizing how her suspicions of Tony had been fed. When she spoke, she regretted her words as soon as they were uttered. “You can’t blame Lolly for what you did with the cyanide bottle,” she said flatly. “You knew what that would do to Beth. And what
about Jimmy? How badly is he burned? How do you feel about
that? What
are your guys going to think of you now?”

“They aren’t going to know. You aren’t going to tell them.” The rage in Peter’s voice was cold now, as he stepped forward toward where Mrs. Potter still stood, framed in the doorway against the pale January dawn.

Almost without thought, she slammed shut the door she was holding. As she did, she heard the heavy sound of Peter falling. She shuddered at the thought of blood-slippery pine floorboards, but she had time to regain the seat and key of Gussie’s small car.