The Nantucket Diet Murders (6 page)

“Matter of fact, I never did entirely quit until last fall,” Gussie admitted, “but Tony says it’s terribly aging to the skin.”

“Your skin looks great,” Mrs. Potter told her. “I’m not sure that quitting has done that much for mine, even though I stopped years ago. Anyway, it’s wonderful to know that the insides of lungs do really restore themselves after a few years, and it’s great not to cough, and of course to be able to really smell things. Nice things, at least.”

“Like fresh-baked bread,” Gussie added. They smiled at each other across Mrs. Potter’s glass of Scotch and Gussie’s of Perrier.

“Again, it’s Tony,” Gussie said diffidently, returning to the subject of liquor. “I suppose you
could
call it Health Week, only it’s much more than that. What he’s doing for me is
so
wonderful. Part of it, of course, is his diet. He prescribes this for each of us individually. There’s lots more to his program
than that, only I haven’t progressed that far yet. Leah and Helen are much more advanced. So far I’m just doing his diet plan for me, and he’s very firm about not drinking, not for any of us.”

“Which brings me back to why haven’t you told me about Tony before,” Mrs. Potter began, when the continuing voice from the television altered in pitch and volume, announcing the start of the local island news.

“Edith Rosborough, secretary to the well-known Nantucket attorney Mr. Oscar deBevereaux, died early this afternoon at the Nantucket Cottage Hospital,” the voice told them as the picture on the screen showed a large white building.

“Miss Rosborough celebrated a birthday lunch today in company with members of the Nantucket Ladies Softball League, of which she is president. Apparently choking on a morsel of food, she was rushed unconscious to the hospital from the Scrimshaw Inn, where the birthday luncheon took place. A hospital spokesperson says that an allergic reaction may have caused the strangulation.”

The two women stared at the blurred screen, then at each other, in compassionate and shocked disbelief. “Oh
no
, “Gussie exclaimed. “They were having
such
a wonderful time, the bunch of them.”

“Ozzie will be shattered,” Mrs. Potter thought to say. “Shouldn’t we call him? Or shall we go over? It’s just a step.”

“Let’s wait until morning,” Gussie decided. “The poor guy is in terrible shape these days. Let’s just hope he’s sitting in his hot bath now, as he says he always does at the end of the day to ease his joints, and then popping into his warm bed, poor old dear.”

Mrs. Potter awoke, on the first day of her return to Nantucket, rested and happy. She stretched, catlike, in the canopied bed. Faint light in the windows told her that January dawn was approaching the island, and the muffled sound of an early truck on the cobblestones told her it had snowed in the night. She snuggled down again in smooth, fragrant old linen sheets, beneath a silk-covered down comforter.

At last she reached with a toe for the slippers beside her bed and slid out of the luxurious cocoon of the guest room bed. She crossed the room, her step soundless on the old oriental scatter rugs spaced on the polished, wide-planked floor. She splashed water on her face and brushed her teeth at the enormous marble washstand in the big bathroom and put on a warm pink robe.

Quietly she descended the wide stairway, its cushioned carpeting soundless under her feet, one hand on the smooth mahogany stair rail to assure her safe passage toward the pale light showing through heavy leaded-glass sidelights flanking the big solid front door.

Familiar with every inch of her old friend’s house, Mrs. Potter now doubled back past the long low chest in the hall,
glad to see that it still bore the huge Chinese vase and the heavy brass candlesticks she remembered, as she headed for the kitchen at the back of the house.

Outside in front, Mrs. Potter knew, was an imposing facade, presenting a double set of granite steps to the cobble-stoned street. Their twin curves of iron railing ended in shining globes of polished brass, matching the gleam of the heavy knocker on the door above.

She also knew that Gussie’s first question on interviewing a prospective new cleaning woman was “How do you feel about brass?” Once a week, summer and winter, someone had to polish these glories of an earlier age. Gussie occasionally had to remind a reluctant helper, “It has to be done; there are just you and me; you might as well know which of us I elect for the job.” It would have been unthinkable for Gussie to let the brasses, indoors or out, become dull and neglected, even if she herself sometimes proved to be the only one to do the polishing.

“I shouldn’t be allowed to live in this house if I don’t intend to keep it up,” Gussie always said. “I love it, and also it’s kind of a public trust, in a funny way. Theo felt the same way about it from the first, and we decided that if we couldn’t afford to take care of the place, we shouldn’t buy it.”

Gussie had continued to live in the house in her days as Mrs. Jules Berner. It had been their summer home for the thirty years of their marriage, alternating with winter city headquarters in a ten-room duplex apartment high above the East River.

During those years, Mrs. Potter and Lew had occasionally stayed in the same elegant old guest room when their own house on ’Sacacha Pond was not yet open for the summer. They and their children had come there over the years to dinner parties and breakfasts and lunches and holiday gatherings, just as Gussie and Jules and Marilyn and Scott had come to Quidnet. As parents they had shared numberless cups of tea or coffee in the big old kitchen, either in the sunny corner looking out onto the big garden in the back, or cozy in soft chairs in front of the kitchen fireplace. Their children
knew in both houses where to find Nabiscos or peanut butter, and in later years where they were expected., on occasion, to find a bed and, if necessary, the sheets for it. She knew her way to the pantry, the liquor closet, the garden, the books in the library.

This morning she was sure she made no sound as she came to the old swinging doors at the back of the hallway leading to the kitchen. It was wonderful, she thought, to be visiting in a house where she felt free to get up at her usual ranch hour, knowing she could make her early morning tea without wakening or inconveniencing the household.

The kitchen was dim, as had been the front hall as she slipped through the quiet door, but a light from the big pantry, off at her left, made her stop short.

“Caught you!”
Her hostess appeared in the lighted doorway. “Thought you’d sneak down for your tea, did you? Didn’t know I get up early these days too? Well, you’ll know when you learn more about Tony’s program. I was expecting you—the kettle’s just ready to boil.

“Cranberry muffins sound good?” she continued as Mrs. Potter was making the tea. “I wish I could toast some Portuguese bread for you, but for now you’ll have to make do with these, hotted up from the freezer. I made them before I began Tony’s diet.”

Slightly surprised to know that Gussie’s own breakfast was to be only the glass of pale juice she had carried in from the pantry, Mrs. Potter assured her that homemade cranberry muffins would be a great treat. The two were still sitting comfortably in bathrobes and slippers when they heard a light stamping of snow boots at the kitchen door opening to the side porch of the house.

“You’re out early, Bethie!” Gussie exclaimed. “How about a hot muffin? I’ll make you a cup of coffee—I know you prefer it in the morning, but Genia likes her tea and Tony has ruled out coffee for me, so I’m afraid it will have to be instant.”

Instant suited Beth very nicely, and she’d love a cranberry muffin. From the pocket of her coat she produced a small vial holding artificial sweetener. “Aren’t you proud of me?” she
asked. “I’m really going to get serious about this diet idea, and I thought I’d begin right away, even before I go to see your miracle man.” She was out for a morning walk, something she and Jim had always done together, even back in his Boston newspaper days.

“Not a soul out yet in this lovely light snow when I came down India Street,” she said. “I don’t know when it started. It hadn’t begun when I walked down to Ozzie’s at the end of the day yesterday, shortly after dark, right after I heard the TV news about Edie Rosborough. Isn’t that
dreadful?
That poor girl—and I kept thinking of Helen’s Lolly, too. Helen said she was Lolly’s first real friend. She must feel
so
sad.”

Beth sighed. “Anyway, after I heard the news I thought I’d try to cheer Ozzie up a little, or at least tell him how sorry I was, and then I remembered I was going to take him some of my dried comfrey. To make tea for his arthritis, you know, and for whatever else is ailing him.”

She sighed again. “I couldn’t rouse him, though. Maybe he was soaking in his tub, or he may have been at the hospital making arrangements about Edie, although there were lights on upstairs in his living room.”

As she broke open a hot, crusty brown muffin and lavishly buttered the first morsel, she exclaimed with pleased surprise, momentarily forgetting Oscar deBevereaux and the comfrey.
“Whole
cranberries!” she marveled. “They’re delicious—but I thought you always had to chop them up for muffins. I always do.”

“Aren’t they pretty?” Mrs. Potter agreed. “I haven’t seen whole cranberries used like this since my Grandmother Andrews made individual steamed puddings with them.”

“You might find them a bit tart,” Gussie warned them, “except that the bran muffin part seems sweet enough to me to temper the bite. Probably your grandmother’s puddings had a sweet sauce that did the same thing.”

“A fluffy hard sauce, as I remember,” Mrs. Potter said. “I can taste it now. Cool and rich, vanilla-flavored, with a sort of slippery feeling on the tongue.”

“I’d love both recipes,” Beth told them, buttering another
morsel of muffin. “Don’t you adore cranberries! Do you think they’re Nantucket’s most special native food?”

Nothing more Nantuckety, they agreed. Cranberry sauce and cranberry conserve, lattice-topped cranberry pie (“Mock cherry, they used to call it,” Gussie said), cranberry nut bread and molded cranberry salad and even cranberry dumplings.

“Cranberried sweet potatoes,” Beth said yearningly, “cranberry cake, cranberry cobbler, cranberry pecan pie. And my cranberry fluff, if I can ever find that recipe.”

“Would you believe cranberry soup?” Gussie asked. “It’s delicious—sort of a cranberry borscht, with beets and chicken broth. It was in that New England cookbook Mary Allen Havemayer did, when they had the Book Corner, remember? She was a wonderful cook.”

“How about Swamp Fires?” Mrs. Potter put in unexpectedly. “I’m not much for vodka myself, but it’s a terrific party punch. We served it at our ranch Christmas parties—at first just with the thought of offering something new to our Arizona neighbors, and then after that almost by popular request. It got to be quite a ranch tradition. Cranberry juice, vodka, and champagne—that was the general idea of it.”

“Trust you to think of Swamp Fires, Genia,” Gussie said. “Always ready for a drink.”

“Reformed characters are always so holy,” Mrs. Potter retorted. “I’m sure we got that punch recipe from you. And I
know
we learned to make beach plum slivovitz right here in this very kitchen. You fill a quart jar with whole, washed beach plums, add a teaspoonful of sugar, and pour in good 151-proof rum to the top. Then you set it away and forget it for a year, at least. Am I right?”

Gussie rose, rather grandly, to put on the kettle for fresh tea and coffee. “Be that as it may,” she said, “we’re talking about whether cranberries are the food most people associate with Nantucket.”

“No,” Beth asserted positively. “Nor bay scallops, superb as they are, nor beach plums. There’s only one food that’s
really
Nantucket, and that’s Portuguese bread.”

Ignoring the truth that Cape Cod might make the same claim, or New Bedford, or other places on the coast where Portuguese sailors and fishermen had settled, the three nodded in complete agreement. Portuguese bread was, for most residents and visitors to the island, Nantucket’s most special and memorable gastronomic delight. Pale and crusty on the outside, each small round loaf was unbelievably creamy and long-lasting within. Delicious fresh from Manny’s ovens, it still tasted fresh for two days, if it ever lasted that long. After that, it became a new delight, sliced and toasted.

There had been a time when Mrs. Potter had worked hard at trying to duplicate, or even approximate, Manny’s Portuguese bread, once the bakeshop was closed for the winter. She collected every recipe she could find for French bread, Cuban bread, Puerto Rican bread, all of which, the cookbooks assured her, were the same thing as Portuguese. They were not.

Those formally called Portuguese bread were invariably of the sweet, egg-bread, Easter-bread variety. Nice, but totally unrelated to the unprettied goodness of real Nantucket Portuguese bread.

Mrs. Potter had approached proper, black-clad Portuguese great-grandmothers on the island and on the Cape and had filled her notebooks with their claims to the one and only authentic recipe. (Younger Portuguese descendants denied any bread-making knowledge or interest.) Her friends had been periodically invited to lunch or dine to sample each latest attempt, then pressed into accepting foil-wrapped loaves for their freezers. Some of these breads were fair, some were awful, but even the best had never been Portuguese bread—not the bread Manny turned out in dozens and dozens of firm round blond loaves each day from late spring to late fall.

There came a day each November when Manny declared
bastante
. He pulled down the bakery blinds. He took himself off to his own condominium in Fort Lauderdale, where, as they all knew, he had genuine crystal chandeliers. There, everyone felt sure, he stuffed himself comfortably all winter
with soggy pizza, stale hamburger buns, and soft white sandwich bread, with an occasional cold, hard bagel to exercise his
dentes
.

“But to go back to Ozzie,” Beth reminded them, sighing. “I wonder how he’s taking the news about Edie.”