The Nantucket Diet Murders (35 page)

She spun into a quick reverse turn. Almost before she was on the new road leading to the pavement, and then to town and safety, she heard the roar of the heavy car taking off behind her.

There was no way to outdistance its menace. She even knew exactly at what bend, once she was on the main road, Peter would overtake her at the head of the pond. She knew exactly at what spot he could force her car from the road into the ditch, and at what point she would again see the dull gleam of the gun.

There was no escape for either of them. Peter had shot Lolly, and now he would have to shoot her as well.

At the end of the new road from Peter’s shack, she did not hesitate. Instead of following its well-defined turn left onto the road that would lead past the pond and to town, she drove straight ahead, the gas pedal pushed to the floor, across the old intersection, long since blocked off to traffic.

As she hurtled across the ragged pavement edge, already pierced with growth of rough beach grasses, she could see the abrupt ten-foot drop on her right, with the sand of the beach below and the white line of the surf just beyond. The small car faltered on the edge of the drop. She felt the ground give way beneath the right rear wheel, but speed and momentum carried her forward, and she found herself back on the long-abandoned shorefront track she remembered.

Behind her, the heavy station wagon had taken heed of her barely averted plunge onto the beach below the cliffside.
Laboring, it was making its own track a few feet farther from the edge. Thus slowed, it remained behind her.

So far, she had gambled successfully on finding and using the old road tracks. It would be only a moment before the car behind would find them too. Ahead, just ahead, had to be the particular stretch she remembered so well. It had to be there still if she was to win.

She shifted into four-wheel drive, forcing herself to accept the painful slowing of speed and aware that now the big car behind her was closing the gap between them. Then, although not as near as she had hoped, she saw the short stretch she had gambled to find—there where she had once, years ago, been entrapped in the old blue convertible, stuck for hours in the hot sun waiting for a tow truck from town.

With a long breath she gripped the wheel and drove Gussie’s car into what she knew was deep, soft sand.

Her wheels spun and began to dig in. She forced herself to accept a snail’s pace. The station wagon behind was closing in fast, and she could imagine Peter’s face, distorted in rage and frustration, judging the distance before his attack. Thinking of his square hand on his recently fired gun, she knew that if she failed he would shoot her here. She would die alongside a deserted Nantucket beach road, and he would be convinced that she was a part of the things that had gone wrong in his life, wrong beyond his intent or his comprehension.

There was one last gamble, that she could manage to get through the sand and the heavier car could not. If they both were stuck there, she would be an easy target for Peter’s .38.

The small car groaned, halted, then pulled slowly forward to firm ground. It was not until then that Mrs. Potter allowed herself a clear look in the mirror at the left of her car door.

The station wagon was no longer the pursuer, but a prisoner. She watched, as she increased the short distance between them, to see the familiar stocky figure step out of the stalled station wagon, now up to its hubcaps in the sand.

She was still near enough to hear Peter’s last wordless scream of rage, like that of a wounded animal. She heard the
single gunshot, which she knew, this time, was not intended for her.

To regain the traveled road ahead, Mrs. Potter had to crash through the back of a wooden barrier, one she knew must carry on its other side warnings of erosion and danger, an old sign declaring the road long closed. That was easy—a crash of weathered white-painted splinters. Past small boarded-up cottages, she turned abruptly left, again on a paved town road, to safety.

Her memory of Nantucket back roads had not failed her. Now, shaking as she drove, Mrs. Potter had to make herself remember where the police headquarters building was. The only time she had ever been there was when Benjie at sixteen got his first speeding ticket.

After she left the small building, Mrs. Potter, still several blocks short of Gussie’s house, pulled to the side of a small street, alone in early morning quiet and for the first time again aware of the pain in her right arm and shoulder. Tears streamed down her face as, for a moment blinded, she wept helplessly. Poor little Lolly. Poor Peter, who in his rage to be loved, didn’t know what the
hell
he had got himself into, or what kind of hell he had made of his life.

“Tony?” Gussie asked brightly. “Didn’t you all know? He’s gone to Palm Springs. Really a much more suitable place for his diet center than here on Nantucket—don’t you all agree? None of us was really rich enough for him.”

“I told you he was a bastard,” Dee said in Mrs. Potter’s right: ear. “He’d have figured out a way to look good even if Peter had managed to expose him with those papers of mine. I say good riddance, and I’m certainly not going to file suit against him now. I never intended to, in spite of Ozzie’s urging.”

In answer to Gussie, Mary Lynne nodded emphatically. “Those old Chattanooga skinflint lawyers wouldn’t listen to my buying Mittie’s house for him, anyway, as I guess you all know,” she said. “They’ve got everything tied up tight as a crocus sack, and I’m just plain going to have to get down on my knees to them for every red cent Bo Heidecker left me.” She sounded totally unconcerned. “Now let me tell you about another new idea for the Daffodil Festival.”

It was Monday, the last Monday in January, a little more than, two weeks after Lolly’s death and Peter’s. No one at Gussie’s house, where Les Girls were meeting for lunch, each
bearing a sandwich in her lightship basket as they had in years past, had needed to speak of this today. Their shared knowledge and sorrow had been talked out. At least for the moment, they were bravely pretending that Les Girls, as a weekly institution, would some way go on, in spite of their grief. And perhaps, Mrs. Potter thought, it would. Women their age had learned to be both strong and resilient.

Today’s news was that Beth would be back with them soon. Laurence and Paula said she was fine again. Awfully thin, for her, but beginning to get a little appetite back. One of the granddaughters is coming with her to stay for a while, they said, the one who wants to study astronomy and has got a temporary job at the science library.

There was a moment of silence.
Poor Lolly
was unspoken.

“The news about Helen is about as good as we could hope for,” Leah offered next. “You all know, I expect, that she’s gone off somewhere in New Jersey to study hospital administration, to make a career of it. I don’t think she’ll be back on the island, but at least she’s going to try to make a new life for herself.”

There was another long moment of silence. None of them could yet bear to speak of Peter. The pain was too raw. Each of them felt that she had in some way contributed to his destruction. “We took him for granted,” Gussie had said in private mourning with Mrs. Potter. “We should have seen how jealous he was of Tony, before it was too late.”

They knew that Jimmy’s sight would be somewhat impaired, but they had arranged for his care and for a new job on the island when he returned, as a helper to Hans Muller in the bakery. Jadine was already at work part time behind the counter at The Portuguese Bread Man, in her free time from her training as a bank teller, having announced that she was ready for a new line of work.

All of them had agreed that they had been spared, not the sorrow of Lolly’s death and Peter’s, but the indignity of the public ordeal of the murder trial that would have resulted if Peter had lived.

“The island would have been so crowded with reporters
and cameramen it would have sunk under water,” Mary Lynne said. “We wouldn’t have been able to walk across the street without being interviewed, and heaven only knows what would have been said about us. We were the ones who were there when Edie died. We were the ones who knew Ozzie best, we were the friends of Lolly’s mother, and Peter’s regulars at the Scrim. We’d have been massacred.”

Mrs. Potter privately agreed with this. A trial would have resulted in a public caricaturing of her friends. She felt sure that they would have been shown as shallow, useless, incredibly frivolous women, with their fashionably thin bodies and their big Nantucket houses. They would have been pictured as rich, idle, and useless, with no acknowledgment of their contributions to the life of the island, their hours of hard work in the community, their generosity of spirit and money, their genuine concern for others.

Dee, perhaps even more aware of all this than Mrs. Potter was, insisted on a complete change of subject. “About Mittie’s house,” she said, “there’s no more problem about its being sold, even if Mary Lynne can’t buy it and wouldn’t want to now if she could. I know the name may sound a bit alarming, but a very nice man, a Mr. Ali Akbar, just signed the sales contract this morning. Wonderful price—highest ever paid for anything on the island!”

“I’m delighted, of course,” Mittie said. “Daddy would never let us be intolerant about nationalities. However, I don’t intend to spend any part of the money fixing up the old house on Main Street.” Turning squarely to face Dee, she spoke with youthful insouciance. “Since Dee’s going to be rolling in money with the commission, she’s going to find a place of her own . . .”

Dee’s hat brim nodded agreement, and Mrs. Potter felt a quick hope that the sum would assure Mikai—Mikey—a good many years, perhaps
enough
years, at Fieldstone Hall.

Mittie had not finished. “. . . so I’m moving into the carriage house apartment and furnishing it with all my favorite pieces of Mummy’s, and moving all Ab’s ducks and stuff into the old house, to help that sell, too, as soon as Dee finds
another rich buyer. Now comes the nicest part. With the money, George is going to help me set up my own landscaping and garden service business, with our own greenhouses, as soon as we find the right location on the island. George has a wonderful business head, naturally, after all those years running his school. And we’ve decided on a church wedding in September, as soon as we get the business well started.”

Mrs. Potter thought wildly that Mittie was about to ask them all to be bridesmaids, in chiffon and maline. Clearly, Gussie had the same flight of fancy. They grinned at each other companionably, sure that this, at least, would not happen.

Mittie still had not finished. “. . . Before that, next week, as a matter of fact, I’m going to Boston for a few weeks. When I come back, I expect you all to say I look wonderfully
rested
, the thing people say when they know someone’s had a facelift. That’s another part of Tony’s program for me I couldn’t afford before.”

Mrs. Potter controlled an inward shudder. She had once, hoping to counteract the effects of the Arizona sun, consulted a plastic surgeon herself, about what her friends assured her was a comparatively simple operation. When she found out what it actually entailed, she had left his office in horror. Horror compounded later, she recalled, by his bill just for describing the procedure. Still, this was Mittie’s business, and those clear young eyes belonged in a younger-looking face.

“I think we should drink a toast to George and Mittie,” Gussie said. “I squeezed fresh juice for us, but how about a glass of white wine first? I’ll be right back.”

“Let’s toast me a little bit, while we’re at it,” Leah said. “I’ve got a job too, more or less. Victor’s
such
a fine writer—you all know that—and he’s selling his new novels as fast as I can think up the plots for him. The movie people were even here talking with us—remember, at the Scrim, the day of the fire, Genia? We may even have a new slogan. ‘Victor Sandys, the man who put
man
in romance!’ Don’t you
love
it? And he won’t have to be Vicki Sands anymore.”

Mrs. Potter thought of Peter’s description of Tony as a
cardboard man. He had never been anything but that, even to Gussie. Just a cardboard figure in a romantic novel.

“Speaking of diets,” she said, although they were not and it was only the thought of Tony that made her bring it up, “I lost eight pounds this month, with all this Nantucket dieting. I think I should be toasted too, particularly since I figure roughly that I’ve lost eight pounds every two years for the last forty years, then spent the next two gaining it back again. That comes out to one thousand, six hundred pounds—right, Gussie? I have lost more than three-quarters of a ton, and I expect to round that out to a full two thousand if I live that long., which I fully intend to do. Aren’t you proud of me?”

“Not of your arithmetic,” Gussie told her. “Get out your yellow pad. You always
were
shaky on zeroes.”

Dee spoke up suddenly. “You know who are the best diet authorities in the country?” she asked.
“Us! We
are! We got in on the whole thing at the start, when we were about twenty! I’m not sure calories were ever talked about before then—does anybody know? Our mothers and grandmothers didn’t diet . . .”

“Maybe they were more concerned with having enough to eat,” Leah said unexpectedly.

“Well, maybe,” Dee conceded. “The thing is that
we’re
the ones who have lived through the whole history of modern dieting. I’ve got to look that up—when the word began to mean eating to get thinner!” Her enthusiasm for the topic was mounting. “Remember the milk-and-banana diet? That’s the first one I ever tried. Three bananas a day, and three glasses of skim milk. You alternate them, spaced out in six so-called meals through the day.”

“How about the grapefruit diet?” Mittie asked quickly. “I can’t remember what the actual meals were, but you ate a half grapefruit before each one, and that was supposed to do the trick.”

“Remember the micro-macro thing?” Leah said. “We ate all we could hold of unsalted brown rice, and decided everything as to whether it was Yin or Yang.”