The Nantucket Diet Murders by Virginia Rich Read Free Book Online Page A

Gussie’s first marriage had been to Mrs. Potter’s favorite cousin, Theo Andrews, and it was he, to celebrate his sudden success in business, who had bought the big Main Street mansion. There, the two had happily planned a lifetime of summers together.
    The grand piano had been Jules Berner’s, Mrs. Potter remembered, and it was there that he used to entertain them all with wild and brilliant improvisations. By then Gussie, a richly adored young wife, had married Jules, a successful New York investment banker. It was through the years of their summers here that the two families, the Berners and the Potters, had maintained their long friendship.
    A stiff, but bright and engaging, painting of Dutch burgher houses caught her eye. This had been her and Lew’s third wedding present to Gussie as a bride. A year after Jules’s fatal heart attack four years ago, Gussie had again remarried, this time to Gordon Van Vleeck, a Nantucket-summering bachelor from Schenectady. They knew that Gordon was inordinately proud of his Dutch ancestry, and hoped that the small painting would please them both.
    She and Lew had not really liked Gordon, and had done everything they tactfully could do to discourage Gussie’s remarriage after what seemed to them such a short time.
    “I think our Gussie’s a gal who just has to be married,” she remembered Lew’s saying. “She’s not as independent as you might be, Genia. . ..” Lew then could not have known how independent she was going to have to prove herself. It was a help at times to remember his confidence in her.
    There was nothing to be gained now by wishing that they had been able to talk Gussie out of what had been an unfortunatethird marriage. And she certainly had not come to Nantucket now to share any further mourning over Gordon’s death. She went to Jules’s piano and dashed off a quick double-time version of Chopsticks, just to let Gussie, presumably still busy in the kitchen, know how glad she was to be back on the island.
    Drink in hand, she returned to the library to find her sitting comfortably in a wing chair with a glass of soda water. “I think it’s great you aren’t drinking,” Mrs. Potter told her. “Calling it Health Week after the holidays, are you?”
    Ignoring the television set in the corner, the two began to recall all those times in their shared past when they had declared Health Week. Early to bed for a week, they would vow (it never took more than one night, actually, to catch up then), after the red-rimmed eyes and exhaustion of exams or after a particularly strenuous weekend. No desserts for a week, they would decree, as penance for an after-hours orgy of ice cream and pretzels and sardines. No smoking for a month, just to be sure they weren’t getting the habit. They now agreed that the no-smoking times had become more and more difficult in the years that followed.
    “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 programthan 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