Free The Nantucket Diet Murders by Virginia Rich

momentary dismay. “I didn’t realize I was getting
so fat!”
she exclaimed. “There must be something wrong with my scales. Every morning they tell me about the same thing, give or take a pound or two.
But look at me!
Standing beside you I look absolutely
gross.”
    Gussie’s trousers and sweater, nicely fitted, as were Mrs. Potter’s own, were clearly a size—could it be two sizes?—smaller. “You’re not fat, Genia,” she said comfortingly. “In fact you look pretty good by the standards we used to apply to ourselves ten or twenty years ago. I know you may think the fashion of being quite thin is only a fad, or purely vanity, but Tony has convinced me it’s as much for health as forlooks.” As Gussie spoke, she turned to look at her full-length profile in the mirror.
    “Don’t
do
that!” Mrs. Potter begged her. “I can’t bear the comparison!”
    “If you’re serious,” Gussie said, “you may decide to join the club. You know I don’t mean it’s really a
club
. It’s just that all of us—except Bethie and Dee—are totally committed to Tony Ferencz. His program is different for each of us—we all know that, and he’s asked us not to discuss it with each other. All I can tell you is that all of us who are his regulars think that he’s wonderful.”
    “I saw the change in all the others the minute we were together at lunch yesterday,” Mrs. Potter told her. “I just hadn’t realized how fat I look next to you! Frankly, it’s rather a shock.”
    “Let me ask Tony what he thinks about taking on a new client,” Gussie said doubtfully. “I think he really wants to stay with just the small group of us for individual counseling. He says he only wants people who are permanently on the island for now, although of course that will change once he establishes his foundation. And even that is confidential, so will you please forget I mentioned it? He’s a wonderful man, but some things make him very angry, like discussing his plans, even anything about his methods, with outsiders.”
    Feeling fat, taken aback at the realization that she was now an outsider, at least to Tony Ferencz, in a place she had known and loved and been a part of for so long, Mrs. Potter flattened her stomach muscles, tucked under her behind, and followed Gussie’s slim figure down the stairs.
    Even as she wondered what Tony and his diet and his confidential methods could do for
her
, Mrs. Potter’s thoughts veered sharply to the two deaths of the previous day. It seemed too much a coincidence that a secretary should die of an allergic seizure at a Wednesday lunch party and that her employer, Mrs. Potter’s old friend, should die that same evening.
    Nonsense, she told herself briskly. Ozzie was older than the rest of us, and in poor health. It was possible that news ofEdie’s death had precipitated his fatal heart attack or whatever it was. The whole thing was simply chance—sad chance, for both of them.
    However, the breakfast conversation had pointed out an uncomfortable fact. The two of them, Ozzie and his secretary, were equally privy to the affairs of all of her friends, it seemed, and probably to those of dozens of others of the island’s winter population as well,
    So it was, that perhaps twelve hours after Oscar deBevereaux’s death, and less than an hour after she had learned of it, Mrs. Potter began to feel vaguely troubled.

8
    Scarved, wool-capped, and storm-coated, the two women separated moments later to descend to the street by the twin stairs flanking Gussie’s front door. Each brushed the snow from the round brass finial on her side of the stairway, and they smiled at each other in the sunshine.
    Yesterday’s uncertain January patchiness had become a new world of clear blue and white. The red brick of the great houses across the street, one of them Helen Latham’s, showed sharp and clean against the white of small gardens; the heavy wood frame above each window held a ledge of soft white snow;