Free The Nantucket Diet Murders by Virginia Rich Page A

snow-capped iron railings were cleanly defined.
    “If we don’t hurry, it will all melt before we get there to see the trees,” Gussie urged as Mrs. Potter stood looking, unwilling to move. “Come
on!”
    “It’s just that this place is
so
beautiful,” Mrs. Potter said. “You forget, being away, just how perfect it all is, and how
real.”
    “It’s real,” Gussie said. “It never changed and it never had to be rebuilt, the way they did when they restored Williamsburg.”
    “Poor old Nantucketers,” Mrs. Potter said. “The bottom dropped out of the whale oil market when somebody drilled an oil well out in Pennsylvania. They couldn’t afford to modernize.” She thought of what those modernizations would have been—fake English timbering and fancy shingle patterns—and how blessedly the island had been spared.
    Suddenly she clutched her hostess’s arm. “Gussie,” she said quietly, “even if you’ve gone down this street a thousand times, you’ve never seen it like this.”
    From Orange Street to their right, the clock on the South Tower struck nine. A few tracks of early cars and trucks had left their marks in the snow on the wide cobblestone street leading down to a glimpse of the harbor, sparkling in the sunshine at the bottom of the hill. A few foot tracks showed on the broad sidewalks, but for the moment not a car was parked on the quiet, snowy street, not another person was in sight.
    For the moment, the world between the big red-brick bank at the head of the street, and the smaller, older red brick of the Pacific Club at the foot was entirely their own, in unbelievable contrast to Mrs. Potter’s summertime memories, when it was thronged with well-dressed strollers and shoppers, with people in shorts walking their bicycles on the sidewalk, with clusters of eager buyers circling bright flower stands or choosing fresh-picked local vegetables from the backs of parked trucks. Now tall Christmas trees marked the front of these two landmark buildings. Along each side of the street were a dozen or more smaller trees. Each of them, large or small, had this morning been returned to its forest beginnings by the magic of the snow.
    “The lights and trimmings were taken down yesterday,” Gussie said softly. “All of the holiday glitter is gone. It’s just snow and trees.”
    As she spoke, a green town truck entered at the foot of the street and parked at the central corner, in front of what Mrs. Potter always called “the paper store.” Two men in heavy jackets and dark, billed caps climbed out of the cab, lit cigarettes, and looked around slowly.
    “We just made it in time,” Gussie said. “They’ve come to take down the trees. Let’s walk on down to Straight Wharf on our side of the street and pretend they aren’t there.”
    The two walked slowly down the hill toward the harbor, scarcely glancing at the old brick storefronts and shopwindows—shops that had been filled with tanned and affluent summer customers the last time Mrs. Potter had seen them. Their displays of books and gifts and antiques and confections and beautiful textiles could wait. For her now, there was only the quiet and the snow and the reborn trees.
    Mrs. Potter broke the silence as they passed the friendly old red bricks of the Pacific Club, discreetly peering in to see if any early morning cribbage players were already at their small tables in the back room. “Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, “that it could have been the Nantucket Tea Party in the history books? Those three ships carrying the tea from England might have come in to Nantucket instead of Boston Harbor. They were owned here, remember? And by the same company that used to have headquarters in this building. Can you see the old Nantucketers painting themselves up like Wampanoags and dumping that tea in the harbor here, rather than pay the king’s taxes?”
    “Highly unlikely,” Gussie assured her. “The ships—what were their names?—belonged to Mr.