The Nantucket Diet Murders by Virginia Rich Page A

her when she had gumption enough to buy one of the bricks and came here to stay on the island, a few years after he died.” Gussie was musing now. “She was the first of us to be widowed.”
    “What a long time ago that was,” Mrs. Potter mused. “I think Lolly was still very young when they came to stay, and Elna was more nurse than cook. Remember how surprised we all were when Helen let Lolly stay on in school here through high school? I suppose that’s why she always seemed so much more a part of the town group, like the softball league yesterday, than, say, of the Yacht Club, even though she grew up in one of the grand brick mansions. She was always such a quiet little thing and I don’t think any of our children ever knew her very well.”
    “She had reason to be a quiet little thing,” Gussie replied. “We’re all inclined to forget what it must have done to her to be the one to find her father after he’d shot himself. And after that, I really think Helen turned over the parents’ job to Walter and Elna.”
    Mrs. Potter remembered Helen’s plump, elderly cook and houseman very well. “I suppose Lolly was lucky that the two of them stayed on all these years,” she said. “At least they knew what she’d gone through.”
    Gussie was thoughtful. “Walter once told me she used to wake up screaming for months afterward, and they tried to make things easier for her any way they could. That worried me—I thought maybe they’d given her paregoric or somethingof the sort to calm her down, but if so, it was apparently before they moved back here to stay. By then, which was a couple of years later, he said she was better.”
    “I think they may simply have let her overeat,” Mrs. Potter said. “It would have been so easy for them to do, if it seemed to make her feel better. That might account for her being overweight now, and the reason she’s always seemed, well, out of things. Instead of going out to play, I have an awful feeling she went to her room with a handful of cookies, and that maybe she’s still doing it, in a manner of speaking.”
    “They’ve done the best they knew how,” Gussie said. “At least Walter said she always came to the two of them with her troubles. That was something. But nothing could have made up for the shock of Lester’s shooting himself and Helen’s obvious indifference to the child after that. Maybe
even before that
, for all we know. Helen’s not a very warm person and she’s always had a very busy schedule. Poor little Lolly.”
    “Did you see how she seemed to respond to Peter yesterday?” Mrs. Potter asked. “I thought that was very nice.”
    “What I’d really like is to turn her over to Tony,” Gussie said. “He could do wonders with her. Peter’s a dear, of course, but Tony could work a miracle, at least with her looks, and that, as we all know, can make all the difference in the world in how we feel about ourselves.”
    “All right, we’ll give her to Tony,” Mrs. Potter said, “and then to Larry to do something about that frizzy home permanent—I’ll bet Elna did that. While we’re planning this great make-over, you can take her to that little woman of yours at Bergdorf’s to find her some decent clothes. That old raincoat and hat yesterday were a disgrace.”
    Gussie was totally serious. “Helen said Edie Rosborough was her first real friend, and I wonder if maybe she wasn’t her only real friend. Edie’s dying that way, right beside her at the lunch table, must have been almost as much of a shock as her father’s suicide was. I say it again, poor Lolly.”
    They continued walking steadily, occasionally pulling close to the edge of the path to avoid spattering slush from an oncoming car. Gussie continued talking. “Funny how all of usfirst came here as summer people and then stayed on, all but you, when the husbands died or retired.”
    The salt marshes at the edge of the harbor showed brilliant blue pools in the morning sunlight,