The Corpse in Oozak's Pond

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Chacun à son goût,” said Shandy, who was a hawk man himself. “I suppose Persephone was beguiled into this harebrained lawsuit by the lure of easy money, but I can’t understand why Purvis didn’t try to head her off.”

  “Sephy wouldn’t be lured by easy money.”

  “Well, drat it, she must have been lured by something.”

  “Family pride, I suppose. Darling, can’t you imagine what it must have been like for a girl who was supposed to be connected with the local aristocracy, growing up in that ratty old house without two nickels to rub together and having to wear Grace’s hand-me-downs? Grace used to pretend they swapped clothes back and forth because they were cousins, but everybody knew Sephy wouldn’t have had a rag to her name if it hadn’t been for Grace.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “Mrs. Lomax, I suppose. So now Sephy’s out for revenge?”

  “I expect she’d call it getting a little of her own back. Put yourself in Sephy’s place, Peter. If your people had been the underdogs generation after generation and your parents were old and discouraged, and suddenly they thought they’d found a way to get up on top at last, wouldn’t you have a hard time refusing to back them up?”

  “And Grace is willing to stand behind her, even though the parents are dead?”

  “How do I know where Grace is standing? Right now I daresay she’s trying to stay neutral about the lawsuit and help Sephy cope with the funeral. It’s an awful spot for her to be in.”

  Unless Sephy decided to drop the lawsuit, Shandy thought. If not, the situation could only get worse. Phil Porble must be doing some heavy thinking about now. If he found after due deliberation that justice lay on Persephone’s side, he’d support her regardless of the consequences to himself, Grace, or the college. If he decided the Ichabod Buggins claim was a bundle of horsefeathers, he wouldn’t hesitate to start a family feud by saying so. If he’d already determined that some action on his own part was required to solve the dilemma, Phil would act. Whether his dispassionate logic would lead him to drown the man who thought up the lawsuit, Shandy honestly didn’t know.

  “Peter, I know what you’re thinking, and he wouldn’t,” said Helen. “He wouldn’t have to. If he wanted to get rid of somebody, he’d just give them one of his looks and they’d wither away.”

  “M’well, you know Porble better than I do, I suppose, notwithstanding the fact that he and I had been colleagues for approximately eighteen years before you ever got here.”

  “Bah, humbug. You may have strolled into the library to look up petunia statistics occasionally or to give him a hard time about opening up the Buggins Room on the off chance there’d be a copy of the collected poems of John G. Saxe you could get your lustful hands on. That’s not knowing.”

  “Not knowing in the sense that I couldn’t tell you what color pajamas he wears, perhaps. That seems to be the sort of thing women always seem to think matters.”

  “I haven’t the remotest idea what color pajamas Dr. Porble wears, nor have I troubled to inquire,” Helen retorted icily. “Probably cream-colored silk with a tasteful maroon piping and his initials embroidered on the pocket. Darn you, Peter, why did you have to mention pajamas? Now I’ll wonder about them next time I see him. And get an unseemly fit of the giggles, like as not.”

  “You might more profitably expend your wonderment on why two more or less identical corpses turned up in Oozak’s Pond eighty years apart,” Shandy suggested. “Who besides yourself and Phil Porble has access to the Buggins Archive? You don’t let visitors wander at will through the Buggins Room, do you?”

  “You know perfectly well we don’t.”

  For half a century or more, the Buggins Room had been a dusty, cobwebbed dump for splintered crates nobody wanted to look through. Now all books were shelved according to the Dewey decimal system, all papers dealt with according to the Helen Marsh Shandy system.

  Helen had gone ferreting in the library basement and found a long oak table, which she’d caused to be lugged upstairs by a squad of burly sophomores for the better sorting and collating of the Buggins Archive. By now, the table was covered with racks and baskets full of carefully annotated folders that scholars from other areas were itching to get a look at. Dr. Porble himself, having for decades despised and ignored the Buggins Collection as an incubus that took up space better devoted to hog statistics, was virtually being forced to take an interest.

  He could easily have taken advantage of his position as library director and keeper of the extra key to wander in and poke around. He could have come upon Corydon’s memorial ode to Augustus, read it, and returned it to its designated spot without Helen’s ever knowing, now that she was doing much of her work at home. Later, faced with the problem of dispatching a pestiferous Buggins and remembering what Henry Doe had got away with, his sardonic sense of humor might conceivably have prompted him to try Doe’s method again.

  Helen wasn’t ready to ascribe such perfidy to her boss. “Dr. Porble wouldn’t do a thing like that,” she insisted. “Anyway, lots of people might have heard the story. It’s the sort of yarn grandparents like to scare their grandchildren with.”

  “True enough,” he replied. “Can’t you see little Gracie Buggins listening wide-eyed to Uncle Trevelyan spinning the tale, with her pigtails standing right up straight and her kitty cat purring by her side? And passing it on to Phil during their courting days while they strolled hand in hand around picturesque old Oozak’s Pond watching the bullfrogs seduce the cowfrogs.”

  “Grace and Phil would have been doing no such thing. They’d be over at the library, necking in the stacks. Grace told me so. She said she and Phil were always catching students at it, and they thought they might as well try it themselves in the spirit of scholarly research. Phil was rooming with some old battle-ax down on Grove Street at the time. His landlady used to wait up for him, to make sure he hadn’t taken to drink or moral turpitude. He’d stroll in about half past eleven with lipstick all over his shirtfront and try to make her believe he’d been sorting Library of Congress catalog cards.”

  “Good gad, a master of deceitful dalliance and carnal cunning! Why couldn’t they go and canoodle in the cottage? Weren’t Grace and Persephone living there then?”

  “Yes, but Sephy was already going steady with Purvis Mink. Purvis had ten or eleven brothers and sisters at home, so they could hardly go to his house. And naturally Sephy wouldn’t invite him out to her folks’ because it was so awfully depressing and her father would insist on telling them all the corny old stories she’d heard a million times already. “

  “The one about the corpse in Oozak’s Pond, for instance.”

  “All right, Peter, you’ve made your point.”

  Persephone Buggins would surely have heard about Augustus’s watery doom and passed it on to Grace if nobody else did. Being a collateral connection of Corydon’s, Trevelyan would no doubt have held on to a copy of his poems. Scions of old families who’ve hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors, and Corydon Buggins had evidently cut as grand a figure on the Balaclava County literary scene as Charles Follen Adams or even Lydia Sigourney had done in wider circles.

  Shandy snorted at such once-famous names. “In my opinion, Belial Buggins could rhyme the pants off the lot of them.”

  “I’m not saying he couldn’t,” Helen had to agree, “but you must admit, Belial’s verses weren’t the sort young ladies could copy into their albums.”

  “Belial was a man ahead of his time.”

  “He was usually about three jumps ahead of some irate husband carrying a shotgun, too.”

  “So he was. Damn, I wish old Hilda Horsefall hadn’t moved to Sweden. She’d know how many of Belial’s bastard begets passed on the family genes and which of their children favor the Bugginses as much as that bearded enigma on Goulson’s mortuary slab does. Maybe Mrs. Lomax can tell. “

  “She might tell me, but she’d never tell you,” sai
d Helen. “She’s much too delicate in the sensibilities to discuss such things with a man she isn’t married to. The problem is, she’ll know why I’m asking, and she’ll tie it straight up with the Minks. Mrs. Lomax wouldn’t breathe a word that might hurt Purvis and Sephy.”

  “Gad! The schism is widening faster than you can shake a stick at it,” Shandy groaned.

  “You can’t shake a stick at a schism, dear. At least I suppose you could, but I can’t see what you’d accomplish if you did. Were you planning to walk me back up to the library, or shall I try to make it on my own?”

  “Why? Do you feel a swoon coming on?”

  “I suppose that means you’d rather get back to Goulson’s and hang out with the medical examiner.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather I hung out with him than hung from Svenson’s paws as a bleeding pulp?”

  “Oh, all right, if you’re squeamish about getting mangled. I’ll see if I can find anything about Oozak’s Pond among Balaclava’s personal records, but there’s an awful lot to get through. I must say this lawsuit sounds totally spurious to me, Peter. Ichabod was Balaclava’s nephew, you know.”

  “You said Dalbert was Balaclava’s nephew.”

  “There were four nephews. Dalbert was the only son of Balaclava’s sister, Druella, who married Fortitude Lumpkin and founded Lumpkin Corners. Ichabod, Corydon, and Belial were sons of Balaclava’s brother, Abelard, the horse trader. Abelard built that house where Trevelyan and Beatrice lived as a wedding present for Ichabod when he married Prudence Plover in 1831. Prudence was said to be a little weak in the head, though that may have been only because she had no more sense than to marry Ichabod.”

  “Who never amounted to much.”

  “Right. Corydon, on the other hand, took over his father’s horse-trading business and did very well at it, when he wasn’t being visited by an attack of the muse. Belial got disinherited for reasons too numerous to mention but didn’t care because he had his own sources of income.”

  “And could always find a bed for the night.”

  “Don’t digress. I don’t know how we got started on nephews. What I meant to say was that Balaclava Buggins was a sensible, dedicated man. He taught school before he was sixteen, he farmed, he lived what he preached. He truly believed in earning his bread by the sweat of his brow and training young people to be good farmers and good citizens. He knew perfectly well the only way he could reach them was by setting an example worth following. Does that sound like the kind of man who’d go around making reckless bets?”

  “Not to me, but I doubt if you’re going to sell an unsupported argument to the Bugginses’ lawyers. Or to Miss Minerva Mink.”

  “Miss Mink? What does she have to do with the lawsuit?”

  “Good question. She claims to have been bilked of her patrimony and maybe also of her matrimony by her handsome cousin Algernon and is determined not to let Persephone make a similar mistake. Miss Mink doesn’t talk as if she carried much clout among the Bugginses, but one never knows. Come on, I’ll walk you back to the library before I go to Goulson’s.”

  Chapter 7

  “SO WHAT’S THE VERDICT?” Shandy asked.

  “Interesting,” said the medical examiner. “With all respect to the doctor who made out the death certificate, the old man’s heart must have been remarkably sound, considering his age, and the old lady’s lungs as clear as a bell. And vice versa, I may add. If Chief Ottermole doesn’t mind, I’d like to take some bits and pieces back for analysis.”

  “Take all you want,” said the chief. “They won’t be needing them anymore. How about the guy we fished out of the pond?”

  “A straightforward case of murder.”

  “Huh? How come not suicide? Couldn’t he simply have filled his pockets with rocks to weigh him down an’ jumped in?”

  “Not after somebody ran an ice pick into the base of his skull, he couldn’t. In fact, I’m wondering if he may have been left lying around somewhere for a day or two before he was put into the pond. There are certain signs not altogether consistent with immediate immersion in icy water and none whatever of drowning.”

  “Then one person acting alone may have killed him and had to wait some time for help in dumping the body, do you think?” said Shandy.

  “It’s a possibility. He may have been driven across country in a car with a heater running, for all I know, though I can’t imagine why. I’m not saying the weapon was in fact an ice pick, but an ice pick would have made exactly the kind of wound he received. Driving it into his neck wouldn’t have taken any great amount of strength if it was sharp enough, which it obviously was. Getting a tall, well-nourished corpse into the pond would have taken more than average strength and was most likely done by more than one person. Unless he was considerate enough to be lying facedown on a toboggan when he was stabbed.”

  “With his pockets full of rocks.”

  “You do slay with panache over here, I must say. Could you lend me a couple of buckets for the stomachs, Goulson?”

  “Better bring a spare,” mumbled Fred Ottermole. They weren’t actually in the room where the autopsy had been taking place, but they were closer to it than he wished he were. Ottermole was still suffering from the morning’s injudicious combination of corpse and crullers.

  Seeing a relapse on the way, Shandy hastened to change the subject. “What can you tell us about the murdered man, Doctor? We still don’t have an identification, as Goulson must have told you, and we’d welcome any ideas you may have. Did you get any, er, Holmesian hints from his hands, for instance?”

  “Well, he wasn’t a surgeon or a golfer.” The coroner displayed his own calluses as evidence. “He may have done a fair amount of physical labor when he was younger, but not all that much in recent years. He was in excellent physical condition for a man his age, which would be between sixty and sixty-five, I’d say; well nourished but not fat, didn’t smoke or drink to excess, and spent a lot of time outdoors. He might possibly have been a construction foreman who’d worked his way up from the pick-and-shovel brigade or something on that general line, but that’s only a guess.”

  “What about his teeth?”

  “They’d been freshly pulled. By an amateur using a hammer and chisel, from the looks of the gums.”

  “My God! To hamper identification, I suppose.”

  “Oh, yes. The fingertips have been sandpapered, too. Quite a home handyman’s job all around. I haven’t had time to prowl through that beard, but I’d suggest you have Goulson get rid of it. There may be a scar or birthmark underneath that would give you a clue. We took some pictures of him all nicely dried and combed out before I began my examination, by the way.”

  “We got some, too,” Fred Ottermole bragged. “We had a photographer on the scene when we hauled him out of the pond.”

  “By George, Chief Ottermole, you’re an organizer. I don’t see how you run such a tight department with such a tiny staff, the lowest budget in the county, and the highest percentage of murders.”

  “We got no more murders than anyplace else,” Ottermole protested. “It’s just that we don’t pussyfoot around calling ’em what they ain’t. Chief Olson over at Lumpkinton, he finds a body with six bullets in it, tied up with clothesline, an’ stuffed into an old icebox. There’s six fresh holes shot through the icebox door, an’ he tries to pass it off as suicide while of unsound mind because the stiff’s his wife’s cousin’s brother-in-law.”

  “That was carrying family loyalty to the ultimate limit,” the medical examiner agreed. “Speaking of families and identifications, Professor Shandy, have you noticed how strongly the man we’ve been talking about resembles the late Mr. Buggins? Perhaps it’s not obvious at first glance because of the difference in age and size and all that facial hair, but the bone structure, the shape of the ears, and, of course, the eye color are remarkably similar.”

  “The eye color?” said Shandy. “You mean that washed-out blue? I never knew the Bugginses. What color were the wife’s eyes?�
��

  “Why, I can’t say I noticed particularly. Harry, can you enlighten us?”

  The undertaker hesitated. “Sort of hazely, aren’t they?”

  “Let’s go take a look,” said Shandy.

  Fred Ottermole gulped. “I got to call the station.”

  “Why don’t you go out in the side hall and use the phone down near the rest rooms?” Harry Goulson suggested kindly. “I’ll just run ahead and get the loved ones ready for viewing, you not being much used to autopsies.”

  Peter Shandy was grateful that Goulson’s preparation had included covering the three corpses with sheets, all but their faces. The eyes were open. He took a look at Beatrice Buggins’s and shook his head. “Is that what you call hazel, Goulson?”

  “If you want the honest truth, Professor, I always say hazel unless they’re plain blue or brown. I’m not much on colors. Arabella picks out the clothes and does the makeup mostly. What would you call them?”

  “I’d say darkish gray. Do you agree, Doctor?”

  “Yes, I do. To me, hazel suggests a tinge of brown, and I don’t see any of that here. Rather an unusual shade, isn’t it? She must have been pretty when she was young. Well, if we’re through here, I’ll get back to the lab and see what else I can find out for you. I may have some information on the stomach contents by the end of the afternoon. You can handle things here, can’t you, Harry?”

  “Sure thing, Doctor. Let me give you a hand with those buckets.”

  Chief Ottermole came out of the men’s room and said he had urgent business over at the station, which nobody doubted for a moment. Shandy was reminded that he had to get to the bank before it closed or there’d be no money in the house to buy Jane Austen her supper. He left, too, deep in thought.

  So Goulson’s corroboration of Sephy Mink’s statement about her brothers’ brown eyes didn’t amount to a hill of beans. The twins’ eyes could have been dark gray like their mother’s easily enough, but there was only one way they could have been brown, even a hazel brown.