The Corpse in Oozak's Pond

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Mrs. Woozle did not go into wild jubilation at sight of a middle-aged man in a shabby mackinaw. “If you’re looking for Zack,” she told him drily, “he’s over at the Dirty Duck.”

  “Er, no,” said Shandy. “It’s yourself I was hoping to see. You are Mrs. Marietta Woozle, I take it?”

  “Take it or leave it for all I care.” Mrs. Woozle shrugged, causing the blue chicken feathers to flutter in a manner that might perhaps have suggested an attempt at beguilement had the flutterer shown herself more hospitably inclined. “How do you spell Constantinople?”

  Shandy supposed this might not be a particularly out-of-the-way question coming from a proofreader. Or perhaps she was doing a crossword puzzle. Anyway, he spelled it, and she nodded.

  “Aha, just as I thought. You’re one of those professors from the college, come to tempt me with your filthy lucre to recant my testimony about the perfidious Dr. Porble. My only reply to you, sir, is no, no, a thousand times no.”

  “Half that number would have sufficed,” said Shandy. “I freely admit to being a professor from the college, Shandy by name, but I have no intention of trying to buy you off.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “No, no, a thousand times no. I shouldn’t dream of such a thing. Anybody can see you’re a woman of”—he gauged the depth of her neckline in some bemusement and settled for—“character.”

  “Oh.”

  She rested her right hand on her hip and raised the left to toy with her back hair exactly the way Mae West used to do. It was at moments like this that the older boys used to start whistling and the younger ones go out for popcorn. For an eerie moment, Shandy experienced an auditory illusion of corduroy knickers squeaking in the dark.

  “What I came for, Mrs. Woozle, was simply to, er, verify a few points from the testimony obtained by Officer Dorkin earlier today. Provided you can spare the time, that is.” He’d noticed her swift glance at the white hands on the blue face of the red clock on the wall.

  “Make it snappy, then. What do you want to know?”

  She hadn’t asked him to sit down and clearly didn’t intend to, although there were plenty of white vinyl chairs around, each with its starred-and-striped cushion of red and blue. She must have born on the Fourth of July, Shandy decided. He cleared his throat.

  “As I understand it, Mrs. Woozle, you were on your way to the community hall at twenty minutes past nine on the night of February first. As you reached the intersection, you noticed a car with no lights on coming out of First Fork.”

  “Dr. Porble’s car, yes.”

  “How did you know it was Dr. Porble’s car?”

  “I know the car, and I saw the number plate. I told Budge Dorkin that. Furthermore, I wrote down the number right away so I wouldn’t forget it, not that I ever do. I have a photographic memory.”

  “Handy for you. Then perhaps you can describe the appearance of Dr. Porble’s car.”

  She could and did. Shandy became increasingly depressed. He told himself the description didn’t necessarily mean anything. Grace Porble must have driven the car over here often enough, bringing the Bugginses hot soup and flower arrangements. Marietta Woozle would have had opportunities enough to memorize its details.

  But why would she want to lie about having seen it night before last? Surely she must realize the probable consequences to Porble. Mrs. Woozle didn’t look to him like any half-wit, notwithstanding her blue chicken feathers. Maybe the Mae West getup was just one of those Total Woman ploys intended to lure Zack away from the Dirty Duck. As Marietta was a size or two larger than the dress, there did seem an element of overkill in her technique, but it might be that Zack was a type on whom subtleties would be wasted.

  “Did you actually see Dr. Porble driving the car?” he asked in desperation.

  “Well, hardly, how could I? When I flashed my high beams, I could see a shape that looked like him, sitting up tall the way he does, with sort of a Dick Tracy profile and one of those Harry Truman felt hats. I don’t know anybody else who still wears one like it, so I figured that must have been him, but I’m not going to swear it was. I couldn’t see the features, just a silhouette in the dark.”

  “I’d say you did unusually well to see as much as you did in the flash of a headlight,” Shandy told her somewhat nastily. “You must have incredible eyesight, Mrs. Woozle.”

  “I have,” she snapped back. “In my profession, you need it. Furthermore, it wasn’t just one flash of a headlight. I had my high beams on him the whole time he was pulling out and making his left turn toward the Junction, so I got both a back and a side view. Both of which are registered on my photographic mind like as if they were a videotape in the old family cassette box, and don’t you think they’re not. And I’ll say so in front of a judge and jury if I have to. Got what you came for, Professor?”

  She fluttered over to the door and held it open. Coming from a woman who stood perhaps five feet eight in her blue artificial-leather mules and must weigh in at one sixty-five or better, not counting the chicken feathers, the hint would have been a difficult one not to take. Shandy hadn’t got what he’d hoped for, but he’d clearly had all she was about to give him. He mumbled, “Thanks for your time,” and left. Zack Woozle’s preference for the Dirty Duck, at least, had begun to make some sense.

  Now that it was too late, Shandy remembered that he hadn’t asked Mrs. Woozle why she was lolling around peeling grapes instead of going down to Harry Goulson’s to view her former neighbors’ remains along with the rest of the town. Maybe she’d felt she had nothing subdued enough to wear. Maybe she’d had another tough day over the annual warrant. Maybe she’d had enough of the Bugginses to last her while they were still alive.

  Or maybe she was expecting a gentleman caller. As Shandy pulled away from the house, he noticed another car turning into Second Fork. Just for the hell of it, he pulled up on the verge once he’d got safely out on the county road, cut his engine, and got his field glasses out of the glove compartment. It was all swamp maples and alder along here, so he had a clear view through the leafless branches. Sure enough, the other car was backing up and pulling into the Woozles’ turnaround.

  Marietta had snapped on the outdoor light, and all he saw was Flo in her fake fur and red fright wig. Marietta didn’t seem to be evincing any sign of overwhelming joy, but she was letting Flo in. As Mike’s official resident lady friend, Flo might hold some kind of quasifamilial status among the Woozles. Or perhaps Marietta just welcomed any audience to unload an account of her latest real-life drama on.

  They could sit over a cup of coffee in the red-and-blue dinette while Marietta gave Flo an earful about how she’d foiled the perfidious designs of the vile Professor Shandy. Flo could riposte with his comeuppance from Miss Minerva Mink. All told, Shandy wasn’t cutting much of a figure around the Seven Forks. Well, he might as well turn a disastrous day into a total ruin. On to the Dirty Duck.

  The roadhouse’s interior was almost exactly as scabrous as Shandy had pictured it, except that he’d forgotten to include an old black-and-white television set with a totally flyspecked screen blaring away mostly unheeded on a shelf behind the bar. He ordered a beer and told the bartender not to bother about a glass. The bottle would be cleaner. Or so Shandy assumed until the bartender gallantly twisted the top off for him and wiped the neck with an unspeakable rag before shoving it across the beer-puddled, popcorn-strewn counter. There wasn’t much Shandy could do except give the bottle a surreptitious wipe on his coat sleeve and send up a silent orison to whichever saint might happen to be in charge of streptococcus bacilli.

  He knew better than to rush into conversation with anybody in a place like this. He took his time with the beer, which he didn’t want but would have been conspicuous without, and pretended to be absorbed by whatever was happening on the television screen. Mud wrestling, from the look of it, though all Shandy could make out was the mud. As he gazed, he kept his ears open for names. He was curious to identify Zack Woozle, and he’
d prefer to connect with Hesperus Hudson without having to ask who Hudson was.

  Zack turned out to be no problem. He was a bit of chewed string who didn’t look as if he’d stand up very well to the voluptuous Marietta, though a certain haggardness around the eyes suggested that he’d been trying to. Zack wasn’t saying much, just sitting there nursing his beer and nodding automatically whenever anybody happened to throw a remark in his direction. Shandy didn’t hear him speak until somebody asked him if he’d been over to see Mike lately. He said, “Nope,” and went on gazing into his beer.

  “Guess you been havin’ a little excitement over to First Fork, eh, Zack?” somebody else remarked.

  Zack nodded.

  “Old man Buggins poisoned hisself and the old woman, too, I hear. Did he do it on purpose, or was it just bad booze?”

  Zack shrugged.

  “Bound to happen sooner or later, wasn’t it? Pretty awful stuff he used to make, huh?”

  “I never drunk none.”

  “How come?”

  “Never got asked.”

  “Good a reason as any.”

  “I drunk plenty,” a voice piped up from the corner.

  “Huh,” said Zack’s interrogator. “Name me somethin’ you didn’t drink plenty of, long as somebody else was payin’. What you drinkin’ tonight, Hesp? Cat piss an’ battery acid?”

  Ah, the missing link was found. Shandy listened to the inane banter another minute or two and nodded to the bartender for a second beer. While everybody else’s attention was momentarily diverted to the television screen, which had somehow cleared itself in time to show a great many cars crashing into each other, he picked his way to one of the more leprous cafe tables, on which Hesperus Hudson was half reclining.

  “Care for a beer, Mr. Hudson?”

  “Huh?” A red eye glanced out from under the peak of a once-white painter’s cap. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Name’s Shandy. Jim Feldster told me to look you up and say hello. You remember Jim?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  Hesperus Hudson would have been equally ready to remember Princess Margaret or Idi Amin, Shandy thought, if they’d sent somebody over to him bearing a free beer. It was of course possible that Hudson did remember Jim Feldster because Feldster belonged to every fraternal organization in Balaclava County and a few more besides. Hesp didn’t look like anybody’s lodge brother, though. He looked like a dedicated barfly. He’d drained the beer before Shandy managed to find himself a chair with all its legs intact.

  “Here,” said Shandy, “have some of mine.”

  He switched bottles, figuring Hudson wouldn’t be finicky about drinking after a stranger. Sure enough, Hudson wasn’t.

  “Thanks, pal. What’d you say your name was?”

  “Longfellow,” said Shandy. “Henry W.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I remember now. I got a phonographic memory. “

  “A rare gift,” Shandy replied politely. “You wouldn’t happen to be related to Zack Woozle’s wife?”

  “Zack who?”

  Hesperus Hudson took a long pull at Shandy’s beer. “I knew a gink named Zack once out in Frisco. He ran a Chinese laundry. Used to be a feller named Ah So that started it, but Ah went into computer stocks an’ got to be a multimillionaire. So he says to hell with it, he wasn’t goin’ to iron no more shirts for nobody. So Zack took over. Zack Hoover, his name was. You know Zack Hoover?”

  Shandy shook his head. “I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure. But despite your, er, evident peregrinations, I understand you’re a native of the Seven Forks, Mr. Hudson. “

  “Who you callin’ a native? The Hudsons was always dyed-in-the-wool Methodists. Till I come along. I’m a freethinker. I’m a free drinker, too, when I get the chance.”

  Shandy took the hint and went for more beer, wondering whether he was going to get any sort of return on his bottles. The bartender gave him a thoughtful look.

  “You a friend of Hesp’s?”

  “Nope,” said Shandy. “Never laid eyes on him before tonight. Zack Hoover asked me to look him up for old times’ sake, that’s all. You know Zack Hoover?”

  The bartender said he didn’t and went to serve some loudmouth down at the other end of the bar. Shandy took the full bottles back to the unclean table and its even uncleaner occupant.

  “Here you are, Mr. Hudson. I understand you more or less grew up with the Buggins twins out here.”

  “Who?”

  “Bracebridge and Bainbridge Buggins.”

  “Oh, Brace an’ Bain. Hell, yes. Them an’ me, we was the biggest hellions ever went unhung. We used to swipe the old man’s liquor. Drunk it hot out o’ the still usin’ a hollow reed for a straw so’s he wouldn’t know we was at it. Yup, first drink I ever had was right straight from Trevelyan Buggins’s still. That still’s a historic landmark, that still is. They ought to put up one o’ them fancy signs with writin’ on it.”

  “Who do you suppose is going to take over now that old Mr. Buggins is gone?”

  “Huh?”

  “Will Bracebridge come back and run the still, do you think? Have you seen him lately?”

  “I see Bain now an’ then.”

  “You do?” Shandy hoped he didn’t sound too excited. “Where do you see Bain?”

  “Here an’ there. He comes an’ goes.”

  “Goes where?”

  “Back to get more snakes, I s’pose. Bain’s always got six or eight o’ them damn big pink snakes with ‘im. I hate pink snakes. They remind me of Erna Milien back when we was kids. Erna Milien, fat an’ willin’. Only she wasn’t. I ast ’er once, an’ she hauled off an’ landed me one right on the kisser. Knocked out three o’ my best teeth.”

  Shandy was beginning to suspect Hesperus Hudson had been Jim Feldster’s idea of a joke. Now that he’d got stuck with the old souse, however, he might as well keep trying to get some of his beer money’s worth. “What does Bainbridge Buggins do with these pink snakes?”

  “Sics ’em on me. Bain was always a mean cuss. Sometimes he turns into a pink snake hisself. Dunno but what he looks more natural that way.”

  Hudson drained the last of his beer with a horrible slurping noise, and Shandy slid the other bottle over to him.

  “Thanks, pal. Funny thing, you’d of expected it to be Brace that turned into a snake instead o’ Bain. Brace was always pullin’ some damn sneaky trick like that. Like as if I’m sittin’ here talkin’ to you an’ thinkin’ I’m seein’ you an’ all of a sudden you bust out laughin’ in my face an’ you’re Brace all the time. You sure you ain’t Brace? Seems to me I did see Brace lately. He was passin’ hisself off as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”

  “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? What in Sam Hill makes you say that?”

  “I seen Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I mean, I seen pitchers of ’im. See, over in Middlesex County they got a place they call the Wayside Inn, which it ain’t. It’s the Red Horse Inn, an’ before that it was somethin’ else. But anyways, it’s where this here Longfellow was s’posed to have done ’is heavy drinkin’ an’ wrote ’is pomes, so they got this room they call the Longfellow Room an’ they got pitchers of ’im all around. Got a taproom, too. I had me one o’ them old-time drinks they call a coow woow. Whoo! So I had me a few more. That was when I was young an’ reckless.”

  “So in short, you recognized your old, friend Bracebridge Buggins from portraits you’d seen of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury,” said Shandy. “That makes sense, I suppose. What were the, er, distinguishing features?”

  “Huh? Oh. Well, see, Brace had this big bushy white beard clear down to ’is belt buckle, an’ he was wearin’ this runny-lookin’ old black suit with long coattails to it.”

  “Did you ask him why?”

  “Nope, no sense in askin’.”

  “Why not?”

  “He was dead.”

  Shandy tried to keep his voice level. “Are you sure of that? He didn’t, er, turn into anything an
d disappear?”

  “Nope. He just laid there.”

  “There where?”

  “Same place we always used to go. That shack in the woods where Brace’s ol’ man run his still.”

  Great balls of fire, could Hudson possibly be telling the truth? “Did you touch him, Mr. Hudson? Try to take his pulse or anything?”

  “I didn’t take nothin’. Nothin’ to take. I tried the still first, see, thinkin’ there might be a swig or two left in the bottom, but she was dry as an old maid’s tit. So then I figured I better see if there was anything in Brace’s pockets. Like maybe a bottle or the price of a drink.”

  “And was there?”

  “Nope. Not a damn blasted thing ’cept a couple o’ rocks.”

  Chapter 16

  “GREAT SCOT!” CRIED SHANDY. “Are you positive it was Bracebridge?”

  “If it wasn’t him, then who the hell was it?”

  “Not Bainbridge, by any remote chance?”

  “He didn’t have no pink snakes with ’im.”

  The old soak leaned even farther across the table and blew a gust of ill-digested alcohol in Shandy’s direction. “Look, mister, I know when I’m seein’ things an’ when I ain’t. If that’d o’ been Bain, I wouldn’t o’ bothered tryin’ to fish through his pockets, would I? ’Cause anybody that can turn into a snake ain’t got none, see.”

  “M’well, you may have something there, Mr. Hudson. All right, then, you did in reasonably sober fact see a human being in the still house whom you were satisfied was Bracebridge Buggins. You felt his body.”

  “I never. All I done was go through that ol’ black suit he was wearin’, like I said. There wasn’t nothin’ in the pants pockets, only the coat. I couldn’t find them at first. Turned out they was in the coattails, where you’d least expect ’em.”