The Corpse in Oozak's Pond

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “I know you.”

  “I know you, too, Mr. Hudson,” Shandy replied affably. “I enjoyed your singing in church this morning.”

  “Huh? You tryin’ to start somethin’?”

  Surprisingly, Hudson’s right hand whipped out of his pocket equipped With a tarnished but serviceable set of brass knuckles.

  “Very impressive,” said Shandy. “Are those the same ones you laid Bracebridge Buggins’s chin open with?”

  “I didn’t kill ’im!”

  “I never said you did. How would you like to make ten dollars?”

  “I already got ten dollars. What I’d like is for you to get the hell out o’ my way so’s I can go in here an’ spend it.”

  “But then that ten dollars will be gone and you’ll be thirsty again. If you had another ten, you could stay drunk longer.”

  “Put not the cup to thy brother’s lips.” Hudson was full of surprises today.

  “I’m not putting any cup to your lips,” Shandy replied testily.

  “You damn well better hadn’t try. I’d rather have it straight from the bottle any day. Okay, let’s have the ten.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to give it to you outright. You’ll have to earn it.”

  “I knew there was goin’ to be a catch somewheres. Doin’ what?”

  “Merely taking my friend and myself to see Trevelyan Buggins’s still.”

  “What for? There ain’t nothin’ left in it. I already looked. “

  “I know, but I want to look for myself. Last night, as you may or may not recall, you told me a remarkable story.”

  “Who, me?”

  “Yes, you.” How did they keep getting into this Abbott and Costello cross talk? “You said you’d gone to the still house and found a man whom you took to be Bracebridge Buggins disguised as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lying there dead.”

  “What if I did? No law against findin’ a stiff, is there? You tryin’ to make out I killed ’im?”

  “By no means, Mr. Hudson. I’m extremely grateful to you for coming forth with the information. That’s why I gave you the ten last night.”

  “You gimme that ten, too?”

  “I certainly did. Where did you think you got it?”

  “I thought maybe it was the tooth fairy.”

  “You’re a card, Mr. Hudson. A deuce or a trey, perhaps. How far is the still house from here?”

  “It’s back there.”

  He waved an arm pretty much as he’d done last night. Shandy grabbed at the shreds of his temper.

  “Precisely where back there? Is this the shortest way in, or would we make better time going around by First Fork?”

  “Oh, yeah, First Fork would be quicker. You gonna gimme a ride?”

  “If you want one, sure,” said Cronkite Swope. “Pile in.”

  “But I was plannin’ to get drunk.”

  “Here,” said Shandy, who’d anticipated some such objection and come equipped to deal with it. “Drink this.”

  The pocket flask he’d brought along only held about one stiff drink, but he didn’t want Hudson to have more than enough to get his tonsils in working order before their mission was completed.

  At least it was enough to get him into the car and begin shouting thoroughly garbled directions. Despite his help, they managed to get the car stashed under some overhanging evergreens and find the well-trampled path that led to the small, weathered board shack. There was another path leading to it from the Second Fork side.

  “I done that,” Hudson told them with some pride. “Mostly, anyways.”

  “Why? Do other people come here, too?” Shandy asked him.

  “I guess likely. Kids lookin’ for a quiet place to do what comes natural, hunters takin’ a rest an’ gettin’ warm. Build up a little fire under the still there an’ you can get the place hot in a few minutes. Cut up a rabbit an’ roast it if you can get one. Or a grouse. Grouse is good eatin’. You could bring in a sack o’ rotten potatoes an’ brew yourself up a little somethin’ to drink with it, I s’pose, if you’d a mind to.”

  “Have you done that yourself, Mr. Hudson?”

  “Not me. Too much like work.” Disregarding the rusty padlock hanging from the hasp, Hudson picked the screws from the rotted-out holes behind the hinges and swung the door open from the wrong side. “Make yourselves to home.”

  The shack did in fact have a slight air of hominess about it. Since old Buggins had spent so much of his life there, tending his still, he’d naturally have wanted to add a few creature comforts. There was an old porch rocker with its rush seat broken through and a grimy brown plush sofa pillow plugging up the hole. On the ledge beside it were several rusty tobacco tins, a pipe with the stem almost bitten through, a fancy ashtray, and a stack of assorted magazines. Shandy was mildly intrigued to see a few copies of Collier’s Weekly among them. He could just about remember his own father sitting on the front porch they’d once had, in a rocking chair like this one, reading Collier’s Weekly.

  This was hardly the time or the place for childhood reminiscences. “How was the body lying, Mr. Hudson?” he asked.

  “Down,” said his star witness promptly. “Ever see anybody layin’ up?”

  “A pithy observation,” snarled Shandy. “Was it here?”

  He pointed to the floor beside the rocking chair, which was about the only place a grown man could have been stretched out to full length. The corners were filled with stacks of firewood and empty vinegar jugs, the middle of the little room was occupied by the fieldstone chimney and the square firebox on which sat the big, closed pot with the copper condensing coil sprouting out of its lid. The coil ended above a plastic bucket that had once held a compound for cleaning floors. Shandy wondered if Buggins had used the stuff to enhance the flavor of his hell-brew.

  “Yup,” Hudson was saying. “He was layin’ right there, where you’re pointin’. His head was up against the rocker, an’ his feet was pointin’ towards the door. He looked real peaceful, like he’d just passed out from the booze, ’cept his eyes were starin’ an’ his mouth was open.”

  Swope was making frantic scribbles on a wad of copy paper. “Hey, Professor, can I print this?”

  “I don’t see why not. We should have the whole story before too many more hours have passed. Maybe you’d like to take a—ah!”

  Shandy stepped gingerly across the plank floor and pointed to a few whitish long hairs caught under a splinter. “See those? I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts they’re from that fake beard the dead man was wearing.”

  He began crawling around the planks, snagging the knees of his own trousers more than once. “And here’s a black thread, and another. If there are corresponding pulls on the back of that old coat, I think we can call them conclusive proof that the body was parked here after the man was killed, just as Hudson testifies. It’s quite conceivable he was actually murdered here. Did you happen to notice a small stab wound in the back of his neck when you moved him, Hudson?”

  “Huh? He wasn’t bleedin’.”

  “No, I expect he wouldn’t have been. It was only a puncture, really. From an ice pick or something of the sort.”

  “Brace always liked ice in ’is drinks,” said Hudson. “We’d sneak into the Flackleys’ icehouse an’ hack off a piece an’ bring it here so’s he could fix his like he wanted it.”

  “I thought you said you drank it hot from the still with a reed for a straw,” said Shandy.

  “That was me an’ Bain. Bain didn’t give a damn, an’ neither did I. Brace was the fussy one. He’d even wipe off the sawdust before he put the ice in ’is cup. He had this little collapsin’ cup that he carried around in ’is pocket.”

  “Did he carry an ice pick, too?” Shandy asked,

  “Nope. Didn’t have to. There was always one in the icehouse.”

  “I see. Would the icehouse be still standing, by any chance?”

  “Prob’ly. The Flackleys was always great ones for keepin’ things like they used to be.�
��

  “But they don’t cut ice anymore, do they?”

  Hudson shrugged. “What-for?”

  “Still, they’d leave the ice pick in the icehouse?”

  “How the hell do I know? Ask them, why don’t you?”

  “Do you think the Flackleys’ ice pick was the murder weapon, Professor?” asked Swope.

  “I’m not going to think anything until I know for sure whether or not the Flackleys still have an ice pick,” Shandy said rather irritably. “If you want to be helpful, Swope, why don’t you snap a picture of me taking samples of these threads from the floor? It’s not for publication, just for evidence.”

  “I could take one for you and one for the paper, too.”

  “All right, but let’s get on with it. We’re not through yet, you know.”

  “Why? What else do we have to do?”

  “Catch the murderer, among other things. Mr. Hudson, you’ve been extremely helpful. Here’s your ten and another to go with it. Now Swope’s going to drive you back to the Dirty Duck, and I’d be most grateful if you’d refrain from talking to anybody there about what’s been happening here.”

  “Huh. Won’t be anybody there to talk to, anyways, not this early in the day, ’cept that fat ol’ slob Margery that tends bar till Jack comes in, an’ she don’t like me. She says I lower the tone o’ the place.”

  “A feat few could accomplish,” Shandy said politely. “Godspeed, Mr. Hudson. Swope, take that press card out of your windshield. Leave your car at the Dirty Duck and walk back through the woods if you think you can manage it without getting lost. I’m going on to the Buggins house. If you see a car in the driveway or any other sign of activity when you get there, don’t try to come in. Stay out of sight, and be careful about making footprints in unbroken snow,” he added, mindful of the turkey pie thief’s providential capture. If Cronkite Swope fell into the wrong hands now, though, there’d be no happy ending for him.

  “I get you, Professor,” Swope answered. “Come on, Mr. Hudson.”

  Shandy left them and beelined it for the house, hoping he hadn’t dallied too long. He’d taken it for granted Miss Mink would go to the cemetery and then to her nephew’s house with the rest of the family, but he wouldn’t put it past the old basket to develop a headache or a case of the pip and insist on being brought back to squat on her claim.

  No, by George, she hadn’t. Nobody was around, no car in the yard, no sign of life anywhere. Yet the door wasn’t locked. That was a surprise. Shandy had come prepared for burglarious entry, sure Miss Mink would have battened down the hatches before she left for the funeral. Maybe she’d been too overcome with grief to bother, though she hadn’t shown any sign of that at the church. Or maybe whoever picked her up had been in a hurry and flustered her into forgetting.

  Anyway, the open door was a break for him. Shandy inched his way inside, making sure somebody was not, after all, sitting behind the drawn curtains, and went straight upstairs.

  It was Trevelyan Buggins’s den he aimed for first. Here, he found just about what he’d expected: a couple of rump-sprung armchairs with gaudy Dacron-filled comforters hanging over their backs, a middle-aged television set, a lot more old magazines, and the collected works of Corydon Buggins, bound in limp green suede and inscribed, “To my beloved nephew Knightsbridge Buggins on his eighteenth birthday.”

  That would have been Trevelyan’s father, son of the Ichabod who’d established the family tradition of not amounting to much. Shandy picked up the book. It flopped open of itself to the page where Augustus Buggins’s appalling end was described, complete with a gloomy steel engraving of a darksome mere and a floating body. He wondered how much Knightsbridge had enjoyed reading about the awful demise of a cousin from the more successful branch of the family and whether Trevelyan had relished it, too.

  Shandy put the book back where he’d found it, took down a cardboard file, and searched through it for possible revelations about the lawsuit. Trevelyan had prepared an inner folder grandly inscribed, “Documents pertaining to the Ichabod Buggins family lawsuit against Balaclava Agricultural College in the matter of Oozak’s Pond,” but there was nothing in it except a carbon copy of the same letter President Svenson had been so wroth to receive. He pawed around a little more, checked out the bedrooms, found nothing of interest, and went on to the attic.

  The Bugginses were savers, no doubt about that. Here were enough copies of Life, Look, and Liberty Magazine to have stocked a newsstand back in the thirties. Here were gift boxes without any presents in them, candy boxes with no candy, empty bags, empty baskets, empty relics of empty lives. And here were old clothes enough to start a moth farm, empty of moths. They’d all been carefully preserved with naphtha flakes in the pockets and once-white sheets or cleaners’ bags around them. Shandy had almost forgotten that cleaners’ bags used to be made of shiny paper. These were dusty, yellowed, brittle with age. And one was freshly torn.

  Shandy sneaked across the grimy plank floor and tore it some more. Here it was, the thing he’d come looking for, proof of where the antique suit had been taken from and why it had to go. Now he knew the name of the man he’d fished out of Oozak’s Pond.

  Chapter 20

  DRAT IT, WHERE WAS Swope? Shandy wanted a photograph of what he’d discovered, showing the place where it had been hanging. And what was that small noise from below him? It sounded like a window being inched open.

  Shandy remembered that there’d been a tree badly in need of trimming just outside the den window, with one bough that rubbed right up against the house. Moving as softly as he could, careful not to step on any board that looked creaky, he got down the worn, steep attic stairs and crept along the hall. By some carpenter’s vagary, the door to the den opened out instead of into the room and provided a convenient screen. Peeking through the crack, he could see a bright new green rubber sole, followed by the rest of a Maine hunting boot poking in through the window.

  He was around the door in a flash. “Swope, why in perdition couldn’t you use the door?”

  The young newspaperman grinned. “Windows are kind of a habit of mine. How do you think I got away from my mother this morning? I figured Mr. Buggins never got around to putting any locks upstairs. What’s happening, Professor?”

  “Come on.”

  Shandy rushed him up to the attic, ripped away what was left of the cleaners’ bag, and said, “Shoot.”

  “Sure, if you say so. But it’s just somebody’s—”

  “Shh!”

  Something was happening downstairs. They could hear a creak, then another creak, then a whole series of creaks in steady rhythm. Then a whiff of pipe smoke drifted up the narrow stairwell.

  Great balls of fire, Shandy thought, was Trevelyan Buggins back from the funeral with that detoxified pipe in his waxwork hand, having one final puff in the old rocking chair before he settled down beside his wife for their last, long sleep? On the whole, Shandy didn’t think so. He was remembering his second visit to Miss Minerva Mink. He’d smelled pipe smoke that night, too, and old man Buggins was already dead. Was it possible the elderly housekeeper had a gentleman friend?

  “I’m going down,” Shandy mouthed to Swope. “You stay here and guard the evidence. If anybody comes up here, deck him. And for God’s sake, don’t sneeze.”

  Swope was already pressing a finger frantically against his upper lip. The dust must be getting to those inflamed nasal passages. He nodded like a good soldier, and Shandy went.

  The stairs would have been a risk, but luckily for Shandy, a diversion occurred at the right moment. A car drove into the yard, and he could hear Minerva Mink telling somebody not to bother coming in with her, she just needed to be alone for a while. He lay belly-bumper on the once-varnished banister, prayed it was less rickety than it felt, and slid down without a sound. By the time she’d got herself into the kitchen, he was in the cheerless front parlor with his eye to the keyhole.

  She was taking off her coat and hat, saying, “Whew, I’m glad
that’s over.”

  “Got ‘em both nicely planted, eh?” The other voice, as Shandy had expected, was Flo’s.

  “That’s a fine way to talk, I must say.” The words might be chiding, but Miss Mink’s voice was not. Shandy nodded to himself. His hunch was working out just fine. “What’s that you’re drinking?” she was asking now.

  “What is there to drink around here? Here’s to the old man. May he stew forever in his own juice!”

  That didn’t go down too well with Miss Mink. “I hope you didn’t get hold of the wrong bottle.”

  “Damn the fear of it, dearie. You only put the poison into the opened jug, didn’t you?”

  “I did precisely what you told me to. I didn’t know what that stuff was. You needn’t go at me as if I were a murderess.”

  “But that’s exactly what you are, Minerva my love.”

  “And what are you? At least I didn’t take a rusty old ice pick and—”

  “Now, Minnie, don’t go getting all haired up. We’re partners, remember.”

  “And I get my equal share, don’t you forget.”

  “You sure do, sweetheart. Come on, relax. Have a drink. “

  “Thanks, I’ll have this one you just drank from. Go pour yourself another.”

  “Atta girl, Min! Sharp as a tack and a damn sight better-looking. First time I laid eyes on you, I knew you were the woman I’d been after all my life.”

  “How many others have you said that to? And when are you going to quit wearing those silly clothes?”

  “In about half an hour. I just dropped in to say good-bye. Mike’s given me the boot because he’s formed a meaningful relationship with the warden, and I’m going out to commit suicide. Or maybe I’ll just fade away sadly into the sunset. I haven’t quite decided yet. For a suicide, I’d need a female corpse about five foot ten with false teeth, and that might be tough to come by.”