The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (16 page)

“Yes,” Grace answered. “I keep it there to remind myself I used to have one. People tell me I’ve grown to look just like my mother. Do you think so?”

“Oh, yes, no question. Your brothers favored the Bugginses, though.”

“Yes, and so did Sephy’s. That’s another thing she and I used to giggle about, that it was our brothers and not ourselves who’d inherited the Buggins jaw.”

“I saw a picture of the twins that morning out at First Fork. You said you never knew them well, but can you remember anything at all about them?”

“Not Bainbridge. He ran off and joined the army when he was still in school, or should have been. Uncle Trev had to sign some papers, I think.”

“Harry Goulson told me about that. He said Bainbridge was listed as missing in action. Did his parents ever find out what happened to him?”

“If they did, nobody told me. Sephy never mentions him.”

Grace fiddled with a bowl of paper-white narcissi that played the starring role in her arrangement. “No doubt Harry also told you Uncle Trev and Aunt Bea weren’t exactly overcome with grief to be rid of him. Bain had been pretty wild before he went. I’ve always wondered how he stood the army discipline. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d simply deserted, but you needn’t tell Harry Goulson I said so.”

She tried a further experiment with the narcissus bowl. “I’ll bet Harry gave you an earful.”

“The twins seem to have left some, er, graphic memories behind them,” Shandy conceded.

Grace put the narcissi back where they’d been in the first place. “Bracebridge was an awful tease. He used to tell me horrible bedtime stories about a bear coming to swallow me whole while I was asleep. He said I’d wake up in the bear’s stomach and not know where I was. Naturally, I’d have nightmares and wake up in the dark and start screaming because I thought I was inside the bear. Then Brace would run in and laugh at me. Sephy used to get furious with him.”

“As well she might. God, what a thing to do to a child.”

“Brace could be awfully funny, though. He’d imitate the neighbors so you’d swear they were right there with you. He had a part in the senior play where he was supposed to be an older man, so he put on his makeup and costume and went all around the Seven Forks pretending to be an underwear salesman. He’d taken quite a few orders before some girl caught on to who he was. Instead of making him give back the money, she made him take her out for a rip-roaring time. Then he got drafted, and I never saw him again. He did come home for a little while after the war, but I was away at school by then.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to. Sephy won’t have anything to do with him anymore.”

“Any special reason?”

“I’ll say there is. As soon as Brace found out Sephy had a job and was on her own, he began writing her letters from a place in New York called the Wayfarers’ Rest. He said it was sort of a shelter for people who were down on their luck, that he’d been sick and not able to hold a steady job on account of these fainting fits he was having. He wondered if Sephy could spare him ten dollars to pay a doctor. So she sent the ten dollars and naturally a couple of weeks later, he dunned her again.”

Grace emitted something very like a snort. “Finally, he sent this real tearjerker. He’d fallen and broken his arm during one of his fainting fits and couldn’t even dress himself. He hadn’t eaten for days and was going to be turned out of his room, and if Sephy didn’t wire him fifty dollars PDQ, he’d be pushing up daisies by the end of the week.

“So Sephy decided there was only one thing to do. She’d go to New York and bring him home. That was the only time in her life Sephy asked me to lend her money. I had two hundred dollars, so I gave it to her and off she went on the train, scared stiff to be traveling all that way alone when she’d never even been to Boston but determined to do her duty.

“Well, to make a long story short, she got to New York and managed to find the Wayfarers’ Rest. It turned out to be a fancy nightclub. And there was her poor, sick brother, dressed to kill, out on the dance floor with some painted-up floozy, having the time of his life. Sephy gave him one look, turned around and came straight home, and gave me back my two hundred dollars. He had the nerve to write her another letter, but she threw it in the fire and then he quit.

“I shouldn’t be surprised if he went right on dunning his parents, though. Every so often Uncle Trev would come to us with some hard-luck story about not being able to meet his taxes or something, which I’d know was a lie because Sephy and Purvis always kept track of the bills. We’d give him a little something if we happened to feel like it and charge it up to bread on the waters.”

“Then you believe the parents had been in touch with Bracebridge all along.”

“Peter, I really think you should be talking to Sephy about Brace instead of me. Right now I’m mostly concerned for my own husband. Will that lamebrain Fred Ottermole let me take Phil some supper? Or are they keeping him on bread and water?”

“You might phone the station and ask. I expect Ottermole will let you see Phil if you want to.”

“Peter Shandy, you ought to be shot! Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Since you’re the great detective, I expect you can find your way out. I suppose I ought to thank you for coming, but frankly I wish you hadn’t.”

Grace was already in the next room, dialing. Shandy buttoned the coat he’d never been invited to take off and faced the gathering dusk.

W
HAT WAS A MAN SUPPOSED
to make of this? Had he been talking with an innocent woman in a well-merited tizzy or a Mrs. Borgia whose ill-laid plans had backfired on her own husband? Shandy had been wont to think of Grace as Porble’s wife, Helen’s friend, his good neighbor. There was a Burne-Jones quality about her stately good looks and her winning ways with tiger lilies that he’d admired from a respectful distance. Should he go back and ask a woman who arranged lilies if she’d happened to arrange a triple murder, too?

He’d been thinking of it as the crime of a shrewd plotter, but what if he was dealing with a series of bungles instead? Suppose that fleeting thought of his about Grace’s finding something about Oozak’s Pond in the Buggins Collection happened to be valid? Suppose she’d seen a way to prove the Ichabod claim legitimate or make it appear to be so? What if Grace, a fundamentally uncomplicated woman with do-gooding urges and perhaps some latent hangups from her mixed-up childhood, had decided to make her dear Sephy’s early dreams come true? And what if, through her own lack of sinister cunning and Porble’s unexpectedly violent reaction to the lawsuit, her plot had gone haywire?

No doubt Grace had been over at the Enderbles’ looking at Chicken Inspector buttons that night, as she’d said. However, she hadn’t given him a definite time when she’d left, and Shandy doubted if Mary or John would remember. Grace wouldn’t have stayed late in any case. The Enderbles went to bed with the birds, and they’d have made a special point of turning in early on the first because of John Enderble’s 6:00 a.m. engagement with Beauregard on the second.

Yet Porble had implied that Grace was out for the whole evening. Perhaps Porble was just being cussed, or perhaps she really had been. Grace had her own car keys. She could have picked up the car and gone out to the Forks after she left the Enderbles at, say, half past eight or even before. She could have heard about the carbon tet in Flackley’s barn. Miss Mink would have brought the neighborhood trivia home from the bingo, no doubt, and the Bugginses would have repeated it because they had nothing more interesting to talk about.

She wouldn’t go prowling around the place at night and risk setting the huskies off. She’d have dropped in one day to borrow a piece of dogsled harness as a container for a flower arrangement interpreting the aurora borealis or something. Any excuse would have done.

Hiding the bottle in the tennis-ball can would have made sense to Grace because only Lizanne played tennis, and Lizanne was away at school. The can had probably been kicking around the car’s trunk for months. Porble wouldn’t have bothered to open it. Only a simpleminded cop like Ottermole would do that. Grace wouldn’t have figured on Ottermole.

She wouldn’t have thought of Marietta Woozle’s having to work late, either. Amateur criminals never allowed for the unexpected. Anyway, Grace wouldn’t have worried much about being spotted visiting her aged relatives on the night they died. She’d come to keep them company on bingo night and found them looking poorly. No, she wasn’t surprised at the doctor’s verdict of death from natural causes. Only by the autopsy.

But why would she have to kill them? Because Uncle Trev was talking too much? Because she was afraid they’d let Bracebridge get Sephy’s share? Or would it be the renegade Bainbridge she had to stab? Anyway, with the rest of the family dead, everything would go to Sephy.

Could that be why Persephone Mink had refused to identify the man from the pond as her brother? If Grace had killed for Sephy, then surely Sephy could have lied for Grace.

It was an ugly theory, and Shandy didn’t want to believe a word of it. He wanted to sit down with a bag of beans and count them one by one. His own house was only two doors away. Jane Austen would be glad to see him. Helen would still be up at the library, though, so it was thitherward he turned his lagging steps.

Helen was in full charge but looking frayed around the edges. She beckoned him into the librarian’s office, shut the door, and bared her teeth.

“I hope you’re satisfied!”

“What about?” Shandy asked, not wanting to hear.

“Sending Fred Ottermole to arrest Dr. Porble and stick me with his job.”

“I did nothing of the sort,” Shandy protested. “Ottermole acted on his own initiative. Look at the facts, Helen. He found the empty carbon tet bottle in Phil’s car, which had been seen coming away from First Fork with its lights out on the night the Bugginses were poisoned. He knew about the fight Phil had picked with Trevelyan Buggins that same morning. With that kind of evidence, he pretty much had to put the arm on Phil. I didn’t know till he’d done it. I hope to God he’s mistaken, and Grace has already hauled me over the coals, so I’d thank you to lay off my wounded sensibilities. “

“But what’s going to happen to Dr. Porble?”

“Nothing drastic, I hope. Ottermole’s being quite restrained, by his standards. When last seen, he was trying to turn the hoosegow into the Ritz Carlton with a folding cot and a bar of fancy soap.”

Helen hadn’t meant to laugh, but she did. “Maybe we ought to take down a flower arrangement. Is Dr. Porble allowed visitors?”

“Probably, but I’d suggest we wait till matters have simmered down a bit. Grace was on the phone with him when I left her, discussing the dinner menu. Speaking of which, what are your plans for this evening?”

“I thought I might just sit in a corner and have a good cry, assuming I ever get out of here. I’d meant to go to the visiting hours at Goulson’s out of respect for Sephy, but I expect you’d rather I put in another whack at the Buggins material instead. Why does everything always have to come at once?”

“Good question,” said Shandy. Through the clear glass panel in the office door, he could see the ultimate disaster impending. “Brace yourself, Helen. Here comes the president.”

“Why us, O Lord?” Helen moaned. “But why isn’t he roaring?”

That, thought Shandy, was another good question. Moody was not the precise word to describe Dr. Svenson’s manner, but it was the best he could think of offhand.

The great man’s greeting was delivered more in sorrow than in anger. “Damned shame. Sorry, Helen.”

“I’m sorry too, Thorkjeld,” she replied, “but I’m sure we’ll soon have everything straightened out.”

“Damned well better.” It was more a sigh than a threat.

“You feeling all right, President?” Shandy inquired anxiously.

“No. What are you lollygagging around here for?”

“He’s winning your silly old lawsuit,” said Helen.

“Urrgh.” But it was a spiritless urrgh. “Get Porble out first. Unseemly. Bad for morale. No reflection on you, Helen.”

“And no umbrage taken. Thorkjeld, what’s the matter with you?”

“It’s Purvis Mink,” Svenson blurted. “Came to me just now and offered to resign. Conflict of interest. Friend against friend, brother against brother. Worse than the Blue and the Gray. God damn it to hell, Purve’s been on the security force ever since I got to Balaclava. Took my kids owl watching. Took
me
owl watching, blast it! Told him if he resigns, I’ll resign and it’ll be all his Goddamn fault if the Goddamn college goes down the tube. Got to go. Goddamn trustees’ meeting.”

“Shall we have a chorus of ‘Just Before the Battle, Mother’ before you go?” Shandy volunteered.

Svenson gave him a look. “Not funny, Shandy.” But there was more spirit in his snarl and more surge in his step as he left the library.

“I think we did him good,” said Helen. “Poor Thorkjeld. Running this college is an awful responsibility, Peter.”

“And how adroitly he made his point that we’re all in the barrel together. Do you think I’d get anywhere if I dropped over for a chat with Persephone Mink?”

“Tonight? Are you out of your mind?”

“I take it I’m to assume my query has been answered in the negative. What time might you be through here?”

“Peter, I haven’t the remotest idea. Why don’t you go feed Jane and make yourself a sandwich? Or stop at the faculty dining room.”

“Can I bring you something?”

 
“With a horde of lackeys here to do my every bidding? Darling, just go.”

The telephone rang. Helen gave him an absentminded kiss and picked up the receiver. Shandy went.

Jane was annoyed at having been kept waiting so long for her preprandial stroll and told him so. “Ah, you women are all alike,” he replied, holding the front door for her and watching as she placed a dainty paw on the cold, wet top step, drew it back, gave it a shake and a lick, and tried again. “There’s no pleasing you. Give you what you say you want, and it turns out you don’t want it after all.”

He was still standing there watching her pick and shake her way down the path when Jim Feldster, his next-door neighbor, came along. Feldster clanked a bit, from which sound Shandy deduced he was wearing some lodge regalia or other under his overcoat.