The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (8 page)

“She might tell me, but she’d never tell you,” said 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.”

“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.

Shandy was of course familiar with Mendel’s experiments in color dominance among plants and with the vast body of work that has since been done. He was a trifle hazy about eye color in humans, but he was pretty damned certain a blue-eyed man and a gray-eyed woman could never have produced brown-eyed twins without a little help from a brown-eyed friend.

The Bugginses were alleged to have been a devoted couple, but people always said that about any pair who’d managed to stick it out together for over fifty years. In defense of Beatrice Buggins’s fidelity, however, there was that strong family resemblance between the two male corpses. Drat! Persephone must either have forgotten what color her brothers’ eyes were or else had not forgotten and was trying to cover up a suspicious death, like Chief Olson with the in-law in the icebox.

On the other hand, suppose Persephone had forgotten and was not lying. Did that mean the college was stuck with an authentic reincarnation of Augustus Caesar Buggins? How the flaming perdition was Peter Shandy going to explain a murdered supernatural phenomenon to Thorkjeld Svenson? Maybe he’d better go home, get Helen to pack her bags and Jane her catnip mouse, and flee with them to some relatively safe, peaceful spot, like the upper slopes of Mount St. Helen’s.

After thinking the matter over, Shandy did go home, first pausing at the bank to restock his wallet; dispensing some of his cash at the grocery store on replenishments for the larder in case they decided to stay and ride out the storm, and having a few terse words with a student he happened to meet there on the subject of an overdue term paper. He found Helen in the kitchen making tapioca custard.

“It’s soothing to the nerves,” she explained. “Also to the eyeballs. Between that pale-brown ink and Balaclava’s scratchy penmanship, I’m Bugginsed out. He must have beaten his nibs into plowshares.”

“You haven’t come across anything in the archives?”

“Not yet, but there’s still a long way to go. Stir this for me, will you? Don’t stop or it will curdle. I meant to bring up a jar of those cherry preserves we made last fall. Mary Enderble puts a layer in the bottom of the dish with a little rum and pours the hot tapioca over the cherries. It’s lovely.”

Shandy’s culinary education had come a long way since the soup-heating days of his bachelorhood. However, Helen had never left him alone before with something that might take a pettish notion to curdle if you didn’t treat it right. He was pushing the spoon in a careful rhythm, watching with incipient panic for any sign of a lump, when the telephone rang.

Luckily, the kitchen extension wasn’t far from the stove. By holding the spoon by the tip and stretching as far as he could, Shandy was able to take down the receiver without having to pause. By the time Helen had got back upstairs with the cherries, though, the pudding had not only curdled but scorched, and Shandy hadn’t even noticed.

“Oh, Peter!” That was as close to a rebuke as Helen got. “Peter, what’s the matter?”

“Your friend Sephy’s parents,” he told her. “Ottermole just got the report. Somebody served them a nightcap. Moonshine and carbon tetrachloride.”

H
ELEN STOOD STARING AT
him with the cherries in her hand. “Carbon tetrachloride? Peter, that’s cleaning fluid. Wouldn’t the smell alone have put them off?”

“Maybe they couldn’t smell it. Ottermole says Trevelyan Buggins kept up a family tradition by running his own still. He claims Buggins made the awfullest rotgut ever distilled in Balaclava County, and that’s saying plenty. I reminded him carbon tet smells like chloroform, and he said old Trev’s booze always smelled like chloroform. Besides, they’d had potatoes and onions fried in salt pork for supper. That must have stunk up the house pretty thoroughly and also made a cozy bed for the poison to work in. According to the medical examiner, fats in the digestive system would have speeded up the toxic effect. So would the alcohol. Whoever slipped them the slug must have known his chemistry.”

“I’d say she must have planned the menu,” said Helen.

“Ottermole jumped on that angle, too, but Mrs. Ottermole says the Bugginses always had potatoes and onions fried in salt pork on Thursday nights. It’s an old Seven Forks tradition, God knows why. She claims those Thursday night suppers were what made Persephone leave home.”