The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (2 page)

“I don’t know which rite of spring you think we’re expected to perform on this expedition, madam, but I assure you I shan’t need any serendipitous female to perform it with,” Shandy replied austerely. “I shall eat my cruller in solitary decorum, though not on an empty stomach. Mightn’t it be prudent to leave here with something hot under our belts?”

“Such as what? Would a cup of tea and a piece of toast sustain you?”

“It might, if there happened to be a poached egg on top of the toast. Shall I go down and put the kettle on?”

“Do.” Helen reached for a fleecy blue sweater that matched her eyes and dragged it over her short blond curls. “Drop an egg for me, while you’re about it. The poacher’s in the top left-hand drawer. And be sure to butter the toast.”

“Save your nagging till it’s needed, woman. I was buttering toast for my oldest nephew while you were yet a babe in arms. Speaking of which—”

“Darling, not now.” Somewhat reluctantly, Helen wriggled out of Peter’s embrace. “Duty calls, and we must obey, or Beauregard may get huffy and refuse to cooperate. Who gets to pull him out this year, by the way?”

“John Enderble’s still head man in charge of groundhog rousting. “

Professor Emeritus Enderble, expert on local fauna and author of that much-lauded best-seller
How to Live with the Burrowing Mammals,
was certainly the man for the job. As the Shandys left their house, they could see John and his wife, Mary, both of them bundled up against the cold, already climbing the path that led to the campus and ultimately to the top of the hill where Oozak’s Pond lay open to the flake-filled sky. Shandy dropped Helen on at the faculty dining room, then hurried to catch up with the Enderbles in case the elderly pair might need an unobtrusive helping hand up the hill.

No, they wouldn’t. A group of students were swooping down, dragging a couple of handsleds bravely decked out with sheepskins, pillows, and Balaclava banners. Mary Enderble was gallantly assisted onto one and John, after a bit of coaxing, onto the other. As many young people as could get a handhold tagged on to the two ropes, while the rest swarmed around the sleds yelling “Mush! Mush!”

“We’re supposed to be hollering ‘Make way for the groundhog king and queen,’” one musher explained to Professor Shandy, “but that sounds kind of sappy, so we decided to stick with ‘Mush! Mush!’”

“I’m sure Professor and Mrs. Enderble would rather have it this way,” Shandy assured him.

What mattered wasn’t the racket they were making but the thought behind it. He might have known the students would think of a way to spare them the cold climb. Balaclava lads and lasses were a remarkably decent lot, on the whole, and anybody who wasn’t, damned soon got a little decency pounded into him by his classmates.

Shandy and the mush brigade were halfway up the hill when the great sled passed them: Odin, Thor, Hoenir, and Heimdallr in the shafts and the president himself holding the reins. Mrs. Svenson was right up there with him, naturally. Sieglinde knew better than to trust Thorkjeld Svenson out of her sight at a time like this.

Helen looked like a snowflake fairy between the statuesque Mrs. Svenson and the billowing Iduna Stott. Even Mrs. Mouzouka, head of the cookery department and no puny figure herself, was dwarfed by these two Valkyries. Iduna was blowing kisses to the cheering multitudes. Helen and Mrs. Mouzouka were smiling and waving. Sieglinde Svenson, serene and beautiful even in a blue nylon ski jacket and pants, kept raising her hand with the palm-outward gesture favored by royalty everywhere. That she happened to be wearing a fuzzy red mitten instead of a sleek white glove in no way diminished the dignity of the gesture.

Faculty folk were out in force. Shandy spied his next-door neighbors the Jackmans, with their four children, all six of them togged out in identical cross-country ski suits. Dickie was washing Wendy’s face with snow. Wendy was howling. Now Wendy was kicking Dickie in the shins and Dickie was howling. Shandy steered away from the Jackmans.

A good many townspeople were swelling the throng. Fred Ottermole, Balaclava Junction’s police chief and almost its entire force, was there with his pretty wife, Edna Mae, and their four sons. The Ottermole kids were less dashingly garbed than the Jackman quartet but a lot better behaved. Shandy also recognized Mrs. Betsy Lomax, who cleaned for him and Helen twice a week. She was with Mrs. Purvis Mink, wife of a college security guard. Mrs. Mink had at last got her gallstones out and appeared to be in fine fettle. So did Cronkite Swope, demon reporter for the
Balaclava County Weekly Fane and Pennon.
He was already poising his new camera to record the moment of truth for his vast reading public.

The urns were broached, the cocoa flowed. The crullers were passed around from huge flat baskets woven by students in Pam Waggoner’s native arts class. Then John Enderble took his post in front of Beauregard’s den, and the countdown began.

“Five, four, three, two, one—
Groundhog
!”

This was it. Professor Enderble reached into the hole, hauled out a fat bundle of gray-brown fur, and held it up for Cronkite Swope to photograph. One might have thought the roar of the crowd would already have wakened Beauregard, but it hadn’t. Only after Enderble had addressed the wood-chuck kindly but firmly, reminding him that the time had come to perform that once-a-year stint for which he was so well fed and housed by the college, did Beauregard consent to rouse himself.

Enderble set him down on the trodden snow. Professor Stott, hog expert nonpareil, hence official adjudicator of groundhog shadows, bent his head in earnest scrutiny, then performed a jocular thumbs-down. Even wilder cheers erupted. Enderble picked up Beauregard, thanked him for his cooperation even though he was already dozing again, and returned him to his lair as Cronkite Swope snapped yet another photograph.

Now the bonfire was alight, cracking and snapping and sending curls of fragrant blue smoke over Oozak’s Pond. The seemingly bottomless cocoa urns were again in service. Reheaped baskets of crullers were being carried by willing students to those spectators too far back to get at the sled so that nobody would be left out.

Peter Shandy, a compulsive counter, tried to compute how many crullers were being masticated by how many eager mandibles this gala morning. He knew he’d never arrive at an accurate figure, but he kept counting anyway. The effort gave him an excuse to stand alone on a little mound, like Napoleon at Ratisbon, looking over the crowd.

The bonfire was blazing finely. Shandy could feel its welcome heat from where he stood. The heat was melting the ice around the pond, but that was all to the good. The pond had to be kept flowing or the methane plant wouldn’t work.

Being spring fed, the Skunk Works Reservoir, as Oozak’s Pond was now generally called, never froze solid, anyway. One of the first things freshmen learned was to stay off its unsafe ice in the winter. The Wash Pond, larger, more conveniently situated, and kept clear of snow, was where the students skated and the faculty curled. Except for this one day out of the school year, nobody came up here much except plant maintenance staff and security guards. Beauregard probably didn’t mind being left to himself.

The snowman representing Old Man Winter was growing fast. Somebody had brought a ladder from one of the storage barns. A tall student was up on it, taking a hard-packed ball that was being passed up to him and fitting it as a head. A redheaded young woman was right behind him waving a bright headscarf, demanding that the effigy put it on and become Old Woman Winter as a blow for equal rights.

The redhead reminded Shandy a little of Birgit, the Svensons’ fire-eating fifth daughter, now married to former honor student Hjalmar Olafssen and raising, as Birgit and Hjalmar would naturally do, a superior strain of raspberries. Shandy hadn’t yet seen their new baby and wasn’t sure he wanted to. It was said to be the spitting image of its maternal grandfather. Thus musing, he’d just accepted another cruller from a passing basket when the redhead screamed.

Of course there’d been plenty of screaming already, but this was a different kind of scream. Shandy’s first thought was that the ladder was tipping over, but it wasn’t. Then he realized the woman was pointing at something floating in the pond, among the melting cakes of broken ice.

Shandy had been out looking for pileated woodpeckers the day before, and he still had his field glasses in his windbreaker pocket. He whipped them out, took one quick look, and made a dash for the bank.

Somebody was yelling, “Aw, it’s only a dummy.” Shandy’s binoculars were good ones; he knew better. He glanced at the cruller he was still holding, began to feel queasy, and dropped it unobtrusively in the slush.

Spectators were crowding forward. Chief Ottermole was trying to keep them away from the bank but not having much luck until President Svenson bulldozed his way to the fore yelling, “Stand back!”

Knowing they’d damned well better obey or he’d start picking them up two by two and hurling them into snowbanks, the mob receded. With the area safely cleared, Svenson planted himself in front of the bonfire, raised his mighty arms, and, bellowed, “Shut up!”

Absolute silence fell upon the throng. Even Wendy Jackman didn’t dare to whimper. Then Svenson did what Shandy had feared he’d do. “Shandy,” he ordered, “tell ’em.”

There was no escape. Peter Shandy, by the vicissitudes of fate and the iron will of Thorkjeld Svenson, had become Balaclava’s expert on bodies found in unexpected places. He cleared his throat and raised his voice.

“It looks as if there’s been a drowning. I don’t know who. You can forget about rescue; the victim is far beyond help.”

He held up his field glasses to show them how he knew. “Our maintenance crew has equipment to cope with the situation, and we’ll get right to it. If you’re ghoulish enough to stand around and watch, kindly keep out from underfoot. If you know of any local person who’s been missing from home, tell Chief Ottermole now. Otherwise, you can help us most by dispersing quietly. I don’t have to remind faculty and students that classes will begin at the usual time. Those due at the animal barns,” he added after a signal from Professor Stott, “had better make tracks. You’re half a minute late already.”

Tardiness in tending the livestock was the ultimate Thou Shalt Not at Balaclava Agricultural College. Several students gasped and sprinted for the barns. They started a mass exodus. Muttering of jobs, chores, or getting the kids on the school bus, townsfolk straggled off across the campus or up the back road. A few paused to speak with Fred Ottermole, who was having his picture taken by Cronkite Swope while Edna Mae and the boys stood by basking in reflected glory.

Shandy didn’t bother asking Ottermole what the informants were saying. He was dispatching students to fetch the rubber dinghy kept at the methane plant for working on the sluices, to bring one of the nets used to trap floating debris and a tarpaulin to cover the body when they brought it ashore. He delegated one to call Dr. Melchett, the college physician, and another to get hold of Harry Goulson, the local mortician. Melchett would balk at a waterlogged cadaver cluttering up his swank office, but Goulson was used to taking them any way they came. Shandy only hoped to God this one wouldn’t fall to pieces when they lifted it out of the water.

In less than a minute, the dinghy was brought, the oars and net put on board, and they were ready to cast off. President Svenson moved to step aboard, but his wife hauled him back.

“Thorkjeld, you will not set foot in that little boat. You would get wet and catch a sniffle. Let Peter go.”

“Why should Shandy catch a sniffle instead of me?”

“Peter will not catch a sniffle because he will not wallow around like a whale in a bathtub and sink the boat. Come now, you must drive back the sled. Mrs. Mouzouka needs the urns to make coffee for breakfast.”

Rather than trust any hand but his own to drive the Balaclava Blacks in a four-horse hitch, Svenson had to obey with what grace he could muster. That would not have been much at the best of times, and this was surely one of the worse.

“Report to me later in my office, Shandy,” he growled to show his was still the hand on the helm regardless of who got to ride in the boat. Then he followed his wife back to the sled.

“That’s a relief,” grunted Chief Ottermole, who’d been secretly terrified of losing face in front of his family. Honor demanded that he himself be among the crew, but with that behemoth aboard, there’d have been no room for a man Ottermole’s size, or anybody’s size. He and Shandy would fit together all right. Besides, the chief had no idea how to go about recovering the body, but it looked as if Shandy might.

Helen was none too happy at watching Shandy get stuck with the dirty work again, but there wasn’t a thing she could do except bite her tongue and hope that flimsy apology for a boat would hold together. Shandy wasn’t thinking much about the dinghy or anything else except what he’d seen bobbing around out there. He stepped in and settled himself between the oarlocks, feeling the boat’s thin plastic bottom every whit as cold on his backside as he’d expected it to be. He held up a steadying hand to Ottermole and took the oars, the net, and the rope he’d forgotten to ask for from the student who’d been smart enough to bring it anyway. He fitted the oars into the oarlocks and handed the net and rope to the chief.

“Here, your lap’s bigger than mine. I’ll row. You navigate.”

Ottermole was doing his manful best not to look green around the gills. “Okay, if that’s the way you want it. Cripes, my ass is frozen already.”

“Don’t start bitching yet,” Shandy warned him. “Swope’s taking your picture.”

Being the smaller and the older of the two, Shandy could have let the chief row; but he was a powerful man for his size and well aware that he stood less chance of a dunking if he handled the oars himself. Anyway, there wasn’t much to do. A dozen good heaves on the oars brought them close enough to the body for Ottermole to abandon all pretense of having his stomach under control.

“Jeez, why’d I eat them five crullers?” he moaned as he got his first real look. Where the face should have been, there was only a grayish mist.