The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (23 page)

“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 It’s not for publication, just for evidence.”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.

D
RAT 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.”

“I know where you can get one, not far off.”

“Now, Minnie, that’s not a bit nice. She’s come in very handy, and we may need her again. Anyway, she doesn’t have false teeth.”

“Why should that stop you? You could pull them out, the way you did with—”

“We weren’t going to talk about that, remember?”

Flo was up out of the rocking chair, getting another drink. Through the keyhole Shandy could see Miss Mink’s partner crossing over to the cupboard. He had a clear view of the hands that had always been kept covered and of the head that wasn’t wearing a wig. Without all that wild red hair obscuring them, the eyes showed up as a strange, opaque darkish gray, like slate.

“Here’s to us, Min.” Flo was drunk enough to be euphoric. “Three down and none to go, unless Sephy and that tin soldier she’s married to start giving us trouble. How’s darling Gracie?”

“Terribly upset, naturally.”

“Glad to hear it. Starched-up little bitch.”

“She’s hardly little anymore. She’s as tall as—don’t you want to hear about the funeral?”

“No, I want to hear about Grace. Is she as tall as I am?”

“No, not nearly.” Miss Mink sounded frightened. “And she’s much slighter built.”

“Too bad. All right, so who else was at the funeral?”

“All the gawkers in town, as you might expect. Your lady friend brought that drunken old uncle of hers.”

“Hesp Hudson? No kidding! How did he act?”

“Reasonably sober, for a change. Of course, the way he bellowed out the hymns, you could hear him all over the church. I thought my eardrums were going to burst.”

“Hesp Hudson singing hymns? That’s a hot one!”

Flo was cracking up, practically falling off the rocking chair. Shandy wished the keyhole were more strategically placed. Then he leaped back like a scalded rabbit. Flo was up and heading for the parlor.

“Come on, Min, let’s us sing a hymn. You can play the organ, can’t you?”

“It’s making a mockery.”

“Mockery, hell. Think how respectable we’ll sound when the neighbors come over with the pies. Chintzy bastards, why haven’t they?”

“There’s a nice cake Mrs. Flackley brought, if you want some.”

“No, I don’t want any of nice Mrs. Flackley’s nice cake,” Flo answered in a squeaky, mincing voice. “Here, let’s both have another hair of the woof-woof to oil up the jolly old choobs, as we say in Liverpool, and away we go.”

Luckily, there was another door to the parlor. Shandy was out in the stairwell trying to look like a grandfather’s clock by the time Minerva Mink got her feet on the treadles and her hands on the keys of the pump organ. Doors in old houses never stay open unless you put a brick in front of them, so he was able to shut himself off from the singers without any fuss.

“Washed in the booze, by the spirits healed.” Flo’s rendition of the rousing old gospel song was hardly respectable, but Trevelyan Buggins’s last batch was certainly an efficacious lubricant for the bronchii. Miss Mink must be well into the spirits, too, by this time. She was pulling out the loud stops and pumping for all she was worth. Under cover of the racket they were making, Shandy dared to reach for the telephone, make a tent of his overcoat to muffle the sound, and dial. This entailed squatting down so he could grip the instrument between his knees, cradling the receiver somewhat painfully between his chin and shoulder, holding his tiny pocket flashlight in a most peculiar way with most of his right-hand fingers while leaving the index finger free to dial with, and using the other hand to keep the coat in place, but he persevered and overcame. He even got the right number.

“Ottermole,” he whispered, “I’m at the Buggins place on First Fork. Get out here as quick as you can. Bring Porble. Use his car; don’t trust that wreck of yours. She’s there, too? Good. Let her come.”

They were still yowling like a pair of banshees on the other side of the door, so now that he’d got the knack, Shandy risked another call. He waited awhile, half-smothered in melton cloth, and made a third. Then he put the phone back and waited some more.

Marietta Woozle, last to be called, was the first to arrive. She’d taken longer than one might expect to cover so short a distance, though. Shandy had guessed she wouldn’t go on to work after the funeral. Now he deduced she’d slipped into something comfortable, expecting to be the visited rather than the visitor, and had had to get dressed again. She was got up like a firecracker and acting the part.