The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (5 page)

“This is utter hogwash,” Shandy snorted. “Balaclava Buggins owned the pond and all the land around it.”

“Says he didn’t.”

“I know what it says. They’re claiming Balaclava gambled the pond away to Ichabod’s father, Abelard, in a sporting wager, whatever that’s supposed to mean. When did Balaclava Buggins ever gamble?”

“Gambled on starting the college.”

“That was no gamble. It was a calculated risk based on a sound premise. Anyway, if Balaclava did indulge in an occasional spree of horseshoe pitching or whatever, he’d have known better than to bet on the outcome with that horse-trading brother of his.”

“Might have been drunk.”

“M’yes, that’s always a possibility.” After all, their founder had invented the Balaclava Boomerang, a combination of homemade cherry brandy and home-hardened cider that was hardly a tipple for the timid tippler. “But Abelard would have been drunker,” Shandy insisted. “He was a two-fisted toper.”

“Stayed sober long enough to con Oozak’s Pond out of old Balaclava. “

“Abelard Buggins did nothing of the sort. Nor did his alleged heir, Ichabod.” Shandy didn’t often raise his voice in anger, but he was raising it now.

Svenson saw him and raised him. “How the hell do you know?”

“By the twitching of my thumbs.”

“Try taking a twitch into a courtroom. They say they’ve got proof.”

“To quote you, blah! I’ll believe their proof when I see it, provided it hasn’t been faked, which you can bet your boots it has. The Bugginses were always fantastic practical jokers, you know that as well as I do. Look, President, you don’t need me to get you out of this one. You need Helen and a lawyer. “

“Helen’s your wife.”

“So what? Helen is a distinguished scholar, an authority on the Buggins family, and a member of the college in her own right.”

“Urrgh!”

Svenson’s final argument was irrefutable. Anyway, they were coming to Harry Goulson’s big white clapboard house now, the sled runners grating hideously over the bare spots on Main Street. The president brought his team to a halt, apparently by thought transference, and Shandy climbed down.

A banged-up green Valiant with a press card stuck behind the windshield was sitting out front. His cohorts had arrived. In fact, they were already coming back out. Persephone Mink was walking a step ahead of Ottermole and Swope. She looked both forlorn and mulish.

“He could o’ been wearin’ blue contact lenses,” Fred Ottermole was arguing.

“Blue contact lenses, my eyeball,” sniffed Persephone. “D’ you think I wouldn’t know my own brothuh?”

“But you ain’t seen neither Brace nor Bain since you was a kid.”

Mrs. Mink didn’t answer, merely buttoned her decent black coat up under her chin and gave a smart tug to the black scarf with red spots she’d tied over her hair. Time was when any Balaclava County matron would have kept a black hat in her closet for occasions such as this or at least had an aunt handy she could borrow one from. Things were different nowadays. Shandy was rather surprised Sephy had bothered about mourning clothes at all. To be sure, the red polka dots were a bit frisky, but at least the black scarf showed she’d done the best she could with what she had.

Maybe Purve had reminded her about the proprieties. Purvis Mink was a bit of a stickler, as any security guard who expected to get along with joint chiefs of staff Clarence and Silvester Lomax would have to be. Perhaps Persephone was a stickler herself. Mrs. Lomax thought a lot of Sephy Mink, Shandy knew. She’d said so often enough. He took off his aged tweed hat.

“Good morning, Mrs. Mink. I’m sorry to hear of your bereavement.”

“Thank you, Professuh. I’m none too pleased about it myself, though I’m not quite so bereft as Fred heah seems to think,” she replied, snipping off her
r
’s like a true Balaclava County native. They wouldn’t go to waste; she’d use them up in words like
sawring
and
drawring
and
idear.
“ ’Scuse me, I’m on my way to the pahsonage.”

Persephone went. Ottermole stayed put, shaking his head. “She claims it ain’t neither one of the twins.”

“What was that you said about contact lenses?” Shandy asked him.

“She claims Brace an’ Bain both had brown eyes. This here stiff’s eyes are blue, so that’s how she knows he ain’t them.”

“Drat. Unless the man did in fact happen to be wearing tinted lenses. Did you ask Goulson?”

“Never thought of it myself till just this minute,” the police chief admitted.

“Then let’s go back and ask him now.”

Shandy led the way through the Goulsons’ tastefully decorated hallway, careful to step only on the transparent plastic runners Arabella had laid down over the gray plush carpeting, and on to Goulson’s workroom. The undertaker wasn’t working now, merely standing there with a melancholy expression on his wontedly genial face.

“Hello, Professor. Looks as if we struck out.”

“So Ottermole was just telling me. Would he by any chance have tinted contact lenses?”

“Nope. I thought of them myself right off the bat when she said the boys’ eyes were brown.”

“And were they?”

Goulson hunched his shoulders. “Their own sister ought to know. I guess maybe they were—sort of hazely brown. So that means we’re back where we started, eh?”

“I expect something will turn up once the word gets around,” said Shandy. If he knew this town, the news was well on its way already. “Did the medical examiner tell you when he’d be over, Ottermole?”

“He said he’d make it as quick as he could.”

Ottermole grinned. “He says he always enjoys comin’ here because we get the most int’restin’ corpses.”

“Ungh,” said Shandy, since Thorkjeld Svenson wasn’t here to say it for him. “I’m glad somebody gets a kick out of our misfortunes. You might as well get on with watering the potted palms or whatever’s on your agenda, Goulson. You, er, won’t want to touch any of the bodies until the medical examiner has seen them, I’m sure. We’ll check back with you in a while. Come along, Swope. Save your film for Miss Mink.”

“We still going to see her?” Chief Ottermole asked in some surprise.

“Why not?” said Shandy. “Trevelyan Buggins and his wife are still dead, aren’t they?”

“Were the last time I looked at ‘em,” said Harry Goulson with a return of his customary joviality. “Sephy Mink asked to view the remains, as was only natural, them being her parents. I gave it as my professional opinion that the passing of the loved ones was a blessed release, and she agreed.”

“She didn’t say who was gettin’ released, I noticed,” Ottermole grunted. “I guess it won’t break her an’ Purve’s hearts not to be runnin’ out to First Fork three or four times a week, fetchin’ an’ carryin’ an’ helpin’ out with the chores, which usually meant doin’ it all themselves.”

“Well, now, that’s something I wouldn’t be too sure of myself,” said the undertaker. “Time and again I’ve noticed it’s the ones people do the most for who they miss the worst. Persephone Mink’s not a person to give way in public, no more than you or I, but she’s feeling her loss.”

He nodded, more to himself than to his hearers. “Yes, she’s feeling it, poor soul. And she’ll feel it a darned sight harder once she’s had time to sit down and think about it. Maybe I ought to give Betsy Lomax a ring so she can slip over to the Minks’ and have a cup of hot tea waiting for Sephy when she gets back from talking to the minister. Knowing Betsy, though, I shouldn’t be surprised if she’s already there with the kettle on the simmer. Purve’s gone to work, I suppose?”

“He went,” said Ottermole. “I don’t know if he stayed. Purve’s on the day shift this week. Cronk and I met him on the road. He was runnin’ late. He told us his aunt had called to give ’em the word after Sephy left for the doin’s up at the pond, an’ he’d waited till she came back so he could break it to her easy. He didn’t much like leavin’ her, but he said he figured he’d better at least check in at the security office an’ hang around till Clarence an’ Sil could find somebody to cover for him.”

“I suppose it’s hard to know where your priorities are at a time like this,” said Cronkite Swope, who’d been remarkably silent up to now, for him.

“Yeah, ’specially with President Svenson breathin’ fire down your neck if he thinks you’re slackin’ your job.”

“President Svenson would work the shift himself, if he had to, rather than put pressure on a man with a family crisis on his hands,” Shandy retorted somewhat stiffly.

Then again, if Thorkjeld Svenson had known Purve’s wife was not only a Buggins but a descendant of the accursed Ichabod—and he might, because the president always knew what you least wanted him to—he might have taken the alternative course of tearing Purve limb from limb and stamping on the pieces. Maybe it was as well Mink had elected to show up at the office.

Shandy told Goulson again that he’d see him later and followed Swope and Ottermole out to the green Valiant. Cronkite Swope was no slouch at the wheel, he soon found; nevertheless, the ride out to First Fork seemed a dull and pallid affair after the Nantucket sleighride with Svenson and the Blacks.        

The Ichabod Buggins homestead was a dull and pallid affair, too. It couldn’t be called ramshackle, exactly. Purvis and Persephone Mink had obviously done what they could. Plastic storm windows had been tacked over the dried-out wooden sashes. Trash hadn’t been allowed to collect in the dooryard beyond a reasonable limit. Paint had been applied to the withered clapboards, possibly within the present decade.

But Purve and Sephy had their own place to keep up, and there was just so much one could do to a house that had been sliding downhill for a century or more, short of tearing it down and starting over. Ichabod couldn’t have left his heirs much to go on with, and those who followed him wouldn’t have done enough better to make much of a difference.

Shandy knew all about the Ichabods, the families that barely managed to scrape along from generation to generation. It was generally the weaker vessels that hung around the old place. They’d have an ill-tended plot out back where they’d raise some garden sass in the summertime, if their few stringy hens didn’t scratch up all the seed before the plants got going. Maybe there’d be a pig in a makeshift pen when they could raise the price of a shoat and scrounge enough garbage to fatten it on. They’d hunt and fish and do odd jobs now and then and get by somehow.

Those with any gumption either pitched in and turned the family fortunes around, which clearly hadn’t happened here, or got out and made lives for themselves somewhere else. If they happened to find their niche nearby, like Sephy, they’d drop over and lend a hand when they got the chance. If they moved far away, they’d maybe send a money order now and then. Bainbridge mightn’t have lived long enough to do much in that way.

Then there were the ones who just cleared out and tried to forget where they’d come from. Bracebridge Buggins sounded like one of those, from the way Dr. Melchett had described him. But how far had he gotten?

He hadn’t landed in Oozak’s Pond, anyway, unless his sister was lying and Harry Goulson was backing her up. What in Sam Hill would they do that for? Unless Persephone Mink happened to be the one who’d instigated this mad lawsuit against the college and Harry was hoping for some hush money out of the proceeds.

Shandy could not see Harry Goulson lending his good name to any such shenanigans. Aside from the ethical question of would he, there was the practical one of why the hell should he?

Goulson had been born to affluence, by Balaclava Junction standards. When his father passed on; Goulson had come into a tidy inheritance and a business that never ran short of customers for long. So had that father before him and the sire’s sire, for that matter. Goulson’s Funeral Parlor was one of the oldest established enterprises in the county, and Harry Goulson took pride in his heritage. Why should he dishonor the family name and risk his professional standing by finagling a bribe he didn’t need?

Was he having a love affair with Persephone Mink? Not a chance, Shandy thought. He wouldn’t dare, being married to an accomplished, professional snoop like Arabella. Besides, Persephone Mink was a virtuous woman. Shandy had it on Mrs. Betsy Lomax’s personal authority that not another housewife in the village could shine a copper saucepan like Sephy Mink. So dedicated a pan polisher would hardly find time for clandestine amours.

What would Goulson want another woman for, anyway? Arabella was a good-looker, a lively talker without being tiresome, a snappy dresser without being flashy, a competent housekeeper, and a capable assistant. When it came to putting the finishing touches on a loved one, Goulson relied absolutely on Arabella’s taste and artistry. Could he throw such a talent to the winds?

Mrs. Goulson had presented her spouse with only one child. That wasn’t due to lack of connubial devotion, though, but to female troubles vaguely alluded to by Mrs. Lomax. Besides, the boy was as fine a lad as one would meet in a month of Sundays, zealous to follow in his forefathers’ footsteps, and going steady with Lizanne Porble, of whom even the most doting parent would be hard put to disapprove. Goulson had always appeared satisfied with his lot in life. As far as Shandy could see, he damned well ought to be.

If Harry Goulson hadn’t lied for love or money, might he not still have done so out of kindness? Looking around this discouraged little place, thinking of the three old people, Sephy’s parents and Purvis’s aunt, who’d needed a roof over their heads and probably hadn’t the price of a bag of shingle nails to keep it on with, Shandy could understand why Persephone might be drawn into a scheme to extract money from the college, especially if there was any shred of evidence that the Trevelyan Bugginses might have something like a legitimate claim.

Sephy wouldn’t be doing it for herself, Goulson would realize that. Purvis Mink made a decent week’s pay. Their children had been eligible to attend the college tuition-free. Two of the daughters had studied with Mrs. Mouzouka, opened a coffee shop near the soap works in Lumpkinton, and done just fine. They’d started another in Hoddersville and sold both for a good price when their husbands got transferred. Mrs. Lomax had told Professor Shandy all about the Mink girls one day when he’d stayed home to grade papers on the mistaken assumption that he’d be able to work there in peace and quiet.