The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (6 page)

So the Minks ought to be sitting pretty, but maybe for some reason they weren’t. Shandy wouldn’t know, but Goulson would. Between Arabella’s work for the
Fane and Pennon
and Harry’s membership in all the local clubs and lodges, the Goulsons didn’t miss much. Even now, with her parents beyond any earthly need, Persephone might feel too deeply committed to draw back from whatever scheme was afoot, and Goulson might understand why.

But this was no time to stand around speculating. Miss Minerva Mink, for it must be she, was peeking out at them through the mended lace curtain on the front door. How the blue blazes was he going to work around to asking her whether she thought Mr. and Mrs. Buggins could have been murdered?

S
HANDY CLEARED HIS THROAT
and raised his hat. “Miss Mink?”

The woman standing in the doorway answered him by a weary nod. Everything about her seemed tired. No wonder, Shandy thought, considering the kind of morning she’d had thus far. He had a hunch, though, that Miss Mink always looked tired.

She was wearing a longish dress of some limp gray material with a gray worsted cardigan over it. The dress wasn’t exactly shabby and certainly not unclean, but it drooped from her lean frame as if it had known from the start there was no earthly use of its ever pretending to be stylish.

Everything about Miss Mink drooped, for that matter: her shoulders, her spine, the end of her thin nose, the wrinkles hacked into her grayish face by a mouth that must have developed a permanent downturn about three-score years ago. Her stockings were gray, and bagged. Her black shoes were what everybody’s grandmother used to wear when Shandy was a boy: laced-up oxfords with Cuban heels. Most women wouldn’t call them Cuban anymore, Shandy supposed, but he’d bet Miss Mink still did. He essayed another courtesy.

“I expect you know Chief Ottermole, and this is Cronkite Swope of the
Weekly Fane and Pennon.
We dropped by to, er, pay our respects.”

“You can pay your respects at Goulson’s Funeral Parlor tomorrow from two to four and seven to nine,” she told him in a voice as gray as her stockings. “No member of the family is present to receive visitors.”

Miss Mink started to close the door. Shandy took hold of the knob from the outside. “Actually, what we came for is—”

“I know what you came for.” Her tone didn’t change. “You came to talk Persephone out of the lawsuit. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Frederick Ottermole, abetting this minion of the vested interests against the workers of the earth.”

“Huh? Who? Him?” Miss Mink’s reprimand had clearly shaken the police chief. Shandy wondered if she’d been Ottermole’s fourth-grade teacher. “Are you whatever she said, Professor?”

“I said he’s a grinder of the faces of the poor,” Miss Mink amplified, still without any enthusiasm.

“No, you didn’t.” Ottermole had got his nerve back. “You said something about a minion in a vest. An’ you said Purve an’ Sephy was workers of the earth, which they ain’t. Purve’s a security guard, an’ Sephy hates to garden ’cause she’s scared to death of bees.”

“I was speaking figuratively,” Miss Mink droned, but Fred Ottermole wasn’t having any figures.

“Whereas,” he brought out the word with visible pride, “what the professor does mostly is raise turnips when he’s not being what you might call my unofficial deputy. Seeing as how I got hardly no regular force except Budge Dorkin, I have to make do with what I can get, which I wouldn’t if people would get out an’ vote me enough money to run my station with. How long since you been to town meeting, Miss Mink?”

She gave him a look. Her eyes were a pale, watery blue, Shandy noticed, like the unidentified corpse’s.

“Now, don’t you start in on me, Frederick. You know perfectly well I couldn’t just waltz out of here as the whim seized me and leave Mr. and Mrs. Buggins to fend for themselves. I had to do my duty in the sphere of life to which I was called, didn’t I? And what’s to become of me now?” she finished bleakly.

“Well, heck, Purve an’ Sephy—”

“Already have Purvis’s mother living with them—and will have until the end of her days, if I know Rosalinda Mink.”

“So what? They got two spare bedrooms now the kids are all gone.”

“I find it impossible to visualize any house large enough to hold both myself and Rosalinda. And to think I might have been living in my own snug home all this time, if only I hadn’t been stupid enough to let good nature prevail over common sense.”

For the first time, Miss Mink’s voice quivered with bona fide emotion. “How sadly do I rue the day I let my handsome cousin Algernon talk me into signing over my share of the old home so Aunt Amelia could, as he put it, live out her years in peace knowing she’d always have a roof over her head. Next thing I knew, Algernon had gambled away the property, Aunt Amelia was over the hill to the poorhouse, and I was out in the cold.”

The down-drooping lips tightened into a thin gray line. “If Persephone Mink fails to profit from my disastrous example, she’s a bigger fool than I take her for. And so I told her. Demand your rights, Sephy, I said. You never know. Purvis appears healthy enough, but they’re always the first to go. He’ll drop down dead in his tracks one day, I said, and then where will you be? Sephy didn’t like that much, I have to tell you, but I reminded her she’d like it a good deal less trotting into the county welfare office and admitting she’s a pauper.”

“But she wouldn’t be,” Shandy protested. “All college personnel get free life insurance, and Mrs. Mink would be able to collect her husband’s pension as long as she lived.”

Minerva Mink sniffed. “The widow’s mite.”

“Then again, they mightn’t. Hi, Min.”

The interruption came from a flaming hulk of a woman with red-orange hair, red-purple cheeks, and scarlet lips painted on sideways in the manner of the late Pablo Picasso. She came wallowing around from behind the house in a pair of floppy rubber boots that had been splashed with red paint, perhaps in an effort to achieve the
tout ensemble.
Above them, she wore what Shandy assumed was a red dress, though he supposed it might be a red petticoat or simply an outsize red shirt. Whatever it was dragged in exuberant dips and swoops from under a dirty windbreaker she was clutching around her with her fists balled on the inside and the sleeves flapping empty, further distorting an already uncouth figure.

“Didn’t know you was expectin’ company, Min,” she rasped around a cigarette that was stuck in me corner of her incarnadined mouth. “I just run over to see was there anything I could do.”

Miss Mink jumped as though she’d been poked with a hat pin, stared at the apparition as if she couldn’t imagine what it might be, then recovered her composure. She even managed a grim apology for a smile.

“You came to snoop, and what you can do for me is take yourself right back to where you came from. When I want any help from the likes of you, I’ll ask for it, thank you very much.”

“Huh. Try to be neighborly, an’ where does it get you?” The neighbor glanced around from under her unkempt vermilion tresses, saw no welcome in the men’s faces, and left.

Cronkite Swope, who’d been having some trouble with his nose, put away his tissues and essayed a change of subject. “What’s this about a lawsuit, Miss Mink?”

“That is a family concern and none of yours, young man.”

“Oh, come on, Miss Mink. You wouldn’t hold out on a poor newspaperman with a living to earn?”

Cronkite Swope was withal an attractive young sprout, as half the winsome young ladies of Balaclava County would have been only too pleased to certify. Swope was perhaps wondering whether, where Cousin Algernon had once pulled a successful wheedle, he himself might yet succeed.

He might have, too, if he hadn’t been interrupted by a car’s driving into the yard just as he’d got his engaging grin up to full candlepower. The car was a newish American one in a discreet brown color, and Shandy wasn’t surprised to see Persephone Mink driving. What did surprise him was that Grace Porble was with her.

Then Shandy remembered that Grace was not just the college librarian’s wife but a Buggins in her own right. It was she who came first up the stairs.

“How are you, Miss Mink? What a dreadful thing to happen, both Uncle Trev and Auntie Bea in the same night. I suppose it’s better this way, but it’s still a shock. Why, Peter Shandy! Whatever are you doing here?”

“Exerting undue influence is the word, I believe,” Miss Mink answered before Shandy could get a word in edgewise. “Or trying to. He came about the lawsuit.”

“Aunt Minerva,” cried Persephone, “you haven’t been talking about that in front of a reporter?”

Both Grace and Persephone shied away from Cronkite Swope as if he were a bad case of the flu. Miss Mink shook her tidy gray head.

“All I said was it’s nobody’s business but the family’s.”

Grace Porble sighed. “I wish you hadn’t said anything at all. Phil’s upset enough already.”

“I don’t see what call he has to fret himself,” Miss Mink snapped back. “He doesn’t stand to make anything out of it.”

“Well, Purve’s none too happy, either,” said Persephone. “I don’t know what we’re standing out here on the doorstep for. Come inside, Aunt Minerva. You’d better sit down before you fall down.”

She put her arm around the gray worsted cardigan and led her husband’s aunt into the house. Grace Porble lingered beside Peter Shandy.

“Peter,” she murmured, glancing over to make sure Cronkite Swope wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, which he wasn’t, being a well-brought-up young man. Fred Ottermole was, but Grace gave him a look, and he backed off. “Peter, what are you really doing here?”

“I’m on an errand for the president, if you want to know. Didn’t your cousin tell you about the man who wasn’t her brother?”

“The one you and Fred Ottermole fished out of Oozak’s Pond? Surely you don’t think that has anything to do with this? Peter Shandy, if you start trying to make a scandal out of the way Sephy’s parents died, I’ll strangle you with my bare hands.”

“Drat it, Grace, I’m not trying to make anything out of anything. Look, we’d better talk later on, when you’re free. I hadn’t realized you were such pals with Mrs. Mink.”

“Sephy and I are some kind of cousins. Helen could tell you in what degree, I expect. I can’t. Anyway, we’ve always been fond of each other. We even lived together before we got married, in that little house where those two associate professors, Pam Waggoner and Shirley Wrenne, live now. Spinsters’ Haven, they used to call it, but don’t tell Shirley that. Peter, I’ve got to go in. Get that Swope boy out of here before he prints something about the family.”

“Grace, you know he’s going to do that, anyway. Why don’t you spike his guns by giving him a few decorous facts for the obituary?”

“Oh, all right. I suppose I’d better.”

None too happily, the librarian’s wife went over to the reporter and began outlining the meager highlights of her deceased relatives’ undistinguished lives. Shandy took advantage of her preoccupation to slip inside the house.

The old Buggins place looked about the way he’d expected it to, clean and dejected, like Miss Mink’s gray dress. The rooms were tiny, the floors sagged. The furniture hadn’t been much good to start with and hadn’t been improved by the passage of time. There were too many crocheted doilies, too many knickknacks and doodads, too much varnished woodwork and faded wallpaper, too many yellowed photographs, not enough light and air, and definitely no sign of welcome on the faces turned toward him as he entered the parlor where Mrs. and Miss Mink were standing.

“Er, sorry to trouble you, ladies. Grace is talking to Swope about the obituary. She sent me to get a photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Buggins for the paper. She said you’d know which one.”

To Shandy’s relief, both women accepted his barefaced lie. “I suppose Grace means the one Arabella Goulson took at their fiftieth wedding anniversary,” said Persephone. “Do you know where it is, Aunt Minerva?”

“I expect your mother kept it upstairs in her top dresser drawer, but I’m not going up there to get it. Mrs. Buggins was always touchy about the hired help prying into her personal affairs.”

“Aunt Minerva, you were never hired help.”

“Then would you kindly and gently tell me what I was?”

Persephone sighed and went to fetch the photograph. Arabella Goulson had made an attractive presentation of it in a deckle-edged cardboard folder, but she hadn’t been able to do much with her subjects. The cake they were cutting was impressively decorated, the outfits they wore must have been bought new for the occasion, but the couple inside the clothes were such pallid wisps that they seemed hardly more than a vague excuse for the fancy confectionery, the corsage, and the boutonnière. Shandy wondered how this puny pair had ever managed to produce a daughter like Persephone, let alone twin sons.

Among the clutter on the mantelpiece, he spied a picture of the boys, perhaps taken for the high school graduation Bainbridge hadn’t waited to attend. They did look alike but, as Harry Goulson had said, not so alike that you couldn’t tell them apart when you got them together. Both had the Buggins nose and chin. If they’d grown beards as they got older, either one of them might have resembled Balaclava Buggins as much as the man in the pond had.

Too bad it was a black-and-white photo, hence there was no telling what the eye color might have been. The eyes didn’t look dark enough to have been brown, but the photograph had no doubt faded considerably after all these years. And Goulson had described the eyes as hazel, which might have meant almost anything.

Miss Mink cleared her throat, reminding Shandy of what he was allegedly there for. “Is that the picture you wanted?”

“Oh, yes,” he stuttered. “This will, er, do just, er, fine. Devoted couple, weren’t they? It must have been a dreadful shock to you, Miss Mink, finding them both, er, together. Though, since Mrs. Buggins had been ill with pneumonia—”

“Mother didn’t have pneumonia,” Persephone interrupted sharply. “If she had, we’d have taken her to the hospital.”

“But I understand Dr. Fotheringay gave the cause of, er, passing as respiratory failure. That means pneumonia, doesn’t it?”