The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (7 page)

“It means she stopped breathing when she died. People generally do.”

“I see. And your father’s was heart failure.”

“Just so.”

“Which is to say also that people’s hearts generally stop beating once they quit breathing. How right you are, Mrs. Mink. Did Mr. Buggins have a history of coronary weakness?”

“No, as a matter of fact, the last time Papa had a checkup, Dr. Fotheringay said—” Persephone stopped short and tightened her mouth. “Thank you for stopping by, Professor Shandy. The funeral’s half past eight Wednesday morning at the First Church, if you’d care to come.”

H
ELEN SHANDY LAID DOWN
the sandwich she’d been eating and glared at her husband across the kitchen table. “Peter, I cannot possibly go pumping Grace Porble when she’s in the midst of a family funeral. Anyway, I wouldn’t be able to get hold of her. She’s all tied up with poor Sephy.”

“What do you mean, poor Sephy? I didn’t know you were on Sephying terms with Purvis Mink’s wife.”

“Of course I am. Sephy’s in the garden club, isn’t she?”

“If you say so,” Shandy replied, sneaking Jane Austen a sliver of chicken from his own sandwich.

“I saw that, Peter Shandy. You know perfectly well Jane isn’t supposed to be fed at the table.”

The small tiger cat jumped up into Helen’s lap and began washing her white whiskers with a white-mittened paw. Helen rubbed one finger along Jane’s delicate jaw.

“And so do you, you little scrounger. Grace is terribly upset over Sephy’s parents, Peter. She’s canceled the Bonsai Workshop out of respect.”

“Good gad, I hadn’t realized the far-reaching ramifications of this unfortunate occurrence.”

Helen got up, ostensibly to refill the teapot, actually to come around the table and lay a wifely hand on Shandy’s shoulder. “Darling, you’re not going to make trouble for Grace and Sephy, are you?”

Disregarding Jane’s designs on his sandwich, Shandy stood up and put his arms around Helen. “I don’t know yet if there’s any trouble to be made. The medical examiner’s due at Goulson’s sometime soon. I hope he’ll find both parents’ deaths were due to natural causes.”

“Why shouldn’t he?” said Helen. “Couldn’t Mr. Buggins have waked up in the night, found his wife dead in bed beside him, and had a heart attack from the shock?”

“Certainly he could. It’s also possible that stiff we fished out of the pond this morning dressed up as Augustus Buggins, filled his pockets with rocks, and jumped into Oozak’s Pond just for the hell of it. What sticks in my craw is that all three bodies have turned up at the same time as Ichabod Buggins’s descendants are threatening the college with a lawsuit over the water rights from the pond.”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

Shandy explained, in words that ranged from the mildly profane to the downright scatological. Helen listened, first aghast, then bitter.

“So our precious president’s dumped the mess into your lap, as usual. I wish Thorkjeld Svenson would go fly a kite. “

“No doubt he would, if you asked him nicely.”

“You needn’t try to be funny.”

Helen disentangled herself from his embrace and picked up the cat. “Come to Mummy, Jane. We women have to stick together at a time like this. I’m warning you, Peter, if it turns out Sephy Mink is entitled to a legitimate share in Oozak’s Pond—”

“Then you’d better learn how to dip tallow candles, because that’s what you’ll be doing the Buggins family history by the light of,” Shandy finished for her. “In point of fact, the president has not dumped this mess exclusively into my lap. A goodly chunk of it’s in yours. Svenson expects us to work as a team. Any information that could bail the college out of a lawsuit ought to be in the archives, and you’re the only one with the expertise to dig it out. You’ll probably find an official ukase on your desk when you get back to the library.”

“Dr. Porble’s going to be in an awful swivet.”

“He’s in one already,” Shandy assured his wife. “Grace was telling Miss Mink this morning how burned up Phil is over the lawsuit. She sounded pretty bedraggled herself.”

“Poor Grace, why wouldn’t she be? Dr. Porble’s all for the college, no doubt, as you yourself would be, and she’s on Sephy’s side. So am I, but not very far on. After all, Sephy wasn’t my bridesmaid.”

It had been Sieglinde Svenson herself who’d taken on that function and served a nice smorgasbord with seven kinds of herring afterward, to make sure the erstwhile maverick Peter Shandy was well and duly corralled. Sieglinde must be on one side or the other, too, but she’d be far too suave a diplomat to let anybody know which. Still, it was clear there’d be a good many divided loyalties and perhaps a full-scale civil war before the ownership of Oozak’s Pond got straightened out, assuming it ever did.

“Drat,” Shandy exploded. “I wish that corpse had turned out to be Bracebridge Buggins. You don’t suppose Persephone Mink could have been wrong about the identification?”

“Sephy’s never wrong about anything,” said Helen: “Ask anybody. Peter, dear, have you stopped to consider that since Dr. Porble had been chewing Grace’s ear about the lawsuit when you saw her this morning and that since Thorkjeld didn’t throw his fit until after he’d been to his office and read his mail, then the Porbles must have known some time before he did?”

“I have stopped to consider, yes. Obviously, Persephone Mink had to be aware of what was up some time ago. Lawyers’ letters don’t get written overnight. There must have been considerable discussion among the family before they took any action, and it’s hard to believe she wasn’t involved in that. Being so close to Grace, who’s also a relative, Persephone would naturally have let her know about the lawsuit.”

“And Grace would have told Dr. Porble, and Sephy must surely have told Purvis. They’re a very devoted couple, I believe. “

Like Trevelyan and Beatrice. “I wonder how devoted Purvis Mink would be to the prospect of risking a good, steady job with assured benefits and a generous pension by participating in a wildcat scheme to gouge money out of the institution that provides the job, the benefits, and the pension,” said Shandy.

“Not terribly keen, I suppose,” Helen admitted. “Purvis loves his job, Sephy says, particularly when he works the night shift. He gets a kick out of watching the owls.”

“Chacun à son goût,”
said Shandy, who was a hawk man himself. “I suppose Persephone was beguiled into this harebrained lawsuit by the lure of easy money, but I can’t understand why Purvis didn’t try to head her off.”

“Sephy wouldn’t be lured by easy money.”

“Well, drat it, she must have been lured by something.”

“Family pride, I suppose. Darling, can’t you imagine what it must have been like for a girl who was supposed to be connected with the local aristocracy, growing up in that ratty old house without two nickels to rub together and having to wear Grace’s hand-me-downs? Grace used to pretend they swapped clothes back and forth because they were cousins, but everybody knew Sephy wouldn’t have had a rag to her name if it hadn’t been for Grace.”

“Who told you that?”

“I have my sources.”

“Mrs. Lomax, I suppose. So now Sephy’s out for revenge?”

“I expect she’d call it getting a little of her own back. Put yourself in Sephy’s place, Peter. If your people had been the underdogs generation after generation and your parents were old and discouraged, and suddenly they thought they’d found a way to get up on top at last, wouldn’t you have a hard time refusing to back them up?”

“And Grace is willing to stand behind her, even though the parents are dead?”

“How do I know where Grace is standing? Right now I daresay she’s trying to stay neutral about the lawsuit and help Sephy cope with the funeral. It’s an awful spot for her to be in.”

Unless Sephy decided to drop the lawsuit, Shandy thought. If not, the situation could only get worse. Phil Porble must be doing some heavy thinking about now. If he found after due deliberation that justice lay on Persephone’s side, he’d support her regardless of the consequences to himself, Grace, or the college. If he decided the Ichabod Buggins claim was a bundle of horsefeathers, he wouldn’t hesitate to start a family feud by saying so. If he’d already determined that some action on his own part was required to solve the dilemma, Phil would act. Whether his dispassionate logic would lead him to drown the man who thought up the lawsuit, Shandy honestly didn’t know.

“Peter, I know what you’re thinking,  and he wouldn’t,” said Helen. “He wouldn’t have to. If he wanted to get rid of somebody, he’d just give them one of his looks and they’d wither away.”

“M’well, you know Porble better than I do, I suppose, notwithstanding the fact that he and I had been colleagues for approximately eighteen years before you ever got here.”

“Bah, humbug. You may have strolled into the library to look up petunia statistics occasionally or to give him a hard time about opening up the Buggins Room on the off chance there’d be a copy of the collected poems of John G. Saxe you could get your lustful hands on. That’s not knowing.”

“Not knowing in the sense that I couldn’t tell you what color pajamas he wears, perhaps. That seems to be the sort of thing women always seem to think matters.”

“I haven’t the remotest idea what color pajamas Dr. Porble wears, nor have I troubled to inquire,” Helen retorted icily. “Probably cream-colored silk with a tasteful maroon piping and his initials embroidered on the pocket. Darn you, Peter, why did you have to mention pajamas? Now I’ll wonder about them next time I see him. And get an unseemly fit of the giggles, like as not.”

“You might more profitably expend your wonderment on why two more or less identical corpses turned up in Oozak’s Pond eighty years apart,” Shandy suggested. “Who besides yourself and Phil Porble has access to the Buggins Archive? You don’t let visitors wander at will through the Buggins Room, do you?”

“You know perfectly well we don’t.”

For half a century or more, the Buggins Room had been a dusty, cobwebbed dump for splintered crates nobody wanted to look through. Now all books were shelved according to the Dewey decimal system, all papers dealt with according to the Helen Marsh Shandy system.

Helen had gone ferreting in the library basement and found a long oak table, which she’d caused to be lugged upstairs by a squad of burly sophomores for the better sorting and collating of the Buggins Archive. By now, the table was covered with racks and baskets full of carefully annotated folders that scholars from other areas were itching to get a look at. Dr. Porble himself, having for decades despised and ignored the Buggins Collection as an incubus that took up space better devoted to hog statistics, was virtually being forced to take an interest.

He could easily have taken advantage of his position as library director and keeper of the extra key to wander in and poke around. He could have come upon Corydon’s memorial ode to Augustus, read it, and returned it to its designated spot without Helen’s ever knowing, now that she was doing much of her work at home. Later, faced with the problem of dispatching a pestiferous Buggins and remembering what Henry Doe had got away with, his sardonic sense of humor might conceivably have prompted him to try Doe’s method again.

Helen wasn’t ready to ascribe such perfidy to her boss. “Dr. Porble wouldn’t do a thing like that,” she insisted. “Anyway, lots of people might have heard the story. It’s the sort of yarn grandparents like to scare their grandchildren with.”

“True enough,” he replied. “Can’t you see little Gracie Buggins listening wide-eyed to Uncle Trevelyan spinning the tale, with her pigtails standing right up straight and her kitty cat purring by her side? And passing it on to Phil during their courting days while they strolled hand in hand around picturesque old Oozak’s Pond watching the bullfrogs seduce the cowfrogs.”

“Grace and Phil would have been doing no such thing. They’d be over at the library, necking in the stacks. Grace told me so. She said she and Phil were always catching students at it, and they thought they might as well try it themselves in the spirit of scholarly research. Phil was rooming with some old battle-ax down on Grove Street at the time. His landlady used to wait up for him, to make sure he hadn’t taken to drink or moral turpitude. He’d stroll in about half past eleven with lipstick all over his shirtfront and try to make her believe he’d been sorting Library of Congress catalog cards.”

“Good gad, a master of deceitful dalliance and carnal cunning! Why couldn’t they go and canoodle in the cottage? Weren’t Grace and Persephone living there then?”

“Yes, but Sephy was already going steady with Purvis Mink. Purvis had ten or eleven brothers and sisters at home, so they could hardly go to his house. And naturally Sephy wouldn’t invite him out to her folks’ because it was so awfully depressing and her father would insist on telling them all the corny old stories she’d heard a million times already. “

“The one about the corpse in Oozak’s Pond, for instance.”

“All right, Peter, you’ve made your point.”

Persephone Buggins would surely have heard about Augustus’s watery doom and passed it on to Grace if nobody else did. Being a collateral connection of Corydon’s, Trevelyan would no doubt have held on to a copy of his poems. Scions of old families who’ve hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors, and Corydon Buggins had evidently cut as grand a figure on the Balaclava County literary scene as Charles Follen Adams or even Lydia Sigourney had done in wider circles.

Shandy snorted at such once-famous names. “In my opinion, Belial Buggins could rhyme the pants off the lot of them.”

“I’m not saying he couldn’t,” Helen had to agree, “but you must admit, Belial’s verses weren’t the sort young ladies could copy into their albums.”

“Belial was a man ahead of his time.”

“He was usually about three jumps ahead of some irate husband carrying a shotgun, too.”

“So he was. Damn, I wish old Hilda Horsefall hadn’t moved to Sweden. She’d know how many of Belial’s bastard begets passed on the family genes and which of their children favor the Bugginses as much as that bearded enigma on Goulson’s mortuary slab does. Maybe Mrs. Lomax can tell. “