The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (9 page)

“Has Ottermole talked to Sephy?”

“Not yet. He was eating his own supper when the call came in. Naturally he told his wife about the report, and she happened to recall Persephone’s joking about the Thursday night fried pork at some women’s shindig. Would it have been your garden club?”

“No, Edna Mae won’t join till her boys get old enough to leave. It was more likely somebody’s baby shower. Peter, this is horrible. You don’t suppose the Bugginses were carrying out a suicide pact?”

“Just when they were about to restore the descendants of Ichabod Buggins to their place in the sun and wallow in unwonted wealth?”

“But what if they’d found out their claim was invalid and there wasn’t going to be any wealth?”

“They still wouldn’t have been any worse off than they were before, would they?”

“I don’t suppose so,” Helen conceded. “They’d stick Sephy and Purvis for the lawyer’s fee, no doubt. But it’s so…so Ethan Frome-ish, those two old souls in that wretched house, toddling off to their long winter’s nap with their tummies full of salt pork and white lightning and never waking up. Though I suppose it would have been worse for them if they had.”

“The medical examiner thinks they probably never did because they’d been given such a massive dose. If they did, they’d have had awful bellyaches, which they’d no doubt have put down to Miss Mink’s cooking. Pretty soon they’d have felt drowsy again and passed out, and that would have been the end of them, unless they’d received immediate first aid.”

“They wouldn’t have called the doctor. They’d have taken paregoric or castor oil or something and just got sicker. Peter, that’s diabolical.”

“It’s that, all right. Oddly enough, carbon tetrachloride can cause irregular heartbeat and respiratory failure. Even if he’d seen them alive, that doctor of theirs might still have diagnosed pneumonia and heart failure and had what seemed like good reasons for doing so. Maybe this is hardly the time to ask, but would you like a drink?”

“We’d better smell the cork first.” Helen tried a shaky laugh, but it didn’t come off. “Yes, I’ll have one. Then what are you going to do?”

“Ottermole wants me to go out to First Fork with him right after supper, which I expect means roughly half an hour from now. He’ll hate missing
Doctor Who,
but since he got that pat on the back from the medical examiner, he’s all fired up about duty before pleasure.”

“Provided you stand duty with him, I gather. There’s no point in my setting the dining-room table, then. I’d meant to put on the dog a bit tonight so you wouldn’t notice it’s just warmed-over stew.”

“All the better second time around,” Shandy assured her. “And a damned sight better than potatoes fried in salt pork, though I’ve eaten enough of those in my time. Mother always kept salt pork in the icebox out at the farm. I remember watching my grandmother whacking off a piece to put in the bean pot on Saturday morning. And when she made fish hash, she’d try out a few slices in the big frying pan till they were nice and crispy, then crumble them in with the potatoes and onions and salt cod.”

“I remember salt codfish. It came packed in little wooden boxes. I always wanted them for my doll’s clothes, but the fish smell would never come out.”

“Those boxes were for the aristocracy. What we had was just a hunk of fish, dried hard as a board and salty as a cattle lick. Grandma had to soak it overnight, then parboil it awhile to get out enough salt to make the fish palatable and soften it enough to break into flakes. She’d throw in plenty of black pepper and a beaten egg, cover the skillet, and set it on the back of the stove till it got a good brown crust on the bottom. It wasn’t bad eating, with some homemade catsup to jazz it up a little.”

“My mother used to cream the cod and serve it over boiled potatoes with hard-boiled eggs cut up in the sauce,” Helen recalled. “I have to admit, I’d try to switch the plates around so I’d get more egg than fish.”

“That’s why you never grew any hair on your chest. Here you are, my love. Good for what ails you.”

Shandy handed his wife her drink, knowing full well what ailed them both and why they were making small talk about codfish. “Were you planning to take another whack at the archives this evening?”

“I’ll get back to work as soon as we’ve finished eating,” Helen promised. “You’re really pinning your faith to them, aren’t you?”

“Faith is all I have so far, my love. Was Balaclava any sort of bookkeeper?”

“Compulsive. If he spent a penny for a postage stamp, down it went in the ledger.”

“He wasn’t the type to deed over a whole acre of land without at least jotting down a memorandum?”

“Not unless somebody swiped his ink pot. Even if they had, I expect he’d have brewed some more out of oak galls and iron filings or something. Balaclava was a great one for making the best use of everything, including people. It irked him terribly to see the brightest boys going off to be ministers or lawyers instead of sticking to the land and making it pay. He was absolutely wedded to the idea of an agricultural college, you know, even when he was still a teenager teaching in a one-room school.”

“Is all that in the archives?”

“It certainly is. Balaclava used to go on and on about his plan in his journals. He kept a diary right from the time he scraped together enough cash to buy his first quire of paper. His mother stitched the sheets together with needle and thread to make him a book. That’s the most precious thing in the entire Buggins Collection, to my way of thinking. Balaclava never had literary aspirations, like his nephews Corydon and Belial, but he did have lots of ideas. He liked to work things out on paper so he’d be all set to put them into practice when he got the chance.”

“Then nothing but lack of money kept him from establishing the college long before 1850.”

“That’s right. His father could have helped but he wouldn’t. Habakkuk Buggins wasn’t one to pamper his sons with handouts during his lifetime. And when he died, he stuck to the old British custom of favoring the elder son. Abelard got the house and the best of the land, most of which his sons and grandson sold off or frittered away, as you know. All Balaclava got was this parcel out here in what was then considered the middle of nowhere. Habakkuk had picked it up for about two cents an acre, and most of his neighbors thought he’d got the short end of the deal. I’m sure you’ve heard all this before. More stew? Or some cherries without the tapioca?”

“Cherries, please. Go on about Balaclava.”

“What I’m driving at is that his land was all Balaclava had. He couldn’t bear to give up teaching, and he farmed on the side, as you know. That kept his family fed and clothed, but it didn’t give him any working capital, so he made the land work for him. He sold off timber and fought for years to get the county road extended his way. Once he’d managed to push that through, he was able to attract a few tenant farmers, and the village began to evolve. This of course made his land more valuable, so he began selling off small parcels around the edges. By 1850, he was in a position to start building not only barns and dormitories but also houses he could rent or sell to his teachers. I don’t have to tell you he wrote it right into the charter that the college was always to keep title to the land these houses stood on.”

“By gad, yes. That’s important, Helen. In lieu of anything specific about Oozak’s Pond, a comprehensive statement of Balaclava’s consistently farseeing policies with regard to his real estate might be enough to give the college the benefit of the doubt over this damned fool bet he’s supposed to have lost. The hell of it is, there’s always so much public sentiment, in favor of the downtrodden private citizen up against the big, wicked institution.”

“Those are generally your sentiments, too,” Helen reminded him.

“Likewise yours, my love. But dag-nab it, in this case the college is the good guy. And I’m afraid it’s up to you and me to establish that fact before any more Bugginses get done in and they hang the rap on Svenson. Here’s wishing us luck. God knows we’re going to need some.”

He got into his old mackinaw, his storm boots, and his fleece-lined cap with the retractable earflaps. This wasn’t what a person would call a good night, but it was not yet a noticeably bad one. With any luck, the snow flurries that had been piddling along since before daybreak would either give up and quit or else not develop into a full-scale storm until after he was back home and sound asleep.

He hoped the latter happy event would not be too long in occurring. This had been one of those days that set one to brooding on the futility of trying to measure off the hours with a clock. In theory, only twelve of them had elapsed since he’d stood up beside Oozak’s Pond watching Beauregard ignore the multitude. Since then, the slothful groundhog had been back pounding his fuzzy ear in his presumably cozy den, while P. Shandy had been slogging knee-deep in slaughter. Shandy felt a savage impulse to go wake the little bastard up again.

Being a man of reason, however, he fought down the urge for vengeance and went to get his car. Now that he thought of it, why was he appointed chauffeur? Why wasn’t Cronkite Swope slavering at their heels with the press car? Great balls of fire, was the intrepid newshound lying out in the dark somewhere with an ice pick through his neck?

Ottermole was able to reassure Shandy on that point, though he first had to disentangle himself from his sons, who crowded the doorways yelling “Don’t let the space monsters get you, Pop” before they rushed back to stimulate their budding intellects in front of the television set.

“Cronk’s in bed sick” was his report. “He stopped off home to get a muffler ’cause he’d begun sneezing his head off from getting his feet wet up at the pond. His mother heard him an’ wouldn’t let him back out.”

“I wonder if Charles Kuralt ever ran into a similar problem,” Shandy mused as he turned up the old county road. “Am I correct in assuming we’re headed toward First Fork?”

“Well, yeah. I figured we might as well go back an’ arrest Miss Mink or somebody.”

“Sounds like a great idea to me. Does Miss Mink drive a car?”

“Nope. I don’t see where she ever had a chance to learn how. She never owned one herself, an’ the Bugginses haven’t had one since old Trev racked up his brand-new Edsel. He wanted to buy another, but Sephy an’ Purve wouldn’t sign the note for the loan. Trev never could remember which side of the road he was s’posed to drive on. Sephy or Purve always took him an’ his wife anyplace they wanted to go. Miss Mink used to ride a bicycle, but she had to give it up on account of her sciatica.”

“Too bad. By the way, what did Miss Mink do before she came to live with the Bugginses?”

“Took care of her own folks mostly. Then she stayed with the Sills for a while after Mrs. Sill got so she needed somebody in the house all the time, but I guess Miss Mink didn’t get along too good with the congressman. They’d fight about politics. So she went on to the Bugginses’, an’ she’s been there ever since.”

“So, in fact, she’s a, er, professional housekeeper-companion.”

“I s’pose you could call her that.”

Ottermole fell silent, perhaps worrying about what extraterrestrial peril might now be threatening Dr. Who, perhaps brooding over the ill-timed maternal solicitude that was keeping Cronkite Swope from taking pictures of him arresting Miss Mink or somebody.

Shandy let him brood. As for himself, he’d as soon see Miss Mink jugged as anybody, after the reception she’d given them this morning. She might be worth pinching, at that. She’d had every opportunity to kill the Bugginses. As for motive, mightn’t a person get so fed up with a lifetime of making porridge for enfeebled oldsters that she’d do almost anything for a change?

Minerva Mink hadn’t talked like an ignorant woman, but she’d made some fairly wild remarks. She could be a trifle touched, and she must at some time have had access to carbon tetrachloride.

It was only during the past few years that the dangerous chemical hadn’t been sold openly as a cleaning agent. When she’d lived with the Sills, Miss Mink had been right on Main Street, handy to stores. As poor relation and professional doormat, she probably didn’t have much of a wardrobe. Spot remover would be a useful thing to keep among her effects. After she’d got to the Bugginses’, she might have kept the bottle hidden for fear Beatrice would use it up on her or Trevelyan would get to wondering if the stuff was fit to drink.

People had been known to commit murders for petty reasons, especially toward the end of a long, bleak winter when the cabin fever got to them and the weather was raising hell with their sciatica and they still had to go on boiling the porridge every morning. Miss Mink could even have stuck the ice pick into that stranger’s neck when he dropped in to see his long-lost relatives, assuming they were and he had.

Shandy knew he mustn’t assume all three deaths were related until he’d found some proof that they were, but why waste time thinking they weren’t? If Miss Mink had stabbed the stranger, though, it would seem she must have done so out at First Fork. So how in the flaming blue blazes had a woman her age, plagued with a game leg, pedaled a corpse his size all the way to Oozak’s Pond sometime in January on the back of a bicycle? Shandy gave up thinking and concentrated on the road.

Seven Forks was becoming gentrified, he noticed as they got past the town dump. Time was when you couldn’t have told which was town and which was dump out here. However, since Captain Amos Flackley had come home from Antarctica to take over the family farriery at Forgery Point, he’d been hectoring his neighbors to pen up their hens and pigs, clear away the junk cluttering their dooryards, and nail back the clapboards on their houses.

Flackley had started a kind of cooperative do-it-yourself shop, enabling residents to buy paint and other needed materials at cost, on the installment plan if necessary. His wife, Yvette, was running sewing and upholstery classes and planning a neighborhood landscaping project for when the weather got warm enough. Where erst the locals’ idea of haute cuisine had been a sixpack of Bud and a take-out pizza, one now heard rumors of fondue pots and wine tastings. Shandy went back to thinking.