The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (10 page)

“Ottermole, how much of First Fork did Trevelyan Buggins own?”

“Huh? Oh, I dunno. Most of it, I guess. None of it worth a hoot.”

And taxed accordingly, otherwise Buggins couldn’t have held on to it all these years. And the only reason he had kept the land was that he hadn’t been able to find a sucker to unload it on, no doubt.

“By George!” he exclaimed.

“Huh?” said Ottermole again.

“Sorry. I was just thinking. Why do you say First Fork isn’t worth a hoot? Kindly reflect, Ottermole, that the Seven Forks lie closer to the county seat than any other large tract of land that isn’t being farmed or built on. Most of the owners are as hard up as the Bugginses were and would no doubt sell out like a shot if some developer made them an offer. Look what’s happened over in Lumpkinton, with that pirate Gunnar Gaffson slapping up his cracker-box condominiums right and left.”

“Jeez, I never thought of that. D’you suppose that’s why Captain Flackley’s gettin’ everybody to fix up their property?”

“I’d rather think he’s just trying to help them to a better way of life. Of course, he may see the possibility of a takeover and figure that if the owners spruce up their places, they can attract individual buyers and keep some control over the neighborhood instead of letting some big developer rip the whole place apart to suit himself.”

“Huh,” said Ottermole, in whom the viewing of many cops-and-robbers movies had planted the seeds of cynicism, “or Flackley himself aims to buy the houses cheap and sell ’em high once the owners have got ’em looking good. He could do it through a phony real-estate trust, an’ they’d never know it was him.”

“M’yes, I daresay he could.”

Easy as falling off a log. Shandy didn’t like this notion one bit. He’d admired the scientist-explorer who’d given up a thrilling career in the Antarctic and settled down to maintain a family tradition. But what if Flackley had acted not out of concern for the unshod hooves of Balaclava County horses but from the realization that here lay a chance to enrich himself at his unwary neighbors’ expense and go back to exploring without having to scrounge for any more grants?

What if the farrier had already approached Trevelyan Buggins about selling off his large holdings? What if the old man had told him to get lost on the grounds that he himself was about to get rich and preferred to keep the ancestral acres intact for future generations? What if Flackley had pressed Buggins to reconsider, and what if old Trevelyan had sent for his son to help him withstand Flackley’s badgering? What if Bracebridge, or possibly Bainbridge, had got tough, and what if the farrier had got tougher?

Shandy didn’t know how hot tempers had been wont to flare in the southernmost latitudes, but he did know a fair amount about Captain Amos Flackley. Royall Ames, son of Shandy’s close friend Professor Timothy Ames, had met his wife, Laurie, while both were serving as biologists aboard Flackley’s ship, the
Hippocampus.
The captain had actually presided at their wedding, attended by the ship’s crew and several hundred penguins.

According to Roy and Laurie, Captain Flackley was a man of infinite resource and indomitable courage. He was no reckless ice rover who rushed in where others feared to mush, but neither had they ever seen him flinch from any dauntless deed of derring-do that needed to be done. Should Captain Flackley decide Bracebridge Buggins or his reasonable facsimile ought to be stabbed in the neck and shoved into Oozak’s Pond dressed in a funny suit with rocks in the pockets, then Captain Flackley would no doubt accomplish the task with a minimum of fuss and get on to the next thing. As for the ice pick, what more appropriate weapon for a man who’d spent so many years among the bergs and floes?

Oozak’s Pond wasn’t the Weddell Sea, but it was a darned sight closer. Flackley would know the pond never froze over. If he didn’t recall that fact from his boyhood, he could easily have picked it up when he made his biweekly visit to shoe Thorkjeld Svenson’s Balaclava Blacks or exchange sage words with Professor Stott about the care and feeding of hogs, sheep, and elephant seals. Stott had no elephant seals under his care at the moment, but one never knew.

Perdition! Flackley had the brains and the enterprise, he had at least a hypothetical motive, and he was right here on the spot. What more likely suspect could a person want?

What Peter Shandy wanted was somebody he didn’t like. He was in an even more somber mood than he’d started out with by the time they reached the Buggins place. Miss Mink had been here alone when Edna Mae Ottermole had telephoned awhile back at her husband’s guileful hest, ostensibly to see how she was feeling. By now, the woman could have been joined by an assortment of Minks and Porbles or taken away to one of their homes.

No, by George, she was still here and still alone. She hadn’t been for long, though, unless she indulged in the long-ago country woman’s habit of smoking a pipe. When she opened the door, the unmistakable smell hung in the air, overpowering various other odors of old house and stale, cooking. Her greeting was unenthusiastic.

“Oh, it’s you.”

“Had lots of company, Miss Mink?” Shandy asked her.

She sniffed. “If you can call it that. Nosy neighbors coming to snoop would be nearer the mark. But it was either stay here and put up with their impertinence or go to Persephone’s and listen to Purvis’s mother simper and sigh. Grace Porble did offer me a bed, but I knew better than to take her up on it. Dr. Porble’s far too high and mighty to be bothered with the likes of me.”

Phil Porble would hardly have turned an old woman put in the snow. Miss Mink must know that. She must also know that Persephone would let her stay here until she found another place, however long that might be. Shandy wondered whether Miss Mink might be scheming to acquire the house for herself on the basis of squatter’s rights.

Ottermole produced a small jar from one of the many pockets in his black leather jacket. “Here, Miss Mink. My wife sent you some preserves.”

Edna Mae had done her gift up nicely. A circle of pinked gingham was tied over the lid with a red ribbon and a sprig of dried statice tucked under it like a flower in a hatband. They were going to love Edna Mae at the garden club. Miss Mink set the jar on the table with a weary sigh.

“I’ll drop her a note when I get the chance.”

“You don’t have to bother.”

“I know my duty, Frederick Ottermole. Why do you suppose they always send strawberry?”

Shandy decided now was as good a time as any to give this unpleasant old person the raspberry. “Miss Mink,” he said, “have you been in touch with Persephone anytime during the past few hours?”

“What do you mean by the past few hours? Sephy was out here this morning to pick up the clothes for her parents to be laid out in. You saw her yourself. She phoned again about half past three to say it was all set about the funeral and ask if I wanted to go into town and stay with her and Purvis tonight. I did not. I reminded her that somebody had better stay here and hold the fort or certain people I shan’t dignify by naming would be in here stealing everything they could lay their filthy hands on.”

“Then you haven’t heard the final verdict on Mr. and Mrs. Buggins?”

“What verdict? Dr. Fotheringay signed the death certificate.”

“Nope,” said Ottermole. “That hot-dog pen you loaned him run dry before he finished writing his name. He just kept scratchin’ away without noticing the ink wasn’t coming out.”

“That still counts as signing.”

“Not to me it don’t. He should o’ known better, anyways. Doctors aren’t supposed to sign death certificates in suspicious circumstances.”

“The circumstances were hardly suspicious. Both Mr. and Mrs. Buggins had been ailing all winter.”

“Not the way they ailed last night. Hey, you better sit down here in the rocking chair, Miss Mink.”

“Why should I?”

She was, after all, an old woman. “Because,” said Shandy, “we have some shocking news for you. Sit down, Miss Mink.”

S
HANDY MOVED THE ROCKING
chair closer to the wood stove. After some flouncing and grumbling, Miss Mink allowed him to seat her.

“All right, what is it? After what I’ve been through today, I don’t suppose anything could faze me much.”

Shandy gave up trying to be tactful. “The autopsy showed both Mr. and Mrs. Buggins had been poisoned.”

“Autopsy? What right had anybody to—” She must have realized it was too late to argue. “What kind of poison?”

“Carbon tetrachloride.”

She stared at him. “You’re trying to trick me, aren’t you? I know what that means, and I say it’s ridiculous. Don’t you think the Bugginses would have had more sense than to drink cleaning fluid? They weren’t senile, you know.”

“We’re not trying to trick you, Miss Mink. Did you have any in the house?”

“Of course not. What would we want it for? Anything her parents needed to have cleaned Persephone took over to the Sunny Spot.”

“Then we’re left with the assumption that somebody brought the poison here.”

“Not me.”

“I’m not saying it was you, Miss Mink. Chief Ottermole and I are only trying to find out who it might have been. We hope you’ll be able to help us.”

“I can’t.” All at once, Miss Mink’s brass-plated composure had developed a serious crack. “I wasn’t here. I deserted my post. I failed them in their time of need. Oh, Lord, forgive me! Why wasn’t I taken instead?”

She flung her apron up over her face and started rocking frantically. The rocker scooted backward over the uneven wide-board floor. Shandy had to leap aside or be rocked over.

“Ottermole, is there any hot water in that kettle? Miss Mink could use a cup of tea to steady her nerves.”

“I don’t deserve any tea,” Miss Mink moaned from under her apron. “I’m a wicked sinner.”

“Aw, heck,” said Ottermole, “it ain’t that bad. Here, take a swallow of this.”

The housekeeper rubbed viciously at her face with the apron, let it fall, and glared at the sloppy mug Ottermole was holding out to her with the teabag’s little cardboard tag floating on top. “How am I to know it isn’t poisoned?”

“What do you care?” the chief retorted. “You just said why wasn’t it you instead of them? Anyway, how could carbon tetrachloride get into a teabag?”

“It might be in the water.”

“No chance. The water was boiling. Carbon tet would o’ turned into phosgene gas an’ leaked out the spout.”

“Good gad, Ottermole, I didn’t know that,” said Shandy. “Where did you pick up such esoteric knowledge?”

“I called up Professor Joad in the chemistry department. See, I figured they’d keep a kettle boilin’ on the wood stove, so I thought I’d better check it out.” There were, as Edna Mae had been trying for years to convince her relatives, no flies on Fred Ottermole.

Thus reassured, Miss Mink essayed a sip of the tea. “Humph,” she complained, “you might have put a little milk and sugar in it.”

Meekly, Chief Ottermole fetched the sugar bowl off the kitchen table and the milk from the circa 1954 Frigidaire. The larder was well stocked, Shandy noticed. Probably Grace and Persephone had brought groceries with them. He waited until Miss Mink had got her tea doctored to her liking and downed about half the mugful, then risked another question.

“Would you mind telling us where you went last night?”

Miss Mink finished her tea, carried the mug to the sink, rinsed it under the faucet, set it in the dish drainer to dry, walked back, and sat down in the rocking chair with her face turned toward the stove. “I was at the bingo,” she muttered.

“Thus do our sins find us out,” Shandy murmured. “Ah yes, the bingo. Where was it being held, Miss Mink?”

“Over at Fourth Fork.”

“They got a kind of community hall over there,” Ottermole explained to Shandy. “It used to be a schoolhouse till they started busin’ the kids over to the center. How’d you get there, Miss Mink?”

“I was driven.”

“Who by?”

“One of the neighbors.” She flapped her apron as if she were trying to shoo her bothersome visitors away. “Well, I have to get out of here sometimes, don’t I? Cooped up in this poky house day after day, night after night, waiting on the pair of them hand and foot with never a letup.”

“Aw, come on, Min. You had them Bugginses right where you wanted ’em. An’ don’t think we all didn’t know it.”

The speaker was the lady in red, blowing in out of the night, her hair a shade frowsier, her general aspect if possible more bedraggled. Instead of the windbreaker, she had on a fake-fur coat. Imitation wombat, Shandy thought. He wondered if she’d salvaged the garment from some long-distance truck driver who’d been in the habit of using it to wipe the stains of travel off his sixteen-wheeler.

“I didn’t hear you knock” was Miss Mink’s icy greeting.

“The door was open.”

“It was not.”

“Okay, then, but it wasn’t latched tight. I brung you a bunch o’ magazines to while away the time. Don’t I even rate a thanks?”

“I have no time to fritter away on your kind of reading matter. “

“Still sore ’cause you didn’t win last night, eh?”

Shandy intervened. “You were also at the bingo last night, Miss, er?”

“Just call me Flo. You married?”

“Very happily, thank you.”

“Well, any time.” Flo didn’t put much enthusiasm into her invitation, if such it was. “What’s up?”

“We are having a private discussion.” Miss Mink was probably too refined to snarl, but she came pretty close.

“Get her,” said Flo. “She’s still mad as hell ’cause I wouldn’t stay for the last game.”

“How late was this, er, Flo?” Shandy asked her.

“I dunno. Eleven o’clock, ha’ past, maybe. Min don’t ever want to leave till the last gun’s fired an’ the smoke’s cleared away. Me, I gotta get my beauty sleep. Anybody spare a cigarette?”

Nobody could. Edna Mae had made Ottermole quit smoking because he was setting a bad example to his sons. Shandy had been too poor to afford bad habits back when he’d been callow enough to have acquired them. Miss Mink only sniffed. Flo didn’t look as if she’d expected to be given one, anyway. Shandy noticed she hadn’t even bothered to remove the red knitted gloves she was wearing. In contrast to the rest of her garb, they looked new and clean. Maybe she’d just bought them out of her bingo winnings and wanted to show them off.