The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (13 page)

Poor you. Would you like some hot cocoa? It’s all made. “

“Got any animal crackers to go with it?”

“Peter Shandy, if you start quoting
A Child’s Garden of Verses
at me, I shall rush screaming out into the night and ruin my brand-new bedroom slippers. I’ve been reading Corydon Buggins’s poetry until I quail at the mere thought of an iambic footfall.”

“May one hope that you found something significant?”

“Would you settle for a red-hot love affair with a girl named Arbolene Woozle?”

“By thunder, Helen, I knew you could do it! Was this union, er, fructified?”

“I shouldn’t be at all surprised. Corydon appears to have been going through what might be termed his Robbie Burns period at the time.”

“ ‘I’ll ne’er forget that happy night among the cornstalks wi’ Arbolene.’ Stuff like that?”

“Like that and a good deal more so. Imogene and he grew gracious wi’ favors secret, sweet, and downright unprintable, even in Corydon’s private notebook. I found one fragment that began, ‘Arbolene, my lusty queen, thou——est like a gasogene.’ As to what the——represented, I leave you to conjecture. I’m much too pure-minded a lady myself. But surely there aren’t any Woozles?”

“Ah, but there are. One Woozle is even now languishing in the county bastille for bopping Chief Olson of Lumpkinton with a can of root beer out of a vandalized vending machine at the Gasoline Alley Petrolatorium. Another Woozle does chores for Captain Flackley
et ux.
Out at the Seven Forks, the woods are full of Woozles.”

“Then I say Fred Ottermole had better go out there tomorrow and find out whether they’re short a Woozle. Here, Jane, go to Papa while I get the cocoa. I’m afraid the only animal crackers we have are Kitty Krumbles, dear. Would you settle for gingersnaps?”

S
HANDY HAD CLASSES THE
next morning. Before he left the house, though, he phoned Chief Ottermole and explained what Helen had turned up about Corydon and Arbolene. “So my wife thinks it would be an excellent move for you to go back out to the Seven Forks and run a check on missing Woozles. That might help us identify the chap in Goulson’s icebox.”

Ottermole had just got to the station and settled down for his usual morning visit with Mrs. Lomax’s cat Edmund. He spoke as if his mouth were full of jelly doughnut, which in fact it was. “Budge Dorkin’s been bustin’ his britches to do some detecting. Why don’t I send him instead?”

Shandy said that was a great idea and went on to his classroom. He found his students restive, as students often were, but not usually in Professor Shandy’s classes. While he endeavored to alert them to the secret, evil work of the nematode, they demanded to hear about the secret, evil work of the fiend who’d dumped a corpse into the midst of their Groundhog Day revels, and was it true the demised had been wearing Balaclava Buggins’s Sunday suit?

Professor Shandy assured them that the sacred relic was safe in its glass case in the Buggins Room and that if they expected to pass his course, they’d better keep their minds on the nematode. Thenceforth they tried, but it was uphill work for them—and for him. Even as he described the pitiable plight of a tender young radish with a worm in its bosom, his thoughts were on that empty coffee can in Amos Flackley’s woodshed.

He wondered whether Mrs. or Miss Flackley had managed to come up with an innocent explanation for the missing bottle. He wondered further if Ottermole had thought to tell Dorkin to check Miss Mink’s alibi. He put no faith in Flo. She looked to him like the type who wouldn’t hesitate to lie in what she thought was a good cause and would certainly do so in a bad one.

He pondered the question of whether Persephone had been lying, too. Was there any way he could extract the truth of the matter without getting Purve and all the security guards, not to mention Grace, Helen, and the whole garden club, down on him?

He even debated a humanitarian visit to the bedside of Cronkite Swope. The young reporter must be feeling like a radish attacked by a nematode, lying there with Vicks up his nose and a mustard plaster on his chest, knowing that a story of the first magnitude was breaking and Arabella Goulson was snaffling his byline.

Gripped by the Sophoclean implications of Swope’s bronchitic epiphany, Professor Shandy was able to put such pathos into his delivery that he at last succeeded in capturing his students’ full and undivided attention. Sweeping them on from spider mites to cutworms, he soared to dramatic heights that had every student scribbling in his or her notebook with the concentrated zeal of a locust attacking a turnip green. They left his classroom shaken and trembling but uplifted and fired with a new dedication to the biological control of insect pests. Shandy mopped his brow and asked himself, “Where do I go from here?”

Lunch was the obvious answer. Shandy no longer timed his faculty dining room visits so as to afford maximum probability of catching Helen there, as he’d been wont to do back when love was young and Helen Marsh not yet Mrs. Shandy, but he still tended to pause at the doorway and cast a hopeful glance around for a curly-haired blonde with a few tiger-colored cat hairs clinging to her skirt. He was unlucky today. Helen was not there. Her boss was.

Dr. Porble sat alone at one of the smaller tables consuming Tuna Surprise with cold ferocity. Coldness and ferocity weren’t the easiest emotions to combine, Shandy thought as he sat down without waiting to be invited, but Porble was managing capably. He paused only to give Shandy a curt nod, then went on chomping tuna fish.

Shandy gave his own order to a hovering restaurant-management major and opened diplomatic negotiations. “Hi, Phil. What’s up?”

“My gorge,” said the librarian, rending a hard roll in twain. “I expect you know why.”

“I do. Our esteemed president has, er, handed me the baby. Any hints as to its care and feeding will be gratefully received.”

“That lawsuit’s a damned swindle.”

“I think so, too. Any idea who dreamed it up?”

“One of old Trevelyan’s half-baked notions, I suppose. He’d been steeping his brains so long in that sheep-dip he used to brew that he must have started believing his own fairy tales. I must say, I’m surprised Persephone didn’t squash him before he got out of hand. I’ve always had a certain amount of respect for Sephy’s intelligence, until now.”

“You’ve, er, seen a fair amount of the Minks over the years, I understand.”

“Oh, yes. Sephy and my wife are related, you know. She and Purve stood up with us at our wedding as a matter of fact. We four used to double-date sometimes before we got married. We still get together on occasion. Purve and I generally open the trout season together.”

Dry fly-fishing was the only subject outside his family and his library for which Dr. Porble ever showed much real enthusiasm. “I’d been looking forward to it,” he added rather wistfully.

“This lawsuit isn’t going to cause a rift in the lute?”

“The lute’s already rifted, I’m afraid. When I found out what that senile idiot was up to, I went out and told him to lay off.”

“Was that all you told him?”

Porble shrugged one shoulder and gave his colleague a wry smile. “Aunt Minnehaha’s been talking, has she? All right, I lost my temper and gave it to him both barrels. I don’t go in much for stack blowing as a rule, but this last stunt of Trevelyan’s was one too many. For years he’d been poor-mouthing to Grace behind Sephy’s back about needing money for one desperate emergency or another. After we’d coughed up, we’d find he’d stuck Sephy and Purve with the same yarn.”

The librarian harpooned another chunk of tuna. “Trevelyan was quite a con artist in his own cute way. That’s how they got by, along with his moonshining and a little annuity they bought with the insurance they got from Bainbridge, their son who was lost in the war. Trev never did a tap of honest work in his life, as far as I know.”

“His sons didn’t get it from anybody strange then?” said Shandy. “I’ve heard they were both what you might call unreliable.”

“I’ve heard them called a damned sight worse than that. If Bracebridge isn’t in jail somewhere right now, he probably ought to be.”

“What about Bainbridge? He must have been declared legally dead since his father collected the insurance, but is he?”

“Who knows? The way they run this ridiculous government, anything’s possible. If he did survive, he’s had the sense to stay away from here, anyway. Damn it, Peter, I’m so fed up with that crowd—”

Porble took a drink of water to cool himself down. “I didn’t mind so much being swindled occasionally myself, but when that old shyster went after the college, I decided it was time to draw the line. So now he’s apparently poisoned his wife and himself, and they’re acting as if it were all my fault.”

“You don’t believe that yourself?” Shandy asked him.

“I’m not conceited enough to believe a few harsh words from me drove him over the edge, no. But it must have been murder and suicide. What other explanation is there? Sephy told Grace they drank whiskey laced with carbon tetrachloride. Despite my allegedly contumacious nature, I can’t quarrel with the medical examiner.”

“Then how do you think Trevelyan got hold of the carbon tet?”

“Who knows? Had it kicking around the house, I suppose.”

“What would have been his motive?”

“To make me look bad, like as not. I told you he was loopy.”

“Wouldn’t he have left a suicide note saying you goaded him into it?”

“Not if he was trying to get me indicted for murder. I’m sure Minnie Mink’s already told you I did them in.”

Shandy didn’t answer that one. “What does Persephone say?”

“I wouldn’t know. We don’t seem to be speaking at the moment. Well, I must get back to work. We’re short-staffed since your wife’s started giving her all to the Buggins Collection.”

“That’s what she was hired for, Phil.”

“Not by me.”

Porble signed his check and left without saying good-bye. Shandy finished his lunch without tasting a mouthful of it. Right here in the faculty dining room, he recalled, was where Sieglinde Svenson had got Thorkjeld to offer Helen Marsh her job. Porble had resented the Svensons’ high-handedness until he found out Helen had a doctorate in library science. After that, he’d naturally wanted to utilize her on what he deemed more important projects, notably the compilation of hog statistics. Now Svenson had plunked her back in the Buggins Room, perhaps helping to inflame Phil’s smoldering anti-Buggins feeling.

Shandy didn’t go much for Porble’s suggestion that Trevelyan Buggins had committed murder and suicide merely to get back at his nephew-in-law for chewing him out. The man would have had to be completely around the bend for that. Nobody else had portrayed him as anything but a garrulous old coot and a fairly artful conniver. Would a wily chatterbox kill himself and his wife without at least dropping a few pregnant hints about the man he wanted to frame?

Furthermore, would Trevelyan find it necessary to die? Why couldn’t he have drunk just enough of some noxious substance to make him sick, plant the seeds of suspicion and perhaps strengthen his case with regard to the lawsuit, then stay alive to enjoy Porble’s downfall and collect his winnings? Maybe Trevelyan had intended to do so, but habit had got the better of him and he hadn’t been able to resist pouring too generous a slug of anything that came from a bottle.

“Tommyrot,” Shandy snorted aloud, to the distress of his young waiter, who thought he meant the Tuna Surprise. So he had to reassure the student that he’d only been talking to himself about something else, as absentminded professors were wont to do, and leave a bigger tip than usual to cover his confusion.

After this small contretemps, Shandy decided to soothe his nerves by strolling down to the police station and finding out what, if anything, had been learned about the Woozles. He found he’d timed his visit well. Officer Dorkin was back at the desk, sharing a hot fudge sundae with his friend Edmund.

“How did you make out at the Seven Forks?” Shandy asked him. “Great Scot, what’s wrong with that cat? He’s foaming at the mouth.”

“Nah,” said Dorkin. “That’s marshmallow stuck to his whiskers. He’ll lick it off sooner or later. Ed likes to save the marshmallow for last. Haul up and set. The chief’ll be back in a while. He’s gone to get a haircut.”

“In the middle of the week?”

“Yeah, I guess he figures he might be getting his picture in the paper again. He was talking to Cronk Swope.”

“Ah, then Swope’s on the road to recovery?”

“I guess he’s still got the cold, but his mother’s going to let him out tomorrow if it doesn’t storm because he’s driving her nuts. She wanted to make a bunch of calls about the Friends of the Library book sale, but Cronk’s got the telephone in bed with him, interviewing everybody he can think of. Hey, Edmund, quit hogging the fudge sauce.”

Dorkin extracted a paw from his sundae, then resumed his report through a mouthful of ice cream. “Cronk’s got his typewriter in bed with him, too, and he keeps getting the bedclothes caught in the roller. He typed half his lead article on a pillowcase Mrs. Swope’s cousin Lucy embroidered for their twenty-fifth anniversary. His mother came in and saw what he was doing, and they had a big fight. Cronk wanted to get the story over to the paper, and Mrs. Swope wanted to get the pillowcase soaking in bleach before the ink got too set and wouldn’t come off. She wishes to heck he’d get married and move out.”

“God help the woman who gets him,” said Shandy. “I gather you’ve completed your stint at the Seven Forks. Did you detect any Woozles?”

“Oh, sure. They’re all present and accounted for. Mike’s the only one I didn’t see. He’s in the slammer, you know. Working in the machine shop, his mother tells me. He learned a lot about mechanics holding up all those filling stations. Anyway, they don’t any of them look like the Bugginses. Mike and Zack’s grandmother was there, and she claims Corydon was more talk than action. She says Arbolene got sick of having to listen to all that poetry when she wanted to get down to the nitty-gritty, so she gave Corydon the mitten after a while and ran off with a tar-paper salesman from Schenectady. Want me to get hold of the FBI and see if they can put a tracer on her?”