The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (20 page)

His wife blushed. “There I go again. I’m sorry, Arabella.”

“Think nothing of it, Sephy, dear,” her fellow garden clubber replied with a smile. “It’s not like that time at Commonwealth Pier after the flower show when you had us all traipsing back and forth around that huge parking lot looking for a gray car and it turned out to be brown. My Aunt Luanna had the same problem. Brown looks gray to you because you can’t see the red in it. And not being able to see red is what makes you so sweet-tempered.”

Shandy hated to spoil Arabella’s bit of fun, but it did raise an interesting question. “Er, if you’ll forgive me for mentioning it, Mrs. Mink, how could you be so sure about your brother’s eyes yesterday morning?”

“I said they were brown, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but you can’t see brown.”

“I can see blue all right. That man’s were blue, weren’t they?”

“Yes,” Shandy had to admit.

“Then that lets Brace out, as I told you in the first place. His were brown. He said so himself, once when I asked him.”

“WE WON’T WORRY ABOUT
that one till we get this pair here buried,” said Purvis Mink with gruff tenderness. “Come on home, Sephy.”

“It’s bedtime for me, too.” Arabella Goulson clearly felt she’d hovered long enough. “You won’t be long, will you, Harry?”

She was too well mannered to give Professor Shandy a look, but he was left with the distinct impression that a look had been given. Her husband cleared his throat.

“What are you planning to do with Hesp Hudson, Professor?”

“Frankly, I’ve been wondering about that myself,” Shandy admitted. “There’s no room in the lockup, unless Ottermole’s had a change of heart about Phil Porble.”

“Which he hasn’t,” Goulson half groaned. “Grace was in to pay her respects a while back, and she looked pretty glum, I can tell you. But you know Grace—she’d hold her head up no matter what. The wife and I are pretty worried about Phil ourselves, I don’t mind telling you. Aside from everything else, there’s Lizanne and the boy to think of. I asked Grace on the QT if she’d told Lizanne yet, and she said no, she hadn’t had the heart to spoil the kids’ big weekend. Well, I expect it’ll all get straightened out in a day or so. Won’t it?”

What the hell was Goulson asking him for? Shandy supposed even an undertaker needed a little consolation now and then. “I hope so, Goulson,” he said. For whatever that was worth.

“You don’t suppose, Professor, there’s any chance Trevelyan Buggins and his wife what you might call effected the departure of their loved one themselves? Not that they mightn’t figure they had good and sufficient reason, from all I’ve heard of the Buggins boys, but they might nevertheless have been overtaken by remorse afterward, him being their own son, after all, and, well—”

“Effected their own departures, too?”

Shandy didn’t try to suppress his next yawn. It wasn’t the kind that can safely be bottled up. “Having first arranged with Phil Porble, you mean, to dump the son’s body in Oozak’s Pond on the night of February first so it would be there to provide a spot of extra excitement at the Groundhog. Day doings? M’yes, that would tie everything up nicely, wouldn’t it? Do you suppose Persephone Mink would feel any better if we called her up and asked her what she thinks of the idea?”

“It was only a passing notion,” Harry Goulson replied somewhat huffily. “I don’t suppose you realize it, Professor, but there’s something pretty darned upsetting to a man in my profession, having an unknown loved one cluttering up his refrigerator.”

“No, I hadn’t quite realized it,” Shandy admitted, “but I can see that it might be.”

Thus encouraged, Goulson warmed to his topic. “And when you’ve been given reason to believe he might be a known after all but nobody seems to be sure which known, that only makes it worse. We Goulsons have always prided ourselves on friendly service to our friends and neighbors, but it’s awfully hard to work up much friendly feeling toward somebody that you don’t know who he is. ’Specially when he’s been murdered. I don’t mean to complain, Professor, but I can’t help having a feeling that this particular stiff has overstayed his welcome. Which brings us back to the subject of Hesperus Hudson.”

“All right, you’ve made your point, Goulson. I’d drive him home if I knew where he lives, but from what he told me, it’s just a shack in the underbrush somewhere between Buggins’s still and the Dirty Duck. I can’t say I’m keen on going out to look for it at this time of night. I can’t put him in the lockup because Phil Porble’s in residence there. I can’t take him home because my wife’s got our guest room, such as it is, crammed full of the Buggins Archive, and I’m afraid she’d take umbrage in a big way if I parked him on the living-room sofa. Normally, we put up unexpected guests at the College Arms, but I don’t know how Mrs. Blore would react to Hudson.”

The College Arms was the somewhat pretentious name of an ultrarespectable boardinghouse run by a third cousin of Betsy Lomax and catering mostly to stray professors and visiting parents. In fact, Shandy knew exactly how Mrs. Blore would react to Hesperus Hudson, and so did Goulson. The undertaker sighed.

“I wish I could help you Out, Professor, but I’m pretty tied up here, what with the double funeral tomorrow morning. Best thing I can suggest is that you take Hesp over to Zack Woozle’s. Marietta’s his niece. I expect she’d know what to do with him.”

“Thanks, Goulson.” Shandy tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Now if I can just get him out to the car—”

“I’ve got that rolling table I use to cart the loved ones around on.”

This proved not to be needed. Hesperus Hudson was still able to roll a bleary eye and push his glass hopefully across the table. Shandy shook his head.

“No more tonight, Mr. Hudson. I’ll give you some drinking money for tomorrow, but right now I’m going to take you home.”

“Dirty Duck,” Hudson insisted.

That would have been fine with Shandy. The trouble was, by the time they’d got back out there, the cars were gone and the door was locked.

“Closed for the night,” Shandy groaned. “Where’s your shack, Hudson?”

“Huh?”

“Your shack. The place you live in. Where is it?”

“In there.” Hudson waved his arm in a gesture that included most of the Seven Forks.

Shandy stared gloomily out the car window at the expanse of slush and brush in which he had no intention of getting stuck. “Come on, I’ll drop you at your niece’s.”

“Leave me here.”

“You’d be frozen to death by morning.” And not a bad idea, either, but Shandy didn’t want to be the one responsible. It would have to be the Woozles’, though the thought of Hesperus Hudson amid all that shining vinyl was mind-boggling.

It was clear even before Shandy got Hudson pried out of the passenger seat that they couldn’t have arrived at a less opportune time. Despite what looked to be an efficient job of weatherproofing around the doors and windows, he could hear the hitherto silent Zack bellowing like an infuriated gnu.

“You needn’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to. “

“Yeah?” Marietta was giving it back to him, hot and heavy. “Listen, Buster, if you were up to it yourself once in a while, you wouldn’t have to be so Goddamn worried about whether I was getting it from somebody else.”

Shandy had to listen to a number of improvisations on the same theme before he’d managed to drag Hudson up to the door and make his pounding and hammering heard over the bedlam inside.

“Who the hell is it?” Zack roared at last.

“Why don’t you go find out, you lazy bum?” screamed Marietta.

“Why don’t you go yourself, you sleazy slut?”  

“Oh, Christ on a crutch!” Shandy joined his own voice to the pandemonium. “Open up in there. It’s the police.”

That got him some action. Zack Woozle hurled the door open. “What the hell do you want?”

“I want you to take your drinking buddy off my hands so I can go home and go to bed.”

Shandy spun the by now comatose Hesperus Hudson across the waxed red-white-and-blue linoleum like a skep on a curling rink and ran for his car before the Woozles could get their wits together and scoot the old sot back.

Not that it was any of his business, but he couldn’t help wondering whom Marietta Woozle had been entertaining. With all her screaming just now, he’d noticed that she hadn’t once come straight out and denied her husband’s accusations. Her proofreader’s code of ethics must balk her of any flagrant inaccuracy. It would have had to be somebody local, anyway. No Don Juan in his right mind would travel far on a night like this just to get tickled by a lot of blue chicken feathers.

“
Seductio ad absurdum,
” he murmured and switched on the car radio to keep himself awake.

It was with ineffable relief that he at last unlocked the door of the little brick house on the Crescent. He’d expected Helen would be asleep, but she called down the stairs, “Peter, is that you?”

“Nay, my love,” he replied. “ ’Tis but a pallid wraith of the dashing fellow you once knew. I thought you’d be well away to the Land of Nod by now.”

“So did I, but it’s been a busy evening. Grace Porble just left a short while ago. She’s in a state, Peter.”

“Who isn’t? Want a cup of cocoa?”

“No, thanks. I must have drunk six cups of tea with Grace. I didn’t dare offer anything alcoholic for fear she’d fall apart completely.”

“And how right you were to refrain. Getting yourself stuck with a helpless drunk is one hell of a fix to be in. I speak from recent personal experience.”

“So that’s what you’ve been up to.” Helen was downstairs now, in a padded apricot silk robe Shandy had given her for Christmas, with her head buried against his old gray cardigan. “Phew, you smell like a barroom.”

“Like the Dirty Duck, to be precise.”

“Not that awful dive out on the old county road?”

“How do you know it’s an awful dive?”

“Anybody can tell just by looking at the outside. What were you doing there, for goodness’ sake?”

“Goodness, as your friend Sephy Mink remarked a while ago in Harry Goulson’s front parlor, had nothing to do with it.”

“Peter, she didn’t! Sephy would never in the world say such a thing at her own parents’ funeral.”

“It was not at the funeral. It was at the lying-in-state, or whatever they call it these days, after the visitors had gone and she was free to let down her hair a bit. Nor were the words uttered in a spirit of levity, as you appear to have erroneously surmised.”

“Peter, darling,” said Helen, “our marriage until now has been, on the whole, a remarkably happy one. Would you care to keep it that way, or do you want me to begin shrieking like a shrew?”

“I’ll opt for continued harmony, since you’re kind enough to offer the choice. I’ve had one run-in with a shrew already.”

“My, my, you have been making a night of it, haven’t you? Shall we hold an experience-sharing session?”

“How about if we just hold each other? All this prowling around late at night is setting Jane a bad example.”

“Don’t try to humbug me. Cats are nocturnal animals, like husbands on the loose. What have you been up to?”

So Shandy told her, scattering garments around the bedroom as he talked. “And now I’m going to take a shower and chew a couple of cloves and hit the sack. ‘For the sword outwears the sheath and the soul outwears the breast, and the coat outwears the pants till there’s nothing left but the vest.’ First half Byron, second half some greater poet whose name I can’t recall offhand. Not Corydon Buggins, that’s for sure. Come on, Jane, you can climb the shower curtain while the old man ablutes.”

“Take his dirty socks and underwear with you, Jane, and stuff them in the laundry hamper,” Helen suggested through a yawn. “And bury those awful old trousers in the kitty box.”

“Shrew!” Shandy removed the offending garments and went to wash off the clinging effluvia of the Dirty Duck. Then, snug in clean pajamas and warmed by a sweet conjugal form, he lay trying to sort out the scramble in his mind.

Was it one of the twins down there taking up room in Goulson’s icebox or just a stray body Bracebridge had stolen along with the beard, as Hesperus Hudson had suggested? Had Captain Flackley shown up at the funeral parlor tonight, or had he been otherwise occupied? And did the occupation, interesting thought, have anything to do with Marietta Woozle? Maybe it wasn’t Mae West she’d been trying to impersonate but a patriotic penguin. Thinking of penguins, Shandy fell asleep.

He’d probably have slept until noon if Helen hadn’t set the alarm clock for seven. “Sadist,” he groaned. “Is there no compassion in your bowels?”

“People aren’t supposed to use words like bowels in polite conversation. My mother says it’s rude,” she replied. “One of us has to work today, in case you’d forgotten. Me first in the shower.”

“Go ahead. I’m clean enough already.”

He was all set to settle back for a little more sack time, but Helen had other plans for him. “Then you can cook breakfast. Bacon and two eggs for me, please. Goodness knows when I’ll get any lunch. You were planning to get poor Dr. Porble unjugged today, were you not? I don’t see how I can handle his job and my other responsibilities much longer.”

“Am I then to construe his continued incarceration as a threat to my connubial privileges?”

“I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but what a splendid suggestion.”

Helen shut herself in the bathroom. Cursing the unsportsmanlike behavior of Dame Fortune, Shandy went down to the kitchen.

He had two classes to teach this afternoon. Tomorrow was booked solid with morning and afternoon laboratory sessions in the experimental greenhouses. That gave him a bit less than six more hours to get Phil Porble sprung and somebody else arrested for three murders.

At least Hesperus Hudson’s testimony had pretty well clinched the connection between the first man’s death and the other two. Pink snakes Hesp might see, but rocks in the pockets of an old-fashioned tailcoat worn by a man got up to look like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were not the sort of hallucination likely to be visited upon even a steady customer of the Dirty Duck. Not when he’d seen it on premises belonging to a man well versed in the works of Corydon Buggins and not when a corpse perfectly answering Hesp’s description had been fished out of Oozak’s Pond in front of about half the inhabitants of Balaclava Junction and its environs.