The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (3 page)

“Any idea who it might be?” Shandy asked him.

“Hell, no. How could you tell?”

“What about the people who were reported missing?”

“Three high school kids hitchhikin’ to Boston an’ old man Hooker off on another toot. This here was a middle-aged man, I’d say as a guess. Good-sized an’ well fed, though that might just be the body blowin’ up from—” The chief paused to deal with some poignant inner conflict.

Peter Shandy was a man of the turnip fields. Furthermore, he’d refrained from eating that other cruller. “Well, let’s get the net around him. Flip it over the body, then we’ll turn him over and wrap the other end around.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Ottermole gulped a mighty gulp, glanced shoreward to see whether Cronkite Swope was still taking pictures, took heart when he spied the camera pointed in his direction, and laid hold of the net.

Shandy’s plan proved easier in theory than in fact, but by bringing the dinghy parallel to the corpse and each taking a corner of the net, they managed to get the body covered. Then came the grisly task of turning it over. This, they persuaded themselves, could be done better with the oars than by hand. After too much splashing and fumbling, they succeeded after a fashion, passed a bight of the rope around their dreadful catch, and towed it back to where the bonfire had melted out a viable landing place.

By now, nobody was left on the bank except Cronkite Swope. The helpful students had gone off, no doubt reluctantly, to their classes. Mrs. Ottermole had taken the boys to school. Dr. Melchett still hadn’t arrived.

Melchett wasn’t cut out for this kind of doctoring, Shandy thought. He’d have been happier in a Back Bay office, treating wealthy Boston ladies for nervous prostration brought on by too many charity balls. Only a perverse fate in the guise of a lucrative family practice had kept him in Balaclava Junction.

Melchetts had been the official college physicians ever since Balaclava Buggins’s first student had come down with a quinsy sore throat. As the college had grown, so had the prestige of the position. Shandy wondered whether it had been the current Melchett’s grandfather or his great-grandfather who’d examined the corpse Corydon Buggins had written his god-awful poem about. The god-awfulness had taken on a different tinge for him now. He knelt in the slush to unwind the net.

“Who is it?” Cronkite Swope had his notebook out. “Have you been able to identify him, Fred?”

“Not yet.” Ottermole was trying not to look at the thing they’d brought back. “He’s mildewed or something.”

“Actually,” said Shandy, “I think it’s a beard. Would either of you happen to have a pocket comb?”

“You’re goin’ to comb his face?” gasped Ottermole.

“Unless you’d rather do it yourself.”

Ottermole fumbled at one of the many zippered pockets in his black leather jacket and fished out a dainty pink plastic comb. “No, you can,” he said through clenched teeth. “I got to go see if the doctor’s coming.”

He disappeared through a stand of spruce trees, and nobody was tactless enough to follow him. Shandy finished disentangling the appalling object from the net with some assistance from Cronkite Swope, who kept muttering to himself that Dan Rather wouldn’t shirk such an assignment.

“Neither would Harry Goulson,” snapped Shandy, who was none too happy about it, either.

“At least Harry could collect from the relatives,” Swope argued back.

“Assuming we ever find out who the relatives are.”

Shandy had to admit there was something particularly sickening about all that gray hair plastered over the dead face. Swope straightened up and focused his camera but seemed to feel it wasn’t quite the thing to take a picture of the eminent Professor Shandy combing a cadaver. Then he discovered he was out of film, or said he was, and stepped back a good deal farther to reload.

Shandy was having his problems with the beard. It had picked up a considerable amount of duckweed during its immersion and was now beginning to freeze in the colder air. He did manage to sort out the whiskers from the eyebrows, which were not quite luxuriant enough to hide half-open eyes of an appropriate watery blue. He also located a nose that must have started out to become a real Yankee eagle beak and got broken somewhere along the way.

The mouth defeated him; it was hopelessly buried under all those weeds and whiskers. He’d leave that for Harry Goulson to exhume under more favorable conditions. Shandy had better luck with an ear, a large one that stuck out from the skull with force and determination and had the oversized lobe supposed to prognosticate a long and vigorous life. So much for prognostication.

Ottermole had found his man. He came striding over the rise with his uniform cap at a purposeful angle and Dr. Melchett in tow. The doctor, as Shandy had anticipated, was not happy.

“Who is it this time?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Shandy. “I have a feeling I’ve met him somewhere, but I can’t seem to place him.”

Melchett scrutinized the remains with professional detachment. “He does look vaguely familiar, but he’s no patient of mine. Ottermole, you should know him if anyone does.”

“Well, I don’t. What I want to know is, how come he’s wearing those funny clothes?”

“What funny clothes?” Melchett took a closer look at the sodden garments. “Why, bless my soul, so they are. Shandy, what do you make of this?”

“I don’t know what to make of it. I know we New Englanders tend to hang on to things, but this outfit must be a hundred years old. Great Scott, I wonder—” On a hideous impulse, Shandy knelt beside the body and ran his hands into the clammy pockets of the tight-waisted black frock coat. He wasn’t really much surprised to find they each contained one large, smooth rock.

“THOUGHT PERCHANCE IT WAS
a mink,” Shandy murmured, wiping his half-frozen hands on the sides of his trousers.

Cronkite Swope had quick ears. “You okay, Professor?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes, I think so. Drat, I wish Mrs. Lomax were still here.”

“Aunt Betsy? What for?”

“She’d know whether there are any Bugginses still living around these parts.”

“By George, yes,” cried Melchett. “No wonder he looked familiar. This man’s the spitting image of that daguerreotype enlargement of Balaclava Buggins you’ve got hanging in the foyer of the administration building. And wasn’t there a suit of his kicking around somewhere? Could this be it?”

Shandy shook his head. “Not in a million years. Balaclava’s Sunday go-to-meetings are preserved as a sacred relic in a glass case at the library. What’s left of them, anyway. The moths got into his coattails along about 1905, my wife estimates, and nobody noticed till they’d done several decades’ worth of damage.”

He straightened out the coat as best he could and scrutinized the cloth. “These duds look to me to be in excellent condition, all things considered. It’s my guess they may have come from a theatrical costumer or somewhere like that. Unless our stranger here had them made to order, in which case he must have been well heeled enough to indulge such a whim and crazy enough to carry it through. You’ve lived in Balaclava Junction all your life, Melchett. Can’t you think of any Buggins who might fill the bill?”

The doctor started to shake his head, then stopped. “Bracebridge! By thunder, I’ll bet this is Bracebridge Buggins. Well, well, after all these years.”

“How many years?” Shandy demanded.

Melchett rubbed his chin. “Let’s see, would it have been in the fifties? No, earlier than that. Right after the war, say 1946 or thereabouts. Brace showed up in a rear admiral’s uniform with a chestful of ribbons and a headful of yarns. He swanked around town for a few days, then disappeared, and that’s the last I ever saw of him. A week or so later, a couple of men in business suits came looking for him. We never did find out who they were or what they wanted him for.”

“Interesting,” said Shandy. “Did he claim the broken nose was a war injury?”

“No, he didn’t have it then. I wonder when it happened.” Melchett made a cautious exploration. “Sometime during the past thirty years or so is the best I can do. It’s not a recent break.”

“Um. Grew up around here, did he?”

“Out at the Seven Forks. I never knew him well. Brace was much older than I, of course.”

The hell he was, assuming this was, in fact, Bracebridge Buggins. “Getting back to my original question, are there any Bugginses living around here now?”

Melchett stared at him. “Certainly. Your neighbor Grace Porble is a direct descendant of Balaclava himself. Didn’t you know that?”

Shandy had not known that. Helen did, maybe, but she’d never happened to mention it. To him, Grace Porble had always been the librarian’s wife and a prominent member of the garden club, which he was occasionally asked to address. He saw a lot more of her now that she and his own wife had become friends, but he still had reservations about a woman more interested in arranging flowers than in growing them.

Grace’s natural dignity of manner had led Shandy to assume she’d come from what his mother would have called a good family, but she’d never talked about her connections and Shandy was never curious enough to ask.

“Has Grace any brothers?”

“Two. Trowbridge is a geologist out west somewhere, and Boatwright’s captain of a tramp steamer. Sails all over the world, they say. What a life, eh?”

“Does he ever sail back to Balaclava Junction?”

“What would he want to do that for?” Melchett replied somewhat bitterly “No, Grace and her brothers have never been what you’d call close. Their mother died young and the father remarried.”

“Is he still living?”

“No, though I believe the stepmother is. She married again, too, a real-estate broker from Florida. Anyway, the boys resented her and took off as soon as they could. Grace got along with her all right, as far as I know. Grace was the youngest by several years, so I suppose she adjusted more easily. Anyway, she stayed home and went to Simmons. I think she hoped to become the college librarian, but while she was still an undergraduate, old Dr. Brinkle died and Phil Porble was hired to replace him. The upshot was that Grace and Phil were married right after her graduation. A very suitable match, my wife and I have always felt,” Dr. Melchett added rather pompously, “though it wasn’t an impressive wedding. Grace’s cousin was her only attendant.”

“Was this a Buggins cousin?” Shandy asked him.

“Yes, Persephone, that was. Bracebridge’s sister, come to think of it. She’s Mrs. Mink now. Her husband’s one of your security guards.”

“Mrs. Purvis Mink, then. The one with the gallstones. Or without them, I should say.”

“Quite right,” said Melchett crisply, somewhat put out by Shandy’s touch of levity. “Sephy never had Grace’s advantages, needless to say.”

“Purvis Mink’s a damned good man,” barked Chief Ottermole, equally nettled by Melchett’s intimation that any law-enforcement officer could be in any way inferior to a pantywaist librarian.

“I’m not saying he isn’t,” Melchett snapped back. “However, the simple fact of the matter is that Persephone came from Ichabod’s stock instead of Balaclava’s. You know as well as I do that none of the Ichabod Buggins line ever amounted to a row of pins.”

“Oh yeah? Then how about Bracebridge gettin’ to be a rear admiral?”

“How about those two men who came looking for him? Putting on a uniform doesn’t necessarily mean you’re entitled to wear it.”

“M’yes,” said Shandy. “You have a point there, Melchett. If this is in fact Bracebridge Buggins, perhaps these odd clothes he has on could be merely another expression of a penchant for fancy dress. Were he and Persephone the only siblings?”

“No. Brace had a twin bother, Bainbridge. Bain ran away and joined the army while he was still in high school. There was a bit of a stink because he lied about his age and forged his father’s name on the papers. The parents were upset, but not enough to go to the authorities and get him released before he was sent overseas into combat. Those twins had been nothing but trouble since the day they were born. Anyway, Bainbridge never came back.”

“Do you mean he was killed in action?”

“That was the general assumption. I can’t tell you for sure. I was away at prep school then myself. You wouldn’t remember, Ottermole?”

“Hell, no. I wasn’t even born.”

One up for the boys in blue. Shandy might have been amused if his mind weren’t still on the Bugginses. “What were the parents’ names? Is either of them still living?”

“I think they both are,” said Melchett. “Trevelyan and Beatrice were still hanging on at the old Ichabod Buggins homestead last I saw of them, though neither is in good health.”

“Purve’s Aunt Minerva lives with ’em,” Ottermole interjected. “They’d have tough sledding without old Min to keep things going.”

“Yes, Miss Mink’s a grand old gal,” Melchett replied automatically, that being the accepted cliché for elderly women still in possession of their faculties. “Well, I can’t do anything more here, and I’m due for my hospital rounds. Death by drowning, on the face of it.”

“How long was the body in the water?” Shandy asked him, not expecting a firm answer and not getting one.

“That’s a bit tricky, considering the water temperature and so forth. Not a great while, I shouldn’t think, maybe a week or two. I’d really prefer you get on to the county medical examiner.”

As the doctor bustled away, Ottermole snorted. “Trust Melchett to pass the buck. Anyhow, we accomplished something. I better get hold of Sephy Mink. She’d be the best one to make an identification, huh?”

“She or her parents,” Shandy agreed, “unless they’re too rocky. If I were you, though, I’d let Goulson, er, tidy him up first. I couldn’t make much headway with that beard. I’m afraid I broke some teeth out of your comb trying to pry the duckweed loose.”

“That’s okay. I can’t say I’d feel much like using it again, anyway.”

Ottermole flipped the shard of pink plastic into the pond. He, Shandy, and Swope had been to the well together,
*
he didn’t have to be indomitable in front of them. “What the heck’s keeping Harry, anyway?”

“I’ll run down and phone him, if you like,” offered Cronkite Swope. “I ought to get hold of my editor, too, and tell him there’s a big story breaking.”