The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (4 page)

“Yeah, tell ’em to tear out the front page,” said Ottermole.

“They won’t have set it yet,” Swope reassured him. “Does the Skunk Works have a phone I can call from, Professor?”

“No, just an intercom. You’ll have to use the pay phone in the administration building. Here’s some change if you need it.”

Telephones were one of President Svenson’s economies. Professors were paid to teach students, not chin with outsiders. Students were to listen and learn. Staff members were paid to work. The fewer phones available, the less apt everybody would be to waste time in idle chitchat and run up the overhead.

Nobody would have disputed Thorkjeld Svenson’s logic even if they’d had the guts to try. Everyone knew the savings from his many penny-pinchings filtered back in better pay for staff and faculty, better food, better student housing, and an absence of the leaping tuition rates that afflicted less tautly run institutions. Well aware of Balaclava’s fiscal policies, Cronkite Swope accepted Shandy’s change and galloped phoneward.

As it happened, Swope saved Shandy a quarter. Harry Goulson passed him on the way, jockeying a van painted a discreet charcoal-gray with a chaste white dove carrying a laurel wreath in its beak across the front panel. The reporter wavered. Should he rush back up the hill and take a picture of the undertaker emerging from his van? Should he press on and call his editor, who must by now be foaming at the mouth because Cronk hadn’t yet shown up with a whimsical tidbit about Balaclava Beauregard? Little did the editor know.

Fortified by his knowledge of what his chief didn’t know and aware that Harry Goulson wasn’t one to rush, since his customers never got up and walked out on him, Swope kept going. It was as well he did. Goulson’s van got stuck in the slush. The undertaker and Fred Ottermole had to put their backs to the bumper and shove, while Peter Shandy tried all the different gears and finally hit on one that worked.

Once the van was back on terra more or less firma, they decided they’d better leave it there and bring the corpse down to it. By the time Swope got back, he found the remains neatly disposed on a stretcher, rigor having passed off who knew how long ago, and Harry Goulson bent over it, pondering.

“Were Bracebridge and Bainbridge identical twins?” Professor Shandy was asking.

“They were and they weren’t” was Goulson’s unsatisfactory reply. “What I mean is, you could tell them apart when they were together, but it was tough when they were apart. Added to which, I haven’t laid eyes on either one of them for maybe forty years.”

“So you can’t say for sure whether this is Bracebridge or Bainbridge?”

“To be honest with you, I wouldn’t want to swear it’s either one of them. He was a Buggins, I’d be willing to bet, my last jug of formaldehyde on that. He ought to be Brace, because Bain was reported missing right after the Normandy invasion, in 1944. Offhand, I can’t think who else he could be. There’s a few what you might call unofficial Bugginses around Balaclava County, Belial having been the kind of man he was, which I don’t have to tell you because you know Henny Horsefall’s Aunt Hilda. But that was a long time ago, and they’ve sort of petered out. Sorry, Professor, I didn’t mean to take your name in vain.”

“I’m used to it,” Shandy reassured him. “Whoever he is, we might as well get him into the van. Ottermole wants to bring Persephone Mink over to your place, hoping she’ll be able to make a positive identification. If she can’t, we’ll have to ask the parents.”

“Now that,” said Goulson, “is what you can’t do. See, they’re the reason I was so late getting here.”

“Great balls of fire! You don’t mean to tell me they’re dead, too?”

“Yup. Got ’em both tucked away side by side in the cold room right now. You know, that was a queer thing. Maybe not so queer, you’d say, considering they were both in their eighties and pretty shaky on their pins. Still and all, you know how it is with the creaking gates, as we call ’em in the trade. My own professional estimate would have been that old Trevelyan ought to have hit ninety and Beatrice might have outlasted him a year or two. But be cussed and be blowed if they didn’t pass to their rewards last night.”

“Both at the same time?” demanded Fred Ottermole.

“ ’Fraid I can’t answer that one, Fred. All I know is, Miss Mink went to take them their breakfast this morning about ten to six, just as I was getting my boots on to come up here and see what Beauregard had to report, as a matter of fact, the boy being off to embalming school as you know and Mrs. Goulson not being keen to get rousted out that early. She was out late last night covering the installation at the Ladies of the Sunbeam.”

“Arabella does the society news for the
Fane and Pennon
,” Cronkite Swope put in, as if anyone had to be told.

“That’s right,” said Goulson. “Arabella knew you’d be here for the big event, Cronk, and doing a fine job as usual. But anyway, Miss Mink went upstairs to the bedroom, as I said, and there they were. Stiff and stark in their flannelette nightgowns, united in their passing as in their lives. And Miss Mink stuck with two extra plates of porridge and nobody to eat ’em.”

“She could do like Edna Mae does,” Chief Ottermole suggested. “Fry it like pancakes an’ pour maple syrup over it. Ugh! I wish I hadn’t said that. Both of ’em in one night? Cripes, that’s something.”

It was something, all right. Shandy wanted a more precise definition. “Did Miss Mink call the doctor? Melchett didn’t say anything about that.”

“She called me first,” said Goulson. “I said I’d go right out, which I did, but in the meantime she should call Dr. Fotheringay. They were his patients, not Melchett’s. We got there just about the same time.”

“And did Dr. Fotheringay sign death certificates before you took the bodies away?”

“Yup. Both loved ones laid to rest with one stroke of the pen, as you might say. Actually, the doctor’s ballpoint wasn’t working too good, so Miss Mink had to go and hunt him up one of those big fat brown ones shaped like a wienie that Sam’s Hot Doggery was giving out last summer with their Gourmet Special. Miss Mink was kind of upset over the doctor’s having to use such an undignified pen for so solemn an occasion. As I told her, though, I don’t suppose Saint Peter’s going to hold a little thing like that against Beatrice and Trevelyan when they get to the pearly gates.”

“You have a genius for the
mot juste,
Goulson,” said Shandy. “What did Fotheringay put down as the cause of death, do you recall?”

“Let’s see now. Beatrice was pulmonary failure, and Trev was cardiac arrest. Or was it the other way around? I’m so bollixed up, what with three demises in a row before I’ve even had time to get a hot breakfast into me, that I hardly know which end I’m standing on. Miss Mink did offer me a plate of porridge, but somehow I couldn’t warm up to it.”

Shandy cleared his throat. “Cardiac arrest and pulmonary failure, eh? That’s rather a portmanteau kind of diagnosis, isn’t it?”

“It’s what Doc Fotheringay generally puts for people their age. One or the other, I mean. Only this time he got to use both.”

“I see. But did he perform a thorough examination before he arrived at his conclusions?”

“I wouldn’t know about that, Professor. Professional etiquette demanded that I stand back and let the doctor go first, so I waited downstairs. That was when Miss Mink offered me the porridge. And then he came down and handed me the forms and said he was going home to get his breakfast. As was right and proper.”

“I’m sure it was,” said Shandy. “Nevertheless, Ottermole, I expect you’re thinking that since the circumstances are so, er, unusual, you’re planning to instruct the medical examiner to take a look at the elder Bugginses, along with our chap here, before Goulson goes ahead with the proceedings.”

“Yeah, sure,” Ottermole lied bravely. “You took the words right out of my mouth, Professor. I bet you even know what I’m going to do next,” he added, being not without guile.

“Well, I’d suppose you’re planning to drop over for a chat with Miss Mink,” Shandy obliged him by saying. “If you need someone to take notes, I’d be glad to ride along with you.”

“Why not? The more the merrier. Cronk can come, too, and take pictures. We might as well stop an’ pick up Sephy Mink while we’re about it, unless she’s there already.”

“Drat,” said Shandy. “She was right here a while back. I saw her with Mrs. Lomax.”

“Yeah,” snarled the chief, “an’ maybe she’d still be here if you hadn’t given everybody the bum’s rush an’ made ’em miss watching me bring in the body. Want me to go get the police cruiser? She’s popped her last spring, an’ I’m none too sure about the master cylinder, but she might hold together long enough to take us there.”

The professor knew Ottermole was hinting to use the Shandy car and didn’t blame him a whit. He was about to offer when Cronkite Swope beat him to it.

“We can ride in the press car if you want, Fred.”

“Huh? I didn’t know there was one.”

“Heck, yes. The
Fane and Pennon
moves with the times. After I took that header off my motorcycle and landed in the hospital, Mr. Droggins, the editor, went straight over to Lunatic Louie’s used-car lot and bought a 1974 Plymouth Valiant.”

“Decent of him,” Shandy grunted.

Considering how much Swope had done to boost the
Fane and Pennon’s
circulation to its present dizzy height and how close he’d come to killing himself in the line of duty, Shandy didn’t see why Droggins couldn’t have sprung for a later model. But he didn’t say so. He was thinking about those two old people and the porridge they’d never got to eat and about those two smooth rocks in the old frock coat and the duckweed freezing in a dead man’s beard.

The others must have been thinking much the same as he. Nobody spoke a word as Goulson and Ottermole picked up the stretcher and slid it into the van. Only the faint clicking of Cronkite Swope’s camera shutter disturbed the eerie calm that had fallen over Oozak’s Pond.

*
Something the Cat Dragged In, 1983.

“MY GOD, WHAT’S THAT?”

Well might Chief Ottermole ask. From below the hill, shattering the stillness, came a roaring and a rattling, a wild tintinnabulation of bells and a Plutonian thunder of hooves.

“It’s either Lützow’s Wild Hunt or President Svenson out for another little spin with the Blacks,” Shandy guessed, and the latter it proved to be.

Svenson was standing up in the sled, leaning forward like Ben Bur on the last lap. His gray knitted cap was gone with the wind, his gray-black hair in tumultuous disarray. He was slapping his reins, urging the Blacks to breakneck speed, and the howls that emerged from his cavernous throat sounded all too dreadfully like “Shandy! Shandy! Shandy!”

Peter Shandy stepped well clear of the path and waved his arms, knowing he couldn’t possibly make himself heard above the hullabaloo. Catching his signal, Svenson somehow brought the equine typhoon to a safe halt. Shandy walked over to the smoking beasts, of whom the one holding the reins was surely the smokiest.

“Practicing up for the Charge of the Light Brigade, President?” he asked sociably.

“Arrgh! We got a letter.”

“We? You mean you and Sieglinde or you and I?”

“I mean the college, damn it. Get in.”

One did not argue with Thorkjeld Svenson on petty questions of life and limb. Shandy merely suggested to Ottermole and Swope that they pick up Mrs. Mink and wait for him at Goulson’s, then he got.

“Do I gather you wish me to read this letter, President?”

“Urrgh!”

Svenson thrust the paper into his hands and turned the Blacks, without yanking on the reins. Enraged though he might be, indeed as he often was, Balaclava’s president had never been known to treat a child or an animal with anything other than fatherly kindness. Shandy settled himself among the straw that still half filled the sled and began to read. Halfway through the letter, he exploded.

“Good God, President, this is outrageous!”

“Arrgh,” Svenson agreed.

“They must be stark, raving lunatics.”

“Ungh.”

“It says here that the college doesn’t own Oozak’s Pond.”

“I know what it says,” Svenson bellowed. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Me?”

“What the hell do you think we pay you for?”

“Well, er, I’ve always assumed it was for teaching agronomy.”

Svenson emitted a snort.

“Does that mean I’m relieved from my classes?”

“No. Who the hell was Ichabod Buggins?”

“M’well, I shouldn’t be overwhelmingly surprised to learn he was the great-grandfather of the man we just found in the pond dressed up as Augustus.”

“Augustus who?”

“Buggins, naturally. He was Balaclava’s grandson.”

“Talk sense.”

Shandy talked what sense he could, which was not a great deal once he got into the Bracebridge-Bainbridge area. The cloud over Svenson’s brow grew blacker than the coat on Loki’s back. He flipped the reins and turned the sled again.

“Where in tunket are you headed now?” Shandy demanded.

“Godson’s. Drop you off.”

“I can walk, thanks.”

“Blah.”

Shandy resigned himself and went back to the disturbing missive. The gist of it was that attorneys Patter, Potter, Patter, and Foote had been retained by heirs of the late Ichabod Buggins to defend their rights with regard to a certain parcel of land described in tedious detail but boiling down to the acre containing the body of water known since 1765 and so depicted on early town maps as Oozak’s Pond.

The college was alleged to have been committing acts of trespass and illegally diverting water out of the pond for its own purposes ever since its founding, at which time Oozak’s Pond was already owned by Ichabod Buggins.

Unless an agreement could be reached on the amount of reparations due, retroactive to the date when the first college cow took its first bootleg swig from the pond—the legal phraseology was obfuscated, but Shandy caught its meaning easily enough—the water supply would be summarily cut off. This meant that the college and other properties served by the methane plant—Shandy’s own house among them—would be without power until another source could be provided.