The Corpse in Oozak's Pond Read online

  “Carbon tetrachloride.”

  “I’ll be darned.” Flackley shook his head. “That’s one I’d never have thought of. Not a bad choice, though, I guess, if your mind was running that way. Hell, we’ve still got half a bottle sitting out in the woodshed because we can’t think how best to get rid of it. Toxic waste, you know. My aunt must have kept it to clean her gloves with or something. God rest her soul, she was a fine woman and a damned good farrier but no chemist. You want to impound the bottle for evidence?”

  “Maybe we better go take a look at it, anyways,” said Ottermole.

  Shandy didn’t see why. Flackley’s armchair was comfortable, Flackley’s fire was bright. He himself would have been content to sit and rest awhile, but he didn’t want to stifle the chief’s initiative, so he went.

  The Flackleys were tidy people, he noticed as they walked through the back entry to the woodshed. People who lived aboard ship learned to be, he supposed. The shed was new since Miss Flackley’s time, though it probably replaced an earlier one that had been connected with the smithy. One side was hung with gardening implements, a dogsled harness, hand looms, upholstery stretchers, and other evidences of the family’s multifarious interests. The other side was lined with shelves, all stacked with neatly labeled boxes, bins, cans, and jars. Flackley glanced along the top shelves, reached up, and took down a somewhat rusty coffee can.

  “I stuck the bottle inside this, for fear some neighbor’s kid might—” He shook the tin. “That’s funny, there’s nothing in it.” He took off the lid and peered inside to make sure. “Nope, it’s gone.”

  “Who took it?” Ottermole asked.

  “My wife or daughter are the only ones I can think of offhand. They might have heard about a toxic waste collection drive somewhere, or one of Yvette’s students got a bad stain on the piece he’d been upholstering—I don’t know.”

  He slammed the lid down on the can and set it back on the shelf. “I’ll ask her when she gets home. No sense getting all worked up till we find out whether there’s anything to panic about.”

  “None whatever,” Shandy agreed. “What time is Mrs. Flackley due back?”

  “That’s hard to say. The class is supposed to be over at half past nine, but they get interested, you know, and then there’s the mess to clean up afterward. We can go over to the community hall and ask her if you think it’s important.”

  And start every tongue in the place wagging at full speed? Shandy shook his head. “It can wait. Do you recall when you last saw the bottle yourself?”

  “Gosh, I’m not sure. Let’s see. We had a red squirrel and his wife—at least I assume she was his wife—get in here last fall and try to set up housekeeping. They were running along the shelves, knocking things down and making a mess. This can was one of the things they kicked off, I know. I definitely remember looking inside to make sure they hadn’t broken the bottle because I didn’t want the fumes leaking out. It was all right, so I put the can back up there, which was stupid of me. I should have taken care of it then and there, but all I could think of were those pesky squirrels. You know what a job they can do on a place if you once let them get a toehold.”

  Ottermole started a tale of woe about squirrels in his own attic, but Shandy headed him off. “Was anybody with you at the time?”

  “Why, yes, a fellow named Zack Woozle who helps us around the place quite a lot. He saw me open the can and made some crack about ‘What you got in there, Cap’n? A jar of Buggins’s booze?’ So I thought I’d better explain what was in the bottle and why I’d hidden it away so Zack wouldn’t be tempted to try a snort.”

  “Zack Woozle?” said Ottermole. “Isn’t he a brother or cousin or somethin’ of the Mike Woozle that held up the gas station over at Lumpkin Upper Mills?”

  “I expect so,” Flackley replied. “There are a good many Woozles around the Seven Forks, and chances are they’re all connected one way or another. Zack’s okay. Most of them are, and there’s nothing much wrong with the rest except poverty and lack of effective training, as far as Yvette and I can see.”

  “Is Zack Woozle married?” Shandy asked.

  “Yes. His wife’s a nice woman. Rather dressy.”

  “Does she play bingo?”

  The farrier blinked, then smiled. “I see what you’re getting at. Sure, I daresay she and Zack both do. Bingo’s the big thing around here, you know. They play for a dime a card, something like that. Silly waste of time, to my way of thinking, but I can’t see any real harm in it. At least it’s sociability of a sort. And, yes, I shouldn’t be surprised if Zack was joking at the hall about thinking I had a bottle of liquor hidden in the woodshed and it turned out to be carbon tetrachloride.”

  “Do you keep the woodshed locked?”

  “Not during the daytime and seldom at night, if you want the truth. There’s the forge, you know, and we’re always needing one thing or another out of the shed. Anybody could have come in and taken it, if he’d a mind to. Maybe some kid, thinking he’d get high by sniffing the bottle, poor little jackass. Or maybe some grown-up with a grudge against the Bugginses. Damn, I wish I’d poured the stuff out on the ground and been done with it. That’s what comes of having principles. “

  “Nobody’s going to fault you for not wanting to pollute the environment,” Shandy assured him. “We can’t know for sure that yours was the carbon tetrachloride that killed the Bugginses. If it was, you can console yourself with the thought that if it hadn’t been handy, they could easily enough have found something else.”

  “That doesn’t excuse my carelessness,” said Flackley. “I’m afraid I haven’t been much help to you.”

  Shandy was afraid not, too. Much as he’d have preferred to take the explorer at face value, he didn’t feel encouraged to do so. Naturally Captain Flackley had had to admit there’d been carbon tetrachloride on the place if his hired man had gone snickering about it to his bingo buddies. Keeping a toxic substance inside a rusty coffee can didn’t strike Professor Shandy as a particularly intelligent solution to what had, after all, been an insignificant problem. Granted, it was the sort of thing any householder might do, but Amos Flackley wasn’t just anybody.

  Unless the farrier had kept the bottle as a subconscious act of piety toward his late aunt’s memory. The premise was a doubtful one at best. Shandy was not happy as he slid back behind the steering wheel.

  Chief Ottermole wasn’t happy, either. He’d begun chewing gum with what might have been perhaps overdramatically described as savage intensity, blowing little bubbles and popping them back as if he hated them. Shandy turned on the car radio hoping to drown out the pops, but Ottermole only began puffing and snapping in time with the music.

  This unceasing spearmint roulade might perhaps have been inspirational to a composer. To a middle-aged professor who’d had a long, bad day, it was next to unendurable. He was to no end relieved when at last he dropped his eruptive passenger off at the blue house with the white shutters, where Edna Mae was doubtless waiting with arms outstretched and ears atilt for the latest thrilling adventure in the ongoing saga of Fred Ottermole, Supercop.

  Helen was waiting, too, in front of the living-room fire with Jane Austen curled up on her lap and a bundle of Bugginsana on the lamp table beside her. She’d been napping but woke when she heard Shandy’s step and held up her face for a kiss.

  “Hello, darling. How did you make out?”

  He sighed and flopped down on the settee beside her. “Who knows? Miss Mink claims Phil Porble was out there yesterday throwing a tantrum over the lawsuit. She claims she was afraid he’d tear the place apart with his bare hands.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “In a word, no. She didn’t take kindly to my dubiety.”

  “So then what did you do?”

  “Folded my tents like the Arabs and as quietly snuck away. I think that allusion is a trifle outdated. So’s Miss Mink. She was in fairly wan condition by then. As am I.”

  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?”

  Chapter 11

  SHANDY 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 d
amned 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.