The Corpse in Oozak's Pond Read online

  Now the bonfire was alight, cracking and snapping and sending curls of fragrant blue smoke over Oozak’s Pond. The seemingly bottomless cocoa urns were again in service. Reheaped baskets of crullers were being carried by willing students to those spectators too far back to get at the sled so that nobody would be left out.

  Peter Shandy, a compulsive counter, tried to compute how many crullers were being masticated by how many eager mandibles this gala morning. He knew he’d never arrive at an accurate figure, but he kept counting anyway. The effort gave him an excuse to stand alone on a little mound, like Napoleon at Ratisbon, looking over the crowd.

  The bonfire was blazing finely. Shandy could feel its welcome heat from where he stood. The heat was melting the ice around the pond, but that was all to the good. The pond had to be kept flowing or the methane plant wouldn’t work.

  Being spring fed, the Skunk Works Reservoir, as Oozak’s Pond was now generally called, never froze solid, anyway. One of the first things freshmen learned was to stay off its unsafe ice in the winter. The Wash Pond, larger, more conveniently situated, and kept clear of snow, was where the students skated and the faculty curled. Except for this one day out of the school year, nobody came up here much except plant maintenance staff and security guards. Beauregard probably didn’t mind being left to himself.

  The snowman representing Old Man Winter was growing fast. Somebody had brought a ladder from one of the storage barns. A tall student was up on it, taking a hard-packed ball that was being passed up to him and fitting it as a head. A redheaded young woman was right behind him waving a bright headscarf, demanding that the effigy put it on and become Old Woman Winter as a blow for equal rights.

  The redhead reminded Shandy a little of Birgit, the Svensons’ fire-eating fifth daughter, now married to former honor student Hjalmar Olafssen and raising, as Birgit and Hjalmar would naturally do, a superior strain of raspberries. Shandy hadn’t yet seen their new baby and wasn’t sure he wanted to. It was said to be the spitting image of its maternal grandfather. Thus musing, he’d just accepted another cruller from a passing basket when the redhead screamed.

  Of course there’d been plenty of screaming already, but this was a different kind of scream. Shandy’s first thought was that the ladder was tipping over, but it wasn’t. Then he realized the woman was pointing at something floating in the pond, among the melting cakes of broken ice.

  Shandy had been out looking for pileated woodpeckers the day before, and he still had his field glasses in his windbreaker pocket. He whipped them out, took one quick look, and made a dash for the bank.

  Somebody was yelling, “Aw, it’s only a dummy.” Shandy’s binoculars were good ones; he knew better. He glanced at the cruller he was still holding, began to feel queasy, and dropped it unobtrusively in the slush.

  Spectators were crowding forward. Chief Ottermole was trying to keep them away from the bank but not having much luck until President Svenson bulldozed his way to the fore yelling, “Stand back!”

  Knowing they’d damned well better obey or he’d start picking them up two by two and hurling them into snowbanks, the mob receded. With the area safely cleared, Svenson planted himself in front of the bonfire, raised his mighty arms, and, bellowed, “Shut up!”

  Absolute silence fell upon the throng. Even Wendy Jackman didn’t dare to whimper. Then Svenson did what Shandy had feared he’d do. “Shandy,” he ordered, “tell ’em.”

  There was no escape. Peter Shandy, by the vicissitudes of fate and the iron will of Thorkjeld Svenson, had become Balaclava’s expert on bodies found in unexpected places. He cleared his throat and raised his voice.

  “It looks as if there’s been a drowning. I don’t know who. You can forget about rescue; the victim is far beyond help.”

  He held up his field glasses to show them how he knew. “Our maintenance crew has equipment to cope with the situation, and we’ll get right to it. If you’re ghoulish enough to stand around and watch, kindly keep out from underfoot. If you know of any local person who’s been missing from home, tell Chief Ottermole now. Otherwise, you can help us most by dispersing quietly. I don’t have to remind faculty and students that classes will begin at the usual time. Those due at the animal barns,” he added after a signal from Professor Stott, “had better make tracks. You’re half a minute late already.”

  Tardiness in tending the livestock was the ultimate Thou Shalt Not at Balaclava Agricultural College. Several students gasped and sprinted for the barns. They started a mass exodus. Muttering of jobs, chores, or getting the kids on the school bus, townsfolk straggled off across the campus or up the back road. A few paused to speak with Fred Ottermole, who was having his picture taken by Cronkite Swope while Edna Mae and the boys stood by basking in reflected glory.

  Shandy didn’t bother asking Ottermole what the informants were saying. He was dispatching students to fetch the rubber dinghy kept at the methane plant for working on the sluices, to bring one of the nets used to trap floating debris and a tarpaulin to cover the body when they brought it ashore. He delegated one to call Dr. Melchett, the college physician, and another to get hold of Harry Goulson, the local mortician. Melchett would balk at a waterlogged cadaver cluttering up his swank office, but Goulson was used to taking them any way they came. Shandy only hoped to God this one wouldn’t fall to pieces when they lifted it out of the water.

  In less than a minute, the dinghy was brought, the oars and net put on board, and they were ready to cast off. President Svenson moved to step aboard, but his wife hauled him back.

  “Thorkjeld, you will not set foot in that little boat. You would get wet and catch a sniffle. Let Peter go.”

  “Why should Shandy catch a sniffle instead of me?”

  “Peter will not catch a sniffle because he will not wallow around like a whale in a bathtub and sink the boat. Come now, you must drive back the sled. Mrs. Mouzouka needs the urns to make coffee for breakfast.”

  Rather than trust any hand but his own to drive the Balaclava Blacks in a four-horse hitch, Svenson had to obey with what grace he could muster. That would not have been much at the best of times, and this was surely one of the worse.

  “Report to me later in my office, Shandy,” he growled to show his was still the hand on the helm regardless of who got to ride in the boat. Then he followed his wife back to the sled.

  “That’s a relief,” grunted Chief Ottermole, who’d been secretly terrified of losing face in front of his family. Honor demanded that he himself be among the crew, but with that behemoth aboard, there’d have been no room for a man Ottermole’s size, or anybody’s size. He and Shandy would fit together all right. Besides, the chief had no idea how to go about recovering the body, but it looked as if Shandy might.

  Helen was none too happy at watching Shandy get stuck with the dirty work again, but there wasn’t a thing she could do except bite her tongue and hope that flimsy apology for a boat would hold together. Shandy wasn’t thinking much about the dinghy or anything else except what he’d seen bobbing around out there. He stepped in and settled himself between the oarlocks, feeling the boat’s thin plastic bottom every whit as cold on his backside as he’d expected it to be. He held up a steadying hand to Ottermole and took the oars, the net, and the rope he’d forgotten to ask for from the student who’d been smart enough to bring it anyway. He fitted the oars into the oarlocks and handed the net and rope to the chief.

  “Here, your lap’s bigger than mine. I’ll row. You navigate.”

  Ottermole was doing his manful best not to look green around the gills. “Okay, if that’s the way you want it. Cripes, my ass is frozen already.”

  “Don’t start bitching yet,” Shandy warned him. “Swope’s taking your picture.”

  Being the smaller and the older of the two, Shandy could have let the chief row; but he was a powerful man for his size and well aware that he stood less chance of a dunking if he handled the oars himself. Anyway, there wasn’t much to do. A dozen good heaves on the oars
brought them close enough to the body for Ottermole to abandon all pretense of having his stomach under control.

  “Jeez, why’d I eat them five crullers?” he moaned as he got his first real look. Where the face should have been, there was only a grayish mist.

  “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.

  Chapter 3

  “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.”