The Corpse in Oozak's Pond

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Blast it, Shandy thought, this was carrying acrimony too far. Granted, Phil Porble had every right to express his dudgeon at being yanked from his august position into durance vile at a crummy lockup half the size of a chicken coop, but couldn’t he allow Ottermole a little credit for Edna Mae’s clean towel and fancy soap?

  Shandy was about to tell Porble, “You’re allowed to phone Grace,” but he didn’t. If he went himself to break the news that her husband had just been jugged for the murder of her aunt and uncle, he might jolt her into abandoning any misguided loyalty to Persephone Mink and spilling whatever beans she was keeping under her hat. He buttoned his mackinaw, pulled down his earflaps, and trudged back up to the Crescent.

  Chapter 13

  HE MIGHT HAVE KNOWN the news would get to Grace Porble before he did. Mary Enderble was just leaving the house, wearing the sort of face people reserved for condolence calls. Even Mary, who loved everybody, didn’t look happy to see him. Grace herself was downright hostile.

  “Well, Peter Shandy, I hope you’re satisfied.”

  “Great Scot, Grace, you don’t think I put Ottermole up to arresting Phil?” he protested.

  “If you didn’t, who did?”

  “Grace, Miss Mink spilled the beans about the fight with Trevelyan Buggins, to which Phil himself admits. Some woman from Second Fork has testified that she saw Phil’s car with the headlights out leaving First Fork at twenty minutes past nine night before last. Ottermole himself searched the car and found an empty carbon tetrachloride bottle hidden inside the trunk. On the evidence, he had no alternative but to hold Phil for questioning.”

  “Peter, that’s nonsense. Why didn’t he arrest me instead? I drive the car a lot more than Phil does.”

  “I understand you were out somewhere at the time.”

  “I was over at the Enderbles’ looking over a box of buttons John inherited from his Uncle Elijah, if that constitutes an alibi.”

  “What kind of buttons were they?”

  “Those celluloid things you stick on your lapel, with sayings on them like ‘I Love My Wife but Oh, You Kid’ and ‘Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain.’”

  “And don’t forget to pull the chain,” Shandy murmured. “Sorry, Grace, that was crass of me; I learned that from an uncle of my own. I used to think it a scream when I was a kid.”

  “So did my brother Boatwright,” said Grace in something like astonishment. “Goodness, I hadn’t thought of Boat in ages. I wondered why it looked familiar. But anyway, Phil was right here reading the whole evening.”

  “So he told us. He also said you hadn’t told him about the lawsuit until the previous evening. Didn’t your cousin tell you before then?”

  “Yes, and I was pretty upset about it myself, I don’t mind telling you. I kept hoping it would all blow over, but when she said the lawyer was serving the papers or whatever they do, I knew I had to tell Phil.”

  “And Phil went up in smoke.”

  “Phil doesn’t like to be put in an embarrassing position, and, I must say, neither do I. However, I knew there was no earthly use trying to talk sense to Uncle Trevelyan once he’d got a bee in his bonnet. I told Phil he’d be wasting his time, but—” Grace reached out toward the flower arrangement on the table beside her, as if for reassurance. “I’ll bet it was one of the Woozles who told Ottermole that whopper about Phil. They’d love to get us in trouble.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the kind they are. They’ve always had it in for the Bugginses.”

  “Grace, that would hardly be a satisfactory explanation to offer a judge.”

  “A judge?” For the first time, there was an edge of panic in her voice. “Peter, surely Phil wont have to stand trial for something he didn’t do?”

  “Not if we can come up with something more concrete than the Woozles’ not liking the Bugginses.”

  “Well, if the truth won’t serve, I don’t know what will. Have you seen Phil since—?”

  “Oh, yes, I just left him. He sent me up for his overnight bag.”

  “Peter, they’re not taking him to jail!”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Ottermole’s holding him down at the station.”

  “In that awful little lockup where they put the Woozle boys on Saturday nights?”

  “Edna Mae’s sending over some clean towels.”

  “Oh, my God! What am I going to tell Lizanne?”

  “Why tell her anything? Your daughter’s not coming home from college this weekend, is she?”

  “No, they’re having a special performance of Death and Transfiguration at Harry Junior’s school. But what if it gets into the papers?”

  “How can it?” Shandy replied with well-feigned confidence. “Cronkite Swope’s mother’s keeping him in bed with a cold.”

  “But Arabella Goulson’s still on the loose.”

  “Er, considering your personal friendship with the Goulsons and the special relationship between Lizanne and young Harry, do you think Arabella will be any more eager than you are to publicize this unfortunate development?”

  Grace thought it over. “No, I don’t suppose she will, though it’s going to break her heart to miss a chance of scooping Cronkite. Arabella’s a really dedicated newspaperwoman, you know. But she is fond of Lizanne, and you have to admit it would be a very suitable match. Not that we’re anxious to get our only child married off, but to have her so well settled right here in Balaclava Junction—Peter, do you realize what this crazy stunt of Ottermole’s might do to the Goulsons as well as us? Can’t you get him to let Phil go? Surely there must be some way?”

  “There might, if you and Persephone Mink would quit clamming up on me. Talk, Grace.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “You might start by telling me who’s actually behind this half-witted lawsuit Trevelyan Buggins is alleged to have perpetrated.”

  “Why do you say alleged? Uncle Trev always felt very strongly—”

  “Uncle Trev felt strongly for eighty-some years, I gather, but never did anything until now. Was it his daughter’s idea?”

  “Of course not. Sephy wouldn’t have dreamed of such a thing.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Peter, I honestly can’t tell you. Phil and I took it for granted Uncle Trev was responsible. He wasn’t my uncle, of course, but I never knew what else to call him. Anyway, he was always poring over old papers of Knightsbridge’s and Ichabod’s. They were his father and grandfather, as I expect Helen’s already told you. She knows more about the Bugginses than I do.”

  Grace wet her lips. “Knightsbridge never amounted to much. Neither did Uncle Trev, for all his big talk about not judging the worth of a man by his ability to accumulate worldly goods. I personally never saw anything morally uplifting about distilling rotten moonshine, which was about the only thing he ever lifted a hand to. When I was a little girl, Aunt Beatrice would be after him to fix the door or weed the garden. He’d say he would as soon as he got around to it, and she’d say, ‘That’ll be the day after never.’ Sephy and I would wind up doing it more often than not. Or Sephy would, and I’d make believe I was helping.”

  “You lived with them, then?”

  “For a while, after my mother died and Father didn’t know what to do with me. That’s when Sephy and I got to be such great friends. We’d lie in bed and talk about all the wonderful things we were going to do when we grew up.”

  “What about Persephone’s brothers? Did you like them?”

  “I can’t say I ever had much chance to know them. Any more than I knew my own,” Grace added somewhat bitterly. “They were all so much older, you know. That was another thing Sephy and I had in common, both of us having two bigger brothers. Of course mine weren’t twins like hers, and there was a wider span between us. Boatwright must be well into his sixties now, I should think. Isn’t it awful, not being able to say how old your own brother is?”

  She shrugged. “But then I don’t suppose Boat
remembers much about me, either. He’s sent me little presents once in a blue moon from different ports his ship put in at, and I used to write to him in care of the steamship line, but he never wrote back so I quit that years ago. I did send an invitation to our wedding and an announcement when Lizanne was born. He sent me a pair of carved ebony back scratchers for a wedding present with a note saying, ‘You scratch his back, and he’ll scratch yours.’ That’s about the longest letter I’ve ever had from him. Phil thought it was funny, but I wished Boat could have shown a little more family feeling.”

  Grace paused to steady her voice. “Trowbridge and his wife sent a nice gravy boat from Gump’s. I did a period flower arrangement in it one year for the Boston show and won my first blue ribbon. I sent them a photo and the piece out of the paper, but all they wrote back was a postcard saying thanks for the clipping. Maybe they were offended because I used it for flowers instead of gravy. Oh, and Boat sent Lizanne one of those little Russian dolls you keep taking apart and there’s another doll inside. I think that’s the last I’ve heard from him. I’ve got so I just send a Christmas card myself.”

  “Where to?”

  “I told you, the steamship line. It’s the Great Magnificent, supposedly out of Liberia, but they have a New York office. I assume he’s still with them. My cards don’t come back.”

  “May I have the address?”

  “I suppose so, though I can’t imagine why you want it.” She went over to a small rolltop desk and took out her address book, a rather sumptuous affair of green morocco with “Grace B. Porble” stamped in gold on the cover and all the entries one hundred percent legible.

  “Do you want Trowbridge’s, too? We do keep in touch, more or less, though they’ve never come to see us or invited us out there. I’ll admit Washington State’s a long way from Balaclava Junction. They live in Tacoma. Trowbridge is a geologist. I believe he’s always wading through swamps and climbing mountains, deciding where to build roads and things.”

  She handed Shandy the book, open to the B’s, and sat down again with her hands on the arms of the velvet-covered chair. They were capable hands, well kept, with their nails painted a subdued apricot shade that harmonized with the chair and the rust-colored wool dress she was wearing. A modest diamond in a simple white-gold setting shot a few nicely coordinated sparks from above her matching wedding ring. While Shandy copied the brothers’ addresses into the bedraggled notebook he carried around with him to keep his student appointments straight, she went on talking, more to herself than to him.

  “Until I met Phil, I never really felt as if I belonged to anybody. My brothers were always away at school or camp or somewhere until they struck out on their own. I can’t remember much about Mother. I was a change-of-life baby, and I don’t suppose she was any too thrilled about having me in the first place. She had a stroke when I was four. Just keeled over in the kitchen one day when she was frying doughnuts. Luckily, Mrs. Horrigan—he was comptroller then and they lived where the Jackmans do now—she smelled the hot fat smoking and ran over. Otherwise, the house would probably have gone up in flames and me with it. I was upstairs in my crib, supposedly taking my nap, though I was more likely playing with my stuffed animals. It’s strange that I remember my panda better than my mother, don’t you think?”

  “Quite natural, I should say.” What other reply could Shandy make?

  “So then Father took me out to board with Uncle Trev and Aunt Beatrice. I stayed there for almost two years. I don’t remember Father coming to see me more than once or twice. Aunt Beatrice used to say I favored my mother, and it was painful for him being reminded. It was no picnic for me, either, but I don’t suppose that ever occurred to him. People don’t mink small children feel things much, but they do.”

  She realized she was picking at the velvet and folded her hands in her lap. “Anyway, after a while, he married Judith and I came back to live with them. Judith was kind to me in her way, but she wasn’t the maternal type and didn’t pretend to be. She was more like a governess. But she was good for Father. They’d go out in the evening a lot and get Sephy to baby-sit me. I don’t know what I’d have done without Sephy.”

  Damn it, what had he got himself into? Shandy wished he’d let Helen tackle Grace. But Helen must be eyeballs-deep in administrative work at the library, fretting because she was making no headway with the Buggins Collection. Great balls of fire, could Phil have been framed to keep Helen away from the archives?

  Cold reason told Shandy that Dr. Porble had been framed because he’d set himself up to be eminently frameable. Getting Helen off the trail could have been seen as a possible fringe benefit, though, by somebody who knew there’d be something in the Buggins Collection that could quash the lawsuit. Considering how long the archives had been locked up at the library, that raised an interesting question.

  Could Phil Porble be that subtle a conniver? Could he, despite his self-incriminating histrionics, have been the one who put old Trevelyan up to the lawsuit? Had he struck a secret deal making Grace heiress to half the profits or something like that?

  Blah! If Phil had been pussyfooting through the archives and knew proofs were there, he’d have destroyed them, wouldn’t he? Unless his ethics as a librarian were stronger than his honesty as a private citizen. Unless he’d meant all along for the suit to fail. Unless he planned to whip in at the last minute, drag the relevant document out of the archives, save the college from financial disaster, and make Dr. Helen Marsh Shandy look like an incompetent ninny.

  What the hell for? Helen wasn’t after his job. She wasn’t trying to undermine his prestige. Granted, she’d exposed the boner he’d pulled in thinking the Buggins Collection a roomful of rubbish, but his predecessor had done the same. They’d both neglected the collection on the grounds that their first duty was to provide and maintain the best possible research and study facilities for students and faculty, which in fact it was and which they’d accomplished.

  Besides, there was a more likely conniver right in front of him. It wasn’t Phil who’d spent those early years at First Fork, who’d been steeped in Buggins family history, who loved Persephone Mink like a sister but hadn’t had much use for old Trev. Grace had worked at the library, had canoodled in the stacks, had married the librarian and been privy, no doubt, to all his counsels. Lately, she’d been helping Helen some in the Buggins Room. Maybe she’d sported something whose significance she was best suited to grasp. Maybe she was less devoted to that sarcastic bastard she lived with than their neighbors thought she was. Maybe P. Shandy had better finish off what he’d come for and get out of there.

  “Is that your family?” He nodded at a photograph in an ornate silver frame that was accessorizing Grace’s flower arrangement. It showed a man and woman in clothing of the late thirties, with their children. The man held a tiny girl in a fluffy white dress on his knee. Behind the parents stood two teenage boys looking resentful in jackets and ties.

  “Yes,” Grace answered. “I keep it there to remind myself I used to have one. People tell me I’ve grown to look just like my mother. Do you think so?”

  “Oh, yes, no question. Your brothers favored the Bugginses, though.”

  “Yes, and so did Sephy’s. That’s another thing she and I used to giggle about, that it was our brothers and not ourselves who’d inherited the Buggins jaw.”

  “I saw a picture of the twins that morning out at First Fork. You said you never knew them well, but can you remember anything at all about them?”

  “Not Bainbridge. He ran off and joined the army when he was still in school, or should have been. Uncle Trev had to sign some papers, I think.”

  “Harry Goulson told me about that. He said Bainbridge was listed as missing in action. Did his parents ever find out what happened to him?”

  “If they did, nobody told me. Sephy never mentions him.”

  Grace fiddled with a bowl of paper-white narcissi that played the starring role in her arrangement. “No doubt Harry also told you Uncle Tr
ev and Aunt Bea weren’t exactly overcome with grief to be rid of him. Bain had been pretty wild before he went. I’ve always wondered how he stood the army discipline. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d simply deserted, but you needn’t tell Harry Goulson I said so.”

  She tried a further experiment with the narcissus bowl. “I’ll bet Harry gave you an earful.”

  “The twins seem to have left some, er, graphic memories behind them,” Shandy conceded.

  Grace put the narcissi back where they’d been in the first place. “Bracebridge was an awful tease. He used to tell me horrible bedtime stories about a bear coming to swallow me whole while I was asleep. He said I’d wake up in the bear’s stomach and not know where I was. Naturally, I’d have nightmares and wake up in the dark and start screaming because I thought I was inside the bear. Then Brace would run in and laugh at me. Sephy used to get furious with him.”

  “As well she might. God, what a thing to do to a child.”

  “Brace could be awfully funny, though. He’d imitate the neighbors so you’d swear they were right there with you. He had a part in the senior play where he was supposed to be an older man, so he put on his makeup and costume and went all around the Seven Forks pretending to be an underwear salesman. He’d taken quite a few orders before some girl caught on to who he was. Instead of making him give back the money, she made him take her out for a rip-roaring time. Then he got drafted, and I never saw him again. He did come home for a little while after the war, but I was away at school by then.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to. Sephy won’t have anything to do with him anymore.”

  “Any special reason?”

  “I’ll say there is. As soon as Brace found out Sephy had a job and was on her own, he began writing her letters from a place in New York called the Wayfarers’ Rest. He said it was sort of a shelter for people who were down on their luck, that he’d been sick and not able to hold a steady job on account of these fainting fits he was having. He wondered if Sephy could spare him ten dollars to pay a doctor. So she sent the ten dollars and naturally a couple of weeks later, he dunned her again.”