The Corpse in Oozak's Pond Read Online Free

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