Missing Susan

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “Tell you later,” muttered Elizabeth.

  Compared to Winchester, the only other cathedral they had seen, Exeter looked rather wide and squat. It lacked the tall spires and the sprawling length of Winchester, but the exterior decoration was much more ornate. The entire west front of the cathedral was decorated with a pantheon of life-sized figures. Jesus and his apostles had pride of place above the central doorway, above more figures of kings, confessors, and prophets. The lowest row of statues depicted angels.

  “Why are the statues damaged?” asked Frances Coles, pointing to a crowned figure who was missing several facial parts.

  “Not the Blitz?” asked Alice. She had about decided that the Germans and the French deserved each other.

  “No,” said Mrs. Lacey sadly. “The damage goes back to medieval times, I’m afraid. In those days people were very superstitious about the miraculous healing powers of saints. People used to chip off bits of the statues in hopes that the blessed stone would effect a cure for themselves or a loved one. Some of the statues have been replaced over the years. That king on the right is a new one. Now let’s go inside.”

  Susan Cohen whispered to Elizabeth, “Since the statues are already so damaged, they probably wouldn’t notice if I broke off another little piece as a souvenir.”

  “Try it and I’ll break your arm,” Elizabeth whispered back.

  Elizabeth took no notes at all during the cathedral tour. She followed along in an abstracted way, while the rest of the party admired the rib vaulting of the ceiling (“finest decorated Gothic vault in existence”), and she came out of her reverie briefly to examine the carvings beneath the choir seats. The undersides of the seats were fashioned with a small shelf so that weary choir members might slump against these supports and still remain in a standing position. Mrs. Lacey explained that because the choir members were going to rest their posteriors on the misereres, the builders considered it inappropriate to decorate them with images of saints or other divine symbols around them. Instead, they carved a variety of secular items in the choir seats, so that the wood could be decorated without impropriety.

  “This is meant to be the image of an elephant,” she told them, pointing to an object with tusks and hooves, carved under stall 44. “We think the artist did it from hearsay.”

  “Well, it isn’t too bad,” said Frances Coles, who had seen her second-graders do worse after an eyewitness encounter with the beast.

  Charles Warren carefully photographed the elephant seat, with and without the tour members grouped around it. Emma asked a number of technical questions about cathedral restoration, and Maud Marsh made a note of the times services were held.

  “I may come back for Evensong,” she told the guide.

  “I’ll come with you,” said Alice.

  At 11:55 Mrs. Lacey finished the whirlwind tour at the west front of the cathedral and wished them a pleasant stay in Exeter. Most of the group started back for the hotel, where lunch was being served, and Susan was complaining that her feet hurt because Italians didn’t know how to make shoes. When Kate, Alice, and Frances declared themselves ready for more walking, Elizabeth looked at her watch. “We have fifty-five minutes until the baron wants us for rehearsal,” she announced.

  “We could go shopping,” said Kate Conway wistfully. “But it would mean missing lunch.”

  “I’d rather shop than eat,” said Elizabeth.

  Frances Coles burrowed into her cavernous purse. “I saved some rolls from breakfast if anyone else would like one.”

  Alice MacKenzie looked longingly at the maze of streets leading away from the cathedral. “I just wish we could find our way back to some of those shops we passed on the tour.”

  “We can,” said Elizabeth, holding up her notebook. “I mapped the entire route, and made a note of all the best shops. But we only have an hour. Run!”

  Two woolshops, five clothing stores, and eight curio vendors later, the weary shoppers returned to the hotel, laden with packages and too late for lunch, but triumphant in their success at having achieved an entire hour for a guide-free rampage in an English city.

  “Rowan would be very disappointed in us,” said Frances Coles. “We should have been visiting museums or something.”

  “Consider it a contribution to the local economy,” Elizabeth advised her.

  After depositing the packages in their respective rooms, they hurried downstairs to the lower level, where the 1928 movie company was rehearsing its screen melodrama in the room that had been a banquet hall the night before. Now it was dark and the tables were gone. In their place stood a wooden coffin on sawhorses, illuminated by a brace of candles. The spectators lined the walls watching Sir Herbert the actor (Dracula) embrace a beautiful young victim.

  “Did we miss much?” asked Elizabeth, who managed to recognize Martha Tabram in the semidarkness. Alice, Frances, and Kate crowded around to hear her whispered reply.

  “They’re casting stand-ins for the actors. Sir Herbert was particularly asking for you, Kate.”

  Kate blushed and hurried over to join the actors. Soon she was decked out in a white nightgown, ready to be the bride of Dracula.

  Martha Tabram turned back to the shoppers. “Oh, before we began, the baron announced that Miss Jenkins had died of arsenic poisoning.” She laughed. “He read a list of symptoms that she displayed at the hospital. They tallied exactly with the ones you mentioned last night, Elizabeth.”

  “Nice save on their part,” muttered Elizabeth grudgingly.

  “Wouldn’t it be funny if she really were dead,” mused Frances.

  “If so, I think you’ll find that she has been reincarnated,” said Martha. “Look at that woman standing beside the coffin.”

  “The blonde?” asked Frances, squinting into the darkness. “She looks very young and beautiful to me.”

  “So she does,” Martha agreed. “But if you put her in a frumpy gray wig and a shapeless dress, she could appear considerably older. It’s the same actress. Very clever of them. There wouldn’t be much point in having a member of the company out of commission after the first hour of the weekend.”

  “Then it isn’t a clue,” said Alice, disappointed.

  “No,” said Martha. “I just wanted to set Frances’ mind at rest. The secretary may be dead, but the actress who played her is very much alive.”

  The cleverness of the acting company was further exhibited later that same afternoon. On the hotel terrace a sword-fight was staged between their two principal actors, with all the mystery guests watching from the sidelines. As they thrust and parried, the young blond Mr. Scott was cut on the arm. Ginger, the leading lady vampire, hurried him away to have it bandaged. This time Kate did not offer her nursing skills.

  “Well, he’s dead,” said Alice MacKenzie cheerfully.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” protested Frances. “It was only a little scratch.”

  “Hamlet,” Alice replied. “A little poison on the sword and he’s done for.”

  “Better still,” said Susan Cohen, “irradiated thallium! Rick Boyer used that in Moscow Metal. You get it out of nuclear power plants and put it on a pellet or knife blade in order to penetrate the skin. See, in the novel-”

  “Susan… Susan!” Elizabeth MacPherson was shaking her head sadly. “It’s 1928, Susan. No irradiated thallium. No nuclear power plants.”

  “Curare?” said Susan hopefully. “There’s another book…”

  Several minutes later the answer to their speculations proved to be: none of the above. The actor reappeared with a bandaged arm, in good spirits again, and ready to resume rehearsal. It was only then that people noticed that another member of the cast was missing. Ten minutes of frantic searching by all concerned resulted in the discovery of his body in the hallway outside the banquet room. He was theatrically dead.

  “Well,” said Maud Marsh philosophically. “They got us on that one. Did any of you see him leave?”

>   “No,” said Kate Conway. “I was too busy worrying about the sword wound.”

  Emma Smith and her mother were comparing notes. “At least this pares down the list of suspects,” she remarked. “At this rate there won’t be many people left by tomorrow morning.”

  “If we get any more clues, we’ll let you know,” said Elizabeth kindly.

  After dinner that night there were more goings-on. The amateur sleuths were summoned to the leading lady’s room by a distraught Mr. Scott and a new murder victim was discovered, dead on the bathroom floor, with Mr. Scott’s scarf wound around her neck. Clues were dispensed left and right as the actors quarreled and expressed their sorrow over the loss of the grande dame. Elizabeth had been spending a quiet evening in her room, intending to write some letters, but after the dramatic interruptions, she was out of the mood for solitary correspondence. Instead she invited Kate Conway and Frances Coles back to her room for hot chocolate.

  “It’s wonderful having these little electric kettles in the hotel rooms!” said Frances, as she settled in the chintz chair beside the window. She was wearing a dark green dressing gown that set off her auburn hair. “I wish American hotels would think of doing that.”

  “They’re probably afraid the guests would burn the place down,” said Elizabeth. “Which they probably would.”

  Kate Conway, in a white gown reminiscent of her bride of Dracula costume, sat down on the bed, nibbling on a piece of shortbread. “I still don’t know who the murderer will turn out to be. I thought it was Lady Alice, but now she’s dead. That was an exciting episode tonight, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m glad they’ve taken to strangling people,” Elizabeth replied. “They weren’t sound at all on poisons.”

  “Do you think they’ve killed everyone that they’re going to?” asked Frances.

  “I expect so,” said Elizabeth. “It’s Saturday night. They’re running out of time.”

  Kate giggled. “Too bad they can’t kill Susan Cohen.”

  Frances Coles gasped. “It’s so odd that you should say that! I was thinking the same thing. And yet, she’s really a very nice person.”

  Elizabeth unplugged the kettle and prepared their hot cocoa. “She’s a nice person in small doses,” she said. “But it’s the cumulative effect that’s wearing. After four days of Minneapolis travelogues and mystery fiction plot summaries, I think we’re all about ready to kill her.”

  “I don’t think she’s used to interacting socially,” said Frances Coles. “Sometimes I get a second-grader who alienates the rest of the class just the way Susan does. It usually means they haven’t had much practice in getting along with people. I’ll bet she’s an only child.”

  “But she’s very pretty,” Kate Conway pointed out. “It’s strange that we don’t like her. She’s so confrontational, which is strange. Pretty people usually find it very easy to socialize.”

  “I can explain that,” said Elizabeth. She told them about Susan’s recent plastic surgery and her transformation from ugly duckling to swan.

  “So that’s it,” said Kate, glancing at her own pretty face in the dressing table mirror. “Susan hasn’t learned how to stop acting like a wallflower. She’s only pretty on the outside; she doesn’t believe it yet.”

  “Or perhaps she talks all the time to make up for all the times that she was lonely,” said Frances sadly. “It’s really awful of us to be so hard on her.”

  Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “Well, then… would you like me to invite her over for chocolate now?”

  “No!” cried Kate and Frances in unison.

  At breakfast the next morning Elizabeth and the other members of the mystery tour sat together, comparing notes so that they could turn in their whodunit ballots.

  “Don’t forget we have to consider motive,” Susan reminded them. “You get points for guessing who did it and separate points for saying why.”

  Frances Coles groaned. “Everybody has a motive. Mr. Scott could be Sir Herbert’s long-lost son, and Jackie and Ginger may be sisters, and what about the diamond smuggling clue?”

  “I think the baron did it,” said Alice MacKenzie.

  “The baron? Why?”

  “Because it’s 1928,” said Alice darkly. “And he’s German.” After a moment of stunned silence, Susan burst out laughing. “Don’t be ridiculous! It’s one of the women. The baron is so obvious that only an idiot would fall for it. Now is it Jackie or Ginger? Or maybe Gladys was only pretending to be dead…”

  “Detecting is very difficult in 1928,” Elizabeth complained. “I wish I could get hold of some decent forensic evidence.”

  “We’d better huny and mark our ballots,” said Kate Con-way. “That Eylesbarrow woman is herding everybody toward the banquet room for the final confrontation. Who shall we put? Jackie or Ginger?”

  “I’ll vote for whoever you pick, Alice,” said Frances Coles loyally.

  “Let’s split our votes,” Alice suggested, glaring at Susan. “Then at least one of us will win.”

  At ten minutes until one the members of the murder tour assembled with their bags in the hotel lobby, still rehashing the murder mystery weekend and chatting with two of the actors, who were now out of character. Rowan Rover appeared a few minutes later, with his canvas bag slung over his shoulders, and sporting freshly laundered khaki trousers.

  “Good afternoon, everybody! I see that Bernard has returned and is pulling the coach up out front. Did you enjoy the murder weekend?”

  “It was quite well done,” said Kate Conway with her usual look of big-eyed sincerity.

  “It could have been anybody,” Susan Cohen declared, scowling.

  “And did you solve the crime?”

  “We did!” cried Miriam Angel, holding up the bottle of wine that was their trophy. “Emma and I were the only ones who guessed who did it!”

  “And who did it?” asked Rowan indulgently.

  “Why the baron, of course!” said Miriam.

  “There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible.”

  – ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  CHAPTER 9

  DARTMOOR

  THE SUNDAY AFTERNOON drive to the next destination was a short one: seventeen miles to the edge of the Dartmoor National Park, to the Manor House Hotel, a beautiful Jacobean-style mansion nestled among the moors. Bernard maneuvered the coach up the narrow access road, past the golf course, and up to the massive stone arch that marked the entrance to the Manor House parking area. From the vantage point of a full-sized tour bus, the archway looked dangerously low and disastrously solid.

  “You’ll never make it,” said Susan Cohen, surveying the obstacle from her usual seat behind the driver. “You’d have to be stupid to even try.”

  Charles Warren got up and signaled for Bernard to open the coach door. He walked through the arch and, with a succession of nods and hand signals, he guided the coach through the archway with inches to spare. When he had parked in the paved lot on the side bordering the golf course, Bernard modestly acknowledged the cheers of the passengers and then climbed down to unload the suitcases.

  The tour members stood in the parking lot and surveyed their new lodgings, the first of the accommodations that was not newly constructed. This one was imposing and ancient-looking, but a certain reticence on the part of the hotel literature led Rowan to suspect (aloud) that it was actually constructed in the late nineteenth century by a nouveau riche industrialist with aristocratic delusions. The Manor House was a sprawling beige stone building, or series of buildings, about the length of a city block, with formal archways, pitched roofs, and multiple chimneys, looking very much like the country estate it must have been once. The enormous mansion was set down in an expanse of well-tended lawn, surrounded by acres of wood and park land, some of which was now a golf course.

  “This looks familiar,” said Maud Marsh, twisting a lock of silver hair. “I’m sure I’ve seen this place somewhere.”

  “I expect you have,” said Rowan Rover. “It
was the setting for the 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone.”

  The others gathered around. “Oh, is this Sherlock Holmes country?” asked Susan.

  “The Hound of the Baskervilles is set in this area,” Rowan replied. “Many of the place names mentioned in Conan Doyle’s story are variations of actual places nearby: Hound Tor and Black Tor. Cleft Tor can only be Cleft Rock. If you know the area well, it is possible to pinpoint the locations in the story.” He paused for two beats, and then said, as if the thought had just occurred to him, “Would you like to go for a walk on the moors? It’s an unseasonably warm day for September. Not a cloud in the sky.” He glanced at Elizabeth MacPherson. “No shops open.”

  Everyone assured him that they would love to go for a walk, and they agreed to meet on the south terrace of the manor in twenty minutes.

  Rowan closed his personally annotated guidebook with a smile, wondering how well any of them actually remembered the Holmes tale. He had wisely chosen not to read them the passage of his notes concerning another feature of the Baskerville story:

  You see, for example, this great plain to the north here, with the queer hills breaking out of it… You notice those bright green spots scattered thickly over it? Rowan looked up from the page to scan the rolling grassland beyond the Manor House. He thought he did see such patches of green. That is the great Grimpen Mire… a false step yonder means death to man or beast.

  Elizabeth MacPherson never claimed to be psychic, not even in the dimmest candlelight in an evening of ghost-storytelling, but something about Moretonhampstead made her uneasy. She had a tiny room on the top floor of the manor, with an impressive view of the rolling green moorland, but even in the full sun of a cloudless September day, she felt chilled by the atmosphere of the place. She had walked up the flights of stairs to her room, and, while all was bright and elegant on the lower landings, the higher reaches gave way to worn green carpeting and walls in need of new paint.