Missing Susan Read online

  As he hurried upstairs, he scarcely noticed the churchlike windows and the ornate ceiling designs above the Randolph’s main staircase. His mind was focused on the task at hand. God knows it will need concentration, he thought. Electronics is hardly my forte. He stopped in front of Room 307 and looked up and down the hall to make sure that no one else was lingering. Satisfied that he was unobserved, he slipped the key into the lock and let himself into the room. It was a small, nondescript single room with a view of an alley. The private bath was nearly half the size of the room itself. Barely glancing at the luggage still piled in the corner, Rowan took out his tools and headed for the bathroom. The light fixture over the sink, he decided. It’s the only thing she’ll be sure to touch. Carefully, he reached up and unscrewed the protective cover over the light. After several minutes’ tinkering with the wires, he was satisfied that he had made the correct modifications. Hurriedly he replaced the metal cover, wiped his fingerprints off everything with a hand towel, and left the room. Once downstairs, he waited until the clerk was talking on the telephone, with her back to him, before he strode over and placed the key on the counter. He was gone before she turned around. Perhaps she wouldn’t remember him at all, he thought-with more hope than conviction. Sighing in relief to have it over with, Rowan Rover wandered away in search of Chapters Cocktail Bar, where he would await further developments in a haze of cigarette smoke and double Scotches.

  It was nearly six o’clock before the light faded and the shops closed, driving all the stragglers back to the safety of the hotel to plan their evening’s entertainment. Elizabeth MacPherson had met Kate Conway on Broad Street, in a gift shop specializing in Oxford sweatshirts, and they walked back to the hotel together.

  “Maud went to Evensong with Alice MacKenzie and Frances Coles,” Kate told her. “Martha is seeing a friend from Oxford this evening, and Susan is still shopping.” She giggled. “You know that beautiful navy-blue coat of Martha’s? I saw Susan buying one just like it at Laura Ashley. She’ll probably wear it, too. I wonder what Martha will think of that.”

  “Plenty, but she’s too well-bred to say anything,” said Elizabeth. “Dinner is out of our own pocket tonight, I suppose?”

  Kate nodded. “Do you think Rowan would like to join us?”

  “We could ask him. What time are you planning to go out?”

  “In about an hour,” said Kate, glancing at her watch. “Shall I come and get you when we’re ready to leave?”

  “Yes, do. I’m in Room 307.” She made a face. “Susan, being her usual impossible self, insisted that we change rooms because there’s a light outside her window that she was sure would disturb her sleep.”

  Kate wrote the number on the back of the sweatshirt bag. “Okay, 307. Got it. I’ll see you around seven. Where do you suppose Rowan is?”

  Elizabeth paused at the foot of the stairs. “Try the bar.”

  After dialing the guide’s room and surveying the lounge where cream teas were served, Kate did indeed extend her search to the downstairs bar, where she found Rowan Rover seated at a tiny wooden table, blowing smoking rings like the Wonderland caterpillar.

  “Hello, there!” said Kate, blushing a little at the memory of their last solitary encounter. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Not at all,” he said graciously, glad for any distraction from the scenario in his mind.

  “We were wondering if you’d like to go out to dinner with us in about an hour.”

  Rowan raised his eyebrows. “We?”

  “Yes, Maud and I. And Elizabeth. We thought you might be able to recommend a good restaurant. We thought we’d treat you to dinner.”

  This enabled Rowan to recollect any amount of acceptable restaurants in the vicinity of Oxford. He spent several cigarettes detailing the virtues of each establishment and recounting stories of escapades at many of them during his student days. Kate listened with a wide-eyed expression of awe that he found almost as gratifying as the Scotch. Perhaps, he thought, if the Susan problem resolves itself neatly, I can forego my vow to Mrs. Thatcher after all.

  As he finished his recital of restaurants, Kate glanced at her watch. “Golly!” she said. “It’s twenty to seven and I still have to change. Would you mind going up to get Elizabeth? I promised her we’d stop by, but I’m running late.”

  “Certainly,” said Rowan, mellowed by the pleasant interlude with his favorite sedatives. “What is her room number?”

  Kate’s lovely face went blank. “I forget. But I wrote it down somewhere.” She picked up her packages and began to examine them for pencil marks. “Let’s see… I met her in the sweatshirt shop. Here it is! Room 307.”

  “Right. I’ll go and get her,” said Rowan, striding briskly away, as he wondered why that number sounded vaguely familiar. Finally, recognition overtook him and he stood for one frozen moment to let the calamity sink in. An instant later he was running down the hall toward the stairs, trying frantically to remember the first-aid treatment for electrocution. And what should he do if he knocked on her door and received no answer? It would look awfully suspicious to panic on so little provocation. He couldn’t ask for the passkey again.

  “Hello. Rowan! Yoo-hoo!”

  With a sigh of exasperation the guide turned around. “Not now,” he began. “I’m in a hurry.”

  “All right,” said Elizabeth, waving him on.

  Rowan stared. “It’s you!” To cover his gaffe, he said the next thing that came into his head. “You look ghastly.”

  “So would you if you’d just been zapped by a light switch,” she murmured. She was about three shades paler than usual. She looked as if she might fall down at any second. “I came down to report it to the desk clerk.”

  “Go and sit down,” said Rowan. “I’ll see to it.”

  Later that evening at dinner, Elizabeth told the story of the vicious light switch to her table partners with considerably more aplomb and self-deprecation than she had felt at the time. “And to top it all off, it wasn’t even my room!” she concluded with a laugh. “It was Susan’s, but she made me swap with her because she didn’t like the view. Just my luck!”

  No, thought Rowan with a heavy heart. Just mine.

  The next morning, Rowan endeavored to be cheerful during breakfast, but his thoughts were elsewhere. His face was beginning to show the strain of too much planning and too little success. He had got very little sleep, and he made only a perfunctory show of paying attention to the conversation of his breakfast partners, the Warrens. Fortunately, since they were pontificating about their children, his long lapses into silence went unnoticed.

  At ten o’clock he downed his coffee and signaled for the last of the stragglers to finish their meals and prepare to depart. “You will need coats today,” he warned them. “It’s rather windy.”

  “I’ll just be a minute,” said Frances Coles, scooping up the uneaten pastries from beside her plate.

  Eyeing Frances’ slender figure, Nancy Warren sighed. “Where does she put it all?”

  “In her bag,” snapped Rowan.

  A short time later the troop marched down the front steps of the Randolph and set off to see the dreaming spires of Oxford. To everyone’s quiet amusement, Susan had appeared wearing her newly acquired navy coat, identical to Martha Tabram’s. As predicted, however, Martha appeared oblivious to the occurrence, although she did manage not to walk in the vicinity of Susan.

  Oxford really was a perfect town for a tour, Rowan reflected, as he led the procession: compact, picturesque, and with historical associations for every taste. There were plenty of photo opportunities for Charles. Mystery readers like Susan could visit Balliol College, alma mater of Peter Wimsey, and scour the campus for scenes from the Edmund Crispin novels. Elizabeth MacPherson could see the cross in the street marking the place where the martyrs were burnt, and the church where Amy Robsart was buried. For Kate, the TV buff and moviegoer, he could offer vistas from Brideshead Revisited and Dreamchild. The intellectuals would enjoy the descr
iptions of the various colleges and a brief look at the Bodleian Library. And for the rest-the easiest tour of all: the Oxford of Alice in Wonderland. The two-hour tour of the city that he conducted that morning was a skillful blend of all these, as he walked them from college to college, reeling off anecdotes dredged up from his prodigious memory. All the while his mind was busy on another track altogether.

  He marched them out to Somerville College, which boasted Dorothy L. Sayers among its graduates. That venerable institution for women was not located in the cluster of other colleges, but was a good distance away from the city center-and scarcely worth the walk when supplemented by Susan’s droning recital of the plot of Gaudy Night in meticulous detail.

  “And it wasn’t her best book to begin with,” muttered Maud Marsh.

  They admired the Radcliffe Camera and the Sheldonian Theatre, while Rowan fantasized about the possibility of throwing Susan out a window of either one. They walked through the Bodleian courtyard and into the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin, where Elizabeth instituted a search for the final resting place of Amy Robsart. A clerk in the church gift shop told her that a small plaque in the chancel was the only trace of the ill-fated lady of Leicester.

  Susan kept saying that she didn’t see how students could get any studying done at Oxford, since all the colleges bordered on streets that hummed with incessant traffic. The others contrived to ignore her remarks.

  “It isn’t like the American university system,” said Rowan. “Traditionally, tutors made assignments entirely on an individual basis.”

  “But suppose you don’t want to learn anything?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Then you don’t,” Rowan replied.

  Elizabeth considered it. “What about graduate school? Did it take you two years to get your master’s?”

  The guide sighed. Trust her to ask. “At Oxford, a graduate is automatically awarded a master’s degree upon graduation if he pays an additional fee.”

  “What?” howled Elizabeth. “You mean the only difference between a B.A. and an M.A. at Oxford is fifty bucks?”

  “Less than that in my day, I believe,” Rowan admitted.

  “I am going to drown myself,” Elizabeth declared. “Now you tell me! After I’ve spent umpteen months of my life writing term papers for that gang of pedants in Virginia! Honestly!”

  “Typical,” sniffed Maud Marsh. “Did I tell you about their so-called lemonade over here?”

  The tour continued past Braesnose and looped back past a cordoned area of renovation work beside the library.

  “And this is the back wall of Exeter College,” Rowan was saying. “You see that it is quite high and without footholds. As I am too old to demonstrate, let me just tell you how undergrads used to sneak over the wall to get in after curfew…” Exeter, he thought. The very name of the college was urging him on. Exit-her. Forty-five minutes later their ramble had led them to the gardens of Christ Church, which is both college and cathedral. It was there, he told them, that Charles Dodgson-in literature Lewis Carroll-came as an undergraduate in 1851 and remained for the rest of his life. His literary inspiration, Alice, was the daughter of the Reverend Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, and many of the images in Alice and Wonderland are based on familiar objects in Oxford.

  “Name one,” said Maud Marsh, still resentful over the non-isle of Glastonbury and other misrepresentations.

  Rowan was ready for her. He had done his homework on Oxford. “The brass firedogs in the Great Hall at Christ Church have the figure of a woman’s head set on a long stalk of a neck. Remember when Alice drinks the potion and stretches out of shape? The Tenniel illustration greatly resembles those firedogs. And the illustration of Alice and the frog knocking at the door shows that they are standing at the Chapter House door. And the deer at Magdalen are featured-”

  Susan Cohen interrupted. “What is that place across the street?”

  “That was the shop kept by the sheep in Through the Looking Glass,” said Rowan triumphantly. “Now it is called Alice’s Shop and, appropriately enough, it specializes in Alice in Wonderland memorabilia.” He called after the sudden stampede in the direction of the shop, “That’s it for this morning, then! I shall see you all for tea at four! Look out for the traffic, all!”

  Rowan spent the remainder of the sunny afternoon in a solitary walking tour of the university town, reminiscing about his student days. He found a wonderful serenity in Oxford that somehow diminished all his financial problems-and the even more pressing moral one that confronted him at present. As he contemplated the graceful arch of the Bridge of Sighs in Hertford College, he found it easy to believe that he was nineteen again, with a glorious academic future in front of him and no ex-wives to haunt him like avenging Furies. He strolled through the South Park and wondered if life would have been simpler if, like the Reverend Dodgson, he had come to Oxford at nineteen and never left.

  “Not bloody likely,” he muttered in a moment of realism. “I’d probably be crazier than Lewis Carroll. I’d like to see him try to get away with his infatuation with little girls in this jaundiced century!”

  Besides, there was no point in getting despondent about a few minor financial and professional setbacks. As soon as he performed his small service for Aaron Kosminski, all would be well. He could do whatever he liked. Fix the boat. Take a year off and write a book at his leisure. Vacation in the sunny Caribbean. Were such worldly luxuries really worth the life of the fair young Susan Cohen? he pondered, gazing up at the spire of St. Mary’s. Oh, yes, he told himself. Cheap at twice the price.

  When it was nearly time for the afternoon tea scheduled at the Randolph, Rowan wandered back along the high street, dismayed by the ceaseless blur of high-speed traffic along the road. Susan had a point about the modern-day disturbance of the academic peace. Perhaps the city ought to consider restricting some of the downtown streets to pedestrians only, as Winchester had done.

  As he joined a clump of shoppers at Broad Street about to cross over to St. Giles, he noticed Susan Cohen a few yards in front of him. She was surrounded by a knot of people, still bundled up in her new navy wool coat, and she was chattering nineteen to the dozen, oblivious to her surroundings as usual. By the time Rowan saw that a red city bus was coming, he could measure his planning time in fractions of a second.

  Resolutely he pushed his way through the package-laden pedestrians, head down like a charging bull. When he saw the back of the navy coat in front of him with no obstacles in between, he took a deep breath for courage, put out his hands, and pushed.

  With a shout of alarm, she went down, inches from the front wheel of the oncoming bus, which somehow managed to swerve out of the way, horn blaring. There she lay facedown in the street, surrounded by horrified shoppers who were going off like air raid sirens.

  “Gee, Martha,” said Susan Cohen. “Are you okay?”

  By the time good Samaritans had helped Martha Tabram to her feet and dusted off her soiled coat-no longer identical to Susan’s-Rowan Rover had melted into the fringes of the crowd without anyone having seen him. He crossed the road and wandered into a shop, where he observed the drama in the street from the anonymous vantage point of a tie rack.

  He saw that Martha was unable to walk unassisted. She had not been seriously injured, thanks to the bus driver’s phenomenal reflexes, but apparently she had twisted her ankle in the fall. True to form, though, she was not displaying any obvious signs of distress. Her calm, dignified countenance was paler than usual, but it registered no emotion. She seemed to be ignoring the ministrations of Susan Cohen, who was hovering at her side like a small terrier attempting to chivvy a marble statue.

  As the procession inched out of sight, Rowan slipped out the door of the department store and resorted to a circuitous series of back routes to find his way to the hotel.

  When he arrived, the other members of the tour were already assembled in the parlor around a laden tea table, wolfing down pastries and discussing the latest stroke of
misfortune to befall the group. Elizabeth MacPherson looked somewhat distressed. He wondered if it was the lingering effects of the electric shock or philanthropic concern for a fellow traveler. Martha, he noted, was not present, but Susan was-reciting her version of the events through a mouthful of cucumber sandwich. Her eyes shone with self-importance. She was apparently oblivious to the real intent of the accident.

  “It’s the uneven pavement in these streets,” she insisted. “Not that Martha could see where she was walking, of course, because the street was absolutely packed, and I expect she was paying pretty close attention to what I was telling her about that Colin Dexter novel.”

  Not bloody likely, thought Rowan. If she’d been listening to you all afternoon, she might have dived under that bus on purpose.

  Later that evening, after too many pastries and cups of tea had robbed her appetite for dinner, Elizabeth MacPherson retired to her room-and finally wrote more than a two-line postcard. Since her new husband was still incommunicado on the high seas, she reverted to her lifelong habit of confiding in her brother back in Virginia.

  Dear Bill,

  The ghouls on wheels, as you are pleased to call this very sedate mystery tour, have nearly finished their trek through the south of England. Since my last postcard, we’ve seen Hereford, Ruthin in Wales, Shrewsbury, Minster Lovell, and now Oxford. You will be glad to know that I have taken very few photographs, so you will have no slide show to dread at future family gatherings.