Missing Susan Read online

  “I know. Isn’t it amazing? After Grandpa Benjie died and left me a fortune, one of the girls down at the library where I worked-her name was Claire, and she was the children’s librarian-anyway, Claire said, ‘If I were you, I’d take some of that money and become gorgeous.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, why not?’ Because in Minnesota, even though it’s cold for a lot of the year, we have gyms and health clubs, so there’s really no excuse not to exercise.” She looked appraisingly at Elizabeth. “I suppose you haven’t found any gyms yet in Edinburgh? Anyhow, I’d never bothered before, because I went to an all-girls’ college, and I was so shy and all, that there really didn’t seem to be any point in it. But about a year ago, after Grandpa Benjie left me his money, I could afford to quit my library job…”

  By this time they had found the cafeteria, selected their tea and scones, and paid for them, found a table and settled in for elevenses, during the course of which Susan had recited her biography without pausing for breath. Three weeks, Elizabeth kept thinking. Three weeks. “Look at this passport picture,” said Susan triumphantly. “It stops them cold in customs.”

  Dutifully, Elizabeth accepted the blue passport booklet, and turned to look at Susan’s photograph. “This is you?” she blurted out. Sure enough, the identification page said Susan Cohen, 420 North Fifth Street, Minneapolis, but the face that looked back from the passport was a round-faced woman with short mouse-brown hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses balanced on a Roman nose. Her protruding front teeth made her look like an intellectual beaver. Elizabeth could see why the photo gave the immigration people pause. The Susan Cohen who sat across the table from her wolfing down a scone bore little resemblance to the dumpling girl in the passport. “That’s quite a change,” she murmured, handing it back.

  “I know. Isn’t money wonderful? I went to a dear old plastic surgeon in Long Beach. My doctor recommended him. He’s a friend of the family. I’ve always called him Uncle Bob, and he told me to go to this friend of his up the coast. Anyhow, I went to see him for a consultation. He took this computer thingamabob and scanned in a picture of me, and then he adjusted the machine to show me various changes that we could make. Noses, jawline, everything! Do you like this nose? It’s Katharine Hepburn’s. After that, I had my teeth fixed, and I went to one of those fat farms, and got a wardrobe consultant, and now I’m perfect.”

  “How amusing for you,” said Elizabeth, who had heard that the Queen said that to people who were being completely obnoxious.

  The sarcasm was lost on her table partner. “I suppose so,” said Susan. “If you can afford it, you ought to give it a try. I think they all did a nice job on me, but I’m not sure what to do next. It’s not like I want to be an actress or anything. And I don’t need a job. I mean, sometimes I say to myself: what’s the point? But you know what? People are nicer to you if you’re pretty. Isn’t that weird? It seems so unfair, doesn’t it?”

  Elizabeth managed to get a nod in edgewise.

  “Actually, I haven’t exactly turned into a party girl. I guess I was too old to learn to like it. What’s the point of talking to a bunch of boring strangers while you overeat? So I do my exercises and read my books and stay at home with my cats-there’s Dickens and Waldo and Wilkie and Trollope. Trollope is female, get it? I had her fixed, though. And as I said, I read a lot. I think people are much nicer in books than they are in person, don’t you?”

  At least, thought Elizabeth, they are easier to shut up. Aloud she said, “Actually, in the books I usually read, the people are nowhere near as nice as those I meet in real life. I like true crime.”

  Susan appeared less than thrilled by this revelation. “True crime? That’s pretty ghoulish. Sort of perverted, I mean. How did you get interested in that?”

  “I am a forensic anthropologist,” Elizabeth reminded her in icy tones, “but actually, it all began a few years ago on an archaeological dig in Scotland. One of the other diggers was a crime buff and he sparked my interest.” She neglected to mention what fate befell this crime buff. Besides, the truth was that Elizabeth’s fervors were short-lived, lasting for approximately six months each. Having gone through her Brontë phase, her sea lion fixation, and her most recent (and to her loved ones particularly trying) royal flush, she was now occupying her intellect with murder most foul, until the next idée fixe happened along.

  “In fact, I brought along a true crime book today. I kept it with me in case I had time to read.” She reached into her purse and brought out a copy of Death Takes A Holiday: A Murder Guide to Britain by Rowan Rover. “It covers old murder cases in just the areas we will visit on this tour.”

  “Do you think the guide will take us to those?” asked Susan. “I hope not. I wanted to see things of real cultural importance, like Agatha Christie’s home, and the cathedral of Brother Cadfael, and-”

  “But those aren’t real crimes!” Elizabeth protested.

  “But they were set in real places,” said Susan with unshakable logic. “And they’re much more famous. Besides, those PBS Mystery! adaptations are always filmed on location. Wouldn’t it be great to visit a movie set?”

  “No,” said Elizabeth. “I want to see the roof where Charles Bravo threw up the poison his wife gave him. And I thought that as long as I was here early, I’d use this book to find some other places of interest to the group-just in case the guide isn’t familiar with this text.”

  “Lucky for you that I turned up, isn’t it?” said Susan. “Imagine being stuck here all day with that nasty reference book. I find it impossible to read in airports with all the noise and confusion.”

  Elizabeth managed a feeble smile. “Lucky me,” she said.

  Elsewhere in the airport Alice MacKenzie, her finger inserted in a cup of ice water, was debarking from a flight that had seemed to last six months. Under these circumstances, she bore a newfound indifference to the charms of Britain.

  Alice was a gray-haired woman in her mid-fifties with a penchant for pantsuits and sensible shoes, and she was not the least bit embarrassed to enter Great Britain wearing a Dixie cup on her forefinger. It would be silly to value appearances more than comfort, in her oft-stated opinion.

  Alice had boarded the plane many time zones earlier in southern California, full of excitement about the upcoming murder mystery tour of England. A retired teacher from San Diego, she was a mystery buff who combined a keen love of travel with an interest in the island origins of her MacKenzie ancestors. When she read about the tour in a local newspaper, it seemed the perfect combination of both her passions.

  “Go,” said her second husband Richard, who was not retired. “I have enough work at the office for two people. Besides, as long as the sports channel doesn’t go on the fritz and the pizzeria doesn’t stop delivering, I can manage.”

  So Alice had boarded the plane with last minute instructions about the houseplants and the cat, and promises to call each weekend to check on him and give him tour updates. Once the plane began to taxi down the runway, Alice relegated the cat, the houseplants, and Richard to a mental broom closet. She settled back happily with her guidebook to anticipate the coming adventure. She was going to keep a journal of the trip, so that she could relive it privately in the months to come. Perhaps she would write it up for her book club. She pictured herself guest speaker at one of the winter meetings, regaling her friends with details of her sojourn in England.

  Several cramped, monotonous hours later, Alice was beginning to feel like the modern equivalent of a wagon train pioneer. At least the forty-niners got more to eat than salted peanuts and Diet Coke. And they didn’t have to sit next to a snoring businessman for three thousand miles.

  As the plane droned on toward Chicago over dark empty prairies, she found herself wondering if it would have been faster to get to England from the other direction. She supposed not. The Pacific was rather large, not to mention China and Russia. Still, it did seem to take forever to inch across North America and finally into the sky above the vast blackness of the
Atlantic.

  To make matters worse, just about the time she could have gone to sleep from sheer exhaustion, she managed to burn herself on that stupid light fixture above her seat, causing her to spend most of the Atlantic stretch of the journey in absolute agony. She was trying to turn off the light so that she could sleep, she explained tearfully to the flight attendant. On other airlines (better airlines, her tone suggested) the switch was beside the bulb. In this plane, it was on the arm-rest, but how was she to know that? In groping for it, she had put her forefinger directly on the white-hot bulb, sending a wave of unbelievable pain through her body. It seemed hours before a flight attendant strolled by to answer her call button. She asked for ice for her finger, which was by now beginning to blister. The stewardess brought it with all the casualness of someone indulging an irrational whim. Alice, mindful of her dependence on this creature’s goodwill for more ice, managed to thank her politely.

  Ice, she discovered, made it possible for her to stand the pain without weeping, but she was still unable to sleep. She stared at the meager cup encasing her enflamed forefinger and watched the ice melt and turn tepid, sending stabs of pain through her injured flesh.

  The necessity of staving off the pain forced her to make quite a nuisance of herself with the cabin crew for the remainder of the flight, ringing them whenever her balm melted, and in one instance, when no one answered her summons, venturing for ice herself, much to the dismay of the stewardesses, who were lounging around gossiping in the galley.

  Alice remained civil to these slackers, but she was firm in her request for assistance in her medical dilemma. That’s what they were paid for, wasn’t it? Why shouldn’t they help a stricken passenger?

  She supposed that they were delighted to see her go when the plane finally touched down at Gatwick. For once she didn’t fret about the plane crashing on the runway. Now, however, she was having considerable misgivings about her ability to enjoy the tour. She exited the plane with her finger thrust into a cup of rapidly melting ice, wondering what would become of her next. An airport attendant told her that Gatwick had a first-aid station-not that anything could be done for minor burns, he added. His directions on how to get there were so endless and complicated that Alice resolved to look for a restaurant instead. Surely someone would sell her some ice.

  But first she had to get through customs. Before the plane landed, the flight attendant had recited some carefully memorized instructions on how to proceed. It boiled down to: get your luggage, stand in the appropriate line.

  Alice wondered how she was going to carry two suitcases with her finger in a paper cup. She managed to find the metal shopping carts, and was debating the best way to steer one with a hand and a foot, when a slender auburn-haired woman of about her own age approached her. “You look like you could use some help,” she said in familiar California English.

  Alice heaved a sigh of relief. “I sure could,” she said. “I burned my finger on the airplane reading lamp! Did you just get here, too? Were you on Flight 304?”

  The woman picked up Alice’s suitcases and set them on the cart. “Yes,” she said. “I’m Frances Coles, from La Mesa. I’m taking a mystery tour of southern England.”

  After they had expressed delight and astonishment that they were both on the same tour, Alice reflected that it was not such a remarkable coincidence after all, since they were both from southern California. The travel agency had quite naturally booked them on the same flight, albeit twenty rows apart. But she was nonetheless delighted to find an ally so soon.

  “I’ll hold your passport for you,” said Frances, as they waited in the nonresidents’ line for customs.

  “Thanks,” said Alice. “I hope we get through fast.” She indicated her paper cup. “My ice is melting.”

  “That would be a great way to smuggle diamonds into the country,” Frances remarked. “Burn your finger and hide the diamonds in the ice.”

  “You’re welcome to it,” Alice said. “After this experience, I wouldn’t burn my finger on purpose for all the diamonds in South Africa.”

  The customs official was cheerful, but brisk, and apparently unthreatened by a couple of middle-aged women with well-worn suitcases, one of whom had a finger immersed in a cup of ice. He was an expert on American eccentricities. He wished the ladies a pleasant stay in England and waved them through.

  Frances Coles glanced at her watch. “We still have four hours before the tour assembles. How is your finger feeling now?”

  Alice took a deep breath and eased her finger out of the puddle of ice. She shut her eyes, waiting for the stab of pain. Instead there was only a mild twinge of discomfort. “It’s better,” she admitted.

  “Good. I think you should switch from ice to something else now. Aloe, if we can find any. Do you suppose there’s a drugstore in the airport?”

  “Bound to be,” said Alice. “I suppose we’d better change some money first.”

  Together they trundled off down the halls of Gatwick. The adventure had begun.

  At two-fifteen that afternoon a small group of travelers began to assemble in the ground-floor lobby of the airport: a married couple, an English-looking mother and daughter in tweeds and sensible shoes, a pretty young nurse, a Canadian doctor’s wife, a silver-haired lady from Berkeley, Frances Coles, and her new friend Alice MacKenzie, whose burned finger was now shiny with aloe ointment.

  Elizabeth MacPherson was the last to arrive, followed by the beautiful Susan Cohen, who had reached chapter thirty-one in the oral history of her life. “And then I got my second cat, Wilkie. He’s the tortoiseshell one with the yellow eyes. I have a picture of him somewhere-”

  “Oh look!” cried Elizabeth, more with relief than surprise. “This must be the rest of the tour!” She wondered hopefully if any of them were hard of hearing. “Mystery tour?” she asked, striding toward the group.

  Several of the travelers nodded.

  Elizabeth and Susan added their suitcases to the pile of luggage in the circle.

  “Is the guide here yet?” Elizabeth inquired.

  “Not yet,” said the tall silver-haired woman consulting her watch. “Oh dear,” she said. “It’s still on Berkeley time.”

  The rest of the tour members offered her local times ranging from two-twenty to two-forty. Elizabeth noticed that there was only one man in the group, a tanned and genial-looking gentleman with peppery hair. He wore a T-shirt that proclaimed ERIK BROADAXE RULES PRETTY GOOD. From this evidence, Elizabeth deduced that he was an American; that he had been to the Jorvik, the Norse exhibit at York (whence the T-shirt); and that he had a good sense of humor, always a pleasant discovery in a fellow traveler. His wife, who was half a head shorter than he, was blonde and smiling, and looked equally good-tempered.

  “Is everybody here from California?” asked Mrs. Broadaxe (as Elizabeth had begun to characterize her).

  “San Diego,” said the pretty, dark-eyed nurse.

  “So am I!” said Alice MacKenzie. “And Frances is from La Mesa, which amounts to the same thing.”

  “We’re from Colorado,” said the lady in tweeds. Her daughter nodded and smiled.

  “Vancouver.”

  “Berkeley,” said the silver-haired woman, eldest of the party.

  “I’m from Minneapolis,” said Susan, “and our airport, the Minneapolis-St. Paul International, is much more-”

  “Edinburgh,” said Elizabeth MacPherson-and instantly regretted it. She then had to admit that she was, in fact, an American; she started to explain how she came to be living in Scotland and why her new husband hadn’t come along.

  She was still relating all this when a man in a beige leisure suit approached the group, carrying a canvas shoulder bag and a sheaf of typed papers. “Tour?” he said briskly. “South of England mystery tour? I am your guide.”

  There was a moment of silence while the assembly took in the sight of their guide. He was a desperately stately five feet, eight inches, with longish blue-black hair that conjured up images o
f shoe polish in the minds of the beholders. Such a hue did, of course, exist in nature. Innumerable species of crows possessed it without resorting to artifice, and, among homo sapiens, certain bands of Comanches may in their youth rejoice in a similarly stygian shade; but in an aging Englishman whose face sported the crow’s-feet to accompany the crow’s color, the shade suggested hairstyling of a suicidal nature: dyed by his own hand and with a reckless disregard for plausibility. His eyes behind dark-framed glasses were similarly dark, and his expression radiated a confidence and self-esteem that belied his unevenly cut, safety-pinned trousers.

  “My name is Rowan Rover,” said the personage.

  With an exclamation of surprise Elizabeth held aloft her copy of Death Takes a Holiday. “Yes, I’ll sign it for you later,” said Rowan Rover soothingly. “Now, I’ll just read out the names on my list to make sure that we are all here. Elizabeth MacPherson?”

  “Here,” mumbled Elizabeth, chagrined at having been mistaken for a groupie. She wondered if she could arrange for him to sit with Susan on the bus trip to Winchester.

  “It may take me a while to learn your names. Ah, only one gentleman, I see. That should be easy.” He beamed at Erik Broadaxe. “Charles Warren, I presume?”

  “That’s right, and this is my wife Nancy.”

  “Martha Tabram?” The well-dressed woman from Vancouver raised her hand.

  “Frances Coles? Alice MacKenzie? Ah, there you are together. Very convenient. Both from California, aren’t you? How lovely. And two Colorado ladies, where are they? Miriam Angel and Emma Smith?”

  “We’re mother and daughter,” said Miriam Angel.

  “Splendid. No one’s mistaken you for the Judds, have they, dear?” Rowan said under his breath. He had become conversant in country music during the period he referred to as his exile in the academic gulag, by which he meant the state of Wisconsin. “Any more Californians? Kate Conway?”

  The pretty young nurse in the red sweater raised her hand.