Sharyn McCrumb - Missing Susan

The mystery group members admitted that they hadn’t been paying attention.

“Oh, but you must watch everyone very carefully!” the woman chided them. “You can’t trust anyone, you know!”

“I hope she did it,” muttered Elizabeth, as the woman walked away.

“Not a hope,” said Susan Cohen. “When it’s time to reveal the killer, she’ll run the confrontation scene. But she’s much too brash. They need somebody who’s gracious and charming to be the amateur sleuth.”

“Like Angela Lansbury on Murder She Wrote?” asked Kate.

Susan shook her head. “I was thinking more of Charlotte MacLeod.”

Maud Marsh was ready to try her hand at solving the case. “What do you suppose she was killed with?” she asked the others. “Poison in the drink?”

“So they would have us believe,” said Elizabeth. “We mustn’t forget that it’s 1928.”

“This has been done in a lot of books,” said Susan, with the air of one beginning a lecture. “There’s The Mirror Cracked , and Murder in Three Acts. Of course, both those murders were done the same way…”

Nancy Warren pretended to hear her husband calling and wandered away, followed by Martha Tabram, stifling a yawn.

“Well, I guess the evening’s drama is over,” said Alice. “People are beginning to sit down to dinner. Let’s go and sit by the baron, shall we? He looks suspicious.”

“As long as we don’t have to sit with Miss Eylesbarrow,” muttered Elizabeth. “I wish Rowan were here. We’d show him detective work!”

Despite the watchful anticipation of the mystery weekend guests, no one pitched forward into his soup during the dinner. The members of the acting troupe stayed perfectly in character and chatted with the guests. The older leading man, Sir Herbert, seemed quite taken with pretty Kate Conway and he spent much of the meal urging her to go into film work, while she giggled prettily in response. Susan Cohen and Elizabeth MacPherson sat beside the actor playing the baron. In a German accent that was on the horizon of plausible, the movie mogul talked amiably with the young women, inquiring where they were from and what they planned to see on their tour of England.

“You should come and see Minneapolis,” Susan Cohen told him. “It’s the most beautiful city. Very clean and crime-free.”

“I have never had any interest in visiting the United States,” said the baron at his most Teutonic. “I have always wanted to go and see… Russia!”

Elizabeth, remembering that it was supposed to be 1928, quipped, “Oh, I expect you will! Give it ten years or so.”

The baron caught this reference to the Russian front and managed to stifle a laugh just in time to stay in character. He hastily changed the subject, telling them about the film company and the new talkie they were making, about his investments, and all the problems that he was having with his actors; but Elizabeth was having too much fun pretending that it was 1928 to pay much attention to any clues he might have offered. When he mentioned that he was contemplating buying a country house, she advised him to purchase a place called High Grove.

“You will profit enormously from selling it again in fifty years’ time,” she assured him, approximating the year that Prince Charles acquired the property. “It will sell for a bundle!” What fun it was to parade her Anglophilia!

She was pleased to note that the baron was as clever as he was talented. One fleeting expression showed that he had caught that reference, too, but he was quick to play dumb-and to resume less prophetic topics of conversation.

When the meal was almost over, Mr. Scott, the handsome young leading man, excused himself from one of the other tables, announcing that he wanted to telephone the hospital to ask after Miss Jenkins, the secretary who had been taken ill. This sparked fresh speculation about the cause of her attack, but the baron refused to be drawn by Susan’s declaration that the woman had been poisoned.

“I expect it was something she ate for lunch that didn’t agree with her,” he said.

Alice MacKenzie made a note of his remark in her book.

Ten minutes later Mr. Scott reappeared in the doorway looking properly, if not convincingly, stricken. “I’ve just had word from the hospital that poor Miss Jenkins is dead,” he lamented. “The doctors say that she was poisoned with arsenic!”

A shocked silence fell over the assembly, broken two seconds later by Elizabeth MacPherson, who proclaimed, “She certainly was not.” This bit of unscheduled improvisation on a carefully rehearsed scenario left all the actors speechless.

“I am a doctor of forensic anthropology,” said Elizabeth, more pompously than usual. “And I assure you that we can rule out arsenic as a cause of death.”

“Why?” gasped the baron in spite of himself.

“Because she just fell quietly to the floor and passed out,” Elizabeth informed him. “That is not what you do if you have been poisoned with arsenic. To begin with, she should have been puking her guts out-”

Kate Conway nodded vigorously. “From both ends,” she said with medical authority.

“Not before my dinner,” murmured Martha Tabram.

Elizabeth continued. “She should have been having tonic and clonic convulsions, dizzy spells, and she would have been in incredible pain from the cramping of the stomach muscles. Also, death would not occur so quickly. If you look at the Maybrick case…” Elizabeth was thinking how pleased Rowan Rover would have been at this evidence of her detecting ability.

The actors were thinking that a little arsenic in the wineglass of Miss MacPherson wouldn’t be amiss. Too bad they only had sugar cubes for poison.

“This is such fun!” said Frances Coles happily. “I wonder what Rowan is doing this weekend without us?”

In a picturesque village in Cornwall, the last pirate of Penzance was plotting his perfect crime. At eight o’clock Friday evening Rowan Rover had got off the train at Penzance and returned to his nonaquatic residence, the family home a few miles from the city.

After an omelet supper, washed down with liberal quantities of Scotch, he had retired to his study to read his mail. There was the usual assortment of politely worded threats from his creditors, and a dutiful scrawl from his offspring Sebastian which managed to impart no information whatsoever, except a weather report for the vicinity of his school, which Sebastian always included in lieu of any information about his grades, his interests, or his most recent misdemeanors. The air mail letter bearing a Sri Lankan stamp began with the salutation Dear Insect. A salvo from a former wife. He tossed that one in the pile with the Inland Revenue forms and the Stop Smoking pamphlets he received regularly from meddling friends. A royalty statement from one of his publishers, written as usual in Sanskrit, contained a check for the beggarly sum of seven pounds, forty-three pence. You could hardly call it a royalty statement. Why couldn’t those buggers manage to sell the foreign rights to the bloodthirsty Americans, or sell the movie rights for a fat fee, so that he could make a living off crime without having to practice it!

He resigned himself to the prospect at hand. Now that he had actually gotten to know the murder group, he could refine the general plans he had sketched out in London. He settled down in his leather chair and surrounded himself with piles of guidebooks and volumes on true crime.

He decided that one good plan would not suffice. Since he was an amateur, he should not rely upon success on the first venture. Accidents were tricky. People often survived the most lethal situations, while others succumbed to a fall over a footstool. The more accidents he could arrange, the better his chances for eliminating… the victim. Now that she was a real person to him, he hesitated to think of her as Susan when planning her demise. A study of the itinerary suggested several possibilities to the hopeful murderer. Beginning on Sunday, when he would rejoin the group in Exeter, he hoped to schedule one potential accident per day.