Sharyn McCrumb - Missing Susan

Rowan leaped to his feet and motioned for Bernard to open the doors. “Here we are!” he announced, somewhat unnecessarily. “An ancient Celtic chapel that is not a tourist trap.” He smiled at Miriam Angel. “As you can see, there are no guides, no gates, and no admission fee. It is a simple country relic.”

A dirt trail led upward through the tangle of bushes to the foot of the rock, about a hundred yards from the road. Rowan led the way, answering questions about the shrubbery, and giving them more facts about the area. Finally, when they were all assembled on a small hill at the foot of the towering rock, the guide turned to the group and said, “Ready to go up?”

Frances Coles put her head back to survey the summit of the pinnacle. She looked up, and up, and up, until she nearly lost her balance. “Oh, my,” she murmured. “Where are the steps?”

Rowan Rover shook his head. He walked to the base of the rock and climbed three rungs up a vertical iron ladder that was hammered into the rock. There were no handrails and the rungs of the ladder were circular iron bars, hardly suited to steady footing. “Magnificent view at the top!” he told them. “Tell you what: I’ll go up to the top and help you up at the summit. Charles can stay at the foot of the ladder and steady you from below. That’s quite safe, isn’t it?”

Maud Marsh strode over to the foot of the ladder. “No guts, no glory,” she said with a shrug, and she began to follow the guide up the iron rungs.

After snapping another shot of the rock, Charles Warren did as he was instructed, taking up his place at the base of the ladder. “Who’s next?” he asked, grinning at the huddle of tourists. “Nancy?”

His wife grinned back at him. “Sure,” she said. “Just make sure you catch me, Charles.”

“Anybody else?” asked Charles, noting that Maud had nearly reached Rowan’s outstretched hand.

“I think the view is just fine from down here,” said Miriam Angel. “We’ll watch.” She sat down on a flat boulder with Emma and Martha Tabram to watch the climbers.

“We’re still deliberating!” yelled Kate Conway, who was standing with the undecided Alice MacKenzie and the horrified Frances Coles.

“You can be the next group!” Rowan called back from far above them. “There isn’t much room up here, so we’d better limit ourselves to four people at a time. I can take one more now. Susan? Not afraid, are you?”

Susan hesitated for a moment and looked down at her slick-soled Italian pumps. “You’d better not, Susan,” said Elizabeth, also looking at Susan’s footwear. “That ladder is awfully small. And it may be slippery.”

Susan cast her companion a look of scorn. “I have excellent balance,” she retorted. “In grade school I took several months of ballet.” She waved her hand at the group on the summit. “Here I come, you guys!”

Elizabeth sighed. “I’d better come with you, then.”

For anyone afraid of heights, the top of Roche Rock could fuel twenty years of nightmares. The roofless ruined chapel was missing walls on two sides so that only one’s sense of balance separated the climber from a sixty-foot plunge to the jagged rocks below. The space within the chapel was about the size of a walk-in closet, so that the climbers had to be very careful not to bump into each other as they changed positions to look at the scenery.

“You’re right about the view,” said Nancy Warren. “You can see for miles. Rowan, look almost straight down on the back side. Is that a schoolyard? What are those boys playing?”

“Football. Well, soccer to you,” Rowan replied. “What a perfect place to watch the game from. I wonder none of the school’s football fans has thought of it.”

Maud Marsh, who was looking across the fields to the northeast, motioned for Rowan to come and stand beside her. “That’s an odd-looking mountain over there,” she said, pointing to a bare hill with an escarpment of white clay.

“I’m afraid that what you’re looking at is a bit of industrial blight,” said Rowan sadly. “This part of Cornwall is the source of the clay used by the makers of fine china. You know, Wedgwood… Spode… all those wonderfully delicate works of ceramic art. That mound that you’re looking at is a refuse heap made by the china clay industry. They take the earth they want, and leave the rest behind in ugly mounds to sully the landscape. Ugly, isn’t it?”

Maud Marsh looked stern. “They’d never get away with that in Berkeley!”

“No,” said Rowan. “I expect your environmental terrorists would begin picketing before they’d deposited more than four shovels full of waste dirt.” Still, he felt a pang of sympathy for the clay quarriers. They made it possible to fashion creations of great and lasting beauty, but all anyone ever seemed to notice was their refuse dump. In his darkest drinking moods, he saw his life like that: superior intelligence and achievement that went unrewarded, while the world carped about his credit rating and his marital problems. He wondered if his much-contemplated actions were about to change his luck or whether the deed would only prove to make his spiritual refuse heap so much the greater. He reminded himself that this was not the time for philosophy.

“You’d think there’d be a better way up here than that stupid iron ladder!” Susan Cohen’s voice floated up to them several moments before her scowling face appeared at the top rung. She heaved herself onto the flat rock floor of the mined chapel and looked around while she caught her breath. “No barriers!” she exclaimed, edging forward to peer over the precipice. “That’s negligence if I ever saw it. If somebody fell off this thing, whoever owns this could get sued for a bundle.”

“We are up here at our own risk,” said Rowan. He hoped that Mr. Kosminski would not be crass enough to recoup his assassin’s fee by suing the landowner of the rock. It was definitely a consideration, but unfortunately for Rowan’s scruples, his time was running out and he could not afford to be overly fastidious in his choice of methods. “Walk around a bit,” he said to Susan. “The views are quite spectacular.”

Elizabeth MacPherson crept up the ladder, resolutely refusing to look down. She eased her way out onto the barren rock in a posture that was somewhere between a crawl and a catatonic seizure. “This is intense,” she managed to whisper. “And there’s nothing below us but rocks, whichever way you fall.” She edged her way to the one wall of the chapel that was still standing and sat with her back to it, gripping a small outcrop of rock and taking slow deep breaths while she mustered her composure.

Susan seemed undisturbed by the imminence of death. She ambled around the tiny square of rock as if it were the interior of a gift shop. “This is a funny place for a chapel,” she announced. “Like they wanted to look down on everybody. You know that Father Brown story called ‘The Hammer of God’? According to him…”

Rowan Rover, who had been standing next to the ladder, suddenly moved in behind Susan. Furtively he took in the positions of everyone else. The group down below were talking among themselves and weren’t looking up at the rock anymore. Charles Warren, still at the base of the iron ladder, was out of the line of sight. Maud Marsh and Nancy Warren were on the eastern edge of the precipice, watching the schoolyard soccer game. Fortunately the position of the afternoon sun meant that the people in the schoolyard could not clearly see the top of the rock. Elizabeth MacPherson seemed to be taking in the scenery or recovering from the shock of the heights; at any rate, she was oblivious to her companions. Now! he thought.

He edged in closer to Susan, so that he was standing beside her, but a few inches back, out of her range of vision. They were six inches from the rock floor’s ending in open space. He felt his stomach turn over as the wind touched him, reminding him of the emptiness beyond. Moving his arms slowly, so as not to attract attention, he maneuvered himself behind Susan, preparing to give her a fatal shove in her back and send her plummeting over the edge. He put his left foot forward and shifted his weight onto that foot as he leaned out, palms upright, ready to deliver the coup de grace.