Sharyn McCrumb - Missing Susan

Rowan pushed.

Susan moved.

The soccer game had caught her attention and, in the last split second, she moved sideways along the rock to get a better view of the playing field. Rowan Rover, hands outstretched and braced for a collision, found himself pushing molecules of air that were only too willing to step aside.

Rowan Rover pitched forward into the welcoming abyss, with an obscenity caught in his throat. His mind, which was racing in overdrive, was considering all the Famous Last Words entries in reference books. If the anthologists were to be believed, people never seemed to say “Oh shit!” as their ultimate utterance, but he was willing to bet that in accidents, that phrase topped the list of final remarks. In his terror-driven brain, properties like gravity and inertia had switched to slow motion and there seemed to be endless time left to contemplate his life-and various other philosophical points of interest. And, he reflected, if he did go to hell, he might be able to find out who Jack the Ripper actually was. A tempting prospect. He wondered if he could come back as a ghost and taunt Donald Rumblelow with the information.

As he reached a horizontal position, with a clear view of the underbrush, the rocks, and eternity, something stopped his forward catapult, so that instead of diving into space, he slammed against the edge of Roche Rock and dangled in a dizzying jackknife position halfway over the side. The obscenity lodged in his throat managed to find its way out, meandered for a short jaunt up into his nasal passages, and finally emerged triumphantly through his open jaws, leading a parade of expelled air for maximum volume. Fortunately, perhaps, for the schoolboys’ innocent ears, the word was lost amid the general screams on the precipice.

The pain of incipient bruises coursed through his body on the way to his whirling brain, and he had to sift through injury, fright, and bewilderment to ascertain why he wasn’t plummeting to his death. A further check of his senses told him that someone was holding onto his leg. Shortly thereafter he noted that he was being shouted at.

“Hold on to something, Rowan! Somebody! Help!” Elizabeth MacPherson, thought Rowan idly. Amazing that her reflexes were that good and that she could manage to hold on to him. All those shopping forays must have strengthened her grip. Obligingly, he grabbed the rock. It was shortly thereafter that he lost his celestial objectivity about the situation and began to grip the rock until his knuckles whitened, bellowing to be pulled up.

A moment later he felt another weight on his legs, very like someone sitting down on them. It secured his attachment to the rock, but did nothing to remove him from his dangling position off the side.

He heard Nancy Warren say, “I’ve got him. Where’s Charles?”

An out-of-breath masculine voice responded. “Here! I’ve got his feet. You grab his shoulders to steady him, Nancy!”

“It’s all right, Rowan,” called Elizabeth MacPherson. “It was lucky for you that I was coming over to ask you something about Constance Kent; otherwise I’d never have caught you in time.”

As they hoisted him back over the rim of the rock, Rowan heard Susan Cohen saying, “You’re not such a mountain goat after all, are you, Rowan?”

He closed his eyes and vowed to get safely down from Roche Rock, if only for the pleasure of seeing Susan Cohen dead and silenced.

CORNWALL

THE ONE FORTUNATE aspect of the entire incident was that no one seemed to have noticed that Rowan had been attempting to push Susan at the time he fell. He told them that he had suffered a dizzy spell from the heights. Their concern for his health assured him that there were no suspicions to the contrary. Aside from bruised knees and a few minor scrapes, he found that he was quite uninjured and, fearful of losing another chance at Susan, he insisted that the tour continue uninterrupted.

On his instructions Bernard continued to drive down the length of Cornwall to a picturesque castle across the inlet from Falmouth. St. Mawes, a military fortification rather than a residence, was built by Henry VIII as part of his chain of coastal defenses. Its massive guns protected Carrick Roads, still used as a berthing for oceangoing vessels. The guide took a perverse pleasure in marching his restive charges through the village high street, past any number of inviting shops, without letting them stop for even a postcard, let alone a cup of tea or a quarter of an hour of browsing. With only a trace of a limp, he led them up the hill toward the castle, past an assortment of private homes with lovely views of the inlet, and into the castle. Nancy Warren wanted to stop and examine the magnificent bushes of hydrangeas with blue flowers as big as cabbages, but Rowan was firm.

It was just past five o’clock when he herded them back to the coach, telling Bernard to forget the regular route to St. Ives. He knew a shortcut.

“We’ll take the King Harry Ferry,” he announced. “It’s just north of here.”

Bernard rolled his eyes, but, in the best British tradition, he concluded that it was not his to reason why; though if the do or die killed the bus, the company would go into fits, he was sure. Without a word of argument, he put the coach in gear and headed north on a winding, shady country road, labeled B3289 on his road atlas.

No one said very much along the way. It had been a tiring day of long walks and melodrama. The tourists were glad of a break. Rowan spent the time considering his contingency plan and wondering if the wretched Susan had nine lives-or only nine cats.

After a twenty-minute drive at a leisurely speed, they went down a long hill toward the river and joined the line of cars waiting for the ferry, which was on its way back to the dock.

“We’re the only bus in the ferry line!” Frances Coles remarked.

Bernard heaved a weary sigh and shook his head. One by one the small cars ahead of them were driven onto the flat deck of the small river ferry. When the huge coach lumbered up to the embarkation point, three ferry workers crowded about to see them safely aboard. With many hand signals and shakes of the head, they succeeded in getting the coach down the ramp with only one major scraping of the fender, to which Bernard reacted as if he had felt it personally.

The river was only about a quarter of a mile wide, approximately a five-minute journey on the ferry. The tourists amused themselves by studying the large ships anchored just downstream and by looking ahead to the tiny hillside village on the other shore. When the ferry docked, Bernard managed to get the coach onto dry land without much difficulty.

“There!” said Rowan Rover heartily, to disguise his relief. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

He had spoken prematurely. Fifty yards from the ferry dock, Bernard began to search for the road that would lead them out of the village. It was just as Rowan spoke that he discovered the route-and the fact that it involved a series of corkscrew turns up the side of the hill, at intervals approximating the length of the coach.

First Bernard stared, then he looked for another way out of the village and found none. Finally he took a deep breath and said to Rowan, “You’ll owe me a pint for this one, mate.”

“Done!” said Rowan, who was seeing his shortcut in a new light. “I’ve never been this way in a battleship before,” he explained.