Sharyn McCrumb - Missing Susan

“Free at last!” sighed Frances. “But I don’t envy you having to tell him.”

“Somebody had to,” Elizabeth replied. “Did you want to spend the day slogging through a dark cave?”

After that the talk turned to crime. The foursome listened happily to tales of police work in Penzance. Midway through the main course, Elizabeth thought of something else to ask. “Are you familiar with the case of Constance Kent?”

Burgess thought it over. “Victorian era? The teenage girl who supposedly cut her little brother’s throat?”

“That’s the one,” said Elizabeth. “Rowan and I are arguing about whether or not she did it.”

“It’s been years since I read about the case,” the inspector warned her, “but I seem to remember that there was insanity in the family. The girl’s mother was shut up in her room for years before she died. The child who was killed was the son of the second Mrs. Kent, formerly the older children’s governess. I think it was put about at the time that Constance might have taken after her mother-mentally unstable, you know. And a year or so before the murder, she tried to run away. Dressed as a boy. She wouldn’t be the first neurotic teenager who resorted to murder.”

“Thank you,” said Elizabeth. “That seems quite conclusive. I wonder what Rowan will say to that!”

Two tables away Rowan Rover’s mind was on a more immediate crime than the one at Road Hill House. He had pointed out the interesting arrangement of exposed beams in the high ceiling of the dining room, and while his tablemates were inspecting this architectural marvel, he had sprinkled some powder into Susan Cohen’s untouched glass of wine. The maneuver had been completely successful: no one had noticed his sleight of hand. After a few more minutes of conversation, Rowan, anxious to get it over with, said, “I should like to propose a toast!” He lifted his glass and smiled at his tablemates from behind a film of cold sweat. “Er-here’s to crime!” Obediently they reached for their glasses. Susan Cohen made a face. “I hate white wine,” she whined. “It tastes like horse piss. Here, Emma, your glass is empty, and you haven’t touched your water. You take my wine, and I’ll toast with water. I don’t see why they can’t serve Pepsi over here-”

Before Rowan Rover could think of a way to salvage the situation, Detective Heamoor echoed, “Here’s to crime!” and finished his glass.

With mounting horror, Rowan saw Emma Smith take a generous swallow of Susan Cohen’s tainted wine. Immediately she made a face. “You’re right, Susan,” she giggled. “It does taste like… what you said.”

After that the conversation progressed smoothly on to other topics. Rowan supposed that he must have uttered a word here and there, but he had no idea what went on at his table, beyond a vague impression that Susan had given the police officer plot summaries of a great many murder mysteries-so perhaps no one remembered much of the conversation. Rowan’s own mind was reeling with the enormity of his error, and he was frantically engaged in trying to devise some excuse to persuade Emma Smith to take an emetic. (Ipecac as a traditional Cornish beverage? But where would he get any on ten minutes’ notice so late at night?) His one consolation was that he hadn’t been able to obtain a really good poison like arsenic. His homemade herbal concoction might, after all, prove too weak to cause serious injury. Perhaps, he thought hopefully, she will have a thundering case of indigestion, for which I shall blame the seafood. Please let her survive , he thought. Idly he wondered if the Deity paid any attention at all to the prayers of aspiring murderers.

After a sleepless night of worry and more contingency planning for Susan’s demise, Rowan crept down to breakfast, half expecting his detective friends to be present in their official capacity. Instead, he found Emma Smith alive and well and eating breakfast with her mother and Maud Marsh. In his relief at this unexpected miracle, he scooped up a bowlful of Mueslix and sat down at their table.

“Good morning, ladies. How are you? How are you, Emma?” Never had the greeting been less perfunctory.

“Oh, I’m all right, I suppose,” Emma replied, but her tone suggested that she might have complained if she’d tried.

“Feeling a bit seedy?” asked Rowan. “Probably the rich food. Let me bring you a glass of milk.” Milk, he knew, could also act to lessen the effects of certain poisons. It was worth a try.

Half an hour later the group was assembled in the parking lot, marveling at another perfect summer day granted to them in late September.

“It’s St. Michael’s Mount this morning, isn’t it?” asked Nancy Warren.

“Can’t we go to Land’s End?” asked Elizabeth MacPherson.

“No,” snapped the guide. “That place is a complete tourist trap. I do have my standards. They may be low, but I have them. St. Michael’s Mount is much less commercial.”

“All right,” said Elizabeth. “It’s just that I was reading some English folklore about the lost land of Lyonesse, now covered by the sea. It’s supposed to be off the shore at Land’s End, and they say that during storms you can still hear the church bells of the drowned village, tolling beneath the waves.”

Rowan’s glare was flint. “Perhaps you’d like to go there on a buying spree this afternoon.”

This salvo ended all further discussion, and the rebellious flock boarded the bus in chastened silence. Susan managed to maintain this silence until the coach was nearly out of the grounds of Tregenna Castle. “I thought Mont St. Michel was over near France,” she remarked. “Have you read Aaron Elkins’ book Old Bones? It’s set out there, and it’s about this-”

Rowan lunged for the microphone and cut her off in mid-gallop. “Some of you may have confused Cornwall’s Mount St. Michael with its French counterpart Mont St. Michel.” Those of you to whom the word atlas denotes a brand of tire , he finished silently. “Actually the two differ somewhat in size and are located in entirely different places geographically. The French one is, conveniently enough, in the Channel, off the coast of France. The Cornish one was a port on the tin route to the Mediterranean in Roman times, but in 1070 a monastery was founded there by monks from Mont St. Michel.”

“William the Conqueror’s doing, I suppose?” said Alice.

“Probably. It’s a captivating place. An ancient granite castle seems to rise out of the rock itself at the summit of a mound surrounded by the sea. Actually, it will be interesting to see whether it is an island when we arrive. At high tide, the Mount is a few hundred yards from shore, but when the tide is out, you can walk out to it. There is a paved path leading from the shore to the stone steps at the harbor.”

“Maybe we could swim!” said Kate Conway, with rather more enthusiasm than she showed for walking.

Rowan Rover was stunned. “Swim? In the seas off Cornwall? You might as well go snorkeling in the sewage treatment plant. If it is low tide, you may walk the path to St. Michael’s Mount; otherwise, you will enrich a local boatman by fifty pence for a three-minute ride to the rock.”

Elizabeth, remembering the legend of Lyonesse, said, “How long ago was the island cut off from the mainland?”

“Well, the old Cornish name for the Mount means gray rock in the middle of the forest. There are still traces of old tree trunks in Mount’s Bay. Legend has it that the rock used to be five miles inland and in the middle of a dense forest. The forest was submerged by the sea around the time that Stonehenge was built-long before the arrival of the Romans. Or the French.”

“Is it a fortress?” asked Charles Warren.