Sharyn McCrumb - Missing Susan

For a while tonight, though, I thought you might have to defend me on an assault and battery charge, but I managed to keep my temper and did not slug the woman, much as she deserved it. No doubt you are not wondering what I am talking about, but I’ll tell you anyway.

I was sitting in the parlor of the Randolph Hotel, waiting for everyone else to turn up for tea, when this apparently friendly English lady came over and started chatting me up. This Mrs. Pope-Locksley lives in Oxford; she just comes to tea at the Randolph for fun, I suppose; or possibly to bait the Americans. I suspected nothing; she seemed nice enough. Ha!

So she asks me where I’m from, and I said Virginia, and she starts going on about Alexandria and Fairfax, and all the other bedrooms of D.C. No, I told her, I live in the Blue Ridge, close to Tennessee and eastern Kentucky. That set her off. “Eeee-oow,” she says in that little toffee voice, “Appa-lay-cha.” And she goes on for what seemed like a week about the primitive people living there, and what gun-toting barbarians we all were. Apparently, the old bat mistook Deliverance for a documentary!

I wasted a lot of time protesting. You know, “I live in Appalachia, and I have a Ph.D. and my brother’s an attorney.” And “Pearl Buck is from West Virginia, and she got the Nobel Prize for literature.” And “Actually, the homicide rate in the mountains is quite low. It’s Richmond that’s dangerous, and it’s on the coast, where the English settled.” Waste of breath. I don’t think she heard a word I said. She droned on and on about what a wild and savage place it was, and then she called a friend over, and they asked me if we had electricity and indoor plumbing at home!

Fortunately, the Warrens arrived just then and rescued me, but I was close to tears for half an hour. Oxford has been a great shock to me. All my life I’ve thought of it as a center of culture and learning, and in one day I discover that they sell master’s degrees like a matchbook diploma mill, and that people in Oxford can be just as ignorant and rude as people from anywhere else.

Aside from the boorish Mrs. Pope-Locksley, the rest of the tour has been delightful, although somewhat restrictive on shopping opportunities. And fraught with bad luck. We seem to have had more than our share of accidents. First, our guide almost falls off a sixty-foot precipice in Cornwall, and then a lovely woman from Colorado becomes ill and has to fly home. Yesterday and today we had two mishaps! I tried to turn on the light switch in the bathroom and got a severe electric shock. If I’d tried it with wet hands, I might be dead. And then, Martha Tabram, the Canadian surgeon’s wife, fell in the street and was almost hit by a bus. She has turned her ankle so badly that she has to leave the tour as well.

Unfortunately, the one member of the group that we could really spare-the interminable Susan-is impervious to harm and impossible to shut up. With all these accidents going on, I do wish one of them would zero in on her. She really is a pain. Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if somebody were trying to kill Susan, and kept missing?

Before Elizabeth completed the letter to her brother, she stared at that last sentence for a long time, lost in thought.

LONDON

AS OXFORD IS only thirty miles from London, the last day’s coach journey was a brief one. Before Rowan had finished elaborating on the gruesome details of Francis Dashwood’s Hellfire Club in the caves at West Wycombe, Bernard announced that they were coming into the city. “You think Cornwall’s country lanes are bad,” he added. “Wait till you see the asphalt bridle paths they call streets in Bloomsbury. We may have to orbit the hotel for an hour, before I figure out a way to get the coach in there. Thank God it’s not rush hour.”

“No hurry, Bernard,” Rowan assured him. “It’s just on eleven now.”

The coach had one less passenger for the trip to London. An Oxford physician recommended that Martha Tabram stay on a few days to rest her injured ankle. After that, she would be meeting her daughter in London. The group had signed a get-well card and sent it up to her room before they left. Undaunted by this latest patch of misfortune, the remaining tour members spent the ride to London making plans to see shows and discussing the London phase of the tour. Only Elizabeth MacPherson was quieter than usual. She kept looking over at the sleeping Susan Cohen, with a thoughtful expression on her face.

That afternoon, armed with daily passes to the Underground, the tour members assembled in the Baker Street station for their visit to Madame Tussaud’s famous wax museum. After Charles Warren posed them for photographs with the wax effigies of the royal family in the Grand Hall (Elizabeth, Kate, and Nancy Warren), and with Agatha Christie in the Conservatory (Alice and Frances), Rowan led them hurriedly past the rock stars and the politicians, down the stairs to the Chamber of Horrors.

While everyone else maintained a polite interest in the realistic atmosphere of the Victorian street scene and the sinister wax images lurking about the dimly lit tableaux, Elizabeth and Rowan rushed from one display to another, greeting the killers like old friends.

“People from home!” giggled Elizabeth, pointing to two men carrying a body in a wooden tea chest.

Rowan nodded. “Ay, yes, Burke and Hare, the Edinburgh bodysnatchers. The gallows over there is authentic, by the way. The museum got it from the Hertford Gaol in 1878.”

“Why don’t they label these things?” gmmbled Alice MacKenzie. “Some of these people could be politicians, for all I know.” She pointed to a prosperous-looking wax gentleman in a vintage brown suit.

“That fellow is John George Haigh,” Rowan told her. “He’s famous for luring a wealthy old lady to his so-called factory in Sussex, where he murdered her and dissolved the body in an acid bath. He’s wearing his own suit, by the way. He donated it to Madame Tussaud’s on the eve of his execution. Over here is John Christie, of Ten Rillington Place, who entombed his victims behind the walls of his house. Imagine the surprise of the next tenant when he began to redecorate!”

“I don’t think we have any weird killers in Minnesota,” said Susan. “They’re all from Wisconsin.”

“Who is the couple in the dock?” asked Maud Marsh, pointing to a small bespectacled man and the pretty dark-haired girl beside him. “She looks rather sweet.”

Rowan motioned the group over to the exhibit. “That charming couple is Harvey Hawley Crippen and the lovely Ethel LeNeve,” he told them. “Poor old sod. He killed his shrew of a wife and buried her in the basement. If he’d done it today, the case would barely have made the papers and he’d have been out in ten years. But in 1910 people called him a monster, and he was hanged for it.”

“That’s his girlfriend, I suppose?” said Alice, pointing to the young girl’s statue.

“Yes, that’s his motive for murdering his wife, who was much less charming. Ethel may not have known about the murder. She was acquitted at the trial anyhow. Although I think she might have suspected something when he asked her to dress as a boy and flee the country with him on a steamship. Over there is the actual telegram that was dispatched by the ship’s captain to alert Scotland Yard to their presence on his ship.”