Missing Susan (5 page)

“They’re charging
four dollars
for a hamburger!” she muttered. “I wouldn’t pay that if they were making them out of last year’s Derby winner.”

Similar responses to menu prices in Edinburgh had caused Cameron to remark that after only eight weeks in residence, she was out-Scottishing the Scots. Elizabeth replied that it was culture shock, and began muttering threats about CARE packages whenever she went out shopping.

“Anyway,” she said, turning her back on the metaphorical golden arches, “the last thing I want to eat in Britain is American food. I’ll go back to the cafeteria and have tea and scones.”

The return trek to the upstairs restaurant took longer than it should have, because the hallway led past Elizabeth’s main weakness: a row of gift shops. Her cousin Geoffrey liked to
remark that had Elizabeth been aboard the
Titanic
, she would have checked the gift shop for a Going Out of Business Sale before proceeding to the lifeboat. She glanced at an enticing window display of Beefeater teddy bears and scenic linen towels. It wouldn’t hurt to browse for a little while, she thought. It’s not as if I’m short of time.

Once inside she went straight to the postcard rack, assuring herself that she was only looking, because it would be stupid to buy postcards in the airport on the first day of a three-week tour. Well, maybe just a couple, to give herself a head start on correspondence. There didn’t seem to be much point in attempting to correspond with Cameron, who would be at sea for five more weeks, annoying the seals of the north Atlantic. “Perhaps you could toss a note in a Guinness bottle into the sea at Land’s End,” he’d suggested, when she brought up the subject of writing. To which she replied that there’d be enough Guinness bottles aboard the research vessel without her contributing to the supply.

With Cameron incommunicado, the list of correspondents dwindled to her parents, her brother Bill, her insufferable cousin Geoffrey, and her new in-laws. She was searching the postcard rack for cards suitably impertinent for Bill and Geoffrey, when a tall young woman beside her picked up a postcard portrait of Princess Diana and said, “Back in the States we have a mystery writer who looks just like her!”

Elizabeth was unable to think of a reply to this gambit, and she wasn’t entirely sure that this total stranger was addressing her. (There is nothing worse than replying to a stranger’s pleasantry, only to discover that the intended recipient of the remark is the person standing directly behind you.)

She smiled vaguely to indicate polite disinterest, then went back to studying the postcards.

“You’re American, aren’t you?” the woman persisted.

Elizabeth, suspecting insult, longed to reply in the negative, but such an accusation is difficult to deny with a Virginia
accent. She took a long look at her interrogator. The woman was the personification of Cheerleader: shoulder-length blonde hair, trim figure, and a perky beauty-pageant smile. Just the sort of person that Elizabeth wished the Japanese would hunt, instead of whales. She summoned up a chilling smile. “I’m from Virginia. How did you guess?”

The woman shrugged. “You just look American, I guess. Anyway, you’re wearing a fairystone necklace, and you can only get them in Virginia. They’re a natural crystal formation, right? Only found in the mountains. I know because I traveled the Blue Ridge Parkway with my parents when I was twelve.”

“Good detective work,” said Elizabeth grudgingly, fingering her staurolite necklace. She made a mental note to give fairystones to every British woman she knew next Christmas. (Take that, Sherlock!)

“I guess some of it rubbed off,” came the complacent reply. “I read a lot of murder mysteries.”

Elizabeth stared at her and at last the penny dropped. (Or, at the current exchange rate, two cents did.) “Are you, by any chance, with the murder mystery tour that’s meeting here this afternoon?”

“That’s right!” said the woman, beaming. “My name is Susan Cohen. Are you on it, too?”

Elizabeth nodded slowly. “Elizabeth MacPherson,” she said, withholding her title in a rare gesture of modesty. “Where are you from?”

“Minneapolis,” said Susan eagerly. “Have you ever been there? It’s in the Midwest, but it isn’t at all provincial like the coastal people think it is. It’s the most gorgeous city in the world.”

Elizabeth managed to refrain from asking why Susan had bothered to leave this Shangri-la for a mere excursion to England. “I’m from Virginia originally,” she said, “but I just
got married in July, so now I live in Edinburgh. For a while, at least. We’re still negotiating careers.”

Susan looked around. “But your husband didn’t come on the tour?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “He had better fish to fry.” She explained about the oceangoing expedition, and the six-week separation that she decided to fill with a package tour. She looked appraisingly at the youthful Susan. “So I’m not man-hunting or anything on this trip. In fact I was sure that everyone else on this tour was going to be much older than I.”

“I expect they will be,” said Susan Cohen complacently. “After all, we can’t all be heiresses.”

We all are so far
, thought Elizabeth, mindful of the receipt of her great-aunt Augusta’s money which came to her upon her marriage. She didn’t think it was a topic you ought to broach with strangers in an airport, though. “I was just going to get some tea,” she said.

“Great!” said Susan, cheerfully abandoning the postcards. “The airline breakfast was lousy. The French toast tasted like they made it with Play-Doh. I’m going to write a letter of complaint to the airline.”

They started off together down the hall, dodging baggage-laden passengers. “It sounds like a very interesting tour, doesn’t it?” said Elizabeth.

“The perfect combination,” Susan agreed. “I just love England, and I love mysteries. My uncle Aaron says that my house will probably collapse under the weight of all the books I have. See, I used to read all the time. I mean
all
the time. I was an only child, you know, and I didn’t have a lot of friends.” She laughed. “I guess I was kind of an ugly duckling.”

Whereas now you are a nonstop parrot
, thought Elizabeth. But, she had to admit, a pretty one. Aloud she said, “You seem to have made a satisfactory transition to swandom.”

“I know. Isn’t it amazing? After Grandpa Benjie died and
left me a fortune, one of the girls down at the library where I worked—her name was Claire, and she was the children’s librarian—anyway, Claire said, ‘If I were you, I’d take some of that money and become gorgeous.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, why not?’ Because in Minnesota, even though it’s cold for a lot of the year, we have gyms and health clubs, so there’s really no excuse not to exercise.” She looked appraisingly at Elizabeth. “I suppose you haven’t found any gyms yet in Edinburgh?
Anyhow
, I’d never bothered before, because I went to an all-girls’ college, and I was so shy and all, that there really didn’t seem to be any point in it. But about a year ago, after Grandpa Benjie left me his money, I could afford to quit my library job …”

By this time they had found the cafeteria, selected their tea and scones, and paid for them, found a table and settled in for elevenses, during the course of which Susan had recited her biography without pausing for breath.
Three weeks
, Elizabeth kept thinking.
Three weeks.
“Look at this passport picture,” said Susan triumphantly. “It stops them cold in customs.”

Dutifully, Elizabeth accepted the blue passport booklet, and turned to look at Susan’s photograph. “This is
you?”
she blurted out. Sure enough, the identification page said Susan Cohen, 420 North Fifth Street, Minneapolis, but the face that looked back from the passport was a round-faced woman with short mouse-brown hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses balanced on a Roman nose. Her protruding front teeth made her look like an intellectual beaver. Elizabeth could see why the photo gave the immigration people pause. The Susan Cohen who sat across the table from her wolfing down a scone bore little resemblance to the dumpling girl in the passport. “That’s quite a change,” she murmured, handing it back.

“I know. Isn’t money wonderful? I went to a dear old plastic surgeon in Long Beach. My doctor recommended
him. He’s a friend of the family. I’ve always called him Uncle Bob, and he told me to go to this friend of his up the coast. Anyhow, I went to see him for a consultation. He took this computer thingamabob and scanned in a picture of me, and then he adjusted the machine to show me various changes that we could make. Noses, jawline, everything! Do you like this nose? It’s Katharine Hepburn’s. After that, I had my teeth fixed, and I went to one of those fat farms, and got a wardrobe consultant, and now I’m perfect.”

“How amusing for you,” said Elizabeth, who had heard that the Queen said that to people who were being completely obnoxious.

The sarcasm was lost on her table partner. “I suppose so,” said Susan. “If you can afford it, you ought to give it a try. I think they all did a nice job on me, but I’m not sure what to do next. It’s not like I want to be an actress or anything. And I don’t need a job. I mean, sometimes I say to myself: what’s the point? But you know what? People are nicer to you if you’re pretty. Isn’t that weird? It seems so unfair, doesn’t it?”

Elizabeth managed to get a nod in edgewise.

“Actually, I haven’t exactly turned into a party girl. I guess I was too old to learn to like it. What’s the point of talking to a bunch of boring strangers while you overeat? So I do my exercises and read my books and stay at home with my cats—there’s Dickens and Waldo and Wilkie and Trollope. Trollope is female, get it? I had her fixed, though. And as I said, I read a lot. I think people are much nicer in books than they are in person, don’t you?”

At least
, thought Elizabeth,
they are easier to shut up.
Aloud she said, “Actually, in the books I usually read, the people are nowhere near as nice as those I meet in real life. I like true crime.”

Susan appeared less than thrilled by this revelation. “True
crime? That’s pretty ghoulish. Sort of perverted, I mean. How did you get interested in that?”

“I am a forensic anthropologist,” Elizabeth reminded her in icy tones, “but actually, it all began a few years ago on an archaeological dig in Scotland. One of the other diggers was a crime buff and he sparked my interest.” She neglected to mention what fate befell this crime buff. Besides, the truth was that Elizabeth’s fervors were short-lived, lasting for approximately six months each. Having gone through her Brontë phase, her sea lion fixation, and her most recent (and to her loved ones particularly trying) royal flush, she was now occupying her intellect with murder most foul, until the next idée fixe happened along.

“In fact, I brought along a true crime book today. I kept it with me in case I had time to read.” She reached into her purse and brought out a copy of
Death Takes A Holiday: A Murder Guide to Britain
by Rowan Rover. “It covers old murder cases in just the areas we will visit on this tour.”

“Do you think the guide will take us to those?” asked Susan. “I hope not. I wanted to see things of real cultural importance, like Agatha Christie’s home, and the cathedral of Brother Cadfael, and—”

“But those aren’t real crimes!” Elizabeth protested.

“But they were set in real places,” said Susan with unshakable logic. “And they’re much more famous. Besides, those PBS
Mystery!
adaptations are always filmed on location. Wouldn’t it be great to visit a movie set?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “I want to see the roof where Charles Bravo threw up the poison his wife gave him. And I thought that as long as I was here early, I’d use this book to find some other places of interest to the group—just in case the guide isn’t familiar with this text.”

“Lucky for you that I turned up, isn’t it?” said Susan. “Imagine being stuck here all day with that nasty reference
book. I find it impossible to read in airports with all the noise and confusion.”

Elizabeth managed a feeble smile. “Lucky me,” she said.

   Elsewhere in the airport Alice MacKenzie, her finger inserted in a cup of ice water, was debarking from a flight that had seemed to last six months. Under these circumstances, she bore a newfound indifference to the charms of Britain.

Alice was a gray-haired woman in her mid-fifties with a penchant for pantsuits and sensible shoes, and she was not the least bit embarrassed to enter Great Britain wearing a Dixie cup on her forefinger. It would be silly to value appearances more than comfort, in her oft-stated opinion.

Alice had boarded the plane many time zones earlier in southern California, full of excitement about the upcoming murder mystery tour of England. A retired teacher from San Diego, she was a mystery buff who combined a keen love of travel with an interest in the island origins of her MacKenzie ancestors. When she read about the tour in a local newspaper, it seemed the perfect combination of both her passions.

“Go,” said her second husband Richard, who was not retired. “I have enough work at the office for two people. Besides, as long as the sports channel doesn’t go on the fritz and the pizzeria doesn’t stop delivering, I can manage.”

So Alice had boarded the plane with last minute instructions about the houseplants and the cat, and promises to call each weekend to check on him and give him tour updates. Once the plane began to taxi down the runway, Alice relegated the cat, the houseplants, and Richard to a mental broom closet. She settled back happily with her guidebook to anticipate the coming adventure. She was going to keep a journal of the trip, so that she could relive it privately in the months to come. Perhaps she would write it up for her book club. She pictured herself guest speaker at one of the winter
meetings, regaling her friends with details of her sojourn in England.

Several cramped, monotonous hours later, Alice was beginning to feel like the modern equivalent of a wagon train pioneer. At least the forty-niners got more to eat than salted peanuts and Diet Coke. And they didn’t have to sit next to a snoring businessman for three thousand miles.