Missing Susan

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Rowan Rover blinked. “Boats?”

  “Oh, yes!” cried Emma Smith. “I read The Mists of Avalon! Wasn’t it wonderful? You got into a little boat and if you just crossed the river-or whatever the water was-you ended up in Glastonbury, but if you got into the boat and said the magic words, you ended up on the magic island of Avalon!”

  “It’s a very holy place for the Church, too,” said Rowan, postponing the answer to Maud’s question and the inevitable reaction. “Joseph of Arimathea is said to have brought the Holy Grail here, and when he planted his staff in the earth, it grew into the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury.”

  “You might want to explain who Joseph of Arimathea was,” Elizabeth whispered to the guide.

  “Nonsense!” said Rowan. “Everybody knows that!”

  “They’re Californians,” said Elizabeth gently.

  “Who was Joseph What’s-His-Name?” asked Kate Conway, looking blank and beautiful.

  Rowan sighed. “He was the man who gave the tomb in which Jesus was buried after the Crucifixion. Legend has it that Joseph was in possession of the Holy Grail-that’s the cup used by Christ during the Last Supper, for those of you who didn’t see Paul Newman in The Silver Chalice.” By this time Bernard had found a public parking lot on the brick-lined high street of a small country town. He was pulling the coach into a space near a cluster of other tour vehicles. “Here we are,” he announced. “Abbey is just to the left there.”

  Radiating astonishment, Maud Marsh peered out the window. “This is Glastonbury?” she demanded.

  “Right.”

  “It isn’t an island?”

  “No.”

  “Damned English. They lie about everything!”

  As they walked up to the admission complex adjoining the entrance to the grounds, Rowan Rover explained that the geography of England does not stay the same. “You remember that St. Michael’s Mount was once a mountain in a forest, and now it is an island in Mount’s Bay. Glastonbury was indeed an island centuries ago. The Celts called it Ynis Witrin, the isle of glass. It was once a towering peak in an inland sea, but now it is surrounded only by Somerset’s flat meadows and marshland, some of which has been drained in modern times, I expect. Progress, you know.”

  “No wonder the fairies left England,” muttered Emma Smith, still thinking of The Mists of Avalon. She was looking paler than usual and she seemed irritable.

  Rowan Rover showed the group’s admission pass, and led them through the gates and into the grounds of the ruined abbey. A few yards from the iron gates, Rowan stopped beside a spreading tree, about twelve feet in height. “That,” he said, “is the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury.”

  Nancy Warren examined a branch with the eye of a practiced gardener. “It’s a hawthorn tree,” she announced.

  “A variation thereof,” Rowan agreed. “But this tree flowers in December. A cutting of white flowering branches is sent each year to the royal family as a Christmas gift.”

  “It can’t be the original tree,” said Nancy Warren, whose belief in miracles did not extend to botany.

  “No, Cromwell’s men cut it down in their usual rage against holy relics. This is descended from a cutting of the original. Now, if you’ll come this way, I’ll tell you what these ruins are and we shall find the grave of King Arthur.”

  For a pleasant hour they walked about the spreading green lawn amid the soaring ruins of the abbey. Charles took many pictures, conscious of the deepening twilight that would soon envelop the site. The others wandered around, strangely quiet, trying to imagine the church in all its medieval splendor.

  Rowan, consulting his guidebook with great discretion, told them about the twelfth-century historian, William of Malmesbury, who wrote a chronicle of the abbey, placing its founding a thousand years before his time. According to legend, Ireland’s St. Patrick ended his days as abbot of Glastonbury, and St. Bridget and Wales’ patron saint, David, also visited the holy site. The Domesday Book pronounced it free from taxation, and the Viking raiders left it alone. Just after Malmesbury’s time, a fire destroyed the old structures, but even that turned out to be a mixed blessing, because in the old burial ground, the monks discovered two oak coffins, containing the remains of a large man and a woman with strands of golden hair still clinging to her skull. A leaden cross found with them identified the bodies as those of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. The bodies were reburied in a shrine within the church, and the site of that burial was located again in 1934.

  “What a lot of famous people have been here!” said Kate Conway. “King Arthur! St. Patrick! Imagine a Grauman’s Chinese Theatre of saints’ footprints!”

  “If it’s so important to England, you’d think they’d have taken better care of it,” said Susan disapprovingly. Seeing the others’ frowns, she said, “Well, they restored the shopping mall in Exeter after the Blitz, didn’t they? Why couldn’t they rebuild one old church?”

  Rowan Rover closed his eyes and counted to ten in several languages. Finally he glanced at his watch and, with evident relief, announced, “It is nearly six o’clock, ladies and Charles. The grounds are closing, and we are due in Bath this evening. Tomorrow we shall be seeing the ruins of the Roman baths.”

  Rowan was looking forward to inspecting the drowning facilities.

  By seven o’clock that evening, they had arrived in Bath and had been shown to their rooms in the stately Francis Hotel in the city center. The hotel, an eighteenth-century building overlooking Queen’s Square, adjoined the residence occupied by Jane Austen when she visited that elegant spa of Georgian England. The natural hot springs over which the city is built were much prized by the Romans, who built the spa baths for their soldiers. Taking the waters became fashionable again in the eighteenth century when Beau Nash made London the playground of the aristocracy. Much of the classic Georgian architecture of the time remains, making Bath an architectural treasure, if not an English Lourdes. (“Wait until you taste the waters,” Rowan kept telling them gleefully.)

  At eight Rowan had exchanged his khaki windbreaker for a tweed jacket and was waiting for the rest of the party in the dining room, where they were expected for dinner en masse. His head count, though, showed that there were three people missing.

  He was just trying to figure out who they were when Maud Marsh appeared in the doorway. “We can go in to dinner now,” she told him. “I’m afraid Miriam and Emma won’t be joining us. Emma is quite ill.”

  “There stood arcades of stone, the stream hotly issued

  With eddies widening up to the wall,

  encircling all.”

  – SAXON POEM, EIGHTH CENTURY

  CHAPTER 12

  BATH

  NEITHER EMMA NOR her mother appeared for breakfast the next morning, but since traveler’s tummy was a condition familiar to all of them, no one was particularly worried. They were impressed, though, by the touching concern of Rowan Rover, who appeared genuinely grieved by Emma’s indisposition and who insisted that she have a doctor in to examine her.

  “I almost wish that I were the one who was sick,” sighed Kate Conway. “Isn’t Rowan being sweet?”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth. “It is most unlike him.”

  “I wonder if Bath’s healing waters would do Emma any good,” mused Maud Marsh.

  “I very much doubt it,” said Alice. “Jane Austen must have drunk quite a lot of it and she died of Addison’s disease at forty-two.”

  “Well,” said Susan, “I’m still going to drink some of it.”

  Alice looked at her with a glint in her eye. “You do that, Susan.”

  After he had seen to Emma and her mother, Rowan gulped down his own breakfast, and arrived in the hotel lobby just at ten o’clock to lead the tour of the Roman baths and museum.

  “This will take just over an hour,” he told the group, looking particularly at Elizabeth. “After that you may have the rest of the day to sack the city. I’m sure you will make the locals forget the Romans.”

  “I’m going t
o the library,” said Elizabeth, the picture of virtue.

  “Before or after you shop?”

  “Both.”

  As they were leaving the hotel, Elizabeth posted the letters she had written the night before. The one to Cameron was an unfortunate exercise in newlywed purple prose, followed by a cheerful and chatty account of her travels, mentioning the places she’d like to visit again (“Perhaps you ought to check out Dozmary Pool for seals…”). The letter Elizabeth wrote to her brother Bill was also a travelogue, but considerably funnier, mostly at Susan’s expense. She discovered, though, that it was difficult on paper to convey just how annoying Susan really was. Quoted singly, any of Susan’s remarks might seem merely dull, or at best, a trifle eccentric. It was the cumulative effect of the running commentary hour after hour that wore down one’s nerves. Elizabeth felt that she could pass any test devised on the history and geography of Minnesota, or write a Cohen cat genealogy, and she could hear Susan’s voice droning mystery plot summaries in her sleep. All this aggravation would be impossible to impart without a fifty-page transcript of Susan’s endless monologue. She wondered at Rowan’s boundless tact and patience. Susan didn’t seem to annoy him at all. Perhaps he sees all of us that way, she thought with sudden humility.

  Rowan Rover, leading the party in the direction of the baths, was lecturing wittily on the eighteenth-century antics of Beau Nash and the transformation of provincial Bath into the St. Tropez of Georgian England. Of all the group, only he himself was not listening. While he talked, his mind raced back and forth across a number of topics, including: contemplating an anonymous telephone call to Emma Smith’s physician to disclose the probable nature of her illness; entertaining a hopeful thought that perhaps the poison hadn’t worked at all, and she really did have a stomach virus; and considering the possibility of issuing a refund to an assassin-employer. He pictured the interchange at the bank when he attempted to explain that he needed a loan to pay back said assassin-employer. This unpleasant scenario dissolved into a vision of a melodrama called The Custody Battle for Sebastian Melmoth Rover, Upon the Conviction of His Father for Murder Most Foul, a farce in many exhausting acts, featuring all his ex-wives as the Avenging Furies.

  No, it was all impossible. Not to be thought of. Every possible way out was worse than going ahead with the plan. He couldn’t tip the wink to Emma’s doctor, because doing so would land him on a charge of attempted murder. He couldn’t give Mr. Kosminski back his money, because he had already spent it. And he couldn’t persuade himself to abstain from murder for aesthetic reasons, because he had begun to view the killing of Susan Cohen as a pleasure, an intellectual duty, and an early Christmas present to the rest of the tour group.

  How unfortunate that she had managed to live through their stay in Cornwall, where he was best prepared to contrive a successful murder. He was still smarting over the group’s arbitrary and irrational rejection of his smugglers’ caves excursion. It would have been a perfectly splendid accident, disposing of Susan neatly without a hint of murder. Besides, it would have left the group an entire week of the mystery tour which they could have enjoyed in blissful harmony, without so much as hearing the word Minneapolis uttered in their presence. As it was, Susan was alive and well. Even now he heard her saying:

  “Oh, look! A bakery! In Minneapolis I buy my fresh-baked bread at…”

  He saw the others cringe and edge away from her relentless nattering. Let them get an earful, he thought brutally. God knows I’ve tried to eliminate her.

  The unpleasant implications of this last figure of speech forced all further reverie from his mind and concentrated his mind wonderfully on the exhibit at hand: one two-thousand-year-old swimming pool filled with water so murky and foul-tasting that one corpse more could hardly matter.

  While Rowan was reflecting on his ominous intentions, the other members of the party were admiring the architecture of Bath, with its graceful Georgian buildings and its arcades of elegant boutiques. When they reached the stone building that housed the baths and museum, they found that it was in the square adjoining the cathedral. Since medieval times the English city of Bath had been built atop the ruins of the Roman city of Aquae Sulis, so that the ancient baths themselves had lain intact but undiscovered below street level for many centuries, until excavations in the eighteenth century led to the discovery of Roman ruins and the restoration of the baths.

  “Is there some sort of spring here, like Old Faithful?” asked Frances Coles.

  Rowan, who had no idea what Old Faithful was, replied with his stock answer. “The guidebook explains that the main spring, under the city center here, sends up a quarter of a million gallons a day, and maintains a constant temperature of 46.5 degrees centigrade. Apparently the spring water is the rain of ten thousand years ago, which penetrated deep into the earth and was warmed by geothermal heat.”

  “Can we bathe in the springs?” asked Maud Marsh. “Not that I’d want to.”

  “No bathing. But at the end of the tour in the pump room you can buy a glassful. Now come this way. First we will look at the exhibits of Roman artifacts and then we will walk through the complex containing the baths.”

  The dimly lit display rooms featured exhibits of objects found over the course of several centuries of construction and excavation. Simple tombstones inscribed in Latin, intricate mosaics, and fragments of statuary were on display, each in its own little circle of light. Farther along they saw the array of objects that had been removed from the baths themselves. The placard explained that to the Romans, the springs were not only heated pools for cleanliness and recreation, but also sacred waters dedicated to the goddess Minerva Sulis. Worshipers threw coins, jewelry, and other offerings into the pools as a tribute to the deity.

  “Emma would have loved seeing this,” murmured Elizabeth. “It’s too bad she had to miss it.”

  “Look at this!” cried Alice MacKenzie, pointing to the next display. “Curses!”

  “Yes,” said Rowen, motioning for the group. “The Sacred Spring was considered a way to bring divine retribution on one’s enemies. Disgruntled Romans would write their grievance on a piece of pewter. May he who stole my ring become covered with sores and die in agony. That sort of thing. Then the complainant would throw the pewter message into the spring, and wait for the goddess to smite down the guilty party. Today, I suppose, we’d write a letter to the Times.”

  “I’d be tempted to try that one,” said Alice, casting a baleful glance in Susan’s direction.

  “Look out,” said Rowan lightly. “You might get what you wish for at the shrine of the goddess.”

  As they proceeded into the series of rooms containing the various bathing pools, the guide took care to be close to Susan Cohen, so that he could make the most of any chance that might arise. The Great Bath was now restored and open to the outdoors, some two stories above it, but the other rooms in the complex were enclosed and lit only by the faint strains of sunlight from without. Another group of tourists had proceeded into the baths just ahead of them, but they were farther along in the tour. A dark-haired young man, probably a college student, introduced himself as Nigel, their guide. Apparently, the mystery tourists would be taken round by themselves.

  It must look like an accident, Rowan reminded himself. She tripped, hit her head on the stone, and she fell unconscious into the pool and drowned. Alas, none of us missed her until it was too late. Of course he could not maintain his running commentary during the tour, but fortunately this was not necessary. Nigel was nattering away nineteen to the dozen about the plumbing, the drains, the bathing rituals, and all sorts of other diverting things that Rowan might otherwise have listened to. He contrived to fall behind the rest of the party, who obligingly crowded around Nigel, enthralled by his command of water trivia.

  Rowan bided his time through the dry east baths, the splendid open air Great Bath, and at last to the dark and inviting west bath, where he was determined to make his move. He let the others go in ahead of him, and t
hen slipped in quietly to the back of the group, discerning a shadowy figure of the right size and shape to be Susan. Mustn’t do it now, he thought. She’d cry out. He leaned over and whispered, “Wait here a moment.”

  He could just make out the nod of her head in the gloom. He held his breath for what seemed like hours until Nigel finished his spiel and the rest of the party turned a corner and disappeared from view. Then with a great sigh of determination, the would-be murderer put his hands on his victim’s shoulders, ready to push her into the pool and hold her head under the murky water.

  She spun round at once, and he found himself looking into the shining Bambi-lashed eyes of Kate Conway. “Oh, Rowan!” she sighed, with a trace of a giggle in her voice. She threw her arms around him. “But what if somebody sees us?”

  As quickly and gently as he possibly could, Rowan disengaged himself from the fervent embrace. At any other time a nubile and willing nurse would be more than he could resist, but just now his mind was on murder. “You’re quite right,” he murmured. “Someone might see us. Some other time perhaps.”

  “Of course, I’m rooming with Maud,” she sighed. “But I suppose there’s always your room.”

  “And I would like a shot, you know,” said Rowan, improvising madly. “Except for my vow.”

  “Your vow?” echoed Kate.

  “Yes. Pesky old thing.” He was thinking furiously, enveloped in the scents of her duty-free perfume and the Francis Hotel complimentary shampoo. “I’ve sworn to remain celibate until Margaret Thatcher is no longer prime minister.”

  In the dimness, he could see Kate’s bewildered face. “But I thought she was already married.”

  Rowan shuddered at the implication of that. “No, dear,” he said gently. “It’s not Mrs. Thatcher I’m waiting for. This is for political reasons. A protest. Like fasting.”