It was on the tip of Elizabeth’s unrepentant Jacobite tongue to snap back, “Well, it oughtn’t to be!” But she realized that airport officials take a dim view of unsanctioned patriots, and that such a reply could lead to an unpleasant half-hour search of herself and her belongings, on the off chance that she was that rarest of political animals: a Scottish terrorist. In any case, the man looked much too harried to be interested in a discussion of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Rebellion of 1745, so she smiled sweetly, hoisted her bags, and hurried away to find the airport lobby.
It would be several hours yet before all of the tour members’ planes arrived, since they had set out from half a dozen different cities. Elizabeth, the only one not flying in from the United States, had arrived just after nine in the morning, which gave her at least four hours to wait for the coach and guide, scheduled to meet the party at two o’clock. The rendezvous point for the murder mystery tour was to be the luggage carousel on the first floor of the airport. Until then, lacking name tags with which to identify each other as fellow travelers, the early-arriving tour members would prowl the airport shops and restaurants, killing time until someone came to collect them.
Elizabeth first looked round all the eating places, marveling at the exorbitant food prices. Although she had been in Scotland for a little over two months, her mind still ran on the U.S. currency system, which, at the current exchange rate, meant doubling the stated price of everything, in order to get an emotional understanding of how much anything cost. Inevitably, the short answer was: too much. She read the McDonald’s sign with an expression of disbelief usually reserved for UFO sightings.
“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.”