To Perish in Penzance by Jeanne M. Dams Page B

I’d wake soon.
    But I wouldn’t, and neither would Alan.
    I went back and sat on my rock, staring this time at nothing. I was very much afraid Alan was going to worry himself to a frazzle over this, fretting all the more because he could play no active role in the investigation of this crime. He’d blame himself for not solving the first murder, all those years ago. He’d wonder if this death was related, and he’d turn everything over in his mind, trying to force from his memory some tiny fact that would help. He’d feel old and ineffectual and useless.
    Well, I wouldn’t let that happen! I slapped my hand on my knee. “I will not have it!” My shout startled a gull that had once more ventured too close. It flapped away with a scream that, in turn, startled me.
    Where
was
Alan? I looked at my watch, but since I had no idea when he’d left, the time shown on the dial told me nothing. I felt as though he’d been gone an hour, but common sense told me that probably no more than fifteen minutes or so had elapsed. We’d taken—what?—about ten to come down from the head of the path, but we’d moved slowly on my account. Alan would have gone up faster, but then he had to get to the car, make the phone call, wait for the police to arrive, and escort them down.
    Another twenty minutes, then, at a bare minimum. For the first time in my life I wished I were a smoker. A cigarette would at least give me something to do, and maybe a nicotine hit would keep me from thinking too much?
    I had never smoked. That dubious comfort was denied me. I sat and watched the waves.
    The tide was coming in.
    Fast.
    I stood, in an instant panic again. What did I know about tides?
    Precious little. I’d spent my first sixty-odd years living in southern Indiana, many hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. I had a vague idea that there were two high tides a day and two low tides, but that they were not at exact six-hour intervals; that’s why seaside places issued tide tables. The figure of half an hour stuck in my mind. Was it six and a half hours from high tide to low, more or less? Or twelve and a half from one high tide to the next? Or did the variation work the other way? Could I somehow work it out from when low tide was three days ago, at Marazion?
    Well, no, I couldn’t. I was too ignorant. All I knew for certain was that each powerful wave that swept into the cove came up a little higher than the one before. Where Alan and I had walked dry shod to the cave, wavelets now lapped. Water licked at the base of what I had come to think of as “my” rock. As I watched in horror, an especially large wave rolled into the cave, going back a few inches before retreating.
    It couldn’t—it mustn’t—
    I took deep breaths again.
Think
, Dorothy!
    I could do nothing about the tide. King Canute couldn’t stop it, and neither could I. Nor could I blunder into the cave to try to rescue Alexis, and not only because of my ridiculous phobia. Much as I was sickened by the idea of the water reaching her, I tried to be reasonable. The sea couldn’t harm her now, and if it destroyed evidence, well, that was a serious matter, but I would certainly mess things up much worse if I tried to move her. When someone has died, the very first rule of investigation, as I knew from the hundreds of mysteries I’d read, was “Don’t move the body.”
    Mysteries. A thought was swimming to the surface, struggling for attention. Don’t force it. Think about something else. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, recited the multiplication tables, tried to remember state capitals …
    Have His Carcase
, that was it. Dorothy L. Sayers. The body on the big rock, on the remote beach. Harriet Vane found it and then worried because the rising tide might wash the body away before she could get to a telephone and summon the police.
    So she took pictures.
    I