her back. "You can't blame yourself."
"Yes, I can! If I'd run a little faster, Professor Smoker might not be dead!"
"If you'd run a little faster, you might be dead," I said gently. "Think about it. After taking care of the professor, the killer might have turned his sights on you."
"I wish I was dead," Bailey sobbed. "Everything I've worked for -- without Professor Smoker's imprimatur, it's not worth spit."
Nana retreated into the bathroom and returned with a paper towel compress. She placed it on Bailey's forehead. "At least you got a good look at the fella."
"But I didn't," she whimpered. "He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants. I didn't see his face. I couldn't see his hair. I think it was a man, but I was so far away, I'm not even sure about that. For all I know, it could have been a woman! The captain asked me for a description when he looked in on me a little while ago, and all I could tell him was that the person was wearing a hooded gray warm-up outfit." Sobs. Tears. Nose blowing. "What good am I as an eyewitness? If they never catch Professor Smoker's killer, it'll be all my fault!"
I'd be more apt to fault the fashion industry for encouraging the unisex look in athletic attire, but that was just a personal opinion.
"Why was Professor Smoker on deck twelve in the first place?" Tilly inquired.
"He wanted to check out the golf simulators." Bailey gave an indulgent eye roll. "He loved golf. He claimed it was his only vice. Well, that, and Indian cuisine. So while he drooled over the simulators, I searched out a quiet lounge where we could look over the Ring journal. And I found one on the top deck, overlooking the bow. So I took the stairs back down to deck twelve and" -- her voice caught in her throat -- "and that's when I saw the commotion at the rail. I ran to help him. I ran as fast as I could, but I was half a city block away from him! Why do they make these ships so big?"
"Economics, dear," Nana piped up. "The bigger they are, the more guests they pack in, the more money they make. I seen that on an A&E special that took an inside look at the cruise industry. But it don't make no sense to me about the professor. He seemed like a nice enough fella. Who'd wanna kill 'im?"
"Everyone wanted to kill him!" Bailey cried.
Oh yeah, that's what I wanted to hear. "Excuse me?"
"Did you see who showed up at the lecture?" she choked out. "The World Navigators? The Sandwich Islanders? Do you know who those people are?"
I recalled the three World Navigators we'd met earlier. "Umm...ifI tossed out the phrase 'Viking look-alikes,' would I be close?"
Her face whitened with the kind of shock people experience just before cardiac arrest. "You've never heard of them, have you? How could you not have heard of them?"
"We're from Iowa," Nana explained.
Bailey's shock continued to parade across her face. "I'm sorry. It's just that we run into their anti-Cook literature so much at the university that I naturally assume everyone has heard of them. Both groups set forth ideas that are radically opposed to Professor Smoker's theories about Cook, and they've been vicious in their attempts to discredit him. Scathing papers. Hateful articles. Threatening emails. In the week before we left, some of their emails became so extreme that I begged the professor to consider canceling the cruise. But he wouldn't. He could be so stubborn. He said he wasn't going to let a bunch of miscreants ruin his holiday in paradise." She rubbed her nose and sniffed. "Besides, he enjoyed lecturing too much to miss an opportunity to influence a new audience."
"I should think the chancellor's office would have forbidden him to lecture anyplace where his life might have been in jeopardy," Tilly theorized.
Bailey heaved a guilty sigh. "He didn't report it to the chancellor's office. He didn't tell anyone. He considered the threats to be quackery; acknowledging them would have been beneath his contempt."
"Did he realize both groups were going to show up for the cruise?" I asked.
"Not until he walked into the lecture room and saw them all sitting there with their society affiliations pinned to their chests."
Aha! So that's what he'd looked so unsettled about. Receiving threatening emails was one thing, but knowing you were in the same room with the people who might