gonna prolong your life by one minute, so you might as well throw your money at a helicopter ride instead." He gave my bare knee a friendly pat with his huge, sweaty palm. "So, are you married? Good-looking girl like you, I'm thinking we might have a future together."
"Would you excuse me a moment? I'm meeting someone." I plucked his hand off my knee and scooted across the floor, sidling up to Shelly Valentine as if she were a long-lost friend. "I need you to save me," I said in a desperate whisper. "Will you pretend we're together so Jabba the Hutt will hit on someone else?" I bobbed my head in his direction.
Shelly looked beyond me, shivered a little, then gave me a huge hug. "I'm so happy to see you!" she said in a loud voice, then in an undertone close to my ear, "I'm glad to help. I figure I owe you one after the way Jen treated you yesterday."
We moved forward in the line, heading toward the scales.
"She's not with you today?"
"She decided to stay on the ship for an all-day spa treatment. Maybe they'll be able to extract cellulite, toxins, and that big mean streak of hers. Frankly, I don't see how Dori put up with her. She's so moody. Just because you're in pain doesn't mean you have to be one. No wonder she doesn't have any friends."
"I thought you were her friend."
"Me? Hah! Not in this lifetime."
"Then what were you doing on the kayak adventure together yesterday?"
She tossed her long, glossy dark hair behind her shoulder. "I didn't have anything better to do. She wanted help excavating something that was supposed to be buried near that waterfall, so I agreed. Jen and I are both archaeology majors; we've both had the same methods courses. Since I have another year of school to go, I figured I could use the practice."
"Isn't this a strange time of year to be on a cruise if you're in school?"
"I took the semester off. The course work got so intense, I needed to take a breather."
If she thought college was bad, wait until she hit real life.
"Step onto the scales there, honey," the woman behind the counter instructed Shelly. After we weighed in and filled out the necessary paperwork, we wandered into an adjoining room and sat down to await further instructions.
"Remember when you asked Jen and me yesterday where we got our map?" Shelly asked. "I don't know why Jen was being so secretive, but she wouldn't tell me where she got it, either. Isn't that weird? I don't know what the big deal was. It looked to me as if everyone had one."
I couldn't help entertaining a suspicion that unlike everyone else, Jennifer may have acquired her map from Dorian Smoker himself -- right before she pushed him overboard. "You mind if I ask where you and Jennifer went after you left Professor Smoker's lecture?"
Shelly's mouth angled in disgust. "I don't know where Jen went, but I went back to my cabin and had a good cry. I thought I was going to have Dori all to myself for ten days. I share him enough throughout the year. Then bam! Jennifer shows up. I was so disappointed."
She heaved a pathetic sigh. "I know women of my generation are supposed to be too liberated to get jealous, but...I guess I'm guilty of being way too sensitive. Don't tell Jen that I cried about it, okay? She'd only make some snide comment and laugh at me. I hate to admit it, but she's a lot more socially evolved than I am. She didn't even fall apart after she flunked that ethnographic methods course last semester, but she was really steamed. I mean, she had a job lined up and everything."
She had a job lined up? YES! I knew it! "So what kind of jobs are archaeology majors applying for these days?"
"The L. S. B. Leakey Foundation? Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania? They're beginning excavation on a new site on Bed One. That's the level where the strata dates back over a million years. She was supposed to be in charge of cataloging all the Pleistocene artifacts, but since she didn't graduate, they gave the position to someone else. She really blew that one."
A man's voice blared out over a loudspeaker, causing us both to jump. "When I call your name, please proceed across the street to the gate I assign you." He read off a litany of names, eventually