Hula Done It - By Maddy Hunter Page 0,7
on me. My ears pounded with the sudden silence until a uniformed officer with a well-trimmed white beard sang out, "Stop all engines," which prompted a chain reaction of activity. As I stood there panting, the bearded officer hurried across the room to me, scrutinizing my face with sober eyes.
"Who has fallen overboard?"
I opened my mouth to respond, only to realize, I didn't know.
"I still don't see no sign a him," Nana reported an hour later from her lookout at the ship's rail. The wind that buffeted the stern had exploded through her hair and snarled it like a cheap angora sweater, but she was far too interested in the activity in the sea below to notice. She readjusted her binoculars. "He seemed like a real nice man, even if he did get a little snippy with them fellas what disagreed with him. Be an awful shame if he missed the whole trip."
We were dead in the water as the ship's launches searched the immediate area for the body of Professor Dorian Smoker. Bailey had been carted off to the infirmary to be treated for symptoms of shock. Tilly and I were huddled in a sheltered spot away from the rail, where her visor would be less apt to fly away, and my short, sassy Italian 'do' wouldn't be whipped into a style worn only by rock stars and mythological creatures who sported more than one head.
"I don't mean to be the voice of doom," Tilly remarked as she cast a somber look toward the launches circling in the water, "but if they haven't found his body by now, they probably won't recover it until it floats to the surface in a few days. Tissue decomposition takes place rapidly in tropical waters. If this were an Alaskan cruise, they might not recover the body for months."
My knees went a little gimpy as I realized that at any moment, the mission to "search and rescue" might be downgraded to "find and retrieve."
I hunkered closer to the bulkhead as a trio of curious onlookers, clad in cargo shorts and hiking boots, lumbered past me to join Nana at the rail. One was a giant of a man whose red-gold hair and beard smacked of ancient Viking roots. I remembered seeing him in the second row at Professor Smoker's lecture, his head towering above everyone else's. Giant Vikings aren't exactly commonplace, unless it's Sunday afternoon and you're attending an NFL game in the dome in Minneapolis.
"Forgive me, madame," he asked Nana in English too perfect to be his native tongue. "Do you know what they're looking for?"
"They're lookin' for that nice Professor Smoker, on account a he fell off the ship. The men in them little boats fished a life buoy outta the water a little while ago, but I haven't seen 'em fish out the professor yet. You wanna borrow my binoculars and have a look-see?"
The giant translated Nana's spiel for his two male companions in a rapid-fire language that sounded a bit like "gangsta" rap minus the expletives. Only when one of the men muttered a thoughtful "Uff da," did I realize it wasn't gansta rap. It was Norwegian! They really were Vikings! Or maybe distant relations.
The three stood conversing in curious undertones for a half minute before the giant handed the binoculars back to Nana. "The professor could not swim?" he asked.
Tilly thumped her walking stick on the deck for attention. "Swimming is one thing, young man. Getting sucked beneath the keel of a nine - hundred - and - sixty - two - foot ship is something else entirely."
He turned from the rail to face Tilly, eyes wary, lips stretched razor-thin. "A tragedy, yah. For us, too. We traveled many miles to hear the professor speak."
The ID dangling around his neck read Nils -- World Navigators Club, and he looked as if circumnavigating the globe at the helm of a sailing ship would be second nature to him. His face was bronzed and leathery, his eyelashes bleached to pale gold. Crow's-feet slashed outward from his eyes as if he'd spent his entire life squinting into the sun. I suspected he probably knew everything there was to know about navigating, and absolutely nothing about the most important aspects of life at sea -- SPF and sunblock.
He said something to his companions, who pushed away from the rail and turned around to face us. They were both half a head shorter than Nils. One was sandy-haired and solid, with tree trunks