light saber before, I didn't realize how titillating it could be.
Removing his hand suddenly, he clicked his heels together again and bowed dramatically at the waist. "I've just remembered something I've forgotten to do, Emily. Will you excuse me? I'll rejoin you in a few minutes. Where will you be sitting?"
I nodded toward Jonathan. "Over there, with the broccoli spear. Don't be long, okay?" For some reason, the thought of that light saber was making me frisky.
"Holy cow," Jonathan exclaimed when I set his plate down before him. "I don't know if I can eat all this."
I pulled out a chair and sat down beside him, shoving aside some orange flyers with spiders and skeletons and lots of writing on them. "Pace yourself. This is only the first course. Open wide." I forked a few leaves of spinach into his mouth, keeping one eye on Catwoman and one eye on the rest of the room while he chewed.
"Aren't you eating?" he mumbled around his spinach salad.
"I'm focusing on you first."
He sighed regretfully. "I wish Beth could have been more like you. I bet you'd never run off with another man, or get a tattoo, or sign up for gourmet-cooking lessons with a famous Indian chef whose name is long as my arm. I bet you don't even like Indian food."
Indian cooking? Hadn't someone else talked about Indian cooking recently? I shoveled a couple of supersized croutons into his mouth as I tried to recall the conversation. "I interrupted your story earlier, Jonathan. I'm sorry. What were you saying you overheard while Jennifer was being outfitted in a new costume?"
Crunch. Cruuunch. "Oh, yeah. Remember when I told you that the blonde's tattoo was just like Beth's? You want to know why they looked so much alike?" Crunch, crunch. "Because they had it done in the same tattoo parlor! Tattoos Unlimited, close to the Penn State campus. The same artist probably did it using the same pattern. Can you believe that? The blonde lives in University Park. We're probably neighbors and don't even know it." Crunch, crunch. "Could I try some of the avocado salad?"
I speared an avocado slice and fed it to him thoughtfully. "You never mentioned you live in University Park." And I wasn't exactly sure why the news bothered me.
"I don't actually live in University Park, just outside the city limits. And don't ask me what a Nittany Lion is. I've lived there for six years, and no one's ever been able to tell me."
"Well, you're on the right cruise ship to find out. The woman Jen confronted outside the infirmary the other night? I bet you anything she'd know. She's working on a Ph.D., so she probably knows everything. But you'd better hurry up and find her because she's getting ready to leav --"
My fork clattered to the plate as the conversation I'd forgotten lasered back into my brain. Bailey! That's who'd mentioned Indian cuisine. The day when we'd visited her in the infirmary. She'd informed us that Professor Smoker's only vices had been golf and Indian cuisine. I stared at Jonathan, my mental connect-the-dots picture suddenly exploding with an impossible notion.
"Jonathan, I don't mean to be insensitive, but I remember you telling us at dinner that Beth ran off with someone in her gourmet-cooking class. Was it the Indian cooking class you were just talking about?"
He waggled his florets. "Yeah. The campus union offers minicourses to the staff and public every semester. Specialty cooking. Self-defense. Origami for dummies. They only last six weeks, but I guess six weeks was all it took for Romeo to lure Beth away from me."
Dorian Smoker, a beautiful, dissatisfied, gold-digging wife, and a shared love of exotic cuisine that was spicy enough to strip the enamel off your teeth? Was I grasping at straws, or had I just stumbled upon the ingredients of a toxic cocktail? "The man she ran off with, Jonathan. Did you ever learn his name?"
He averted his eyes. "She didn't stick around to tell me his name. Um, look, even though I was the one who mentioned Beth first, is it okay if we don't talk about her anymore tonight? I'd rather sit here with you and pretend that Beth and her boyfriend never happened. That's old history. I'm more into current events now." He slanted a ravenous look at the mounds of food on his plate. "Is that white stuff ambrosia? That looks pretty good. How about a bite of that?"
The white stuff on the plate was