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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 have sent them had to be downright scary. “Had the professor met any member of either group before he stepped into that room today?”
    Bailey shrugged. “I’d have no way of knowing that.”
    “He didn’t mention that he recognized anyone?”
    “Not to me. But when you’re as successful as Professor Smoker was in academia, you inspire professional jealousy, and everyone starts gunning for you. You make more enemies than you know what to do with.” She slanted a hard look at me and sniffed. “Dorian Smoker had enemies crawling out of the woodwork on this ship, and you saw the end result. One of them killed him.”
    I sighed to myself. Another vacation, another body. This was getting
really
old.
    “You mentioned you and the professor were going to peruse my journal,” Tilly spoke up. “Do you have the journal with you?”
    All color drained from Bailey’s face as she stared at Tilly. “Oh, my God. I forgot about…” She cast a frantic look about the room before squeezing her eyes shut and patting the left side of her chest. “Professor