Top O' the Mournin' Page 0,3

"Did you get his name? We should march right down to the Garda Station and file a complaint. This situation was not Emily's fault. She was treated unfairly." She turned to me. "And if I were you, I'd sue the carriage company for damages. Look at you. You look like one of the contestants on Survivor."

I caught a glimpse of myself in the gilt-framed mirror decorating the lobby wall. Ehhh. My dark brown hair was a wild, dripping mop of corkscrew curls. Mascara circled my eyes. My new rayon blouse and skirt clung to my five-foot-five-inch frame in a series of wet, misshapen folds. I didn't look as good as a Survivor contestant. I looked more like "Alice Cooper Meets Xena, Warrior Princess."

Nana regarded Tilly with a twinkle in her eye. "You watch Survivor?"

"Reality television, Marion. Anthropology for the masses. I think of it as a modern version of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa without the monographic analysis."

"I think of it as Days of Our Lives without the script."

Tilly looked pensive. "I hadn't thought of it that way, but in a sense, you're perfectly right. That's a very astute observation. Do you have a favorite contestant?"

I'd been concerned that Tilly and Nana wouldn't be compatible as roommates. Tilly had a Ph.D. Nana had an eighth-grade education. Tilly was five-foot-eleven, built like a beanpole, and carried a fancy walking stick. Nana was four-foot-ten, built like a fire hydrant, and carried a really big handbag. Tilly had never married. Nana had been married to the same man for over fifty years. Survivor was the only thing they had in common, but, come to think of it, that was probably a lot more than most married couples had in common. Heck, they'd probably become fast friends.

I waved my arm to catch the notice of a desk clerk. My appearance was making me nervous. I needed to change my clothes before someone issued me a written warning for shedding water in an unauthorized area. "The key to room four-ten, please? And I'm in something of a hurry."

Bernice Zwerg shuffled up to us at the front desk and looked me up and down. "Is this a new look for you, or did you find another body of water to fall into?" Bernice had the body of a rubber chicken, a dowager's hump that made her clothes hang funny, and a voice that screamed of eight packs of Marlboros a day before she'd finally kicked the habit. She'd accompanied us on our earlier tour to Switzerland, so we had history.

I narrowed my eyes at her. "I was a victim of circumstance."

She flashed me a tight little smile that said she'd heard that one before. "I thought you'd want to know that the other bus just arrived from the airport."

Since our flight from Des Moines had arrived so early, the tour company had bused us the short distance to our hotel rather than make us wait at the airport for the other flights to arrive. We were expecting a contingent of people from the East Coast and a few stragglers from the Continent to add their numbers to the twenty Iowans I was escorting.

"I heard a bunch of people from New York will be joining us," Bernice continued with a sour look. "They'll probably be loud. And pushy."

Which meant Bernice would fit in with them just fine.

"What have you got there?" Bernice asked, snatching the photos from Tilly's hands. She flipped through them quickly. "Looks like Emily having sex with a dead guy in some pond."

"He wasn't dead," Nana objected. "Emily would never engage in necrophilia, would you, dear?"

I shook my head, remembering those occasions when making love to Jack had been like having sex with a corpse. But we'd been married, so in my case, the necrophilia was legitimate.

"How come you don't have a digital camera?" Bernice asked Nana, handing the photos back. "Polaroids are old technology."

"I'm waitin' for the price to come down," Nana said in a no-nonsense tone. She might be a millionaire, but her Midwestern frugality still reared its ugly head from time to time.

"Room four-ten," the desk clerk said, handing me my key.

"I'm going up to change, so I'll see you later," I said to Nana.

Bernice gave us a squinty look. "What? You two aren't rooming together?"

"Escorts get rooms by themselves," said Nana, "so I'm roomin' with Tilly."

"Tilly?" Bernice sucked in her cheeks. "When I asked you to room with me, you said you already had a roommate, so I