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 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 410," 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 assumed it was Emily. You never said you were rooming with Tilly. I'm supposed to be your best friend, Marion. What's the matter? I'm not good enough for you anymore?"

"Tilly asked me first."

"Oh, I get it. It's on account of the mashed peas, isn't it?"

Back in December, Nana had slipped on some mashed peas on the floor of the senior center and bruised her tail-bone. She'd had to sit on an inflatable doughnut during the entire holiday season, which didn't work out too well during Midnight Mass, when my nephew punched a hole in it with his Moses action figure with authentic scale-model staff. All Nana could say was that we were lucky David hadn't brought his GI Joe. Joe carried his own grenade launcher.