"Aren't you a little young to be on a Golden Tour?" Wally finally asked.

"Traveling companion," I said. "I'm with my grandmother."

Nana belonged to a seniors' travel club run by the bank in Windsor City. The bank scheduled tours through a national company called Triangle Tours that arranged transportation, lodging, and a professional tour guide in the country of destination. Since many of the seniors were novices at foreign travel, the bank also provided a local escort to cater to the individual needs of the group. Nana invited me to accompany her on the trip because she said I'd be less bossy than my mother and a lot more fun than the other seventy-eight-year-olds in her retirement village. So being a sucker for flattery, I turned my back on the lure of Club Med for the opportunity to spend nine days in Switzerland with thirty white-haired seniors who made twenty-nine look young.

"Now," continued Wally, "who did you say you don't want to sleep with?"

"Look, Wally, someone made a mistake. I'm supposed to room with my grandmother, not Andrew Simon. In case you didn't know, Mr. Simon is our escort from the Windsor City Bank. He's being paid to accompany the group, not sleep with the guests."

Someone sneezed loudly behind me. I felt a hand caress the back of my neck. "Emily, honey, I just heard the good news. How do you suppose an old coot like me got lucky enough to room with the prettiest little trick on the tour?"

Andrew Simon was short, stocky, and stuck on himself. His year-round tan was out of a tube. His hair color was out of a bottle--Surfer Blonde, which was something of an anomaly considering the only surfing you can do in Iowa is on the Internet. He'd married his sixth wife, Louise, three years earlier, and since then had whiled away his time swinging golf clubs by day and rehearsing lines for the local community theater by night. Louise was sister to the Windsor City Bank president, which explained how Simon had landed himself the cushy job of escort on the Golden Swiss Triangle Tour. He'd left Louise back in Windsor City, however, since the thought of flying gave her hives and caused her windpipe to swell shut. Not a good way to begin your Golden Swiss holiday.

I snatched his hand from my neck and stood toe-to-toe with him, our noses separated by bare inches, my chest every bit as inflated as his ego. "There's been a mistake. Your first name, my last name. Some out-of-touch administrator must have thought we were family and stuck us in the same room together. What's wrong with your eyes?" They were painfully bloodshot and weepy. "Are you contagious?" I took a giant step backward. He'd probably contracted a fatal disease on the plane and was infecting everyone within a six-mile radius. Bad idea for a holiday. Arrive in Switzerland. Die.

"It's that damned air on the plane. I shouldn't have worn my contact lenses. The pharmacist warned me, but I didn't listen. My eyes are so itchy, I feel like I have the worst case of hay fever in medical history."