"I'll get right on it," I said without missing a beat. I'd had such good luck with luggage, I could hardly wait to see my results with small appliances. I regarded Bernice offhandedly, trying to recall a visual memory of her that was flirting with my subconscious. What was it? Unh.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" asked Bernice.

I shook myself out of my reverie. "Sorry." Had I gone over the top with my suspicions about Bernice? She was one of Nana's closest friends. Nana was a great judge of character who had better intuition than to hang out with a cold-blooded murderer, didn't she? Of course, she did. So why did I still have a niggling doubt in my mind?

I saw the lines being cast off from the pier, heard more chugging and sputtering from the engine, then we were angling out of our berth and heading into open water. "Lake Lucerne is the fourth largest lake in Svitzerland," our guide said over the microphone. "It is tventy-four miles long, and at its broadest point, is two miles vide."

I peered out at the fog, thinking this would be a good time for it to lift. Nana and Bernice excused themselves to buy coffee at the snack bar, and Wally excused himself to make the rounds. "Chitchat is part of the job," he said. "A good tour guide is attentive to every member of the group. Besides, if you ignore someone, they'll probably give you a lousy evaluation."

"Evaluation? Guides get evaluated?"

"Yeah. At the end of the tour I'll hand out a sheet that all the guests are supposed to fill out. It asks questions like: Was I courteous? Was I informative?"

"Are escorts evaluated, too?" It would be just my luck. I could imagine what Bernice would write about me when I dumped her cuckoos back in her lap, or the Stolees after the incident last night. If the evaluations were too bad, maybe the bank wouldn't even reimburse me for the trip. Then what would I do? How would I pay back all those credit card bills that would be landing in my mailbox?

"I don't know if bank escorts are subjected to the evaluation process, but I can find out for you."

I nodded my thanks and as we nosed farther away from the shoreline, felt myself slip into a semivegetative state. I'd wondered what else could go wrong, but hadn't expected the answer to come so quickly. It looked like I was going to have to redeem myself, and fast, but the problem was, how?

"Out the vindow to your right is the snowcapped, seven-thousand-foot mountain named Mount Pilatus," the guide announced.

Heads turned to the right. Cameras clicked. Film whirred. It didn't seem to matter that we couldn't actually see the mountain. People obviously wanted to capture the moment rather than the mountain. I could hardly wait for the picture exchange.

"Some kilometers in the distance to your left is Mount Rigi," the guide continued.