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whirled back to the right before stopping dead in her tracks. “Don’t know if I should be headin’ up or down. I gotta find Tilly and George. Have you seen ’em? We gotta call an emergency team meetin’ before we get blown away.”
    “I didn’t pass them on my way down from the upper deck, so they must be ahead of—”
    “Emily! Thank God I found you.” Tilly pelted toward us from the aft sun lounge, jaw set and cane thumping. “You’d better come quick. Margi’s being detained by security.”
    “What for?” I cried.
    “Distribution of a suspicious substance. If you hurry, you can catch them before they haul her off to jail.”

three
    “I don’t know what was wrong with their noses,” Margi Swanson fussed later that night. I’d brought her back to my hotel room for a little TLC after her near brush with disaster at the hands of the Britannia security detail, but the incident had turned her into such an instant celebrity with the other tour guests that I’d had a hard time dragging her away from her admirers. “Honestly, Emily, does this smell like a compound that could be used to make a nuclear device to you?”
    Seated opposite me in a comfy armchair, she leaned forward to hand me a plastic bottle that was no bigger than my baby finger. Popping open the flip-cap, I squirted a stream of clear gel into my palm and sniffed. “ Hmm , this is different.” I rubbed it into my hands and sniffed again. “Smells like a blend of … baked ham, hickory-smoked bacon, and pork rinds.”
    “It’s the pharmacy’s signature scent for the summer,” said Margi. “They call it, ‘Hog Wild.’ Isn’t that cute? They formulate it right there at Pills Etcetera, and I buy it in gallon containers and transfer it to one-ounce bottles for travel. Saves me a ton of money. You wouldn’t believe what hand sanitizer goes for in specialty shops.” Margi still worked part-time for the Windsor City Medical Clinic, so annihilating other people’s germs was a big part of her daily routine.
    “The pharmacist is working on a new scent for fall,” she tittered. “An homage to grain farmers. He’s going to call it, ‘Harvest Moon.’”
    I wondered what that was going to smell like. Corn silage?
    “Okay, Margi, here’s the deal.” I handed back her plastic bottle. “In order to avoid a repeat of today’s incident, I’m going to recommend that you only hand out sanitizer to people who know you.”
    Disappointment rippled down her face in one long, gut-wrenching wave. “But, Emily, people who don’t know me have germs, too.”
    “True, but they also have suspicions. How do they know the gel in those bottles won’t kill them?”
    She lowered her brows over her eyes, fixing me with a grave look. “Because if I intended to hand out poison, I would have bought the bottles with the skull and crossbones on them.”
    “Of course you would! I know that, and you know that, but they don’t know that.” I paused. “Where do you find travel-size bottles with skulls and crossbones on them?” My nephews would get a kick out of something like that.
    “Pills Etcetera. They’re in the aisle with all the pirate paraphernalia.”
    “The pharmacy carries pirate stuff ?”
    “They expanded their inventory after the tornado remodel.” She sighed. “I suppose I could have bought the regular one-ounce bottles and attached warning labels, but I think the print would have been too small to read without a magnifying glass, and I’m not sure the pharmacy sells magnifying glasses in bulk. I could have tried a couple of the big box stores—”
    “Margi.”
    “But if I struck out at Walmart, I would have gotten stuck driving all the way to Ames, and—”
    “MARGI!”
    She clamped her mouth shut and blinked. “What?”
    “If you distribute all your sanitizer to complete strangers, you’ll run out, and then you won’t have enough left for your friends. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”
    She inched her lips