Bob: a name once of heavy significance to her, though surely she’s rid herself of that load of luggage by now. Another Bob, then another: there are a lot of Bobs on this trip. She notes the nametags: a Fred, a Dan, a Rick, a Norm, a Bob. There’s a lot of sportswear in the room, much beige among the men, many plaid shirts, vests with multiple pockets. She travelled with this company once before, after the death of her third husband, five years ago, so she knows pretty much what to expect. One features excessive hiking and attracts the under-fifties-not her target market-and the other goes in for singsongs and dressing up in silly outfits, so she’s stuck with Magnetic Northward, which offers the comfort of familiarity. She’s investigated the two other outfits that tour the region, but neither appeals. Magnetic Northward attracts serious punters, with an earnest bunch of experts laid on to herd them around and lecture to them. The men will be retired professionals: doctors, lawyers, engineers, stockbrokers, interested in Arctic exploration, polar bears, archeology, birds, Inuit crafts, perhaps even Vikings or plant life or geology. She makes her entrance slightly late, smiling a detached but cheerful smile-it doesn’t do for an unaccompanied woman to appear too eager-accepts a glass of the passable white wine they’re doling out, and drifts among the assembled nibblers and sippers. It’s a mistake to overdo it: though elderly noses aren’t as keen as they may once have been, it’s best to allow for allergies a sneezing man is not an attentive man. She adds a dab of cologne-an understated scent, floral, nostalgic-then she blots it off, leaving a mere whiff. Her face is what it is, and certainly the best that money can buy at this stage: with a little bronzer and pale eyeshadow and mascara and glimmer powder and low lighting, she can finesse ten years. She wouldn’t want to chance a deck chair in a bikini-superficial puckering has set in, despite her best efforts-which is one reason for selecting the Arctic over, say, the Caribbean. Thanks to Aquacize and core strength training, she’s still in excellent shape for her age, or indeed for any age, at least when fully clothed and buttressed with carefully fitted underwiring. Not that she’ll do anything about it, she tells herself, but there’s nothing wrong with a little warmup practice, if only to demonstrate to herself that she can still knock one off if she wishes to.įor that evening’s meet-and-greet she chooses her cream-colored pullover, perching the Magnetic Northward nametag just slightly too low on her left breast. The ones who cherish the belief that there’s life in the old dog yet: these are her game. Some of these are too old for her purposes she avoids eye contact with them. It’s the solitaries who interest her, the lurkers at the fringes. Some have females attached to them, and she eliminates these on principle: why work harder than you need to? Prying a spouse loose can be arduous, as she discovered via her first husband: discarded wives stick like burrs. Passing over the women, she ear-tags the male members of the flock. Surely she has at last achieved this modest goal.īut old habits die hard, and it’s not long before she’s casting an appraising eye over her fleece-clad fellow-travellers dithering with their wheely bags in the lobby of the first-night airport hotel. She’s not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her. She’s made an inner memo to renounce flirtations and any consequences that might result from them. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south.Īmong the clutter she includes other people, and by other people she means men. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone.
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