LITMIR.BIZ

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a second that he was going to say no. He conjured up one last cozy image of the fishing cabin in Wisconsin, of his brothers, a cooler full of beer, a nice big lake trout frying up in a pan…and then he banished it all. The cabin, the boys, the beer, the fish, all of it.

      Bottom line—when his dad asked, Jake responded. They all knew that. This is your chance to come through for me, Jake. I need you.

      He was the oldest, the responsible one, the one Dad could depend on. He glanced over at his father, sitting there waiting for an answer. Jake nodded. “Yeah, okay. I’ll do it.”

      IF THE EXPLORER’S JOURNEY, whatever the heck it was, left tomorrow, he didn’t have much time. He quickly left messages on both Sean and Cooper’s cell phones that they shouldn’t expect him in Wisconsin. For once, he was happy to reach voice mail. At least this way he didn’t have to offer anything more in the way of explanations. Then he headed over to the Red Sails travel agency.

      There was only one clerk working this Friday afternoon, and she seemed quite frazzled as she tried to deal with ringing telephones and a beeping fax machine. “I’m new,” she said into the phone about seventeen times, her voice trilling with increasing panic. He heard her wail “Please don’t yell at me!” another five or six times.

      Not a good sign. Jake tried to catch her eye as he lounged there in front of her desk, but she kept holding a “wait a minute, I can’t talk to you yet” finger in the air and jabbering on into her headset about something to do with a cruise ship and stranded passengers. “I’m new,” she tossed in yet again. “Please don’t yell at me!”

      Feeling more than a tad irritable, Jake let his eyes wander over the posters of Jamaica and Tahiti, hoping against hope that if he had to be on it, the Explorer’s Journey was at least headed somewhere good. Maybe these explorers went in for scuba diving or island hopping. Hawaiian shirts and mai tais with little umbrellas in them might be fun. Man, he needed a vacation.

      As the girl behind the desk hyperventilated into her phone, Jake hunted through the racks of brochures, looking for clues, but there was nothing there about any Explorer’s Journey. “With my luck, it’ll be the North Pole,” he muttered.

      At last, she punched a button on her phone, took off her headset, heaved a big sigh and stood up. “Can I help you?” she asked doubtfully, as if she already knew that whatever it was he wanted, she wouldn’t have it.

      “Hi,” he offered with a smile, trying his best to work around his annoyance level. “Bad day, huh?”

      “I’m new,” she blurted out, waving her hands helplessly. “The computer isn’t working, the other agent had to run off to find someone to fix the computers, and there’s a whole cruise ship full of Beanie Baby collectors stranded in Puerta Vallarta with possible dysentery.” Fear colored her face as she stared up at him. “You won’t tell anybody, will you? I mean, if they do have dysentery, it may not be the fault of Red Sails or the cruise. It could be a coincidence.”

      “Uh-huh.”

      She started to sniffle, her voice rising, tears brimming in her eyes. “I unplugged the phone. I had to. I don’t know what to tell them. It’s not my fault! I wasn’t even here when their cruise was arranged.”

      “I’m sure they’ll understand.” He leaned in closer, nabbing and handing her a tissue from the box on her desk. He tried to think of something nice to say. “Look on the bright side—if they’re stranded together, at least they have something to talk about.”

      “Well, there is that.” She stared at him. “Did you need something? Not a cruise, I hope.”

      “I’m actually not sure what it is. Something called the Explorer’s Journey?”

      Dabbing at her eyes, she blinked three or four times, as if that would help jump-start her brain. She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

      Afraid even the slightest impatience would knock her over the edge into a collapse, he tried to ooze nonthreatening, nice-guy vibes. He was usually pretty good at that. “I know someone who booked this Explorer’s Journey from this agency. Is there somewhere you can look for information about it?”

      “The computers are down,” she said in a quavery tone.

      He crooked his thumb at the filing cabinets lining the wall behind her. “How about your files?”

      She scrunched up her face, staring vacantly at him.

      “They look alphabetical. Maybe the cabinet that says E-F-G on it,” Jake suggested. “E for Explorers?”

      “Oh.” She stumbled back there and pulled open the top drawer. “Hmm…these are mostly European tours. What did you say it was again?”

      “Explorer’s Journey.”

      “Is that Europe?” she asked, giving him a hopeful glance.

      “I don’t know.”

      She sighed again. “I don’t see anything.” After poking through those files for a few more minutes, she continued on to the second drawer, fumbled through a few more folders, let her shoulders sag in defeat, turned back, saw the look on Jake’s face, and—just at the point where he was ready to leap over the desk and start looking himself—reluctantly returned to her halfhearted search. “Nope. I don’t see anything…oh, wait. What did you say it was? Explorer’s Journey. Here it is.”

      Jake held his breath. Although she seemed astonished to have located it, she actually had a file folder in her hands. The label pasted to the front really did identify it as Explorer’s Journey. She slid it onto her desk and opened it up, carefully, slowly flipping the pages over one at a time.

      “Is there a brochure or anything in there? Any information?”

      “No. Just the registration pages. They look really full. It must be popular.” She continued to turn pages at the speed of mud. Slow mud. “There’s one a month, I guess. Here’s March… April…”

      Could she be any slower, even if she really, really tried? “I need July,” he reminded her, holding himself back from snatching the file away from her. “It’s supposed to leave tomorrow.”

      “Here it is. July.” Peering down at it, she smoothed the page with one hand, blocking his view, neatly detaching a piece of pink memo paper clipped to the corner and setting it aside. “Oh, that’s too bad. All the spaces are filled.”

      “Can’t you add me as an extra?” How hard could it be? He could see, even upside down, that there were names on all the lines, neatly divided into two columns. A quick count told him there were forty people scheduled to be on this trip. So what difference would it make if they went to forty-one?

      “Oh, no, I couldn’t do that.” She turned the page around, pointing to the instructions scrawled across the top. Someone had written No Extras! No Waiting List! in big, bold letters.

      Jake ignored that little problem for the moment, glancing down the list now that he had a chance to see it right side up, scanning for possibilities. One Antoinette, a Tonya, a Tori, and two names that just used T as a first initial. Plus there was one listed under the last name Antonini. The woman he was looking for could be any of them. Or none, if she had a pile of aliases.

      “So you see I can’t add you,” she continued. “It’s very clear that I’m not allowed to do that even if I did know how to register you for this trip, which I don’t, because the computers are down and I can’t even look up what it costs or anything.”

      She painstakingly reattached the pink memo and its paper clip and then moved to close the folder, but Jake laid a hand on top of hers. “Isn’t there any other way you can let me in on this tour? Anybody else I could contact? Any other source of info? Anything?”

      “Not that I would know about…” Looking even more unhappy and put-upon, she glanced back at the beeping fax machine and blinking phone. “Here.” She shoved the folder at him. “You look.”

      He

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