You’ll be going through that door.” The young woman, seated behind the table, pointed to the open doorway at the far end of the cavernous port terminal, then passed Rachel a long, narrow boarding card and two visitor passes. “Enjoy your cruise, Mrs. MacKinley.” “Thank you.” Rachel stepped away from the table to make room for the next passenger in line, then paused to look around and locate the couple who had come to see her off. The long table was one of several that had been set up to process the tickets and papers of arriving cruise passengers. Their location split the long half of the huge room nearly in the middle, separating the waiting area with seats from the baggage-handling section where passengers’ luggage was loaded on a conveyer belt and carried out to the ship’s hold. From there the luggage would be disbursed to the cabins indicated on their attached tags and be waiting in the passengers’ assigned rooms when they came aboard. The sitting area did not have enough seats to accommodate all of the hundreds of waiting passengers gathered in the terminal building of the port of Los Angeles.
