deliberately.'
I suppressed a giggle. Wearing four-inch heels, which made me a good five inches taller than Wesley, had been the only form of retribution I'd dared take at the time of the prom.
I thought Wesley was going to follow us back to our tent and try to interrogate me again, but to my relief, just after we got into the crafters' section of the camp, he waved goodnight and ducked into his own tent.
'Good riddance,' I muttered.
'What did happen after the senior prom?' Michael asked.
'Not what you're thinking,' I said.
'How do you know what I'm thinking?'
'Because whatever you're thinking, that isn't it,' I said. 'Some guys Wesley ticked off decided to play a prank on him.
Kidnap him, strip him down to his underwear, and drop him off someplace with no wallet and no idea where he was. I guess they weren't expecting him to have a date along.'
'They kidnapped you, too?'
'Yeah, but at least they let me keep my prom dress on. Although that wasn't much of a favor, considering where they dropped us off.'
'Okay, I'll bite. Where?'
'The Dismal Swamp.'
'You're kidding.'
'Unfortunately not,' I said. 'It's only about an hour and a half from here, you know.'
'How did you ever get back?'
'I waited for daylight, then followed a likely looking path until I ran into some bird-watchers. They gave me a ride to Skeetertown, and Dad drove down to pick me up.'
'And Wesley?'
'Decided he could do better without me slowing him down, so he struck out on his own half an hour after they dumped us. The bloodhounds finally found him three days later.'
'Okay, now I understand why Wesley isn't exactly your favorite cousin,' Michael said as he held up the flap of our tent.
'He isn't even a cousin as far as I'm concerned,' I said, as I ducked inside. 'Mother's about the only one who puts up with him any more.' I winced, remembering Mother's orders to find Wesley a nice story. Well, the murder would certainly qualify, but I wasn't sure I trusted what Wesley would write. I'd worry about it later.
I collapsed onto the bedroll, feeling very grateful for the well-concealed, anachronistic air mattress beneath. I was, I thought, too tired to lift a finger. If Jess and the entire artillery crew rolled their cannon here and shot it off over our tent, I'd probably sleep through the whole thing.
'I'm certainly going to sleep soundly tonight,' I murmured.
'Soundly, yes,' Michael said. 'But not, I hope, immediately.'
Okay, so maybe I wasn't quite as tired as all that.
Either the artillery crew decided to sleep in, or I really was getting used to the sound of gunfire. When the familiar boom woke me up, I scrabbled in my haversack for my watch and found it was a little past seven.
Michael not only slept through the cannon, he also didn't seem to notice getting kicked or elbowed several times while I struggled into my dress in the tiny tent.
I stumbled outside, stretched, and bunked at the bright sunlight. Another unseasonable steam bath of a day.
'Pardon me, mistress, could you direct me to the necessary?'
'The necessary what?' I asked, turning to see a disheveled-looking man clutching a lumpy haversack.
'The necessary,' he said. 'You know – the privies?'
'Oh, that's right,' I said, belatedly recognizing the colonial euphemism for toilets. And not entirely inappropriate, since the sanitary facilities were a collection of portable toilets and sinks that we all used only when absolutely necessary. I pointed over the tops of the surrounding tents. 'Right over there, behind the fences. Men's on the left.'
'Thank you, mistress,' he said, and galloped off.
I pondered visiting the necessary myself, and decided it wasn't urgent. If I set off now, in fifteen minutes I could be at my parents' house, partaking of the forbidden modern pleasures of running water and flush toilets. And perhaps even a hot shower, if I could get there before most of the visiting crowd of relatives woke up.
Even more important, I could talk to Rob. He'd been conspicuously absent from the party last night, and I had a feeling that, sooner or later, Deputy Monty was going to want to talk to him. And I knew Rob was less likely to push himself to the top of the suspect list if he uttered his first, careless comments about Benson's death to me, rather than Monty.
I made my way through the sleeping crafter section of camp to the more lively regimental section. The camp seemed more authentic today. Yesterday, when everyone was setting up and on their best behavior, I'd decided it was more like a really well-done movie set than an actual Revolutionary War encampment. Everything seemed just a little too clean and well repaired, not to mention a lot less smelly than the real thing. And the reenactors seemed too much on their best behavior, as if to say, 'Look how authentic I am!'
This morning, as campers got up and stumbled through pared-down and much-adapted versions of their usual morning rituals, the whole place reeked of authenticity. People had stopped worrying about whether the dogs and children were rolling in the dirt and whether their language was absolutely free of anachronisms, and had just started living. I liked it better this morning.
Until I got closer to the road, where the troops of modern police who'd started searching the encampment at that end spoiled the illusion of walking back into the eighteenth century. I felt a little guilty, since it was probably my cash box they were searching for.
'Don't be silly,' I told myself. 'It's the murderer's fault they're waking everyone up this way, not yours.'
A couple of the more wide-awake reenactors decided to use the police incursion as a teaching tool, and pretended the police were British soldiers looking for wounded rebels. One reenactor got up on a barrel and made an impassioned speech about the colonists' right to freedom from search and seizure, and I could see the local police, who'd had time to get used to this kind of thing, taking the out-of-town police aside and enlightening them.
'You mean the whole town goes crazy like this every October?' I heard one state trooper say. I didn't stick around to hear the answer.
I decided to detour by the craft-fair grounds on the way, hoping the police would have finished messing around in my booth, so I could clean up and get ready for opening. But when I arrived, I saw even more police than before, crawling in and around the place, including a lot I didn't recognize as local.
'Stay outside,' Monty called when he saw me. He was talking to a black man, and for an anxious second I thought he was interrogating Tad. Then I told myself not to be silly; the man talking to Monty had no dreadlocks or costume, and was at least ten years older than Tad.
'Well, thanks for coming in,' Monty said, shaking hands with the man and guiding him out of the booth. 'We'll let you know if we have any other questions.'
The man nodded and left.
'You don't look all that grateful,' I said.
'Well, I confess, I did like your friend Tad for the murder,' Monty said, with a shrug. 'He seems to have spent the whole day yesterday quarreling with the deceased, and he certainly has motive. But he might have an alibi after all. Supposedly, he spent the whole evening in a coffee shop with our witness there.'
'Well that's good,' I said.
'I said 'might*,' Monty said. 'We still have to check it out. Could be a put-up job. And funny he wouldn't
