Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos

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 mention it himself, don't you think? You can't come in here," he added, planting himself in front of me with his arms crossed.

"Well, I figured that," I said. "Any idea when you're going to be finished?"

"I can't make any promises," he said. "We got some guys with the Virginia State Bureau of Investigation down from Richmond to help, and they're still examining the crime scene."

"I'll check back a little later, then," I said.

"Hang on," he said. "Where will you be if we need to talk to you?"

"That depends," I said. "Have you found my cash box yet?"

"No," he said. "And if we do, we'll have to hold on to it until the forensic guys have checked it out."

"Okay," I said. "Right now I'm going over to my parents' house to take a shower. Then I'll probably have to go into Yorktown to get some cash, so I can make change for my customers, assuming you finish up with my booth sometime today and I have any customers to make change for. Shall I check in with you when I get back, in case you're finished?"

"Don't count on it. Where will you be later on?"

"I have no idea. I'd planned to be in my booth all day," I said. "If you need to find me, check the medical tent, and if I'm not there, leave a message with my dad."

"Your dad? He's the one running the medical tent?"

"Yes, why?"

He grimaced, and began to massage the bridge of his nose.

"What's Dad been doing to give you a headache?" I said.

"Why, what would you expect him to be doing?" Monty snapped back.

"I couldn't even begin to guess," I said. "That's one of Dad's greatest charms, his spontaneity and unpredictability."

"Are you trying to tell me he's a mental case?"

"No," I said, "I'm trying to tell you that he's a free spirit, and I wouldn't necessarily have any idea what he's been up to."

Although, come to think of it, considering that Dad was an avid mystery buff with a deep and largely unfulfilled yearning to become involved in exciting real-life sleuthing, I could probably make a few guesses.

"If I didn't know better, I'd assume he's trying to convince me that he committed the crime," Monty said. "Which seems pretty impossible, because he's got an airtight alibi, so I have to figure maybe he's one of those cranks who show up all the time when you have a well-publicized homicide, trying to confess and get credit for a crime they didn't do."

"He didn't confess, did he?" I said.

"No," Monty said. "Not yet, anyway. But he's been over here twice this morning already, trying to prove that his alibi has holes in it. There must have been two thousand people wandering around the neighborhood in fancy dress last night, half of them carrying swords and daggers and guns with bayonets, and I'm supposed to worry about one crank with holes in his alibi?"

"You haven't had a lot of sleep, have you?" I asked.

"No," he replied, with a look of surprise.

"Let the SBI take care of themselves for a while, then," I suggested. "And take a nap. You'll be no good to anyone if you're exhausted and irritable."

"Wish I could," he said. "But thanks anyway."

He was looking at me oddly. I realized, with dismay, it was the look of someone who reads too much into a sympathetic remark – perhaps because he scares most people off before they make any.

"I'll talk to my dad when I get the chance," I said, backing away. "He's not a crank, just an avid mystery reader."

"There's a difference?" Monty muttered, to my departing back.

I chose to ignore him, partly because I wanted to hurry over to my parents' house and partly because it was too early for me to remember the exact quote about mysteries being the recreation of the intelligent mind or whatever it was Dad was so fond of reciting.

The neighborhood still slept. I heard nothing but birdcalls, and a persistent tapping that was either a pileated woodpecker hunting for breakfast or Mrs. Fenniman nailing up more campaign posters.

My parents' house was quiet, too. Four out-of-town relatives were breakfasting in the gazebo on the back lawn and throwing scraps to the family peacock flock, which was a bad idea, actually. The peacocks already had their benefactors outnumbered, with more appearing all the time. Had these people never seen The Birds?

Dad liked to brag about how well the peacocks were flourishing under his care, but in the past several months we'd begun to realize that perhaps they were flourishing a little too well. We'd only acquired them the previous year, as part of some family wedding preparations, but they'd already quadrupled in number, and the neighbors had grown mutinous. Dad hadn't been able to give away any of the flock, and so far, efforts to turn a profit by selling the surplus birds on eBay had proven strangely unsuccessful. He'd already promised Mother that his next project, after the Yorktown Day festival was over, would be spaying and neutering most of the peacocks.

We all tried to ignore Mrs. Fenniman's occasional ruminations on whether .peacocks would taste more like turkey or pheasant. Just to be sure, though, I was planning a brief fling with vegetarianism around Thanksgiving.

Other than the soon-to-be-wiser quartet in the garden, I didn't run into anyone else on my way up to Rob's room. And I was in luck; I could tell from the gentle snoring within that Rob was still home.

Knocking on the door of Rob's room did nothing to interrupt the snoring. Neither did calling his name. I finally had to shake him soundly to get a reaction. Some reaction. He turned over and pulled a pillow over his head.

"Wake up, Rob, I need to talk to you," I said, shaking him again.

"Ohhh," he groaned. "Just let me sleep a little while longer."

"I have to tell you about what happened last night," I said.

"Look, I didn't mean to do it," came his voice, somewhat muffled by the pillow. "I'm sorry."

"Didn't mean to do what?" I asked, and heard a gentle snore. "Rob!"

"I'll go over later to confess," he mumbled.