After making sure the girls were in their sleeping bags and that Betty was actually snoring, I slipped away to do some thinking. A cool breeze picked up, and the fresh air was like a balm. I waited a moment to see if Kelly would chase after and yell at me. When she didn't emerge from her tent, I headed away from our tents in the direction of the sutlery.
Just as the shop was coming into view, I could make out Doc handing something to Tom Branson. It looked like an envelope. What was this about? It certainly wasn't open hours for the sutlery. Could there be an innocent reason for this exchange?
Maybe Doc had purchased something. That was a possibility. Just because the store was closed didn't mean business couldn't be conducted after hours. However, there was something about the way Doc and Tom kept looking over their shoulders that brought me up short.
Ugh. I was seeing suspicious activity everywhere. This could be a perfectly normal thing. I had no experience with reenactments. Well, not with Civil War reenactments.
One time, the Chechens I'd been stationed with—the same ones I'd fled when I was outed on CNN—decided to have some fun because it was quite boring in Chechnya. We were always sitting around, waiting weeks in between any sort of action.
The third in charge, a burly, ham-fisted guy named Boris, who had seventeen cats and a spitting problem, was a World War II junkie, and he'd decided that we would reenact the invasion of D-Day. We spent months planning it, using a tiny lake nearby.
The only place on the shoreline where we could stage a landing was about twenty yards in length. The only vehicles we could find were some paddleboards that Boris had won at a church bingo night in Grozny.
Anyway, because they believed I was a Chechen who'd grown up in the US (but was loyal to their cause), I had to play President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When I tried to tell them that the president hadn't been at D-Day, they ignored me. Their sense of enthusiasm was impressive.
So on a windy, cold day (all days in Chechnya are windy and cold, by the way), Boris, Alexei, Vlad, and Igor invaded a little beach on paddleboards, while the rest of the guys fired Nerf guns at them, and I stood on a hill singing "God Bless America" over and over.
The whole thing was lame, but I've got to say, it was a nice break from planning suicide bombings.
What was Doc up to? He seemed like a normal guy and possibly a normal reenactor—whatever that was. I wasn't entirely sure. This was basically pretend playacting with really old weapons—where one side was always going to lose. Between guys who enjoyed suffering and guys who liked to fake injuries, who knew what counted for normal.
Then again, was it normal for a doctor to be obsessed with nineteenth century amputation? Maybe it was. I mean doctors had hobbies too, right? Spies had hobbies. My friend Hilly, who was an assassin that wasn't an assassin, messed around with Crispr gene editing in her spare time, and I once knew a guy in the IT department at Langley who collected bags made out of bull testicles. He had two thousand and seventy-one—which was two thousand and seventy-one more than anybody should have. Maybe I was reading way too much into this. That was possible.
The only thing that made me think Doc was innocent was that he'd found the leg and brought it to our attention. A killer wouldn't bring his actions to our attention. Unless he was an idiot. Or thought he was very smart.
And yet, Doc would be the perfect suspect for dismembering the leg because he'd know exactly how to do it. What was it that Soo Jin said? That she thought it was a fatal cut? That the guy died because of the amputation? No, she didn't say that exactly.
The victim could've been killed another way. He could've been shot, stabbed, or poisoned. Without a body, it was impossible to tell. And we'd only had the leg for a very short time. Not long enough for a thorough examination.
Doc would stay on my list with Eldo and Ike for now. His area of expertise would keep him there.
Earlier I'd suspected Ike of working with Doc, but then there was one of my attackers—Eldo, who I'd originally met at the campfire. Could he have sought me out with his accomplice to find out what I knew? None of the other reenactors had really given me a second glance. Only a few had introduced themselves. But none of the others had tried to beat me up a short while ago.
And then there was Ralph, who'd gone out of his way to warn me. Was he just a good Samaritan, or did he really think I was in danger? My gut told me he wouldn't have warned me if he wasn't involved, so he stayed on the list too.
There was that soldier who had almost killed Ava with a badly thrown knife. Having bad aim didn't mean you were a killer. And if he was, why hadn't he aimed at me? Maybe he'd thought that if he killed one of my girls, I'd leave the reenactment.
Boy did he have me wrong if that was the case! Killing one of my girls would've sent me into a revenge overdrive that would rival Sherman's March to the Sea, if Sherman had had a giant robot/flamethrower and a healthy supply of napalm.
Besides, he was genuinely horrified, and his apology seemed very sincere. Although, didn't someone tell me reenactors didn't throw knives at these events? That it wasn't part of the canon of reenacting?
And what about Embry? The galvanized soldier had been cordial. That didn't mean much. In my former line of work, the baddie was often the guy you thought was your friend. Spies worked hard to find folks to turn against their government. It was always a crapshoot that they'd be disloyal to their country and loyal to the USA.
Embry had introduced himself too. I was going to keep him on my list just for that.
My thoughts ran back to Ike. That man did not like me or my girls. And, until Betty had liberated it, he'd given our cannon to the other side. Ike was an interesting character. He kind of reminded me of a curmudgeonly prospector.
He seemed to know his way around a reenactment. And in helping people move in, he would get to know others here. I'd guess especially so on the Rebel side since he delivered my cannon to them.
What about Daisy? You'd think I'd rule animals out, right? Not with my past. I'd been robbed by monkeys, shot at by a chicken, and once had great intel eaten by a weasel. The girls liked the donkey. But that didn't mean she wasn't in on it.
The thought of animals made me think of Mitch and his skunk, Babette. I kind of ruled them out because this crime seemed to be transitory, and Mitch lived here. Besides, I liked the skunk.
Argh! There were too many suspects! And just one of me. I couldn't involve Kelly in this. She was too busy with the kids and batting her eyelashes at the provost. And I didn't want to include the girls any more than I had to. I had my hands full keeping Betty in line.
Riley had made it clear his case was off limits. He'd be no help. And Soo Jin and Eddie were swamped. There was only one person who could handle this.
Me.
Where was I? Looking around in the darkness, I realized I was near one of the Rebel campsites. Huh. I'd crossed over Idiot Creek and hadn't even noticed. What a surprise. And that's when I heard muffled voices.
About twenty feet away and oblivious to my presence, Embry was deep in conversation with Eldo. I don't know why that seemed unusual. These guys talked to each other all the time, trading tips on hardtack recipes, the right shoes, and the nature of different wounds.
I tried to slip a little closer to see if I could overhear. Finding a spot behind a tent, I could hear them but not see them.
"Stop it. I know it was you," I heard Eldo say.
"I'll do what I damn well want!" Embry growled.
"You should know better," Eldo warned. "This isn't your concern."
Embry's laugh was cold and taunting. "What are you going to do about it?"
What were they talking about? Could be something to do with the missing body? The leg? Or was it a missing body that was missing a leg? All of this was so confusing.
It had to be something because Eldo was involved. Now it seemed like Embry was in on something he shouldn't be. That was interesting.
"Break it up!" a man's voice shouted. Had the two men started fighting?
There was some grumbling as the sound of footsteps led away.
I ran to the Ladies Aid tent and got some paper, a pen, and a bottle of ink.
I listed everybody I thought was a suspect. It took forever. I wasn't used to dipping a pen into an ink bottle. The ink took a millennium to dry, so before long, my right hand and arm were smudged with black ink. Didn't they have pencils in this time? But then I'd have to sharpen a pencil.
By the time I was finished, practically the entire camp was a suspect, with the exception of me, Kelly, my troop, Soo Jin, and Eddie. Oh, I'd forgotten about Riley. Sadly, I'd have to list him in the innocent category.
This camp was seething with suspicious activity. Why was that? It was just supposed to be a little reenactment. Something fun to do. But was it that difficult to think that there were insidious activities going on? Maybe these events always had the undercurrent of criminal activity. It was the perfect thing to run drugs, launder money, and now, commit murder.
Sure, I had a lot of suspects. But what I didn't have was the body—which was the only evidence that a crime had been committed at all. Temporarily, I'd had a leg. That was it. Oh, and I had some people who hated me, like Juliette Dowd and Mary Gold.
As much as I wanted to, I couldn't really believe that Juliette would go so far as to murder some guy. Yes, she was awful and hated everything. But in my mind, she'd stop short of actually killing and dismembering a man. Now doing that to me…that was a different matter.
No, she wouldn't kill me. I'd never give her the chance. And I was a Girl Scout. I was pretty sure killing another Scout was frowned upon. That was probably in the pledge or law or something.
The list was nearly dry, and I wasn't much closer to solving this. My suspect list had grown, but with no body, the list was useless.
It was getting late, the muscle soreness from the fight was catching up to me, and I was dead tired. I rolled up the piece of paper, took it to my tent, and crawled into my sleeping bag. Maybe in the morning I'd have an easier time collecting my thoughts.
The only problem with that was the fact that tomorrow was the last day of the reenactment. I'd never had an investigation go cold before. If I didn't figure things out by tomorrow, the whole mess would hang in the back of my mind forever.
The clock was running out. I needed answers. But most of all, I needed a body.