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  "Your girls are the only ones who appreciated me. Who liked me. I couldn't let them get hurt. They're the next generation of art lovers."

  Okay. Seemed like a strange excuse, but okay.

  "But those horses! They won't be so lucky!" A dark glee took over her eyes. "They're going to be butchered up into dog food!" And she started laughing maniacally. That's right, like a villain in a Bond movie.

  Before I could stop her, Lauren ran the length of the barn and tackled Venus' legs. The woman looked down, startled. For some reason, she thought the tiny kid was trying to hug her, so she hugged her back.

  "Cookie!!!" The remaining nine girls screamed and ran at Venus, succeeding in knocking her to the floor. Tiny fists started beating on the woman as she struggled.

  I picked up the gun. "Tie her up!" I pointed to the empty ropes that had previously held Dot. The four Kaitlins grabbed the rope, and the other six girls helped wrestle them around the writhing art instructor. I knew they'd do a good job. These girls were terrifying with knots.

  "Stop!" Venus yelled before Ava shoved a balled up bandana in her mouth.

  I checked the door. "I'm going out. Stay here!" I said.

  My troop nodded. Dot sat up. I explained what was happening, and she said she'd watch the girls. She was unsteady, but I thought she could do the job.

  I closed the barn door behind me once I got outside. The trucks with their trailers were gone. Benson and the others must've taken them to the paddocks. At this point, all I was going to do was guard my girls and wait for the sheriff to show up. I'd meet them and explain where they could find the men. But I wasn't going any farther than that.

  "Mrs. Wrath!" Inez's voice made me turn around. What was she doing out here?

  Benson came around the side of the barn holding a gun to the child's head.

  "I figured you'd get the best of Venus," he growled. "I caught this kid trying to sneak out the side door."

  Inez gave me a weak smile. "I wanted to help."

  My heart sank. Of course she wanted to help.

  "Let her go." I tossed the gun down. "If you need a hostage, take me."

  Benson spat on the ground. "I don't like hostages. Hostages have eyes and ears and share what they know with the cops when they're freed."

  His words sent a chill down my spine. Was he implying that he was going to kill all of us? That was not going to happen.

  "Inez and I will lie. We have no interest in stopping you," I promised.

  Benson looked at me for a long, hard moment. "I'll let the kid go. But you and I aren't finished." He shoved Inez away, hard. She fell to the ground but got up quickly and stood there, arms folded across her chest.

  "Mrs. Wrath will kick your butt!" Inez shouted defiantly.

  A nasty leer crossed the man's face. "Oh really?"

  "Yes really! She's a good fighter!"

  Oh crap. What was this kid doing?

  Benson turned his grin on me. "Okay. You can fight for your life."

  "Excuse me?" I asked.

  He started flexing muscles I hadn't seen yet. "I've always wanted to fight a woman. You can fight me. If you knock me out, you go free." He dropped the gun to the ground.

  "Inez!" I shouted as the kid started for the weapon. "You don't touch that gun."

  The child obeyed, giving me a nod that I think was meant to inspire courage but fell slightly short of the mark.

  Great. While it was true that I could fight and fight well, most of my successful fights had been because I'd started them when the other person's guard was down. Going up against a trained fighter who knew I was going to attack was not going to end well.

  Benson started jumping up and down and waving his massive arms to loosen them up. I just crouched into a defensive position and tried to size him up. He didn't seem to have any weak points, except for the usual eyes and throat. This was not going to be a fair fight.

  "Come on." Benson motioned me toward him, "Show me what you've got."

  I closed in because that's all I could do. We circled each other warily. I was hoping he would think I'd fight like a girl. Most men did. That way the first blow I landed would surprise him.

  Feinting to the left, I swung to the right and kicked him hard in the stomach. He doubled over slightly, but soon righted himself and was able to dodge a right cross to the jaw. His fist connected with my cheek, and I scrambled backwards. Damn, that hurt.

  I acted like I was going to fold but instead launched myself toward his waist, taking him down to the ground. I landed a few sharp blows to his throat before he threw me off of him. We both got to our feet and started circling each other again. The man was made of iron. None of my blows had fazed him.

  "Not bad," he said. "Not bad at all."

  It was bad. All bad. My jaw was throbbing. He simply had more power than me. Where in the hell were those damn deputies?

  I went to kick him in the groin, but he grabbed my leg and threw it upwards, making me land on my back. Benson dove on top of me, but I rolled to my left, and he hit the ground on his hands and knees. My right foot connected hard with his ribcage, and he went the rest of the way down.

  His arm flew out and grabbed my ankle, pulling it and me toward him. I smashed his wrist with my other foot, and he let go.

  "Stupid bitch!" he snarled as he got to his feet. "I'm going to kill you!"

  I just stood there and smiled.

  "Aaaaaaaaaah!" he screamed as he ran toward me.

  The boomerang I saw Surf throw connected with the back of his head before he got close enough to hit me. He went down like a sack of manure just as Surf caught the returning Australian weapon.

  "Isn't that a bit of a cliché? Using a boomerang?" I smiled at Surf. Reef was right behind her. The cavalry had come to the rescue—just not the one I had been expecting.

  At that moment, the sheriff's car arrived, and two men got out, guns drawn. I told them where they'd find Skinny and Fat Guy, and they handcuffed the unconscious Benson and threw him into the car.

  "We thought something was off," Reef said, running a hand through her short, dark hair.

  "You didn't go back to your campsite after final campfire," Surf said.

  Apparently, the young ladies had thought nothing of it at first. But when they were helping with checking troops out, they noticed that one was missing. After stopping by Raccoon Fork and finding a very frantic, and pregnant, leader alone, they came looking for us. Kelly had called the sheriff's department too. It made me wonder why the deputies hadn't arrived sooner.

  An ambulance showed up for Dot, who was concussed and confused as to why ten little girls were pleading for the life of Cookie the horse. The deputies took my statement, and Pony showed up in the camp van to drive us to our site.

  Kelly ran up to us, stopping when she saw my face. I hadn't seen a mirror yet. They didn't have them in camp anywhere because they didn't want the girls to worry about what they looked like. I was pretty sure I looked like a bruise with eyes.

  "So you told yourself you were making something out of nothing by going to the bridge last night and then walked right into something by taking the girls to see the horses today," Kelly said after I'd told her the whole story.

  "That sums it up, yes," I said as I tossed the last of the sleeping bags into the second van, driven by Surf. Pony and Surf drove us to our cars. We went through the checkout process, and after getting the girls into our vehicles, we finally headed home.

  I let the girls in my car scream all the way home. It was the least I could do considering what they'd been through only an hour ago. They seemed to have taken it in stride. Especially since Dot had told them that she'd decided Cookie would be her horse, and he'd live at Camp Mika for the rest of his life.

  The parents were waiting for us when we pulled up in Kelly's driveway. While Kelly supervised the girls unloading the cars and sorting their things, I called a little meeting and told the parents what had happened. .

  A couple of parents looked surprised, but no one
said anything. They all looked like they'd been at a spa for a week. Clearly, having their daughters at camp had been good for them. Maybe they thought that was a fair tradeoff. I couldn't tell. Or maybe, unlike other incidents, this wasn't my fault. We'd just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  When I was finished, the four Kaitlins walked up to me, holding their giant papier-mâché horse.

  "Mrs. Wrath?" Kaitlin asked. "We want you to have Cookie."

  I shook my head. "No girls. You went to a lot of work on him."

  "Yes, but we want you to have him," Caitlyn said.

  "You can bring him to meetings as our mascot!" Katelynn shouted.

  I looked dubiously at the huge horse. It came up to my waist. Then I looked at the parents, one of whom mouthed the word Please!

  "Okay. I'll give him a good home." I knelt down to the girls. "Thank you. I love Cookie."

  A huge cheer went up, and Kelly joined me as the last of the girls finally went home.

  "What are you going to do with him?" Kelly asked.

  I thought for a moment. In spite of everything—painted girls, runaway horses, ghost badgers, and horse thieves—I thought camp had gone rather well.

  "Next year," I said as I struggled to pick up the horse, "I'll be prepared for camp."

  Kelly's right eyebrow rose. "Next year? There's going to be a next year?"

  I ignored her. "Next year, Cookie's going with us."

  "What? Why?" Kelly looked alarmed.

  "I'm going to make a secret flap and fill him with guns, like a weapons piñata."

  I patted the sides of the horse, feeling around for the best spot to make a hole. There was room for a couple of guns, knives, and a Taser or two.

  "And why would you even think that's okay?" Kelly asked.

  I smiled at her. "Because pocket knives aren't going to cut it, and you know our motto."

  She frowned. "Motto?"

  I nodded. "Always be prepared." And from here on out—I was going to take that literally.

  * * * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Leslie Langtry is the author of the Greatest Hits Mysteries series, Sex, Lies, & Family Vacations, The Hanging Tree Tales as Max Deimos, the Merry Wrath Mysteries, and several books she hasn't finished yet, because she's very lazy.

  Leslie loves puppies and cake (but she will not share her cake with puppies) and thinks praying mantids make everything better. She lives with her family and assorted animals in the Midwest, where she is currently working on her next book and trying to learn to play the ukulele.

  To learn more about Leslie, visit her online at:

  http://www.leslielangtry.com

  * * * * *

  BOOKS BY LESLIE LANGTRY

  Merry Wrath Mysteries

  Merit Badge Murder

  Mint Cookie Murder

  Greatest Hits Mysteries:

  'Scuse Me While I Kill This Guy

  Guns Will Keep Us Together

  Stand By Your Hitman

  I Shot You Babe

  Paradise By The Rifle Sights

  Snuff the Magic Dragon

  My Heroes Have Always Been Hitmen

  Four Killing Birds (a holiday short story)

  Have Yourself a Deadly Little Christmas (a holiday short story)

  Other Works:

  Sex, Lies, & Family Vacations

  Hanging Tree Tales YA Horror novels:

  Hell House

  Tyler's Fate

  Witch Hill

  The Teacher

  A KILLING IN THE MARKET

  (a Danger Cove Farmers' Market Mystery)

  by

  Gin Jones & Elizabeth Ashby

  * * * * *

  "It was a dark and stormy night," intoned a serious-faced fifth-grade boy seated with his legs dangling over the edge of the temporary stage. Behind him, the backdrop portrayed that dark and stormy night, with equally dark and stormy ocean waves below. Rising above the backdrop, a couple of hundred feet behind the stage, was a real lighthouse at the very edge of a rocky cliff overlooking the harbor.

  The boy stared at me, possibly because I was the front-row guest of honor for the play, but judging from the slightly panicked look on his face, more likely because someone had told him he should concentrate on just one person if he was nervous about speaking to an audience of about a hundred people.

  I'd been told that I have a reassuring presence. Apparently, everyone who'd ever met me shared the same first impression: I was solid, take-charge, and unflappable. Not really the sort of description a woman in her thirties dreams of inspiring, but it was reasonably accurate. I was a little over average height and large-boned, and I worked hard to keep the "solid" from becoming flabby. The take-charge trait came naturally too me, as the oldest of five children, and from what I'd heard about my ancestors, the unflappability was just as much due to my DNA as the large bones were.

  I nodded at the boy on the stage, willing him to conquer his stage fright. Snap out of it!

  A moment later, I heard those exact words coming from behind the curtains to the boy's left, probably spoken by the teacher who'd sponsored and directed the play that the children had written.

  The boy started and brushed his hand over the script lying on the stage beside him for reassurance but didn't pick it up.

  "It was a dark and stormy night," he repeated, this time with all the composure and clear enunciation of a television news anchor three times his age. "And Nana Dolores, whose real name was Maria Dolores, worried about the ships sailing near Danger Cove."

  Another boy raced onto the stage, dressed in what was probably supposed to mark him as a sailor, but he actually looked much more like a Halloween-style pirate, complete with a cutlass and an eye patch. "Argh, mateys. We're going down with all hands on deck."

  I stifled my laughter at the enthusiastic overacting while another dozen or so young actors joined him on the stage to portray a particularly memorable night in the life of my own great-great-great-grandmother's tenure as the first lighthouse keeper in Danger Cove. I'd heard the story plenty of times before from my mother. My namesake, Maria Dolores, had become as close to an overnight sensation as was possible in the 1920s when she, her daughter, and her granddaughter had saved the lives of a dozen sailors.

  In my mother's version, the story had featured a great deal fewer cutlasses, eyepatches, and heroics, and a great deal more callous child endangerment and foolish disregard of personal safety. I also knew what few others did, that the story hadn't been quite as uplifting as it was being portrayed. The rescues had been real all right, but what the newspapers had neglected to mention was that the rescued sailors had been smuggling whiskey during Prohibition, and my great-great-great-grandmother had turned them over to the authorities for prosecution and substantial federal prison sentences. From what I'd been told, all of my ancestors—at least until my mother had come along to break with tradition—had been great believers in law and order.

  On the stage, a young girl in a long calico dress and white pinafore-style apron called out, "Come with me, girls. We must save the sailors." This personification of my seventy-year-old great-great-great-grandmother hobbled across the stage, leaning on a cane.

  I'd seen several pictures of the original Maria Dolores, and we looked enough alike to be sisters. People had undoubtedly considered her solid, take-charge, and unflappable too. She had my large-boned build, dark hair, and square face. Although I hoped that I didn't usually wear the grim, stoic expression she had in all of her pictures. Her daughter had very similar looks, and their DNA had reasserted itself in me, after somehow getting scrambled when it produced my redheaded, round-faced, drama queen of a mother.

  The Maria Dolores on the stage was joined a moment later by another girl in a matching costume, presumably my then thirty-five-year-old great-great-grandmother. Whoever had done the hair and makeup apparently thought anyone over the age of thirty was ancient, since the two women had matching white hair in buns, and faces as wrinkled as
shrunken apples. The hair was wrong for the younger woman, but the face might not have been too far off even for a younger woman of that era. Keeping a lighthouse was hard work, with constant exposure to the elements.

  A third girl skipped onto the stage wearing another matching dress and apron, although it was a little shorter than the others were, and she'd been spared the bun and makeup. She had to be portraying my great-grandmother, only twelve years old at the time.

  All three of them had died before I was born, and I'd never met my grandmother due to my mother's estrangement from her family. I'd been born here in Danger Cove, but my mother had taken me to Seattle when I was two-years-old, and I'd never had any reason to return in the intervening thirty-four years. The invitation to be the guest of honor at today's grand opening of the Lighthouse Farmer's Market had come at just the right moment. I'd recently closed down my financial planning practice, and, much too young to retire at age thirty-six, I was taking some time to find a new career that appealed to me.

  Fortunately, I'd taken my own planning advice and accumulated a decent portfolio because I was having more trouble than I'd expected in figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. All I knew for sure was that after fourteen years behind a desk—with a widening backside to prove it—I wanted to do something a bit more physical.

  One of the careers I was considering was house flipping. A friend had suggested that I talk to Alexandra Jordan here in Danger Cove. I'd been assured that as the owner of Finials and Facades Renovation and Restoration Services, Alex could give me good advice about house flipping. Still, I'd been reluctant to contact her at first, in part because I wasn't particularly sold on the career, which I suspected would get in the way of my one personal appearance indulgence: fingernail art.

  The other consideration that had held me back from meeting with Alex before now was that I wasn't sure her experience would be relevant. As a lifelong city dweller, I had no intention of ever settling down in a small town, least of all this one, which my mother had told me was a terrible place to live, full of vicious, backstabbing, coldhearted people. While the town's chamber of commerce described it as "a sleepy little town in the Pacific Northwest" and claimed the title of "friendliest,"—my mother had completely different adjectives for it, few of them fit for polite company.