History wasn’t something Jenny Brady particularly liked, and she wondered how much the interns actually knew. What she had noticed about them was that they both wore short shorts, and they looked more like high school than college girls. But then, she reasoned, since they were former Girl Scouts, maybe they weren’t all bad.
Behind the little blue Tracker rolled two jam-packed minivans driven by harried mothers and loaded to the gills with girls and their gear-bedrolls, backpacks, and the scattered crumbs and associated debris left over from their now consumed sack lunches. Once the mothers finished discharging their rowdy passengers, both they and their empty minivans would return to Bisbee. They were due back Monday at noon to retrieve a grubby set of campers after their weekend in the wilderness.
Behind the minivans, Mrs. Lambert and one of her twelve charges lumbered along in the clumsy looking Winnebago. The motor home belonged to a man named Emmet Foxworth, one of Faye Lambert’s husband’s most prominent parishioners. Upon hearing that the U.S. Forest Service had closed all Arizona campgrounds due to extreme fire danger, most youth group leaders had canceled their scheduled camp outs. Faye Lambert wasn’t to be deterred. She simply made alternate arrangements. First she had borrowed the motor home and then, since public lands were closed to camping, she petitioned a local rancher to allow her girls to use his private range land.
Even Faye Lambert had to admit that borrowing the motor home had been nothing short of inspired. She might have taken on the challenge of being a Girl Scout leader, but she had never slept on the ground in her life. Having the motor home there meant she could keep her indoor sleeping record unblemished. Also, since the ranch obviously lacked camping facilities, the motor home would provide both restroom and cooking facilities in addition to the luxury of running water.
Cassie Parks, seated in the middle row of the second minivan, turned around and looked questioningly at Jenny through thick, red-framed glasses. “Who’s your partner?” Cassie asked.
Cassie was a quiet girl with long dark hair in two thick braids. Her home, out near Double Adobe, was even farther from town than the Bradys’ place on High Lonesome Ranch. Cassie’s parents, relative newcomers who hailed from Kansas, had bought what had once been a nationally owned campground that had been allowed to drift into a state of ruin. After a year’s worth of back-breaking labor, Cassie’s parents had completely re-furbished the place, turning it into an independent, moderately priced RV park.
When school had started the previous fall, Cassie had been the new girl in Jenny’s sixth grade class at Lowell School. Now, with school just out, the two girls had a history that included nine months of riding the school bus together. Much of that time they had been on the bus by themselves as they traveled to and from their outlying Sulphur Springs Valley homes. They also belonged to the same scout troop. In the course of that year, the pair of girls had become good friends.
If Jenny had been able to choose her own pup-tent partner for the Memorial Day weekend camp out, Cassie would have been it. But Mrs. Lambert, who didn’t like cliques or pairing off, had decided to mix things up. She had shown up in the church parking lot with a sock filled with six pairs of buttons in six different colors. While the twelve girls had been loading their gear into the minivans, Mrs. Lambert had instructed each one to pull out a single button. To prevent trading around, as soon as a button was drawn, Mrs. Lambert wrote the color down on a clipboard next to each girl’s name. Jenny had already drawn her yellow button when she saw Cassie draw a blue one.
The last girl to arrive in the parking lot and the last to draw her button was Dora Matthews. Glimpsing the yellow button in Dora’s fingers, Jenny’s heart sank. Of all the girls in the troop, Dora Matthews was the one Jenny liked least.
For one thing, Dora’s hair was dirty, and she smelled bad. She was also loud, rude, and obnoxious. She couldn’t have been very smart because she was thirteen years old and was still in a sixth grade classroom where everybody else was twelve. Mrs. Lambert usually brought Dora to troop meetings and was always nice to her even though Dora wasn’t nice back. Two months before school was out, Dora and her mother had returned to Bisbee and moved into the house that had once belonged to Dora’s deceased maternal grandmother, Dolly Pommer. All their lives, the elder Pommers had been movers and shakers in the Presbyterian Church. Out of respect for them, Faye Lambert had done what she could for their newly arrived daughter and granddaughter. That also explained why Dora Matthews was now the newest member in Jenny’s Girl Scout troop.