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 sack lunches that would be that evening’s meal. 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 time 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 their, since public lands were closed to camping, she petitioned a local rancher to allow her girls to use his private rangeland.
Even Faye Lambert had to admit that borrowing the motor hone 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 rest-room 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 refurbished 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 two 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 mini-vans, 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.
Not that Dora was even remotely interested in Girl Scouts—she was far too mature for that. She was into cigarettes. And boys. She bragged that before she and her mother had moved back to Bisbee, she’d had a boyfriend who had “done it” with her and who had wanted to marry her. Dora claimed that was why her mother had left Tucson—to get her daughter away from the boyfriend, but Jenny didn’t think that was the truth. What boy in his right mind would ever want to marry someone like Dora?
“Guess,” Jenny muttered dolefully in answer to Cassie’s question.
Behind her thick glasses, Cassie Parks’s brown eyes widened in horror. “Not Dora,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“You’ve got it,” Jenny replied and then lapsed into miserable silence. She hadn’t wanted to come on the camping trip to begin with. It was bad enough that Grandma Brady had insisted she bring her stupid sit-upon, but having to spend the weekend with Dora Matthews was far worse than anything Jenny could have imagined. After three whole nights in a pup tent with stinky Dora Matthews, Jenny would be lucky if she didn’t stink, too.
Slowly the four vehicles wound up the dusty road that was little more than a rutted track. On either side of the road, the parched desert was spiked with spindly foot-high blades of stiff yellowed grass. Heat shimmered ahead and behind them, covering the road with visible rivers of mirage-fed water. At last the Tracker pulled off the narrow roadway and into a shallow, scrub-oak-dotted basin. Kelly Martindale and Amber Summers leaped out of the Tracker and motioned the other vehicles to pull in behind them. By the time the motor home had maneuvered into place, all the girls had piled out of the minivans and were busy unloading. Dora, who had been accorded the honor of riding along with Mrs. Lambert in the motor home, was the last to arrive. She hung back, letting the other girls do the work of unpacking.
“All right, ladies,” Mrs. Lambert announced as soon as the minivans drove away. “You all know who your partner is. Take tents from the luggage compartment under the motor home. Then choose your spots. We want all the tents up and organized well before dark. Let’s get going.”
Each pair of girls was required to erect its own tent. Of all the girls in the troop, Jenny had the most experience in that regard. While Mrs. Lambert and the two interns supervised the other girls, Jenny set about instructing Dora Matthews on how to help set up theirs.
When it came time to choose a place for the tent, Dora selected a spot that was some distance from the others. Rather than argue about it, Jenny simply shrugged in agreement. “Fine,” she muttered. Without much help from Dora, Jenny managed to lay the tent out properly, but when she asked Dora to hold the center support pole in place, Dora proved totally inept.
“Don’t you know how to do anything right?” Jenny demanded impatiently. “Here, hold it like this!”
Instead of holding the pole, Dora grabbed it away from Jenny and threw it as far as she could heave it. The pole landed in the dirt and stuck up at an angle like a spear.
“If you’re so smart, Jennifer Brady, you can do it yourself.” With that, Dora stalked away.
“Wait a minute,” Mrs. Lambert said, picking up the pole and walking toward the still unraised tent. “What seems to be the problem, girls?”