Mosquito Bite Murder

by Leslie Langtry

  I leaned in and said very softly in case she was listening, "What if we made her believe we could do that?"

  He considered this. "That might work. She'll be super pissed off when she realizes we are bluffing."

  "That's a risk I'm willing to take." I called out to the woods. "Maria, you can come over and join us. It's just Riley and me."

  "And me, Betty," Betty called from her bunk.

  "And Lauren," Lauren added.

  The others chimed in with their names.

  There was a rustling in the leaves and out stepped Maria. She hesitated, looking both ways, and then joined us on the log.

  I was pretty surprised that worked, to be honest. I reached into my backpack and pulled out some trail mix and gave it to the woman. She accepted gratefully and began to nibble. Even when starving, she had impeccable manners. Maybe I could get her to teach the girls…you know, when she wasn't on the run, that is.

  "Hey Maria," Riley said. "Nice to see you."

  "Do you want something more to eat?" I handed her some granola bars before she could answer, and she went to town on them too.

  "I saw Hilly leave," Maria said finally. "She was pulling something in a wagon."

  "Old Eisenhower," Lauren shouted from her tent.

  "He's a turtle from the past!" another girl chimed in.

  "Girls," I warned, "that's enough."

  "Maria," Riley asked, "why all the cloak and dagger stuff? We're in the middle of nowhere."

  Maria sighed. "Yes, sorry about that. There's someone here I didn't expect to see. It's just that I don't trust…"

  I waited for her to finish her sentence, but she never did. "Who?"

  "Her," she said with a strange emphasis on the word.

  "No one trusts her." Riley shook his head.

  "I trust her!" Betty called out.

  "Guys!" I shouted, and it grew quiet once again.

  "Not Hilly! It's one of the women." Maria looked around. "I recognize her!"

  "From what?" I was a bit taken aback. "None of the women have left these woods since 1966!"

  "I can't explain it," Maria said. "All I know is that one of them is…"

  Snap.

  "Mrs. Wrath?" Betty Sr.'s voice rang out. "Is everything alright?"

  Maria flew to the woods, disappearing as the older woman joined us.

  It was. "Absolutely. Why do you ask?"

  Betty Sr. sat down on a log as Betty Jr. appeared in her jammies.

  "What are you doing here?" I asked.

  "I'm supposed to be wherever she is." The girl pointed at the older version. "It's an alternate universe thing. You wouldn't understand."

  Okay, I'll bite. "Try me."

  Betty Jr. sat next to Betty Sr. "I read all about it in a comic book. She's me in an alternate dimension. The dimensions have obviously merged, and she's out of her time. So we need to be together in order to keep the world from exploding."

  Betty Sr. listened carefully and then nodded. "Seems legit."

  I stared at the older woman. "That's an awfully modern phrase. How do you know it?"

  Betty Sr. pulled a sheet of paper out of her pocket. "Betty gave me this. They're updating me on the slang of the future."

  "May I look at that?" I asked.

  She handed it over with a shrug. There was a list of slang from the present, such as LOL, among others, including seems legit. There was also a picture of both Bettys riding on Cookie's back to fight the commies for Scotland's freedom.

  "Scotland?" I asked.

  Betty Jr. nodded. "I'm kind of over the Basque and Catalan thing."

  "Back to bed, please," I said.

  The girl sighed, rolled her eyes, and got up. After fist-bumping her elderly namesake, she vanished into our tent.

  "I thought I should apologize for the magic act tonight," Betty Sr. started. "You didn't know it was coming."

  "It was a perfect storm of hypnotism," I acknowledged grudgingly.

  "The Sharons' hypnosis isn't perfect," the old woman explained. "Truth is, they've had no formal training. Once they made Laura think she was someone else for a whole year. And then there was the time they had Ada walking backwards everywhere. And Esme believed for two whole months that she was in love with a thorn bush—which turned out to be a terrible idea."

  "I seem fine," I said. "I haven't acted out of the norm." I looked at Riley. "Have I?"

  He became extremely interested in his bootlace.

  "Well, you should be careful. Sometimes this weird stuff kicks in the first time you go to sleep," Betty Sr. warned.

  "It does?" I asked in a strangled voice.

  "You always said you were immune to hypnosis," Riley said.

  I shook my head. "I'm sure this was just a fluke. My body isn't used to this kind of food."

  "No, it's more used to the junk and chemicals you usually eat." Riley grinned.

  Betty Sr. pressed, "You haven't been seeing things, like people who aren't here? Heard noises no one else hears?"

  With all the weird stuff happening, I could see how that might seem to be true. "But they just hypnotized me tonight. It doesn't act retroactively."

  Betty Sr. rubbed her chin. "Well, no, I should probably tell you that sometimes the Sharons don't wait until their show. A couple of times they've hypnotized someone before, in a way they don't know it. I think they believe it will make the volunteer more pliable for the performance."

  "What have they made you do?" Riley asked.

  Betty stared at him. "Nothing. They've tried to hypnotize me, but it's never worked. I guess, unlike you, I really am immune. I had to make them stop after they'd tried twenty-three times."

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  "Good morning!" Hilly was sitting on the edge of her cot, bouncing.

  "Morning," I mumbled as I sat up. My head was splitting with one of the worst headaches I'd ever had.

  Must be the potatoes. I rummaged in my backpack for two aspirin and swallowed them dry. As I climbed into my jeans, it felt like something was off. I felt in the pockets, but found nothing.

  Nothing? Where was the bandana and hood? I searched my bunk, my sleeping bag, and my backpack, but the hood and bandana were gone! I looked over at Hilly. She had to have taken them. She must have thought they'd implicate her.

  The girls were outside, brushing their teeth with the water in their bottles and spitting into the weeds. I joined them, and then we all got dressed.

  "The ladies have invited us for breakfast." Hilly was now outside, rocking back and forth on her heels.

  "Great," I managed. "The last thing I want is more potatoes."

  "You don't know that," Hilly chastised. "It could be something completely different."

  "I don't see how. Unless egg-laying hens appeared overnight or a loaf of bread and a battery-powered toaster fell from the sky, I'm pretty sure we're having boiled potatoes."

  Ada met us at the lodge and ushered us inside.

  "I was right," I said. "More potatoes."

  "It's totally different, because this time we're eating them inside!" Hilly said.

  The girls settled down at one of the two tables for eight, while the adults sat at the second. There was a pitcher of lukewarm water and a platter of boiled potatoes.

  "I sure wish we had some bacon," one of the Sharons said. "Do you remember bacon?"

  "Well, we don't," Betty Sr. said. "We never do. So complaining about it isn't going to get us anywhere."

  "You know"—Laura pushed her potato around on her plate—"up until last year, we were able to grow other kinds of vegetables, like peas and carrots. But last year there was a terrible peas and carrot blight, and we've been eating potatoes nonstop."

  "Which is all the more reason you should come back with us," I said. "This isn't healthy. You can't just eat one food for the rest of your lives. You ladies need other vitamins."

  "I do miss other food," Esme said sadly. "I think we should go back with Mrs. Wrath."

  Betty Jr. snapped her fingers. "Yes!" />
  I opened my mouth and said, "Rutabaga!" I slapped my hands over my mouth. Why did I say that? It just came out of me. I couldn't control it.

  Betty Jr. looked at her fingers and me and snapped again.

  This time I jumped to my feet and shouted, "Rutabaga!"

  What the hell was happening? Why was I shouting about some vegetable?

  Lauren snapped her fingers twice.

  I began to hop from one foot to the other, all while shouting, "Rutabaga," twice.

  "It worked!" One of the Sharons snapped her fingers.

  This time I did a flip. I've never done a flip in my life. How was I not lying on the floor with a broken neck?

  "Stop snapping your fingers!" I pleaded.

  The Kaitlyns snapped their fingers three times.

  "Rutabaga, rutabaga, rutabaga!"

  Riley was laughing so hard it probably hurt. Hilly was fascinated and probably wondering if she could rutabaga someone to death.

  "I wish we had some rutabagas," Esme said, and the others nodded.

  Hilly stepped forward and snapped her fingers, watching as I once more shouted, "Rutabaga."

  "How did you do this? Can you really make them jump around like that? I could use something like this when luring a target to a ledge." She frowned. "Of course, then I'd have to scrape up the remains and pour them into a dumpster, so maybe that wouldn't be very convenient."

  Inez, maybe feeling a bit left out, snapped her fingers five times and watched as I spun around in circles, shouting out that word.

  "All right!" Betty Sr. rounded on the Sharons. "That's enough."

  "Can you make her give us her Amazon password?" Betty Jr. wondered.

  I paused. "You don't already have that?"

  "You changed it." Betty shrugged.

  Oh. Right. I did.

  I slumped into my chair as the older Betty chastised the Sharons for hypnotizing the first real adult Girl Scout they'd come across in fifty years. I thought about reminding them that they were, in fact, adult Girl Scouts, but I was exhausted from all the spinning, jumping, and shouting out the name of a root vegetable.

  Betty Sr. made the Sharons clean up after breakfast while the rest of us went outside. Lauren pulled a bag of plastic lacing from her backpack and offered to teach the older women and Hilly how to make lanyards.

  Riley and I sat it out, going off by ourselves to the campfire logs.

  "I can't believe I was still hypnotized!" I complained. "The Sharons have to undo this."

  "Oh, I don't know. Maybe I can bribe them to keep it going. Think of all the fun to be had with you running around shouting one word over and over."

  "Do you know anything about hypnosis?" I pleaded.

  Riley thought about it. "I dated a psychiatrist once who did that sort of thing. She was very clingy and tried to hypnotize me into proposing."

  Riley? Proposing? That psychiatrist had some seriously deranged pipe dreams. "It didn't work?"

  He shook his head. "No. Apparently my whole being rejected the idea. In the end I learned that hypnosis is only a suggestion. It can't make you do something that's morally repugnant to you."

  I steeled myself. "Well I've just decided that saying rutabaga is morally repugnant to me."

  "Good luck with that." He laughed.

  A thought occurred to me. "Do you think maybe the Sharons are involved in Chad's murder? They could've hypnotized someone else to kill him."

  "Murder usually falls into the morally repugnant category," Riley said. "What would their motive be? I can't imagine that they'd do it just to do it."

  "I'm not sure. But it seems possible somehow. However, you're right. I can't think of any reason why they would want to kill Chad."

  Lauren handed Riley and me a couple of pieces of brightly colored plastic lacing.

  "You have to make them too," the girl insisted before walking off.

  Riley held up two laces and began folding them into a boxy lanyard.

  "How," I demanded, "do you know how to make lanyards?"

  Seriously! On our second or third ever camping trip, Kelly introduced us all to the joy of making something completely useless out of plastic lacing. It took me all weekend, and I still struggled with starting one every time.

  Riley braided his like a natural. It hardly seemed fair.

  "I picked it up during that Civil War reenactment recently," he said. "Betty taught me one night when she was gambling with the Rebs."

  Of course she did. I fiddled with the lanyards, but my mind drifted off to the conversations each girl was having with her older doppelganger.

  "I had big dreams once, you know," Ada confided in Ava. She looked at me, but I pretended to be very interested in making my lanyard. "I wanted to run my own insurance company."

  Ava squealed. "Really? Me too!"

  "Of course, there isn't much call for that here," Ada said as she twisted her lacing. "We don't even have medical help."

  "How do you live?" Ava gasped.

  The older woman looked up from her work. "Well, I thought about starting an insurance company with the six of us. It was a pretty good idea too. I called it Ada Care."

  Ava was so intrigued she set her lanyard aside. "How would that work?"

  "Well, they could pay me for coverage against injuries in the woods, like being bitten by a bat, mauled by a cougar, or murdered by Boy Scouts."

  Ava frowned. "You get much of that here?"

  "You'd be surprised," Ada replied.

  "I don't know." The little girl shook her head. "Some of those might come under pre-existing conditions, considering that you're living with bats and cougars so you're exposing yourself to risk."

  The old lady seemed surprised. "I hadn't thought about that."

  "How would they pay for coverage?" Ava picked her lanyard back up but did not work on it.

  Ada said, "I was thinking of using sticks or potatoes as currency."

  Ava nodded as if this made perfect sense. "And how would you deliver the medical care when they were injured?"

  "That's the part that tripped me up. We don't exactly have a doctor you'd need insurance for out here. Betty was going to be our doctor, but she said she wouldn't take my insurance."

  "That's not fair!" Ava protested.

  Ada nodded. "Agreed. I've kind of always resented her for that."

  The little girl put her hands on her hips. "You'd think she'd just get with the program if this was your dream and all."

  "We didn't talk for a while," Ada admitted. "Of course, then I tripped over a dead branch and sprained my ankle, and she was the only one who could bind it. I guess we all should've known first aid. Hindsight and all that."

  "I'm definitely going to run an insurance company when I'm older. I'm only ten, but I'm starting now," Ava explained.

  The older woman squinted at her. "How's that?"

  "I'm running for mayor back home. I figure it will be good leadership experience. Help me up the corporate ladder."

  Ada looked confused. "There's a corporate ladder?"

  Ava nodded. "And it goes all the way up to a glass ceiling, which I need to break. I'm not sure why, but all women have to break it."

  "Sounds kind of dangerous," Ada responded.

  Ava agreed. "I'll have to have good insurance when I do that. Seems like a stupid thing to have to do, doesn't it?"

  Ada shook her head. "Things sure have changed out there. Now you have to climb a ladder—which would be hard in a dress. All you had to do in my day to get ahead…was not be a woman. And why a glass ceiling? Is it reinforced? And if not, why would you want something that could break and kill the people below?"

  "I don't know." Ava thought about this. "I guess you really need insurance to do those dangerous things. In which case, it's pretty brilliant."

  "If more people do that"—Ada rubbed her chin—"you could make a lot of money in insurance! Why wait to be a CEO?"

  "I have to finish elementary school at least first," Ava said matter-of-factly. "That's
why I'm running for mayor now. It's the lower hanging fruit."

  "What does that mean?"

  Ava shrugged. "I don't know. More of that corporate lingo, I guess."

  "That makes sense." Ada leaned over and showed Ava her work. "Now, how do I do this part?"

  I felt like I should've stepped up and explained that the corporate ladder and glass ceiling were metaphors, but I didn't want to get sucked into a conversation on insurance, because it would be boring. I turned my attention to the Sharons and Kaitlyns, who were all working on pink and green lanyards.

  "We like strawberry ice cream," one of the Sharons said.

  "Us too!" both Kaitlyns agreed in unison. "Do you like puppies?"

  "We do!" the other Sharon said. "What's your favorite color?" She asked as if both girls would have the same favorite color, which was, of course, ridiculous.

  "Pink and green!" the Kaitlyns said.

  Well, that seemed kind of obvious…

  "Us too!" the Sharons cried out.

  "High five!" The Kaitlyns moved to high-five the older women, who pulled back hesitantly.

  One of the Kaitlyns noticed their distress and said, "It's okay. You didn't have high fives in your olden days?"

  The Sharons shook their heads.

  The Kaitlyns showed them how to hold up their hands to strike the other's hands.

  "And then you yell, 'high five!'" one of the little girls explained as she stood next to one of the Sharons, opposite the other Kaitlyn and Sharon. "Try it!"

  "High five!" The Sharons high-fived each other while the Kaitlyns did the same.

  It was like watching one girl and one old lady high-five a mirror.

  "Why do you yell those words?" one of the Sharons asked. "What do they mean?" asked the other.

  "High, because your hand is up in the air," one of the Kaitlyns said. "Five because your hand has five fingers."

  "Ah," the Sharons replied in unison.

  "And then there's the fist bump." The Kaitlyns demonstrated with each other. "That's kind of a thing now. High fives are old-school, sorta."

  The Sharons tried the fist bump. "What do you yell out with that?"

  The Kaitlyns shrugged. "No clue. Low zero, maybe? But you don't really yell with that one."

  One of the Sharons shook her head. "Things sure are strange in the future."