Free Merit Badge Murder by Leslie Langtry

worse yet, I'd have to bring Lana. What else could I do with her? Riley wanted me to keep an eye on the blonde bimbo.
    This was going to be a disaster. Lana would be useful only if we were working on a How To Sleep Your Way Through The Kremlin merit badge, and I was pretty sure the Girl Scouts didn't have one of those. I imagined all sorts of scenarios—Lana screaming at the sight of a daddy longlegs spider…Lana breaking a nail just looking at the outdoors…Lana getting poison ivy on her… Well, I guess it wasn't all bad. I'd just have to make her stay out of the way. It was going to be hard enough as it was with the fire and knots and any dads in the area standing there like brain-dead mouth breathers.
    Damn it. Instead of being an afternoon of awkward quality time with my girls, it was now going to be a tense babysitting session with me trying to keep Lana out of trouble while trying to teach something I was terrible at. I was angry and worried, which meant I wasn't getting any beauty sleep tonight. Sigh.
     
    *  *  *
     
    I woke up early and stumbled through the shower. After digging out my rope supplies from the garage, I got Lana up and dressed without killing her. The park was only twenty minutes away, so we didn't have far to go. Lana and I snuck out the back and using the back yards of my neighbors, made it to Kelly's house unnoticed by the slowly dissipating media mob. I knocked on her sliding glass door at 12:30pm. She did not look happy to see us.
    "What's she doing here?" Kelly folded her arms across her chest.
    Lana piped up cheerfully, ignoring the insult. "I was Girl Scout back in Russia! Fifteen years!"
    What? Lana had been a scout? I imagined the blonde as a Brownie with long, lustrous hair and huge boobs. I'd bet she sold more cookies than anyone. If they sold cookies, that was. What else would they sell? Vodka and borscht?
    I gave Kelly a weak smile. "Come on. We're doing knots and making fires. We'll need all the help we can get." It was an okay argument. Not my best, but I just needed Kelly to buy it. Fourteen second-graders were about to be dropped off in a park, and we had to make sure to send them home without third-degree burns or partially strangled by rope.
    Kelly narrowed her eyes and studied Lana. I'd dressed my roomie carefully—T-shirt, khakis, tennis shoes, and a baseball hat with her hair in a ponytail behind it. I didn't even let her wear makeup. She still looked like a super model, but it was the best I could do.
    "Fine," Kelly said finally, "she can help." She turned and went into her house, and we followed meekly. My argument had worked. It had taken all my talents as a persuasive spy to convince my best friend. I was exhausted.
    The drive was agonizing. Kelly didn't speak to me, not once. I could feel her hostility with every bump in the road. In fact, I was pretty sure she was hitting every bump in the road just to get back at me.
    I had a tiny, fragile sense of hope that maybe Lana would be okay. I didn't know what Russian Girl Scouts did—maybe just evaded wolves or wrestled bears or sent Boy Scouts to gulags—but there had to be a shred of skill there, right? Maybe it would be kind of okay. And by that I meant that maybe I could keep Kelly from killing her.
    My fears and concerns—the ones that kept me up all night, I might add—dissolved the minute we arrived. At the campsite we'd rented for the afternoon, Lana jumped into action. She met each car as it drove up and dazzled the parents, men and women alike, before shepherding their daughters to Kelly and me. The girls looked at Lana as if she was a living Barbie/Fairy Princess. They were hypnotized. Lana apparently liked kids.
    "I've got to admit," Kelly grumbled, "she's pretty good at this part."
    I nodded. Usually parents just dumped their kids and left, sometimes complaining that this was inconvenient for them. I was pretty sure the parents hated us most of the time. But now, many of them parked and came back to join