Free Merit Badge Murder by Leslie Langtry Page B

first!" Lana enthused. She knew the girls' names already! She even pronounced the kaitlins in a way that somehow reflected how you'd spell their names. I don't know how she did it, but it was completely obvious that she did.
    One by one, the girls came forward as she called on them to help build the main fire. Then each girl lit a match without setting her clothes on fire and held it to the tinder. It was like watching a surreal movie that you knew couldn't be true, even though you were watching it with your own eyes. I expected that George Lucas would walk in at any moment and yell, "Cut!"
    A small part of me was jealous. I'll admit that. But a large part of me watched in wonder that something like this could actually happen. And another part of me was ridiculously happy that Lana was here with my troop.
    I had no idea what Kelly was thinking. I could only guess she thought the same thing. At least I hoped she was thinking the same thing.
    "Great job girls!" Lana praised, and the girls almost fainted under the glow. "Who wants to make s'mores?" she asked, and every hand shot up, including the five dads. Lana laughed and clapped her hands. It was obvious she was having fun.
    Kelly took charge and called for the girls to come over to her. The girls blinked at each other, then looked to Lana. Lana nodded, and the girls broke loose, racing over to us in loud, chattering chaos. We were swarmed as we put marshmallows on sticks and handed them out. When the last one was handed out, Kelly and I exhaled.
    "Did you see how they descended into complete chaos when we asked them to do something?" Kelly whispered.
    "Yeah. I think we should have Lana run everything from now on." I was covered with sticky marshmallow goo—and they hadn't even melted the marshmallows yet.
    "Agreed," Kelly said as she tore the wrappers off the Hershey bars and I opened the graham crackers.
    It started up again as the girls crowded us with their burned and squishy marshmallows. We somehow managed to scrape each one off the stick onto the chocolate and graham crackers. When the last girl walked away, I noticed Kelly had bits of graham cracker in her hair, and I had a huge smear of chocolate down one leg.
    "You know," the mom spoke up, "you really should have had Lana handle that."
    Kelly and I looked at each other and nodded. She was right. We really should have.
    Lana took over for clean up. Once again, the girls snapped to silent attention, and in brigades worthy of a military parade on Red Square, erased all evidence of the mess they'd created and put out the fire.
    And no one got hurt. No one.
    When they were finished, Lana got the girls to sit in their circle around the fire pit again. I noticed with amazement that each girl was sitting exactly where they'd stood during the fire lesson. They were replaced with robot girls. I was dealing with Stepford Scouts.
    Kelly and I gave each girl two twelve-inch pieces of rope. Lana jumped in and proceeded to lead them through a knot tying lesson the likes of which has never been experienced on this Earth. Never. She put every seasoned sailor to shame. If any of them would've been with us, they would've wept.
    I'd never been good at knots. I'd been preparing for this since we arranged this meeting. But no matter how much I practiced, I couldn't grasp it. The square knot was hopeless. The bow-line hitch was out of the question. Thank God I'd never had to hang anyone because the guy would just drop harmlessly to the ground, watch the ropes tumble around his toes uselessly, and then he'd run off. I hated knots.
    Kelly had some experience— being a nurse made her something of a natural. But between the two of us, we'd been very worried about how we were going to pull this off. If I couldn't master a knot, how could I possibly teach fourteen girls to do it?
    "Right over left," Lana was singing, "and left over right, makes a square knot that's sturdy and tight!" She held up her square knot, and as if on cue, all fourteen