“Margo!” called a familiar voice. Bobbie Kay, my best friend since we were four, ran toward me. Bobbie was dressed in her usual daily uniform: white polo shirt, khaki pants, and Tretorn sneakers. Her brown bobbed hair swung around her face as she ran. She carried a large, lumpy bag slung over one shoulder. “They’re here!”
Back in high school, Bobbie had shot to the head of our class thanks to a natural inclination for business. What most people didn’t know was that she’d managed an accelerated pace of diet pills and dangerous levels of caffeine to fuel her as she became the state of Nevada’s very own Young Entrepreneur of the Year. A physical meltdown had led her to walk away from it all and seek treatment. When she’d recovered, she turned down several paid internships at Fortune 500 companies and started Money Changes Everything, where she handmade teddy bears and sold them to raise money for worthy causes. Thanks to Bobbie, practically everybody in Proper had a teddy bear.
Had I run across the stretch of the PCP with a Santa Claus–type bag over my shoulder, I’d be more than a little out of breath when I stopped. Bobbie, however, was not. I guess that’s the benefit of running ten miles every morning and existing on a diet of kale, quinoa, and almonds. My exercise routine involved yoga approximately once a month—every six weeks if I was really lazy—and my diet involved regular servings of fried rice, homemade smoothies, and the occasional bowl of Fruity Pebbles for dinner.
Bobbie set the bag on the table and pulled the drawstring open. When she tipped it, small, six-inch-tall teddy bears spilled out onto the table. All told, there were probably a hundred of them.
“Mayor Young wanted me to come up with something I could give away for the festival. I have two hundred yards of ribbon that says ‘Sagebrush Festival: Game On!’ Can you help me get them ready?”
“Sure,” I said. I picked up a teddy bear and tipped my head to one side and then the other while I assessed him. “What if I made tiny little domino costumes for the bears? Like the ones I made for the Double Ds? Modified, of course. And not for all of them, but maybe for ten or twenty?”
“That would be perfect!”
A six-foot-tall teddy bear approached us. Earlier in the week, Bobbie had had the idea for me to bring the lone teddy bear costume that we had in our inventory, and she had convinced Don to pose for teddy bear selfies to help her raise money. In addition to being my dad’s closest friend and fellow troublemaker, Don was a retired nurse with a penchant for poker games and the blues. He was about five foot eight, short for a man but slightly taller than I was. His wire-rimmed glasses added an intellectual slant to his appearance, which gave him an air of credibility when he spouted off about interplanetary life and the various UFO cover-ups that the government perpetuated.
He reached his paws up and removed the head, setting it on the table, and then looked behind him at the stage. “I didn’t think I’d ever see them back together on stage,” he said.
“The divas?” I asked.
He nodded. “The last time they performed together was a long time ago. I wonder what made them say yes.” He watched as the dancers stumbled through more of their routine before it came to an end. They took their bows and then pas de bourrée’d themselves off the stage.
As we stood watching, Jayne stormed over to Ronnie. “You need to get it together,” she said. “This isn’t ‘The Ronnie Show.’ It’s the Domino Divas. Nobody cares about your reputation fifty years ago.”
Ronnie turned to leave and Jayne grabbed her arm and spun her back around. Seconds later, Jayne smacked her across the face.
Chapter 2
RONNIE’S HAND FLEW to her cheek. I expected her to retaliate with a return slap or some nasty insults, but she remained quiet. Don turned away from them. “Ronnie Cass always knew how to bring out the best in people,” he said, shaking his head back and forth. He put the teddy bear head back on and walked away.
Mayor Wharton Young appeared on the opposite side of the stage. A thin man pushing seventy who carried extra weight around his belly, he favored short-sleeved dress shirts, seersucker pants, and rocker-bottom shoes that gave him an extra couple of inches of height. His pants were held up with a pair of suspenders, which he apparently didn’t trust because he also wore a belt. He climbed the stairs and approached the dancers.
“Ladies, ladies, let’s keep the peace. If I may offer some constructive criticism, I think we can loosen things up a bit. These people won’t mind a little sizzle in the routine. You girls still have a little sizzle in you, don’t you?” He swatted Jayne on the tush.
Jayne’s face was flushed with anger over her altercation with Ronnie, and the mayor’s inappropriate tap gave her a release. She whirled around, her hands in fists. “Keep your hands off me or I’ll slap you too,” she said.
The mayor stepped backward and held his hands up in surrender. “Calm down, Jayne. I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. This little show of yours is just that: a little show. But don’t forget, we have a contract. If you don’t fulfill your agreement, you’re through. And I don’t just mean the festival.”
I’d gotten so caught up in the exchange between Jayne and the mayor that I’d lost track of Ronnie. When I looked around, I spotted her halfway through the festival grounds heading toward a silver Airstream trailer parked across the street. She hadn’t cared much about mingling, that was sure. And there was no love lost between her and the rest of the group. But worse than that, I had a suspicious feeling that there was more to her antisocial behavior than the slap.
Mayor Young approached me. “Margo Tamblyn. Jerry’s daughter, right? From the costume shop? What are you doing here?”
“One of the divas was missing,” I said. “Ebony asked me to handle this for her while she put out another fire.”
“That wasn’t her call to make. I have too much publicity riding on this festival to let it be destroyed by a fifty-year-old catfight. Where is Ebony?”
“The last time I saw her, she was by Monopoly,” I said, conveniently failing to mention that her other fire pertained to my dad.
“Properopoly, not Monopoly,” the mayor corrected. “Our publicist advised us to brand the festival this year. It’s one of the reasons I agreed to the Domino Divas being our headlining act. They’re the closest thing we have to celebrities.”
“I’ll take care of them,” I said.
“You’d better. I gave them everything they asked for, including their own trailer.” He pointed toward the silver Airstream. “They have no right to pull this kind of behavior, even if they do call themselves divas.”
I excused myself and jogged across the park. I approached the trailer. Before I could knock, I heard voices arguing from inside. I beat my hand on the door and tried the knob. It was locked.
“Ronnie? Are you in there?” I yelled to the door.
Footsteps sounded inside. Metal lock mechanisms grated against each other and then the door opened. The scent of musk wafted out of the trailer. Ronnie appeared, wearing a man’s white dress shirt and little else. Her chemically straightened and highlighted brown hair fell just past her shoulders. One side was tucked behind her ear and the other swung around the side of her face, obstructing her cheekbone and half of her eyebrow. Her face was evenly made up, but the skin on her neck and clavicle showed signs of UVA damage through an assortment of freckles and sunspots. “Hold on,” she said. She shut the door in my face. I heard muffled voices, and then the door opened again. This time she had a red silk robe knotted over the shirt.
“Are you alone?” I asked, trying to look past her into the trailer. “I thought I heard someone.”
“My daughter asked me to watch her cat,” she said, clearly lying. She stepped out front and pulled the trailer door shut behind her. “What do you want?”
“Mayor Young is concerned about the infighting between the divas. He needs some kind of reassurance that whatever is going on, you won’t bring it to th
e festival. You might want to work things out when they get here.”
“Why are they coming here?”
“This is the divas’ trailer, isn’t it?”
“This is my trailer. I don’t think the rest of them were smart enough to ask for perks.”
“Please, Ronnie, try to set aside your differences, at least publicly. You don’t want to ruin the festival for the whole community.”
“Jayne Lemming is the problem, not me. She thinks she’s perfect just because her doctor husband gives her a nip and tuck every fifteen thousand miles.” She glared over my head toward the festival. “But don’t worry. I’ll be on my best behavior tonight.” She stepped inside the trailer and shut the door in my face.
One crisis partially managed, I trudged back across the street toward the striped booth that my dad and Don occupied. The tent opening had been tied shut, which only raised my concern. Who knew what kind of trouble those two could cook up in secret? I untied the flaps and went inside.
The two men sat at a crude wooden table. My dad wore his usual shirt, tie, and blazer. Don wore the brown bear costume. An open bag of sunflower seeds sat on the table between them. The head of the bear rested on the end of the table. In front of the two men were several three-ring binders that had pages marked with colorful sticky tabs.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
“Our contribution to the festival,” my dad said.
Don chimed in. “Come on, Margo, you can’t pretend that you’ve never noticed how many board games are just training ground for the military: Stratego, Risk, Project CIA . . . It’s up to us to expose the truth.”
“The mayor agreed to this?”
“Mayor Young agreed to us having a booth where we coordinated a massive game of conspiracy,” Don said. He picked up a blue cardboard rectangle and held it next to his head. “Conspiracy, the game. It came out in 1984. George Orwell would have loved that.” They both laughed.
“I think when Mayor Young finds out what you’re really doing, he’s going to kick you out.”
“With everything else going on, he won’t even notice us.” Don pulled the binder closer to him with the bear paws. “We need a screening process, though. What do you think, a questionnaire? A quiz?”
“You’re screening people before they can play your game?”
Don set down the binder and lowered his voice. “The game playing is a front. We’re secretly launching a subversive newspaper. We have to make sure it gets into the right hands or else we might have a problem.”
He tried to flip the pages, but the paws made him unsuccessful. He pushed the binder toward my dad. “What should be our first story? Kennedy assassination. Martin Luther King, Jr. Or maybe we tackle the faked moon landing. I have a source that will swear that Stanley Kubrick directed the footage of Neil Armstrong.”
“I don’t see why we can’t do them all,” my dad said. “This is a chance for us to teach the citizens of Proper City the truth about what the government has been telling them for years.”
“You’re a costume shop owner,” I said to my dad and then turned to Don. “And you’re a nurse. What do you two know about running a newspaper?”
“Do you have any idea what kind of conspiracies take place inside the medical industry?” Don said. He turned to my dad. “Maybe we should start with that. ‘Sexy Nurses: Conspiracy or Costume?’” He turned back to me and tapped his finger to his temple. “That one uses both of our experience.”
I looked at the stack of board games behind them, which included the games they’d mentioned plus a couple versions of Battleship. “No good can come from this. Dad, you should be helping me with the store.”
My move back to Proper had benefited my dad in more ways than one. After his heart attack—and follow-up heart attack—eleven months ago, he’d been willing to sell the store so he wouldn’t be chained to the business. It had taken me most of my life in Proper City and then seven years away from it to realize that running a costume shop was just about the perfect job for me. I’d taken over the store, and my dad had made it his mission to follow up on every interesting costume lead in the country. In those eleven months, we’d acquired alien costumes from Area 51, cow costumes from New Jersey, Bavarian waitress costumes from the Midwest, and pink flamingo costumes from Florida. When he returned from those trips, he was happier than I’d ever seen him.
He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. “In the year since you’ve been back, my scouting trips have boosted our inventory by thirty percent. I’ll still handle the booth here while you take care of the store. Didn’t you ask for my help?”
“With the booth, yes. Distributing a subversive newspaper at the annual Sagebrush Festival, no. And, Don, you don’t have time for this. Didn’t you agree to wear the teddy bear costume and work with Bobbie?”
“Who says I can’t do both?” Don said.
My dad spoke up again. “We can’t ignore this, Margo. These army games are training soldiers from early childhood. And Jenga. It’s a metaphor for toppling governments and the unstable infrastructure of the world we live in.”
“Margo,” Don said with exaggerated patience, “we’re going to expose their secondary agenda, maybe show a connection between the board game companies and the defense department.”
My dad reached behind him and picked up a folded piece of newsprint. He handed it to me. Across the top in an Old English font were the words Spicy Acorn. Underneath was a recipe for stuffing.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
They looked at each other and laughed. “Perfect!” Don said. “If Margo doesn’t get it, then Wharton Young won’t either.”
“Margo, have I taught you nothing? Aside from the art of costumes and the importance of changing the litter for Soot every day?”
I looked at the newspaper again. “Spicy Acorn . . . Spicy Acorn . . . Spicy Acorn . . . nope. Not getting it.”
“It’s an anagram.” He picked up a pen and a piece of paper, wrote SPICY ACORN and below it wrote CONSPIRACY. One by one he crossed out the letters until they were all x-ed through. “Every issue will have a recipe for acorns. That’s our cover. It’s genius!”
“We told the mayor we’d be handing out commemorative memorabilia for the festival. Increased value to his constituents,” Don said. “You have to know how to speak their language if you want politicians to listen to you.”
I set the newspaper on the table and kissed my dad on top of his head. “Okay, you’re geniuses. But I thought there were three lone gunmen. Where’s Frohike?”
“Margo, this is serious. Somebody has to expose the secrets of the world.”
“And nothing needs exposing like a rousing game of Monopoly.”
The two men looked at each other and Don did a head smack. “Monopoly! Why didn’t we think of that? We’re training our children to be ruthless capitalists! There has to be a way to work that into our column on societal influences.”
I left the two nuts—I mean spicy acorns—and wandered around the festival grounds. Instinctively, I scanned the staff behind the Hoshiyama Kobe Steak House booth for Tak, son of the owners, though I knew I wouldn’t see him. Tak had been my sometimes-companion on Saturday nights until recently, when he’d started interviewing for jobs out of state. During the planning of the festival, he’d been in charge of zoning. It was his responsibility to sort through the applications for booths and then assign them based on the needs of the tenants, which, come to think of it, might explain how the Spicy Acorn booth got the green light. He’d left town more than a week ago for a string of interviews a headhunter had set up for him.
Food vendors who had spent their morning setting up their equipment now put it to work, sending out scents of breakfast potatoes from Eggcetera, grilled scallops from Catch-22, and fried rice from Hoshiyama. I fought the urge to sample one of everything and lost, spending th
e next half hour at a picnic table with other weak-willed volunteers.
After bussing my spot, I gave up my seat to the next person and then spent an hour helping dress the greeters in their costumes. I’d gone with a playing card motif. Face cards had been scanned in, blown up, and printed at the local print shop. I’d mounted each poster-sized image on thick precut oak tag and attached the front to the back with shoulder straps like a sandwich board. I’d affixed thick black grosgrain ribbon about halfway down the underside of the costume front and back and now tied the ends together. The ribbons kept the rigid pieces from shifting while the volunteers walked. Like everything else at the festival, the cards showed the Domino Divas logo on the back with the words SAGEBRUSH FESTIVAL underneath.
Ebony arrived as I tied the final volunteer into her costume.
The flaps to the booth flipped open and Ebony came in. “Margo, Ebony needs to speak to you. What happened today at rehearsal?”
“Nothing,” I said. I pointed out front. I thought back to Ronnie slapping Jayne. “Well, not nothing, but it’s under control.”
“Then why is Mayor Young throwing a fit about those divas?”
“Another fit? What happened now?”
“It’s time for them to go onstage and the blue one is missing.”
“She promised me she’d be on her best behavior. What is with her?”
“I don’t know, but if she doesn’t turn up in the next five minutes, the mayor is going to go ballistic.”
“I’m on it,” I said.
I found five divas backstage, nervous energy building as their performance time grew closer. They were dressed in their black and white costumes I’d made, their black wigs, and their colorful masks. Three stood in a cluster. A fourth had her palms on the wall while she stretched her calves as if she was about to run a sprint. The fifth stood by a full-length mirror tugging the hem of her stiff black and white domino dress. I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around.
Mayor Young stood in front of me. “Where is the sixth one?”
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