Sneak Peek of "Fishing Badge Murder" (a Merry Wrath Mystery) by Leslie Langtry...
"Do worms have girlfriends?" Inez stuck her tongue out as she tried to wrestle the wriggling bait onto a hook. I was fishing with my Girl Scout troop of eight-year-olds. So far no one had fallen into the river or gotten a fishhook stuck somewhere painful. No suspicious fires had broken out, and no dead bodies had floated by. I'd say it was going well.
"Of course not," Ava chided. "They have arranged marriages."
"Who arranges that?" one of the Hannahs asked. I say "one" because I had two Hannahs.
"How do you know about arranged marriages?" my co-leader, Kelly, asked.
Ava rolled her eyes at us. "Everyone knows that. It's when you hire a wedding planner and the bride turns into a monster known as a Bridezilla and starts smashing buildings."
"That's not what an arranged marriage is," Kelly said. Then, realizing she'd opened a door to endless questions that she probably didn't want to answer, she covered her mouth with her right hand.
"Do they turn green when they are monsters?" the other Hannah asked.
"Did they get bitten by a radioactive mosquito?" Lauren added.
Inez had a question. "What happens to the groom?"
Caterina answered, "She steps on him, silly!"
This was not a conversation I wanted to be having, because talking about marriage and earthworms could only lead to one thing—the question about where babies come from. That, to me, was far more terrifying than anything I'd experienced in my former career as a spy. And I'd faced down gorillas in Africa (I know, you think I meant guerillas—but no, I didn't), the Russian mafia in Kiev, and a howler monkey with an AR-15 in Guam.
Another reason the talk of weddings made me jumpy was that I was several months away from my own wedding, and the jitters were hitting hard. While I loved my fiancé, doubts were coming on like malaria in a third-world country.
Maybe turning into a giant Bridezilla wasn't a bad idea…
"You watch too many reality shows," Kelly grumbled at the girls. "There are no monsters squashing buildings or grooms." Kelly was a buzzkill.
Betty shook her head as she reeled in her empty fishhook for what had to be the tenth time in ten minutes. "Yes, there are. My mom says marriage is"—she cocked her head to one side as if struggling to get the words right—"a punishing hell-scape she couldn't get through without something called Xanax."
"What's Xanax?" one of the Kaitlyns asked. In addition to the Hannahs, I also had four Kaitlyns. And they all looked alike.
Kelly and I exchanged glances. Hers seemed to ask how do we steer the conversation back to earthworms? My glance asked can married earthworms get a prescription for Xanax?
"Hey! I got something!" Emily shrieked as she pointed to her bent fishing pole.
The girls all dropped their fishing poles and ran to circle the lucky kid. I managed to grab most of the rods before they fell into the river, but I missed four—which wasn't good since I'd borrowed the poles. Now I'd have to buy new ones and rough them up a little so they'd look like the ones the park had loaned us. I guess I could just admit what happened and hand the park rangers four new poles…but that seemed unduly incriminating and unnecessary.
Kelly stood behind Emily, quietly coaching her on what to do. The little girl concentrated, reeling in the line just as her leader told her. The others cheered and screamed, which probably frightened the rest of the fish away.
I wasn't surprised when Kelly suggested the fishing trip. When we were kids, the two of us used to go to a creek that ran just past the outskirts of town. My best friend had kept it up through the years—it was her Zen thing. I hadn't gone fishing in years. The last time was on the Volga when I was undercover in a small village in Russia. I'd caught a bastard fish (yes, it's a real thing) just as my situation erupted into a firefight with Chechen separatists.
My name is Merry Wrath, and I'm a former CIA agent turned unemployed Girl Scout leader in Who's There, Iowa. My name was originally Fionnaghuala Merrygold Czrygy before I was "accidentally" outed by the vice president (who wasn't fond of my senator dad). I took half of my middle name and my mother's maiden name and moved back to my hometown, hoping to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
I wasn't very good at it.
"Wow!" Emily squealed as a fish broke the surface, whipping back and forth at the end of her line.
It was our third catch of the day, resulting in two fish total. That's because two of the Kaitlyns claimed the second fish. Their hooks had gotten tangled just before the fish bit, so we didn't know exactly whose fish it was. They had to share, and the Gods of Girl Scouts must have been smiling upon us, because inexplicably, they both agreed.
"It's ginormous!" Hannah shouted.
"You should have it taxi-mermaid!" Lauren said.
Inez's right eyebrow shot up. "What's taxi-mermaid?"
Lauren sighed the sigh of a thousand martyrs and explained, "It's where a mermaid takes a taxi. But it's a bad taxi and takes her to the government. And they stuff her and use her as a throw pillow."
You know what? That kind of made sense. The other girls all nodded knowingly.
"Your name—" Emily looked earnestly at the gaping fish "—is King Doodoobuttface."
The girls applauded as Kelly took the fish and unhooked it from the line. We took pictures of Emily, beaming at her foot-long catfish, then watched as she threw the fish back into the water. From the beginning, the girls had made it clear they didn't want to kill any fish. They just wanted to catch them, christen the fish, and toss them back.
The girls cheered and then demanded juice boxes. As they sat on the shore with their snack, I wondered how I was going to tell them that four of them no longer had poles to fish with.
Craaaaack! The sound came from the woods behind us.
"What was that?" Ava was on her feet and headed toward the trees.
Eleven little girls followed suit before I cut them off. "Hold on. You don't go running toward a strange noise!"
It was a valuable lesson for them to learn now, since I learned it on my first field assignment when I heard something weird at an embassy ball in Spain and walked into a room with several men, dressed as unicorns, having a Jell-O fight. I always knocked after that. Always.
"A branch must've broken off a tree." Kelly frowned and didn't at all sound convinced.
It was time to go.
