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Letty: “I don’t know. I haven’t opened the envelope.”
“Well, open it.”
Letty opened the envelope and took out a card and read it into the phone: “You are cordially invited to a reception for Ms. Elaine Shelton at the clubhouse of the Washington Ladies Peace-Maker Society. Respondents only, please.”
The date of the reception was September 25, a Saturday, the location on Cemetery Lane near Mount Pleasant, Virginia. The note specified “practical attire” and “personal equipment.”
“Who’s Ms. Elaine Shelton?” Letty asked. “I never heard of her.”
“Look at the medals list from the last Olympics,” Greet said.
“Really? Huh. Think I should go?”
“I... dunno. There’s some odd rumors about them. I don’t know much more. Maybe... a gun club?”
“That’s what I’ve heard. Do you think when it says ‘personal equipment’...”
“I guess. What else could it be?”
Practical attire.
After obsessing on the phrase for two weeks, Letty went with jeans, a tee-shirt under a loose nylon long-sleeved Orvis fishing shirt, and lightweight hiking boots. The drive out to the Ladies clubhouse, in her hybrid Highlander, took almost two hours from her apartment in Arlington.
Autumn was breaking out in brilliant, spangled color, making the trip into the Blue Ridge spectacular, all that red, yellow, and orange against the remaining green of the forest, and a flawless robin’s-egg sky.
She drove most of the way with the driver’s-side window down, so she could smell the dusty, astringent scent of the roadside wildflowers. The clubhouse, she’d imagined, would be something like a southern mansion, long broad porch, white pillars, a place where George Washington or Robert E. Lee might have stopped to take a leak.
She found Cemetery Lane on the main road out of Mount Pleasant, a place which barely qualified as a hamlet. A few minutes north, a gravel road branched to the west, taking her past a small, unkempt cemetery guarded by a rusting barbed-wire fence strung on rotting wooden posts. The track took her up a hill, and then over a ridge and down into a heavily wooded valley.
The road narrowed as she went along, went from gravel to packed dirt, weeds growing up in the middle of the two-track, all of it spotted with fallen red and yellow maple leaves. The track passed through an open metal gate, and finally ended at what she guessed must have been the “clubhouse”—a row of three green-painted industrial-sized Quonset huts. They were neatly kept with stone steps and zinnia gardens around the foundations. But still... Quonsets. No porch with white pillars.
Two of the Quonsets showed open doors toward the parking lot. She could see farm-style equipment in one—two corn-green John Deere Gators, an orange Kubota backhoe, walls hung with what looked like landscaping tools. In the other, she could see a group of women in practical attire, standing, talking.
There were thirty or so cars in the parking lot, with another following her in. Letty parked and sat for a moment. The woman who’d followed her in hopped out of her car, opened the back door, and took out a five-foot-long nylon rifle case, slipped it over her shoulder, twiddled fingers at Letty, and then walked up the stone steps and through the open door of the center Quonset.
All right.
Letty got out, took her equipment case out of the back—black nylon, soft-sided, smaller than a briefcase—and walked up the steps to the Quonset. There were thirty or thirty-five women standing down the length of the building, chatting, some of them drinking from bottles of water, all casually dressed, as Letty was, which immediately took some pressure off.
A fortyish woman caught Letty’s eye, smiled, and walked over and said, “Letty! So happy you could join us. Very nice work you did in Pershing.”
Letty said, “Thank you, thanks for inviting me.” She tried notto crane her neck around, though there really wasn’t much to see—a series of what looked like small offices and storage rooms, built with drywall and painted a government tan, a concrete floor. The largest room showed a table with some energy bars and cookies, bottles of water sticking out of a basin filled with ice, and several ranks of folding chairs.
An oversized reproduction of a nineteenth-century newspaper advertisement, four feet long and two feet high, was framed and hung on a wall in the middle of the building. The advertisement showed an exploded view, an engineering drawing, of a Colt Single-Action Army revolver, the M1873, in .45 Colt. The gun was also known “in the trade” as a Peace-Maker, according to the ancient advertisement, though Letty had only seen it spelled as one word, Peacemaker, like the comic book superhero.
Hence, Letty thought, the Washington Ladies Peace-Maker Society, with a nineteenth-century hyphen.
“I see you brought equipment,” the woman said.
Letty nodded and held up the case: “I wasn’t exactly sure what I could use, but it’s a Staccato XC.”
“Excellent. What kind of sight?”
A few other women drifted over, to listen: “A Leupold DeltaPoint Pro,” Letty said. “The gun is pretty much stock. I did replace the grips with checkered cherry.”
“We have a couple of members shooting Staccatos,” one of the other women said. “Nice gear.”
Cartwright threaded her way through the crowd. “You decided to show up.”
