We rolled to a stop in front of Guac ‘n’ Roll about eight fifteen. I won’t bore you with the details of the car ride from Lake Placid to Woodstock. Just know that according to Anais I hadn’t done anything right except for putting the suitcases in the trunk. I drove too fast on route seventy three and too slow on the Northway south to Albany. Then I should have been in the center lane on the thruway, instead of the right lane. The entire time I was driving, I thought back to the time when my back window had been shot out. To drown out Anais’s commentary about automotive safety all I had to do was speed up. The wind flow through the back window produced a thumping noise so loud I could pretend to not hear a word she was saying. It was glorious.

  If we actually survive this road trip without killing each other, I’ll just let her drive. It’d be so much more peaceful just riding and looking at the scenery. Poor Amy didn’t get a word in amongst all of Anais’s complaints. It was a hot night and since the air conditioning in my car died about ten years ago, all the windows were down. It was much warmer in Woodstock than it had been in Lake Placid. Anais starts rolling up her window.

  “Anais, it’s hot out, let's just leave the windows down, hopefully it’ll cool off once the sun goes down.” It did not it was warm and muggy all night long.

  “My suitcase is in the trunk. I don't want it stolen.”

  “You need a key to get into the trunk, Anais”

  “I can see the trunk release right there.” She pointed toward it.

  “That doesn’t work, Anais, it broke five years ago and I never used it anyway. Who possibly needs to open their trunk while they are driving, besides cab drivers.”

  “Does anything work on this car, the trunk release doesn't, the ac doesn’t, I’m surprised it even got us here.”

  “And yet here we are, come on lets go in I’m starving and Willow and Pappy are probably waiting for us. We don’t want to keep them waiting, do we? It’s rude.”

  “You keep me waiting all the time.”

  “You must be the person who told me it was rude.”

  We finally got through the door into blessed air conditioning. Living in a mountain town far north I’m just not used to the heat and humidity like I was when I lived in New York city.

  Willow and an older guy with long grey hair sat at a large round table with plenty of room from us. Willow hopped up when she saw us come in and hugged each of us. I was used to her hugging me by now and maybe even starting to enjoy it. She introduced Pappy to each of us and I said “Pappy you look like a younger Wavy Gravy.”

  He laughed, “well, I’ll take that as a great compliment.”

  “Did you know he was from just outside of Albany, a place called East Greenbush.”

  “You seem to know a lot about hippies for such a young woman,” he replied.

  “Yep my aunt drilled it into me, but then on the flip side she wouldn’t let me come here in sixty nine for the concert.”

  “It was a little kids and a pigs dream, miles and miles of mud and muddy hippies. But I didn’t see a fight all weekend which was amazing. Even the troopers were nice to everyone, probably because they knew that they were sorely out numbered. Can you imagine putting half a million people in a muddy field today. They’d be killing each other in half a day.”

  The waitress came and took our order, the others got beers and margarita's but I was driving so I stuck with tonic water. Besides, someone told me recently that I was drinking too much, like an old time noir detective. This’ll prove them wrong. We were about halfway through some excellent taco’s when Pappy finally began to tell us what the problem was.

  He pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me, it said

  You know what you did in 1968 and so do I. If you don’t pay up in forty eight hours, I’m going to tell the world. C M

  “Pappy, do you know what this note is referring to?”

  “Yeah I’m afraid I do, I’d run away in nineteen sixty eight and the place to be was Berkeley, so that is where I went, I was fifteen. I had no money, but I fell in with a new movement. The Youth International Party, I became a yippie. Life was a prank and we were going to prank it right back. We did street theater in Berkeley and San Francisco then in the summer of sixty eight we all got on a bus and headed to Chicago to prank mayor Daley. It was called the ‘Festival of Life’ as opposed to the Democratic National Convention which was dubbed the Convention of Death. There were ten thousand protesters and twenty three thousand police and National guard. But that didn’t stop the yippies. Ruben and Hoffman managed to get a live pig into the park and formally nominated Pigasus for President of the United States. But at eleven pm, the cops and the national guard came into the park, batons swinging. The congressional committee that looked into called it a ‘police riot’. We were beaten, arrested, charged for conspiracy, rioting, resisting arrest. Mostly we lay on the ground with our arms covering our heads so our skulls wouldn’t be bashed in. I was hauled to the same station house as Rubin and Hoffman, where I woke up in the lobby. They had managed to knock me out even though I was on the ground, with my arms covering my head. Anyways I woke in the lobby, where I had been dropped by the cop or the guard who had hauled me in. Hoffman was calling the cops pigs and making grunting sounds while Ruben went on that the ‘pigs’ should vote for Pigasus. Just generally creating chaos, enough chaos that I managed to slip out the front door. I thought I got away scotfree, but I later learned that I had been booked, charged and a new charge of felony escape had been added to my charges. That’s the only thing I was up to in sixty eight, I went to Berkeley because of the sixty seven summer of love and by sixty eight I was a fugitive in Chicago. I was on the run for a year until I arrived in Bethel for the concert. Three days after the concert I arrived in Woodstock, and went off the grid. I got a job and a room at the junkyard and I’ve been there ever since. I don’t have any money to pay extortion, the best I could do would be to give whoever it is free used autoparts.”

  I was stunned, I knew all of those events, but just through the newspaper. I remember watching the Convention on TV in the mansion with the writers, watching the police beat on the kids. The cops were completely out of control, they punched Dan Rather, a journalist in the stomach while he was reporting from the convention floor. But I had never spoken to anyone who had actually been there. I felt like a fan girl at her favorite boy band concert. But I got myself under control and said,

  “Pappy, do you have any idea who C M is?”

  “No, I’ve been here coming up to almost sixty years and no one I know of is named C M and no one new has moved into town within the past year. My best guess is that it is someone in the Renaissance Festival either a performer or one of their support staff. They’ve only been here five days and I found this note pinned to my door this morning after coming back from walking. I go out everyday walking early in the morning before the salvage yard opens. Everyday I walk past grounds where they have been setting up for the Renaissance Festival, it’s interesting. They are like medieval carnies. Doing something I might have done had my life turned out differently. But I can’t go to prison, I might have been able to handle it at fifteen but not at seventy three. Honestly if I go in, I’m afraid I’ll never come back out. Worst of all is what will happen to Fred.”

  Willow looked like she was about to cry, “Pappy, I told you. No matter what happens, I will take care of Fred, if he doesn’t want to move in with me, I’ll move in with him. Just worry about yourself, if you have to worry. But what have you always told me about worry, it’s just wasted energy. If you’ve got time to worry, you’ve got time to do something positive.”

  “Alright, well if that note is from someone in the Renaissance Festival troupe. They should be fairly easy to spot. They have to be at least seventy three years old. Pappy, there weren’t any younger kids then you in the yippies were there?”

  “No, I was by far the youngest, the rest were mostly college age, so they’d be seventy five and up by now.”

  “Okay, tomorrow morning when the festival opens we’ll be there. We’ll spread out and try to find any staff or performers, seventy three and up. The three of us will figure out who the suspects are, hopefully by noontime. Then we can spend the rest of the day narrowing down the suspect pool. We already have two clues to who may be doing this. Pappy, are you sure that when you left for your walk that the note was not already pinned to your door?”

  “Yes, it wasn’t there when I left, I’m certain of it.”

  “Good, now what time did you leave and what time did you get back?”

  “It was early maybe six or six thirty and I was back around eight maybe eight thirty. The yard is open eight to four, so I always try to get back around eight or so.”

  I heard Anais mutter, “Time, it must be a hippie thing.”

  “Alright that’s good, lets go with between six and nine just to be safe. So what we need to do is first find our suspects and then start ruling them out if possible based on where they were and who they were with this morning Friday July eleventh between the hours of six and nine. Willow, you have no idea who this C M might be either?”

  “No, I’m sure no one who lives around here has those initials, besides like Pappy says he’s lived here over fifty five years. Why wait until now to send a threat like this?”

  “No, you are right, I’m just trying to cover all the bases. Well then we will find our best group of suspects tomorrow morning at ten at the festival.”

  We’d finished our supper, but everyone aside from Willow and I had another drink, we both got sodas. When they had finished their drinks, we paid and left. Pappy to walk home to the salvage yard I was driving the four women to the writers collective and our home for the next two nights.

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  Willow showed us to our room.

  “Laura, thank you so much for doing this for Pappy, I know you were looking forward to just relaxing and enjoying the Renaissance Festival, so I’m sorry.”

  “Willow, I told you before, I owe you big time for fixing my car for me. For escorting the escorts and for teaming up the two stores. My store was teetering on the edge before Bianca stepped in and fixed our financial situation. Our two stores are teamed together and maybe we’ll be a team publishing together, but you and I are a team for now and forever more, if you’ll have me.”

  She gave me a big hug, of course she did. Pappy means a lot to her. We have to do everything we can to keep him out of prison. We always have Eve as an ace up our sleeve if he gets arrested, we’ll call her right away. But for now there is little she can do. Amy, Anais and I went into our room after saying goodnight to Willow. As soon as the door was closed.

  Anais started, “You do know that we are all criminals the moment that we start to investigate this right?”

  “Anais what the heck are you talking about? Criminals, how would we be criminals from trying to stop someone from blackmailing another. They should make us junior deputies or some for preventing a crime, not committing one.”

  “We would be aiding a known felon, he admitted that much to us in the restaurant. We would be, Accessories after the fact, To be guilty of accessory after the fact, prosecution must usually prove you knew a felony had been committed which Pappy freely admitted and you intentionally assisted the felon to evade arrest or prosecution. If we try to stop C M from turning him in, that is assisting.”

  Amy said “We can’t let him go to prison, because some cop went berserk in sixty eight. He’s a nice old guy, and Willow obviously loves him. Besides, we used to break the law all the time. Underage drinking, smoking pot, sneaking into concerts, those were some of the best moments of my life. Seems to me we should break the law more often.”

  “Anais, weren’t you just complaining to me about breaking the law last week when we were driving around without a rear window. That turned out fine, I’m sure this will too.”

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be too sure. First you don’t have a cousin as chief of police here in Woodstock, second, Accessory after the fact is a lot more serious than driving without a rear window.”

  “I still don’t understand how driving without a rear window is against the law but it’s legal to produce a car, a convertible, that doesn’t even come with a rear window. It’s a stupid unjust law. So is letting a cop beat on a kid, and fifty five years later, said old man is still scared of the government. The government was crap in the sixties, sending kids to Vietnam to die for no reason and the bastards knew it. They wrote the Pentagon Papers, they knew they couldn’t win yet they kept on sending kids to die. The government is still crap today, shooting mothers who are protesting ICE using gestapo tactics, hiding their faces. So let them put me in jail. I won’t leave my cell. I'll be too busy writing my manifesto. It’ll be better than Hoffman’s, you won’t have to steal it, because Lucy will make sure the eBook is distributed for free. But look I don’t expect either of you to break the law, I can handle this on my own. Just keep Willow out of it. She is too young to go to prison alright.”

  “Laura, I’m doing this, this is my free choice, so you are not keeping me out of it. Anais, Laura is right, just make sure that Willow stays out of this, she’s too nice a girl for prison. Laura and I can handle ourselves. We’ve got this covered.”

  “I didn’t say that I wasn’t going to help. I was just pointing out that it is illegal, I should have known that Butch and Sundance wouldn’t give a tinker's damn. But riddle me this, once you figure out who is trying to blackmail pappy, how do you plan to stop them. Sure they are committing a crime, but you can’t very well call the cops now can you.”

  “No, you are right about that, we can’t but we can still threaten them with the cops. First off we point out that Pappy doesn’t have any money, all he owns is the salvage yard. Second we will point out that we also have proof they are attempting to commit a crime. A stalemate, or mutually assured destruction. They can’t stalemate us because they don’t know and certainly can’t prove that we know anything about Pappy's past. We just arrived in town today.”

  Then we decided to get some sleep so we would be ready early the next day. So when I laid down and Anais turned out the light’s I felt like a grammar schooler when I dragged out my penlight so I could read Dirk Gentlely’s Holistic Detective Agency. It certainly wasn’t as much fun to read under the covers as it had been when I was a kid. Eventually I decided it would be better to just go to sleep and save the book for another night, I was getting a crimp in my neck. When that happened these days my neck would hurt for days.

  So I tried to go to sleep but I wasn’t really tired, it was only twelve thirty, relatively early for me. Then I had another bright idea. I’d meditate. I’d practiced meditating many times in the past. By the time I had my mind quiet, I fell asleep. So I had quit meditating, the guilt about falling asleep outweighed the positive benefits I felt from the practice. But surely this would be the perfect time to meditate when I want to fall asleep.

  And it worked if I had to guess I’d say five minutes after I started meditating I’d fallen asleep. But I started having weird dreams. Wavy Gravy was at my optometrists handing out free eyeglasses. Which makes sense as he was one of the founding members of Seva, a charity to help restore vision to people around the world. I always felt that Gravy was the kind of hippie that all other hippies should aspire to be. No, not hippies, all people should aspire to be like Gravy, a kind, gentle man that never ever took himself too seriously. But made the world a better place, he opened a clown and circus camp. The dream shifted when I put on the glasses and my eyeballs sprung out of my head and bounced back and forth on tiny little slinkies. No more meditating before bed.

  ***

  Willow was at our door at nine fifteen with coffee and donuts and three weekend passes to the Renaissance Festival. We were already showered and dressed, so the four of us took our breakfast and enjoyed it at the collective’s backyard picnic table.

  “So we are just going around the festival trying to find people seventy three and up, right?” asked Willow.

  “Willow, don’t you have to work?”

  “No, my part timer is working until we get this matter resolved. She didn’t want to but when I offered double time, she was too greedy to refuse.”

  “Willow, you really shouldn’t do this, we can handle this really. You should just stay at your store.”

  “Why, Laura, are you expecting trouble?”

  “No, not trouble per se, it would just be better to go to work.”

  “Laura, come on out with it, what is going on.”

  “Look, honey, there might strictly be some legal ramifications and it would be better if you didn’t get involved.”

  “What kind of legal ramifications?”

  “Tell her Anais.”

  “But you said not to tell her.”

  “That’s when the cat was still in the bag, a horrible expression, I don't know why I ever use that. Just tell her Anais, please.”

  “Willow if you try to help a felon, after the crime, to escape or evade capture. You would be guilty of being an accessory after the fact. So it would be in your best interest to just go back to your store, that would give you plausible deniability that you had no knowledge that Pappy was a fugitive.”

  “So you are not going to help him then?” Willow asked.

  “For sure we are going to help him, we just don’t want you to get into trouble. The law is not going to do something to three sweet old ladies from Lake Placid.”

  “Have you not been watching the news? The feds just shot an unarmed woman protesting ICE in her car. No you guys, go home or just go to the festival, Pappy and I had no idea that you could get into trouble investigating this. We’ll figure this out.”

  “No, I told you last night, we are a team. Pappy is family to you, means Pappy is family to us. Maybe it wasn’t right of me to keep the legal ramifications from you, if we go down, we’ll all go down together. We have nothing to be scared of. We've got an attorney that’s twice as good as Bill Kunstler and he was the best in his day”

  We walked up Waterfall Way, to Tinker St, past The Rabbit Hole. I was dying to see more of Willow’s store but we also wanted to make sure we were at the front gates.

  “Let’s figure this out fast, Willow. I’m dying for you to show me around your store.”

  “Tonight after the festival, I’ll give you a private tour, unless Amy and Anais are interested as well.”

  “Deal”

  Then where Tinker St turns into Mill Hill Rd and joins with Rock City Rd, we turned on to the latter and walked for about a half mile to a large mowed field off of Marion Way. We were standing at the gate minutes before it was due to open. There was a pretty fair sized crowd already waiting and a lot more people waiting in line behind us. But as we already had our tickets I was hoping to jump to the front of the pack when the gates opened.

  A couple minutes later, the gates did open and the majority of the crowd did need tickets so they headed to the ticket booths as we walked to the ticket takers. Almost as soon as we passed through the gates we were immediately halted. The Royal Procession was standing in the way blocking further access to the grounds. Once the King, deemed enough of us peasants had gathered, his herald proclaimed that the King would declare the Festival open amongst pomp and circumstance on the main stage.

  We were all expected to follow. The only person who looked even remotely old enough to be our person was the king. The real snowy white white hair and wrinkled face made for an authentic royal look but also placed him as our first suspect. We waited for the entire ceremony before moving on, who knew if an even older Merlin would pop up on stage as the King declared the festival open and to be sure to join him at the royal games. Which meant combat and no seventy year old in their right mind would be going head to head with any of these strapping knights.

  The Knights looked like a particularly big college forward line. We looked at the schedule and sent Amy and Anais to the smaller stage where a Minstrel set was being performed. The main stage after the Royal Procession had cleared off, was the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene. They wouldn’t have a seventy year old performing Romeo or Juliet. But the nurse could well be an old woman so we watched and waited. The woman playing the nurse wasn’t much older than Juliet.

  So we took the opportunity to walk about halfway down the merchants alley, looking for anyone besides a festival goer that appeared to be in their seventies. There were food stalls with the Renaissance Festival famous turkey drumsticks for sale, then there were roasted meats, and meats on a spit. The only vegetable I saw was a roasted potato. No wonder the people who lived during the Renaissance died so young.