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go. “This isn’t a gun,” he said, “it’s an eighteenth-century flintlock blunderbuss.”
    “I don’t care if it’s Howdy freaking Doody dressed in a ball gown, put the thing on the ground now !”
    The guests loved it.
    Now what was she supposed to do? The modern black revolver in the stranger’s hand also looked real. It had to be a fake; both of them were fake, right? They only seemed real because these people had practiced the script so well and they’d left out the gun part. Her mind spun. Find Juniper. Make sure the servers were out of the way. Let Cadillac out and cue him to herd the guests if it came to that. Her head began to pound with the unmistakable drumming of a migraine on its way. “Excuse me,” she said to every person she bumped into. “Please, may I get by?”
    In the excitement guests pushed back and Glory ended up next to the musicians. “Was this planned?” she asked the guy in the kilt.
    “Dunno. I’m in charge of tunes, not fighting. Where’d you find that guy?”
    “I thought he was a guest.”
    “Lady, I know every person here. I don’t know him.” The Scotsman cupped his hands and shouted, “Angus, back away from that dude! He’s packing!”
    Over the noise of the guests Angus either couldn’t hear or didn’t understand, so as the person hired to run this wedding successfully start to finish, Glory plowed through the crowd, not stopping until she poked her finger into the chest of the uninvited armed guest and in Angus’s as well. “Both of you put the guns away! This is a wedding, not a showdown at the O.K. Corral.”
    “Mine’s fake!” Angus said. “Honest, I bought it on militaryheritage.com for forty-eight dollars. Look. The barrel isn’t even drilled out.”
    The uninvited guest turned his face to her. His black hair was cut sharply above the ears, close to his skull, almost military-style. She couldn’t quite place his ethnicity. Latino? American Indian? Had he been wearing boots and a tricorn hat, he could have passed as a Moorish corsair, but not in a leather jacket and Levi’s and holding what she was pretty sure was a nine-millimeter pistol. “Thank God for that,” Glory said.
    “A sword fight in a wedding?” the man said.
    “Yes,” Glory said. “The fighting is pretend. We’re in the middle of a wedding. A pirate wedding.”
    “Seriously?” The man slid the gun back into the leather holster under his jacket and stepped aside. The pirates cheered as the duel began again.
    “I’m going to shoot blanks now,” Angus said. “Just so you know, there are no real bullets, only black powder caps, okay? You might see some sparks, but that’s all.”
    “Sorry about that,” the man said. “Ingrained reaction. I used to be a cop.”
    “So your gun has actual bullets in it?” Glory asked, pulling him away from the dueling pirates.
    “That’s usually the point of carrying one.” The pirates clashed by them. “From over there it looked to me like the real deal.”
    As soon as he pointed to the oak, Glory realized he’d been taking pictures of the tree without clearing permission from her ahead of time. Having the tree on private property meant she could call the hours people came to see it. Signs posted a hundred yards from the tree in every direction stated so in Spanish, German, Japanese, and Vietnamese. “You’re supposed to make an appointment for a reason.”
    “I can see that now.” He turned quickly away.
    “Are you crying ?” she said, but when he looked at her again, he was laughing.
    “Sorry,” he said. “A wedding inspired by a pirate movie. Who’s to blame? Johnny Depp or Walt Disney?”
    Glory reached for his camera. “May I use this? It’s an emergency.”
    He pulled it back by the strap. “This is a very expensive camera.”
    “Mine’s got a dead battery and you kind of owe me.”
    “I don’t know you.”
    “I’m Glory Solomon. I live here and my camera died. Sufficient? Will you at least take pictures of