Two of the three wooers were listed as living in the same places they’d been the year before. If nothing else, that meant that those two, at least, hadn’t been spooked away by the attention they’d gotten from the police. I figured the young men were probably at work, but there was a good chance the landlord and the woman who’d called the cops were at home, so I drove to the Oak Bluffs Camp Meeting Grounds.The Camp Meeting Grounds is owned by an association, so the colorful, privately owned houses all stand on leased land. It’s a charming place of small parks, walkways, and narrow, winding streets built around a tabernacle that was originally only a large tent. The camp meeting area was established in 1835 during the Methodist revival when preachers expounded from stumps and believers came from the mainland to combine religious joys of the spirit with vacation joys of the flesh.The tents that were the first habitations of the congregations were gradually replaced by prefabricated gingerbread cottages brought over from the mainland, and the large tent that served as a church was replaced by the wood and metal tabernacle that is still the center of the neighborhood and provides a stage for musical, religious, and other summer events.
