Isle of Dogs

  “I cannot spare the truth from you,” Job told Blackbeard, who was drinking cup after cup of rum and setting his beard on fire. “Although we had our beginnings in England long ago, we landed on this island by way of North Carolina.”

  Job offered this blatant lie because he felt certain it would snag Blackbeard’s attention, since it was well known that the pirate was in collusion with Charles Eden, the governor of North Carolina. For much of Blackbeard’s nefarious career, he had navigated the shallow sounds and inlets of North Carolina with never a fear. Indeed, any plot hatched from other territories to defeat Blackbeard and his seadogs was always foiled by a letter from someone in North Carolina, much to the disgust of Virginia’s Governor Spottswood, who was nei-ther friendly with Blackbeard nor inclined for the pirate to remain in business or alive.

  “How can this be?” Blackbeard bellowed through curls of smoke, squinting one eye in a threatening manner that suggested Job best be telling “they God’s truth or I will cut ye asunder into many pieces and send ye back from whence ye came, which is Hell, ye villain!”

  “I am neither villain,” Job promised. “From whence I came is North Carolina—not Hell—where ye have many friends and relations. Yet it cannot be known that we on this fair island originally came from North Carolina and managed to escape with our very lives because there was a terrible drought that withered our crops and parched our very tongues and we were short of supplies, so we crowded into bateaus and made our way here, leaving no word except Crotoan carved into a fence post and Cro carved into a tree to give rise to the expectation that we had gone off to live with the Crotans.”

  Blackbeard reminded Job that the name of the Crotan Indians was spelled C-R-O-T-A-N as opposed to C-R-O-T-O-A-N, to which Job replied, “Yay, that is God’s truth. But it was not I who carved the tree, but another not as well learned as I.”

  “Are you implying,” I probed Fonny Boy, “that the Islanders descended from the Lost Colonists who vanished after Sir Walter Raleigh dropped them off on Roanoke Island? Well,” I was talking to myself now, “it is a fact that when Walter Raleigh set out for the New World on May 8, 1587, his plan was to find a location on the Chesapeake Bay, but he was forced by hurricanes to settle farther south on Roanoke Island. So the Lost Colonists never wanted to be in North Carolina to begin with. I guess if you’re going to relocate, you would certainly consider your original destination, and Tangier was described as a nice island, with the exception of there being no drinkable water.

  “However,” I decided, “the chronology makes what Job told Blackbeard impossible, because the Lost Colonists were already lost by the time Smith headed to Virginia and supposedly discovered your island in 1608. So I am forced to dismiss this theory entirely. Furthermore, we can’t prove, at least not to my satisfaction, that when Smith landed on Tangier, he wasn’t really on Limbo Island, and all of you are therefore not Islanders but Limbonians.”

  Fonny Boy had the vacant look again as he slouched in the dentist’s chair, unfocused and twitching a little. The chair scraped again from somewhere in the back of the clinic and then banged loudly as it crashed to the floor, apparently overturned by the dentist’s tethered dog, who may have been dreaming, too, or so I assumed at the time.

  “Well, I’ve got to run along,” I told Fonny Boy. “I’ll see what else I can find out about your people and why only Job Wheeler and Blackbeard knew the truth or the lies about Tangier’s past. And also why, after Job died and Blackbeard eventually met his much-deserved violent end, those secrets and others remained hidden in the account book in the Spottswoods’ attic.”

  Fonny Boy’s rapid eye movement was picking up speed as he stared off in a trance, gripping the armrests of the dentist’s chair as if he were watching an intense adventure movie. It was pointless to communicate with him further, and I left the clinic. I waved down a golf-cart taxi and headed back to the airstrip as theories and speculations clashed in my head and made little sense because I am neither a historian nor a historical novelist, although I do know people who are. As I set off for home in the helicopter, staying below 3,500 feet to avoid restricted area R 4006, then heading due south to avoid restricted area R 6609, I realized it was only fair and responsible for me to continue my arduous historical investigation on how this country started and what has happened to it since.

  “Watch out for that bird over there.” My copilot pointed out a seagull that apparently didn’t see us until the last second.

  “Wow, that was close,” I commented as the bird dove under us, clipping its tail on a skid. “I hope he’s all right.” I nosed the helicopter west a few degrees to get a glimpse of the seagull as it sailed away, appearing to fly backward because we, of course, were going considerably faster than it.

  P.S. To whoever is holding Popeye hostage, contact me before it’s too late! And many thanks for the tips you, my faithful readers, have been sending me about Trish Thrash.

  Be careful out there!

  Fifteen

  The minute Windy Brees blew into Hammer’s office, Hammer knew there was trouble.

  “Heavens to Betty! Have you seen what Trooper Truth just put up on his website?” Windy declared.

  “Yes,” Hammer replied. “I saw what was up this morning.”

  “No! He’s put up something else, and you won’t believe what it says!”

  “Put up something else?” Hammer was baffled, yet she was not about to let on that she had prior knowledge about Trooper Truth or his publication schedule. “That’s interesting,” she said. “I suppose I just assumed he posted only one essay a day.”

  “Well, not so,” Windy said. “Whoever he is, he is one proliferated writer. I wonder what he looks like and how old he is. He must be old to know so much. All that history and everything . . .”

  “What makes you think Trooper Truth is a man?” Hammer inquired as she logged on to the website.

  “Well, he’s so smart, for one thing.”

  When Hammer began reading the essay, she ordered Windy to leave her office and shut the door. She got Andy on the phone.

  “That’s it!?” she said in an outraged whisper.

  “A common Tangier expression,” Andy remarked. “That’s it! means the person saying it is really saying none of your business. For example, if I ask you if you’re mad at me for not telling you about my secret mission, or will you be mad if I tell you that something awful was left at my house last night, and you say That’s it!, you mean . . .”

  “Meet me at . . . !” she interrupted him as she groped for a location.

  There was really no place in Richmond either one of them could go without being noticed, especially if they were together.

  “Meet me in the Ukrop’s parking lot in fifteen minutes!” she decided angrily.

  “Which Ukrop’s?” Andy asked over the line. “And I can explain everything.”

  “Not over the phone, you’re not. The Ukrop’s at Stony-point. We’ll talk in the car.”

  MAJOR Trader had just read the essay, too, and he huffed and puffed as he hurried his considerable bulk into Governor Crimm’s office.

  “Governor!” Trader exclaimed as he burst in without knocking. “Trooper Truth has been to Tangier and claims some island boy named Fonny Boy is the one holding the dentist hostage! He’s a journalist who wears a disguise!”

  “What?” the governor inquired weakly as he emerged from his private bathroom and straightened his plaid vest, making sure the railroad watch that had been passed down for generations was safely tucked back into the watch pocket. “The island boy’s a journalist? What island boy? And what in thunder are you talking about, and you know not to just walk in on me.”

  “Fonny Boy’s his name. Some island boy named Fonny Boy, and we’ve got a description,” Trader excitedly said. “And no. Trooper Truth disguised himself as a journalist, not Fonny Boy.”

  “He’s disguising himself not as Fonny Boy but as a journalist?” Crimm fished his office magnifying glass out of a landfill of p
apers. “You’re supposed to be a bloody press secretary and you butcher the King’s English, simply butcher it. Constantly and consistently. And for God’s sake, don’t you ever take your suits to the dry cleaners? Doesn’t your wife complain?” The governor cast an enlarged eye over Trader’s slovenly bulk. “You have chili on your shirt and your tie’s too short. You look like Big Daddy after he’s been on a goddamn bender, and I’m thinking very seriously about firing you one of these days.”

  “Please, Governor!” Trader cried out. “Don’t kill the messenger. I’m not the one leaking all this classified and embarrassing information onto the Internet!”

  “I certainly know that.” The governor weakly seated himself behind his desk and motioned for Trader to take a chair and lower his voice. “Whoever Trooper Truth is, he’s at least a writer.”

  “Now, I take that very personally,” Trader said. “That was naughty, naughty to insult me that way. I think you should apologize for wounding my creative sensibilities.”

  “The only thing creative about you is your rendition of the truth,” the governor retorted. “And if I weren’t so preoccupied with important matters, including my health, I would catch you in your lies more often and do something about it.”

  “How is your health?” Trader sweetly asked.

  “Did you bring me this latest essay?”

  Trader unfolded the printout and smoothed it open on the ink blotter. The governor was silent for many long minutes as he moved his magnifying glass over Trooper Truth’s words and grunted now and then and made other inarticulate sounds of disapproval, surprise, and constitutional discomfort.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” he decided in his most sovereign tone. “We’re going to have to find a special operative who will finger this Trooper Truth scoundrel and bring him to justice.”

  “Bring him to justice for what, Governor? I don’t believe he’s committed a crime.”

  “Why, I believe he might just be guilty of treason, don’t you? Isn’t he sticking his nose in state business and referring to my policies as being idiotic? Furthermore, I don’t appreciate this tireless obsession with pirates, when we’ve been working so hard to play down that problem. Now Blackbeard’s even dragged into the fray and is on everybody’s mind.”

  “I know, I know.” Trader couldn’t have agreed with him more as he gleefully thought of his Captain Bonny website. “We certainly don’t want the public thinking that Blackbeard was welcome in Virginia or was ever even in Virginia, not even once. What we need to do is emphasize that Blackbeard and North Carolina were as thick as thieves, and it was our own Governor Spottswood who . . .”

  “You know how I feel about Spottswood!” the governor blurted out as his submarine went on alert. “I don’t want him getting any more credit than he already has, do you hear me? I have to live with his alleged descendants, and I’m sick and tired of being invited to their plantation pig roasts and shad roe plankings and hearing endless apocryphal stories about Governor Spottswood, who was probably a blowhard with gout and the clap.” The governor pulled out his railroad watch again. “It’s getting late. Why don’t you drop by the mansion for supper and we’ll discuss this further and come up with a plan?”

  ANDY already had a plan, but he feared Hammer was too riled up to listen, as he watched her storm out of her car and stride through the Ukrop’s parking lot in his direction.

  “Unplug the website immediately,” she said as she yanked open the door of his unmarked Caprice. “That’s it! You’re totally out of control. Am I to believe you’ve been doing undercover work on Tangier Island and you never bothered to let me know? And what awful thing turned up at your house last night?”

  “I’m sorry. I was wrong not to tell you about my secret mission. But I was afraid you’d try to stop me,” he replied calmly. “And you can’t unplug a website. I could close it down, but you don’t want me to do that, trust me. There’s too much at stake.”

  “The only thing at stake right now, it seems to me, is my career and good name and the life of a dentist,” she retorted.

  “A scoundrel of a dentist. You should see the chart I looked at! And what about Popeye?” Andy asked.

  Hammer’s grief resurfaced and silenced her.

  “I believe there was a lot of premeditation involved in her dognapping, and therefore it is most likely the work of someone who has something personal against you,” Andy told her.

  “That could be half the universe,” she dismally replied.

  “This isn’t about money, not directly,” he said. “If it was about a ransom, you would have been contacted long before now. I think someone has something pretty nefarious up his sleeve. And I’ve been getting some clues because of Trooper Truth—e-mails that are suspicious. I believe if I continue posting my essays and following every lead I can, we’re going to get to the bottom of this and a lot of other things. And I swear to God, if Popeye is alive, I’m going to find her for you.”

  “I refuse to get my hopes up,” she stoically said. “Do you really think she’s still alive?”

  “It’s just an instinct. But yes. For one thing, Boston terriers are not a hot item for dog thieves. They have bat ears, bulging eyes that look at the walls, and their little nub of a corkscrew tail doesn’t cover anything important, if you know what I mean. Not to mention their flat faces, their tendency to get bald in spots, and their intelligence, which far surpasses that of most of their owners—not including you, of course. I would assume the dogs of choice for thieves are Labs, miniature collies, cocker spaniels, and maybe dachshunds.”

  “Then Popeye may have been stolen as part of some bigger scheme that we don’t know about yet,” Hammer deduced.

  “Exactly.” Andy nodded as their conversation steamed up the glass.

  “That was very risky and probably foolish and reckless for you to pretend to be a journalist and go to Tangier Island,” Hammer then said.

  “Look,” he replied, “based on an e-mail tip to Trooper Truth, I knew even before I went there to paint the speed trap that the state police was being set up for a political fall to take attention away from the governor, who is increasingly viewed as a blundering potentate because of that asshole Major Trader. It’s just a crime that nasty slob of a press secretary manipulates him so blatantly, but the poor old man can’t see it because he can’t see anything, period. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories I’ve heard when I’ve been poking around this past year.”

  “Such as?” Hammer was getting interested.

  “It seems, for example, that every time Trader brings Crimm cookies or candy, the governor soon after gets a gastrointestinal attack that completely debilitates him. And let me add, the goodies are always chocolate or have chocolate in them.”

  “No. You don’t think . . . ?”

  “I most certainly do, and I intend to prove it just as soon as the labs complete testing on the chocolates the governor supposedly sent you and what’s left of a fudge cake Trader had sent over to Ruth’s Chris.”

  “You sent those to the lab?” She was shocked.

  “Of course I did. I’d heard the rumors and the governor never even calls you, so why would he send you chocolates through guess who? I think that bastard, no-good Trader is lacing the governor’s goodies with Ex-Lax and has been doing it for years. What better way to confuse and manipulate someone than to have that person doubled over with cramps and embarrassment whenever it’s time to make key decisions, which, in the case of the governor, is daily?”

  “That’s criminal!” Hammer said in disgust as she vaguely recalled being interviewed for the superintendent’s position, and Trader’s offering her a silver bowl of chocolate-covered peanuts, which she refused because she didn’t eat sweets or anything else fattening.

  “Oh, there’s more,” Andy ominously said. “I’ve been doing some pretty thorough checking on Trader. For starters, his mother’s maiden name was Bonny.”

  “I don’t see the significance.”

  ??
?You’re about to.” Andy met her eyes as the sun began to go down and shoppers hurried to and from their cars, oblivious to the very important conversation that was taking place in their midst. “The Bonnys are originally from Tangier Island. Trader’s mother married a waterman named Trader and Major Trader was born on the island on August the eleventh in 1951. He was delivered by a midwife, who apparently had a very difficult time with the birth because he came out feet first, which sort of seems appropriate since he inverts the truth and upends everything moral and decent.”

  “So you’re suggesting that initiating VASCAR on Tangier Island was a deliberate set-up on Trader’s part,” Hammer supposed.

  “Oh, yes. And one thing is certain, Trader knows the Islanders, all right, and probably still knows people on that island. Yet he’s made no effort whatsoever to intervene for at least one very good reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “The Bonny family is descended from pirates,” Andy replied. “And I’m afraid I have more bad news,” he added, and then he told her about the trash bag and envelope left at his house last night.

  Hammer listened to the entire story without interrupting once, which was most unusual for her. But she was clearly shocked and concerned.

  “According to some of the e-mail tips Trooper Truth’s been getting,” Andy went on, “Trish Thrash went by the initials T.T., and of late people had been teasing her about being Trooper Truth. Because of the initials, I’m saying. And she was getting a big kick out of it and often commented that she wished she was Trooper Truth because she wanted to be a journalist but ended up a data entry clerk for the state.”

  He fell silent, deeply saddened by the thought of the poor woman never realizing her dream and then wishing she were Trooper Truth, and now she was dead.

  “So do you think she met the killer and talked to him?” Hammer supposed. “Maybe she told him the same quirky anecdote about people teasing her about Trooper Truth and that she wished she was Trooper Truth, and she then trusted this stranger enough to go off with him somewhere?”