This was all most inappropriate and destined to cause nothing but problems, she thought as she slammed a drawer shut and wished someone knew how to make decent coffee in this place. How was she supposed to feel after reading his mummy essay?
It was a few minutes past eight and everyone at headquarters, it seemed, was reading Trooper Truth, and the comments were an audible buzz in offices up and down the halls. Hammer had been shocked and unnerved when she’d heard Billy Bob in the Morning talking about the mummy essay on the radio as she was driving to work.
“Hey! Guess what we’re gonna do! We’re gonna start a contest right here on Billy Bob in the Morning. Our listeners out there can call us up with a guess about who the real Trooper Truth is. Cool? And whoever gets it right wins a special prize that we’ll figure out later. Wow! Look at that! Our switchboard’s already lighting up. Hello? This is Billy Bob In The Morning. You’re on the air, and who’s this?”
“Windy.”
Hammer couldn’t believe it when her secretary’s high-pitched voice had drifted out of the car radio. Based on the poor connection, Hammer assumed Windy was calling on her cell phone, probably from her car as she drove to work.
“So tell us, Windy, who’s Trooper Truth?”
“I think it’s the governor, only he probably has a ghost pen.”
Hammer fussed with paperwork at her desk, her ear trained toward Windy’s adjoining office. The minute the secretary blew through the door and dropped her bag lunch on the desk, Hammer jumped up from her chair and swooped in on her.
“How could you do such a numbskull thing?” Hammer demanded. “And what the hell is a ghost pen?”
“Oh!” Windy was thrilled but a bit taken aback by Hammer’s ire. “You must have heard me on the radio! Don’t worry, I just said I was Windy and didn’t give my last name or say where I work. What ghost pen? Oh yeah. You know, someone who gets someone else to secretly write for him, probably because he’s not a good writer.”
“I think you have ghost writer and pen name mixed up,” Hammer said with controlled fury as she paced in front of Windy’s desk and then thought to shut the outer door. “Don’t I have enough trouble with the governor without you calling up a goddamn radio station and accusing him of being Trooper Truth?”
“How do you know he’s not?” Windy touched up her lipstick.
“This isn’t about how I know or don’t know anything. It’s about indiscretion and poor judgment, Windy.”
“I bet you know who Trooper Truth is,” Windy said coyly, giving Hammer a little flutter of heavily mascara-coated eye-lashes. “Come on. Tell me. I just bet the band you know exactly who he is. Is he cute? How old is he? Is he single?”
Before this moment, Hammer had given little thought to what it might feel like if people started asking her if she knew who Trooper Truth was. It wasn’t her nature to lie unless an arrest or confession required it, or she was leaving for a trip and hid the suitcases and assured Popeye she’d be right back. Why Hammer would think of Popeye this very moment was hard to say, but images of her beloved Boston Terrier, who had been stolen during the summer, knocked Hammer hard and forced her to retreat into her private office, where she shut the door and took deep breaths. Tears welled up inside her.
“Hammer,” she brusquely said when her private line rang.
“It’s Andy.”
She could barely hear him and sniffed loudly, steadying herself.
“We’ve got a terrible connection,” Hammer said. “Are you on the island?”
“Roger. Just letting you know we landed at oh-eight-hundred . . . I’m on Janders Road. Figured that might be a good one . . . not as heavily traveled as . . . and . . . stupid . . . who cares . . . ?”
“You’re breaking up, Andy,” Hammer said. “And we’ve got to talk about this morning’s essay. I can’t believe it. This can’t continue. Hello? Hello? Are you there?”
The line was dead.
“Dammit!” Hammer muttered.
TANGIER Island had no cell antennas and few of the watermen used cell phones or the Internet or cared a whit about Trooper Truth. But it wasn’t lost on any of the Islanders that a state police helicopter had chopped in from the bay and landed at the airstrip only an hour ago. Ginny Crockett, for one, had been looking out her window ever since. She took a moment to feed her cat, Sookie, and when she returned to the living room of her neat, pink-painted house, she saw a state trooper in his gray uniform and big hat painting a wide, bright white line across the broken pavement of Janders Road. The inexplicable and ominous stripe began right in front of The What Not Shop on the other side of weeds pushing up through broken pavement and was headed straight for the family cemetery in Ginny’s front yard.
Water ran coolly in her crab farm’s three steel tanks just off the porch in the shade of crab-apple trees. Peelers—as blue crabs in the process of shedding their shells are called—were out of season and would not be looking up at tourists with resentful telescope eyes the rest of this year. But that didn’t stop Ginny from posting a sign and charging tourists a quarter to take a peek at the big jimmy, or male crab, she kept in one of the tanks. In fact, she had named the crab “Jimmy,” and so far he had earned her twenty dollars and fifty cents. Maybe that trooper was only pretending to be painting the road so he could spy on her. The authorities were always snooping, it seemed, to find out if people like Ginny were paying taxes on the revenue their entrepreneurial activities earned.
The Islanders had learned over the decades that tourists would buy anything. All you had to do was nail together a little wooden box, saw a slit in its top, set it somewhere, and post a notice saying what you were selling and giving its price. The most popular items were recipes and street maps written and drawn by hand and photocopied on colorful paper.
Ginny walked to her chain-link fence to get a closer look at the trooper working his way across the street with a wide brush and a can of special paint that, based on what Ginny could make out on the label, promised to be waterproof, to dry quickly, and to glow in the dark. He was a young, handsome fellow moving slowly in a crablike fashion, and to give him credit, he didn’t appear to be enjoying himself very much.
“You hadn’t orte do that!” Ginny complained that no one should be painting up the road. “It ain’t fittin’!” she added loudly in the odd, musical way the people of Tangier have expressed themselves since emigrating from England centuries ago and remaining in a tightly closed population on their speck of an island.
Andy fixed dark glasses on her and noticed right off that she had the worst dentures he had ever seen. When he had stopped off in The What Not Shop earlier to buy Evian, he had noticed two other island women inside, and they also had terrible dental work.
“Does your island have a dentist?” Andy asked the old woman who was watching him suspiciously from the other side of her chain-link fence.
“Ever week he come in from the main,” she reluctantly replied, because the dentist was a sore subject and all her neighbors tended to deal with it by denying what was obvious.
“The same one been coming here for a while?” Andy asked from his squatting position on the street. He had stopped painting for a moment.
“Yea. One and the same been coming to Tanger for so long, I disremember when,” she replied, more self-conscious than unfriendly now, her lips crinkled like crepe paper around big, fakey teeth.
“There are a lot of bad dentists out there,” Andy said gently. “Everybody I’ve seen here so far has clearly had an astonishing amount of dental work, ma’am, and although it’s none of my business, maybe you folks ought to consider getting a different dentist or at least having the one you use thoroughly investigated.”
His comment and his bright, perfect, natural teeth cut Ginny to the wick, which was Tangier talk for saying something went deep and caused excruciating pain. It wasn’t that the Islanders didn’t quietly gossip at gatherings about the visiting dentist. But without him, they would have no one.
“I don’t suppose you read
Trooper Truth,” Andy said to her as he resumed painting the stripe. “But he has some interesting things to say about facing the truth and, in fact, demanding truth. But the only way you get truth, ma’am, is to stare what you fear straight in the eye, whether it’s a mummy or a shifty, harmful dentist.”
Ginny was unnerved and had no idea what to make of this young trooper with his kind ways that didn’t seem to fit with his threatening uniform and his trespassing and violating the road in front of her house.
“Now, don’t you be throwing off about the stripe like you ain’t paintin’ it right afore my very eyes,” she declared, changing the subject.
“I’m not,” Andy said. “I have to paint this speed trap—on the orders of the governor, ma’am.”
Ginny had never heard of such a thing and was instantly inflamed. There were fewer than twenty gas-powered land vehicles on the entire island, most of them rusting pickup trucks used for hauling things. Pretty much everybody either walked or got around on golf carts, scooters, mopeds, or bicycles. Tangier was less than three miles long and not even a mile wide. Only six hundred and fifty people lived here, and why would the governor care if one of them got a little frisky in his golf cart? Life was slow on the island. Roads were barely wider than footpaths, few of them paved, and one wrong turn could send you headlong into a marsh. Speeding on land had never been a community problem, and in fact, Ginny had never heard of the mayor or the town council taking up this particular issue.
“Well, theys many a road on the main and you don’t need to be a painting up ours. Doncha stop that? Afore you’re going to catch it, young feller!”
Andy wasn’t sure what the island woman had just said to him, but he detected a threat.
“Just doing my job,” he said, dipping the brush in the paint can.
“What happen you drive over it?” Ginny pointed at the wet painted line on the road.
“Nothing yet,” Andy explained in an ominous tone, in hopes he might encourage the woman to complain and provide him with a few good quotes for the next Trooper Truth essay. “I’ve got to paint another one exactly a quarter of a mile from this one. Then when our helicopters patrol the island, the pilots can time how long it takes for a vehicle to get from stripe to stripe. VASCAR will tell us exactly how fast you’re going.”
“Heee! Jiminy Criminy! They going to bring NASCAR here to Tanger?” Ginny was shocked.
“VASCAR,” Andy repeated, and he was thrilled that Virginians might confuse VASCAR with NASCAR. “It refers to a computer that knows if you’re speeding.”
“Then what?” Ginny still didn’t understand, and her mind was roaring with stock cars and drunken fans.
“Then a trooper on the ground goes after the speeder and gives him a citation.”
“What he gonna to recite at us?” Ginny envisioned the young trooper in his big hat and dark glasses sternly reprimanding some poor Tangierman on his bicycle, probably pointing his finger, trying to scare him as the trooper recited something like one of those Miranda warnings Ginny was always hearing about on programs she picked up on the satellite dish that was surrounded by glass balls and other yard ornaments.
“A ticket,” Andy went on in a stern voice. “You know what a ticket is?” His paintbrush found the edge of the pavement, mere inches from Ginny’s fence and all the dead family members whose headstones were worn smooth and tilting in different directions. “We write you a ticket and then you go down to the courthouse and pay a fine. Cash or check.”
He knew very well that Tangier Island did not have a bank, and a check, in this old woman’s mind, was what the Coast Guard was always doing or what the tourists got when they ate the crab cakes and corn pudding at Hilda Crockett’s Chesapeake House.
“How much you make us pay when we get warranted, if we do?” Ginny was getting increasingly alarmed.
Andy stood up and stretched his aching back as he struggled to decipher what the woman had just said to him. Then he recalled his visit to The What Not Shop right before he had started painting the stripe and overhearing two Tangier women whispering about him and saying something about someone being warranted and that they couldn’t fathom who had done what, but it was probably that Shores boy who live cross from the school. He’s got more mouth than a sheep and here his daddy’s poor as Job’s turkey. That’s right, Hattie. Durn if his daddy don’t foller the water even when it’s the dog days while that Mr. Nutters a his can’t be learned nothing. Spends all his time progging, he does. Well, I swanny, Fonny Boy ain’t neither smarter than a ticky crab, Lula.
So warranted, Andy figured, must mean getting arrested, and according to Hattie and Lula, there was some island kid named Fonny Boy Shores who wasn’t much help at home, had a smart mouth, didn’t study, and preferred to spend his time wading along the shore and looking for things with a stick instead of contributing honest wages to his poor family.
“Fines for speeding depend on how many miles over the limit you were going,” Andy informed the unhappy island woman.
He didn’t let on for a moment that he thought it was appalling to hand out citations based on ground speed checked from the air. Planes and helicopters had neither radar guns nor good views of license tags, and he could just imagine a pilot calculating the speed of a northbound white compact car, for example, and radioing a trooper in his marked car to go after the offender. The trooper would roar out from behind shrubbery in the median strip and flash and wail after the most likely northbound white compact car, selecting the vehicle from a scattered pack of white compact cars whizzing along the interstate. What a waste of Jet-A fuel, taxpayers’ money, and time.
“It’s three dollars for every mile over, plus thirty dollars for court costs,” Andy summarized. “What’s your name, by the way?”
“Why you want to know for?” Ginny backed up a step, threatened.
“Do you ever use the Internet?”
She stared mutely at him.
“No, it’s not something you catch fish with,” Andy said, slightly frustrated and disappointed. “I don’t guess you have PCs or modems out here.” He glanced around at small clapboard houses that lined the deteriorating road and eyed several golf carts bumping along in the distance. “Never mind about the Internet,” he added. “But I would like to know your name, and if you give it to me I can e-mail it to Trooper Truth so he can quote you and let the world know what you think of the governor’s new speed trap initiative.”
Ginny was baffled.
“It might bring more tourists to your crab tanks.” He pointed at them. “Those quarters add up, don’t they?”
“It’s well and all if I get me a quarter now and again,” Ginny said, trying to dilute her private tax-free enterprise. “But this time of year, there are neither pailers to show for a quarter, and all I got is a jimmy right in the tank there. Now, he’s a right big feller, but times is slow and soon enough strangers will take thesselves other places and won’t be coming here.”
“You never know. Nothing like publicity. Maybe things will pick up a bit.” Andy tried to coax her into giving him her name. “People read about your big jimmy and they’ll line up to take a look.”
Ginny gave in and told the trooper who she was because she sensed he wasn’t a revenuer but had other legal matters on his mind, and quarters did add up. A lot of people these days, it was her observation, didn’t think twice about tossing away quarters, dimes, and nickels and, of course, pennies. Not that she was fond of pennies, not hardly. Everyone on the island was always trying to unload their pennies on their neighbors. The little brown coins circulated nonstop and it had gotten to the point that Ginny recognized individual pennies, and knew she’d been had when she shopped for groceries and was given an inordinate number of familiar pennies for change.
“I don’t want neither pennies,” she was constantly chiding Daisy Eskridge, the cashier at the island’s only market.
“Well, now, honey, I’m not trying to put them on you, but I have to give ’em out,” Daisy repli
ed last time Ginny complained. “Leastways I do since Wheezy Parks was in here buying some flour and soap and give me mor’n four hundred pennies. I said I’d give her tick, but she was of a mind to chuck her pennies, and I can’t be fitting all them pennies in my drawer, Ginny.”
Ginny was still annoyed with Wheezy, who always refused to buy things on credit and was the island’s biggest offender when it came to passing unwanted pennies. There was a pervasive and shameful rumor circulating along with the pennies that Wheezy was opening the money boxes late at night and exchanging her pennies for quarters, nickels, and dimes. Then, to make matters worse, the conniving woman was always getting rid of the rest of her pennies at every opportunity. Why, Wheezy probably had most of the silver change on the island—probably stashed in socks under her bed.
“So, Ms. Crockett, ten miles over is thirty dollars plus court costs.” The trooper was explaining a very complicated legal process, and Ginny drifted away from pennies and focused on him again. “Fifteen is reckless driving and the person could go to jail.”
“Lordy! You can’t throw us in the jail!” Ginny protested.
SHE was right, but not entirely. No one could be locked up on the island, which had neither a courthouse nor a jail. This clearly meant that anyone caught speeding would be deported to the mainland. The suggestion of such a thing excited primitive fears throughout the island the instant Ginny hurried down Janders Road and cut over to Spanky’s Place, where Dipper Pruitt was spooning out homemade vanilla ice cream for three quiet Amish tourists in long dresses and hair nets.
“They’s gonna lock all us in the jail on the main!” Ginny exclaimed. “They’s gonna turn the island into a racetrack!”
The Amish women smiled shyly, counting out coveted silver change from tiny black purses, placing one shiny coin at a time on the counter, making not a sound. Ginny didn’t see tourists from Pennsylvania often, and always marveled at the way they dressed and acted and how pale their skin was. They could sail for hours on the Chesapeake Breeze or the Captain Eulice ferries and walk around the island all day without getting sunburned, windblown, or cold. They never helped themselves to porch rocking chairs, sat on gravestones, looked in the crab tanks without paying, or made comments about the exotic way the Islanders talked. Ginny had never heard a single Amish person complain about Tangier’s ban of alcohol or the early curfews that discouraged nightlife and swearing and made sure the watermen were home with their families and in bed early. If all strangers were like people from Pennsylvania, Ginny and her neighbors might not resent them quite so much.