“God-a-mighty! Who say we going to the jail?” Dipper wanted to know as she rinsed off ice cream paddles in a basin of tepid water. “And what they say we did?”
“Going too fast in the golf carts,” Ginny replied as the Amish women silently walked back out into the cool, damp morning. “The police is painting stripes to warrant each and ever one of us with helichoppers. By and by they gonna make us leave for good so they can have NASCAR and make a barrel!”
Within the hour, the entire fleet of white work boats the Islanders called bateaus was speeding back in from the island’s guts and criks and the wide-open Chesapeake Bay. Small outboard motors hissed and sputtered like radiators as the watermen worked the throttles to the limit, responding to the threatening news about jails and NASCAR and the trooper’s insulting comments about the Islanders’ dental work. A spotter plane was diverted from its quest for schools of fish bait and began circling Janders Road at a low altitude, careful not to get too close to the rusting crane that rose from the south hook of the island, near the waste-treatment plant and the airstrip made of dredge.
Fortunately for Andy, the paint dried almost instantly, and therefore the growing crowd of unhappy women and children armed with garden hoses and buckets of water had little effect on his work. But he was getting nervous and having second thoughts about stirring up the locals to get them to offer truthful opinions for the sake of his essays. Maybe he shouldn’t have let Trooper Macovich wait in the helicopter. Maybe this assignment was too dangerous to carry out alone. Andy hurried up with the stripe he was painting in front of the Gladstone Memorial Health Center, where Dr. Sherman Faux was drilling another tooth in Fonny Boy’s mouth.
Five
Governor Crimm’s morning was not going well so far. He had gotten lost on his way down to breakfast and ended up in one of the mansion’s parlors again, where he sat patiently in a Windsor chair waiting for Pony, the butler, to pour coffee from the antique spout lamp into the chamber stick on top of the nearby Chippendale lowboy. Crimm had misplaced the silver magnifying glass that he faithfully kept on the marble fireplace mantel in the master suite.
“Where am I?” he said, just in case someone might be nearby. “I don’t want ham this morning and I must have my coffee. Pony? Come in here immediately! Why is it so chilly? I feel a draft.”
“Oh dear!” First Lady Maude Crimm’s voice floated into the parlor. “Is that you, Bedford?”
“Who the hell else would it be?” the governor thundered. “Who took my magnifying glass? I think someone is taking it on purpose so I can’t see what everybody is up to.”
“You always think that, dear.” Mrs. Crimm’s heavy perfume entered the room, and her bedroom slippers whispered across the Brussels carpet. “There’s no conspiracy, precious,” she lied as her blurry form bent over and kissed the top of his balding head.
There was a conspiracy and the First Lady knew it. She had an incurable addiction to collectibles, and her husband’s failing eyesight and the Internet had, at long last, granted her ample opportunity to succumb to her vice. Most recently, Maude Crimm hadn’t been able to resist trivets, for example, and over the past few months, she had procured scores of them with turned handles, cherubs, lacy circles, tulips, grapes, scrolls, and “God Bless Our Home,” some of them cast iron, some brass. When she was pecking away on the computer earlier this morning, while the governor was snoring in bed and clenching his teeth, she had come across a wonderful buffed star-and-braid trivet that she could not stop thinking about.
Her philosophy about shopping was to exercise restraint now and then by walking away from whatever she wanted, whether it was a new dress or a trivet, and see if the desired item continued to call out to her. If it did, then the purchase was imminent and meant to be. Her husband did not share her philosophy and she had learned to keep her acquisitions out of sight, a task that was getting increasingly easier. All the same, his blind peregrinations throughout the mansion were becoming a great concern. One of these days, she feared, he was going to walk into one of the linen closets and clank into the growing stack of antique trivets on the heart-of-pine floor. The First Lady did not need another one of her husband’s tirades. He hadn’t yet gotten over her last collecting spree, when thirty-eight early nineteenth–century wick trimmers and a rare Monarch Teenie-Weenie toffee tin were delivered to the mansion. Of course, this was over a period of several days. Mrs. Crimm was clever enough not to order everything at once and to stagger the deliveries with Federal Express.
“Did you check the Lafayette Room?” Mrs. Crimm asked her husband. “Sometimes your magnifying glass ends up in there on the Sheraton chest next to the oil lamp. I believe I may have seen it near the two-part mirror the other day, now that I think of it.”
“Why would it end up in the Lafayette Room?” the governor sullenly responded. “We only let other governors and former presidents sleep in there. Someone’s hiding it from me. What is it you don’t want me to see around here?” he demanded as he got up from the spindly old chair.
“You know I never want you to not see anything, dear,” she replied as she led him out of the parlor. “However, I did happen to read that dangerous Trooper Truth this morning. I don’t suppose you’ve seen what he put on his website again?” she added to divert his attention.
“What?” the governor followed her and bumped into a tilt-top tea table in a sitting room, jostling a finger lamp. “Did you print it out?”
“Of course I did,” Mrs. Crimm gravely said. “Since you can’t find your magnifying glass, I’ll have to read it to you. But I fear it will aggravate you, Bedford, and upset your submarine again.”
The governor did not appreciate his wife’s openly discussing his submarine, which was their pet name for his constitution.
“Who’s here?” he asked, squinting about, making sure no one was within earshot.
“Nobody’s here, precious. Just you and me and we’re almost to the breakfast room. There, turn right and watch out for the lithograph. Oops! Here, I’ll straighten it.”
He heard something scrape as she rearranged the lithograph he had just knocked with his large nose.
“I bang my head on that damn thing one more time,” he threatened as he shuffled into the breakfast room and groped for a chair. “What is it of, anyway?”
“William Penn’s treaty with the Indians.” Mrs. Crimm shook out a linen napkin and tucked it into the collar of her husband’s dress shirt, which was buttoned crooked and did not match his paisley suspenders, green velvet vest, or striped necktie.
“This is not Philadelphia and I fail to see why William Penn should be inside the mansion,” the governor said. “Since when did that happen?”
Clearly, he had forgotten his wife’s fleeting passion for lithographs, if he had ever known about it. The governor sighed as Pony materialized with the coffeepot.
“Good morning, sir,” Pony said as he poured.
“No, it’s not, Pony. No, indeed. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket.”
“It most certainly is, sir,” Pony agreed with a sympathetic nod of the head. “I tell you, I thought the world already went to hell in a handbasket a long time ago, but I was wrong. I sure was. Things is just getting more messed up, that’s right. It’s enough to make a man want to run down to the church and beg God Hisself to please, please help us out of our misery and forgive our sins and our enemies and make people behave. What wrong with folks anyway?
“You know, the other day when them caters showed up for that big dinner of yours?” Pony went on. “I was minding my own business getting them tea and I heard one of ’em say to the other, ‘I wonder if I could take one of these little teacups that’s got the Com’wealth of Virginia on it. What you think?’ ‘I don’t know why not,’ the other one say. ‘You pay tax, don’t you?’ ‘I sure do,’ say the other lady cater. ‘And nothing in here belong to the Crimm family anyhow. It belong to all of us.’ ‘Well, if that isn’t the God’s truth. It belong to us.’
“Then,” Pony went on, getting more animated as his tale wore on, “both them caters stuffed their teacups in them big handbags of theirs, can you believe that?”
“Why on earth . . . ?” the First Lady sputtered in shock and disgust. “Why didn’t you stop them, for heaven’s sake! I certainly hope they didn’t take the handleless cups and saucers, those lovely pearlware ones with the Leeds floral design.”
“Oh, no, ma’am,” Pony assured her. “It was the ones with handles and the Com’wealth logo on ’em in gold.”
“You shouldn’t be serving tea to caterers, to begin with,” Mrs. Crimm reprimanded Pony. “And certainly not in official tea cups. Caterers are common workers, not VIP guests of the mansion, oh dear me.” She looked at the governor for support as he slopped coffee on the tablecloth and missed the saucer when he set down the cup. “We really must stop being so generous with the public, Bedford. Why, I suppose next thing, some taxi driver or toll collector will show up at the guard gate and demand a private tour that includes tea in official china!”
“The mansion doesn’t belong to us,” the governor reminded her, and dark thoughts crowded together like unfriendly people on an elevator as the door to his patience slid shut and his mood began to descend. “Any person off the street could come here and ask for a tour, if the truth be known. But that doesn’t mean we have to do it or that they can make us. The public doesn’t know this is their legal right and I’m not about to tell them. Now read that damn essay to me, Maude.”
He was desperately hoping there would be another riddle today that might guide him through the thickets that seemed to be closing in on him from all sides.
“Mummies,” she said, peering over reading glasses and scanning the printout. “You know, I’ve always been rather frightened by mummies, too. I had no idea anyone else felt the same way. But what is all this about Tangier Island? It’s the second time Trooper Truth has mentioned it. What’s going on out there, Bedford?”
“Would you like grits or hash browns with your eggs?” Pony politely inquired.
“I didn’t know we were having eggs,” the governor replied.
“I told him poached eggs,” Mrs. Crimm informed her husband as she smoothed her dressing gown over her ample lap. “I thought that might be soothing. Nothing like bland food when your submarine’s out of sorts.”
Governor Crimm’s mind, like his constitution, was submerging without any clear direction. He scarcely heard another word his wife said or read as he moved closer to a suspicion that soon enough became a conviction. There was an encrypted message in what Trooper Truth had written about mummies, and Crimm suddenly remembered that as a child, he had called his mother “Mummy.”
Lutilla Crimm had conceived her oldest son in a wealthy section of Charlottesville called Farmington during a terrible snowstorm. Crimm dimly conjured up what he could remember hearing about that event, and it seemed that when his father would get annoyed with his wife, he would make snide asides to little Bedford about never allowing a woman to run and ruin his life.
“They’re full of mendacity, women are,” Bedford’s father would say when the two of them were carrying in logs for the wood-burning stove or shoveling snow off the brick sidewalk in front of their imposing brick house that rose before a backdrop of mountains. “They’ll sweet-talk you, son, and make you think they’re right desperate to have sex with you, then when they’ve got you wrapped around their fingers and saddled down with kids, guess what?”
“What?” Bedford had begun giving voice to what would become his most frequently asked question.
“What?” echoed his father. “I’ll tell you what! They’ll suddenly announce that the ceiling needs to be replastered or the molding is crumbling or there are cobwebs hanging from the chandelier, right when you’re in the middle of . . .”
“Oh,” Bedford replied as he dumped split logs into the bin by the stove.
“Let’s just put it this way,” his father went on while his wife worked on a needlepoint in her parlor upstairs. “Half of you was scattered over the quilt, son. That’s probably why you’re a runt with bad eyesight.”
“What exactly did Mummy say?” Bedford had to know the truth. “Was she asking about the ceiling or the cobwebs?”
“Neither one. Not that night. She sat straight up in bed and said, ‘Why, I don’t believe I fed the cat.’ ”
“Had she?” young Bedford inquired, and he would never forget his dismay at learning that he would forever be visually impaired, short, and homely—all because of a cat. “Why would Mummy suddenly think of the cat at that precise moment?”
“That’s exactly what I mean about women, son. They think of all kinds of things at that precise moment because they want to create a diversion.” His father shoved a log into the wood stove and sparks flew up in protest. “Your mummy knew exactly what she was doing when she brought up the cat.”
Since then, Bedford Crimm not only hated cats, but he also carried a pain in his heart and was deeply insecure because his mummy had committed interruptus during his conception, thus spilling much of his vitality on the quilt. She could not possibly have loved her quickening son much, Bedford mused unhappily as he picked at a poached egg he could scarcely see and groped for the pepper mill and continued to tune out his wife, who was having a stressful conversation with Pony about people who have been struck by lightning. Crimm believed he had put his unfair childhood behind him when he had become powerful in politics, and now Trooper Truth had brought it all back.
A miasma of paranoia and anger leaked through Crimm like a noxious gas, and his submarine went into alert. Somehow Trooper Truth knew the truth about the mighty governor’s shameful start in life and the last thing Crimm needed was for others to find out. Oh, of course Trooper Truth knew! He knew everything. Why else would he have mentioned mummies in his essay?
“This is an outrage!” He slammed his fist down on the table and a silver candlestick toppled over into the butter dish.
The breakfast room froze in silence.
After a moment, a startled Maude Crimm said to him, “My goodness! It’s a good thing that candle wasn’t lit, dear, or the butter might have caught on fire. Real butter is animal fat and will burn just as easily as lighter fluid.”
“Not quite as easy as that, ma’am,” Pony voiced his opinion. “But don’t want to take no chances.” He picked up the candlestick and wiped it off with the napkin draped over his arm. “Don’t want no fires in the mansion. This place would go up in flames quick as a dried-out broom, old as it is.”
“Here we are talking about lightning and people’s homes and clothing burning up, and then a candlestick lands in the butter,” the First Lady said in a hushed, ominous tone. “I hope that’s not a sign.”
“Emmm-emm.” Pony shook his head and clucked his tongue. “I sure do hope you’re right. Don’t need no sign like that.”
“What sign?” the governor came to and instantly thought of VASCAR and the signs Major Trader intended to post throughout the Commonwealth. “Get Trader on the phone,” Crimm ordered Pony. “Tell him I want a briefing immediately on how things are going on Tangier Island. We should have that speed trap painted by now. And ask Trooper Macovich if he’s figured out who Trooper Truth is yet. I’m going to find that scoundrel and silence him before he does any more damage! I don’t give a hootenanny about the First Amendment!”
He pounded the table again, and Pony caught the candlestick just in time.
T. T. had not caught on to anything just in time, and Unique was certain T. T. had been more than dead by the time Unique had walked back across the footbridge last night and eventually driven off in her Miata. Even so, Unique felt a strong urge to check things out. Her memory of what had transpired after she and T.T. had gotten to the island was patchy and vague, but based on the amount of blood on her clothing she saw when she finally returned to her shabby downtown apartment, Unique had a pretty good idea of what she had done to that presumptuous, ugly woman who had been
so bold as to think Unique would be interested in her or was her type at all.
She parked near Belle Island and set off in tennis shoes, carrying a Polaroid camera for what would appear to be a brisk morning nature walk. In the light of day, the island looked very different, and it took Unique a good twenty minutes to find the brick ruins where she apparently had dragged T. T.’s nude body, although Unique had no recollection of having done anything after she slashed the young woman’s throat from ear to ear. Unique’s pulse picked up and she felt a surge of power, excitement, and sexual arousal as she stood just inside crumbled brick walls and stared at the mutilated, bloody body lying face up in the mud.
T.T.’s eyes were partially open and dull, and her hair was clotted with blood and dirt. It disgusted Unique to think she had ever touched her lips or any part of her. She squatted and took photographs from every angle, so she could clearly remind herself of the event later without running the risk of having the film developed in a shop. She was a little surprised when she leaned in for close-ups and detected the faint scent of T.T.’s cologne, which brought back memories of a scream and then a gurgling sound as T.T. clutched her neck while Unique kicked her head before slashing her breasts and carving the name Trooper Truth across her belly. Unique was impressed that she had been clever enough to add the Trooper Truth bit. T. T. had wished she was Trooper Truth, and now she was.
“You got what you wanted,” Unique said softly to the cold, gory body as she headed back to the footbridge.
Isle of Dogs Page 6
