Be careful out there!

Four

Hammer closed the Trooper Truth file in frustration and befuddlement. What did Andy think he was doing? What did mummies and Jamestown have to do with current problems in Virginia and crime?

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 lunch bag 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 eyelashes. "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 chainlink 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 crab-like 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 chainlink 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."