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 Tangier?" 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.