"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 replied 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 hairnets.

"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.

"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 mantle 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."