"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 coffee pot.

"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 table cloth 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 which 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 replas-tered 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?"