"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."
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.