What I’m leading up to, my new reader friends, is unfortunate news.
Tangier Island has been discovered again, and not just by tourists interested in crab cakes. Unseemly people in power have decided to use the simple Islanders to make political points, and this is unfair, regardless of the watermen’s tainted pirate past. I will address this in unvarnished detail soon.
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.