“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.