“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?”