“Excuse me, Miss Faith, but where was here?” Pony politely questioned her. “When you saw it last, I mean.”
“Just call the number.” Regina said with a mouth full. “When it rings, you’ll hear where it is.”
“That only works if you’ve lost the phone, not when you lose the base unit,” Constance snapped, impatient that phones, base units, and other things did not stay in their proper places.
“The base unit does ring, actually, as you so wisely pointed out yesterday,” Pony reminded the First Lady, although she had never pointed out anything to him directly in all the terms he had worked for the Crimm family.
A solution was at hand, but the same problem persisted: Inmates were not allowed to have the First Family’s private phone number. So if the base unit were to be located, a member of the First Family would have to dial the number herself, and this was strictly against protocol. The task fell into the job description of personal or administrative assistants, or grade sixes, and at this early hour, no grade sixes were at work yet.
The breakfast table turned into a tableau of the First Family’s females frozen in indecision, except for Regina, who was still piling food on her plate and unmindful of protocols.
“Here.” She stuck out her hand. “Give it to me, Pony.”
He came around behind her and carefully set the phone by her placemat, giving her plenty of body space as if he were serving a flaming dessert. She stabbed out the secret number with honey-coated fingers and immediately the base unit rang under Regina’s wadded-up housecoat on top of the mahogany sideboard.
“Hello?” Regina said into the phone, making sure she was the one who was calling. “Hello?” she tried again, crossing pajama-covered legs that reminded Pony of felt-covered tree stumps wearing filthy furry slippers. “Maybe I should sign on with the EPU.” She returned the phone to Pony. “I’m bored to death of official duties.”
“You couldn’t be assigned to us.” The First Lady was opposed to the idea and intended to discourage her daughter. “Unless you had yet another EPU trooper assigned to protect you while you were protecting your sisters, Papa, and me.”
“Show me that in the Code of Virginia,” Regina argued. “Bet it’s not in there.”
“If I may speak,” Pony spoke up as he wiped off the phone and returned it to the base unit. “It’s not in there–not anywhere in any section of the Code about the First Family needing to protect itself and be protected at the same time.”
“Maybe you can discuss it with that handsome Trooper Brazil, and I’ll let him be the one who talks you out of it,” the First Lady said to Regina. “Being a trooper is very dangerous and unrewarding, and speaking of troopers, did any of you happen to read Trooper Truth this morning?”
“We just got up,” Constance reminded her mother.
“Well, he told the most interesting and mysterious story about who shot J.R.”
“Why’s he writing about Dallas?” Faith puzzled. “That’s been off the air forever.”
“This is a different J.R.,” the First Lady informed her daughters. “But it’s a shame Dallas was canceled. Your papa never got over it and was just furious when the network took that show off the air. You know, there’s nothing good on TV anymore except for the shopping channel.”
A WORD ABOUT EATING EAGLES
by Trooper Truth
Quite possibly, a young man the Jamestown archaeologists nicknamed J.R. was America’s first white-on-white homicide–loosely speaking, since America wasn’t called America back when Jamestown was settled.
But if you visit the excavation site and take a look at the fiberglass cast of J.R.’s skeleton, you can’t help but be moved by the plight of a young man dying so far from home and then lying in hard Virginia clay for four centuries before a trowel discovered the stain of his unmarked grave. J.R., by the way, means Jamestown Rediscovery and is the prefix given to every artifact and feature found on the site, which includes graves and the dead people in them. We don’t know who shot J.R. At this writing, we aren’t even sure who J.R. is.