Free Isle of Dogs by Patricia Cornwell

already went to hell in a handbasket a long time ago, but I was wrong. I sure was. Things is just getting more messed up, that’s right. It’s enough to make a man want to run down to the church and beg God Hisself to please, please help us out of our misery and forgive our sins and our enemies and make people behave. What wrong with folks anyway?
    “You know, the other day when them caters showed up for that big dinner of yours?” Pony went on. “I was minding my own business getting them tea and I heard one of ’em say to the other, ‘I wonder if I could take one of these little teacups that’s got the Com’wealth of Virginia on it. What you think?’ ‘I don’t know why not,’ the other one say. ‘You pay tax, don’t you?’ ‘I sure do,’ say the other lady cater. ‘And nothing in here belong to the Crimm family anyhow. It belong to all of us.’ ‘Well, if that isn’t the God’s truth. It belong to us.’
    “Then,” Pony went on, getting more animated as his tale wore on, “both them caters stuffed their teacups in them big handbags of theirs, can you believe that?”
    “Why on earth . . . ?” the First Lady sputtered in shock and disgust. “Why didn’t you stop them, for heaven’s sake! I certainly hope they didn’t take the handleless cups and saucers, those lovely pearlware ones with the Leeds floral design.”
    “Oh, no, ma’am,” Pony assured her. “It was the ones with handles and the Com’wealth logo on ’em in gold.”
    “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 tablecloth 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 that 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. Thepublic 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,