"Oh, shit," he groaned, looking around, dazed and stiff as the phone continued to ring.
"Hello?" he answered, hoping it was Hammer, and that she'd already read his new essay and liked it.
"Is there somebody there named Andy Brazil?" a vaguely familiar female voice inquired over the line.
"Who wants to know?"
"This is First Lady Crimm."
"Yes, First Lady!" Andy said, startled. "What an unexpected surprise…"
"You're to report to the mansion at six for drinks and a light supper. That's six tonight."
"Thursday?" Andy asked, confused about what day of the week it was.
"Why, I guess it is Thursday. I don't know where the weeks go. We're in the big pale yellow house in the middle of Capitol Square on Ninth Street, right before you get to Broad. I know you're relatively new to the city and were suspended for a year and therefore might not know your way around."
First Lady Crimm handed the phone back to Pony and smiled with satisfaction as her daughters looked on from the antebellum breakfast table.
"I still think you should have discussed this with Papa first." Grace nodded at Pony to please add more butter to her grits as wind gusted in from the north and a hard rain began to fall.
"He liked the young man. I could tell," Mrs. Crimm replied. "Your father has a lot on his mind. My goodness! One minute the sun's out, and it's raining the next!"
"He notices more than you think he does. And if he's suddenly flying around with some blond-haired former city cop who's now a trooper who's been suspended before, Papa might remember he had nothing to do with it," Faith said as rain pummeled the old slate roof.
"Do with what?" the First Lady asked.
"With him suddenly flying us."
"Nonsense. We need more pilots. I don't know what's happened to all our pilots unless they're busy with the speed traps and don't have time for us anymore. And you heard what the young man said. He has something important to discuss with your papa, and I, at least, want to know what it is."
Pony was searching for the portable phone base unit. He could never find anything in the mansion and its guest houses when the Crimms lived here, and on especially trying days, he wasn't sure the prison officials had done him a favor by assigning him to the mansion's domestic staff. Other inmates who worked for the First Family were outside repairing things, doing the gardening, raking leaves, and polishing the state cars.
"I don't mean to intrude," Pony said without looking anyone in the eye. "I can't seem to find the base unit for the phone."
Constance, Grace, Faith, and the First Lady were momentarily distracted, just as they always were when someone couldn't find something. Regina was the only member of the First Family who preferred to eat unassisted. If Pony served her, it took too long. She helped herself to toast, grits, eggs over easy, another banana, and sourwood honey that the governor of North Carolina had sent last Christmas to slyly remind the Crimms that the Tar Heel state was far superior to the Commonwealth of Virginia.
"It was here a minute ago." Faith was getting frustrated, her horse-shaped face pale and scarcely visible because she had not colorized it with heavy make-up yet.
The First Family had learned the art of searching all over the house without ever moving from their chairs. Pony had never understood how people could pull this off, but then if he were so special and smart, he wouldn't be wearing a white jacket and waiting on the Crimms morning, noon, and night.
"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."
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.
But through science, J.R. has managed to tell us a thing or two. Results from radio-carbon dating confirm that he died in 1607, possibly just months after the first settlers arrived at Jamestown, so we can assume he was one of the 108 English men and boys who sailed from the Isle of Dogs and got stalled in the Thames. Anthropology pinpoints that he was a five-foot-five robust male with a rounded chin and small jaw, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, had no signs of arthritis and relatively good teeth, indicating his diet did not include sugar. Tests for lead, strontium, and oxygen isotopes show that he grew up in the United Kingdom, possibly in southwest London or Wales.