Isle of Dogs

The answer Blackbeard got was lost forever until a three-hundred-year-old account book was discovered. This extraordinary find, according to legend, somehow made it from Blackbeard's ship Adventure into the attic of a descendant of Alexander Spottswood, the governor of Virginia during Blackbeard's bloody rampages. The account book focused on the disposition of the loot Black-beard took and offered details of his sadistic cruelty and lust for chopping people into pieces and shaking his empty rum cup at the heavens and daring God to defy him. Blackbeard's handwritten entries mentioned one hundred and forty barrels of cocoa and a cask of sugar he had stolen and buried under hay in a North Carolina barn. There was a cryptic reference to buried treasure that only Blackbeard and the devil knew the location of, and to this day it has not been found.

I realized it wasn't possible that Tangier could have remained populated without women and pressed Fo

"Damnation seize your soul if you are lying to me!" Blackbeard thundered to a clever but untruthful islander named Job Wheeler, a childless widower who, as the story goes, invited the pirate into his home on an area of the island known today as Job's Cove.

"I ca

Job offered this blatant lie because he felt certain it would snag Blackbeard's attention, since it was well known that the pirate was in collusion with Charles Eden, the governor of North Carolina. For much of Blackbeard's nefarious career, he had navigated the shallow sounds and inlets of North Carolina with never a fear. Indeed, any plot hatched from other territories to defeat Blackbeard and his seadogs was always foiled by a letter from someone in North Carolina, much to the disgust of Virginia's Governor Spottswood, who was neither friendly with Blackbeard nor inclined for the pirate to remain in business or alive.

"How can this be?" Blackbeard bellowed through curls of smoke, squinting one eye in a threatening ma

"I am neither villain," Job promised. "From whence I came is North Carolina-not Hell-where ye have many friends and relations. Yet it ca

Blackbeard reminded Job that the name of the Crotan Indians was spelled C-R-O-T-A-N as opposed to C-R-O-T-O-A-N, to which Job replied, "Yay, that is God's truth. But it was not I who carved the tree, but another not as well learned as I."

"Are you implying," I probed Fo

"However," I decided, "the chronology makes what Job told Blackbeard impossible, because the Lost Colonists were already lost by the time Smith headed to Virginia and supposedly discovered your island in 1608. So I am forced to dismiss this theory entirely. Furthermore, we can't prove, at least not to my satisfaction, that when Smith landed on Tangier, he wasn't really on Limbo Island, and all of you are therefore not Islanders but Limbonians."

Fo

"Well, I've got to run along," I told Fo

Fo

"Watch out for that bird over there." My copilot pointed out a seagull that apparently didn't see us until the last second.

"Wow, that was close," I commented as the bird dove under us, clipping its tail on a skid. "I hope he's all right." I nosed the helicopter west a few degrees to get a glimpse of the seagull as it sailed away, appearing to fly backward because we, of course, were going considerably faster than it.

PS. To whoever is holding Popeye hostage, contact me before it's too late! And many thanks for the tips you, my faithful readers, have been sending me about Trish Thrash.

Be careful out there!

Fifteen

The minute Windy Brees blew into Hammer's office, Hammer knew there was trouble. "Heavens to Betty! Have you seen what Trooper Truth just put up on his website?" Windy declared.

"Yes," Hammer replied. "I saw what was up this morning."

"No! He's put up something else, and you won't believe what it says!"

"Put up something else?" Hammer was baffled, yet she was not about to let on that she had prior knowledge about Trooper Truth or his publication schedule. "That's interesting," she said. "I suppose I just assumed he posted only one essay a day."

"Well, not so," Windy said. "Whoever he is, he is one proliferated writer. I wonder what he looks like and how old he is. He must be old to know so much. All that history and everything…"

"What makes you think Trooper Truth is a man?" Hammer inquired as she logged onto the website.

"Well, he's so smart, for one thing."

When Hammer began reading the essay, she ordered Windy to leave her office and shut the door. She got Andy on the phone.

"That's it!?" she said in an outraged whisper.

"A common Tangier expression," Andy remarked. "That's it! means the person saying it is really saying none of your business. For example, if I ask you if you're mad at me for not telling you about my secret mission, or will you be mad if I tell you that something awful was left at my house last night, and you say That's it!, you mean