proud on the horizon on this tiny, barren island where people endured the worst weather with the least beneath their feet.
We chugged slowly past marshes and tidal flats. Old gap-toothed piers were piled high with crab pots made of chicken wire and strung with colored floats, and battle- scarred wooden boats with round and boxy sterns were moored but not idle. Martinez whelped his horn, and the sound ripped the air as we came through. Tangiermen with
bibs turned expressionless, raw faces on us, the way people do when they have private opinions that aren't always friendly. They moved about in their crab shanties and worked on their nets as we docked near fuel pumps.
'Like most everybody else here, the chief's name is Crockett,' Martinez said as his crew tied us down. 'Davy Crockett. Don't laugh.' His eyes searched the pier and a snack bar that didn't look open this time of year. 'Come on.'
I followed him out of the boat, and wind blowing off the water felt as cold as January. We hadn't gone far when a small pickup truck quickly rounded a corner, tires loud on gravel. It stopped, and a tense young man got out. His uniform was blue jeans, a dark winter jacket and a cap that said Tangier Police, and his eyes darted back and forth between Martinez and me. He stared at what I was carrying.
'Okay,' Martinez said to me. 'I'll leave you with Davy.' To Crockett, he added, 'This is
Dr Scarpetta.'
Crockett nodded. 'Y'all come on.'
'It's just the lady who's going.'
'I'll ride you to there.'
I had heard his dialect before in unspoiled mountain coves where people really are not of this century.
'We'll be waiting for you here,' Martinez promised me, walking off to his boat.
I followed Crockett to his truck. I could tell he cleaned it inside and out maybe once a day, and liked Armor All even more than Marino did.
'I assume you've been inside the house,' I said to him as he cranked the engine.
'I haven't. Was a neighbor that did. And when I was noticed about it, I called for
Norfolk.'
He began to back up, a pewter cross swinging from the key chain. I looked out the window at small white frame restaurants with hand-painted signs and plastic seagulls hanging in windows. A truck hauling crab pots was coming the other way and had to pull over to let us pass. People were out on bicycles that had neither hand brakes nor gears, and the favorite mode of travel seemed to be scooters.
'What is the decedent's name?' I began taking notes.
'Lila Pruitt,' he said, unmindful that my door was almost touching someone's chain link fence. 'Widder lady, don't know how aged. Sold receipts for the tourists. Crab cakes and things.'
I wrote this down, not sure what he was saying as he drove me past the Tangier Combined School, and a cemetery. Headstones leaned every way, as if they had been caught in a gale.
'What about when she was last seen alive?' I asked.
'In Daby's, she was.' He nodded. 'Oh, maybe June.'
Now I was hopelessly lost. 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'She was last seen in some place called
Daby's way back in June?'
'Yes'em.' He nodded as if this made all the sense in the world.
'What is Daby's and who saw her there?'
'The store. Daby's and Son. I can get you to it.' He shot me a look, and I shook my head. 'I was in it for shopping and saw her. June, I think.'
His strange syllables and cadences sprung, tongued and rolled over each other like the water of his world. There was thur, can't was cain't, things was thoings, do was doie.
'What about her neighbors? Have any of them seen her?' I asked.
'Not since days.'
'Then who found her?' I asked.
'No one did.'
I looked at him in despair.
'Just Mrs Bradshaw come in for a receipt, went on in and had the smell.'
'Did this Mrs Bradshaw go upstairs?'
'Said she not.' He shook his head. 'She went on straight for me.'
'The decedent's address?'
'Where we are.' He was slowing down. 'School Street.'
Catty-corner to Swain Memorial Methodist Church, the white clapboard house was two stories, with clothes still on the line and a purple martin house on a rusting pole in back. An old wooden rowboat and crab pots were in a yard scattered with oyster shells, and brown hydrangea lined a fence where there was a curious row of white- painted cubbyholes facing the unpaved street.
'What are those?' I asked Crockett.
'For where she sold receipts. Quarter each. Drop it in a slot.' He pointed. 'Mrs Pruitt didn't do direct much with no one.'
I finally realized that he was talking about recipes, and pulled up my door handle.
'I'll here be waiting,' he said.
The expression on his face begged me not to ask him to go inside that house.
'Just keep people away.' I got out of his truck.
'Don't have to worrisome about that none.'
I glanced around at other small homes and trailers in their sandy-soil yards. Some had family plots, the dead buried wherever there was high ground, headstones worn smooth like chalk and tilted or knocked down. I climbed Lila Pruitt's front steps, noticing more headstones in the shadows of junipers in a corner of her yard.
The screen door was rusting in spots, and the spring protested loudly as I entered an enclosed porch sloping toward the street. There was a glider upholstered in floral plastic, and beside it a small plastic table, where I imagined her rocking and drinking iced tea while she watched tourists buying her recipes for a quarter. I wondered if she had spied to make sure they paid.
The storm door was unlocked, and Hoyt had thought to tape on it a homemade sign that warned, SICKNESS: DO NOT ENTER!! I supposed he had figured that Tangiermen might not know what a biological hazard was, but he had made his point. I stepped inside a dim foyer, where a portrait of Jesus praying to His Father hung on the wall, and I smelled the foul odor of decomposing human flesh.
In the living room was evidence that someone had not been well for a while. Pillows and blankets were disarrayed and soiled on the couch, and on the coffee table were tissues, a thermometer, bottles of aspirin, liniment, dirty cups and plates. She had been feverish. She had ached, and had come in here to make herself comfortable and watch TV.
Eventually, she had not been able to make it out of bed, and that was where I found her, in a room upstairs with rosebud wallpaper and a rocker by the window
overlooking her street. The full-length mirror was shrouded with a sheet, as if she could not bear to see her reflection anymore. Hoyt, old-world physician that he was, had respectfully pulled bed covers over the body without disturbing anything else. He knew better than to rearrange a scene, especially if his visit was to be followed by mine. I stood in the middle of the room, and took my time. The stench seemed to make the walls close in and turn the air black.
My eyes wandered over the cheap brush and comb on the dresser, the fuzzy pink slippers beneath a chair that was covered with clothes she hadn't had the energy to put away or wash. On the bedside table was a Bible with a black leather cover that was dried out and flaking, and a sample size of Vita aromatherapy facial spray that I imagined she had used in vain to cool her raging fever. Stacked on the floor were dozens of mail-order catalogues, page corners folded back to mark her wishes.
In the bathroom, the mirror over the sink had been covered with a towel, and other towels on the linoleum floor were soiled and bloody. She had run out of toilet paper, and the box of baking soda on the side of the tub told me she had tried her own remedy in her bath to relieve her misery. Inside the medicine cabinet, I found no prescription drugs, only old dental floss, Jergens, hemorrhoid preparations, first-aid cream. Her dentures were in a plastic box on the sink.