I had left instructions for Rose to call the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, because every time I had tried, I was put on hold. She was also to reach Marino and Wesley and let them know where I was going and that I would call as soon as I could. I took 64 East to 360, and soon found myself in farmland.
Fields were brown with fallow corn, hawks dipping and soaring in a part of the world where Baptist churches had names like Faith, Victory and Zion. Trees wore kudzu like chain mail, and across the Rappahannock River, in the Northern Neck, homes were sprawling old manors that the present-generation owner couldn’t afford anymore. I passed more fields and crepe myrtles, and then the Northumberland Courthouse that had been built before the Civil War.
In Heathsville were cemeteries with plastic flowers and cared-for plots, and an occasional painted anchor in a yard. I turned off through woods dense with pines, passing cornfields so close to the narrow road, I could have reached out my window to touch brown stalks. At Buzzard’s Point Marina, sailboats were moored and the red, white and blue tour boat, Chesapeake Breeze, was going nowhere until spring. I had no trouble parking, and there was no one in the ticket booth to ask me for a dime.
Waiting for me at the dock was a white Coast Guard boat. Guardsmen wore bright orange and blue antiexposure coveralls, known as mustang suits, and one of the men was climbing up on the pier. He was more senior than the others, with dark eyes and hair, and a nine-millimeter Beretta on his hip.
‘Dr Scarpetta?’ He carried his authority easily, but it was there.
‘Yes,’ I said, and I had several bags, including a heavy hard case containing my microscope and MicroCam.
‘Let me help with those.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m Ron Martinez, the station chief at Crisfield.’
‘Thanks. I really appreciate this,’ I said.
‘Hey, so do we.’
The gap between the pier and the forty-foot patrol boat yawned and narrowed as the surge pushed the boat against the pier. Grabbing the rail, I boarded. Martinez went down a steep ladder, and I followed him into a hold packed with rescue equipment, fire hoses and huge coils of rope, the air heavy with diesel fumes. He tucked my belongings in a secure spot and tied them down. Then he handed me a mustang suit, life vest and gloves.
‘You’re going to need to put these on, in case you go in. Not a pretty thought but it can happen. The water’s maybe in the fifties.’ His eyes lingered on me. ‘You might want to stay down here,’ he added as the boat knocked against the pier.
‘I don’t get seasick but I am claustrophobic,’ I told him as I sat on a narrow ledge and took off my boots.
‘Wherever you want, but it’s gonna be rough.’
He climbed back up as I began struggling into the suit, which was an exercise in zippers and Velcro, and filled with polyvinyl chloride to keep me alive a little longer should the boat capsize. I put my boots back on, then the life vest, with its knife and whistle, signal mirror and flares. I climbed back up to the cabin because there was no way I was going to stay down there. The crew shut the engine cover on deck, and Martinez strapped himself into the pilot’s chair.
‘Wind’s blowing out of the northwest at twenty-two knots,’ a guardsman said. ‘Waves cresting at four feet.’
Martinez began pulling away from the pier. ‘That’s the problem with the bay,’ he said to me. ‘The waves are too close together so you never get a good rhythm like you do at sea. I’m sure you’re aware that we could get diverted. There’s no other patrol boat out, so something goes down out here, there’s no one but us.’
We began slowly passing old homes with widow’s walks and bowling greens.
‘Someone needs rescuing, we got to go,’ he went on as a member of the crew checked instruments.
I watched a fishing boat go past, an old man in hip-high boots standing as he steered the outboard motor. He stared at us as if we were poison.