PATRICIA CORNWELL. Unnatural Exposure

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.