‘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.
Pruitt had been old and alone, with very little money, and probably had been off this island few times in her life. I expected that she had not attempted to seek help from any of her neighbors because she had no phone, and had feared that if anyone had seen her, they would have fled in horror. Even I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw when I peeled back the covers.