Unnatural Exposure (20 page)

'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.

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.

She was covered in pustules, gray and hard like pearls, her toothless mouth caved in, and dyed red hair wild. I pulled the covers down more, unbuttoning her gown, noting the density of eruptions was greater on her extremities and face than on her trunk, just as Hoyt had said. Itching had driven her to claw her arms and legs, where she had bled and gotten secondary infections that were crusty and swollen.

'God help you,' I muttered in pain.

I imagined her itching, aching, burning up with fever, and afraid of her own nightmarish image in the mirror.

'How awful,' I said, and my mother flashed in my mind.

Lancing a pustule, I smeared a slide, then went down to the kitchen and set my microscope on the table. I was already convinced of what I' d find. This was not chicken pox. It wasn't shingles. All indicators pointed to the devastating, disfiguring disease variola major, more commonly known as smallpox. Turning on my microscope, I put the slide on the stage, bumped magnification up to four hundred, adjusted the focus as the dense center, the cytoplasmic Guarnieri bodies, came into view. I took more Polaroids of something that could not be true.

Shoving back the chair, I began pacing as a clock ticked loudly from the wall.

'How did you get this? How?' I talked to her out loud.

I went back outside to where Crockett was parked on the street. I didn't get close to his truck.

'We've got a real problem,' I said to him. 'And I'm not a hundred percent sure what I'm going to do about it.'

My immediate difficulty was finding a secure phone, which I finally decided simply was not possible. I couldn't call from any of the local businesses, certainly not from the neighbors' houses or from the chief's trailer. That left my portable cellular phone, which ordinarily I would never have used to make a call like this. But I did not see that I had a choice. At three-fifteen, a woman answered the phone at the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland.

'I need to speak with Colonel Fujitsubo,' I said.

'I'm sorry, he's in a meeting.'

'It's very important.'

'Ma'am, you'll have to call back tomorrow.'

'At least give me his assistant, his secretary . . .'

'In case you haven't heard, all nonessential federal employees are on furlough . . .'

'Jesus Christ!' I exclaimed in frustration. 'I'm stranded on an island with an infectious dead body. There may be some sort of outbreak here. Don't tell me I have to wait until your goddamn furlough ends!'

'Excuse me?'

I could hear telephones ringing nonstop in the background.

'I'm on a cellular phone. The battery could die any minute. For God's sake, interrupt his meeting! Patch me through to him! Now!'

Fujitsubo was in the Russell Building on Capitol Hill, where my call was connected. I knew he was in some senator's office but did not care as I quickly explained the situation, trying to control my panic.

'That's impossible,' he said. 'You're sure it's not chicken pox, measles . . .'

'No. And regardless of what it is, it should be contained, John. I can't send this into my morgue. You've got to handle it.'

USAMRIID was the major medical research laboratory for the U. S. Biological Defense Research Program, its purpose to protect citizens from the possible threat of biological warfare. More to the point, USAMRIID had the largest Bio Level 4 containment laboratory in the country.

'Can't do it unless it's terrorism,' Fujitsubo said to me. 'Outbreaks go to CDC. Sounds like that's who you need to be talking to.'

'And I'm sure I will be, eventually,' I said. 'And I'm sure most of them have been furloughed too, which is why I couldn't get through earlier. But they're in Atlanta, and you're in Maryland, not far from here, and I need to get this body out of here as fast as I can.'

He was silent.

'No one hopes I'm wrong more than I do,' I went on in a cold sweat. 'But if I'm not and we haven't taken the proper precautions . . .'

'I'm clear, I'm clear,' he quickly said. 'Damn. Right now we're a skeleton crew. Okay, give us a few hours. I'll call CDC. We'll deploy a team. When was the last time you were vaccinated for smallpox?'

'When I was too young to remember it.'

'You're coming in with the body.'

'She's my case.'

But I knew what he meant. They would want to quarantine me.

'Let's just get her off the island, and we'll worry about other things later,' I added.

'Where will you be?'

'Her house is in the center of town near the school.'

'God, that's unfortunate. We got any idea how many people might have been exposed?'

'No idea. Listen. There's a tidal creek nearby. Look for that and the Methodist church. It has a tall steeple. According to the map there's another church, but it doesn't have a steeple. There's an airstrip, but the closer you can get to the house, the better, so we don't have to carry her past where people might see.'

'Right. We sure as hell don't need a panic.' He paused, his voice softening a little. 'Are you all right?'

'I sure hope so.' I felt tears in my eyes, my hands trembling.

'I want you to calm down, try to relax now and stop worrying. We'll get you taken care of,' he said as my phone went dead.

It had always been a theoretical possibility that after all the murder and madness I had seen in my career, it would be a disease that quietly killed me in the end. I never knew what I was exposing myself to when I opened a body and handled its blood and breathed the air. I was careful about cuts and needle sticks, but there was more to worry about than hepatitis and HIV. New viruses were discovered all the time, and I often wondered if they would one day rule, at last winning a war with us that began with time.

For a while, I sat in the kitchen listening to the clock tick-tock while the light changed beyond the window as the day fled. I was in the throes of a full-blown anxiety attack when Crockett's peculiar voice suddenly hailed me from outside.

'Ma'am? Ma'am?'

When I went to the porch and looked out the door, I saw on the top step a small brown paper bag and a drink with a lid and a straw. I carried them in as Crockett climbed back inside his truck. He had gone off long enough to bring me supper, which wasn't smart, but kind. I waved at him as if he were a guardian angel, and felt a little better. I sat on the glider, rocking back and forth, and sipping sweetened iced tea from the Fisherman's Corner. The sandwich was fried flounder on white bread, with fried scallops on the side. I didn't think I'd ever tasted anything so fresh and fine.

I rocked and sipped tea, watching the street through the rusting screen as the sun slid down the church steeple in a shimmering ball of red, and geese were black V's flying overhead. Crockett turned his headlights on as windows lit up in homes, and two girls on bicycles pedaled quickly past, their faces turned toward me as they flew. I was certain they knew. The whole island did. Word had spread about doctors and the Coast Guard arriving because of what was in the Pruitt bed.