“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 sea gulls 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.