“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 ticktock 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.

Going back inside, I put on fresh gloves, slipped the mask back over my mouth and nose and returned to the kitchen to see what I might find in the garbage. The plastic can was lined with a paper bag and tucked under the sink. I sat on the floor, sifting through it one item at a time to see if I could get any sense at all of how long Pruitt had been sick. Clearly, she had not emptied her trash for a while. Empty cans and frozen food wrappers were dry and crusty, peelings of raw turnips and carrots wizened and hard like Naugahyde.