LITMIR.BIZ

      I opened the door to find a smile as wide and bright as a mid-summer sunrise. I gestured Ava inside, sniffing in her wake a whisper of perfume and mint. Her motions were music, her hair shone. A blue, short-sleeved shirt tucked into a white skirt touching modestly at her knees. She walked on the long and shapely legs of a figure skater. There was bounce in her steps, the air wanting to carry her. Was that a hint of shyness in her eyes?

      I was breathless at the transformation: Was this the dour-faced woman in the floppy lab coat?

      Ava nodded at my interior decor of posters and driftwood and shells and walked to the doors opening to the deck. The Gulf was slate blue with waves burnished amber by the low western sun. A dark tanker dotted the horizon.

      “What a view. This place is yours? How do you ever affor—” She caught herself and turned, touching pink lacquerless fingertips to her lips. “Whoops,” she said. “That’s not polite.”

      “An inheritance. Don’t worry, everyone asks that question, if not always out loud. Can I fix you a drink and if so, what’s your preference?”

      “I’ll just go with a vodka and tonic. Light, please. I’m not much of a drinker.”

      “Twenty watts, coming up. Get your stereo repaired?”

      She waved her hands above her head and shuffled in a circle, an impersonation of local cable-access preacher Beulah Chilers. “I have mew-sic again and heard its glow-ree and I have been sank-tea-fide by it, pra-a-a-a-ise Jay-sus!”

      I nearly dropped to my knees and hallelujahed. Was this the same gray-humored woman who minced bodies for a living?

      “Damn, it’s colder’n a morgue in here,” Ava said, and with great difficulty I avoided noting her nipples thought so too. We took our drinks to the deck. Ava seemed to have brought a breeze and for the first time in a week the air didn’t feel like hot syrup.

      “So you boated over,” I said as we angled chairs toward one another and tapped glasses in a toast to the boundless spirit of summer nights everywhere.

      “Getting to Gulf Shores was a nightmare. But returning across the Bay made up for it. Someone told me we passed over the site where the guy said, ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.’”

      I nodded. “Admiral Farragut during Battle of Mobile Bay, August fifth, 1864, the curtain coming down on the War Between the States.”

      Our eyes held one another’s longer than usual for a one-line history lesson and startled us into looking away. Ava jumped up and wobbled slightly. “Sea legs from the ferry,” she said, walking to the railing and looking out over the Gulf. A sailboat ran east with the wind toward the mouth of the Bay. The wind nestled Ava’s clothes against her slender body and I knew Reubens was wrong and subtle curves curved best. Ice chimed against her lips as she sipped.

      For a half hour or so, we conversed like friends too long apart. The weather. The dearth of Indian restaurants. Mobile’s once-famed Azalea Trail. The serene and stately glory of Bellingrath Gardens. I told her how Mobile had danced to its own version of Mardi Gras years before New Orleans put its shoes on.

      I discovered Ava Davanelle was thirty years old with an orthopedic-surgeon father and a mother who taught French. She’d grown up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Reading her father’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy when she was thirteen inspired her career. She’d lived in Mobile for six months, and today was the first time she’d been on the beach. I discovered she understood quiet, and our silences were comfortable and contemplative.

      Then, over a period of fifteen minutes, her silences became forced, almost troubled. Her eyes wavered from mine and their incandescence waned. Ava sat forward and rubbed her forehead. “Doggone,” she said, “I brought you the copy of the preliminary report. It’s in my car. I’ll be right back.”

      “I don’t need it now. I’ll wait for finals.”

      “After I’ve brought them here by land and sea? You’re getting them.” Her smile was strained, like trying to smile while lifting weights.

      “Just summarize. Similarities and differences in twenty-five words or less.”

      She rubbed her forehead. “I was struck by how similar the bodies were, like twin brothers, except, had they been brothers, Deschamps worked out two hours for every one of Nelson’s: more pronounced musculature, primarily in the upper body.”

      “Great,” I said. “All I needed.”

      She stood. “I’ll get the report.”

      “I’ll come with you,” I offered. “Show you the exotic sights under my house. You’ll love my kayak.”

      She handed me her glass. “Fix me another, please. Light. I’ll be right back.”

      Shapes of the past: Ben “The Bear” Ashley, my first partner, finding reasons to get me out of the car. “Gimme a pack of gum, Carson,” “Run in and grab me some smokes, bud.” Bear sent me inside fast-food joints for the food instead of using the drive-through. I also recalled Bear’s low moods before he’d command some odd errand. Until learning the truth I thought it a rookie initiation or show of pecking order.

      After mixing two more drinks I returned to the porch and waited, a weight pressing my heart. Ava stepped outside with a manila folder. A new scent of mint suffused the air. She rolled her head as if loosening

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