The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [49]
We parked on a patch of grass and got out. A dog barked somewhere, and its chain rattled. We walked under the limbs of the shade tree and knocked on the back door. The house was small, not much bigger than a cabin, but it was well tended. The white siding was not new, but it had been frequently painted. It was stained auburn at the bottom, the color of hair, where heavy rains had bounced up out of the mud.
The back door was opened by a woman not much older than either Deveraux or me. She was tall and thin and she moved slow, with a kind of sun-beat languor, and with the kind of iron stoicism I imagined all her neighbors shared. She smiled a resigned smile at Deveraux, and shook her hand, and asked her, “Any news about my baby?”
Deveraux said, “We’re still working on it. We’ll get there in the end.”
The bereaved mother was too polite to respond to that. She just smiled her wan smile again and turned to me. She said, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
I said, “Jack Reacher, ma’am,” and shook her hand. She said, “I’m Emmeline McClatchy. I’m delighted to meet you, sir. Are you working with the Sheriff’s Department?”
“The army sent me to help.”
“Now they did,” she said. “Not nine months ago.”
I didn’t answer that.
The woman said, “I have some deer meat in the pot. And some tea in the pitcher. Would you two care to join me for lunch?”
Deveraux said, “Emmeline, I’m sure that’s your dinner, not your lunch. We’ll be OK. We’ll eat in town. But thanks anyway.”
It was the answer the woman seemed to have been expecting. She smiled again and backed away into the gloom behind her. We walked back to the car. Deveraux backed out to the street, and we drove away. Further down the row was a shack much like the others, but it had electric beer signs in the windows. A bar of some kind. Maybe music. We threaded through a matrix of dirt streets. I saw another abandoned construction project. Knee-high foundation walls had been built out of cinder blocks, and four vertical wooden posts had been raised at the corners. But that was all. Building materials were scattered around the rest of the lot in untidy piles. There were surplus cinder blocks, there were bricks, there was a pile of sand, there was a stack of bagged cement, gone all smooth and rigid with dew and rain.
There was also a pile of gravel.
I turned and looked at it as we drove past. Maybe two yards of it, the small sharp gray kind they mix with sand and cement to make into concrete. The pile had spread and wandered into a low hump about the size of a double bed, all weedy at the edges. It had pockmarks and divots in its top surface, as if kids had walked on it.
I didn’t say anything. Deveraux’s mind was already made up. She drove on and turned left into a broader street. Bigger houses, bigger yards. Picket fences, not hurricane wire. Cement paths to the doors, not beaten earth. She slowed and then eased to a stop outside a place twice the size of the shack we had just left. A decent one-story house. Expensive, if it had been in California. But shabby. The paint was peeling and the gutters were broken-backed. The roof was asphalt and some of the tiles had slipped. There was a boy in the yard, maybe sixteen years old. He was standing still and doing nothing. Just watching us.
Deveraux said, “This is the other one. Shawna Lindsay was her name. That’s her baby brother right there, staring at us.”
The baby brother was no oil painting. He had lucked out with the genetic lottery. That was for damn sure. He was nothing like his sister. Nothing at all. He had fallen out of the ugly tree, and hit every branch. He had a head like a bowling ball, and eyes like the finger holes, and about as close together.
I asked, “Are we going in?”
Deveraux shook her head. “Shawna’s mom told me not to come back until I could tell her who slit her first-born’s throat. Those were her words. And I can’t blame her for them. Losing a child is a terrible thing.