The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [65]
I put the wallet back and restacked the bag where it had been, next to the refrigerator. I opened the door Deveraux had pointed out, and behind it I found a tiny mud room that had two more doors in it, one letting out to the back yard on my left, and another to the garage straight ahead. The garage was completely empty apart from the car. The Honda. A small import, silver in color, clean and undamaged, sitting there cold and patient and smelling faintly of oil and unburned hydrocarbons. All around it was nothing but empty swept concrete. No unopened moving boxes, no chairs with the stuffing coming out, no abandoned projects, no junk, no clutter.
Nothing at all.
Unusual.
I opened the door to the back yard and stepped out. Deveraux came out with me and asked, “So, was there anything in there I should have seen?”
“Yes,” I said. “There were things in there anyone should have seen.”
“So what did I miss?”
“Nothing,” I said. “They weren’t there to be seen. That’s my point. We should have seen certain things, but we didn’t. Because certain things were missing.”
“What things?” she asked.
“Later,” I said, because by that point I had seen something else.
Chapter
37
Janice May Chapman’s back yard was not maintained to the same standard as her front yard. In fact it was barely maintained at all. It was almost completely neglected. It was mostly lawn, and it looked a little sad and sunken. It was mowed, but what had been mowed was basically weed, not grass. At the far end was a low panel fence, made of wood, starved of stain or protection, with the center panel fallen out and laid aside.
What I had seen from the door was a faint narrow path through the mowed weeds. It was almost imperceptible. Almost not there at all. Only the late-afternoon sun made it visible. The light came in low from one side and showed a ghostly trail, where the weeds were a little brushed and crushed and bruised. A little darker than the rest of the lawn. The path led through a curved trajectory straight to the hole in the fence. It had been made by feet, going back and forth.
I got two steps along it and stopped again. The ground was crunching under my soles. I looked down. Deveraux bumped into my back.
The second time we had ever touched.
“What?” she said.
I looked up again.
“One thing at a time,” I said, and started walking again.
The path led off the weeds, through the gap in the fence, and out into a barren abandoned field about a hundred yards in width. At the far edge of the field was the railroad track. Halfway along the right-hand edge of the field were two tumbled gateposts, and beyond them was a dirt road that ran east and west. West, I guessed, toward more old field entrances and a link to the winding continuation of Main Street, and east toward the railroad track, where it dead-ended.
The old field had tire tracks all the way across it. They came in between the ruined gateposts and ran through a wide right-angle turn straight toward the gap in Chapman’s fence. They ended close to where I was standing, in a wide looping triangle, where cars had backed up and turned, ready for the return trip.
“She got sick of the old biddies,” I said. “She was playing games with them. Sometimes she came out the front, and sometimes she came out the back. And I bet sometimes the boyfriends said goodnight and drove right around the block for more.”
Deveraux said, “Shit.”
“Can’t blame her. Or the boyfriends. Or the biddies, really. People do what they do.”
“But it makes their evidence meaningless.”
“That’s what she wanted. She didn’t know it was ever going to be important.”
“Now we don’t know when she came and went on that last day.”
I stood in the silence and looked all around. Nothing to see. No other houses, no other people. An empty landscape. Total privacy.
Then I turned and looked back at the weed patch that passed for a lawn.
“What?” Deveraux said again.
“She bought this