The Affair: A Reacher Novel Page 16

  Jeans, T-shirts, leather jackets.

  Soldiers, obviously, off duty.

  Not good.

  I asked, “Was there anyone in particular? Anyone special?”

  They conferred again and agreed a period of relative stability had commenced three or perhaps four months earlier. The parade of suitors had slowed, first to a trickle, and then it had stopped altogether and been replaced by the attentions of a lone man, once again described as polite, young, short-haired, but always inappropriately dressed on the many occasions they had seen him. Jeans, T-shirts, leather jackets. In their day, a gentleman called on his belle in a suit and a tie.

  I asked, “What did they do together?”

  They went out, the ladies said. Sometimes in the afternoons, but most often in the evenings. Probably to bars. There was very little in the way of alternative entertainment in that corner of the state. The nearest picture house was in a town called Corinth. There had been a vaudeville theater in Tupelo, but it had closed many years ago. The couple tended to come back late, sometimes after midnight, after the train had passed. Sometimes the suitor would stay an hour or two, but to their certain knowledge he had never spent the night.

  I asked, “When was the last time you saw her?”

  The day before she died, they said. She had left her house at seven o’clock in the evening. The same suitor had come calling for her, right at the top of the hour, quite formally.

  “What was Janice wearing that night?” I asked.

  A yellow dress, they said, knee length but low cut.

  “Did her friend show up in his own car?” I asked.

  Yes, they said, he did.

  “What kind of a car was it?”

  It was a blue car, they said.

  Chapter

  36

  We left both ladies on one porch and crossed the street to take a closer look at Chapman’s house. It was very much the same as the neighbors’ places. It was classic tract housing, built fast in uniform batches for returning military and their new baby boom families right after the end of World War Two. Then each individual example had grown slightly different from all the others over the passing years, the same way identical triplets might evolve differently with age. Chapman’s choice had ended up modest and unassuming, but pleasant. Someone had put neat gingerbread trim all over it, and the front door had been replaced.

  We stood on the porch and I looked in a window and saw a small square living room, full of furniture that looked pretty new. There was a loveseat and an armchair and a small television set on a low chest of drawers. There was a VHS player and some tapes next to it. The living room door was open and I could see part of a narrow hallway beyond. I shifted position and craned my neck for a better look.

  “Go inside if you want,” Deveraux said, behind me.

  “Really?”

  “The door is unlocked. It was unlocked when we got here.”

  “Is that usual?”

  “Not unusual. We never found her key.”

  “Not in her pocketbook?”

  “She didn’t have a pocketbook with her. She seems to have left it in the kitchen.”

  “Is that usual?”

  “She didn’t smoke,” Deveraux said. “She certainly didn’t pay for drinks. Why would she need a pocketbook?”

  “Makeup?” I said.

  “Twenty-seven-year-olds don’t powder their noses halfway through the evening. Not like they used to. Not anymore.”

  I opened the front door and stepped inside the house. It was neat and clean, but the air was still and heavy. The floors and the rugs and the paint and the furniture was all fresh, but not brand new. There was an eat-in kitchen across the hall from the living room, with two bedrooms behind, and presumably a bathroom.

  “Nice place,” I said. “You could buy it. It would be better than the Toussaint’s hotel.”

  Deveraux said, “With those old biddies across the street, watching me all the time? I’d go crazy inside a week.”

  I smiled. She had a point.

  She said, “I wouldn’t buy it even without the biddies. I wouldn’t want to live like this. Not at all what I’m used to.”

  I nodded. Said nothing.

  Then she said, “Actually I couldn’t buy it even if I wanted to. We don’t know who the next of kin is. I wouldn’t know who to talk to.”

  “No will?”

  “She was twenty-seven years old.”

  “No paperwork anywhere?”

  “We haven’t found any so far.”

  “No mortgage?”

  “Nothing on record with the county.”

  “No family?”

  “No one recalls her mentioning any.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I moved on down the hallway.

  “Look around,” Deveraux called after me. “Feel free. Make yourself at home. But tell me if you find something I should see.”

  I walked from room to room, feeling the kind of trespass feelings I get every time I walk through a dead person’s house. There were minor examples of disarray here and there, the kind of things that would have been cleaned up and tidied away before an expected guest’s arrival. They humanized the place a little, but on the whole it was a bland and soulless home. There was too much uniformity. All the furniture matched. It looked like it had been selected from the same range from the same manufacturer, all at the same time. All the rugs went well together. All the paint was the same color. There were no pictures on the walls, no photographs on the shelves. No books. No souvenirs, no prized possessions.

  The bathroom was clean. The tub and the towels were dry. The medicine cabinet above the sink had a mirrored door, and behind it were over-the-counter analgesics, and toothpaste, and tampons, and dental floss, and spare soap and shampoo. The main bedroom had nothing of interest in it except a bed, which was made, but not well. The second bedroom had a narrower bed that looked like it had never been used.

  The kitchen was fitted out with a range of useful stuff, but on balance I doubted that Chapman had been a gourmet cook. Her pocketbook was stowed neatly on the counter, resting upright against the side of the refrigerator. It was basically a small leather pouch, with a flap lid designed to close magnetically. It was navy blue in color, which might or might not have been the reason it had been left behind. I wasn’t sure of the current protocol involved in matching a blue bag with a yellow dress. Maybe not permitted. Although plenty of medals had blue and yellow in their ribbons, and the women soldiers I knew would have killed to get one, literally.

  I opened the flap and looked in the bag. There was a slim leather wallet, dark red, and a convenience pack of tissues, unopened, and a pen, and some coins, and some crumbs, and a car key. The car key had a long serrated shaft, and a black plastic head molded to feel good to the thumbs, and embossed with a large letter H.

  “Honda,” Deveraux said, beside me. “A Honda Civic. Bought new three years ago from a dealer in Tupelo. All up to date in terms of maintenance.”

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  Deveraux pointed to a door. “In her garage.”

  I took the wallet out of the bag. It had nothing in it except cash money and a Mississippi driver’s license, issued three years before. The picture on it dimmed about half of Chapman’s allure, but it was still well worth looking at. The money added up to less than thirty dollars.

  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 j
unk, 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 place three years ago, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was twenty-four at the time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that usual? Twenty-four-year-olds owning real estate?”

  “Maybe not very usual.”

  “With no mortgage?”

  “Definitely not very usual. But what has that got to do with her yard?”

  “She wasn’t much of a gardener.”

  “That’s not a crime.”

  “The previous owner wasn’t much of a gardener either. Did you know him? Or her?”

  “I was still in the Corps three years ago.”

  “Not a long-time resident, that you remember from being a kid? Maybe a third old biddy, like a matched set?”

  “Why?”

  “No reason. Not important. But whoever, they didn’t like mowing their lawn. So they dug it up and replaced it with something else.”

  “With what?”

  “Go take a look.”

  She backtracked through the gap in the fence and walked halfway along the path and squatted down. She parted the weedy stalks and dug her fingertips into the surface underneath. She raked them back and forth and then she looked up at me and said, “Gravel.”

  The previous owner had tired of lawn care and opted for raked stones. Like a Japanese garden, maybe, or like the low-water-use yards conscientious Californians were starting to put in. Maybe there had been earthenware tubs here and there, full of cheerful flowers. Or maybe not. It was impossible to tell. But it was clear the gravel had not been a total success. Not a labor-saving cure-all. It had been laid thin. The subsoil had been full of weed roots. Regular applications of herbicide had been called for.

  Janice May Chapman had not continued the herbicide applications. That was clear. No hosepipe in her garage. No watering can. Rural Mississippi. Agricultural land. Rain and sun. Those weeds had come boiling up like madmen. Some boyfriend had brought over a gasoline mower and hacked them back. Some nice guy with plenty of energy. The kind of guy who doesn’t like mess and disarray. A soldier, almost certainly. The kind of guy who does things for people, gets things neat, and then keeps them neat.

  Deveraux asked, “So what are you saying? She was raped here?”

  “Maybe she wasn’t raped at all.”

  Deveraux said nothing.

  “It’s possible she wasn’t,” I said. “Think about it. A sunny afternoon, total privacy. They’re sitting out back because they don’t want to sit on the front porch with the old biddies watching every move. They’re on the stoop, they’re feeling good, they get right to it.”

  “On the lawn?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  She looked right at me and said, “Like you told the doctor, it would depend on who I was with.”

  We spent the next few minutes talking about injuries. I did the thing with my forearm again. I pressed it down and mashed it around. I simulated the throes of passion. I came up with plenty of green chlorophyll stains and a smear of dry stony mud. When I wiped off the dirt we both saw the same kind of small red marks we had seen on Janice May Chapman’s corpse. They were superficial and there was no broken skin, but we both agreed Chapman might have been at it longer, and harder, with more weight and force. “We need to go inside again,” I said.

  We found Chapman’s laundry basket in the bathroom. It was a rectangular wicker thing, with a lid. Painted white. On top of the pile inside was a short sundress. It had cap sleeves and was printed with red and white pinstripes. It was rucked and creased at the waist. It had grass stains on the upper back. Next item down in the laundry pile was a hand towel. Then a white blouse.

  “No underwear,” Deveraux said.

  “Evidently,” I said.

  “The rapist kept a souvenir.”

  “She wasn’t wearing any. Her boyfriend was coming over.”

  “It’s March.”

  “What was the weather like that day?”

  “It was warm,” Deveraux said. “And sunny. It was a nice day.”

  “Rosemary McClatchy wasn’t raped,” I said. “Nor was Shawna Lindsay. Escalation is one thing. A complete change in MO is another.”

  Deveraux didn’t answer that. She stepped out of the bathroom into the hallway. The center point of the little house. She looked all around. She asked, “What did I miss here? What should be here that isn’t?”

  “Something more than three years old,” I said. “She moved here from somewhere else, and she should have brought things with her. At least a few things. Books, m
aybe. Or photographs. Maybe a favorite chair or something.”

  “Twenty-four-year-olds aren’t very sentimental.”

  “They keep some little thing.”

  “What did you keep when you were twenty-four?”

  “I’m different. You’re different.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying she showed up here three years ago out of the blue and brought nothing with her. She bought a house and a car and got a local driver’s license. She bought a houseful of new furniture. All for cash. She doesn’t have a rich daddy or his picture would be next to the TV in a silver frame. I want to know who she was.”

  Chapter

  38

  I followed Deveraux from room to room while she checked for herself. Paint on the walls, still fresh. Loveseat and armchair in the living room, still new. A recent television set. A fancy VHS player. Even the pots and pans and knives and forks in the kitchen showed no nicks or scratches from long-term use.

  There were no clothes in the closet older than a couple of seasons. No old prom dress wrapped in plastic. No old cheerleader outfit. No photographs of family. No keepsakes. No old letters. No softball trophies, no jewelry box with a busted ballerina. No battered stuffed animals preserved from childhood years.

  “Does it matter?” Deveraux said. “She was just a random victim, after all.”

  “She’s a loose end,” I said. “I don’t like loose ends.”

  “She was already here when I got back to town. I never thought about it. I mean, people come and go all the time. This is America.”

  “Did you ever hear anything about her background?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No rumors or assumptions?”

  “None at all.”

  “Did she have a job?”

  “No.”

  “Accent?”

  “The Midwest, maybe. Or just south of it. The heartland, anyway. I only spoke to her once.”

  “Did you fingerprint the corpse?”