Now he had a house. And a house is a complicated thing. A big, complicated, physical thing. It started with the basement. The basement was a huge dark space with a concrete floor and concrete walls and floor joists exposed overhead like bones. There were pipes and wires and machines down there. A furnace. Buried outside somewhere was an oil tank. There was a well for the water. Big round pipes ran through the wall to the septic system. It was a complex interdependent machine, and he didn’t know how it worked.
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Upstairs looked more normal. There was a warren of rooms, all of them amiably shabby and unkempt. But they all had secrets. Some of the light switches didn’t work. One of the windows was jammed shut. The range in the kitchen was too complicated to use. The whole place creaked and cracked at night, reminding him it was real and there and needed thinking about.
And a house has an existence beyond the physical. It’s also a bureaucratic thing. Something had come in the mail about title. There was insurance to consider. Taxes. Town tax, school tax, inspection, assessment. There was a bill to pay for garbage collection. And something about a scheduled propane delivery. He kept all that kind of mail in a drawer in the kitchen.
The only thing he had bought for the house was a gold-colored filter cone for Leon’s old coffee machine. He figured it was easier than always running to the store to buy the paper kind. Ten past four that morning, he filled it with coffee from a can and added water and set the machine going. Rinsed out a mug at the sink and set it on the counter, ready. Sat on a stool and leaned on his elbows and watched the dark liquid sputtering into the flask. It was an old machine, inefficient, maybe a little furred up inside. It generally took five minutes to finish. Somewhere during the fourth of those five minutes, he heard a car slowing on the road outside. The hiss of damp pavement. The crunch of tires on his asphalt drive. Jodie couldn’t stand to stay at work, he thought. That hope endured about a second and a half, until the car came around the curve and the flashing red beam started sweeping over his kitchen window. It washed left to right, left to right, cutting through the river mist, and then it died into darkness and the motor noise died into silence. Doors opened and feet touched the ground. Two people. Doors slammed shut. He stood up and killed the kitchen light. Looked out of the window and saw the vague shapes of two people peering into the fog, looking for the path that led up to his front door. He ducked back to the stool and listened to their steps on the gravel. They paused. The doorbell rang.
There were two light switches in the hallway. One of them operated a porch light. He wasn’t sure which one. He gambled and got it right and saw a glow through the fanlight. He opened the door. The bulb out there was a spotlight made of thick glass tinted yellow. It threw a narrow beam downward from high on the right. The beam caught Nelson Blake first, and then the parts of Julia Lamarr that weren’t in his shadow. Blake’s face was showing nothing except strain. Lamarr’s face was still full of hostility and contempt.
fuflJUtlA <£)l(fu( 49 "You're still up," Blake said. A statement, not a question. Reacher nodded. "Come on in, I guess," he said. Lamarr shook her head. The yellow light caught her hair. "We'd rather not," she said. Blake moved his feet. "There someplace we can go? Get some breakfast?" "Four thirty in the morning?" Reacher said. "Not around here." "Can we talk in the car?" Lamarr asked. "No," Reacher said. Impasse. Lamarr looked away and Blake shuffled his feet. "Come on in," Reacher said again. "I just made coffee." He walked away, back to the kitchen. Pulled a cupboard door and found two more mugs. Rinsed the dust out of them at the sink and listened to the creak of the hallway floor as Blake stepped inside. Then he heard Lamarr's lighter tread, and the sound of the door closing behind her.