He made it to the door, with the brush grabbing and snatching at his ankles. There was a bell-push, but it was rusted solid. He leaned forward and rapped on the
wood with his knuckles. Then he waited. No response. He rapped again. He could hear the jungle seething behind him. Insect noise. He could hear the muffler ticking as it cooled underneath the Taurus over on the driveway. He knocked again. Waited. There was the creak of floorboards inside the house. The sound was carrying ahead of somebody’s footsteps and spilling out to him. The footsteps halted on the other side of the door and he heard a woman’s voice, thin and muffled by the wood.
‘Who’s there?’ it called out.
‘Reachier,’ he called back. ‘General Garber’s friend.’
His voice was loud. Behind him, he heard panicked scurrying in the brush. Furtive animals were fleeing. In front of him, he heard a stiff lock turning and bolts easing back. The door creaked open. Darkness inside. He stepped forward into the shadow of the eaves and saw an old woman waiting. She was maybe eighty, stick thin, white hair, stooped, wearing a faded floral-print dress that flared right out from the waist over nylon petticoats. It was the sort of dress he’d seen in photographs of women at suburban garden parties in the fifties and the sixties. The sort of dress that was normally worn with long white gloves and a wide-brimmed hat and a contented bourgeois smile.
‘We were expecting you,’ she said.
She turned and stood aside. He nodded and went in. The radius of the skirt meant he had to push past its flare with a loud rustle of nylon.
‘I brought your mail,’ he said to her. ‘Your box was full.’
He held up the thick stack of curled envelopes and waited.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re very kind. It’s a long walk out there, and we don’t like to stop the car to get it, in case we get rear-ended. It’s a very busy road. People drive terribly fast, you know. Faster than they should, I think.’
Reacher nodded. It was about the quietest road he had ever seen. A person could sleep the night out there right on the yellow line, with a good chance of surviving until morning. He was still holding the mail. The old lady showed no curiosity over it.
‘Where would you like me to put it?’
‘Would you put it in the kitchen?’
The hallway was a dark space, panelled in gloomy wood. The kitchen was worse. It had a tiny window, glassed in with yellow reeded glass. There was a collection of freestanding units in muddy dark veneer, and curious old enamel appliances, speckled in mint greens and greys, standing up on short legs. The whole room smelled of old food and a warm oven, but it was clean and tidy. A rag rug on worn linoleum. There was a chipped china mug with a pair of thick eyeglasses standing vertically in it. He put the stack of mail next to the mug. When her visitor was gone, she would use her eyeglasses to read her mail, right after she put her best frock back in the closet with the mothballs.
‘May I offer you cake?’ she asked.
He glanced at the stove top. There was a china plate there, covered over with a worn linen cloth. She’d baked something for him.
‘And coffee?’
Next to the stove top was an ancient percolator, mint green enamel, green glass knob on the top,
connected to the outlet by a cord insulated with frayed fabric. He nodded.
‘I love coffee and cake,’ he said.
She nodded back, pleased. Bustled forward, crushing her skirt against the oven door. She used a thin trembling thumb and operated the switch on the percolator. It was already filled and ready to go.
‘It takes a moment,’ she said. Then she paused and listened. The old percolator started a loud gulping sound. ‘So come and meet Mr Hobie. He’s awake now, and very anxious to see you. While we’re waiting for the machine.’
She led him through the hallway to a small parlour in the back. It was about twelve by twelve and heavily furnished with armchairs and sofas and glass-fronted chest-high cabinets filled with china ornaments. There was an old guy in one of the chairs. He was wearing a stiff serge suit, blue, worn and shiny in places, and at least three sizes too big for his shrunken body. The collar of his shirt was a wide stiff hoop around a pale scrawny neck. Random silky tufts of white were all that was left of his hair. His wrists were like pencils protruding from the cuffs of his suit. His hands were thin and bony, laid loosely on the arms of the chair. He had clear plastic tubes looped over his ears, running down under his nose. There was a bottle of oxygen on a wheeled cart, parked behind him. He looked up and took a long loud sniff of the gas to fuel the effort of lifting his hand.