They both made it down the hallway to see him leave. The old man worked on the oxygen long enough to get himself up out of his chair, and then he wheeled the cylinder slowly ahead of him, partly leaning on it like a cane, partly pushing it like a golf trolley. His wife
rustled along in front of him, her skirt brushing both door jambs and both sides of the narrow passageway. Reacher followed behind them, with the leather folder tucked up under his arm. The old lady worked the lock on the door and the old man stood panting and gripping the handle of the cart. The door opened and sweet fresh air blew in.
‘Any of Victor’s old friends still around here?’ Reacher asked.
‘Is that important, Major?’
Reacher shrugged. He had learned a long time ago the best way to prepare people for bad news was by looking very thorough, right from the start. People listened better if they thought you’d exhausted every possibility.
‘I just need to build up some background,’ he said.
They looked mystified, but like they were ready to think about it, because he was their last hope. He held their son’s life in his hands, literally.
‘Ed Steven, I guess, at the hardware store,’ Mr Hobie said eventually. ‘Thick as thieves with Victor, from kindergarten right through twelfth grade. But that was thirty-five years ago, Major. Don’t see how it can matter now.’
Reacher nodded, because it didn’t matter now.
‘I’ve got your number,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you, soon as I know anything.’
‘We’re relying on you,’ the old lady said.
Reacher nodded again.
‘It was a pleasure to meet you both,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the coffee and the cake. And I’m very sorry about your situation.’
They made no reply. It was a hopeless thing to say. Thirty years of agony, and he was sorry about their
situation? He just turned and shook their frail hands and stepped back outside on to their overgrown path. Picked his way back to the Taurus, carrying the folder, looking firmly ahead.
He reversed down the driveway, catching the vegetation on both sides, and eased out of the track. Made the right and headed south on the quiet road he’d left to find the house. The town of Brighton firmed up ahead of him. The road widened and smoothed out. There was a gas station and a fire house. A small municipal park with a Little League diamond. A supermarket with a large parking lot, a bank, a row of small stores sharing a common frontage, set back from the street.
The supermarket’s parking lot seemed to be the geographic centre of the town. He cruised slowly past it and saw a nursery, with lines of shrubs in pots under a sprinkler, which was making rainbows in the sun. Then a large shed, dull red paint, standing in its own lot: Steven’s Hardware. He swung the Taurus in and parked next to a timber store in back.
The entrance was an insignificant door set in the end wall of the shed. It gave on to a maze of aisles, packed tight with every kind of thing he’d never had to buy. Screws, nails, bolts, hand tools, power tools, garbage cans, mailboxes, panes of glass, window units, doors, cans of paint. The maze led to a central core, where four shop counters were set in a square under bright fluorescent lighting. Inside the corral were a man and two boys, dressed in jeans and shirts and red canvas aprons. The man was lean and small, maybe fifty, and the boys were clearly his sons, younger versions of the same face and physique, maybe eighteen and twenty.
‘Ed Steven?’ Reacher asked.
The man nodded and set his head at an angle and raised his eyebrows, like a guy who has spent thirty years dealing with enquiries from salesmen and customers.
‘Can I talk to you about Victor Hobie?’
The guy looked blank for a second, and then he glanced sideways at his boys, like he was spooling backward all the way through their lives and far beyond, back to when he last knew Victor Hobie.