The Affair: A Reacher Novel

just don’t buy it.”
    “I buy it,” she said.
    Something in her tone. Something in her face.
    I said, “What? Did the Marines do this once?”
    “It was no big thing.”
    “Tell me all about it.”
    “Classified information,” she said.
    “Where was it?”
    “I can’t tell you that.”
    “When was it?”
    “I can’t tell you that either.”
    I paused a beat and asked, “Have you spoken to Munro yet? The guy they sent to the base?”
    She nodded. “He called and left a message when he arrived. First thing. As a courtesy. He gave me a number to reach him.”
    “Good,” I said. “Because now I need to speak to him.”
    We drove back together , across Clancy’s land, out his gate, south on the washboard two-lane, then west through the black half of town, away from Kelham, toward the railroad. I saw the same old women on the same front porches, and the same kids on the same bikes, and men of various ages moving slow between unknown starting points and unknown destinations. The houses leaned and sagged. There were abandoned work sites. Slabs laid, with no structures built on them. Tangles of rusted rebar. Weedy piles of bricks and sand. All around was flat tilled dirt and trees. There was a kind of hopeless crushed torpor in the air, like there probably had been every day for the last hundred years.
    “My people,” Deveraux said. “My base. They all voted for me. I mean it, practically a hundred percent. Because of my father. He was fair to them. They were voting for him, really.”
    I asked, “How did you do with the white folks?”
    “Close to a hundred percent with them too. But that’s all going to change, on both ends of the deal. Unless I get some answers for all concerned.”
    “Tell me about the first two women.”
    Her response to that was to brake sharply and twist in her seat and back up twenty yards. Then she nosed into the turning she had just passed. It was a dirt track, well smoothed and well scoured. It had a humped camber and shallow bar ditches left and right. It ran straight north, and was lined on both sides with what might once have been slave shacks. Deveraux passed by the first ten or so, passed by a gap where one had burned out, and then she turned into a yard I recognized from the third photograph I had seen. The poor girl’s house. The unadorned neck and ears. The amazing beauty. I recognized the shade tree she had been sitting under, and the white wall that had reflected the setting sun softly and obliquely into her face.
    We parked on a patch of grass and got out. A dog barked somewhere, and its chain rattled. We walked under the limbs of the shade tree and knocked on the back door. The house was small, not much bigger than a cabin, but it was well tended. The white siding was not new, but it had been frequently painted. It was stained auburn at the bottom, the color of hair, where heavy rains had bounced up out of the mud.
    The back door was opened by a woman not much older than either Deveraux or me. She was tall and thin and she moved slow, with a kind of sun-beat languor, and with the kind of iron stoicism I imagined all her neighbors shared. She smiled a resigned smile at Deveraux, and shook her hand, and asked her, “Any news about my baby?”
    Deveraux said, “We’re still working on it. We’ll get there in the end.”
    The bereaved mother was too polite to respond to that. She just smiled her wan smile again and turned to me. She said, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
    I said, “Jack Reacher, ma’am,” and shook her hand. She said, “I’m Emmeline McClatchy. I’m delighted to meet you, sir. Are you working with the Sheriff’s Department?”
    “The army sent me to help.”
    “Now they did,” she said. “Not nine months ago.”
    I didn’t answer that.
    The woman said, “I have some deer meat in the pot. And some tea in the pitcher. Would you two care to join me for lunch?”
    Deveraux said, “Emmeline, I’m sure that’s your dinner, not your lunch. We’ll be OK. We’ll eat in town. But thanks anyway.”
    It was the answer the woman seemed to have been expecting. She smiled again and backed away into the gloom behind her. We walked back to the car. Deveraux backed out to the street, and we drove away. Further down the row was a shack much like the others, but it had electric beer signs in the windows. A bar of some kind. Maybe music. We threaded through a matrix of dirt streets. I saw another abandoned construction project. Knee-high