Reacher climbed up on Janet Salter's porch and pulled the bell wire. Pictured the cop inside getting up off her perch on the bottom stair and stepping across the Persian rug. The door opened. The cops had swapped their positions. This was the one from the library window. She was tall and had fair hair pulled back in an athletic ponytail. Her hand was resting on her gun. She was alert, but not tense. Professionally cautious, but happy about the tiny break in routine.
Reacher hung his borrowed coat on the hat stand and headed for the library. Janet Salter was in the same armchair as before. She wasn't reading. She was just sitting there. The other woman cop was behind her. The one that had been in the hallway earlier. The small, dark one. She was staring out the window. The drapes were wide open.
Janet Salter said, 'You had to rush off before you finished your coffee. Would you like me to make some more?'
'Always,' Reacher said. He followed her to the kitchen and watched her fill the antique percolator. The faucets over the sink were just as old. But nothing in the room was decrepit or dowdy. Good stuff was good stuff, however long ago it had been installed.
She said, 'I understand you'll stay here tonight.'
He said, 'Only if it's convenient.'
'Were you not comfortable at the Peterson place?'
'I was fine. But I don't like to impose too long.'
'One night was too long?'
'They have enough on their plate.'
'You travel light.'
'What you see is what you get.'
'Mr Peterson told me.'
'Told you, or warned you?'
'Is it a phobia? Or a philia? Or a consciously existential decision?'
'I'm not sure I ever inquired that deeply.'
'A phobia would be a fear, of course, possibly of commitment or entanglement. A philia would imply love, possibly of freedom or opportunity. Although technically a philia shades towards issues of abnormal appetite, in your case possibly for secrecy. We must ask of people who fly beneath the radar, why, exactly? Is radar in itself unacceptable, or is the terrain down there uniquely attractive?'
'Maybe it's the third thing,' Reacher said. 'Existential.'
'Your disavowal of possessions is a little extreme. History tells us that asceticism has powerful attractions, but even so most ascetics owned clothes, at least. Shirts, anyway, even if they were only made of hair.'
'Are you making fun of me?'
'You could afford to carry a small bag, I think. It wouldn't change who you are.'
'I'm afraid it would. Unless it was empty, which would be pointless. To fill a small bag means selecting, and choosing, and evaluating. There's no logical end to that process. Pretty soon I would have a big bag, and then two or three. A month later I'd be like the rest of you.'
'And that horrifies you?'
'No, I think to be like everyone else would be comfortable and reassuring. But some things just can't be done. I was born different.'
'That's your answer? You were born different?'
'I think it's clear we're not all born the same.'
Janet Salter poured the coffee, this time straight into tall china mugs, as if she thought silver trays and ceremony were inappropriate for an ascetic, and as if she had noticed his earlier discomfort with the undersized cup.
She said, 'Well, whatever your precise diagnosis might be, I'm glad to have you here. You're welcome to stay as long as you like.'
Five to six in the evening.
Thirty-four hours to go.
After the coffee was finished Janet Salter started to make dinner. Reacher offered to eat out, but she said it was as easy to cook for six as five, which told him the two cops on night watch would be getting up and forming a foursome for most of the evening. Which was reassuring.
With her permission he used the food preparation time to inspect the house. He wasn't interested in the first floor or the second floor. He wanted to see the basement. South Dakota had tornadoes, and he was pretty sure a house of any quality would have been planned with an underground safety zone. He went down a flight of stairs from a small back hallway off the kitchen and found a satisfactory situation. The prairie topsoil had been too deep for the excavation to reach bedrock, so the whole space was basically a huge six-sided wooden box built from massive baulks of timber banded with iron. The walls and floor were thick to provide stability, and the ceiling was thick to prevent the rest of the house from crashing through after a direct hit. There was a thicket of floor-to-ceiling posts throughout the space, not more than six feet apart, each one hewn and smoothed from the trunk of a tree. Four of them were panelled with wallboard, to form a furnace room. The furnace was a stained green appliance. It was fed by a thin fuel line, presumably from an oil tank buried outside in the yard. It had a pump and a complicated matrix of wide iron pipes that led out and up through the ceiling. An old installation. Maybe the first in town. But it was working fine. The burner was roaring and the pump was whirring and the pipes were hissing. It was keeping the whole basement warm.
The stairs leading upward could be closed off at the bottom with a stout door that opened outward. It could be secured from the inside with an iron bar propped across iron brackets. It was a fine tornado shelter, no question. Probably an adequate bomb shelter. Almost certainly resistant to any kind of small arms fire. Reacher had seen.50 calibre machine guns chew through most things, but hundred-year-old foot-thick close-grain hard-wood would probably hold up until their barrels overheated and warped.
He came back upstairs encouraged and found the night watch cops up and about. They were with their daytime partners in the kitchen. Janet Salter was moving around inside their cordon. There was an atmosphere of custom and comfort. Clearly the strange little household was becoming used to getting along together. The oven was on and it was warming the room. The glass in the window was fogged with moisture. Reacher stepped into the library and checked the view to the rear. Nothing to see. Just a vague sense of flat land receding into the frigid distance. The snow was easing. The falling flakes themselves seemed stunned by the cold.
Reacher turned back from the window and found Janet Salter stepping in through the door. She said, 'May we talk?'
Reacher said, 'Sure.'
She said, 'I know the real reason why you're here, of course. I know why you're inspecting the house. You have volunteered to defend me, if the siren should happen to sound, and you're making yourself familiar with the terrain. And I'm very grateful for your kindness. Even though your psychological imperatives may mean you won't be here for quite long enough. The trial might not happen for a month. How many new shirts would that be?'
'Eight,' Reacher said.
She didn't reply.
Reacher said, 'There would be no shame in bowing out, you know. No one could blame you. And those guys will get nailed for something else, sooner or later.'
'There would be considerable shame in it,' she said. 'And I won't do it.'
'Then don't talk to me about psychological imperatives,' Reacher said.
She smiled. Asked, 'Are you armed?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'Do retired plumbers carry wrenches the rest of their lives?' She pointed to a low shelf. 'There's a book that might interest you. A work of history. The large volume, with the leather binding.'
It was a big old thing about a foot and a half high and about four inches thick. It had a leather spine with raised horizontal ribs and a quaint title embossed in gold: An Accurate Illustrated History of Mr Smith's & Mr Wesson's Hand Guns. Which sounded Victorian, which did not compute. Smith & Wesson had made plenty of handguns in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, but not nearly enough to fill a book four inches thick.
Janet Salter said, 'Take a look at it.'