by Lee Child
“I just want him back,” he said. “I just want to see him again, one more day before I die.”
AFTER THAT, THE old couple were done talking. They turned together and fixed misty gazes on the row of photographs on the mantel. Reacher was left sitting in the silence. Then the old man turned back and used both hands and lifted the leather-bound folder off his bony knees and held it out. Reacher leaned forward and took it. At first he assumed it was so he could put the three photographs back inside. Then he realized the baton had been passed to him. Like a ceremony. Their quest had become Leon’s, and now it was his.
The folder was thin. Apart from the three photographs he had seen, it contained nothing more than infrequent letters home from their son and formal letters from the Department of the Army. And a sheaf of paperwork showing the liquidation of their life savings and the transfer by certified check of eighteen thousand dollars to an address in the Bronx, to fund a reconnaissance mission to Vietnam led by a man named Rutter.
The letters from the boy started with brief notes from various locations in the South, as he passed through Dix, and Polk, and Wolters, and Rucker, and Belvoir and Benning on his way through his training. Then there was a short note from Mobile in Alabama, as he boarded ship for the month-long voyage through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific to Indochina. Then there were flimsy Army Mailgrams from Vietnam itself, eight from the first tour, six from the second. The paper was thirty years old, and it was stiff and dry, like ancient papyrus. Like something discovered by archaeologists.
He hadn’t been much of a correspondent. The letters were full of the usual banal phrases a young soldier writes home. There must have been a hundred million parents in the world with treasured old letters like these, different times, different wars, different languages, but the same messages: the food, the weather, the rumor of action, the reassurances.
The responses from the Department of the Army marched through thirty years of office technology. They started out typed on old manual machines, some letters misaligned, some wrongly spaced, some with red haloes above them where the ribbon had slipped. Then electric typewriters, crisper and more uniform. Then word processors, immaculately printed on better paper. But the messages were all the same. No information. Missing in action, presumed killed. Condolences. No further information.
The deal with the guy called Rutter had left them penniless. There had been some modest mutual funds and a little cash on deposit. There was a sheet written in a shaky hand Reacher guessed was the old woman’s, totaling their monthly needs, working the figures again and again, paring them down until they matched the Social Security checks, freeing up their capital. The mutuals had been cashed in eighteen months ago and amalgamated with the cash holdings and the whole lot had been mailed to the Bronx. There was a receipt from Rutter, with the amount formally set off against the cost of the exploratory trip, due to leave imminently. There was a request for any and all information likely to prove helpful, including service number and history and any existing photographs. There was a letter dated three months subsequently, detailing the discovery of the remote camp, the risky clandestine photography, the whispered talk through the wire. There was a prospectus for a rescue mission, planned in great detail, at a projected cost to the Hobies of forty-five thousand dollars. Forty-five thousand dollars they didn’t have.
“Will you help us?” the old woman asked through the silence. “Is it all clear? Is there anything you need to know?”
He glanced across at her and saw she had been following his progress through the dossier. He closed the folder and stared down at its worn leather cover. Right then the only thing he needed to know was why the hell hadn’t Leon told these people the truth?
9
MARILYN STONE MISSED lunch because she was busy, but didn’t mind because she was happy about the way the place was starting to look. She found herself regarding the whole business in a very dispassionate manner, which surprised her a little, because after all it was her home she was getting ready to sell, her own home, the place she’d chosen with care and thought and excitement not so many years ago. It had been the place of her dreams. Way bigger and better than anything she’d ever expected to have. It had been a physical thrill back then, just thinking about it. Moving in felt like she’d died and gone to heaven. Now she was just looking at the place like a showpiece, like a marketing proposition. She wasn’t seeing rooms she’d decorated and lived in and thrilled to and enjoyed. There was no pain. No wistful glances at places where she and Chester had fooled around and laughed and ate and slept. Just a brisk and businesslike determination to bring it all up to a whole new peak of irresistibility.
The furniture movers had arrived first, just as she’d planned. She had them take the credenza out of the hallway, and then Chester’s armchair out of the living room. Not because it was a bad piece, but because it was definitely an extra piece. It was his favorite chair, chosen in the way men choose things, for comfort and familiarity rather than for style and suitability. It was the only piece they’d brought from their last house. He’d put it next to the fireplace, at an angle. Day to day, she rather liked it. It gave the room a comfortable lived-in quality. It was the touch that changed the room from a magazine showpiece to a family home. Which was exactly why it had to go.
She had the movers carry out the butcher’s block table from the kitchen, too. She had thought long and hard about that table. It certainly gave the kitchen a no-nonsense look. Like it was a proper workplace, speaking of serious meals planned and executed there. But without it, there was an uninterrupted thirty-foot expanse of tiled floor running all the way to the bay window. She knew that with fresh polish on the tile, the light from the window would flood the whole thirty-foot span into a sea of space. She had put herself in a prospective buyer’s shoes and asked herself: Which would impress you more? A serious kitchen? Or a drop-dead spacious kitchen? So the butcher’s block was in the mover’s truck.
The TV from the den was in there, too. Chester had a problem with television sets. Video had killed the home-movie side of his business and he had no enthusiasm for buying the latest and best of his competitors’ products. So the TV was an obsolete RCA, not even a console model. It had shiny fake chrome around the screen, and it bulged out like a gray fishbowl. She had seen better sets junked on the sidewalk, looking down from the train when it eased into the 125th Street station. So she’d had the movers clear it out of the den and bring the bookcase down from the guest suite to fill its space. She thought the room looked much better for it. With just the bookcase and the leather couches and the dark lampshades, it looked like a cultured room. An intelligent room. It made it an aspirational space. Like a buyer would be buying a lifestyle, not just a house.
She spent some time choosing books for the coffee tables. Then the florist arrived with flat cardboard boxes full of blooms. She had the girl wash all her vases and then left her alone with a European magazine and told her to copy the arrangements. The guy from Sheryl’s office brought the for-sale sign and she had him plant it in the shoulder next to the mailbox. Then the garden crew arrived at the same time the movers were leaving, which required some awkward maneuvering out on the driveway. She led the crew chief around the garden, explaining what had to be done, and then she ducked back inside the house before the roar of the mowers started up. The pool boy came to the door at the same time as the cleaning service people arrived. She was caught glancing left and right between them, momentarily overcome and unsure of who to start first. But then she nodded firmly and told the cleaners to wait and led the boy around to the pool and showed him what needed doing. Then she ran back to the house, feeling hungry, realizing she’d missed her lunch, but glowing with satisfaction at the progress she was making.
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 doorjambs 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 onto 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 center 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 onto 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 inquiries 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.
“He died in ’Nam, right?” he said.
“I need some background.”
“Checking for his folks again?” He said it without surprise, and there was an edge of weariness in there, too. Like the Hobies’ problems were well known in the town, and gladly tolerated, but no longer exciting any kind of urgent sympathy.
Reacher nodded. “I need to get a feel for what sort of a guy he was. Story is you knew him pretty well.”
Steven looked blank again. “Well, I did, I guess. But we were just kids. I only saw him once, after high school.”
“Want to tell me about him?”
“I’m pretty busy. I’ve got unloading to see to.”
“I could give you a hand. We could talk while we’re doing it.”
Steven started to say a routine no, but then he glanced at Reacher, saw the size of him, and smiled like a laborer who’s been offered the free use of a forklift.
“OK,” he said. “Out back.”
He came out from the corral of counters and led Reacher through a rear door. There was a dusty pickup parked in the sun next to an open shed with a tin roof. The pickup was loaded with bags of cement. The shelves in the open shed were empty. Reacher took his jacket off and laid it on the hood of the truck.
The bags were made of thick paper. He knew from his time with the pool gang that if he used two hands on the middle of the bags, they would fold themselves over and split. The way to do it was to clamp a palm on the corner and lift them one-handed. That would keep the dust off his new shirt, too. The bags weighed a hundred pounds, so he did them two at a time, one in each hand, holding them out, counterbalanced away from his body. Steven watched him, like he was a side-show at the circus.
“So tell me about Victor Hobie,” Reacher grunted.
Steven shrugged. He was leaning on a post, under the tin roof, out of the sun.
“Long time ago,” he said. “What can I tell you? We were just kids, you know? Our dads were in the chamber of commerce together. His was a printer. Mine ran this place, although it was just a lumberyard back then. We were together all the way through school. We started kindergarten on the same day, graduated high school on the same day. I only saw him once after that, when he was home from the Army. He’d been in Vietnam a year, and he was going back again.”
“So what sort of a guy was he?”
Steven shrugged again. “I’m kind of wary about giving you an opinion.”
“Why? Some kind of bad news in there?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” Steven said. “There’s nothing to hide. He was a good kid. But I’d be giving you one kid’s opinion about another kid from thirty-five years ago, right? Might not be a reliable opinion.”
Reacher paused, with a hundred-pound bag in each hand. Glanced back at Steve. He was leaning on his post in his red apron, lean and fit, the exact picture of what Reacher assumed was a typical cautious small-town Yankee businessman. The sort of guy whose judgment might be reasonably solid. He nodded.
“OK, I can see that. I’ll take it into account.”
Steven nodded back, like the ground rules were clear. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-eight,” Reacher said.
“From around here?”
Reacher shook his head. “Not really from around anywhere.”
“OK, couple of things you need to understand,” Steven said. “This is a small small suburban town, and Victor and I were born here in ‘48. We were already fifteen years old when Kennedy got shot, and sixteen before the Beatles arrived, and twenty when there was all that rioting in Chicago and L.A. You know what I’m saying here?”
“Different world,” Reacher said.
“You bet your ass it was,” Steven said back. “We grew up in a different world. Our whole childhood. To us, a real daring guy was one who put baseball cards in the wheels of his Schwinn. You need to bear that in mind, when you hear what I say.”
Reacher nodded. Lifted the ninth and tenth bag out of the pickup bed. He was sweating lightly, and worrying about the state of his shirt when Jodie next saw it.
“Victor was a very straight kid,” Steven said. “A very straight and normal kid. And like I say, for comparative purposes, that was back when the rest of us thought we were the bee’s knees for staying out until half past nine on a Saturday night, drinking milk shakes.”
“What was he interested in?” Reacher asked.
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sp; Steven blew out his cheeks and shrugged. “What can I tell you? Same things as all the rest of us, I guess. Baseball, Mickey Mantle. We liked Elvis, too. Ice cream, and the Lone Ranger. Stuff like that. Normal stuff.”
“His dad said he always wanted to be a soldier.”
“We all did. First it was cowboys and Indians, then it was soldiers.”
“So did you go to ’Nam?”
Steven shook his head. “No, I kind of moved on from the soldier thing. Not because I disapproved. You got to understand, this was way, way before all that longhair stuff arrived up here. Nobody objected to the military. I wasn’t afraid of it, either. Back then there was nothing to be afraid of. We were the U.S., right? We were going to whip the ass off those slanty-eyed gooks, six months maximum. Nobody was worried about going. It just seemed old-fashioned. We all respected it, we all loved the stories, but it seemed like yesterday’s thing, you know what I mean? I wanted to go into business. I wanted to build my dad’s yard up into a big corporation. That seemed like the thing to do. To me, that seemed like more of an American thing than going into the military. Back then, it seemed just as patriotic.”
“So you beat the draft?” Reacher asked.
Steven nodded. “Draft board called me, but I had college applications pending and they skipped right over me. My dad was close to the board chairman, which didn’t hurt any, I guess.”
“How did Victor react to that?”
“He was fine with it. There was no issue about it. I wasn’t antiwar or anything. I supported Vietnam, same as anybody else. It was just a personal choice, yesterday’s thing or tomorrow’s thing. I wanted tomorrow’s thing, Victor wanted the Army. He kind of knew it was kind of, well, staid. Truth is, he was pretty much influenced by his old man. He was four-F in World War Two. Mine was a foot soldier, went to the Pacific. Victor kind of felt his family hadn’t done its bit. So he wanted to do it, like a duty. Sounds stuffy now, right? Duty? But we all thought like that, back then. No comparison at all with the kids of today. We were all pretty serious and old-fashioned around here, Victor maybe slightly more than the rest of us. Very serious, very earnest. But not really a whole lot out of the ordinary.”
