by Child, Lee
They got out of the car and stepped into the office. There was a guy behind the reception counter. He was about Shorty’s own age, and Patty’s, mid-twenties, maybe a year or two more. He had short blond hair, combed neatly, and a good tan, and blue eyes, and white teeth, and a ready smile. But he looked a little out of place. At first Shorty took him to be like a summer thing he had seen in Canada, where a well-bred kid is sent to do a dumb job in the countryside, for the purposes of building his résumé, or expanding his horizons, or finding himself, or some such. But this guy was five years too old for that. And behind his greeting he had a proprietorial air. He was saying welcome, for sure, but to my house. Like he owned the place, Shorty thought.
Maybe he did.
Patty told him they needed a room, and that they wondered if whoever looked after the quad bikes could take a look at their car, or, failing that, they would surely appreciate the phone number of a good mechanic. Hopefully not a tow truck.
The guy smiled and asked, ‘What’s wrong with your car?’
He sounded like every young guy in the movies who worked on Wall Street and wore a suit and a tie. Full of smooth confidence. Probably drank champagne. Greed is good. Not a potato farmer’s favourite type of guy.
Patty said, ‘It’s overheating and making weird banging noises under the hood.’
The guy smiled a different kind of smile, this one a modest but commanding junior-master-of-the-universe grin, and he said, ‘Then I guess we should take a look at it. Sounds low on coolant, and low on oil. Both of which are easy to fix, unless something is leaking. That would depend on what parts are needed. Maybe we could adapt something. Failing that, as you say, we know some good mechanics. Either way, there’s nothing to be done until it cools right down. Park it outside your room overnight, and we’ll check it first thing in the morning.’
‘What time exactly?’ Patty asked, thinking about how late they were already, but also thinking about gift horses and mouths.
The guy said, ‘Here we’re all up with the sun.’
She said, ‘How much is the room?’
‘After Labor Day, before the leaf-peepers, call it fifty bucks.’
‘OK,’ she said, although not really, but she was thinking about gift horses again, and what Shorty had said, which was it’s this or nothing.
‘We’ll give you room ten,’ the guy said. ‘It’s the first we’ve refurbished so far. In fact we only just finished it. You would be its very first guests. We hope you will do us the honour.’
THREE
REACHER WOKE UP a minute after three in the morning. All the clichés: snapped awake, instantly, like flicking a switch. He didn’t move. Didn’t even tense his arms and legs. He just lay there, staring into the dark, listening hard, concentrating a hundred per cent. Not a learned response. A primitive instinct, baked deep in the back of his brain by evolution. One time he had been in Southern California, fast asleep with the windows open on a beautiful night, and he had snapped awake, instantly, like flicking a switch, because in his sleep he had smelled a faint wisp of smoke. Not cigarette smoke or a building on fire, but a burning hillside forty miles away. A primeval smell. Like a wildfire racing across an ancient savannah. Whose ancestors outran it depended on which of them woke up fastest and got the earliest start. Rinse and repeat, down hundreds of generations.
But there was no smoke. Not at one minute past three that particular morning. Not in that particular hotel room. So what woke him? Not sight or touch or taste, because he had been alone in bed with his eyes shut and the drapes closed and nothing in his mouth. Sound, then. He had heard something.
He waited for a repeat. Which he considered an evolutionary weakness. The product was not yet perfect. It was still a two-step process. One time to wake you up, and a second time to tell you what it was. Better to do both together, surely, first time out.
He heard nothing. Not many sounds were lizard-brain sounds any more. The pad or hiss of an ancient predator was unlikely. The nearest forest twigs to be ominously stepped upon and loudly broken were miles away beyond the edge of town. Not much else scared the primitive cortex. Not in the audio kingdom. Newer sounds were dealt with elsewhere, in the front part of the brain, which was plenty vigilant for the scrapes and clicks of modern threats, but which lacked the seniority to wake a person up from a deep and contented sleep.
So what woke him? The only other truly ancient sound was a cry for help. A scream, or a plea. Not a modern yell, or a whoop or a cackle of laughter. Something deeply primitive. The tribe, under attack. At its very edge. A distant early warning.
He heard nothing more. There was no repeat. He slid out from under the covers and listened at the door. Heard nothing. He took a feather pillow from a stack on the floor and held it over the peephole. No reaction. No gunshot through the eye. He looked out. Saw nothing. A bright hallway, with no one in it.
He lifted the drapes and checked the window. Nothing there. Nothing on the street. Pitch dark. All quiet. He got back in bed and smacked the pillow into shape and went back to sleep.
Patty Sundstrom was also awake at one minute past three. She had slept four hours and then some kind of subconscious agitation had forced its way through and woken her up. She didn’t feel good. Not deep inside, like she knew she should. Partly the delay was on her mind. At best they would get to the city halfway through the day. Not prime trading hours. On top of which was the fifty extra bucks for the room. Plus the car was an unknown quantity. It might cost a fortune. If parts were required. If something had to be adapted. Cars were great until they weren’t. Even so, the engine had started when they came out of the office. That was something, at least. The motel guy didn’t seem too worried about it. He made a reassuring face. He didn’t come to the room with them. Which was good too. She hated people crowding in, showing her where the light switch was, and the bathroom, judging her stuff, acting all obsequious, wanting a tip. The guy did none of that.
But still she didn’t feel good. She didn’t know why. The room was pleasant. It was newly refurbished, as promised, every inch. The wallboard was new, and the ceiling, and the trim, and the paint, and the carpet. Nothing adventurous. Certainly nothing flashy. It looked like an apples-for-apples update of what tradition would have had there before, but newly straight and true and smooth and solid. The AC was cold and quiet. There was a flat-screen television. The window was an expensive unit, with two thick panes of glass sealed in thermal gaskets, with an electric roller blind set in the void between. You didn’t tug on a chain to close it. You pressed a button. No expense spared. Only problem was, the window itself didn’t open. Which she would worry about in a fire. And generally she liked a breath of night air in a room. But overall it was a decent place. Better than most she had seen. Maybe even worth fifty bucks.
But she didn’t feel good. There was no phone in the room, and no cell signal, so after half an hour they had walked back to the office to enquire about using the motel’s landline for hot food delivery. Pizza, maybe. The guy at the desk had smiled a rueful smile and said he was sorry, but they were way too remote for delivery. No one would come. He said most guests drove out to a diner or a restaurant. Shorty looked like he was going to get mad. As if the guy was saying, most guests have cars that work. Maybe something to do with the rueful smile. Then the guy said, but hey, we’ve got pizzas in the freezer down at the house. Why don’t you come eat with us?
Which was a weird meal, in a dark old residence, with Shorty and the guy and three others all the same. Same age, same look, with some kind of same-wavelength connection between them. As if they were all on a mission. There was something nervous about them. After some conversation she concluded they were all maxedout investors in the same new venture. The motel, she assumed. She assumed they had bought it and were trying to make a go of it. Whatever, they were all extremely polite and gracious and talkative. The guy from the reception desk said his name was Mark. The others were William, Douglas and Peter. They all asked intelligent questions abo
ut life in Saint Leonard. They asked about the hardcore drive south. Again Shorty looked like he was going to get mad. He thought they were calling him dumb for setting out in a bad car. But the guy who said he looked after the quad bikes, who was Peter, said he would have done exactly the same thing. Purely on a statistical basis. The car had run for years. Why assume it would stop now? The odds said it would keep on going. It always had before.
Then they had said goodnight and walked back to room ten, and gone to sleep, except she had woken up four hours later, agitated. She didn’t feel good, and she didn’t know why. Or maybe she did. Maybe she just didn’t want to admit it. Maybe that was the issue. Truth was, deep down, she guessed she was probably mad at Shorty himself. The big trip. The most important part of their secret plan. He set out in a bad car. He was dumb. He was dumber than his own potatoes. He couldn’t invest a buck upfront? What would it have cost, at a lube shop with a coupon? Less than the fifty bucks they were paying for the motel, that was for sure, which Shorty was also pestering her to agree was a creepy place run by creepy people, which was a conflict for her, because really she felt like a bunch of polite young men were rescuing her, like knights in shining armour, from a predicament caused entirely by a potato farmer too dumb to check his car before setting out on about a thousand-mile trip to, oh yeah, a foreign country, with, oh yeah, something very valuable in the trunk.
Dumb. She wanted air. She slipped out of bed and padded barefoot to the door. She turned the knob, and pressed her other hand on the frame for balance, so she could ease the door open without a sound, because she wanted Shorty to stay asleep, because she didn’t want to deal with him right then, as mad as she was.
But the door was stuck. It wouldn’t move at all. She checked it was properly unlocked from the inside, and she tried the knob both ways, but nothing happened. The door was jammed. Maybe it had never been adjusted properly after installation. Or maybe it had swelled with the summer heat.
Dumb. Really dumb. Now was the one time she could use Shorty. He was a strong little fireplug. From throwing hundred-pound bags of potatoes around. But was she going to wake him up and ask him? Was she hell. She crept back to bed and got in alongside him and stared at the ceiling, which was straight and true and smooth and solid.
Reacher woke again at eight o’clock in the morning. Bright bars of hard sun came past the edges of the drapes. There was dust in the air, floating gently. There were muted sounds from the street. Cars waiting, and then moving off. A light at the end of the block, presumably. Occasionally the dulled blare of a horn, as if a guy in front had looked away and missed the green.
He showered, and retrieved his pants from under the mattress, and dressed, and walked out in search of breakfast. He found coffee and muffins close by, which sustained him through a longer reconnaissance, which brought him to a place he figured might have good food hiding under multiple layers of some kind of faux-retro irony. He figured it would take a smarter guy than him to decode them all. The basic idea seemed to be someone’s modern-day notion of where old-time lumberjacks might have dined, on whatever it was that old-time lumberjacks ate, which in the modern day seemed to be interpreted as one of every fried item on the menu. In Reacher’s experience lumberjacks ate the same as any other working man, which was all kinds of different things. But he had no ideological objection to fried food as such, especially not in generous quantities, so he played along. He went in and sat down, briskly, he hoped, as if he had thirty minutes before he had a tree to fell.
The food was fine, and the coffee kept on coming, so he lingered longer than thirty minutes, watching out the window, timing the hustle and the bustle, waiting until the people in the suits and the skirts were safely at work. Then he got up and left his tip and paid his check, and walked two of the blocks he had scouted the night before, towards the place he guessed he should start. Which was the records department of the city offices. Which had a suite number all its own, on a crowded multi-line floor directory, outside a brick-built multi-purpose government building, which because of its age and its shape Reacher figured had once contained a courtroom. Maybe it still did.
The suite he was looking for turned out to be one of many small rooms opening off a grand mezzanine hallway. Like a corridor in an expensive hotel. Except the doors were half glass, which was pebbled in an old-fashioned style, with the department name painted on it in gold. Over two lines, in the case of the records department. Inside the door was an empty room with four plastic chairs and a waist-high enquiry counter. Like a miniature version of any government office. There was an electric bell push screwed to the counter. It had a thin wire that ran away to a nearby crack, and a handwritten sign that said If Unattended Ring For Service. The message was carefully lettered and protected by many layers of clear tape, applied in strips of generous length, some of which were curled at the corners, and dirty, as if picked at by bored or anxious fingers.
Reacher rang for service. A minute later a woman came through a door in the rear wall, looking back as she did so, with what Reacher thought was regret, as if she was leaving a space dramatically larger and more exciting. She was maybe thirty, slim and neat, in a grey sweater and a grey skirt. She stepped up to the counter but she glanced back at the door. Either her boyfriend was waiting, or she hated her job. Maybe both. But she did her best. She cranked up a warm and welcoming manner. Not exactly like in a store, where the customer was always right, but more as an equal, as if she and the customer were just bound to have a good time together, puzzling through some ancient town business. There was enough light in her eyes Reacher figured she meant at least some of what she was saying. Maybe she didn’t hate her job after all.
He said, ‘I need to ask you about an old real estate record.’
‘Is it for a title dispute?’ the woman asked. ‘In which case you should get your attorney to request it. Much faster that way.’
‘No kind of dispute,’ he said. ‘My father was born here. That’s all. Years ago. He’s dead now. I was passing by. I thought I would stop in and take a look at the house he grew up in.’
‘What’s the address?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can you remember roughly where it is?’
‘I’ve never been there before.’
‘You didn’t visit?’
‘Never.’
‘Perhaps because your father moved away when he was young.’
‘Not until he joined the Marines when he was seventeen.’
‘Then perhaps because your grandparents moved away before your father had a family of his own. Before visits became a thing.’
‘I got the impression my grandparents stayed here the rest of their lives.’
‘But you never met them?’
‘We were a Marine family. We were always somewhere else.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not your fault.’
‘But thank you for your service.’
‘Wasn’t my service. My dad was the Marine, not me. I was hoping we could look him up, maybe in a register of births or something, to get his parents’ full names, so we could find their exact address, maybe in property tax records or something, so I could drop by and take a look.’
‘You don’t know your grandparents’ names?’
‘I think they were James and Elizabeth Reacher.’
‘That’s my name.’
‘Your name is Reacher?’
‘No, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Castle.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ Reacher said.
‘Likewise,’ she said.
‘I’m Jack Reacher. My dad was Stan Reacher.’
‘How long ago did Stan leave to join the Marines?’
‘He would be about ninety now, so it was more than seventy years ago.’
‘Then we should start eighty years ago, for a safety margin,’ the woman said. ‘At that point Stan Reacher would be about ten years old, living at home with his parents James and Elizabeth Reacher, somewhere in Laconia. Is th
at a fair summary?’
‘That could be chapter one of my biography.’
‘I’m pretty sure the computer goes back more than eighty years now,’ she said. ‘But for property taxes that old it might just be a list of names, I’m afraid.’
She turned a key and opened a lid in the countertop. Under it was a keyboard and a screen. Safe from thieves, while unattended. She pressed a button, and looked away.
‘Booting up,’ she said.
Which were words he had heard before, in a technological context, but to him they sounded military, as if infantry companies were lacing tight ahead of a general advance.
She clicked and scrolled, and scrolled and clicked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Eighty years ago is just an index, with file numbers. If you want detail, you need to request the physical document from storage. Usually that takes a long time, I’m afraid.’
‘How long?’
‘Sometimes three months.’
‘Are there names and addresses in the index?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s really all we need.’
‘I guess so. If all you want to do is take a look at the house.’
‘That’s all I’m planning on doing.’
‘Aren’t you curious?’
‘About what?’
‘Their lives. Who they were and what they did.’
‘Not three months’ worth of curious.’
‘OK, then names and addresses are all we need.’
‘If the house is still there,’ he said. ‘Maybe someone tore it down. Suddenly eighty years sounds like a real long time.’
‘Things change slowly here,’ she said.
She clicked again, and scrolled, fast at first, scooting down through the alphabet, and then slowly, peering at the screen, through what Reacher assumed was the R section, and then back up again, just as slowly, peering just as hard. Then down and up again fast, as if trying to shake something loose.
