23 Past Tense

by Lee Child

  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 hard-working person, 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, toward 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 reeded 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 inquiry 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 gray sweater and a gray 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 it. 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.”

  “You didn’t visit?”

  “No.”

  “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 that 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 actual 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.”

  “Then 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 to do.”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “About what?”

  “Their lives. Who they were and what they did.”<
br />
  “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.

  She said, “No one named Reacher owned property in Laconia eighty years ago.”

  Chapter 4

  Patty Sundstrom also woke again at eight in the morning, later than she would have liked, but finally she had succumbed to exhaustion, and she had slept deeply for almost five more hours. She sensed the space in the bed next to her was empty. She rolled over and saw the door was open. Shorty was out in the lot. He was talking to one of the motel guys. Maybe Peter, she thought. The guy who looked after the quad-bikes. They were standing next to the Honda. Its hood was up. The sun was bright.

  She slipped out of bed and crept bent-over to the bathroom. So Peter or whoever it was by the Honda wouldn’t see. She showered, and dressed in the same clothes, because she hadn’t brought enough for an extra day. She came out of the bathroom. She was hungry. The door was still open. The sun was still bright. Now Shorty was there on his own. The other guy had gone.

  She stepped out and said, “Good morning.”

  “Car won’t start,” Shorty said. “The guy messed with it and now it’s dead. It was OK last night.”

  “It was not OK, exactly.”

  “It started last night. Now it won’t. The guy must have messed it up.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He poked around some. He had a wrench and a pair of pliers. I think he made it worse.”

  “Was it Peter? The guy that looks after the quad-bikes?”

  “So he says. If it’s true, good luck to them. Probably that’s why they need nine bikes in the first place. To make sure they always have one that works.”

  “The car started last night because it was hot. Now it’s cold. That makes a difference.”

  “You’re a mechanic now?”

  “Are you?” she said.

  “I think the guy broke something.”

  “And I think he’s trying to help us the best he can. We should be grateful.”

  “For getting our car broken?”

  “It was already broken.”

  “It started last night. First turn of the key.”

  She said, “Did you have a problem with the room door?”

  He said, “When?”

  “When you came out this morning.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I wanted some air in the night but I couldn’t get it open. It was jammed.”

  “I didn’t have a problem,” Shorty said. “It opened right up.”

  Fifty yards away they saw Peter come out of the barn, with a brown canvas bag in his hand. It looked heavy. Tools, Patty thought. To fix their car.

  She said, “Shorty Fleck, now you listen to me. These gentlemen are trying to help us, and I want you to act like you appreciate it. At the very minimum l don’t want you to give them a reason to stop helping us before they’re finished. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Jesus,” he said. “You’re acting like this is my fault or something.”

  “Yeah, something,” she said, and then she shut up and waited for Peter, with the bag of tools. Who clanked up to them with a cheerful smile, as if he was just itching to clap the dust off his hands and get straight to work.

  She said, “Thanks so much for your help.”

  He said, “No problem at all.”

  “I hope it’s not too complicated.”

  “Right now it’s dead as a doornail. Which is usually electrical. Maybe a wire melted.”

  “Can you fix that?”

  “We could splice in a replacement. Just enough to bypass the bad part. Sooner or later you would want to get it properly repaired. It’s the kind of thing that could shake loose eventually.”

  “How long does it take to splice?”

  “First we need to find where it melted.”

  “The engine started last night,” Shorty said. “Then we ran it two minutes and shut it off again. It got cooler and cooler, all night long. How would anything melt?”

  Peter said nothing.

  “He’s just asking,” Patty said. “In case the melting thing is a wild goose chase. We wouldn’t want to take up more of your time than we had to. It’s very nice of you to help us.”

  “It’s OK,” Peter said. “It’s a reasonable question. When you stop the engine you also stop the radiator fan and the water pump. So there’s no forced cooling and no circulation. The hottest water rises passively to the top of the cylinder head. Surface temperatures can actually get worse in the first hour. Maybe there was a wire touching the metal.”

  He ducked under the hood and pondered a moment. He traced circuits with his finger, checking the wires, tugging things, tapping things. He looked at the battery. He used a wrench to check the clamps were tight on the posts.

  He backed out and said, “Try it one more time.”

  Shorty put his butt on the seat and kept his feet on the ground. He twisted to face front and put his hand on the key. He looked up. Peter nodded. Shorty turned the key.

  Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not even a click or a whir or a cough. Turning the key was the same thing as not turning it. Inert. Dead as a doornail. Dead as the deadest thing that ever died.

  —

  Elizabeth Castle looked up from her screen and focused on nothing much, as if running through a number of possible scenarios, and the consequent next steps in all the different circumstances, starting, Reacher assumed, with him being an idiot and getting the town wrong, in which case the next step would be to get rid of him, no doubt politely, but also no doubt expeditiously.

  She said, “They were probably renters. Most people were. The landlords paid the taxes. We’ll have to find them somewhere else. Were they farmers?”

  “I don’t think so,” Reacher said. “I don’t remember any stories about having to go outside in the freezing dawn to feed the chickens before walking twenty miles through the snow to school, uphill both ways. That’s the kind of thing farmers tell you, right? But I never heard that.”

  “Then I’m not sure where you should start.”

  “The beginning is often good. The register of births.”

  “That’s in the county offices, not the city. It’s a whole different building, quite far from here. Maybe you should start with the census records instead. Your father should show up in two of them, when he was around two years old and twelve years old.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They’re in the county offices too, but a different office, slightly closer.”

  “How many offices have they got?”

  “A good number.”

  She gave him the address of the particular place he needed, with extensive turn-by-turn directions how to get there, and he said goodbye and set out walking. He passed the inn where he had spent the night. He passed a place he figured he would come back to for lunch. He was moving south and east through the downtown blocks, sometimes on worn brick sidewalks easily eighty years old. Even a hundred. The stores were crisp and clean, many of them devoted to cookware and bakeware and tableware and all kinds of other wares associated with the preparation and consumption of food. Some were shoe stores. Some had bags.

  The building he was looking for turned out to be a modern structure built wide and low across what must have been two regular lots. It would have looked better on a technology campus, surrounded by computer laboratories. Which was what it was, he thought. He realized in his mind he had been expecting shelves of moldering paper, hand-lettered in
fading ink, tied up with string. All of which still existed, he was sure, but not there. That stuff was in storage, three months away, after being copied and catalogued and indexed on a computer. It would be retrieved not with a puff of dust and a cart with wheels, but with a click of a mouse and the whir of a printer.

  The modern world.

  He went in, to a reception desk that could have been in a hip museum or an upscale dentist. Behind it was a guy who looked like he was stationed there as a punishment. Reacher said hello. The guy looked up but didn’t answer. Reacher told him he wanted to see two sets of old census records.

  “For where?” the guy asked, like he didn’t care at all.

  “Here,” Reacher said.

  The guy looked blank.

  “Laconia,” Reacher said. “New Hampshire, USA, North America, the world, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe.”

  “Why two?”

  “Why not?”

  “What years?”

  Reacher told him, first the year his dad was two, and then the next census ten years later, when his dad was twelve.

  The guy asked, “Are you a county resident?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Funding. This stuff ain’t free. But residents are entitled.”

  “I’ve been here a good while,” Reacher said. “At least as long as I lived anywhere else recently.”

  “What is the reason for your search?”