23 Past Tense

by Lee Child

  “What I saw was Peter voluntarily donating his time to help us out. He got to work right away. I wasn’t even awake yet. Then what I saw was you kicking him in the teeth by saying he had made it worse.”

  “I agree yesterday the car was not running great, but now it’s not running at all. What else can have happened? Obviously he did something.”

  “There was plenty wrong with your car already. Maybe starting it up last night was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  “It was weird, what he made me do.”

  “He made you tell the truth, Shorty. We would have been in New York City by now. The deal would have been done. Now we could be driving to one of those lots where they take anything in trade. We could have gotten something better. We could have gone the rest of the way in style.”

  “I’m sorry,” Shorty said. “I mean it.”

  “Maybe the mechanic can fix it.”

  “Maybe we should just dump it and walk away. Before we have to pay another fifty bucks for the room.”

  “What do you mean, walk away?”

  “On our own two feet. We could walk back to the road and thumb a ride. You said there was some place twenty miles ahead. They might have a bus.”

  “The track through the trees was more than two miles long. You’d be carrying the suitcase. It’s bigger than you are. We can’t leave it here. And then all we got anyway is a back road. With no traffic. We planned it that way, remember? We could wait there all day for a ride. Especially with a big suitcase. That kind of thing puts people off. They don’t stop. Maybe their trunk is already full.”

  “OK, maybe the mechanic will fix it. Or at least he could give us a ride to town. In his truck. With the big suitcase. We could figure something out from there.”

  “Another fifty bucks will surely make a dent.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Shorty said. “Fifty bucks is a drop in the ocean. We could stay here all week, compared to what the mechanic will cost. Those guys get a call-out charge, can you believe that? Which is basically like getting paid for still being alive. It’s not like that when you grow potatoes, let me tell you. Which mechanics eat, by the way. They love potatoes. French fries, hash browns, twice baked with cheese and bacon. What if I asked them to pay me just to think about growing them a potato?”

  Patty got up suddenly, bouncing the bed, and she said, “I’m going out for some air.”

  She crossed to the door and turned the handle and pulled. Nothing happened. It was jammed again. She checked the lock.

  She said, “This is what happened in the night.”

  Shorty got off the bed and stepped over.

  He turned the handle.

  The door opened.

  He said, “Maybe you’re turning the handle wrong.”

  She said, “How many ways are there to turn a handle?”

  He closed the door and stood back.

  She stepped up and tried again. She used the same grip as before, the same turn, the same pull.

  The door swung open.

  She said, “Weird.”

  —

  The sun was shining on downtown Laconia, a little low in the sky, like the first days of fall, but it was still as warm as summer. Reacher got to the coffee shop across the light at ten past eleven, five minutes ahead of schedule, and he got a seat at a small iron table in the corner of the garden, where he could see the sidewalk coming down from the city office door. He wasn’t sure what kind of a person he expected Carter Carrington to be. Although there were a number of clues. One, Elizabeth Castle found it absurd to imagine the guy as her boyfriend. Two, she had taken pains to point out he wasn’t even her regular friend. Three, the guy was banished to a back office. Four, he was kept away from customers. Five, he was enthusiastic about census methodology.

  The signs were not good.

  The garden had a side gate also, for the parking lot. People came and went. Reacher ordered regular black coffee, in a go-cup, not because he was planning on rushing away, but because he didn’t like the look of the table service alternatives, which were about the size and weight of chamber pots. Poor cups for coffee, in his opinion, but other people must have been satisfied, because the garden was filling up. Pretty soon there were only three spare seats. One of which was opposite Reacher, inevitably. A fact of his life. People didn’t find him approachable.

  First in from the direction of the city office was a woman about forty, bustling, competent, probably in charge of some big department. She said hey and hi to a couple of customers, routine co-worker courtesies, and she dumped her bag on an empty seat, not the one opposite Reacher, and then she went in to the counter to get whatever it was she wanted. Reacher watched the sidewalk. In the distance he saw a guy come out of the city office, and start walking down the block. Even far away it was clear he was tall and well dressed. His suit was fine, and his shirt was white, and his tie was neat. He had fair hair, short, but a little unruly. Like he tried his best with it. He was tan and he looked fit and strong and full of vigor and energy. He had presence. Against the old brick he looked like a movie star on a film set.

  Except he walked with a limp. Very slight, left leg.

  The woman who had been to the counter came back with a cup and a plate, and she sat where she had saved her place, which left just two empty spaces, one of which was immediately taken by another woman, probably another department head, because she said hey and hi to a whole different bunch of people. Which left the only spare chair in the garden directly across from Reacher.

  Then the movie star guy stepped in. Up close and personal he was everything Reacher had seen from a distance, and also good looking, in a rugged kind of way. Like a cowboy who went to college. Tall, rangy, capable. Maybe thirty-five years old. Reacher made a small bet with himself the guy was ex-military. Everything said so. In a second he constructed a whole imaginary bio for the guy, from ROTC at a western university to a wound in Iraq or Afghanistan, and a spell at Walter Reed, and then separation and a new job in New Hampshire, maybe an executive position, maybe something that required him to go argue with the city. He was holding a go-cup of coffee and a paper bag slightly translucent with butter. He scanned the garden and located the only empty seat. He set out toward it.

  Both department heads called out, “Hey, Carter.”

  The guy said hey back, with a smile that probably killed them dead, and then he continued on his way. He sat down across from Reacher.

  Who said, “Is your name Carter?”

  The guy said, “Yes, it is.”

  “Carter Carrington?”

  “Pleased to meet you. And you are?”

  He sounded more curious than annoyed. He spoke like an educated man.

  Reacher said, “A lady named Elizabeth Castle suggested I speak to you. From the city records department. My name is Jack Reacher. I have a question about an old-time census.”

  “Is it a legal issue?”

  “It’s a personal thing.”

  “You sure?”

  “The only issue is whether I get on the bus today or tomorrow.”

  “I’m the town attorney,” Carrington said. “I’m also a census geek. For ethical reasons I need to be absolutely certain which one you think you’re talking to.”

  “The geek,” Reacher said. “All I want is background information.”

  “How long ago?”

  Reacher told him, first the year his father was two, and then the year he was twelve.

  Carrington said, “What’s the question?”

  So Reacher told him the story, the family paperwork, the Marine Corps clerks and their typewriters, cubicle two’s computer screen, the conspicuous absence of Reachers.

  “Interesting,” Carrington said.

  “In what way?”

  Carrington paused a beat.

  He said, “Were you a Marine too?”

  “Army,” Reacher said.

  “That’s unusual. Isn’t it? For the son of a Marine to join the army, I mean.”
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  “It wasn’t unusual in our family. My brother did it too.”

  “It’s a three-part answer,” Carrington said. “The first part is all kinds of random mistakes were made. But twice in a row makes that statistically unlikely. What were the odds? So we move on. And neither part two or part three of the answer reflect all that well on a theoretical person’s theoretical ancestors. So you need to accept I’m talking theoretically. In general, as in most of the people most of the time, the vast majority, nothing personal, lots of exceptions, all that kind of good stuff, OK? So don’t get offended.”

  “OK,” Reacher said. “I won’t.”

  “Focus on the count when your dad was twelve. Ignore the earlier one. The later one is better. By then we’d had seven years of the Depression and the New Deal. Counting was really important. Because more people equaled more federal dollars. You can be sure that state and city governments tried like crazy not to miss anyone that year. But they did, even so. The second part of the answer is that the highest miss percentages were among renters, occupants of multi-family dwellings or overcrowded quarters, the unemployed, those of low education and income levels, and those receiving public assistance. Folks on the margins, in other words.”

  “You find people don’t like to hear that about their grandparents?”

  “They like it better than part three of the answer.”

  “Which is?”

  “Their grandparents were hiding from the law.”

  “Interesting,” Reacher said.

  “It happened,” Carrington said. “Obviously no one with a federal warrant would fill out a census form. Other folks thought laying low might help them in the future.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  Carrington said, “What did you do in the army?”

  “Military police,” Reacher said. “You?”

  “What makes you think I was in the army?”

  “Your age, your appearance, your manner and bearing, your air of decisive competence, and your limp.”

  “You noticed.”

  “I was trained to. I was a cop. My guess is you have an artificial lower leg. Barely detectable, therefore a really good one. And the army has the best, these days.”

  “I never served,” Carrington said. “I wasn’t able to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was born with a rare condition. It has a long and complicated name. It meant I had no shin bone. Everything else was there.”

  “So you’ve had a lifetime of practice.”

  “I’m not looking for sympathy.”

  “You’re not getting any. But even so, you’re doing OK. Your walk is close to perfect.”

  “Thank you,” Carrington said. “Tell me about being a cop.”

  “It was a good job, while it lasted.”

  “You saw the effect of crime on families.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Your dad joined the Marines at seventeen,” Carrington said. “Got to be a reason.”

  —

  Patty Sundstrom and Shorty Fleck sat outside their room, in the plastic lawn chairs under the window. They watched the mouth of the track through the trees and waited for the mechanic to come. He didn’t. Shorty got up and tried the Honda one more time. Sometimes leaving a thing switched off for a spell fixed it. He had a TV set like that. About one time in three it came on with no sound. You had to shut it down and try again.

  He turned the key. Nothing happened. On, off, on, off, silently, no difference at all. He went back to his lawn chair. Patty got up and took all their maps from the glove box. She carried them with her to her own chair and spread them out on her knee. She found their current location, at the end of the inch-long spider web vein, in the middle of the pale green shape. The forested area. Which seemed to average about five miles across, and maybe seven from top to bottom. The tip of the spider web vein was off-center in the space, two miles from the eastern limit but three from the western. It was about equal north and south. The green shape had a faint line around it, as if it was all one property. Maybe the motel owned the forest. There was nothing much beyond it, except the two-lane road they had turned off from, which wandered east and south, to the town with its name printed semi-bold. Laconia, New Hampshire. Nearer thirty miles away than twenty. Her guess the day before had been optimistic.

  She said, “Maybe the best bet will be what you said. We should forget the car and get a ride in the tow truck. Laconia is near I-93. We could hitch a ride to the cloverleaf. Or take a taxi, even. For less money than another night here, probably. If we can get to Nashua or Manchester we can get to Boston, and then we can get the cheap bus to New York.”

  “I’m sorry about the car,” Shorty said. “I mean it.”

  “No use crying over spilt milk.”

  “Maybe the mechanic can fix it. It might be easy. I don’t get how it can be so dead. Maybe there’s a loose connection, simple as that. I had a radio once, wouldn’t light up at all. I was banging and banging on it, and then I saw the plug had fallen out of the wall. It felt the same kind of dead.”

  They heard footsteps in the dirt. Steven stepped around the corner and walked toward them. He passed room twelve, and eleven, and came to a stop.

  “Come to lunch,” he said. “Don’t take what Mark said to heart. He’s upset, that’s all. He really wants to help you, and he can’t. He thought Peter would fix it in two minutes. He got frustrated. He likes things to turn out right for everybody.”

  Shorty said, “When is the mechanic coming?”

  “I’m afraid we haven’t called him yet,” Steven said. “The phone has been down all morning.”

  Chapter 7

  Reacher left Carrington in the garden , and walked back to the city office. He pressed the record department’s bell, and a minute later Elizabeth Castle came in through the door.

  He said, “You told me to check back.”

  She said, “Did you find Carter?”

  “He seems like a nice guy. I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to date him.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When I wondered if he was your boyfriend, and you were incredulous.”

  “That he would want to date me. He’s Laconia’s most eligible bachelor. He could have anyone he wants. I’m sure he has no idea who I am. What did he tell you?”

  “That my grandparents were either poor or thieves, or poor thieves.”

  “I’m sure they weren’t.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  She said, “Although I know both those things were frequent reasons.”

  “Either one is a possibility,” he said. “We don’t need to walk on eggs.”

  “Probably they didn’t register to vote, either. Would they have had driver’s licenses?”

  “Not if they were poor. Not if they were thieves, either. Not in their real names, anyway.”

  “Your dad must have had a birth certificate. He must be on paper somewhere.”

  The customer door from the corridor opened, and Carter Carrington stepped inside, with his suit and his smile and his unruly hair. He saw Reacher and said, “Hello again,” not surprised at all, as if he had expected no one else. Then he turned toward the counter and stuck out his hand and said, “You must be Ms. Castle.”

  “Elizabeth,” she said.

  “Carter Carrington. Really pleased to meet you. Thanks for sending this gentleman my way. He has an interesting situation.”

  “Because his dad is missing from two consecutive counts.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Which feels deliberate.”

  “As long as we’re sure we’re looking at the right town.”

  “We are,” Reacher said. “I saw it written down a dozen times. Laconia, New Hampshire.”

  “Interesting,” Carrington said. Then he looked Elizabeth Castle in the eye and said, “We should have lunch sometime. I like the way you saw the thing with the two counts. I’d like to discuss it more.”

  She didn’t answer.

  �
�Anyway, keep me in the loop,” he said.

  She said, “We figure he must have had a birth certificate.”

  “Almost certainly,” he said. “What was his date of birth?”

  Reacher paused a beat.

  He said, “This is going to sound weird. In this context, I mean.”

  “Why?”

  “Sometimes he wasn’t sure.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Sometimes he said June, and sometimes he said July.”

  “Was there an explanation for that?”

  “He said he couldn’t remember because birthdays weren’t important to him. He didn’t see why he should be congratulated for getting another year closer to death.”

  “That’s bleak.”

  “He was a Marine.”

  “What did the paperwork say?”

  “July.”

  Carrington said nothing.

  Reacher said, “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I already agreed with Ms. Castle we don’t need to walk on eggs.”

  “A child uncertain of its birth date is a classic symptom of dysfunction within a family.”

  “Theoretically,” Reacher said.

  “Anyway, birth records are in date order. Could take some time, if you’re not sure. Better to find another avenue.”

  “Such as?”

  “The police blotter, maybe. Not to be insensitive. Purely as a percentage play. If nothing else it would be nice to eliminate the possibility. I don’t want them to be hiding from the law, any more than you do. I want a more interesting reason than that. And it won’t take long to find out. As of now our police department is computerized back about a thousand years. They spent a fortune. Homeland Security money, not ours, but still. They also built a statue of the first chief.”

  “Who should I go see?”

  “I’ll call ahead. Someone will meet you at the desk.”

  “How cooperative will they be?”

  “I’m the guy who decides whether the city goes to bat for them. When they do something wrong, I mean. So they’ll be plenty cooperative. But wait until after lunch. You’ll get more time that way.”

  —

  Patty Sundstrom and Shorty Fleck went to lunch over at the big house. It was an awkward meal. Shorty was by turns stiff and sheepish. Peter was silent. Either offended or disappointed, Patty couldn’t tell. Robert and Steven didn’t say much of anything. Only Mark really talked. He was bright and blithe and chatty. Very friendly. As if the events of the morning had never occurred. He seemed determined to find solutions to their problems. He apologized to them over and over about the phone. He made them listen to the dead handset, as if to share his burden. He said he was concerned people would be worried about them, either back home, or at their destination. Were they missing appointments? Were there people they needed to call?