23 Past Tense

by Lee Child

  Reacher wrote the address with the sharpened pencil on the top sheet of the branded notepaper, which he then tore off, and folded up, and stuck in his back pants pocket.

  —

  Mark parked the quad-bike back at the barn, and walked on down to the house. The phone rang as soon as he got in the door. He picked it up and said his name, and a voice told him, “There was a guy here, name of Reacher, checking out his family history. A big guy, pretty rough. He won’t take no for an answer. So far he’s looked at four different censuses. I think he’s searching for an old address. Maybe he’s a relative. I thought you should know.”

  Mark hung up without replying.

  Chapter 11

  Reacher walked back to the city office and got there a half hour before the close of business. He went up to the records department and pressed the bell. A minute later Elizabeth Castle came in.

  “I found them,” he said. “They lived beyond the city limit, which is why they didn’t show up the first time around.”

  “So no federal warrants.”

  “Turned out they were relatively law abiding.”

  “Where did they live?”

  “A place called Ryantown.”

  “I’m not sure where that is.”

  “That’s a shame, because I came here especially to ask you.”

  “I’m not sure I ever heard of it.”

  “Can’t be far away, because his birdwatching club was here in town.”

  She took out her phone, and did things to it, with spread fingers. She showed him. It was a map, expanded. She spread her fingers some more, and smaller places popped into view. Then she moved the magnified image around, circling Laconia’s boundary, examining the nearby hinterland.

  No Ryantown.

  “Try further out,” he said.

  “How far would a kid go for a birdwatching club?”

  “Maybe he had a bike. Maybe Ryantown was boring. The cops told me there were all kinds of little spots, each with a couple dozen families and not much else. Maybe it was a place like that.”

  “It would still have birds, surely. Maybe more than here, if it was quiet.”

  “The cops said there were all kinds of mills and little factories. Maybe the atmosphere was smoky.”

  “OK, wait,” she said.

  She started over with her phone. This time typing and tapping, not swooping around. Maybe a search engine, or a local history site.

  “Yes,” she said. “It was a tin mill. Belonged to a man named Ryan. He built worker accommodations and called the place Ryantown. The mill finally closed in the 1950s and the town died, such as it was to begin with. Everyone left and the name fell off the map.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Supposedly north and west of here,” she said. She dabbed the map back on her phone, and spread and pinched and moved her fingers around.

  “About here, possibly,” she said.

  There was no name on the map. Just a blank gray shape, and a road.

  “Zoom out,” he said.

  She did, and the gray shape receded to a pinprick, north and west of Laconia, maybe eight miles out. Between ten and eleven on a clock face. It was one of many similar pinpricks. Like busy planets around a sun, held close in by gravity or magnetism or some other kind of strong attraction. Like Detective Brenda Amos had predicted, for all practical purposes Ryantown had been part of Laconia, no matter what the postal service said. The road that passed it by went onward toward nowhere in particular. It just meandered north and west, ten or more miles, and then another ten through a wood, and then onward. A back road, like the one he had been on with the guy in the Subaru. He could picture it.

  He said, “I guess there won’t be a bus.”

  “You could rent a car,” she said. “There are places here in town.”

  “I don’t have a driver’s license.”

  “I don’t think a cab would want to go out there.”

  Eight miles, he thought.

  “I’ll walk,” he said. “But not now. It would be dark as soon as I got there. Tomorrow, maybe. You want to get dinner tonight?”

  “What?”

  “Dinner,” he said. “The third meal of the day, generally eaten in the evening. Can be functional, or social, or sometimes both.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m having dinner with Carter Carrington tonight.”

  —

  Shorty carried the cardboard carton into the room and placed it on the dresser in front of the TV screen. Then he sat with Patty, side by side in their lawn chairs, through the last of the afternoon sun. She didn’t talk. She was thinking. She often was. He knew the signs. He guessed she was processing the information she had received, examining it, turning it this way and that, until she was satisfied. Which would be soon, he thought. Surely. He really didn’t see much of a problem anymore. The thing with the cotton bud had a simple explanation. And the phone was back on. The mechanic was coming first thing in the morning. Total damage, less than two hundred dollars. A drag for sure, but not a disaster.

  Patty said, “Let’s not go to the house for dinner. I think he was kind of hinting they didn’t want us to.”

  “He said we were invited.”

  “He was being polite.”

  “I think he meant it. But he was also looking at it from our point of view.”

  “Now he’s your best friend forever?”

  “I don’t know,” Shorty said. “Most of the time I think he’s a weird asshole who needs a smack. But I have to admit he did good with the mechanic. He explained the problem and got a solution. That shows he’s taking it seriously. Maybe we were both right, way back at the beginning. They’re weird, but also they’re doing their best for us. I guess they could be both things at once.”

  “Whichever, let’s eat just the two of us.”

  “Works for me. I’m sick of answering their questions. It’s like the third degree.”

  “I told you,” Patty said. “They’re being polite. It’s considered polite to take an interest.”

  They got up and stepped inside the room. They left the door wide open. They shifted the cardboard box to the bed. Patty slit the tape with her thumbnail. Shorty lifted the flaps. Inside was an assortment of items, densely and meticulously packed. There were cereal bars and power bars and energy bars, and bottles of water, and packets of dried apricots, and tiny red boxes of raisins. Everything was arranged in a specific pattern that repeated twelve times over. Like twelve identical meals, all neatly laid out. Each one had a bottle of water, and then an equal one-twelfth share of the rest of the stuff.

  There were also two flashlights in the box, standing on their ends, crammed in among the food.

  “Weird,” Patty said.

  “I think this place is for hikers,” Shorty said. “Like in the photograph they took with the model. Why else would they dress her up like that? I bet they give this stuff out as box lunches. Or sell it. It’s the kind of thing a hiker likes to carry.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s compact and high energy. Easy to put in a pocket. Plus water.”

  “What are the flashlights for?”

  “I suppose in case you’re out late and have to eat in the dark.”

  “A lantern would be better.”

  “Maybe hikers prefer flashlights. I’m sure there’s consumer feedback. I think this is part of their stock of supplies.”

  “He said ingredients.”

  “It’s probably a balanced diet. Probably quite healthy. I bet hikers worry about that kind of thing.”

  “He said they put some ingredients together. They didn’t put this together. It’s pre-packaged. Like you said, off their storeroom shelf.”

  “We could still go eat at the house.”

  “I told you, I don’t want to. They don’t want us there.”

  “Then we got to eat this stuff.”

  “Why does he make such grandiose statements? He could have said he brought the same iron rations he sells the hiker
s for lunch. I would have been happy with that. It’s not like we’re paying for it.”

  “Exactly,” Shorty said. “They’re weird. But kind of helpful too. Or the other way around.”

  —

  Reacher ate dinner alone in Laconia, at a greasy hole-in-the-wall with no tablecloths. He didn’t want to risk a fancier place, in case Carter Carrington and Elizabeth Castle picked the same spot. They would feel obliged to at least come over and say hello. He didn’t want to disturb their evening. Afterward he spent an hour walking random blocks, looking for a grocery store with an apartment window above it, that faced east down the length of a street. He found one plausible possibility. It was dead ahead as he walked away from the center of downtown. The apartment was now an attorney’s office. The store now sold pants and sweaters. He stood with his back to its window. He looked down the street. He saw a good-sized patch of night sky in the east, and below it the camber of the blacktop, humped between two gutters, flanked by two curbs and two sidewalks, lit up here and there by widely spaced street lamps.

  He walked the same direction the twenty-year-old had walked. He stopped thirty yards out. Any closer than that, he felt the old lady wouldn’t have used the binoculars. She would have trusted the naked eye. He turned around and looked up at her window. Now he was the smaller boys. He imagined the big guy in front of them, demanding, and then threatening. Technically no big deal. For Reacher himself, anyway. At sixteen he had been bigger than most twenty-year-olds. He had been bigger at thirteen. Biology had been good to him. He was fast, and nasty. He knew all the tricks. He had invented some of them. He had grown up in the Marine Corps, not in Ryantown, New Hampshire. And Stan had been a normal-sized person by comparison. Compact, even, in some respects. Maybe six-one in dress shoes, maybe 190 after a four-course dinner.

  Reacher looked down at the bricks in the sidewalk, and imagined his father’s footsteps there, inching backward, and then turning and running.

  —

  Patty and Shorty ate outside, under their window, in their lawn chairs. They took meal number one and meal number two, which left ten in the box, and they dutifully drank their bottles of water. Then it got cold and they moved inside. But Patty said, “Leave the door open.”

  Shorty said, “Why?”

  “I need the air. Last night I felt like I was choking.”

  “Open the window.”

  “It doesn’t open.”

  “The door might blow.”

  “Wedge it with your shoe.”

  “Someone might get in.”

  “Like who?” Patty said.

  “A passerby.”

  “Here?”

  “Or one of them.”

  “I would wake up. Then I would wake you up.”

  “Promise?”

  “Count on it.”

  Shorty kicked off his shoes, and wedged one between the outer face of the door and the jamb, and he bent the other into a pliable shape, and propped it against the inner face, to push back against gentle nighttime breezes. Potato-farmer engineering, he knew, but it looked like it might work.

  Chapter 12

  Steven called to Robert, who called to Peter, who called to Mark. They were all in different rooms. They got together in the back parlor, and stared at the screens.

  “It’s a pair of shoes,” Steven said. “In case you’re wondering.”

  “Why did they do it?” Mark asked. “Did they say?”

  “She wants air. It’s consistent behavior. She’s mentioned it before. I don’t think it’s a problem.”

  Mark nodded. “I told her a story about a supermodel doing her make up. I think she believed it. I told her a mechanic will be riding to the rescue in the morning. I even made up some technical stuff about the heater hoses. I think she believed all of it. I think she’s calm now. Doesn’t matter about the door.”

  “We need to lock it pretty soon.”

  “But not tonight. Let sleeping dogs lie. They’re relaxed now. They have nothing to worry about.”

  —

  Reacher preferred to move on whenever possible, so he found a new place to sleep, one street away from the previous night. It was a fancy bed and breakfast, in a narrow house built of brick, with its trim newly painted in faded colors. He got a top-floor room, through a low door at the head of a steep and dog-legged stair. He took a long hot shower, and fell asleep, still warm and damp.

  Until one minute past three in the morning.

  Once again he snapped awake, instantly, like flicking a switch. The same thing exactly. Not touch or taste or sight or smell. Therefore sound. This time he got out of bed immediately, and he pulled his pants out from under the mattress, and dressed fast, and tied his shoes. Then he headed out through the low door and down the winding stair to the street.

  The night air was cool, and the silence was hard and brittle, all brick and glass and narrow spaces and humming electricity in the wires. He stood still. A minute later he heard a brief scrape of feet on the sidewalk. Ahead and half left. Maybe thirty yards away. Not going anywhere. Just shuffling in place. Maybe two people. Nothing visible.

  He waited.

  Another minute later he heard a muted yelp. A woman’s voice. Maybe joy. Or ecstasy. Or maybe not. Maybe outrage or anger. It was hard to tell. But it was definitely muted. It was suppressed, in a particular way. It was the sound of clamped lips.

  Nothing visible.

  He moved left, and saw a gap between a bag store and a shoe store. It was pedestrian access to a narrow alley that divided two buildings. The alley had doors both sides for walk-up apartments above the stores. Two people were standing next to one of the doors. A man and a woman, in a full-on clinch. Like wrestling standing up. They were half lit by a harsh bulb above the door. The guy was young. Not much more than a kid. But he was big and solid. The woman was a little older. She had blonde hair, and she was wearing high heels and black nylons under a short black coat, which was getting rucked up by the wrestling.

  Good or bad?

  Hard to tell.

  He didn’t want to ruin anyone’s evening.

  He watched.

  Then the woman squirmed her face away and said, “No,” in a sudden low and breathy tone, like spitting, as firm as talking to a dog, but also with what Reacher took to be feelings of shame and embarrassment and disgust. She pushed against the guy’s chest, and tried to get away. The guy wouldn’t let her.

  Reacher said, “Hey.”

  They both turned their faces toward him.

  He said, “Take your hands off her, kid.”

  The boy said, “This is none of your business.”

  “It is now. You woke me up.”

  “Get lost.”

  “I heard her say no. So step back.”

  The kid half turned. He was wearing a sweatshirt embroidered with the name of a famous university. He was a big solid boy. Maybe six-three, and 220 pounds. Maybe an athlete. He was rippling with youth and excitement. He had a look in his eye. He thought he was a hell of a guy.

  Reacher looked at the woman and said, “Miss, are you OK?”

  She asked, “Are you a cop?”

  “I was once upon a time, in the army. Now I’m just a guy passing through.”

  She didn’t reply. She was close to thirty, Reacher thought. She looked like a nice person. But sad.

  “Are you OK?” he asked her again.

  She pushed away from the boy and stood a yard apart. She didn’t speak. But she looked at Reacher like she didn’t want him to leave.

  He said, “Did this happen last night too?”

  She nodded.

  “Same place?”

  She nodded again.

  “Same exact time?”

  “It’s when I get home from work.”

  “You live here?”

  “Until I get on my feet.”

  Reacher looked at her heels and her hair and her nylons and said, “You work in a cocktail bar.”

  “In Manchester.”

  “And t
his guy followed you home.”

  She nodded.

  “Two nights running?” Reacher said.

  She nodded again.

  The boy said, “She asked me to, man. So butt out and let nature take its course.”

  “That’s not true,” the woman said. “I did not ask you.”

  “You were all over me.”

  “I was being polite. That’s what you do when you work in a cocktail bar.”

  Reacher looked at the boy.

  “Sounds like a classic misunderstanding,” he said. “But easily fixed. All you need to do is apologize most sincerely and then go away and never come back.”

  “It’s her who won’t come back. Not to that bar, anyway. My father owns a big chunk of it. She’ll lose her job.”

  Reacher looked at the woman, and said, “What happened last night?”

  “I let him,” she said. “He agreed one time only. So I got it over with. But now he’s back for more.”

  “I’ll discuss it with him, if you like,” Reacher said. “Meanwhile you go inside now, if you want. And think no more about it.”

  “Don’t you dare go inside,” the boy said. “Not without me.”

  The woman looked from him to Reacher, and back again. And again, as if choosing. As if down to her last twenty bucks at the racetrack. She made her decision. She took her keys from her bag, and unlocked her door, and stepped inside, and closed her door behind her.

  The boy in the sweatshirt stared first at the door, and then at Reacher. Who jerked his head toward the mouth of the alley, and said, “Run along now, kid.”

  The boy stared a minute longer, apparently thinking hard. And then he went. He walked out of the alley and turned out of sight. To the right. Which made him right-handed. He would want to set up his ambush so that Reacher would walk face first into a free-swinging right hook. Which pretty much defined the location. About three feet around the corner, Reacher thought. Level with the edge of the bag shop’s window. Because of the pivot point for the right hook. Basic geometry. Fixed in space.