by Lee Child
Reacher asked, “Do you know who they are?”
The doctor said, “No. They’re not from around here.” His words were thick and indistinct and hard to decipher. Loose teeth, split lips. And a hangover, presumably. “They said they were representing the Duncans. Not working for them. So they’re not hired hands. We don’t know who they are or what their connection is.”
“What did they want?”
“You, of course.”
Reacher said, “I’m very sorry for your trouble.”
The doctor said, “It is what it is.”
Reacher turned back to the doctor’s wife. “Are you OK?”
She said, “They didn’t hit me.”
“But?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Why are you here?”
“I need medical treatment,” Reacher said.
“What kind?”
“I got scratched by thorns. I want to get the cuts cleaned.”
“Really?”
“No, not really,” Reacher said. “I need some painkillers, that’s all. I haven’t been able to rest my arms like I hoped.”
“What do you really want?”
“I want to talk,” Reacher said.
They started in the kitchen. They cleaned his cuts, purely as a way of occupying themselves. The doctor’s wife said she had trained as a nurse. She poured some thin stinging liquid into a bowl and used cotton balls. She started on his face and neck and then did his hands. She made him take off his shirt. His back was all ripped up by the long scrabbling escape from under the truck. He said, “I had breakfast with Dorothy this morning. At her place.”
The doctor’s wife said, “You shouldn’t be telling us that. It could get her in trouble.”
“Only if you rat her out to the Duncans.”
“We might have to.”
“She said she’s a friend of yours.”
“Not really a friend. She’s much older.”
“She said you stood by her, twenty-five years ago.”
The woman said nothing. Just continued her careful ministrations behind his back. She was thorough. She was opening each scratch with thumb and forefinger, and swabbing extensively. The doctor said, “Would you like a drink?”
“Too early for me,” Reacher said.
“I meant coffee,” the doctor said. “You were drinking coffee last night.”
Reacher smiled. The guy was trying to prove he could remember something. Trying to prove he hadn’t been really drunk, trying to prove he wasn’t really hungover.
“A cup of coffee is always welcome,” Reacher said.
The doctor stepped away to the sink and got a drip machine going. Then he came back and took Reacher’s arm, like doctors do, his fingertips in Reacher’s palm, lifting, turning, manipulating. The doctor was small and Reacher’s arm was big. The guy was struggling like a butcher with a side of beef. He dug the fingers of his other hand deep into Reacher’s shoulder joint, poking, feeling, probing.
“I could give you cortisone,” he said.
“Do I need it?”
“It would help.”
“How much?”
“A little. Maybe more than a little. You should think about it. It would ease the discomfort. Right now it’s nagging at you. Probably making you tired.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Go for it.”
“I will,” the doctor said. “In exchange for some information.”
“Like what?”
“How did you hurt yourself?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Call it professional interest.”
The doctor’s wife finished her work. She tossed the last cotton ball on the table and handed Reacher his shirt. He shrugged it on and started buttoning it. He said, “It was like you figured. I was caught in a hurricane.”
The doctor said, “I don’t believe you.”
“Not a natural weather event. I was in an underground chamber. It caught on fire. There was a stair shaft and two ventilation shafts. I was lucky. The flames went up the ventilation shafts. I was on the stairs. So I wasn’t burned. But air to feed the fire was coming down the stair shaft just as hard as the flames were going back up the ventilation shafts. So it was like climbing through a hurricane. It blew me back down twice. I couldn’t keep my feet. In the end I had to haul myself up by the arms.”
“How far?”
“Two hundred and eighty steps.”
“Wow. That would do it. Where was this?”
“That’s outside of your professional interest.”
“Then what happened?”
“That’s outside of your professional interest, too.”
“Recent event, yes?”
“Feels like yesterday,” Reacher said. “Now go get the needle.”
It was a long needle. The doctor went away and came back with a stainless-steel syringe that looked big enough for a horse. He made Reacher take his shirt off again and sit forward with his elbow on the table. He eased the sharp point deep into the joint, from the back. Reacher felt it pushing and popping through all kinds of tendons and muscles. The doctor pressed the plunger, slow and steady. Reacher felt the fluid flood the joint. Felt the joint loosen and relax, in real time, immediately, like healing insanely accelerated. Then the doctor did the other shoulder. Same procedure. Same result.
“Wonderful,” Reacher said.
The doctor asked, “What did you want to talk about?”
“A time long ago,” Reacher said. “When your wife was a kid.”
Chapter 24
Reacher dressed again and all three of them took mugs of fresh coffee to the living room, which was a narrow rectangular space with furniture arranged in an L shape along two walls, and a huge flat screen television on a third wall. Under the screen was a rack loaded with audiovisual components all interconnected with thick wires. Flanking the screen were two serious loudspeakers. Set into the fourth wall was an undraped picture window that gave a great view of a thousand acres of absolutely nothing at all. Dormant lawn, the postand-rail fence, then dirt all the way to the horizon. No hills, no dales, no trees, no streams. But no trucks or patrols, either. No activity of any kind. Reacher took an armchair where he could see the door and the view both at the same time. The doctor sat on a sofa. His wife sat next to him. She didn’t look enthusiastic about talking.
Reacher asked her, “How old were you when Dorothy’s kid went missing?”
She said, “I was fourteen.”
“Six years older than Seth Duncan.”
“About.”
“Not quite in his generation.”
“No.”
“Do you remember when he first showed up?”
“Not really. I was ten or eleven. There was some talk. I’m probably remembering the talk, rather than the event.”
“What did people say?”
“What could they say? No one knew anything. There was no information. People assumed he was a relative. Maybe orphaned. Maybe there had been a car wreck in another state.”
“And the Duncans never explained?”
“Why would they? It was nobody’s business but theirs.”
“What happened when Dorothy’s little girl went missing?”
“It was awful. Almost like a betrayal. It changed people. A thing like that, OK, it puts a scare in you, but it’s supposed to have a happy ending. It’s supposed to turn out right. But it didn’t.”
“Dorothy thought the Duncans did it.”
“I know.”
“She said you stood by her.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
Reacher said, “You were fourteen. She was what? Thirty? Thirty-five? More than twice your age. So it wasn’t about solidarity between two women or two mothers or two neighbors. Not in the normal sense. It was because you knew something, wasn’t it?”
“Why are you asking?”
“Call it professional interest.”
“It was a quart
er of a century ago.”
“It was yesterday, as far as Dorothy is concerned.”
“You’re not from here.”
“I know,” Reacher said. “I’m on my way to Virginia.”
“So go there.”
“I can’t. Not yet. Not if I think the Duncans did it and got away with it.”
“Why does it matter to you?”
“I don’t know. I can’t explain it. But it does.”
“The Duncans get away with plenty, believe me. Every single day.”
“But I don’t care about that other stuff. I don’t care who gets their harvest hauled or when or how much they pay for it. You all can take care of that for yourselves. It’s not rocket science.”
The doctor’s wife said, “I was the Duncans’ babysitter that year.”
“And?”
“They didn’t really need one. They rarely went out. Or actually they went out a lot, but then they came right back. Like a trick or a subterfuge. Then they would be real slow about driving me home. It was like they were paying me to be there with them. With all four of them, I mean, not just with Seth.”
“How long did you work for them?”
“About six times.”
“And what happened?”
“In what way?”
“Anything bad?”
She looked straight at him. “You mean, was I interfered with?”
He asked, “Were you?”
“No.”
“Did you feel in any danger?”
“A little.”
“Was there any inappropriate behavior at all?”
“Not really.”
“So what was it made you stand by Dorothy when the kid went missing?”
“Just a feeling.”
“What kind of a feeling?”
“I was fourteen, OK? I didn’t really understand anything. But I knew I felt uncomfortable.”
“Did you know why?”
“It dawned on me slowly.”
“What was it?”
“They were disappointed that I wasn’t younger. They made me feel I was too old for them. It creeped me out.”
“You felt too old for them at fourteen?”
“Yes. And I wasn’t, you know, very mature. I was a small girl.”
“What did you feel would have happened if you had been younger?”
“I really don’t want to think about it.”
“And you told the cops about how you felt?”
“Sure. We all told them everything. The cops were great. It was twenty-five years ago, but they were very modern. They took us very seriously, even the kids. They listened to everybody. They told us we could say anything, big or small, important or not, truth or rumor. So it all came out.”
“But nothing was proved.”
The doctor’s wife shook her head. “The Duncans were clean as a whistle. Pure as the driven snow. I’m surprised they didn’t get the Nobel Prize.”
“But still you stood by Dorothy.”
“I knew what I felt.”
“Did you think the investigation was OK?”
“I was fourteen. What did I know? I saw dogs and guys in FBI jackets. It was like a television show. So, yes, I thought it was OK.”
“And now? Looking back?”
“They never found her bike.”
The doctor’s wife said that most farm kids started driving their parents’ beat-up pick-up trucks around the age of fifteen, or even a little earlier, if they were tall enough. Younger or shorter than that, they rode bikes. Big old Schwinn cruisers, baseball cards in the spokes, tassels on the handlebars. It was a big county. Walking was too slow. The eight-year-old Margaret had ridden away from the house Reacher had seen, down the track Reacher had seen, all knees and elbows and excitement, on a pink bicycle bigger than she was. Neither she nor the bike was ever seen again.
The doctor’s wife said, “I kept on expecting them to find the bike. You know, maybe on the side of a road somewhere. In the tall grass. Just lying there. That’s what happens on the television shows. Like a clue. With a footprint, or maybe the guy had dropped a piece of paper or something. But it didn’t happen that way. Everything was a dead end.”
“So what was your bottom line at the time?” Reacher asked. “On the Duncans. Guilty or not guilty?”
“Not guilty,” the woman said. “Because facts are facts, aren’t they?”
“Yet you still stood by Dorothy.”
“Partly because of the way I felt. Feelings are different than facts. And partly because of the aftermath. It was horrible for her. The Duncans were very self-righteous. And people were starting to wake up to the power they had over them. It was like the thought police. First Dorothy was supposed to apologize, which she wouldn’t, and then she was supposed to just shut up and carry on like nothing had ever happened. She couldn’t even grieve, because somehow that would have been like accusing the Duncans all over again. The whole county was uneasy about it. It was like Dorothy was supposed to take one for the team. Like one of those old legends, where she had to sacrifice her child to the monster, for the good of the village.”
There was no more talk. Reacher collected the three empty coffee cups and carried them out to the kitchen, partly to be polite, partly because he wanted to check the view through a different window. The landscape was still clear. Nothing coming. Nothing happening. After a minute the doctor joined him in the room, and asked, “So what are you going to do now?”
Reacher said, “I’m going to Virginia.”
“OK.”
“With two stops along the way.”
“Where?”
“I’m going to drop in on the county cops. Sixty miles south of here. I want to see their paperwork.”
“Will they still have it?”
Reacher nodded. “A thing like that, lots of different departments cooperating, everyone on their best behavior, they’ll have built a pretty big file. And they won’t have junked it yet. Because technically it’s still an open case. Their notes will be in storage somewhere. Probably a whole cubic yard of them.”
“Will they let you see them? Just like that?”
“I was a cop of sorts myself, thirteen years. I can usually talk my way past file clerks.”
“Why do you want to see it?”
“To check it for holes. If it’s OK, I’ll keep on running. If it’s not, I might come back.”
“To do what?”
“To fill in the holes.”
“How will you get down there?”
“Drive.”
“Showing up in a stolen truck won’t help your cause.”
“It’s got your plates on it now. They won’t know.”
“My plates?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll swap them back again. If the paperwork’s OK, then I’ll leave the truck right there near the police station with the proper plates on it, and sooner or later someone will figure out whose it is, and word will get back to the Duncans, and they’ll know I’m gone for good, and they’ll start leaving you people alone again.”
“That would be nice. What’s your second stop?”
“The cops are the second stop. First stop is closer to home.”
“Where?”
“We’re going to drop in on Seth Duncan’s wife. You and me. A house call. To make sure she’s healing right.”
Chapter 25
The doctor was immediately dead set against the idea. It was a house call he didn’t want to make. He looked away and paced the kitchen and traced his facial injuries with his fingertips and pursed his lips and ran his tongue over his teeth. Then eventually he said, “But Seth might be there.”
Reacher said, “I hope he is. We can check he’s healing right, too. And if he is, I can hit him again.”
“He’ll have Cornhuskers with him.”
“He won’t. They’re all out in the fields, looking for me. The few that remain, that is.”
“I don’t know about this.”
“You’re a doc
tor. You took an oath. You have obligations.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“Getting out of bed in the morning is dangerous.”
“You’re a crazy man, you know that?”
“I prefer to think of myself as conscientious.”
Reacher and the doctor climbed into the pick-up truck and headed back to the county two-lane and turned right. They came out on the road a couple of miles south of the motel and a couple of miles north of the three Duncan houses. Two minutes later the doctor stared at them as they passed by. Reacher took a look, too. Enemy territory. Three white houses, three parked vehicles, no obvious activity. By that point Reacher assumed the second Brett had delivered his messages. He assumed they had been heard and then immediately dismissed as bravado. Although the burned-out truck should have counted for something. The Duncans were losing, steadily and badly, and they had to know it.
Reacher made the left where he had the night before in the Subaru wagon, and then he threaded through the turns until Seth Duncan’s house appeared ahead on his right. It looked much the same lit by daylight as it had by electricity. The white mailbox with Duncan on it, the hibernating lawn, the antique horse buggy. The long straight driveway, the outbuilding, the three sets of doors. This time two of them were standing open. The back ends of two cars were visible in the gloom inside. One was a small red sports car, maybe a Mazda, very feminine, and the other was a big black Cadillac sedan, very masculine.
The doctor said, “That’s Seth’s car.”
Reacher smiled. “Which one?”
“The Cadillac.”
“Nice car,” Reacher said. “Maybe I should go smash it up. I’ve got a wrench of my own now. Want me to do that?”
“No,” the doctor said. “For God’s sake.”
Reacher smiled again and parked where he had the night before and they climbed out together and stood for a moment in the chill. The cloud was still low and flat, and mist was peeling off the underside of it and drifting back down to earth, ready for afternoon, ready for evening. The mist made the air itself look visible, gray and pearlescent, shimmering like a fluid.