by Lee Child
“You’re welcome. Thank you for mine.”
“It isn’t right, you know. People not eating because of the Duncans.”
“People do all kinds of things because of the Duncans.”
“I know what I’d do.”
She smiled. “We all talked like that, once upon a time, long ago. But they kept us poor and tired, and then we got old.”
“What do the young people do here?”
“They leave, just as soon as they can. The adventurous ones go all over the place. It’s a big country. The others stay closer to home, in Lincoln or Omaha.”
“Doing what?”
“There are jobs there. Some boys join the State Police. That’s always popular.”
“Someone should call those boys.”
She didn’t answer.
He asked, “What happened twenty-five years ago?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“You can, to me. No one will know. If I ever meet the Duncans, we’ll be discussing the present day, not ancient history.”
“I was wrong anyway.”
“About what?”
She wouldn’t answer.
He asked, “Were you the neighbor with the dispute?”
She wouldn’t answer.
He asked, “You want help cleaning up?”
She shook her head. “You don’t wash the dishes in a restaurant, do you?”
“Not so far.”
“Where were you, twenty-five years ago?”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Somewhere in the world.”
“Were you in the army then?”
“Probably.”
“People say you beat up three Cornhuskers yesterday.”
“Not all at once,” he said.
“You want more coffee?”
“Sure,” he said, and she recharged the percolator and set it going again. He asked, “How many farms contracted with the Duncans?”
“All of us,” she said. “This whole corner of the county. Forty farms.”
“That’s a lot of corn.”
“And soybeans and alfalfa. We rotate the crops.”
“Did you buy part of the old Duncan place?”
“A hundred acres. A nice little parcel. It squared off a corner. It made sense.”
“How long ago was that?”
“It must be thirty years.”
“So things were good for the first five years?”
“I’m not going to tell you what happened.”
“I think you should,” he said. “I think you want to.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Like you said, I had three football players sent after me. I’d like to understand why, at least.”
“It was because you busted Seth Duncan’s nose.”
“I’ve busted lots of noses. Nobody ever retaliated with retired athletes before.”
She poured the coffee. She placed his mug in front of him. The kitchen was warm from the stove. It felt like it would stay warm all day long. She said, “Twenty-five years ago Seth Duncan was eight years old.”
“And?”
“This corner of the county was like a little community. We were all spread out and isolated, of course, but the school bus kind of defined it. Everybody knew everybody else. Children would play together, big groups of them, at one house, then another.”
“And?”
“No one liked going to Seth Duncan’s place. Girls especially. And Seth played with girls a lot. More so than with boys.”
“Why didn’t they like it?”
“No one spelled it out. A place like this, a time like that, such things were not discussed. But something unpleasant was going on. Or nearly going on. Or in the air. My daughter was eight years old at the time. Same age as Seth. Almost the same birthday, as a matter of fact. She didn’t want to play there. She made that clear.”
“What was going on?”
“I told you, no one said.”
“But you knew,” Reacher said. “Didn’t you? You had a daughter. Maybe you couldn’t prove anything, but you knew.”
“Have you got kids?”
“None that I know about. But I was a cop of sorts for thirteen years. And I’ve been human all my life. Sometimes people just know things.”
The woman nodded. Sixty years old, blunt and square, her face flushed from the heat and the food. She said, “I suppose today they would call it inappropriate touching.”
“On Seth’s part?”
She nodded again. “And his father’s, and both his uncles’.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yes, it was.”
“What did you do?”
“My daughter never went there again.”
“Did you talk to people?”
“Not at first,” she said. “Then it all came out in a rush. Everyone was talking to everyone else. Nobody’s girl wanted to go there.”
“Did anyone talk to Seth’s mother?”
“Seth didn’t have a mother.”
Reacher said, “Why not? Had she left?”
“No.”
“Had she died?”
“She never existed.”
“She must have.”
“Biologically, I suppose. But Jacob Duncan was never married. He was never seen with a woman. No woman was ever seen with any of them. Their own mother had passed on years before. It was just old man Duncan and the three of them. Then the three of them on their own. Then all of a sudden Jacob was bringing a little boy to kindergarten.”
“Didn’t anyone ask where the kid came from?”
“People talked a little, but they didn’t ask. Too polite. Too inhibited. I suppose we all thought Seth was a relative. You know, maybe orphaned or something.”
“So what happened next? You all stopped your kids from going there to play, and that’s what caused the trouble?”
“That’s how it started. There was a lot of talk and whispers. The Duncans were all alone in their little compound. They were shunned. They resented it.”
“So they retaliated?”
“Not at first.”
“So when?”
“After a little girl went missing.”
Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini got back in their rented Impala and fired up the engine. The car had a bolt-on navigation system, a couple of extra dollars a day, but it was useless. The screen came up with nothing more than a few thin red lines, like doodles on a pad. None of the roads had names. Just numbers, or else nothing at all. Most of the map was blank. And it was either inaccurate or incomplete, anyway. The crossroads wasn’t even marked. Just like Vegas, to be honest. Vegas was growing so fast no GPS company could keep up with it. So Cassano and Mancini were used to navigating the old-fashioned way, which was to scribble down turn-by-turn directions freely given by a source who was anxious to be accurate, in order to avoid a worse beating than he was getting along with the initial questions. And the motel guy had been more anxious than most, right after the first two smacks. He was no kind of hero. That was for sure.
“Left out of the lot,” Mancini read out loud.
Cassano turned left out of the lot.
Dorothy the housekeeper made a third pot of coffee. She rinsed the percolator and filled it again and set it going. She said, “Seth Duncan had a hard time in school. He got bullied. Eight-year-old boys can be very tribal. I guess they felt they had permission to go after him, because of the whispers at home. And none of the girls stuck with him. They wouldn’t go to his house, and they wouldn’t even talk to him. That’s how children are. That’s how it was. All except one girl. Her parents had raised her to be decent and compassionate. She wouldn’t go to his house, but she still talked to him. Then one day that little girl just disappeared.”
Reacher said, “And?”
“It’s a horrible thing, when that happens. You have no idea. There’s a kind of crazy period at first, when everyone is mad and worried but can’t bring themselves to believe the worst. You know, a c
ouple of hours, maybe three or four, you think she’s playing somewhere, maybe out picking flowers, she’s lost track of the time, she’ll be home soon, right as rain. No one had cell phones back then, of course. Some people didn’t even have regular phones. Then you think the girl has gotten lost, and everyone starts driving around, looking for her. Then it goes dark, and then you call the cops.”
Reacher asked, “What did the cops do?”
“Everything they could. They did a fine job. They went house to house, they used flashlights, they used loud-hailers to tell everyone to search their barns and outbuildings, they drove around all night, then at first light they got dogs and called in the State Police and the State Police called in the National Guard and they got a helicopter.”
“Nothing?”
The woman nodded.
“Nothing,” she said. “Then I told them about the Duncans.”
“You did?”
“Someone had to. As soon as I spoke up, others joined in. We were all pointing our fingers. The State Police took us very seriously. I guess they couldn’t afford not to. They took the Duncans to a barracks over near Lincoln and questioned them for days. They searched their houses. They got help from the FBI. All kinds of laboratory people were there.”
“Did they find anything?”
“Not a trace.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Every test was negative. They said the child hadn’t been there.”
“So what happened next?”
“Nothing. It all fizzled out. The Duncans came home. The little girl was never seen again. The case was never solved. The Duncans were very bitter. They asked me to apologize, for naming names, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t give it up. My husband, neither. Some folks were on our side, like the doctor’s wife. But most weren’t, really. They saw which way the wind was blowing. The Duncans withdrew into themselves. Then they started punishing us. Like revenge. We didn’t get our crop hauled that year. We lost it all. My husband killed himself. He sat right in that chair where you’re sitting and he put his shotgun under his chin.”
“I’m sorry.”
The woman said nothing.
Reacher asked, “Who was the girl?”
No reply.
“Yours, right?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “It was my daughter. She was eight years old. She’ll always be eight years old.”
She started to cry, and then her phone started to ring.
Chapter 17
The phone was a clunky old Nokia. It was on the kitchen counter. It hopped and buzzed and trilled the old Nokia tune that Reacher had heard a thousand times before, in bars, on buses, on the street. Dorothy snatched it up and answered. She said hello and then she listened, to what sounded like a fast slurred message of some kind, maybe a warning, and then she clicked off and dropped the phone like it was scalding hot.
“That was Mr. Vincent,” she said. “Over at the motel.”
Reacher said, “And?”
“Two men were there. They’re coming here. Right now.”
“Who?”
“We don’t know. Men we’ve never seen before.” She opened the kitchen door and glanced down a hallway toward the front of the house. There was silence for a second and then Reacher heard the distant hiss of tires on blacktop, the moan of a slowing engine, the sound of brakes, and then the crunch of a wheel on gravel, then another, then two more together, as a car turned in and bumped onto the track.
The woman said, “Get out of here. Please. They can’t know you’re here.”
“We don’t know who they are.”
“They’re Duncan people. Who else would they be? I can’t let them find you here. It’s more than my life is worth.”
Reacher said, “I can’t get out of here. They’re already on the track.”
“Hide out back. Please. I’m begging you. They can’t find you here. I mean it.” She stepped out to the hallway, ready to meet them head-on at the front door. They were close, and moving fast. The gravel was loud. She said, “They might search. If they find you, tell them you snuck in the yard. Over the fields. Please. Tell them I didn’t know. Make them believe you. Tell them you’re nothing to do with me.” Then she closed the door on him and was gone.
Angelo Mancini folded the sheet of handwritten directions and put it in his pocket. They were on some lumpy, bumpy, piece-of-shit farm track, heading for some broken-down old woebegone piece-of-shit farmhouse that belonged in a museum or a history book. The navigation screen showed nothing at all. Just white space. Roberto Cassano was at the wheel, hitting every pothole. What did he care? They were Hertz’s tires, not his. Up ahead the front door opened and an old woman appeared on the step, clutching the jamb, like she would fall over if she let go.
Mancini said, “That’s a woman with a guilty secret, right there. Count on it.”
“Looks that way,” Cassano said.
Reacher checked the view across the yard at the back. Maybe sixty feet to the parked pick-up, maybe sixty more to the line of barns and sheds and coops and sties. He eased the door open. He turned back and checked the door to the front hallway. It was closed, but he could hear the car. It was crunching to a stop. Its doors were opening. He sensed the woman out there, staring at it, fearful and panicking. He shrugged and turned again to leave. His gaze passed over the kitchen table.
Not good.
They might search.
Tell them I didn’t know.
The table held the remains of two breakfasts.
Two oatmeal bowls, two plates all smeared with egg, two plates all full of toast crumbs, two spoons, two knives, two forks, two coffee mugs.
He put his toast plate on his egg plate, and he put his oatmeal bowl on his toast plate, and he put his coffee mug in his oatmeal bowl, and he put his knife and fork and spoon in his pocket. He picked up the teetering stack of china and carried it with him, across the kitchen, out the door. He held the stack one-handed and pulled the door shut after him and set off across the yard. The ground was beaten dirt mixed with crushed stone and matted with winter weeds. It was reasonably quiet underfoot. But the shakes in his arm were rattling the mug in the bowl. He was making a tinkling noise with every step he took. It sounded as loud as a fire alarm. He passed the pick-up truck. Headed onward to a barn. It was an old swaybacked thing made from thin tarred boards. It was in poor condition. It had twin doors. Hinged in the conventional way, not sliders. The hinges were shot and the doors were warped. He hooked a heel behind one of them and forced his ass into the gap and pushed with his hip and scraped his way inside, back first, then his shoulders, then the stack of crockery.
It was dark inside. No light in there, except blinding sparkles from chinks between the boards. They threw thin lines and spots of illumination across the floor. The floor was earth, soaked in old oil, matted with flakes of rust. The air smelled of creosote. He put the stack of china down. All around him was old machinery, uniformly brown and scaly with decay. He didn’t know what any of it was. There were tines and blades and wheels and metal all bent and welded into fantastical shapes. Farm stuff. Not his area of expertise. Not even close.
He stepped back to the leaning doors and peered through a crack and looked and listened, and drew up rules of engagement in his head. He couldn’t touch these guys, not unless he was prepared to go all the way and make them disappear forever, and their car, and then force Vincent at the motel to hold his tongue, also forever. Anything less than that, and it would all come back to Dorothy sooner or later. So prudence dictated he should stay quiet and out of sight, which he was prepared to do, maybe, just possibly, depending on what he heard from the house. One scream might be nerves or fright. Two screams, and he was going in there, come what may.
He heard nothing.
And he saw nothing, for ten long minutes. Then a guy stepped out the back door, into the yard, and another came out behind him. They walked ten paces and stopped and stood there side by side like they owned the place. They gazed left, gazed
ahead, gazed right. City boys. They had shined shoes and wool pants and wool overcoats. They were both on the short side of six feet, both heavy in the chest and shoulders, both dark. Both regular little tough guys, like something out of a television show.
They tracked left a little, toward the pick-up truck. They checked the load bed. They opened a door and checked the cab. They moved on, toward the line of barns and sheds and coops and sties.
Directly toward Reacher.
They came pretty close.
Reacher rolled his shoulders and snapped his elbows and flapped his wrists and tried to work some feeling into his arms. He made a fist with his right hand, and then his left.
The two guys walked on, closer still.
They looked left. They looked right. They sniffed the air.
They stopped.
Shiny shoes, wool coats. City boys. They didn’t want to be wading through pig shit and chicken feathers and turning over piles of old crap. They looked at each other and then the one on the right turned back to the house and called out, “Hey, old lady, get your fat ass out here right now.”
Forty yards away, Dorothy stepped out the door. She paused a beat and then walked toward the two guys, slow and hesitant. The two guys walked back toward her, just as slow. They all met near the pickup truck. The guy on the left stood still. The guy on the right caught Dorothy by the upper arm with one hand and used the other to take a pistol out from under his coat. A shoulder holster. The gun was some kind of a nickel-plated semiautomatic. Or stainless steel. Reacher was too far away to make out the brand. Maybe a Colt. Or maybe a copy. The guy raised it across his body and laid its muzzle against Dorothy’s temple. He held the gun flat, like a punk in a movie. His thumb and three fingers were wrapped tight around the grip. The fourth finger was on the trigger. Dorothy flinched away. The guy hauled on her arm and pulled her back.
He called out, “Reacher? Is that your name? You there? You hiding somewhere? You listening to me? I’m going to count to three. Then you come on out. If you don’t, I’m going to shoot the old cow. I’ve got a gun to her head. Tell him, grandma.”
Dorothy said, “There’s no one here.”
The yard went quiet. Three people, all alone in a thousand acres.
Reacher stood still, right where he was, on his own in the dark.