by Lee Child
Chapter 9
Reacher said, “I still don’t get it. The birdwatcher lady supplied the ID on Stan, and Stan could have been leaned upon to ID his mysterious friend, surely. Just one extra step. One extra visit to his house. Five minutes at most. That’s no kind of a manpower problem. One guy could have done it on the way to the donut shop.”
Amos said, “Stan Reacher was listed as resident outside the jurisdiction. That’s a whole lot of paperwork right there. All they had was typewriters back then. Plus they must have figured he was likely to clam up anyway, no matter how hard they leaned on him, which couldn’t have been very hard anyway, because they would have been on foreign turf, probably with a local guy sitting in, and maybe lawyers or parents too. Plus they must have figured the mystery friend would be in the wind already and out of the state by then. Plus they weren’t shedding any tears for the victim anyway. No doubt the easy decision was to let it all go.”
“Stan Reacher was a resident outside of what jurisdiction?”
“Laconia PD.”
“The story was he was born and grew up here.”
“Maybe he was born here, in the hospital, but then maybe he grew up out of town, on a farm or something.”
“I never got that impression.”
“In a nearby village, then. Close enough to be in the same birdwatching club as a woman living above a downtown grocery store. He would put Laconia as his birthplace, because that’s where the hospital was, and he would probably say he grew up in Laconia, too. Like shorthand for the general area as a whole. Like people say Chicago, even though a lot of the suburbs aren’t technically in Chicago at all. Same thing with Boston.”
“The Laconia metro area,” Reacher said.
“Things were more dispersed back then. There were little mills and factories all over. Couple dozen workers in four-flats. Maybe a one-room schoolhouse. Maybe a church. All considered Laconia, no matter what the postal service had to say about it.”
“Try Reacher on its own,” he said. “No first names. Maybe I have cousins in the area. I could get an address.”
Amos pulled her keyboard close again and typed, seven letters, and clicked. Reacher saw the screen change, reflected in her eyes.
“Just one more hit,” she said. “More than seventy-some years after the first. You must be a relatively law-abiding family.” She clicked again, and read out loud, “About a year and a half ago a patrol car responded to the county offices because a customer was causing a disturbance. Yelling, shouting, behaving in a threatening manner. The uniforms calmed him down and he apologized and it went no further. He gave his name as Mark Reacher. Resident outside the jurisdiction.”
“Age?”
“Then twenty-six.”
“He could be my distant nephew, many times removed. What was he upset about?”
“He claimed a building permit was slow coming through. He claimed he was renovating a motel somewhere out of town.”
—
After thirty minutes in the sun Patty went inside to use the bathroom. On her way back she stopped at the vanity opposite the end of the bed. She looked in the mirror and blew her nose. She balled up the tissue and lobbed it toward the trash can. She missed. She bent down to correct her error. She was Canadian.
She saw a used cotton bud in the dent where the carpet met the wall. Not hers. She didn’t use them. It was deep in the shadows, at the back of the knee hole under the vanity, beyond the legs of the stool. Imperfect housekeeping, no question, but understandable. Maybe even inevitable. Maybe it had been pressed deeper into its hiding place by the wheels of the vacuum cleaner itself.
Except.
She called out, “Shorty, come take a look at this.”
Shorty got up out of his chair and stepped in the room.
He left the door wide open.
Patty pointed.
Shorty said, “It’s for cleaning your ears. Or drying them. Maybe both. They have two ends. I’ve seen them in the drugstore.”
“Why is it there?”
“Someone missed the trash can. Maybe it bounced off the rim, and rolled out of sight. Happens all the time. The maids don’t care.”
She said, “Go back to your lawn chair, Shorty.”
He did.
A long minute later she joined him.
He said, “What did I do?”
She said, “It’s what you didn’t do.”
“What didn’t I do?”
“You didn’t think,” she said. “Mark told us this is the first room they’ve refurbished so far. He said in fact they only just finished it. He asked us to do them the honor of being its very first guests. So why does it have a used cotton bud in it?”
Shorty nodded. Slow but sure. He said, “The story about their car was weird, too. Peter must be some kind of saboteur. When are they going to catch on?”
“Why would they lie about the room?”
“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe a painter used the cotton bud. To touch up a last-minute ding in the wood stain. That happens, too. Maybe when they moved the furniture in. Hard to avoid.”
“Now you think they’re OK?”
“Not about the car, no. If theirs wouldn’t start this morning, why hadn’t they already called the mechanic anyway?”
“The phone was out.”
“Maybe not then. Maybe not first thing in the morning. We could have tagged on. We could have split the call-out charge. That would have made it more reasonable.”
“Shorty, forget the call-out charge, OK? This is more important. They’re acting weird.”
“I told you that at the beginning.”
“I thought you just didn’t like them.”
“For a reason.”
“What are we going to do?”
Shorty glanced around. First at the mouth of the track through the trees, and then at the dead Honda’s load space, where their suitcase was weighing down the springs.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we could tow the car with a quad-bike. Maybe the keys are in them. Or on a hook inside the barn.”
“We can’t steal a quad-bike.”
“It wouldn’t be stealing. It would be borrowing. We could tow the car two miles to the road, and then bring the quad-bike back again.”
“Then what? All we would have is a dead car on the side of the road.”
“Maybe a wrecker would come by. Or we could get any kind of ride and forget about the car. The county would come along and junk it sooner or later.”
“Do we have a tow rope?”
“Maybe there’s one in the barn.”
“I don’t think a quad-bike would be strong enough.”
“We could use two. Like tugboats pulling an ocean liner to the harbor mouth.”
“That’s crazy,” Patty said.
“OK, maybe we could use a quad-bike to haul just the suitcase.”
“You mean drag it along?”
“I think they have a platform on the back.”
“Too small.”
“Then we could balance it on the gas tank and the handlebar.”
“They won’t like it if we leave our car here.”
“Too bad.”
“Do you even know how to drive a quad-bike?”
“It can’t be that hard. We would want to go slow anyway. And we couldn’t fall off. Not like a regular motorbike.”
“It’s a possibility,” Patty said. “I suppose.”
“Let’s wait until after dinner,” Shorty said. “Maybe the phone is back on and the mechanic will show up and everything will work out fine. If not, we’ll take a look at the barn after dark. OK?”
Patty didn’t answer. They stayed where they were, slumped down in their lawn chairs, keeping the low sun on their faces. They left their room door wide open.
—
Fifty yards away in the command center in the back parlor, Mark asked, “Who missed the cotton bud?”
“All of us,” Peter said. “We all checked the room and we all signed off on
it.”
“Then we all made a bad mistake. Now they’re agitated. Way too soon. We need to pace this better.”
“He thinks it was the painter. She’ll believe him eventually. She doesn’t want to worry. She wants to be happy. She’ll talk herself around. They’ll calm down.”
“You think?”
“Why would we lie about the room? There’s no possible reason for it.”
Mark said, “Bring me a quad-bike.”
Chapter 10
Reacher walked back to the fancy county office with the census scans and the million-dollar cubicles, and he found the same surly guy on duty at the desk. Once again Reacher asked for two censuses, the first when Stan was two, and the second when he was twelve, but this time for the rest of the county that lay outside of Laconia’s technical city limit.
The guy said, “We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“You’re asking for a donut shape. With a hole in the middle, which is Laconia, which you already saw. Am I right?”
“You got it in one.”
“That’s not how the extracts are done. There are no donut shapes. You can have an area, or a bigger area, or a bigger-still area. Which would be the city, the county, and the state. But the bigger area always includes the smaller area all over again. And the bigger-still area includes both of them all over again. Which is logical, if you think about it. There are no holes in the middle. The city is in the county, and the county is in the state.”
“Understood,” Reacher said. “Thank you for the explanation. I’ll take the whole county.”
“Are you still a resident?”
“You agreed I was this morning. And here I am again. Clearly I didn’t leave town with all my worldly possessions. I would say my status as a resident is more secure than ever.”
“Cubicle four,” the guy said.
—
Patty and Shorty heard an engine start up in the distance, deafening like a motorcycle, and they got up and walked to the corner to take a look. They saw Peter riding a quad-bike back to the house. Now only eight were neatly parked.
“First turn of the key,” Shorty said. “I hope they’re all like that.”
“Way too noisy,” Patty said, disappointed. “We can’t do it. They would know.”
Peter parked at the distant house. He killed the engine and silence came back. He got off and went inside. Patty and Shorty went back to their lawn chairs.
Shorty said, “The land is pretty flat around here.”
“Does that help us?”
“We could push the quad-bike. With the engine off. With the suitcase balanced on it. We could use it like a furniture dolly.”
“Could we?”
“They can’t be that heavy. You see people wheeling motorbikes all the time. We wouldn’t even have to keep it upright, and there are two of us. I bet we could do it dead easy.”
“Two miles there and two miles back? Which would leave the suitcase by the side of the road, and us back here. So then we would have another two miles to walk. Altogether six, four of them pushing a quad-bike. It would take a good long time.”
“I figure about three hours,” Shorty said.
“Depends how fast we could push. We don’t know yet.”
“OK, call it four hours. We should time it to finish at dawn. Maybe we might see a farmer heading to market. There has to be traffic sometimes. So we should start in the middle of the night. Which is good. They’ll be asleep.”
“It’s a possibility,” Patty said. “I suppose.”
They heard the distant quad-bike start up again, fifty yards away, then closer. It sounded like it was passing the barn and coming straight toward them.
They stood up.
The engine got loud and the machine roared around the corner, with Mark riding it, scattering dirt. There was a cardboard carton strapped to the rack on the back. Mark braked to a stop, and tapped the gear change into neutral, and shut the motor down. He smiled his master-of-the-universe smile.
“Good news,” he said. “The phone is back on. The mechanic will be here first thing in the morning. We were too late to get him today. But he knows what the problem is. He’s seen it before. Apparently there’s an electronic chip close to where the heater hoses go through the back of the dashboard. The chip fries when the water in the hoses gets too hot. He’s bringing a replacement chip he got from a wrecker’s yard. He wants five dollars for it. Plus fifty for labor.”
“That’s great,” Shorty said.
Patty said nothing.
Mark said, “And I’m afraid I want another fifty for the room.”
There was silence for a second.
Mark said, “Guys, I would love to tell you just forget it, but the bank would kick my ass. This is a business, I’m afraid. We have to take it seriously. And from your point of view it’s not so terrible. A hundred for the motel and fifty-some to fix your car, and you’re out of here for less than two hundred dollars all in. Could have been a whole lot worse.”
“Come take a look at this,” Patty said.
Mark climbed off the quad-bike and Patty led the way inside the room. She pointed down into the void under the vanity.
Mark said, “What am I looking for?”
“You’ll see.”
He looked.
He saw.
He said, “Oh, dear.”
He bent down and came back up with the cotton bud.
“I apologize most sincerely,” he said. “This is unforgivable.”
“Why did you tell us we were the first guests in this room?”
“What?”
“You made a big deal out of it.”
“You are the first guests in this room. Most definitely. This is something else entirely.”
“The painter?” Shorty said.
“No.”
“Then who?” Patty asked.
“The bank told us to improve our marketing. We hired a photographer to take pictures for a new brochure. He brought a model from Boston with him. We let her do her make-up in here, because it’s the nicest room. I suppose we were trying to impress her. She was very good looking. I thought we cleaned up after her. Obviously we didn’t succeed completely. Again, I apologize most sincerely.”
“So do I,” Patty said. “I guess. For jumping to conclusions. How did the pictures come out?”
“She was dressed as a hiker. Very big boots and very short shorts. A hiker on a warm day, clearly, because her top wasn’t huge either. The motel was behind her. It looked pretty good.”
Patty gave him fifty of her hard-earned bucks.
She said, “What do we owe you for the meals?”
“Nothing,” Mark said. “That’s the least we can do.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. That’s just housekeeping money. The bank doesn’t see those numbers.” He put the fifty bucks and the cotton bud in his pants pocket. He said, “And kind of on the same subject, I have something for you.”
He led the way out to the lot again, back to the quad-bike, to the carton strapped to its rack.
He said, “You are absolutely invited to dinner tonight, of course, and breakfast tomorrow, but equally all of us would absolutely understand if you preferred to eat alone, just the two of you. Everyone knows making conversation can be stressful. We put together some ingredients for you. Either join us at the house, or help yourselves from the box. No pressure either way.”
He undid the straps and hefted the box in his arms. He half-turned and slid it into Shorty’s waiting hands.
“Thank you,” Patty said.
Mark just smiled, and climbed aboard the quad-bike, and started up its ferocious engine. He turned a wide circle in the stony lot and disappeared around the corner, heading back to the house.
—
Cubicle four was the same as cubicle two, except in a different place. Otherwise it was identical. It had the same tweed chair, and a flat screen, and a sharpened pencil, and a pad of paper with th
e county name at the top, like a hotel brand. The flat screen was already lit up blue, with two icons already top right, like stamps on a letter, the same as before. Reacher double-clicked on the first, and saw the same battleship-gray background, and a title page in the same government writing, saying all the same things he had seen before, except for the center line, which said this time the returns were extracted for the county as a whole.
He scrolled down, with the wheel between the mouse’s shoulder blades. The same introduction was there, with the same long disquisition about improvements in methodology. He skipped it all and went straight to the list of names. He got a rhythm going, flicking at the wheel with the tip of his finger, using some kind of elastic inbuilt momentum, spooling through the A section, and the B section, and the C section, then speeding to a blur, and then letting the list settle and slow and come to a stop among a short run of Q-names. There was a Quaid family, and a Quail, and a Quattlebaum, and two Queens.
He rolled on to the R section.
And there they were. Near the top. James Reacher, male, white, twenty-six years old, a tin mill foreman, and his wife Elizabeth Reacher, female, white, twenty-four years old, a bed sheet finisher, and their thus-far only child Stan Reacher, male, white, two years old.
Two years old in April, when the census was taken. Which would make him three years old in the fall, which would make him sixteen years old late on a September evening in 1943. Not fifteen. The old birdwatching lady was right.
Reacher said, “Huh.”
He read on. Their address was given as a number and a street in a place named Ryantown. Their home was rented, at a cost of forty-three dollars a month. They didn’t own a radio set. They didn’t work on a farm. James had been twenty-two and Elizabeth twenty when they married. Both could read and write. Neither had any Indian tribal affiliation.
Reacher double-clicked on the tiny red traffic light at the top of the document, and the screen went back to the blue wash with the two postage stamps. He double-clicked on the second of them, and the census from ten years later opened up. He scrolled down, swooping through most of the alphabet, once again rolling to a stop among the Q-names. The Quaids were still there, and the Quails, and the two Queen families, but the Quattlebaums had gone.
The Reachers were still there. James, Elizabeth, and Stan, in that April thirty-six, thirty-four, and twelve years old respectively. Apparently there had been no further children. No siblings for Stan. James had changed his employment to laborer on a county road grading crew, and Elizabeth was out of work altogether. Their address was the same, but the rent had dropped to thirty-six bucks. Seven years of Depression had taken its toll, on workers and landlords alike. James and Elizabeth were still listed as literate, and Stan was in daily attendance at school. The household had acquired a radio set.