23 Past Tense

by Lee Child

  Then he said, “I’ll see you soon,” and walked out the door.

  —

  Reacher saw the left turn coming up. It was a hundred yards ahead. It met the main drag at an oblique angle and curved gently away, as if reluctant. Then it ran onward through apple orchards. He walked on toward it. Halfway there he had to step up on the grass shoulder to let a giant tow truck blow by. It was huge and bright red and spotlessly clean. It had gold pinstripes all over it. It shook the ground under his feet. He watched it go. Then he walked on again and took the turn.

  The side road was narrower than the main drag, but wide enough and hard enough for the kind of primitive trucks they might have used long ago, for hauling wood or coal or tin. On either side in the orchards the apple trees were bending over with heavy fruit. He could smell it in the air. He could smell hot dry grass. He could hear the buzz of insects. Overhead a hawk rode the thermals.

  Then half a mile after its reluctant turn away from Laconia, the road turned again, as if definitively, due west. After that it ran straight into the distance, through more apple orchards, toward a small shiny dot, which Reacher figured might be a parked car. Beyond that seemed to be trees of a different green. He walked on. As he got closer he saw the dot was indeed a car. Shiny because of the power of the sun, not because of the paint on the car. It looked like a battered old lump. Eventually he saw it was a Subaru, a little like the one he had ridden in with the contractor with the inspector problem, genetically related, but twenty years older. Like an ancestor. It was parked head on against a wooden fence that ran side to side where the blacktop ended. Beyond the fence was another acre of apple orchard, and then another fence, beyond which were wild trees with bigger leaves.

  There was a guy in the Subaru.

  He was sitting behind the wheel. Reacher could see the collar of a blue denim jacket, and a long gray ponytail. The guy wasn’t moving. He was just staring ahead through the windshield.

  Reacher walked the length of the car on the passenger side and stopped with his back to the guy and his hips against the fence. The next fence was a hundred yards away. The trees beyond it looked like regular New England species, densely but randomly scattered, twisted and competing. Which might be what happened when seeds blew in.

  Also, the fence looked straight.

  Promising.

  Behind him he heard a car door open, and a voice said, “You’re the man who talked to Bruce Jones.”

  Reacher turned around and said, “Am I?”

  The guy from the Subaru was a reedy character maybe seventy years old, tall but cadaverous. Under his jacket his shoulders looked like a coat hanger.

  He said, “He showed you the newsletter I wrote.”

  “That was you?”

  “The very same. He called me. He thought I might be interested that you were interested. I was, so I came out to meet you.”

  “How did you know where?”

  “You’re looking for Ryantown,” the guy said.

  “Have I found it?”

  “Straight ahead.”

  “Those trees?”

  “They thin out in the center. You can see pretty well.”

  “Sure I won’t get poisoned?”

  “Tin has the potential to be dangerous. More than a hundred milligrams of tin per cubic meter of air is immediately injurious to life and health. What’s worse is when tin bonds with certain hydrocarbons to make organotins. Some of those compounds are more lethal than cyanide. That’s what I was worried about.”

  “What happened with that in the end?”

  “The chemistry didn’t say what it needed to say.”

  “Even though top scientists were working on it?”

  “In the end the corporation in Colorado banned me from trespassing on what I insisted was their land. They took out a restraining order to keep me away. I can’t go beyond this fence.”

  “Pity,” Reacher said. “You could have shown me around.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Reacher.”

  The guy said an address. A street number and a street name. The same name and the same number Reacher had seen in cubicle four, on the screen, from the census when his father was two.

  “It was on the ground floor,” the guy said. “Some of the tile is still there. In the kitchen. It was still there eight years ago, anyway.”

  “You haven’t been back?”

  “You can’t fight city hall.”

  “Who would know?” Reacher said. “Just this once.”

  The guy didn’t answer.

  Reacher said, “Wait.”

  He looked ahead, across the hundred yards of orchard, to the second fence, and the trees beyond.

  He said, “If that’s Ryantown over there, why does the road stop here?”

  “It used to go all the way,” the guy said. “Technically the apple farmer is only squatting on this part of his land. About forty years ago a cold winter froze the blacktop off, and the next winter broke the base up, so in the spring the farmer borrowed a bulldozer and planted some more apple trees. Then in the summer the county came by and fixed what it could see. In the fall the farmer threw up this fence, and from that point onward it was a done deal. But good luck ever selling that parcel. The title search won’t come back pretty.”

  “OK,” Reacher said. “Maybe I’ll see you later.”

  He hitched up on the fence, and swung his legs over, and stepped down in the orchard.

  “Wait,” the guy said. “I’ll come with you.”

  “You sure?”

  “Who will know?”

  “Live free or die,” Reacher said. “I saw it on your license plate.”

  The guy stepped up on the bottom rail of the fence and from there performed a maneuver similar to Reacher’s. They walked together past shiny green eye-level apples, all of them bigger than baseballs, some of them bigger than softballs, stumbling now and then on uneven ground, where maybe forty years earlier the clandestine winter cleanup had been a little hasty. A hundred yards later they arrived at the second fence, where ahead of them were trees of a different kind, not decorous or orderly or smelling sweetly of ripe fruit, but rank weeds, basically. They were thinner and unhealthier dead ahead, because there they were growing through where the old road resumed, without the benefit of either a bulldozer or planting. Therefore dead ahead would be the practical way in. No machete required. Or at least less pushing and shoving. The guy with the ponytail agreed. He was looking at it eight years later, but it was still the best option.

  “How long before we see anything?” Reacher asked.

  “Right away,” the guy said. “Look down. You’re walking on the old road. Nothing has been done to it, except by nature, and weather.”

  Which was plenty. They climbed the fence and pushed through thin trunks and halfhearted bushes, over terrain broken up by sixty years of rain and roots, with cobblestones thrust upward and turned over and rolled aside. Soon they were in an inner ring, like the hole in a donut, where the trees were thin everywhere, because the ground was bad everywhere. The road itself could be traced ahead, curving toward where Reacher could hear water. The stream. Maybe the mill was down there. Built next to it, or even over it.

  The guy with the ponytail started pointing things out. First up on the left was a rectangular foundation the size of a single garage. The church, the guy said. Facing away from everything else, as if from temptation and wickedness. Next up on the right was the same kind of thing. The nub of a stone foundation, just inches high, mostly mossy and covered, crisply enclosing an area of early and vigorous growth, because it had been a crawl space, with no cobblestones, or flagstones, or stones of any other kind. Just beaten earth, which after a couple of rains was raring to go. This was the schoolroom, the guy said. Better than you might expect. All the kids could read and write. Some of them could think. Teachers were respected then.

  “Were you a teacher?” Reacher asked.

  “For a time,” the guy said. “In an earlier
life.”

  The mill was where the road met the stream. It had been built half in and half out of the water. All that was left was a complex matrix of blocky foundations made of mossy stone, half overgrown by damp riverbank species. One of the foundations was solid and the size of a chimney. One was solid and the size of a room. Perhaps to support heavy machinery. Cauldrons, and crucibles, and ladles. The guy showed Reacher a drain in the floor, open to the water below.

  The workers’ housing was across the street, in two buildings laid out in a line. Just the foundations remained. Both would have had a central lobby with stairs, with left-hand and right-hand apartments up and down. Two four-flats. A total of eight residences. Ryantown, New Hampshire. Population, possibly less than thirty.

  The guy said, “The Reacher address would have been the ground floor apartment on the extreme right-hand end. Nearest the mill. Traditionally the foreman lived there. Your grandfather, perhaps.”

  “For a time he graded roads for the county. But his address didn’t change.”

  “The mill closed for a couple of years late in the Depression. No point throwing him out in the street. It wasn’t like they fired him and needed his house. The mill was idle. It was World War Two that got it going again.”

  Reacher looked up at the sky. It was full of bird life. Then in his mind he subtracted the new trees and rebuilt the old chimney, and he wondered how it was back in the fall of 1943, with the mill running night and day, and the sky full of smoke.

  The guy said, “I better get going. I shouldn’t be here at all. You stay, if you want. I’ll wait in the car. I could give you a ride, if you like.”

  “Thanks,” Reacher said. “But don’t wait any longer than you want to. I’m always happy to walk.”

  The guy nodded, and slipped away through the trees, back the way they had come. Reacher walked over to the right-hand four-flat. Nothing was left of where the shared entrance would have been, except for a stone doorstep. It was wide and deep. It bridged a gutter on the side of the road. The gutter was made from cobblestones laid in a deep U-shaped contour, now mostly broken up and displaced by growth. He stepped over it into the one-time lobby. The floor was cement, broken up by time into random slabs, canted this way and that like ice floes on a winter river. Every split and seam had been colonized by something growing.

  Nothing remained of the lobby’s right-hand wall except for stubs of broken brick, low down at floor level. They looked like teeth smashed down to the gum. In the center was a stone saddle, no taller, but intact. The right-hand ground-floor apartment’s front door. Reacher stepped inside. The hallway floor had three trees growing through it. Their trunks were no thicker than his wrist, but they had raced twenty feet high, looking for light. Beyond them and either side were low lines of smashed brick, showing where the rooms had been, like an architect’s floor plan come to life, slightly three dimensional. Two bedrooms, he thought, plus a living room and a dine-in kitchen. All small. Mean and pinched, by modern standards. No bathroom. Maybe out back.

  The surviving patch of tile was on a tipped-up slab of what must have been the kitchen floor. It looked like a standard old-fashioned commercial product, and the cement under it looked crusty and full of air, but it had clung on by some miracle of adhesive chemistry. The pattern in the tile was faded and washed out by sixty years of exposure, but it looked like once upon a time it had been some kind of a late Victorian riot of bright tangled colors, with acanthus leaves, and marigolds, and artichoke blossoms. Reacher imagined it close up, from a kid’s point of view, crawling around, with the colors bobbing in and out of focus. As he remembered it the only color Stan had grown up to care about was olive drab. Maybe why.

  He left by squeezing past the hallway trees again and going out through the lobby. Which was pointless, because he could have stepped out of the building anywhere he chose. No wall was more than four inches high. But he wanted to feel he was retracing steps. He paused at the street door, which wasn’t there, and sat down on the step, which still was, like a kid might, maybe after a rainstorm, with the gutter running like a river under his feet.

  Then he heard a sound, way off to his right.

  It was a yelp. A man’s voice. Definitely not joy or ecstasy. Not really outrage or anger either. Just pain. Distant. About where the orchard was, on the way back to the car. Reacher stood up, and picked his way over the heaved and tumbled stones as fast as he could, slipping between trees, following the old road, past the schoolroom, past the church, back to the fence.

  Where fifty yards away he saw the old guy with the ponytail, exactly halfway across the orchard. Another guy less than half his age and maybe twice his weight was standing behind him, twisting his arms.

  Reacher stepped over the fence and set out toward them.

  Chapter 18

  Fifty yards would have been five or six seconds for an athlete, but Reacher was aiming nearer thirty. A slow walk. But purposeful. Intended to communicate something. He kept his strides long and his shoulders loose and his hands away from his sides. He kept his head up and his eyes hard on the guy. A primitive signal, learned long ago. The guy glanced away to the south. For help, maybe. Maybe he wasn’t alone.

  Reacher got close.

  The big guy turned to face him. He wrestled the old guy around in front, and used him like a human shield.

  Reacher stopped six feet away.

  He said, “Let him go.”

  Just three words, but in a tone also learned long ago, with whole extra paragraphs hidden in the dying vowel sound at the end of the phrase, about the inevitable and catastrophic result of attempted resistance. The big guy let the old guy go. But he wasn’t quitting. No sir. He wanted Reacher to be sure about that. He made it like he wanted to free up his hands anyway. For more important purposes. He shoved the old guy aside and stepped right into Reacher’s space, not more than four feet away. He was twenty-some years old, dark haired and unshaven, more than six feet and two hundred pounds, tanned and muscled by outdoor labor.

  He said, “This is none of your business.”

  Reacher thought, what is this, Groundhog Day?

  But out loud he said, “You were committing a crime on public land. I would be failing in my duty as a citizen if I didn’t point it out. That’s how civilization works.”

  The guy glanced away to the south, and back again.

  He said, “This ain’t public land. This is my granddaddy’s apple farm. And neither of you should be here. Him because he ain’t allowed and you because you’re trespassing.”

  “This is the road,” Reacher said. “Your granddaddy stole it from the county forty years ago. Back when he was a brave young fellow. Like you are now.”

  The guy glanced south again, but this time he didn’t glance back. Reacher turned and saw another guy approaching, walking fast between two lines of trees, where the orchard came down a slope. He looked the same as the first guy, except a generation older. Not more. The daddy, perhaps. Not the granddaddy. Better jeans than his son. Cleaner T shirt. Deeper tan, grayer hair. Built the same, but fifty-something.

  He arrived, and said, “What’s going on here?”

  Reacher said, “You tell me.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Just a guy standing on the public road asking you a question.”

  “This is not the public road.”

  “That’s the problem with denial. Reality doesn’t care what you think. It just keeps rolling along. This is the road. Always was. Still is.”

  “What’s your question?”

  “I saw your boy physically assaulting this much older gentleman. I guess my question is how well you think that reflects on your parenting skills.”

  “In this case, pretty damn well,” the new guy said. “What are our apples worth if people think our water is poisoned?”

  “That all was eight years ago,” Reacher said. “It came to nothing anyway. The top scientists in the world said your water is OK. So get over it. With a little humility. Probably
you said some dumb thing eight years ago. Should I twist your arm today?”

  The old guy with the ponytail said, “Technically they have a contract with the corporation in Colorado. There was a rider on the restraining order. It said they get paid if they can prove I was here. I hoped they had forgotten the arrangement. Apparently they hadn’t. They saw my car.”

  “How do they prove it?”

  “They just did. They texted a picture. That’s where he went. No cell signal, except up on the rise.”

  “Law and order,” the daddy said. “It’s what this country needs.”

  “Except for the part about stealing the county road to grow more apples.”

  “I’m getting sick of hearing you say that, over and over.”

  “It’s the sound of reality, rolling along.”

  “Why were you in the woods anyway?”

  “None of your business,” Reacher said.

  “Maybe it is our business. We have a relationship with the landowner.”

  “You can’t text a picture of me.”

  “Why not?”

  “You would have to take your phone out of your pocket. Whereupon I would take it away from you and break it. I guess that’s why you can’t.”

  “There are two of us. Two phones.”

  “Still not enough. You should call for reinforcements. But oh dear, you can’t. No cell signal, except up on the rise.”

  “You’re a cocky son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

  “I prefer realistic,” Reacher said.

  “Want to put it to the test?”

  “I would have an ethical dilemma. It might scar the boy for life to see his daddy laid out in front of him. Equally it might scar you to see your boy laid out. After being unable to protect him, I mean. You might feel bad about that. I believe it’s a parenting thing. I wouldn’t know for sure. I’m not a father myself. But I can imagine.”

  The guy didn’t reply.

  Reacher said, “Wait.”

  He looked south, between the two lines of trees, where the orchard came down the slope.