23 Past Tense

by Lee Child

  “Back there,” Reacher said. “You shouldn’t have run. Not a smart tactic. The cops will always get you in the end.”

  “Were you a cop?”

  “In the army,” Reacher said. “Long ago.”

  “I know I shouldn’t have run,” the guy said. “But it’s an old habit.”

  He said nothing more. He just drove on. Reacher watched the traffic. No blue van. They made a left and a right. They seemed to be heading north and west. Toward the apple farm itself. And Ryantown. That general area.

  Reacher said, “Did you make the arrangements?”

  “They’re expecting us.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Visiting hours start at ten.”

  “Great.”

  “The old man’s name is Mr. Mortimer.”

  “Good to know,” Reacher said.

  They found the main drag out of town, and two miles later turned left, on the road Reacher had seen the day before. The road that led to the place with no water. They followed it west, through woods, past fields. Reacher watched out his window. In the far distance on his right lay Bruce Jones’s acres, with his twelve dogs, and then came the orchards, and Ryantown itself, overgrown and ghostly.

  He said, “How much further?”

  “Nearly there,” the guy said.

  Two miles later on the left Reacher saw a shape. Way far in the distance. Some kind of a new development. Long low buildings, laid out in a virgin field. There were crisp blacktop roads with bright white markings. There were newly planted trees, looking pale and slender and delicate, next to their natural gnarly neighbors. The buildings were bland stucco, with metal windows, and white aluminum rainwater pipes that kinked at the bottom and ran away to spouts a yard into the grass. There was a sign at the main entrance. Something about assisted living.

  “This is it,” the old guy said.

  The clock in Reacher’s head hit ten exactly.

  —

  The third arrival was as stealthy and self contained as the first. The gentleman in question drove himself from a large house in a small town in a rural region of Pennsylvania. Initially he was in a car reported scrapped in western New York four months previously. He had prepared well ahead of time. He believed preparedness was everything. The whole journey had been rehearsed, over and over in his mind. He had looked for snags and problems. He wanted to be ready. He had two overarching aims. He didn’t want to be caught, and he didn’t want to be late.

  The plan was about anonymity, of course, and cut outs, and untraceability. Had to be. Stage one was to drive non-stop in the paperless car to a friend’s place in back of a service station off the Mass Pike, just west of Boston. He knew the guy from a different community. A different shared interest. A tight, passionate group of guys. Secret and embattled. Loyal and helpful. They made a point of it. Like a fetish. What a fellow member wanted, a fellow member got. No questions asked.

  The friend’s day job was trading commercial vehicles. He bought them at auction, after they came off lease. For resale. They came and went, clean and dirty, used and abused, banged up and not a scratch. On any given day he had a couple dozen around. On that particular day he had three clear favorites. All panel vans, all ordinary, all invisible. No one paid attention to a panel van. A panel van was a hole in the air.

  The best example was tidy in appearance and dark blue in color. With gold signwriting. It had come in not long before, as a repo, from a bankrupt carpet cleaner in the city. Once a very upscale operation, by the look of it. Persian rugs. Hence the gold signwriting and the high standard of maintenance. The man from Pennsylvania loaded his stuff in it, and started it up. He set the GPS on his phone. He drove north. The route took him on the highway for a spell, then off near Manchester, New Hampshire, and onward to the back of beyond, through a small town named Laconia.

  Where he got scared. Where he nearly quit. He saw two cop cars, clearly eyeballing everyone coming in from the south. Searching. Staring at him. As if they knew all about him ahead of time. As if someone had dropped a dime. He panicked and pulled over in an alley, and stopped in a loading bay behind a store. He checked his e-mail. His secret account, on his secret phone. The webmail page, with the translations in the foreign alphabets.

  There was no cancelation message.

  No warnings, no alerts.

  He took a deep breath. He knew the scene. Any such community had a failsafe. An emergency one-click button, first thing to get to, guaranteed, no matter what else was going down. It would generate an automatic message. Maybe innocuous, to be on the safe side, but to be understood as a code. The children are under the weather today. Something like that.

  There was no such message.

  He checked again.

  No message.

  He backed out of the alley and drove on. He was quickly out of town. He didn’t see the police cars again. He relaxed. Straight away he felt better. In fact he felt good. He felt he was earning it. He was facing dangers. He drove through woods and past horse fields and cow fields. On his left a shallow turn led away through apple orchards, but his phone said not to take it. He kept on straight, ten more open miles, and then the woods came back, for another ten. The van rushed along, almost brushing the trees. They met overhead. It was a green and secret world.

  Then his phone told him the final turn was fast approaching, in half a mile on the left, a thread-like track curling away an inch into the forest. He took it, and thumped onward over blacktop missing some of its surface. He ran over a wire, that he figured rang a bell somewhere.

  Two miles later he came out in a clearing. The motel was dead ahead. There was a Volvo wagon outside of what must have been room three. As anonymous as a panel van. There was a guy in a lawn chair outside of room five. No visible means of transportation. Outside of room ten was a blue Honda Civic. Weird looking plates. Maybe foreign.

  He met Mark in the office. For the first time, face to face. They had corresponded, of course. He got room seven. He parked the van. The guy in the lawn chair watched. He put his bags in the room, and then he stepped back out to the light. He nodded to the guy in the lawn chair. But he strolled the other way, through the lot, to room ten. Important. Like a ceremony. His first look. At nothing much, as it turned out. Room ten’s window blind was down. There was silence inside. Nothing was happening.

  Chapter 25

  Reacher thought the old people’s home was a cheap but sincere attempt to provide a decent place to live. He liked it. Not for himself. He didn’t expect to live long enough. But other people might enjoy it. The décor was bright. The atmosphere was happy. Maybe a little forced. They were welcomed at the reception desk by a cheerful woman who spoke to them as she would to the bereaved, except not exactly. A little livelier. A unique tone. Maybe part of her training. Maybe learned in role play class. As if visitors to an old people’s home made up a unique demographic. Not the recently bereaved. The soon to be. The pre-bereaved.

  The woman pointed and said, “Mr. Mortimer is waiting for you in the day room.”

  Reacher followed the guy with the ponytail down a long and pleasant corridor, to a set of double doors. Inside was a tight circle of wipe-clean armchairs. In one of them was a very old man. Mr. Mortimer, Reacher assumed. His hair was white and wispy, and his skin was pale and translucent. Like it wasn’t really there at all. Every vein and blotch stood out. He was thin. His ears were old-man big and full of hearing aids. He was strong enough to sit up straight, but only just. His wrists looked like pencils.

  There was no one else in the room. No nurse, no attendant, no carer, no companion. No doctor. No other old people, either.

  The guy with the ponytail walked over and bent down and crouched low, eye to eye with the old man, and he stuck out his hand and said, “Mr. Mortimer, it’s good to see you again. I wonder if you remember me?”

  The old man took his hand.

  “Of course I remember you,” he said. “I would greet you properly, but you warned me never to say your name.
Walls have ears, you said. There are enemies everywhere.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “How did it end up?”

  “Inconclusive.”

  “Do you need my help again?”

  “My friend Mr. Reacher wants to ask you about Ryantown.”

  Mortimer nodded, pensively. His slow watery gaze panned across and tilted up and stopped on Reacher.

  He focused.

  He said, “There was a Reacher family in Ryantown.”

  “The boy was my father,” Reacher said. “His name was Stan.”

  “Sit down,” Mortimer said. “I’ll get a crick in my neck.”

  Reacher sat down in the chair across the circle. Up close Mortimer looked no younger. But he showed some kind of spark. Any weakness was physical, not mental. He raised his hand, bent and bony, like a warning.

  “I had cousins there,” he said. His voice was low and reedy, and wet with saliva. He said, “We lived close by. We visited back and forth, and sometimes we got dumped there, if times were hard at home, and sometimes they got dumped on us, but overall I need to tell you my memories of Ryantown might be patchy. Compared with what you might be looking for, I mean, about your father as a boy, and your grandparents maybe. I was only a visitor now and then.”

  “You remembered which kids got sick.”

  “Only because people talked about it all the time. It was like a county-wide bulletin, every damn morning. Someone’s got this, someone’s got that. People were afraid. You could get polio. Kids died of things back then. So you had to know who to stay away from. Or the other way around. If you got German measles, you got loaned out to go play with all the little girls. If they were laying blacktop somewhere, you got sent to go sniff the tar. Then you wouldn’t get tuberculosis. That’s why I remember who got sick. People were crazy back then.”

  “Did Stan Reacher get sick?”

  The same bent and bony hand came up. The same warning.

  “The name was never listed in the county-wide bulletin,” he said. “As far as I recall. But that doesn’t really mean I knew who he was. Everyone had cousins in and out all the time. Everyone got shunted around, when the wolf was at the door. It was like Times Square. So in my case what I’m saying is, there was always a rotating cast of characters. People were in and out, especially kids. I remember Mr. Reacher the mill foreman. He was a well known figure. He was a fixture. But I couldn’t swear in a court of law which of the kids was his. We all looked the same. You never knew exactly where anyone lived. They all came running out the same four-flat door. About nine of them from the foreman’s building, I think. Eight at least. One of them was a pretty good ballplayer. I heard he went semi-pro in California. Would that be your father?”

  “He was a birdwatcher.”

  Mortimer was quiet a beat. His pale old eyes changed focus, looking back years ago. Then he smiled, in a sad and contemplative way. As if at the strange mysteries of life. He said, “You know, I had completely forgotten about the birdwatchers. How extraordinary that you should remember and I didn’t. What a memory you must have.”

  “Not a memory,” Reacher said. “Not a contemporaneous recollection. It’s a later observation. Projected backward. I assume he started young. I know he was a member of a club by the age of sixteen. But you said birdwatchers. Was there more than one?”

  “There were two,” Mortimer said.

  “Who were they?”

  “I got the impression one of them was someone’s cousin and didn’t live there all the time, and one of them did. But they were together plenty. Like best friends. I guess from what you tell me one of them must have been Stan Reacher. I can picture them. I got to say, they made it pretty exciting. I guess truth to tell the first time I ever met them I was probably ready to stomp them for being sissies, but first of all I would need to bring an army, because they were the best fighters you ever saw, and second of all pretty soon they got everybody doing it, quite happily, taking turns with the binoculars. We saw birds of prey. One time we saw an eagle take something about the size of a puppy.”

  “Stan had binoculars?”

  “One of them did. Can’t say for sure which one was Stan.”

  “I’m guessing the one who lived there all the time.”

  “Can’t say for sure which one that was. I was in and out pretty random. I would find one of them gone from time to time. Or both at once. Whoever you were, you were missing sometimes. You got sent away, to eat better, or avoid an epidemic, or take a vacation. That’s how it was. People came and went.”

  “I’m wondering how he afforded binoculars. When times were tough.”

  “I assumed they were stolen.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “No offense,” Mortimer said.

  “None taken.”

  “We were all nice enough kids. We wouldn’t break into a store. But we wouldn’t ask too many questions either. Not if something came our way. Nice kids got nothing otherwise. I suppose the thought of anything worse would have been in our heads because of his father. Whichever one was Stan. We all thought Mr. Reacher the mill foreman was a bit dubious. So I guess we went ahead and assumed like father, like son. Even though I didn’t know exactly who Stan was. I suppose that’s the power of rumor. I was only a visitor. It felt like local knowledge.”

  “What kind of dubious?”

  “Everyone was scared of him. He was always yelling and screaming and throwing punches and knocking people down. Looking back on it, I suppose he drank. He thought people didn’t like him because he was the foreman at the mill. He was half right. All he got wrong was the reason. I guess we other kids imputed all kinds of villainy to him. Like in a storybook at school. Like Blackbeard or something. No offense. You asked the question.”

  “Did he have a beard?”

  “No one had a beard. It would catch on fire in the mill.”

  “Do you remember when Stan left to join the Marines?”

  Mortimer shook his head.

  “I never heard about that,” he said. “I guess I’m a year or two older. I was already drafted.”

  “Where did you serve?”

  “New Jersey. They didn’t need me. It was the end of the war. They had too many people already. They canceled the draft soon after that. I never did anything. I felt like a fraud, every July Fourth parade.”

  He shook his head, and looked away.

  Reacher said, “Any other memories of Ryantown?”

  “Nothing very exciting. It was a hardscrabble place. People worked all day and slept all night.”

  “What about Elizabeth Reacher? James Reacher’s wife?”

  “She would be your grandmother.”

  “Yes.”

  “She sewed things,” Mortimer said. “I remember that.”

  “Do you remember what she was like?”

  Mortimer was quiet for a moment.

  Then he said, “That’s a difficult question to answer.”

  “Is it?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be discourteous.”

  “Would you need to be?”

  “Perhaps I should say she kept to herself, and leave it at that.”

  “I never met her,” Reacher said. “She was dead long before I was born. I don’t care either way. We don’t need to walk on eggs.”

  “Talking about your grandfather is one thing. He was a public figure. Being foreman at the mill. Talking about your grandmother is different.”

  “How bad was she?”

  “She was a hard woman. Cold. I never saw her smile. I never heard her say a nice thing. She always looked cross. Kind of sour. They deserved each other, that Mr. and Mrs.”

  Reacher nodded.

  He said, “Anything else you can tell me?”

  Mortimer went quiet so long Reacher thought maybe he had fallen into a geriatric coma. Or died. But then he moved. He raised the same bent and bony hand. This time not a warning. This time an appeal for attention. Like a comedian calming a crowd, ahead of a punch
line.

  “I can tell you one thing,” he said. “Since you jogged my memory. And since your dad might have been involved. I remember one time there was a big hoo-hah about a rare bird. Some big deal. First time it was ever seen in New Hampshire. Or some such thing. The birdwatching boys wrote it up for the birdwatching club. For the minutes of the meeting. Or the report on proceedings. Whatever you call it. One of them was club secretary by then. Can’t say which one. The report was about all the things going on that might influence the bird being there, or not. It was very impressive. I believe it got picked up for a hobby magazine. The Associated Press said it was the first time Ryantown was ever mentioned outside the county.”

  “What bird?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Pity,” Reacher said. “It must have been a big sensation.”

  Mortimer’s hand came up again.

  Excitement.

  “You could find out,” he said. “Because of the birdwatching club. All their old ledgers will be in the library. They have a collection. All of those old clubs and societies. Part of history, they tell me. Part of the culture. Personally I thought television was better, when it arrived.”

  “Which library?” Reacher asked.

  “Laconia,” Mortimer said. “That’s where those clubs were.”

  Reacher nodded.

  “Probably takes three months to find anything,” he said.

  “No, it’s all right there,” Mortimer said. “There’s a big room downstairs, with shelves like the spokes of a wheel. The reference section. They get anything you want. You should go. You could find out about the bird. Maybe it was your father who wrote the note. It’s a fifty-fifty chance, after all. Him or the other kid.”

  “The downtown branch of the library?”

  “That’s the only branch there is.”

  —

  They left old Mr. Mortimer in his wipe-clean armchair and walked the long pleasant corridor back to the desk. They signed out. The cheerful woman accepted their departure with grace and equanimity. They walked back to the ancient Subaru.

  Reacher said, “Do you know the library in Laconia?”