23 Past Tense

by Lee Child

  “Not very,” he said. “Maybe a little. I think I figured most of it out. There was always something wrong with the story. Now I know what. Because of something old Mr. Mortimer said.”

  “Who is old Mr. Mortimer?”

  “The old guy in the old people’s home. He said back in the day from time to time he would visit his cousins in Ryantown. He said he remembers the birdwatching boys. He said he was drafted near the end of the war. He said they didn’t need him. They had too many people already. He said he never did anything, and felt like a fraud every July Fourth parade.”

  Amos said nothing.

  They all went to the door together. More seemly, Burke insisted, given the hour. Like delivering a death message, Reacher thought. Two MPs and a priest.

  He rang the bell.

  A whole minute later a hallway light came on. He saw it through a pebbled glass pane set high in the door. He saw a broken-up mosaic of calm cream colors, a long narrow space, with what might have been family photographs on the wall.

  He saw an old man shuffle into view. A broken-up mosaic. Stooped, gray, slow, unsteady. He walked with his knuckles pressed on a millwork rail. He got closer and closer, and then he opened the door.

  Chapter 44

  The old man who opened the door was about ninety. He was thin and stooped inside too-big clothing, maybe favorite stuff bought long ago, back when he was a vigorous seventy. He could have started out six-one and 190, at his peak, before the start of a long decline. Now he was bent over like a question mark. His skin was slack and translucent. His eyes watered. He had strands of gray hair, as fine as silk.

  He wasn’t Reacher’s father.

  Not even thirty years older. Because he wasn’t. Simple as that. Also forensically, because no broken nose, no shrapnel scar on his cheek, no stitch mark in his eyebrow.

  The photographs on the wall were of birds.

  The old man held out a wavering hand.

  “Stan Reacher,” he said. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

  Reacher shook the old man’s hand. It felt cold as ice.

  “Jack Reacher,” he said. “Likewise.”

  “Are we related?”

  “We’re all related, if you go back far enough.”

  “Please come in.”

  Amos said she and Burke would wait in the car. Reacher followed the old guy down the hallway. Slower than a funeral march. Half a step, a long pause, another half a step. They made it to a nook between the living room and an eat-in kitchen. It had two armchairs, set one each side of a lamp with a big fringed shade. Good for reading.

  Old Stan Reacher waved his wavering hand at one of the armchairs, like an invitation, and he sat down in the other. He was happy to talk. He was happy to answer questions. He didn’t seem to find them strange. He confirmed he grew up in Ryantown, in the tin mill foreman’s apartment. He remembered the kitchen tile. Acanthus leaves, and marigolds, and artichoke blossoms. James and Elizabeth Reacher were his parents. The tin mill foreman himself, and the bed sheet finisher. He said it never occurred to him to wonder whether they did a good job or not. Partly because it was all he knew, and partly because he didn’t notice anyway, because he had been introduced to birdwatching by then, which had given him a whole other world to go live in. He said it wasn’t about checking off new sightings on a list. There was a clue in the word. It was about watching. What they did, and how, and why, and where, and when. It was about thinking yourself into whole new dimensions, with whole new problems and whole new powers.

  Reacher asked, “Who introduced you?”

  “My cousin Bill,” Stan said.

  “Who was he?”

  “It was a time, back then. Somehow most of the boys you hung out with were your cousins. Maybe it was a tribal instinct. People were afraid. It was tough times. For a spell it looked like the whole thing could fall apart. I guess cousins were reassuring. Any kid’s best friend was likely his cousin. Bill was mine and I was his.”

  “What kind of cousin was he?”

  “Neither one of us could count high enough. All we knew was I was Stan Reacher and he was William Reacher, and way back we both had the same ancestor in the Dakota Territory. I suppose the truth is Bill was a waif and stray. He seemed to be based up on the Canadian border. But he was always roaming. He spent a lot of time in Ryantown.”

  “How old was he, the first time he came?”

  “I was seven, so he was six. He stayed a whole year.”

  “Did he have parents?”

  “We supposed so. He never saw them. But they weren’t dead or anything. He got birthday cards every year. We thought they must be secret agents, undercover in a foreign country. Later we thought they were more likely organized crime. Whichever required a greater degree of secrecy. Which was sometimes hard to tell.”

  “Was he already a birdwatcher at the age of six?”

  “With the naked eye. Which he always thought was best of all. He wasn’t good at explaining why. He was only a kid. Later we understood. After we got binoculars. You get a bigger picture with the naked eye. You don’t get distracted by the close up beauty.”

  “How did you get the binoculars?”

  “That was much later. Bill would have been ten or eleven by then.”

  “How did you get them?”

  The old man looked down for a second.

  He said, “You got to remember, it was a time, back then.”

  “Did he steal them?”

  “Not exactly. They were spoils of war. Some kid with a stupid vendetta. Bill ran out of patience. We had been reading old battle poems. He said he felt he should seize something. The binoculars and thirty-one cents were all the kid had.”

  “You wrote about the rough-legged hawk together.”

  The old man nodded.

  “We sure did,” he said. “That was a fine piece of work. I would be proud of that today.”

  “Do you remember September 1943?”

  “I guess a few things in general.”

  “Anything special?”

  “It was a long time ago,” the old man said.

  “Your name comes up in an old police report, about an altercation on the street. Late one evening. In fact not far from here. You were seen with a friend.”

  “There were altercations on the street all the time.”

  “This one involved a local bully who was beaten to death two years later.”

  Stan Reacher said nothing.

  “I’m guessing the friend you were seen with that night in September 1943 was your cousin Bill. I think he started something that took two years to finish.”

  “Tell me again, who are you exactly?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” Reacher said. “As of right now, I’m thinking maybe your cousin Bill’s second son.”

  “Then you know what happened.”

  “I was a military cop. I saw it a dozen times.”

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “Not with me,” Reacher said. “The only person I’m mad at is myself. I guess I assumed this was the kind of thing that happened to other people.”

  “Bill was a smart boy. He was always a step ahead, partly because he had a varied life. Streetwise, they would call it now. But he knew other stuff too. He was good at his books. He knew a lot of science. He loved his birds. He liked to be left alone. He was a nice person, back when that meant something. But you better not mess with his sense of right and wrong. Underneath he was a bomb waiting to go off. He had it under control. He was a very self-disciplined person. He had a rule. If you did a bad thing, he would make sure you only did it once. Whatever it took. He was a good fighter, and he was brave as a lunatic.”

  “Tell me about the kid he killed.”

  Stan shook his head.

  “I shouldn’t do that,” he said. “I would be confessing to a crime.”

  “Were you involved?”

  “Not at the end, I guess.”

  “No one will bust you. You’re a hundred years old.”

&n
bsp; “Not quite.”

  “No one is interested. The cops filed it under NHI.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “No human involved.”

  Stan nodded.

  “I could agree with them,” he said. “That kid was every kind of bully. He had a grudge against anyone with one brain cell more. Which was a lot of people. He was the kind of kid who hung around four years after high school, doing the same old things to younger and younger victims. But in a nice car, wearing nice shoes, because his daddy was rich. His brain was rotting away from the inside. He became perverted. He started interfering with little boys and girls. He was real big and strong. He was tormenting them. He was making them do disgusting things. At that point Bill didn’t know about him. Then he came back to town and found out, that night.”

  “What happened?”

  “Bill showed up in Ryantown, like he often did, out of nowhere, and for his first night we came down here, to the jazz lounge. There was a band we liked. They usually let us in. We were walking back to where we hid our bikes, and then all of a sudden the kid came walking toward us. He ignored Bill and started tormenting me on my own. Because he knew me. He was probably starting up again where he left the off last time. But Bill was hearing this stuff for the very first time. He couldn’t believe it. I got it to where we could walk away, but Bill didn’t come with me. The bomb went off. He took the kid apart.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then it became a different story. The kid put out a kind of death warrant. Bill started carrying brass knuckles. There were a couple of incidents. A couple of would-be friends, trying to make their bones. We figured rich kids got that a lot. Bill kept the emergency room busy. He sent the would-be friends their way. Then it was a background thing for a while. Bill was in and out of Ryantown. Then it blew up again. One night they ended up all alone, face to face. The first I knew about it was Bill showing up later, asking for a favor.”

  “He wanted to borrow your birth certificate, to join the Marines.”

  Stan nodded.

  “He needed to bury the name William Reacher. He felt he had to do it. He needed the trail to go cold. It was a homicide, after all.”

  “And he needed to be a year older than he really was,” Reacher said. “That’s what was wrong with the story he told. He said he ran away and joined the Marines at seventeen. No doubt that’s true, in and of itself. But he couldn’t have done it if the Marines knew he was seventeen. They wouldn’t have taken him. Not then. They already had too many people. It was September 1945. The war was over. They wouldn’t want a seventeen-year-old. Two years earlier, sure, no problem at all. They were fighting in the Pacific. They needed to keep the conveyor belt going. But not anymore. On the other hand, an eighteen-year-old was always entitled to volunteer. So he needed your ID.”

  Stan nodded again.

  “We thought it would make him safe,” he said. “And it did, I guess. The cops gave up. I left Ryantown soon afterward. I went birdwatching in South America and stayed there forty years. When I got home I had to sign up for all kinds of new things. I used the same birth certificate. I wondered what would happen if the system said the name Stan Reacher was already taken. But it all worked out fine.”

  Reacher nodded.

  “Thank you for explaining,” he said.

  “What happened to him?” Stan said. “I never saw him again.”

  “He became a pretty good Marine. He fought in Korea and Vietnam. He served in all kinds of other places. He married a Frenchwoman. Her name was Josephine. They got along. They had two boys. He died thirty years ago.”

  “Did he have a happy life?”

  “He was a Marine. Happy was not in the field manual. Sometimes he was satisfied. That was about as good as it got. But he was never unhappy. He felt he belonged. He had a structure he could rely on. I don’t think he would have chosen anything different. He kept on birdwatching. He loved his family. He was glad he had it. We all knew that. Sometimes we thought he was crazy. He wasn’t sure of his birthday. Now I understand why. Yours was July, and his was originally June. He would remember that, because of the birthday cards. I guess sometimes he got confused. Although he did fine with the name. I never heard him slip. He was always Stan.”

  They talked a while longer. Reacher asked about the motel, and their theoretical relative Mark, but Stan had no information beyond a vague old family story about some other distant cousin getting rich during the postwar boom, and buying real estate, and then having a cascade of offspring, all kinds of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Presumably Mark was one of them. Stan said he didn’t know, and didn’t want to. He said he was happy with his photo albums, and his memories.

  Then he said he needed to nap for an hour. That was how it went, he said, with his kind of insomnia. He took hour-long naps whenever he could. Reacher shook his ice cold hand once more and let himself out of the house. Dawn was coming. The morning sun was not far away. Burke and Amos were sitting together, in Amos’s car, on the curb, at the entrance to the alley. They saw him step out. Burke buzzed his window down. Amos leaned over to listen. Reacher checked the sky again, and bent down to talk.

  He said, “I need to go to Ryantown.”

  Burke said, “The professor won’t be there for hours.”

  “That’s why.”

  Amos said, “I need to think about Carrington.”

  “Think about him in Ryantown. It’s as good a place as any.”

  “Do you know something?”

  “We should be looking for Elizabeth Castle just as much as Carrington himself. They’re very romantic. They counted their morning coffee break as their second date. They’re almost certainly together.”

  “Sure, but where?”

  “I’ll tell you later. First I want to go to Ryantown again.”

  Chapter 45

  They went in Amos’s unmarked car. She drove, and Burke sat neatly beside her. Reacher sprawled in the back. He told them everything Stan had told him. They asked how he felt. It was a short conversation. He said nothing had changed, except a very minor historical detail. His father had once been called by a different name, way back long ago, when he was a kid. First he was Bill, then he was Stan. Same guy. Same bomb waiting to go off. But disciplined. If you did the right thing, he left you alone. A good fighter, and brave as a lunatic.

  He loved his family.

  A birdwatcher all his life.

  Often with the naked eye, for a bigger picture.

  “Did your mother know?” Amos asked.

  “Great question,” Reacher said. “Probably not. It turned out she had secrets of her own. I think neither of them knew. I think they allowed for things like that. A clean slate. No questions. Maybe that’s why they got along.”

  “She must have wondered why he had no parents.”

  “I guess.”

  “Do you wonder now?”

  “A little bit. Because of the birthday cards. That has a certain flavor. It feels like an obscure department of a government agency. It takes care of things while you’re away. It makes sure your rent gets paid. Or else they were in prison. I would have to know the return address.”

  Burke said, “Are you going to try to find out?”

  “No,” Reacher said.

  On their right the sky was streaked with dawn. The car was filled with low golden light. Amos found the turn to Ryantown. The gentle left, through the orchards. The sun burned around behind them, until it was low and dead center in the rear windshield. Amos shaded her eyes from the mirror, and came to a stop at the fence.

  “Five minutes,” Reacher said.

  He got out of the car and stepped over the fence. He walked through the orchard. The dawn light was on his back. His shadow was infinitely long. He stepped over the next fence. The Ryantown city limit. The darker leaves, the damper smell. The sunless shadows.

  He walked down Main Street, like before, between the thin trees, on the tipped-up stones, past the church, past t
he school. After that the trees grew thinner, and the sun crept higher. Dappled sunbeams twinkled in. The world was new.

  He heard voices up ahead.

  Two people talking. Lightly, and happily. About something pleasant. Maybe the sunbeams. If so, Reacher agreed. The place looked great. Like an ad for an expensive camera.

  He called out, “Hey guys, officer on the floor, coming in, make yourselves decent and stand by your beds.”

  He didn’t want to embarrass them. Or himself. There were a number of things that could go wrong. She could be naked. He could have his leg off.

  He waited a minute. Neither thing happened. He walked down to the four-flats and found Carter Carrington and Elizabeth Castle standing side by side on the ghost of the road, halfway to the stream. They were staring at him. They were both fully dressed. Albeit in a casual manner. He was in a muscle shirt and athletic pants. She was in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt that didn’t quite meet them. Beyond them were two mountain bikes, leaning on trees. Fat tires, and strong racks on the back, for heavy packs. Beyond the bikes a two-person tent was pitched, on the gritty dirt where the mill foreman’s living room used to be.

  Carrington said, “Good morning.”

  “You too.”

  Then no one spoke.

  “It’s always good to see you,” Carrington said.

  “You too.”

  “But is this purely a coincidence?”

  “Not exactly,” Reacher said.

  “You were looking for us.”

  “Something came up. Turned out to be nothing. It’s all good now. But I thought I should drop by anyway. To say goodbye. I’m moving on”

  “How did you find us?”

  “For once I listened to the front of my brain. I guess I remembered how it felt. For me once or twice, and maybe for you guys now. Just when you think it’s passing you by, boom, you meet someone. You do all the sappy things you thought you were never going to get a chance to do. You invent a new anniversary every couple of hours. You celebrate the thing that brought you together. Some people do really weird stuff. You do Stan Reacher. You already told me you talk about him on dates. You were last seen at the county offices. You were tracing Stan’s birth record. You wanted to do it properly, every step of the way. Rigorously, and meticulously, like a person should. To make it yours. It’s of sentimental value. You got the last known address. Elizabeth already knew where it was, because she and I worked it out together, on her phone. So you went to find it. You took the heritage tour. Because that’s what people do.”