Chapter 15

Mark and Peter and Steven and Robert were together in the back parlor, watching the screens. They all showed Patty and Shorty still on their bed. Different angles, and different zooms. Some were wide shots, and some were close ups.

Their door was still open.

“But no shoes this time,” Steven said. “He’s still got them on.”

“We should have used a self-closing mechanism,” Robert said.

“How could we have known?” Peter said. “Normal people close their doors.”

“Relax,” Mark said. “They’re not going anywhere. Not right now. Bringing that suitcase back broke their hearts. Anyway, now they believe in the mechanic again.”

“We need that door shut pretty soon. We need to start warming them up. Their emotional state is important. Pacing is crucial now.”

“Then think of something.”

Peter turned back to the screens.

Reacher got a mile beyond the old edge-of-town gas station, around a long New England curve through woods as deep as a fairytale setting. Then behind him he heard tires on the blacktop. He heard them slow to a walk. He heard them keep pace, ten yards back.

He stopped and turned around.

He saw a dark sedan. Medium in size and crisp in appearance. But poverty spec. There was paint where chrome might have been, and plain hubs, and mouse-fur upholstery. There was a sprung antenna on the trunk lid. An unmarked squad car. In it was Jim Shaw, of the Laconia Police Department. Chief of detectives. The guy from the police station lobby, the day before, with Brenda Amos. The redheaded Irish guy. In action he looked brisk and confident. He was alone at the wheel. He let his window down. Reacher walked closer, but stopped six feet away.

He said, “Can I help you?”

Shaw said, “Brenda told me you were headed this way.”

“You going to offer me a ride?”

“If I do it will be back to town.”

“How so?”

“The house-to-house turned up a woman who lives in the alley. She works in a cocktail bar in Manchester. Which is half owned by the folks the kid’s father works for. We asked a lot of pointed questions and eventually she told us exactly what happened last night. From beginning to end. Soup to nuts. Everything except a physical description of her savior. She claims she was so stressed her mind has gone blank.”

“That can happen, I guess,” Reacher said.

“She’s lying. Why wouldn’t she? She’s protecting someone who did her a favor. But we have other evidence. She was saved real good, believe me. The kid looks like he was run over by a freight train. Therefore we’re not looking for a small guy. We’re looking for a big guy. Probably right-handed. Probably woke up this morning with damage to his knuckles. Got to be something. A hit like that leaves a mark, believe me.”

“I scraped my hand on a wall,” Reacher said.

“Brenda told me.”

“Just one of those things.”

“A smarter man than me might start putting it all together. The woman from the cocktail bar gets home in the middle of the night, at an exactly predictable time, because of no nighttime traffic, and the kid is waiting there for her, so she yells for help, which wakes a guy up, within a certain narrow radius, who then gets out of bed and goes to check, and who ends up dragging the kid away and smacking him around.”

“You told me she already said all that. Soup to nuts. You don’t need to put it together.”

“The interesting part is the narrow radius. How close would the guy need to be, for the sound to travel clearly, and for him to get there as fast as he did? Pretty close, we think. The woman said she didn’t yell real loud. The kid was trying to get his hand over her mouth at the time. It was definitely not a scream. So the guy asleep had to be close by. He was on the scene more or less immediately. Maximum one block, we think.”

“I’m sure there are many variables involved,” Reacher said. “Maybe it’s all down to how well people hear and how fast they get dressed. Maybe there’s a link between the two. You could conduct a series of experiments. You could get the university involved. You could write a paper for a criminology journal.”

Shaw said, “Common sense would indicate a woman’s low-volume cry for help would be heard only through windows over the street. On a one-block radius. The house-to-house lists only six such rooms as occupied last night. A lot of apartments are offices now. Empty during the night. But still, we had six people to look at. And what did we find?”

“I have no way of knowing.”

“Five were ruled out immediately, two for being women and three of the men for age and infirmity and slightness of build. One of the men was over ninety. Two of them were over sixty. None of them could have hit that kid. Not the way it must have happened.”

“I was asleep at five o’clock,” Reacher said.

“Brenda told me. And because once upon a time you were a brother cop, we believe you. And because the kid was a scumbag, we don’t care anyway. Not even enough to point out that five o’clock doesn’t matter anymore. The woman from the cocktail bar got home at three o’clock. She told Brenda the same thing happened the night before. You told Brenda you woke up the night before. At three o’clock. But we don’t care. Except Brenda also told me she told you the scumbag’s father is obliged to react.”

“She did.”

“That’s my point. You should think carefully. OK, maybe the kid really is woozy. Maybe he truly can’t remember his attacker. But you can’t rely on that. If we can figure it out without eyewitness testimony, so can they. They’ll be looking for a big guy with a damaged hand. You can’t beat their forensics by rubbing your knuckles on a wall, not because they don’t have walls, but because they don’t have forensics. They have other methods. They’re going to send whoever it takes to get this job done. We don’t want trouble here.”

“Has the kid called his father yet?”

“First he called his lawyer. No doubt the lawyer called his father. By now they’ve known for thirty minutes. They’re scrambling. Burner phones are burning up in more than one state, at this very moment, believe me. Presumably nothing is decided yet. But it won’t be long. They’ll be arriving soon. Better if they didn’t find you here. Better if you took a look at the old homestead, and then kept on walking. Better if you didn’t come back.”

“Because you don’t want trouble?”

“Would you?”

“No,” Reacher said. “Generally speaking, I think trouble is best avoided. You could almost call it a rule.”

“So we’re on the same page?”

“We’re in the same book. Maybe a difference in emphasis.”

“I’m not kidding,” Shaw said. “I don’t want trouble.”

“Relax,” Reacher said. “I’ll keep on walking. It’s what I do. Assuming I find Ryantown first.”

“Don’t give me terms and conditions. Don’t tell me what you got to do first. I’m serious. I don’t want trouble in my town.”

“Ryantown ain’t yours. If you don’t believe me, check with the kid at the census archive. He’ll set you straight.”

“It’s all Laconia to guys up from Boston. They’ll be here tomorrow, asking around. Anyone seen a big guy with a banged-up hand?”

Reacher said, “Tomorrow?”

“They won’t let this go.”

“But until tomorrow walking on county roads is still pretty much a legal activity.”

“That’s the problem with terms and conditions. You’ll still be walking tomorrow. You could be walking forever. They could have ten guys in town before you finally figure out you’ll never even know if you find Ryantown or not. Those old places are nothing more than holes in the ground now. Who the hell can tell which was which a hundred years ago? So do me a big favor, OK? Find any old hole in the ground, go right ahead and call it Ryantown, and then get the hell out, and keep on getting, preferably in a straight line, preferably east, north, or west.”

Reacher nodded, and turned, and walked on, waving once but not looking back, and behind him he heard the hiss and squeal of the squad car’s power steering, and then the sound of its tires rolling away, back to town. He kept up a steady pace, four miles an hour, easy in the cool of the morning. The road was entirely in shadow. He checked his map as he passed a left turn that led to a place with gray shading but no water. It was right where it should have been. He was on track. The map was good. He had about six more miles to go.

He walked on.

Patty and Shorty were still on the bed long after dawn. They had stared for hours at their luggage, as if hypnotized. The sudden and capricious reversal of its epic and hard-won voyage was hard to process. It was as if the long two-plus miles spent pushing the heavy load had never happened. But it had. Hours and hours, wasted. Maximum effort, bent at the waist. For no net result. Zero yards gained. A bitter pill.

Patty said, “Do you think the story about the undergraduates is true?”

“Are you crazy?” Shorty said. “You know we took it down there ourselves.”

“I don’t mean this time. I mean undergraduates ever doing that.”

“I don’t know,” Shorty said. “I got no experience. But I guess it could be true. In a logical kind of way. Because Peter didn’t know we took our stuff down there ourselves. All he knew was he found it in the hedge. How could he explain that? It must have reminded him of a thing from the past, which he assumed was happening again. Actually it wasn’t, but it kind of proves the original thing must have been real, or how else could he have been reminded?”

“That’s a circular argument.”

“Is it?”

“But it doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is what he said. And what he said was weird.”

“Was it?”

“He said students steal their motel signs all the time.”

“Maybe they do. Maybe that’s why they’re gone now.”

“But to say all the time means over and over again, year after year.”

“I guess.”

“Like you would say your bottom ten-acre floods all the time.”

“Well, it does. Like you said, over and over, year after year.”

“Exactly. To say all the time means you’re speaking from a certain length of experience. And then he said they thought the bag-stealing thing was finished a couple of years ago. And to know something is finished means you must have suffered it first. Let’s say at least for a year. A whole cycle through both semesters. I’m sure students do different kinds of crazy stuff at different times.”

“OK,” Shorty said. “Call it three years minimum. One year of suffering it and two years of not.”

“Except everything else they’ve said makes this feel like a brand new start-up. Like this could be their very first season. The stories don’t match at all.”

Shorty was quiet a long moment.

Then he said, “But you spoke to the mechanic.”

“Yes,” Patty said. “I did.”

“And the mechanic was real.”

“Yes,” Patty said. “He was.”

“Tell me again.”

“He sounded bright and wide awake and on the ball. He sounded friendly but courteous. He was knowledgeable but not domineering. He was an immigrant. Maybe one of those guys who takes a step down in terms of employment. Compared to the old country, I mean. He said something about the Yugoslav army. Maybe once he was a master sergeant in an armored division, and now he drives a tow truck. That kind of thing. But he’s going to make the best of it. It’s going to be the shiniest tow truck you ever saw. He’s going to work his way back. He’s going to be a classic story.”

“You got all that from his voice?”

“It’s what I felt. He asked mechanic questions. He knew what he should about us. He was worried in case Mark had woken us up. He was apologetic.”

“Total worst case?” Shorty asked, like a ritual between them.

“Would be he was one of those smooth-talking busy guys who pay no attention at all until an appointment actually rolls around. Deep down I think he was apologizing for not figuring it out yesterday.”

“That sounds real,” Shorty said.

“We’ll know soon enough,” Patty said. “He promised four hours maximum.”

After another mile the woods stopped and the vista opened out to a patchwork of horse fields and cow fields. Reacher walked on, conscious of the distance, thinking about a boy on a bike. It felt like a long way. But maybe it wasn’t. Times had changed. In the past a five-mile walk or a twenty-mile cycle ride would have been considered routine. For a boy with a hobby, eight miles was nothing. Or nine, to be exact, to the downtown streets. Which was where he had been seen, late one September evening in 1943. Doing what? The birdwatcher lady made no mention of binoculars around his neck. Reacher felt she would have noticed. He was there for some other purpose. Which theoretically could have been many and various, for a sixteen-year-old. Except that 1943 was a serious year. The war was nearly two years old. Everything was rationed or in short supply. Everyone was dour and worried and working long hours. Hard to imagine any kind of giddy excitement going on good enough to attract a sixteen-year-old nine miles to the center of a stiff little New Hampshire town on a fall evening during tough times.

No mention of a bicycle, either. Maybe he had parked it. Maybe he was walking back to get it. With his friend. Maybe his friend’s bike was parked too. Then they met the big kid.

Reacher walked on. Coming up ahead on his left he saw his general target area. He scoped it out, from the middle distance to the far horizon. Ryantown was in there somewhere. Possibly. He checked the map. The road he wanted was a shallow left turn about a mile ahead. Some distance short of it was shown a thinner spur. Same basic direction, but shorter and narrower. Not much more than a farm track. Which might or might not be useful. Best case, it would lead to a stern old farmhouse, ideally in continuous occupation by the same family for two centuries or more, ideally with a very old farmer sitting in a wheelback chair by the stove in the kitchen, with a rug on his knees, ready to talk for hours about his long-ago neighbors a mile to the north.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst, was Reacher’s motto.

He walked on, and he took the turn into the narrow track. Very quickly he saw it didn’t lead to a stern old farmhouse. What it led to was a pleasant split level, about as old as he was. Therefore built long after Ryantown was already gone. Therefore no good. No old geezer sitting there with his memories. Unless the house was a replacement. Which was possible. Plenty of houses were. Maybe they had torn down the stern old structure. Maybe it was no longer livable, in the modern era. Or maybe it had burned down. Maybe the wiring was bad. Possibly original, with silk insulation. But they all got out in time and they built a new house, which meant the very old farmer with the rug on his knees was no longer in a wheelback chair in the kitchen, but in a vinyl recliner in the family room. But it would be the same guy. With the same stories. Still willing to talk.

Hope for the best.

He walked on. The house was harmoniously designed and lovingly maintained, even pampered, like it got painted a year early every time. It had sensible plants around the foundation, neatly trimmed. It had a car port, shading a clean domestic pick-up truck from the pale midmorning sun. It had a white picket fence, running all the way around, enclosing a neat quarter acre, like a suburban garden.

Behind the fence was a pack of dogs.

There were six of them. Not barking yet. All mutts, all scruffy. Nothing huge, nothing tiny. Maybe a hundred different breeds, all mixed together. They came close and stood inside the picket gate. He was going to have to wade through them. He wasn’t scared of dogs. He believed a measure of mutual trust solved most problems. He didn’t plan to bite them. Why assume they planned to bite him?

He opened the gate. The dogs sniffed around him. They followed him down the path. He found the front door and pressed the bell. He stepped back and waited in the sun. The dogs pooled around his knees. A long minute later the front door opened and a man appeared behind the screen. He was a lean person, with a sensible expression on his face, and buzzed gray hair on his head. He was wearing blue jeans from a farm store, and a plain gray T-shirt. He was old enough to get a discount at the movies, but a long way from needing a cane. He too had a pool of dogs around his knees. Six more. Maybe the previous generation. Some had fur frosted gray.

Reacher watched the guy test out a bunch of alternative greetings in his mind, as if trying to find one to match his particular circumstances, in which a random pedestrian had shown up silently and magically on his doorstep in the middle of nowhere. But evidently failing to find one, because in the end all he said was, “Yes?”

Reacher said, “Sir, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I was passing by, and I have a question about some real estate north of here, and I wondered if you might be in a position to fill in the gaps in my information.”

The guy said, “Are you a salesman?”

“No sir, I am not.”

“Insurance?”

“No sir.”

“Any kind of lawyer?”

“Not guilty.”

“Are you from the government?”

“No sir, not that either.”

“I believe you’re obliged to tell me, if you are.”

“Understood, but I’m not.”

“OK,” the guy said.

He opened the screen door to shake hands.

“Bruce Jones,” he said.

“Jack Reacher.”

Jones closed the screen again.

Maybe to keep the old dogs in and the young dogs out.

He said, “What real estate?”

“Where the next road on the left meets the stream,” Reacher said. He pointed in what he thought was a rough crow-flies direction, west and north. He said, “Maybe a mile or two from here. The abandoned remains of a tiny industrial hamlet. Probably nothing left above ground level. Probably nothing to see except ruined foundations.”

“Nothing like that on my land.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“You’re quick with the questions, mister. You should state your business.”

“My father grew up there. I want to go take a look. That’s all.”

“Then I’m sorry. I can’t help you. Sounds like the kind of thing you would need to stumble across accidentally. I never heard any mention. How long ago was it abandoned?”

“At least sixty years,” Reacher said. “Maybe more.”

“I don’t know whose land it is now, over by the stream. Maybe they know there are ruins, maybe they don’t. If they were railed off for grazing sixty years ago, they would be completely overgrown by now. How big would they be?”

“Some acres, I suppose.”

“Then they could be under any copse of trees you see.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Good to know. I’ll check a few out. Thank you for your time.”

Jones nodded, with the same sensible expression he had used before. Reacher turned to go, and got a couple of paces off the porch, followed by six patient dogs, and then behind him he heard the door change direction and open again, a stiff sound against a diligent draft excluder, and this time the screen door opened too. He turned back and saw Jones leaning one shoulder out and looking around the edge of the frame, as if to see him better, while simultaneously blocking his dogs with his leg.

He called out, “Did you say industrial?”

“Small scale,” Reacher said.

“Would it have had something to do with pollution?”

“Possibly. It was a tin mill. There was probably a certain amount of crap leaking out.”

“You better come in,” Jones said.

The screen door creaked all the way open ahead of him, and slapped all the way shut behind him, which were in his limited experience the eternal sounds of a New England summer. Dog nails clicked on the floors. All six came in with him. He stepped into the unique smell of someone else’s home. It was as clean and well maintained inside as outside. Jones led him to an alcove off an open-plan kitchen and dining room. Twelve dogs foamed around them. There was no family room. No vinyl recliner, no old geezer with a rug on his knees. The alcove was in use as a home office area. It was a decent size, but by that point the house was two generations old, and it looked like every member of both of them had kept every scrap of paper they ever saw. First Jones opened a sliding file drawer and thumbed through one of several fat and bulging folders suspended between sagging steel rods. Apparently he came up short, because he turned away and pushed and shoved a stack of bankers’ boxes around, until he got the one he wanted, which was full of archived folders just as fat and bulging as the current items. He thumbed through the first, and part of the way through the second.

Then he stopped.

He said, “Here.”

He pulled out a faded sheet of paper. Reacher took it from him. It was a photocopied newsletter, dated eight years previously. Clearly one of a sequence of several, covering an issue in feverish detail, with a clear assumption of some prior knowledge. But it was easy enough to follow. The issue was Ryantown.

A little prior history was referred to, with the first appearance of the mill in the historical record, and then much later its period of peak production, which by implication seemed to be universally accepted as a horrific tableau of clouds of smoke and raging fires and boiling metals, like a miniature hell, like something the old poet Dante would have been proud of. Except that the next sentence, in brackets, was a grudging apology that the photograph used to illustrate the same point in an earlier edition had not actually been of Ryantown itself, but was a stock library image of a mill town in Massachusetts a decade earlier than the newsletter suggested, but which was nevertheless chosen with absolutely no intention to deceive, but rather in a spirit meant to be taken as purely mood-based, as such a tragic subject surely demanded, not literally, as indeed most histories were all too often written, usually to their detriment.

After the apology the narrative cut to the then-current chase, which seemed to be equal parts political, legal, and deranged. Apparently it was not yet definitively proved that the slow decomposition of Ryantown’s ancient mineral runoff had harmed anyone’s ground water. But it surely would be proved, and soon. Some of the world’s top scientists were working on it. It was only a matter of time. Therefore readiness was everything. In which connection there was splendid news. Old Marcus Ryan’s long chain of heirs and assigns had finally been untangled, and it was now certain beyond a reasonable doubt that the remaining stock in his company had been bundled with other near worthless assets and swept up in a sixty-year tornado of big-fish-eat-little-fish deals, which as of that moment had left the stock technically in the hands of a giant mining corporation based in Colorado. It was a breakthrough of enormous significance, because at last the tragic Ryantown ecological disaster had an identifiable owner. The lawsuits were typed up and ready to go.

At the bottom of the newsletter was a call for all concerned citizens to attend a meeting. Below that was an obvious pseudonym as the writer’s name, and an e-mail address.

Reacher handed the paper back to Jones.

He said, “What did you think of this at the time?”

“There’s nothing wrong with our water,” Jones said. “Never has been. I remember at first I figured this guy was probably a lawyer, jumping on a bandwagon. I figured he had identified a big corporation to go after with a class action suit. Maybe the company would settle just to make him go away. Bad ground water is never good PR. The lawyer would get a third. But I never heard about it again. I guess it fizzled out. I guess he never got his proof. Which he couldn’t ever anyway, because the water is fine.”

“You said at first you thought he was a lawyer.”

“Later someone told me he was just a crazy old coot about five miles north of here. Then I met him, and he seemed harmless enough. He’s not looking for money. He wants them to acknowledge their wrongdoing. Like a public confession. That seems to mean a lot to him.”

“You didn’t go to the meeting?”

“Meetings are not my thing.”

“Pity,” Reacher said.

“Why?”

“One very important fact about Ryantown was not in the newsletter.”

“What?”

“Where it is.”

“I thought you knew. You said the side road and the river.”

“That was a best guess. Plus now you tell me it’s going to look like a patch of primeval forest anyway. Which at first glance would seem to include about two-thirds of the state. I don’t want to spend all day.”

“To see the place your father grew up? Some folks would spend all day.”

“Where did your father grow up?”

“Right here.”

“Which is a lovely place, I can see. But we just agreed Ryantown is an overgrown hole in the ground. There’s a difference.”

“It might be of sentimental value. People like to know where they come from.”

“Right now I would rather know what a guy who wants to build a mill would need. He would need the road and the water. Is there anything else he would need?”

“How would I know?”

“You know how land is used.”

“I guess where the river meets the road would make sense. Look for a stand of trees with straight edges. The neighbors would have wanted safe grazing. They would have railed off the falling-down buildings long before the saplings came up, from seeds blowing in. The copse will have grown the same shape as the fences. Usually it’s the other way around.”

“Thank you,” Reacher said.

“Good luck,” Jones said.

The screen door creaked open ahead of him, and slapped shut behind him.

He walked away. All twelve dogs followed him to the picket gate.