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.”

“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.”