Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(24)

Reacher wrote the address with the sharpened pencil on the top sheet of the branded notepaper, which he then tore off, and folded up, and stuck in his back pants pocket.

—

Mark parked the quad-bike back at the barn, and walked on down to the house. The phone rang as soon as he got in the door. He picked it up and said his name, and a voice told him, “There was a guy here, name of Reacher, checking out his family history. A big guy, pretty rough. He won’t take no for an answer. So far he’s looked at four different censuses. I think he’s searching for an old address. Maybe he’s a relative. I thought you should know.”

Mark hung up without replying.





Chapter 11


Reacher walked back to the city office and got there a half hour before the close of business. He went up to the records department and pressed the bell. A minute later Elizabeth Castle came in.

“I found them,” he said. “They lived beyond the city limit, which is why they didn’t show up the first time around.”

“So no federal warrants.”

“Turned out they were relatively law abiding.”

“Where did they live?”

“A place called Ryantown.”

“I’m not sure where that is.”

“That’s a shame, because I came here especially to ask you.”

“I’m not sure I ever heard of it.”

“Can’t be far away, because his birdwatching club was here in town.”

She took out her phone, and did things to it, with spread fingers. She showed him. It was a map, expanded. She spread her fingers some more, and smaller places popped into view. Then she moved the magnified image around, circling Laconia’s boundary, examining the nearby hinterland.

No Ryantown.

“Try further out,” he said.

“How far would a kid go for a birdwatching club?”

“Maybe he had a bike. Maybe Ryantown was boring. The cops told me there were all kinds of little spots, each with a couple dozen families and not much else. Maybe it was a place like that.”

“It would still have birds, surely. Maybe more than here, if it was quiet.”

“The cops said there were all kinds of mills and little factories. Maybe the atmosphere was smoky.”

“OK, wait,” she said.

She started over with her phone. This time typing and tapping, not swooping around. Maybe a search engine, or a local history site.

“Yes,” she said. “It was a tin mill. Belonged to a man named Ryan. He built worker accommodations and called the place Ryantown. The mill finally closed in the 1950s and the town died, such as it was to begin with. Everyone left and the name fell off the map.”

“Where was it?”

“Supposedly north and west of here,” she said. She dabbed the map back on her phone, and spread and pinched and moved her fingers around.

“About here, possibly,” she said.

There was no name on the map. Just a blank gray shape, and a road.

“Zoom out,” he said.

She did, and the gray shape receded to a pinprick, north and west of Laconia, maybe eight miles out. Between ten and eleven on a clock face. It was one of many similar pinpricks. Like busy planets around a sun, held close in by gravity or magnetism or some other kind of strong attraction. Like Detective Brenda Amos had predicted, for all practical purposes Ryantown had been part of Laconia, no matter what the postal service said. The road that passed it by went onward toward nowhere in particular. It just meandered north and west, ten or more miles, and then another ten through a wood, and then onward. A back road, like the one he had been on with the guy in the Subaru. He could picture it.

He said, “I guess there won’t be a bus.”

“You could rent a car,” she said. “There are places here in town.”

“I don’t have a driver’s license.”

“I don’t think a cab would want to go out there.”

Eight miles, he thought.

“I’ll walk,” he said. “But not now. It would be dark as soon as I got there. Tomorrow, maybe. You want to get dinner tonight?”

“What?”

“Dinner,” he said. “The third meal of the day, generally eaten in the evening. Can be functional, or social, or sometimes both.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’m having dinner with Carter Carrington tonight.”

—

Shorty carried the cardboard carton into the room and placed it on the dresser in front of the TV screen. Then he sat with Patty, side by side in their lawn chairs, through the last of the afternoon sun. She didn’t talk. She was thinking. She often was. He knew the signs. He guessed she was processing the information she had received, examining it, turning it this way and that, until she was satisfied. Which would be soon, he thought. Surely. He really didn’t see much of a problem anymore. The thing with the cotton bud had a simple explanation. And the phone was back on. The mechanic was coming first thing in the morning. Total damage, less than two hundred dollars. A drag for sure, but not a disaster.

Patty said, “Let’s not go to the house for dinner. I think he was kind of hinting they didn’t want us to.”

“He said we were invited.”

“He was being polite.”