Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(44)

The side road was narrower than the main drag, but wide enough and hard enough for the kind of primitive trucks they might have used long ago, for hauling wood or coal or tin. On either side in the orchards the apple trees were bending over with heavy fruit. He could smell it in the air. He could smell hot dry grass. He could hear the buzz of insects. Overhead a hawk rode the thermals.

Then half a mile after its reluctant turn away from Laconia, the road turned again, as if definitively, due west. After that it ran straight into the distance, through more apple orchards, toward a small shiny dot, which Reacher figured might be a parked car. Beyond that seemed to be trees of a different green. He walked on. As he got closer he saw the dot was indeed a car. Shiny because of the power of the sun, not because of the paint on the car. It looked like a battered old lump. Eventually he saw it was a Subaru, a little like the one he had ridden in with the contractor with the inspector problem, genetically related, but twenty years older. Like an ancestor. It was parked head on against a wooden fence that ran side to side where the blacktop ended. Beyond the fence was another acre of apple orchard, and then another fence, beyond which were wild trees with bigger leaves.

There was a guy in the Subaru.

He was sitting behind the wheel. Reacher could see the collar of a blue denim jacket, and a long gray ponytail. The guy wasn’t moving. He was just staring ahead through the windshield.

Reacher walked the length of the car on the passenger side and stopped with his back to the guy and his hips against the fence. The next fence was a hundred yards away. The trees beyond it looked like regular New England species, densely but randomly scattered, twisted and competing. Which might be what happened when seeds blew in.

Also, the fence looked straight.

Promising.

Behind him he heard a car door open, and a voice said, “You’re the man who talked to Bruce Jones.”

Reacher turned around and said, “Am I?”

The guy from the Subaru was a reedy character maybe seventy years old, tall but cadaverous. Under his jacket his shoulders looked like a coat hanger.

He said, “He showed you the newsletter I wrote.”

“That was you?”

“The very same. He called me. He thought I might be interested that you were interested. I was, so I came out to meet you.”

“How did you know where?”

“You’re looking for Ryantown,” the guy said.

“Have I found it?”

“Straight ahead.”

“Those trees?”

“They thin out in the center. You can see pretty well.”

“Sure I won’t get poisoned?”

“Tin has the potential to be dangerous. More than a hundred milligrams of tin per cubic meter of air is immediately injurious to life and health. What’s worse is when tin bonds with certain hydrocarbons to make organotins. Some of those compounds are more lethal than cyanide. That’s what I was worried about.”

“What happened with that in the end?”

“The chemistry didn’t say what it needed to say.”

“Even though top scientists were working on it?”

“In the end the corporation in Colorado banned me from trespassing on what I insisted was their land. They took out a restraining order to keep me away. I can’t go beyond this fence.”

“Pity,” Reacher said. “You could have shown me around.”

“What’s your name?”

“Reacher.”

The guy said an address. A street number and a street name. The same name and the same number Reacher had seen in cubicle four, on the screen, from the census when his father was two.

“It was on the ground floor,” the guy said. “Some of the tile is still there. In the kitchen. It was still there eight years ago, anyway.”

“You haven’t been back?”

“You can’t fight city hall.”

“Who would know?” Reacher said. “Just this once.”

The guy didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “Wait.”

He looked ahead, across the hundred yards of orchard, to the second fence, and the trees beyond.

He said, “If that’s Ryantown over there, why does the road stop here?”

“It used to go all the way,” the guy said. “Technically the apple farmer is only squatting on this part of his land. About forty years ago a cold winter froze the blacktop off, and the next winter broke the base up, so in the spring the farmer borrowed a bulldozer and planted some more apple trees. Then in the summer the county came by and fixed what it could see. In the fall the farmer threw up this fence, and from that point onward it was a done deal. But good luck ever selling that parcel. The title search won’t come back pretty.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Maybe I’ll see you later.”

He hitched up on the fence, and swung his legs over, and stepped down in the orchard.

“Wait,” the guy said. “I’ll come with you.”

“You sure?”

“Who will know?”

“Live free or die,” Reacher said. “I saw it on your license plate.”

The guy stepped up on the bottom rail of the fence and from there performed a maneuver similar to Reacher’s. They walked together past shiny green eye-level apples, all of them bigger than baseballs, some of them bigger than softballs, stumbling now and then on uneven ground, where maybe forty years earlier the clandestine winter cleanup had been a little hasty. A hundred yards later they arrived at the second fence, where ahead of them were trees of a different kind, not decorous or orderly or smelling sweetly of ripe fruit, but rank weeds, basically. They were thinner and unhealthier dead ahead, because there they were growing through where the old road resumed, without the benefit of either a bulldozer or planting. Therefore dead ahead would be the practical way in. No machete required. Or at least less pushing and shoving. The guy with the ponytail agreed. He was looking at it eight years later, but it was still the best option.