Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(9)
“It started last night. First turn of the key.”
She said, “Did you have a problem with the room door?”
He said, “When?”
“When you came out this morning.”
“What kind of problem?”
“I wanted some air in the night but I couldn’t get it open. It was jammed.”
“I didn’t have a problem,” Shorty said. “It opened right up.”
Fifty yards away they saw Peter come out of the barn, with a brown canvas bag in his hand. It looked heavy. Tools, Patty thought. To fix their car.
She said, “Shorty Fleck, now you listen to me. These gentlemen are trying to help us, and I want you to act like you appreciate it. At the very minimum l don’t want you to give them a reason to stop helping us before they’re finished. Do I make myself clear?”
“Jesus,” he said. “You’re acting like this is my fault or something.”
“Yeah, something,” she said, and then she shut up and waited for Peter, with the bag of tools. Who clanked up to them with a cheerful smile, as if he was just itching to clap the dust off his hands and get straight to work.
She said, “Thanks so much for your help.”
He said, “No problem at all.”
“I hope it’s not too complicated.”
“Right now it’s dead as a doornail. Which is usually electrical. Maybe a wire melted.”
“Can you fix that?”
“We could splice in a replacement. Just enough to bypass the bad part. Sooner or later you would want to get it properly repaired. It’s the kind of thing that could shake loose eventually.”
“How long does it take to splice?”
“First we need to find where it melted.”
“The engine started last night,” Shorty said. “Then we ran it two minutes and shut it off again. It got cooler and cooler, all night long. How would anything melt?”
Peter said nothing.
“He’s just asking,” Patty said. “In case the melting thing is a wild goose chase. We wouldn’t want to take up more of your time than we had to. It’s very nice of you to help us.”
“It’s OK,” Peter said. “It’s a reasonable question. When you stop the engine you also stop the radiator fan and the water pump. So there’s no forced cooling and no circulation. The hottest water rises passively to the top of the cylinder head. Surface temperatures can actually get worse in the first hour. Maybe there was a wire touching the metal.”
He ducked under the hood and pondered a moment. He traced circuits with his finger, checking the wires, tugging things, tapping things. He looked at the battery. He used a wrench to check the clamps were tight on the posts.
He backed out and said, “Try it one more time.”
Shorty put his butt on the seat and kept his feet on the ground. He twisted to face front and put his hand on the key. He looked up. Peter nodded. Shorty turned the key.
Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not even a click or a whir or a cough. Turning the key was the same thing as not turning it. Inert. Dead as a doornail. Dead as the deadest thing that ever died.
—
Elizabeth Castle looked up from her screen and focused on nothing much, as if running through a number of possible scenarios, and the consequent next steps in all the different circumstances, starting, Reacher assumed, with him being an idiot and getting the town wrong, in which case the next step would be to get rid of him, no doubt politely, but also no doubt expeditiously.
She said, “They were probably renters. Most people were. The landlords paid the taxes. We’ll have to find them somewhere else. Were they farmers?”
“I don’t think so,” Reacher said. “I don’t remember any stories about having to go outside in the freezing dawn to feed the chickens before walking twenty miles through the snow to school, uphill both ways. That’s the kind of thing farmers tell you, right? But I never heard that.”
“Then I’m not sure where you should start.”
“The beginning is often good. The register of births.”
“That’s in the county offices, not the city. It’s a whole different building, quite far from here. Maybe you should start with the census records instead. Your father should show up in two of them, when he was around two years old and twelve years old.”
“Where are they?”
“They’re in the county offices too, but a different office, slightly closer.”
“How many offices have they got?”
“A good number.”
She gave him the address of the particular place he needed, with extensive turn-by-turn directions how to get there, and he said goodbye and set out walking. He passed the inn where he had spent the night. He passed a place he figured he would come back to for lunch. He was moving south and east through the downtown blocks, sometimes on worn brick sidewalks easily eighty years old. Even a hundred. The stores were crisp and clean, many of them devoted to cookware and bakeware and tableware and all kinds of other wares associated with the preparation and consumption of food. Some were shoe stores. Some had bags.
The building he was looking for turned out to be a modern structure built wide and low across what must have been two regular lots. It would have looked better on a technology campus, surrounded by computer laboratories. Which was what it was, he thought. He realized in his mind he had been expecting shelves of moldering paper, hand-lettered in fading ink, tied up with string. All of which still existed, he was sure, but not there. That stuff was in storage, three months away, after being copied and catalogued and indexed on a computer. It would be retrieved not with a puff of dust and a cart with wheels, but with a click of a mouse and the whir of a printer.