Ли Чайлд - Past Tense

‘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 Marcus 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 grey shape, and a road.

‘Zoom out,’ he said.

She did, and the grey 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 towards 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 licence.’

‘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 any more. 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.’

‘I think he meant it. But he was also looking at it from our point of view.’

‘Now he’s your best friend for ever?’

‘I don’t know,’ Shorty said. ‘Most of the time I think he’s a weird asshole who needs a smack. But I have to admit he did good with the mechanic. He explained the problem and got a solution. That shows he’s taking it seriously. Maybe we were both right, way back at the beginning. They’re weird, but also they’re doing their best for us. I guess they could be both things at once.’

‘Whichever, let’s eat just the two of us.’

‘Works for me. I’m sick of answering their questions. It’s like the third degree.’

‘I told you,’ Patty said. ‘They’re being polite. It’s considered polite to take an interest.’

They got up and stepped inside the room. They left the door wide open. They shifted the cardboard box to the bed. Patty slit the tape with her thumbnail. Shorty lifted the flaps. Inside was an assortment of items, densely and meticulously packed. There were cereal bars and power bars and energy bars, and bottles of water, and packets of dried apricots, and tiny red boxes of raisins. Everything was arranged in a specific pattern that repeated twelve times over. Like twelve identical meals, all neatly laid out. Each one had a bottle of water, and then an equal one-twelfth share of the rest of the stuff.

There were also two flashlights in the box, standing on their ends, crammed in among the food.

‘Weird,’ Patty said.

‘I think this place is for hikers,’ Shorty said. ‘Like in the photograph they took with the model. Why else would they dress her up like that? I bet they give this stuff out as box lunches. Or sell it. It’s the kind of thing a hiker likes to carry.’

‘Is it?’

‘It’s compact and high energy. Easy to put in a pocket. Plus water.’

‘What are the flashlights for?’

‘I suppose in case you’re out late and have to eat in the dark.’

‘A lantern would be better.’

‘Maybe hikers prefer flashlights. I’m sure there’s consumer feedback. I think this is part of their stock of supplies.’

‘He said ingredients.’

‘It’s probably a balanced diet. Probably quite healthy. I bet hikers worry about that kind of thing.’

‘He said they put some ingredients together. They didn’t put this together. It’s pre-packaged. Like you said, off their storeroom shelf.’

‘We could still go eat at the house.’

‘I told you, I don’t want to. They don’t want us there.’

‘Then we got to eat this stuff.’

‘Why does he make such grandiose statements? He could have said he brought the same iron rations he sells the hikers for lunch. I would have been happy with that. It’s not like we’re paying for it.’

‘Exactly,’ Shorty said. ‘They’re weird. But kind of helpful too. Or the other way around.’

Reacher ate dinner alone in Laconia, at a greasy hole-in-the-wall with no tablecloths. He didn’t want to risk a fancier place, in case Carter Carrington and Elizabeth Castle picked the same spot. They would feel obliged to at least come over and say hello. He didn’t want to disturb their evening. Afterwards he spent an hour walking random blocks, looking for a grocery store with an apartment window above it, that faced east down the length of a street. He found one plausible possibility. It was dead ahead as he walked away from the centre of downtown. The apartment was now an attorney’s office. The store now sold pants and sweaters. He stood with his back to its window. He looked down the street. He saw a good-sized patch of night sky in the east, and below it the camber of the blacktop, humped between two gutters, flanked by two kerbs and two sidewalks, lit up here and there by widely spaced street lamps.

He walked the same direction the twenty-year-old had walked. He stopped thirty yards out. Any closer than that, he felt the old lady wouldn’t have used the binoculars. She would have trusted the naked eye. He turned around and looked up at her window. Now he was the smaller boys. He imagined the big guy in front of them, demanding, and then threatening. Technically no big deal. For Reacher himself, anyway. At sixteen he had been bigger than most twenty-year-olds. He had been bigger at thirteen. Biology had been good to him. He was fast, and nasty. He knew all the tricks. He had invented some of them. He had grown up in the Marine Corps, not in Ryantown, New Hampshire. And Stan had been a normal-sized person by comparison. Compact, even, in some respects. Maybe six-one in dress shoes, maybe 190 after a four-course dinner.