Past Tense

Chapter 14

It took them a fraction more than thirty minutes to push the two-plus miles. They rolled to a stop where the track came out of the trees. It ran on ahead of them, gray and ghostly in the moonlight, through the flat two acres, to the curve of buildings in the distance. The motel, dark and quiet. The barn, dark and quiet. The house, dark and quiet. Five-thirty in the morning, by Patty’s watch. Easily an hour before the first hint of daylight.

All good.

They pushed on, as quiet as they could, nothing but the hiss of the tires and the slap of their soles on the last of the blacktop. Then they bumped down into the motel lot, and their progress got louder, with crunching steps and squelching stones, past the office, past room one, and two, all the way to the dead Honda, and onward, past room twelve’s corner, straight toward the barn. They could see eight ghostly shapes, neatly parked, and the ninth slot empty, like a punched-out tooth in a smile. Shorty pointed and gave Patty a thumbs-up. She was right. The first daylight glance out the window would have raised the alarm.

They cut the last corner across the grass, and rolled real slow on the parking area’s gravel. Putting the bike back in place was easy. Just a question of lining it up and pushing it in, nose first, and then nudging it dead level with the others, and stepping away. Job done. Perfect. Undetectable. They tiptoed across the gravel, and they walked away on the grass, back to the track, where they stood for a second and took a breath. Ahead of them were the same two-plus miles. All over again. But this time they had nothing to push. This time they would be walking, plain and simple. Walking away, forever.

Behind them a door opened. Over at the house. Relatively distant. A faraway voice called out, “Hey guys, is that you?”

Mark.

They stood still.

“Guys?”

A flashlight beam lanced beyond them, with their shadows cut out, which meant light was playing on their backs.

“Guys?” Mark called again.

They turned around.

Mark was walking through the dark toward them. He was fully dressed. His day had already begun. He was keeping his flashlight low, and so were Shorty and Patty, all three beams acting polite, trying to illuminate, but not dazzle.

They waited.

Mark arrived.

He said, “This is the most amazing coincidence.”

Along with the flashlight he was carrying a blank sheet of paper and a pencil.

Patty said, “Is it?”

“I’m sorry, I should have asked, is everything OK?”

“We’re fine.”

“Just out for a walk?”

“Why is it a coincidence?”

“Because literally at this very moment I have the mechanic on the phone. He starts work at five, to be ready for rush hour. This morning he woke up with a sudden thought. He remembered we had mentioned you drove down from Canada. He realizes at the time he instinctively assumed you were Americans returning home. Then this morning he realized it was equally likely you were Canadians visiting the other way around. In which case you would have a Canadian-spec car. In which case you would have the mandatory winter package, which back then was a different heater and no AC. In which case his diagnosis was wrong. That’s a U.S.-spec problem. In Canada it’s the starter motor relay that fries. He needs to know which part to pick up at the scrapyard. He’s heading there now. He literally just sent me out to get the ID number off your windshield.”

He held up the paper and pencil, as if in proof.

Then he said, “But obviously it will be a lot quicker for all concerned if you come in and answer his questions yourselves.”

He mimed the relative distances by chopping his palms closer together and further apart, first showing the long way still to go to the Honda, plus the even longer way back again, versus a short sharp one-way trip from where they were standing to the phone in the house. A dramatic difference. Impeccable logic. Shorty looked at Patty. She looked at him. All kinds of questions.

Mark said, “We could make a pot of coffee. We could ask the guy to call us back when he’s actually got the part he needs in his hot little hand. And then again, when he’s actually in his truck and on his way to you. I want you to hear it from the horse’s mouth. I feel at this point a little reassurance is in order. I feel that’s the least we can do. You folks have been messed around enough already.”

He held out his hand, in a courtly after-you gesture.

Patty and Shorty walked toward the house. Mark walked with them. All three flashlight beams bounced along in the same direction. At the end Mark sped up and then waited at the kitchen door, ushering them in. He flicked on a light and pointed ahead to the inner hallway, where the dead phone had been demonstrated at lunch the day before. Now the receiver was lying tethered by its cord on the seat of a chair. On hold, the old-fashioned way.

Mark said, “His name is Carol. Probably spelled different. He’s from Macedonia.”

He held out his hand, toward the phone, in a courtly help-yourself gesture.

Patty picked up the receiver. She put it to her ear. She heard a kind of spacy noise. A cell connection somewhere, doing its best.

She said, “Carol?”

A voice said, “Mark?”

“No, my name is Patty Sundstrom. My boyfriend and I own the Honda.”

“Oh man, I didn’t mean for Mark to wake you guys up. That isn’t polite.”

The voice had an accent that sounded like wherever it came from deserved a name like Macedonia. Eastern Europe, she thought. Or Central. Somewhere between Greece and Russia. The kind of guy who should shave twice a day but didn’t. Like a sinister bad guy in the movies. Except his voice was friendly. Light in tone. Helpful, and full of concern. Full of energy, too, first thing in the morning.

She said, “We were awake anyway.”

“Were you?”

“We were taking a walk, as a matter of fact.”

“Why?”

“Something else woke us up, I suppose.”

“Listening to your voice I’m guessing you’re Canadian.”

“So is our car.”

“Yeah,” the voice said. “I made an assumption and thereby nearly made a mistake. I learned my trade in the old Yugoslav army. Like armies everywhere they taught us assuming things made an ass out of you and me. This time it’s all me, I’m afraid. I apologize. But let’s be certain. Have you ever had cause to change out the heater hoses?”

“I know they go low down,” Patty said.

“OK, that’s Canadian for sure. Good to know. I’ll pick up a starter motor relay. Then I got to pay the bills. I’ll head out to the highway for a spell. Maybe I’ll get lucky with a wreck. If not, I’ll get to you all the sooner. Call it two hours minimum, four hours maximum.”

“You sure?”

“Ma’am, I cross my heart,” the voice said, with its accent. “I promise I’ll get you on your way.”

Then the call went dead and Patty hung up the phone.

Mark said, “The coffee is ready.”

Patty said, “He’ll be here between two hours and four hours from now.”

“Perfect.”

Shorty said, “Really?”

“He promised,” she said.

They heard a vehicle on the track outside. The crunch of stones, and the thrash of an engine. They looked out the window and saw Peter in a battered old pick-up truck. He was coming close. He was slowing to a stop. He was parking.

Shorty said, “Whose truck?”

“His,” Mark said. “He gave it another try late last night. Maybe the warmth of the day helped the battery. He got it going. Now he’s been down to the road and back, to charge it up and blow the cobwebs away. Maybe that was what woke you up. He can give you a ride to your room, if you like. Better than walking. It’s the least we can do. I’m sure you’re tired.”

They said they didn’t want to impose, but Peter wouldn’t take no for an answer. His truck was a crew cab, so Shorty rode in front, and Patty sat in back. Peter parked next to the Honda. Room ten’s door was closed. Which Patty thought was weird. She was pretty sure they had left it open. Maybe it had blown. Shorty’s shoes were back on his feet, after all. Although she didn’t remember wind. She had been outdoors most of the night. She remembered the air as still and oppressive.

They got out of the truck. Peter watched them to their door. Patty turned the handle and opened up. She went in first. Then she came straight back out again. She pointed at Peter in his truck and she yelled, “You stay there.”

She stepped aside. Shorty looked in the room. In the center of the floor was their luggage. Back again. Their suitcase and their two overnight bags. Neatly placed, in a precise arrangement, as if a bell boy had left them. Their suitcase was now tied up with rope. There were complicated knots on the upper face, with a doubled thickness of rope between them. Like an improvised handle.

Patty said, “What the hell is this?”

Peter got out of his truck.

“We sincerely apologize,” he said. “We are very, very sorry about this, and very, very embarrassed that you should get caught up in it.”

“In what?”

“It’s the time of year, I’m afraid. College semesters are starting. Undergraduates are everywhere. Their fraternities set them challenges. They steal our motel signs all the time. Then they started a new thing. Some kind of initiation rite. They had to steal everything out of a motel room while the guest was temporarily absent. Stupid, but it was what it was. We thought it was finished a couple of years ago, but now it seems to be back again. I found your stuff in the hedge, down by the road. It’s the only possible explanation. They must have gotten in while you were taking your walk. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please let us know if anything is damaged. We’re going to make a police report. I mean, OK, everyone likes high spirits, but this kind of thing is ridiculous.”

Patty said nothing.

Shorty didn’t speak.

Peter got back in his truck and drove away. Patty and Shorty stood still for a moment. Then they went inside. They stepped around their luggage and sat down together on the bed. They left the door open.

The breakfast part of Reacher’s bed and breakfast deal was located in a pretty room that was half a story below the street but level with the small rear garden, which was just as pretty as the room. Reacher took an inside table at a quarter to eight in the morning, ready for coffee. He was the only person in there. The season was over. He was showered and dressed and felt good and looked respectable, all except for a cut knuckle. From the kid in the night. His teeth, no doubt. Not a serious injury. Just a short worm of crusted blood. But a distinctive shape. Reacher had been a cop for thirteen years, and then not a cop for longer, so he saw things from both points of view. As a result wherever possible he liked to avoid confusion. He ordered his meal and then got up and stepped out to the garden. He squatted down and made a fist with his right hand and tapped and scraped it on the brick of a flowerbed wall. Just enough to make the tooth mark one of many. Then he went back to his table and dipped the corner of his napkin in his water glass, and sponged the grit off his knuckles.

Fifteen minutes later Detective Brenda Amos stepped into the room. She was writing in her notebook. At her shoulder was a man in a suit. His posture and his manner said he was showing her around. Therefore he was the bed and breakfast’s manager. Or its owner. Reacher half lip-read and half heard him say, “This gentleman is the only guest still on the premises.”

Amos glanced up from her notebook, routinely, and glanced away again. Then she looked back. A classic slow-motion double take, like something out of an old-time television show. She stared. She blinked.

She said to the man in the suit, “I’ll talk to him now.”

“May I bring you coffee?”

“Yes, please,” Reacher called out to him. “A pot for two.”

The guy nodded politely, after a fractional delay. To bring coffee to a police detective was one thing. To a guest was another. Beneath his station. But on the other hand, the customer was always right. He backed out of the room and Amos came all the way in. She sat down at Reacher’s table, in the empty seat across from him.

She said, “As a matter of fact I already had coffee this morning.”

“It doesn’t have to be a once-a-day thing,” he said. “There’s no law that says you ever have to stop.”

“Also as a matter of fact I think Dunkin’ is spiking it with LSD today.”

“How so?”

“Or else as a matter of fact this is the biggest déjà vu in history.”

“OK, how so that?”

“You know what déjà vu literally means?”

“It literally means already seen. It’s French. My mother was French. She liked it when Americans used French phrases. It made her feel part of things.”

“Why are you telling me about your mother?”

“Why are you asking me about LSD?”

“What did we do yesterday?”

“Do?” he said.

“We dug up an old case from seventy-five years ago, in which a youth was found unconscious on the sidewalk of a downtown Laconia street. He was identified as a local twenty-year-old, already known to the police department as a loudmouth and a bully, but untouchable, because he was the son of the local rich guy. Remember?”

“Sure,” Reacher said.

“What happened when I got to work this morning?”

“I have no way of knowing.”

“I was told that a youth had just been found unconscious on the sidewalk of a downtown Laconia street. He had been identified as a local twenty-year-old, already known to the police department as a loudmouth and a bully, but untouchable, because he was the son of the local rich guy.”

“Seriously?”

“And I walk into the hotel across the street and here you are.”

“I guess that seems like a coincidence.”

“You think?”

“Not really. Clearly such crimes happen all the time.”

“Seventy-five years apart is all the time?”

“I’m sure there were many similar incidents in between. All rich bullies get a smack sooner or later. You could have picked any old case at random, and it could have been the same kind of match. And obviously I’m here, because I’m the guy who asked you about the non-random old case in question. So instead of a coincidence, it’s really a mathematical certainty, especially because you know I don’t live here, so where else would I be, except a hotel?”

“Directly across the street from the crime scene.”

“Are you going house to house for witnesses?”

“That’s what we do.”

“Did anyone see anything?”

“Did you?”

“I’m not a birdwatcher,” Reacher said. “More’s the pity. Migration has started. My dad would have been excited.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“What time?”

“The kid was still unconscious at seven. Assuming his assailant was a human being and not an eighteen-wheel truck, call it no earlier than five o’clock.”

“I was asleep at five o’clock,” Reacher said. “Didn’t hear a thing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Something woke me up the night before. But that was three o’clock, and a different hotel.”

“What was it?”

“It woke me up but it didn’t happen again. I couldn’t get a fix on it.”

“The kid also has a broken arm,” Amos said.

“That can happen,” Reacher said.

A waitress came in with two pots of coffee and two fresh cups. Reacher poured, but Amos didn’t. She closed her notebook. He asked her, “How is this investigation viewed inside the department?”

She said, “We have low expectations.”

“Are tears not being shed?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Who was the kid?”

“The kid is a lout and a bully and a predator. The kind who gets the best of everything, including victims and lawyers.”

“Doesn’t sound all that complicated to me.”

“We’re worried about what happens next.”

“You think he’s going to get up a posse?”

“The problem is his father already has a posse.”

“The local rich guy? Who is he?”

“I paraphrased a little. He’s really from Boston. But he lives in Manchester now.”

“And what kind of posse does he have?”

“He makes financial arrangements for clients who can’t risk paper trails. In other words he launders money for the kind of people who need money laundered. I imagine he could borrow pretty much any kind of posse he wants. And we think he will. These guys have a culture. Someone attacked his family. Got to be made an example. This guy can’t look weak. So we know sooner or later his people will show up here in town, asking around. We don’t want trouble here. That’s why it’s complicated.”

Reacher poured another cup of coffee.

Amos watched.

She said, “How did you hurt your hand?”

“I punched the garden wall.”

“That’s an odd way to put it.”

“Can’t really blame the wall.”

“It makes it sound deliberate.”

He smiled. “Am I coming across as the kind of guy who would deliberately punch a wall?”

“When did it happen?”

“About twenty minutes ago.”

“Were you bending down to look at the flowers?”

“I like flowers as much as the next guy.”

Her phone dinged, and she read a message.

She said, “The kid woke up but doesn’t remember a thing about his attacker.”

“That can happen,” Reacher said again.

“He’s lying. He knows but he’s not telling us. He wants to tell his father instead.”

“Because they have a culture.”

“I hope whoever did it knows what’s coming.”

“I’m sure whoever did it will leave town. Just like seventy-five years ago. Déjà vu all over again.”

“What are your own movements today?”

“I guess technically I’m leaving town.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to Ryantown,” Reacher said. “If I can find it.”

He bought a paper map at an old edge-of-town gas station. It showed the same kind of vagueness as Elizabeth Castle’s phone. Certain roads headed in certain directions, as if for a purpose, and certain destinations were shaded gray, as if once developed, but none of them had names anymore, and there was no way of telling one from the other. He wasn’t entirely sure what kind of geographic setting a tin mill would require. Truth was, he wasn’t entirely sure what a tin mill did. Did it make tin out of ore? Or did it make cans and whistles and toys out of tin? Either way he guessed heat was involved. All kinds of fires and furnaces. Maybe a steam engine, to drive belts and tools. Which meant trucking in wood or coal. Plus water would be necessary, to make the steam. He looked at the map again, for roads, and rivers, and streams, all meeting at a place shaded gray. North and west of Laconia, according to Elizabeth Castle’s historical research.

There were two possibilities. One was eight miles out, and the other was ten. Both had roads coming in off the main drag and stopping right there, for no apparent modern-day reason. Both had water, in what looked like broad tributaries both flowing toward the same larger river. The streams met the roads in tiny triangles, both printed as fine as the mapmaker could get them, both set in dots shaded gray. Little mills and factories, a couple dozen workers in four-flats, maybe a one-room schoolhouse, maybe a church, Amos had said. Either spot would fit the bill. Except the access road in and out of the ten-mile place curved gently north. Away from Laconia. Whereas the road in and out of the eight-mile place curved gently south. Toward Laconia. As if part of it. Not turning its back. Reacher pictured a boy on a bike, rattling eagerly away from home, his binoculars bouncing around his neck. From the ten-mile place he would first waste a couple of miles on the wrong bearing, and then he would have to make an awkward against-the-flow tight right turn. Whereas from the eight-mile place he would be heading the right way from the get-go, accelerating around the curve and then launching straight toward the heart of town. Which boy would say he lived in Laconia?

Which was good. Eight miles not ten would save an hour on the round trip. Plus a quarter of the effort. He folded the map and stuck it in his pocket. He set out walking.

He didn’t get far.