Past Tense

Chapter 7

Reacher left Carrington in the garden, and walked back to the city office. He pressed the record department’s bell, and a minute later Elizabeth Castle came in through the door.

He said, “You told me to check back.”

She said, “Did you find Carter?”

“He seems like a nice guy. I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to date him.”

“Excuse me?”

“When I wondered if he was your boyfriend, and you were incredulous.”

“That he would want to date me. He’s Laconia’s most eligible bachelor. He could have anyone he wants. I’m sure he has no idea who I am. What did he tell you?”

“That my grandparents were either poor or thieves, or poor thieves.”

“I’m sure they weren’t.”

Reacher said nothing.

She said, “Although I know both those things were frequent reasons.”

“Either one is a possibility,” he said. “We don’t need to walk on eggs.”

“Probably they didn’t register to vote, either. Would they have had driver’s licenses?”

“Not if they were poor. Not if they were thieves, either. Not in their real names, anyway.”

“Your dad must have had a birth certificate. He must be on paper somewhere.”

The customer door from the corridor opened, and Carter Carrington stepped inside, with his suit and his smile and his unruly hair. He saw Reacher and said, “Hello again,” not surprised at all, as if he had expected no one else. Then he turned toward the counter and stuck out his hand and said, “You must be Ms. Castle.”

“Elizabeth,” she said.

“Carter Carrington. Really pleased to meet you. Thanks for sending this gentleman my way. He has an interesting situation.”

“Because his dad is missing from two consecutive counts.”

“Exactly.”

“Which feels deliberate.”

“As long as we’re sure we’re looking at the right town.”

“We are,” Reacher said. “I saw it written down a dozen times. Laconia, New Hampshire.”

“Interesting,” Carrington said. Then he looked Elizabeth Castle in the eye and said, “We should have lunch sometime. I like the way you saw the thing with the two counts. I’d like to discuss it more.”

She didn’t answer.

“Anyway, keep me in the loop,” he said.

She said, “We figure he must have had a birth certificate.”

“Almost certainly,” he said. “What was his date of birth?”

Reacher paused a beat.

He said, “This is going to sound weird. In this context, I mean.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes he wasn’t sure.”

“What does that mean?”

“Sometimes he said June, and sometimes he said July.”

“Was there an explanation for that?”

“He said he couldn’t remember because birthdays weren’t important to him. He didn’t see why he should be congratulated for getting another year closer to death.”

“That’s bleak.”

“He was a Marine.”

“What did the paperwork say?”

“July.”

Carrington said nothing.

Reacher said, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“I already agreed with Ms. Castle we don’t need to walk on eggs.”

“A child uncertain of its birth date is a classic symptom of dysfunction within a family.”

“Theoretically,” Reacher said.

“Anyway, birth records are in date order. Could take some time, if you’re not sure. Better to find another avenue.”

“Such as?”

“The police blotter, maybe. Not to be insensitive. Purely as a percentage play. If nothing else it would be nice to eliminate the possibility. I don’t want them to be hiding from the law, any more than you do. I want a more interesting reason than that. And it won’t take long to find out. As of now our police department is computerized back about a thousand years. They spent a fortune. Homeland Security money, not ours, but still. They also built a statue of the first chief.”

“Who should I go see?”

“I’ll call ahead. Someone will meet you at the desk.”

“How cooperative will they be?”

“I’m the guy who decides whether the city goes to bat for them. When they do something wrong, I mean. So they’ll be plenty cooperative. But wait until after lunch. You’ll get more time that way.”

Patty Sundstrom and Shorty Fleck went to lunch over at the big house. It was an awkward meal. Shorty was by turns stiff and sheepish. Peter was silent. Either offended or disappointed, Patty couldn’t tell. Robert and Steven didn’t say much of anything. Only Mark really talked. He was bright and blithe and chatty. Very friendly. As if the events of the morning had never occurred. He seemed determined to find solutions to their problems. He apologized to them over and over about the phone. He made them listen to the dead handset, as if to share his burden. He said he was concerned people would be worried about them, either back home, or at their destination. Were they missing appointments? Were there people they needed to call?

Patty said, “No one knows we’re gone.”

“Really?”

“They would have tried to talk us out of it.”

“Out of what?”

“It’s boring up there. Shorty and I want something different.”

“Where do you plan to go?”

“Florida,” she said. “We want to start our own business there.”

“What kind of business?”

“Something on the ocean. Watersports, maybe. Like windsurfer rentals.”

“You would need capital,” Mark said. “To buy the windsurfers.”

Patty looked away, and thought about the suitcase.

Shorty asked, “How long will the phone be out?”

Mark asked back, “What am I, clairvoyant?”

“I mean, usually. On average.”

“They usually fix it in half a day. And the mechanic is a good friend. We’ll ask him to put us first in line. You could be back on the road before dinnertime.”

“What if it takes longer than half a day?”

“Then it just does, I guess. I can’t control it.”

“Honestly, the best thing would be just give us a ride to town. Best for us, and best for you. We’d be out of your hair.”

“But your car would still be here.”

“We would send a tow truck.”

“Would you?”

“From the first place we saw.”

“Could we trust you?”

“I promise I would take care of it.”

“OK, but you have to admit, you haven’t proved a hundred percent reliable about taking care of things so far.”

“I promise we would send a truck.”

“But suppose you didn’t? We’re running a business here. We would be stuck with getting rid of your car. Which might be difficult, because strictly speaking it isn’t ours to get rid of in the first place. There wouldn’t be much we could do without a title. We couldn’t donate it. We couldn’t even sell it for scrap. No doubt pursuing alternatives would cost us time and money. But needs must. We couldn’t have it here forever, dirtying up the place. Nothing personal. A business like ours is all about image and curb appeal. It needs to entice, not repel. A rusty old wreck of a car front and center would send the wrong message. No offense. I’m sure you understand.”

“You could come with us to the tow company,” Shorty said. “You could drive us there first. You could watch us make the arrangements. Like a witness.”

Mark nodded, eyes down, now a little sheepish himself.

“Good answer,” he said. “The truth is we’re a little embarrassed ourselves, at the moment, when it comes to rides to town. The investment in this place was enormous. Three of us sold our cars. We kept Peter’s, to share, because as it happened it was the oldest and therefore the least valuable. It wouldn’t start this morning. Just like yours. Maybe it’s something in the air. But in practical terms, as of right now, I’m afraid we’re all stuck here together.”

Reacher ate at the place he had picked out earlier, which served upscale but recognizable dishes in a pleasant room with tablecloths. He had a burger piled high with all kinds of extras, and a slice of apricot pie, with black coffee throughout. Then he set out for the police station. He found it right where Carrington said it would be. The public lobby was tall and tiled and formal. There was a civilian desk worker behind a mahogany reception counter. Reacher gave her his name and told her Carter Carrington had promised he would call ahead and arrange for someone to speak with him. The woman was on the phone even before he got through the first part of Carrington’s name. Clearly she had been warned he was coming.

She asked him to take a seat, but he stood instead, and waited. Not long, as it turned out. Two detectives pushed through a pair of double doors. A man and a woman. Both looked like solid professionals. At first Reacher assumed they weren’t for him. He was expecting a file clerk. But they walked straight toward him, and when they arrived the man said, “Mr. Reacher? I’m Jim Shaw, chief of detectives. I’m very pleased to meet you.”

The chief of detectives. Very pleased. They’ll be plenty cooperative, Carrington had said. He wasn’t kidding. Shaw was a heavy guy in his fifties, maybe five-ten, with a lined Irish face and a shock of red hair. Anyone within a hundred miles of Boston would have made him as a cop. He was like a picture in a book.

“I’m very pleased to meet you too,” Reacher said.

“I’m Detective Brenda Amos,” the woman said. “Happy to help. Anything you need.”

Her accent was from the south. A drawl, but no longer honeyed. It was roughed up by exposure. She was ten years younger than Shaw, maybe five-six, and slender. She had blonde hair and cheekbones and sleepy green eyes that said, don’t mess with me.

“Ma’am, thank you,” he said. “But really, this is no kind of a big deal. I don’t know exactly what Mr. Carrington told you, but all I need is some ancient history. Which probably isn’t there anyway. From eighty years ago. It’s not even a cold case.”

Shaw said, “Mr. Carrington mentioned you were an MP.”

“Long ago.”

“That buys you ten minutes with a computer. That’s all it’s going to take.”

They led him back through thigh-high mahogany gates, to an open area full of plain-clothed people sitting face to face at paired desks. The desks were loaded with phones and flat screens and keyboards and wire baskets of paper. Like any office anywhere, except for a weary air of grime and burden, that made it unmistakably a cop shop. They turned a corner, into a corridor with offices either side. They stopped at the third on the left. It was Amos’s. She ushered Reacher in, and Shaw said goodbye and walked on, as if all appropriate courtesies had been observed, and his job was therefore done. Amos followed Reacher inside and closed the door. The outer structure of the office was old and traditional, but everything in it was sleek and new. Desk, chairs, cabinets, computer.

Amos said, “How can I help you?”

He said, “I’m looking for the surname Reacher, in old police reports from the 1920s and 30s and 40s.”

“Relatives of yours?”

“My grandparents and my father. Carrington thinks they dodged the census because they had federal warrants.”

“This is a municipal department. We don’t have access to federal records.”

“They might have started small. Most people do.”

Amos pulled the keyboard close and started tapping away. She asked, “Were there any alternative spellings?”

He said, “I don’t think so.”

“First names?”

“James, Elizabeth, and Stan.”

“Jim, Jimmy, Jamie, Liz, Lizzie, Beth?”

“I don’t know what they called each other. I never met them.”

“Was Stan short for Stanley?”

“I never saw that. It was always just Stan.”

“Any known aliases?”

“Not known to me.”

She typed some more, and clicked, and waited.

She didn’t speak.

He said, “I’m guessing you were an MP too.”

“What gave me away?”

“First your accent. It’s the sound of the U.S. Army. Mostly southern, but a little mixed up. Plus most civilian cops ask about what we did and how we did it. Because they’re professionally curious. But you aren’t. Most likely because you already know.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“How long have you been out?”

“Six years,” she said. “You?”

“Longer than that.”

“What unit?”

“The 110th, mostly.”

“Nice,” she said. “Who was the CO when you were there?”

“I was,” he said.

“And now you’re retired and into genealogy.”

“I saw a road sign,” he said. “That’s all. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t.”

She looked back at the screen.

“We have a hit,” she said. “From seventy-five years ago.”