Past Tense

Chapter 9

Reacher said, “I still don’t get it. The birdwatcher lady supplied the ID on Stan, and Stan could have been leaned upon to ID his mysterious friend, surely. Just one extra step. One extra visit to his house. Five minutes at most. That’s no kind of a manpower problem. One guy could have done it on the way to the donut shop.”

Amos said, “Stan Reacher was listed as resident outside the jurisdiction. That’s a whole lot of paperwork right there. All they had was typewriters back then. Plus they must have figured he was likely to clam up anyway, no matter how hard they leaned on him, which couldn’t have been very hard anyway, because they would have been on foreign turf, probably with a local guy sitting in, and maybe lawyers or parents too. Plus they must have figured the mystery friend would be in the wind already and out of the state by then. Plus they weren’t shedding any tears for the victim anyway. No doubt the easy decision was to let it all go.”

“Stan Reacher was a resident outside of what jurisdiction?”

“Laconia PD.”

“The story was he was born and grew up here.”

“Maybe he was born here, in the hospital, but then maybe he grew up out of town, on a farm or something.”

“I never got that impression.”

“In a nearby village, then. Close enough to be in the same birdwatching club as a woman living above a downtown grocery store. He would put Laconia as his birthplace, because that’s where the hospital was, and he would probably say he grew up in Laconia, too. Like shorthand for the general area as a whole. Like people say Chicago, even though a lot of the suburbs aren’t technically in Chicago at all. Same thing with Boston.”

“The Laconia metro area,” Reacher said.

“Things were more dispersed back then. There were little mills and factories all over. Couple dozen workers in four-flats. Maybe a one-room schoolhouse. Maybe a church. All considered Laconia, no matter what the postal service had to say about it.”

“Try Reacher on its own,” he said. “No first names. Maybe I have cousins in the area. I could get an address.”

Amos pulled her keyboard close again and typed, seven letters, and clicked. Reacher saw the screen change, reflected in her eyes.

“Just one more hit,” she said. “More than seventy-some years after the first. You must be a relatively law-abiding family.” She clicked again, and read out loud, “About a year and a half ago a patrol car responded to the county offices because a customer was causing a disturbance. Yelling, shouting, behaving in a threatening manner. The uniforms calmed him down and he apologized and it went no further. He gave his name as Mark Reacher. Resident outside the jurisdiction.”

“Age?”

“Then twenty-six.”

“He could be my distant nephew, many times removed. What was he upset about?”

“He claimed a building permit was slow coming through. He claimed he was renovating a motel somewhere out of town.”

After thirty minutes in the sun Patty went inside to use the bathroom. On her way back she stopped at the vanity opposite the end of the bed. She looked in the mirror and blew her nose. She balled up the tissue and lobbed it toward the trash can. She missed. She bent down to correct her error. She was Canadian.

She saw a used cotton bud in the dent where the carpet met the wall. Not hers. She didn’t use them. It was deep in the shadows, at the back of the knee hole under the vanity, beyond the legs of the stool. Imperfect housekeeping, no question, but understandable. Maybe even inevitable. Maybe it had been pressed deeper into its hiding place by the wheels of the vacuum cleaner itself.

Except.

She called out, “Shorty, come take a look at this.”

Shorty got up out of his chair and stepped in the room.

He left the door wide open.

Patty pointed.

Shorty said, “It’s for cleaning your ears. Or drying them. Maybe both. They have two ends. I’ve seen them in the drugstore.”

“Why is it there?”

“Someone missed the trash can. Maybe it bounced off the rim, and rolled out of sight. Happens all the time. The maids don’t care.”

She said, “Go back to your lawn chair, Shorty.”

He did.

A long minute later she joined him.

He said, “What did I do?”

She said, “It’s what you didn’t do.”

“What didn’t I do?”

“You didn’t think,” she said. “Mark told us this is the first room they’ve refurbished so far. He said in fact they only just finished it. He asked us to do them the honor of being its very first guests. So why does it have a used cotton bud in it?”

Shorty nodded. Slow but sure. He said, “The story about their car was weird, too. Peter must be some kind of saboteur. When are they going to catch on?”

“Why would they lie about the room?”

“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe a painter used the cotton bud. To touch up a last-minute ding in the wood stain. That happens, too. Maybe when they moved the furniture in. Hard to avoid.”

“Now you think they’re OK?”

“Not about the car, no. If theirs wouldn’t start this morning, why hadn’t they already called the mechanic anyway?”

“The phone was out.”

“Maybe not then. Maybe not first thing in the morning. We could have tagged on. We could have split the call-out charge. That would have made it more reasonable.”

“Shorty, forget the call-out charge, OK? This is more important. They’re acting weird.”

“I told you that at the beginning.”

“I thought you just didn’t like them.”

“For a reason.”

“What are we going to do?”

Shorty glanced around. First at the mouth of the track through the trees, and then at the dead Honda’s load space, where their suitcase was weighing down the springs.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we could tow the car with a quad-bike. Maybe the keys are in them. Or on a hook inside the barn.”

“We can’t steal a quad-bike.”

“It wouldn’t be stealing. It would be borrowing. We could tow the car two miles to the road, and then bring the quad-bike back again.”

“Then what? All we would have is a dead car on the side of the road.”

“Maybe a wrecker would come by. Or we could get any kind of ride and forget about the car. The county would come along and junk it sooner or later.”

“Do we have a tow rope?”

“Maybe there’s one in the barn.”

“I don’t think a quad-bike would be strong enough.”

“We could use two. Like tugboats pulling an ocean liner to the harbor mouth.”

“That’s crazy,” Patty said.

“OK, maybe we could use a quad-bike to haul just the suitcase.”

“You mean drag it along?”

“I think they have a platform on the back.”

“Too small.”

“Then we could balance it on the gas tank and the handlebar.”

“They won’t like it if we leave our car here.”

“Too bad.”

“Do you even know how to drive a quad-bike?”

“It can’t be that hard. We would want to go slow anyway. And we couldn’t fall off. Not like a regular motorbike.”

“It’s a possibility,” Patty said. “I suppose.”

“Let’s wait until after dinner,” Shorty said. “Maybe the phone is back on and the mechanic will show up and everything will work out fine. If not, we’ll take a look at the barn after dark. OK?”

Patty didn’t answer. They stayed where they were, slumped down in their lawn chairs, keeping the low sun on their faces. They left their room door wide open.

Fifty yards away in the command center in the back parlor, Mark asked, “Who missed the cotton bud?”

“All of us,” Peter said. “We all checked the room and we all signed off on it.”

“Then we all made a bad mistake. Now they’re agitated. Way too soon. We need to pace this better.”

“He thinks it was the painter. She’ll believe him eventually. She doesn’t want to worry. She wants to be happy. She’ll talk herself around. They’ll calm down.”

“You think?”

“Why would we lie about the room? There’s no possible reason for it.”

Mark said, “Bring me a quad-bike.”