Hope for the best.
He walked on. The house was harmoniously designed and lovingly maintained, even pampered, like it got painted a year early every time. It had sensible plants around the foundation, neatly trimmed. It had a car port, shading a clean domestic pick-up truck from the pale midmorning sun. It had a white picket fence, running all the way around, enclosing a neat quarter acre, like a suburban garden.
Behind the fence was a pack of dogs.
There were six of them. Not barking yet. All mutts, all scruffy. Nothing huge, nothing tiny. Maybe a hundred different breeds, all mixed together. They came close and stood inside the picket gate. He was going to have to wade through them. He wasn’t scared of dogs. He believed a measure of mutual trust solved most problems. He didn’t plan to bite them. Why assume they planned to bite him?
He opened the gate. The dogs sniffed around him. They followed him down the path. He found the front door and pressed the bell. He stepped back and waited in the sun. The dogs pooled around his knees. A long minute later the front door opened and a man appeared behind the screen. He was a lean person, with a sensible expression on his face, and buzzed gray hair on his head. He was wearing blue jeans from a farm store, and a plain gray T-shirt. He was old enough to get a discount at the movies, but a long way from needing a cane. He too had a pool of dogs around his knees. Six more. Maybe the previous generation. Some had fur frosted gray.
Reacher watched the guy test out a bunch of alternative greetings in his mind, as if trying to find one to match his particular circumstances, in which a random pedestrian had shown up silently and magically on his doorstep in the middle of nowhere. But evidently failing to find one, because in the end all he said was, “Yes?”
Reacher said, “Sir, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I was passing by, and I have a question about some real estate north of here, and I wondered if you might be in a position to fill in the gaps in my information.”
The guy said, “Are you a salesman?”
“No sir, I am not.”
“Insurance?”
“No sir.”
“Any kind of lawyer?”
“Not guilty.”
“Are you from the government?”
“No sir, not that either.”
“I believe you’re obliged to tell me, if you are.”
“Understood, but I’m not.”
“OK,” the guy said.
He opened the screen door to shake hands.
“Bruce Jones,” he said.
“Jack Reacher.”
Jones closed the screen again.
Maybe to keep the old dogs in and the young dogs out.
He said, “What real estate?”
“Where the next road on the left meets the stream,” Reacher said. He pointed in what he thought was a rough crow-flies direction, west and north. He said, “Maybe a mile or two from here. The abandoned remains of a tiny industrial hamlet. Probably nothing left above ground level. Probably nothing to see except ruined foundations.”
“Nothing like that on my land.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“You’re quick with the questions, mister. You should state your business.”
“My father grew up there. I want to go take a look. That’s all.”
“Then I’m sorry. I can’t help you. Sounds like the kind of thing you would need to stumble across accidentally. I never heard any mention. How long ago was it abandoned?”
“At least sixty years,” Reacher said. “Maybe more.”
“I don’t know whose land it is now, over by the stream. Maybe they know there are ruins, maybe they don’t. If they were railed off for grazing sixty years ago, they would be completely overgrown by now. How big would they be?”
“Some acres, I suppose.”
“Then they could be under any copse of trees you see.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Good to know. I’ll check a few out. Thank you for your time.”
Jones nodded, with the same sensible expression he had used before. Reacher turned to go, and got a couple of paces off the porch, followed by six patient dogs, and then behind him he heard the door change direction and open again, a stiff sound against a diligent draft excluder, and this time the screen door opened too. He turned back and saw Jones leaning one shoulder out and looking around the edge of the frame, as if to see him better, while simultaneously blocking his dogs with his leg.
He called out, “Did you say industrial?”
“Small scale,” Reacher said.
“Would it have had something to do with pollution?”
“Possibly. It was a tin mill. There was probably a certain amount of crap leaking out.”
“You better come in,” Jones said.
The screen door creaked all the way open ahead of him, and slapped all the way shut behind him, which were in his limited experience the eternal sounds of a New England summer. Dog nails clicked on the floors. All six came in with him. He stepped into the unique smell of someone else’s home. It was as clean and well maintained inside as outside. Jones led him to an alcove off an open-plan kitchen and dining room. Twelve dogs foamed around them. There was no family room. No vinyl recliner, no old geezer with a rug on his knees. The alcove was in use as a home office area. It was a decent size, but by that point the house was two generations old, and it looked like every member of both of them had kept every scrap of paper they ever saw. First Jones opened a sliding file drawer and thumbed through one of several fat and bulging folders suspended between sagging steel rods. Apparently he came up short, because he turned away and pushed and shoved a stack of bankers’ boxes around, until he got the one he wanted, which was full of archived folders just as fat and bulging as the current items. He thumbed through the first, and part of the way through the second.
Then he stopped.
He said, “Here.”
He pulled out a faded sheet of paper. Reacher took it from him. It was a photocopied newsletter, dated eight years previously. Clearly one of a sequence of several, covering an issue in feverish detail, with a clear assumption of some prior knowledge. But it was easy enough to follow. The issue was Ryantown.
A little prior history was referred to, with the first appearance of the mill in the historical record, and then much later its period of peak production, which by implication seemed to be universally accepted as a horrific tableau of clouds of smoke and raging fires and boiling metals, like a miniature hell, like something the old poet Dante would have been proud of. Except that the next sentence, in brackets, was a grudging apology that the photograph used to illustrate the same point in an earlier edition had not actually been of Ryantown itself, but was a stock library image of a mill town in Massachusetts a decade earlier than the newsletter suggested, but which was nevertheless chosen with absolutely no intention to deceive, but rather in a spirit meant to be taken as purely mood-based, as such a tragic subject surely demanded, not literally, as indeed most histories were all too often written, usually to their detriment.
After the apology the narrative cut to the then-current chase, which seemed to be equal parts political, legal, and deranged. Apparently it was not yet definitively proved that the slow decomposition of Ryantown’s ancient mineral runoff had harmed anyone’s ground water. But it surely would be proved, and soon. Some of the world’s top scientists were working on it. It was only a matter of time. Therefore readiness was everything. In which connection there was splendid news. Old Marcus Ryan’s long chain of heirs and assigns had finally been untangled, and it was now certain beyond a reasonable doubt that the remaining stock in his company had been bundled with other near worthless assets and swept up in a sixty-year tornado of big-fish-eat-little-fish deals, which as of that moment had left the stock technically in the hands of a giant mining corporation based in Colorado. It was a breakthrough of enormous significance, because at last the tragic Ryantown ecological disaster had an identifiable owner. The lawsuits were typed up and ready to go.