He backed out of the alley and drove on. He was quickly out of town. He didn’t see the police cars again. He relaxed. Straight away he felt better. In fact he felt good. He felt he was earning it. He was facing dangers. He drove through woods and past horse fields and cow fields. On his left a shallow turn led away through apple orchards, but his phone said not to take it. He kept on straight, ten more open miles, and then the woods came back, for another ten. The van rushed along, almost brushing the trees. They met overhead. It was a green and secret world.
Then his phone told him the final turn was fast approaching, in half a mile on the left, a thread-like track curling away an inch into the forest. He took it, and thumped onward over blacktop missing some of its surface. He ran over a wire, that he figured rang a bell somewhere.
Two miles later he came out in a clearing. The motel was dead ahead. There was a Volvo wagon outside of what must have been room three. As anonymous as a panel van. There was a guy in a lawn chair outside of room five. No visible means of transportation. Outside of room ten was a blue Honda Civic. Weird looking plates. Maybe foreign.
He met Mark in the office. For the first time, face to face. They had corresponded, of course. He got room seven. He parked the van. The guy in the lawn chair watched. He put his bags in the room, and then he stepped back out to the light. He nodded to the guy in the lawn chair. But he strolled the other way, through the lot, to room ten. Important. Like a ceremony. His first look. At nothing much, as it turned out. Room ten’s window blind was down. There was silence inside. Nothing was happening.
Chapter 25
Reacher thought the old people’s home was a cheap but sincere attempt to provide a decent place to live. He liked it. Not for himself. He didn’t expect to live long enough. But other people might enjoy it. The décor was bright. The atmosphere was happy. Maybe a little forced. They were welcomed at the reception desk by a cheerful woman who spoke to them as she would to the bereaved, except not exactly. A little livelier. A unique tone. Maybe part of her training. Maybe learned in role play class. As if visitors to an old people’s home made up a unique demographic. Not the recently bereaved. The soon to be. The pre-bereaved.
The woman pointed and said, “Mr. Mortimer is waiting for you in the day room.”
Reacher followed the guy with the ponytail down a long and pleasant corridor, to a set of double doors. Inside was a tight circle of wipe-clean armchairs. In one of them was a very old man. Mr. Mortimer, Reacher assumed. His hair was white and wispy, and his skin was pale and translucent. Like it wasn’t really there at all. Every vein and blotch stood out. He was thin. His ears were old-man big and full of hearing aids. He was strong enough to sit up straight, but only just. His wrists looked like pencils.
There was no one else in the room. No nurse, no attendant, no carer, no companion. No doctor. No other old people, either.
The guy with the ponytail walked over and bent down and crouched low, eye to eye with the old man, and he stuck out his hand and said, “Mr. Mortimer, it’s good to see you again. I wonder if you remember me?”
The old man took his hand.
“Of course I remember you,” he said. “I would greet you properly, but you warned me never to say your name. Walls have ears, you said. There are enemies everywhere.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“How did it end up?”
“Inconclusive.”
“Do you need my help again?”
“My friend Mr. Reacher wants to ask you about Ryantown.”
Mortimer nodded, pensively. His slow watery gaze panned across and tilted up and stopped on Reacher.
He focused.
He said, “There was a Reacher family in Ryantown.”
“The boy was my father,” Reacher said. “His name was Stan.”
“Sit down,” Mortimer said. “I’ll get a crick in my neck.”
Reacher sat down in the chair across the circle. Up close Mortimer looked no younger. But he showed some kind of spark. Any weakness was physical, not mental. He raised his hand, bent and bony, like a warning.
“I had cousins there,” he said. His voice was low and reedy, and wet with saliva. He said, “We lived close by. We visited back and forth, and sometimes we got dumped there, if times were hard at home, and sometimes they got dumped on us, but overall I need to tell you my memories of Ryantown might be patchy. Compared with what you might be looking for, I mean, about your father as a boy, and your grandparents maybe. I was only a visitor now and then.”
“You remembered which kids got sick.”
“Only because people talked about it all the time. It was like a county-wide bulletin, every damn morning. Someone’s got this, someone’s got that. People were afraid. You could get polio. Kids died of things back then. So you had to know who to stay away from. Or the other way around. If you got German measles, you got loaned out to go play with all the little girls. If they were laying blacktop somewhere, you got sent to go sniff the tar. Then you wouldn’t get tuberculosis. That’s why I remember who got sick. People were crazy back then.”
“Did Stan Reacher get sick?”
The same bent and bony hand came up. The same warning.
“The name was never listed in the county-wide bulletin,” he said. “As far as I recall. But that doesn’t really mean I knew who he was. Everyone had cousins in and out all the time. Everyone got shunted around, when the wolf was at the door. It was like Times Square. So in my case what I’m saying is, there was always a rotating cast of characters. People were in and out, especially kids. I remember Mr. Reacher the mill foreman. He was a well known figure. He was a fixture. But I couldn’t swear in a court of law which of the kids was his. We all looked the same. You never knew exactly where anyone lived. They all came running out the same four-flat door. About nine of them from the foreman’s building, I think. Eight at least. One of them was a pretty good ballplayer. I heard he went semi-pro in California. Would that be your father?”
“He was a birdwatcher.”
Mortimer was quiet a beat. His pale old eyes changed focus, looking back years ago. Then he smiled, in a sad and contemplative way. As if at the strange mysteries of life. He said, “You know, I had completely forgotten about the birdwatchers. How extraordinary that you should remember and I didn’t. What a memory you must have.”
“Not a memory,” Reacher said. “Not a contemporaneous recollection. It’s a later observation. Projected backward. I assume he started young. I know he was a member of a club by the age of sixteen. But you said birdwatchers. Was there more than one?”
“There were two,” Mortimer said.
“Who were they?”
“I got the impression one of them was someone’s cousin and didn’t live there all the time, and one of them did. But they were together plenty. Like best friends. I guess from what you tell me one of them must have been Stan Reacher. I can picture them. I got to say, they made it pretty exciting. I guess truth to tell the first time I ever met them I was probably ready to stomp them for being sissies, but first of all I would need to bring an army, because they were the best fighters you ever saw, and second of all pretty soon they got everybody doing it, quite happily, taking turns with the binoculars. We saw birds of prey. One time we saw an eagle take something about the size of a puppy.”
“Stan had binoculars?”
“One of them did. Can’t say for sure which one was Stan.”
“I’m guessing the one who lived there all the time.”
“Can’t say for sure which one that was. I was in and out pretty random. I would find one of them gone from time to time. Or both at once. Whoever you were, you were missing sometimes. You got sent away, to eat better, or avoid an epidemic, or take a vacation. That’s how it was. People came and went.”