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.”