Reacher turned around and said, “Am I?”
The guy from the Subaru was a reedy character maybe seventy years old, tall but cadaverous. Under his jacket his shoulders looked like a coat hanger.
He said, “He showed you the newsletter I wrote.”
“That was you?”
“The very same. He called me. He thought I might be interested that you were interested. I was, so I came out to meet you.”
“How did you know where?”
“You’re looking for Ryantown,” the guy said.
“Have I found it?”
“Straight ahead.”
“Those trees?”
“They thin out in the center. You can see pretty well.”
“Sure I won’t get poisoned?”
“Tin has the potential to be dangerous. More than a hundred milligrams of tin per cubic meter of air is immediately injurious to life and health. What’s worse is when tin bonds with certain hydrocarbons to make organotins. Some of those compounds are more lethal than cyanide. That’s what I was worried about.”
“What happened with that in the end?”
“The chemistry didn’t say what it needed to say.”
“Even though top scientists were working on it?”
“In the end the corporation in Colorado banned me from trespassing on what I insisted was their land. They took out a restraining order to keep me away. I can’t go beyond this fence.”
“Pity,” Reacher said. “You could have shown me around.”
“What’s your name?”
“Reacher.”
The guy said an address. A street number and a street name. The same name and the same number Reacher had seen in cubicle four, on the screen, from the census when his father was two.
“It was on the ground floor,” the guy said. “Some of the tile is still there. In the kitchen. It was still there eight years ago, anyway.”
“You haven’t been back?”
“You can’t fight city hall.”
“Who would know?” Reacher said. “Just this once.”
The guy didn’t answer.
Reacher said, “Wait.”
He looked ahead, across the hundred yards of orchard, to the second fence, and the trees beyond.
He said, “If that’s Ryantown over there, why does the road stop here?”
“It used to go all the way,” the guy said. “Technically the apple farmer is only squatting on this part of his land. About forty years ago a cold winter froze the blacktop off, and the next winter broke the base up, so in the spring the farmer borrowed a bulldozer and planted some more apple trees. Then in the summer the county came by and fixed what it could see. In the fall the farmer threw up this fence, and from that point onward it was a done deal. But good luck ever selling that parcel. The title search won’t come back pretty.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Maybe I’ll see you later.”
He hitched up on the fence, and swung his legs over, and stepped down in the orchard.
“Wait,” the guy said. “I’ll come with you.”
“You sure?”
“Who will know?”
“Live free or die,” Reacher said. “I saw it on your license plate.”
The guy stepped up on the bottom rail of the fence and from there performed a maneuver similar to Reacher’s. They walked together past shiny green eye-level apples, all of them bigger than baseballs, some of them bigger than softballs, stumbling now and then on uneven ground, where maybe forty years earlier the clandestine winter cleanup had been a little hasty. A hundred yards later they arrived at the second fence, where ahead of them were trees of a different kind, not decorous or orderly or smelling sweetly of ripe fruit, but rank weeds, basically. They were thinner and unhealthier dead ahead, because there they were growing through where the old road resumed, without the benefit of either a bulldozer or planting. Therefore dead ahead would be the practical way in. No machete required. Or at least less pushing and shoving. The guy with the ponytail agreed. He was looking at it eight years later, but it was still the best option.
“How long before we see anything?” Reacher asked.
“Right away,” the guy said. “Look down. You’re walking on the old road. Nothing has been done to it, except by nature, and weather.”
Which was plenty. They climbed the fence and pushed through thin trunks and halfhearted bushes, over terrain broken up by sixty years of rain and roots, with cobblestones thrust upward and turned over and rolled aside. Soon they were in an inner ring, like the hole in a donut, where the trees were thin everywhere, because the ground was bad everywhere. The road itself could be traced ahead, curving toward where Reacher could hear water. The stream. Maybe the mill was down there. Built next to it, or even over it.
The guy with the ponytail started pointing things out. First up on the left was a rectangular foundation the size of a single garage. The church, the guy said. Facing away from everything else, as if from temptation and wickedness. Next up on the right was the same kind of thing. The nub of a stone foundation, just inches high, mostly mossy and covered, crisply enclosing an area of early and vigorous growth, because it had been a crawl space, with no cobblestones, or flagstones, or stones of any other kind. Just beaten earth, which after a couple of rains was raring to go. This was the schoolroom, the guy said. Better than you might expect. All the kids could read and write. Some of them could think. Teachers were respected then.
“Were you a teacher?” Reacher asked.
“For a time,” the guy said. “In an earlier life.”
The mill was where the road met the stream. It had been built half in and half out of the water. All that was left was a complex matrix of blocky foundations made of mossy stone, half overgrown by damp riverbank species. One of the foundations was solid and the size of a chimney. One was solid and the size of a room. Perhaps to support heavy machinery. Cauldrons, and crucibles, and ladles. The guy showed Reacher a drain in the floor, open to the water below.
The workers’ housing was across the street, in two buildings laid out in a line. Just the foundations remained. Both would have had a central lobby with stairs, with left-hand and right-hand apartments up and down. Two four-flats. A total of eight residences. Ryantown, New Hampshire. Population, possibly less than thirty.
The guy said, “The Reacher address would have been the ground floor apartment on the extreme right-hand end. Nearest the mill. Traditionally the foreman lived there. Your grandfather, perhaps.”