“For a time he graded roads for the county. But his address didn’t change.”
“The mill closed for a couple of years late in the Depression. No point throwing him out in the street. It wasn’t like they fired him and needed his house. The mill was idle. It was World War Two that got it going again.”
Reacher looked up at the sky. It was full of bird life. Then in his mind he subtracted the new trees and rebuilt the old chimney, and he wondered how it was back in the fall of 1943, with the mill running night and day, and the sky full of smoke.
The guy said, “I better get going. I shouldn’t be here at all. You stay, if you want. I’ll wait in the car. I could give you a ride, if you like.”
“Thanks,” Reacher said. “But don’t wait any longer than you want to. I’m always happy to walk.”
The guy nodded, and slipped away through the trees, back the way they had come. Reacher walked over to the right-hand four-flat. Nothing was left of where the shared entrance would have been, except for a stone doorstep. It was wide and deep. It bridged a gutter on the side of the road. The gutter was made from cobblestones laid in a deep U-shaped contour, now mostly broken up and displaced by growth. He stepped over it into the one-time lobby. The floor was cement, broken up by time into random slabs, canted this way and that like ice floes on a winter river. Every split and seam had been colonized by something growing.
Nothing remained of the lobby’s right-hand wall except for stubs of broken brick, low down at floor level. They looked like teeth smashed down to the gum. In the center was a stone saddle, no taller, but intact. The right-hand ground-floor apartment’s front door. Reacher stepped inside. The hallway floor had three trees growing through it. Their trunks were no thicker than his wrist, but they had raced twenty feet high, looking for light. Beyond them and either side were low lines of smashed brick, showing where the rooms had been, like an architect’s floor plan come to life, slightly three dimensional. Two bedrooms, he thought, plus a living room and a dine-in kitchen. All small. Mean and pinched, by modern standards. No bathroom. Maybe out back.
The surviving patch of tile was on a tipped-up slab of what must have been the kitchen floor. It looked like a standard old-fashioned commercial product, and the cement under it looked crusty and full of air, but it had clung on by some miracle of adhesive chemistry. The pattern in the tile was faded and washed out by sixty years of exposure, but it looked like once upon a time it had been some kind of a late Victorian riot of bright tangled colors, with acanthus leaves, and marigolds, and artichoke blossoms. Reacher imagined it close up, from a kid’s point of view, crawling around, with the colors bobbing in and out of focus. As he remembered it the only color Stan had grown up to care about was olive drab. Maybe why.
He left by squeezing past the hallway trees again and going out through the lobby. Which was pointless, because he could have stepped out of the building anywhere he chose. No wall was more than four inches high. But he wanted to feel he was retracing steps. He paused at the street door, which wasn’t there, and sat down on the step, which still was, like a kid might, maybe after a rainstorm, with the gutter running like a river under his feet.
Then he heard a sound, way off to his right.
It was a yelp. A man’s voice. Definitely not joy or ecstasy. Not really outrage or anger, either. Just pain. Distant. About where the orchard was, on the way back to the car. Reacher stood up, and picked his way over the heaved and tumbled stones as fast as he could, slipping between trees, following the old road, past the schoolroom, past the church, back to the fence.
Where fifty yards away he saw the old guy with the ponytail, exactly halfway across the orchard. Another guy less than half his age and maybe twice his weight was standing behind him, twisting his arms.
Reacher stepped over the fence and set out toward them.
Chapter 18
Fifty yards would have been five or six seconds for an athlete, but Reacher was aiming nearer thirty. A slow walk. But purposeful. Intended to communicate something. He kept his strides long and his shoulders loose and his hands away from his sides. He kept his head up and his eyes hard on the guy. A primitive signal, learned long ago. The guy glanced away to the south. For help, maybe. Maybe he wasn’t alone.
Reacher got close.
The big guy turned to face him. He wrestled the old guy around in front, and used him like a human shield.
Reacher stopped six feet away.
He said, “Let him go.”
Just three words, but in a tone also learned long ago, with whole extra paragraphs hidden in the dying vowel sound at the end of the phrase, about the inevitable and catastrophic result of attempted resistance. The big guy let the old guy go. But he wasn’t quitting. No sir. He wanted Reacher to be sure about that. He made it like he wanted to free up his hands anyway. For more important purposes. He shoved the old guy aside and stepped right into Reacher’s space, not more than four feet away. He was twenty-some years old, dark haired and unshaven, more than six feet and two hundred pounds, tanned and muscled by outdoor labor.
He said, “This is none of your business.”
Reacher thought, what is this, Groundhog Day?
But out loud he said, “You were committing a crime on public land. I would be failing in my duty as a citizen if I didn’t point it out. That’s how civilization works.”
The guy glanced away to the south, and back again.
He said, “This ain’t public land. This is my granddaddy’s apple farm. And neither of you should be here. Him because he ain’t allowed and you because you’re trespassing.”
“This is the road,” Reacher said. “Your granddaddy stole it from the county forty years ago. Back when he was a brave young fellow. Like you are now.”
The guy glanced south again, but this time he didn’t glance back. Reacher turned and saw another guy approaching, walking fast between two lines of trees, where the orchard came down a slope. He looked the same as the first guy, except a generation older. Not more. The daddy, perhaps. Not the granddaddy. Better jeans than his son. Cleaner T-shirt. Deeper tan, grayer hair. Built the same, but fifty-something.
He arrived, and said, “What’s going on here?”
Reacher said, “You tell me.”
“Who are you?”
“Just a guy standing on the public road asking you a question.”
“This is not the public road.”
“That’s the problem with denial. Reality doesn’t care what you think. It just keeps rolling along. This is the road. Always was. Still is.”
“What’s your question?”
“I saw your boy physically assaulting this much older gentleman. I guess my question is how well you think that reflects on your parenting skills.”