“I guess so. If all you want to do is take a look at the house.”
“That’s all I’m planning to do.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“About what?”
“Their lives. Who they were and what they did.”
“Not three months’ worth of curious.”
“OK, then names and addresses are all we need.”
“If the house is still there,” he said. “Maybe someone tore it down. Suddenly eighty years sounds like a real long time.”
“Things change slowly here,” she said.
She clicked again, and scrolled, fast at first, scooting down through the alphabet, and then slowly, peering at the screen, through what Reacher assumed was the R section, and then back up again, just as slowly, peering just as hard. Then down and up again fast, as if trying to shake something loose.
She said, “No one named Reacher owned property in Laconia eighty years ago.”
Chapter 4
Patty Sundstrom also woke again at eight in the morning, later than she would have liked, but finally she had succumbed to exhaustion, and she had slept deeply for almost five more hours. She sensed the space in the bed next to her was empty. She rolled over and saw the door was open. Shorty was out in the lot. He was talking to one of the motel guys. Maybe Peter, she thought. The guy who looked after the quad-bikes. They were standing next to the Honda. Its hood was up. The sun was bright.
She slipped out of bed and crept bent-over to the bathroom. So Peter or whoever it was by the Honda wouldn’t see. She showered, and dressed in the same clothes, because she hadn’t brought enough for an extra day. She came out of the bathroom. She was hungry. The door was still open. The sun was still bright. Now Shorty was there on his own. The other guy had gone.
She stepped out and said, “Good morning.”
“Car won’t start,” Shorty said. “The guy messed with it and now it’s dead. It was OK last night.”
“It was not OK, exactly.”
“It started last night. Now it won’t. The guy must have messed it up.”
“What did he do?”
“He poked around some. He had a wrench and a pair of pliers. I think he made it worse.”
“Was it Peter? The guy that looks after the quad-bikes?”
“So he says. If it’s true, good luck to them. Probably that’s why they need nine bikes in the first place. To make sure they always have one that works.”
“The car started last night because it was hot. Now it’s cold. That makes a difference.”
“You’re a mechanic now?”
“Are you?” she said.
“I think the guy broke something.”
“And I think he’s trying to help us the best he can. We should be grateful.”
“For getting our car broken?”
“It was already broken.”
“It started last night. First turn of the key.”
She said, “Did you have a problem with the room door?”
He said, “When?”
“When you came out this morning.”
“What kind of problem?”
“I wanted some air in the night but I couldn’t get it open. It was jammed.”
“I didn’t have a problem,” Shorty said. “It opened right up.”
Fifty yards away they saw Peter come out of the barn, with a brown canvas bag in his hand. It looked heavy. Tools, Patty thought. To fix their car.
She said, “Shorty Fleck, now you listen to me. These gentlemen are trying to help us, and I want you to act like you appreciate it. At the very minimum I don’t want you to give them a reason to stop helping us before they’re finished. Do I make myself clear?”
“Jesus,” he said. “You’re acting like this is my fault or something.”
“Yeah, something,” she said, and then she shut up and waited for Peter, with the bag of tools. Who clanked up to them with a cheerful smile, as if he was just itching to clap the dust off his hands and get straight to work.
She said, “Thanks so much for your help.”
He said, “No problem at all.”
“I hope it’s not too complicated.”
“Right now it’s dead as a doornail. Which is usually electrical. Maybe a wire melted.”
“Can you fix that?”
“We could splice in a replacement. Just enough to bypass the bad part. Sooner or later you would want to get it properly repaired. It’s the kind of thing that could shake loose eventually.”
“How long does it take to splice?”
“First we need to find where it melted.”
“The engine started last night,” Shorty said. “Then we ran it two minutes and shut it off again. It got cooler and cooler, all night long. How would anything melt?”
Peter said nothing.
“He’s just asking,” Patty said. “In case the melting thing is a wild goose chase. We wouldn’t want to take up more of your time than we had to. It’s very nice of you to help us.”
“It’s OK,” Peter said. “It’s a reasonable question. When you stop the engine you also stop the radiator fan and the water pump. So there’s no forced cooling and no circulation. The hottest water rises passively to the top of the cylinder head. Surface temperatures can actually get worse in the first hour. Maybe there was a wire touching the metal.”
He ducked under the hood and pondered a moment. He traced circuits with his finger, checking the wires, tugging things, tapping things. He looked at the battery. He used a wrench to check the clamps were tight on the posts.
He backed out and said, “Try it one more time.”
Shorty put his butt on the seat and kept his feet on the ground. He twisted to face front and put his hand on the key. He looked up. Peter nodded. Shorty turned the key.
Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Not even a click or a whir or a cough. Turning the key was the same thing as not turning it. Inert. Dead as a doornail. Dead as the deadest thing that ever died.
* * *
—
Elizabeth Castle looked up from her screen and focused on nothing much, as if running through a number of possible scenarios, and the consequent next steps in all the different circumstances, starting, Reacher assumed, with him being an idiot and getting the town wrong, in which case the next step would be to get rid of him, no doubt politely, but also no doubt expeditiously.