Stan nodded again.
“We thought it would make him safe,” he said. “And it did, I guess. The cops gave up. I left Ryantown soon afterward. I went birdwatching in South America and stayed there forty years. When I got home I had to sign up for all kinds of new things. I used the same birth certificate. I wondered what would happen if the system said the name Stan Reacher was already taken. But it all worked out fine.”
Reacher nodded.
“Thank you for explaining,” he said.
“What happened to him?” Stan said. “I never saw him again.”
“He became a pretty good Marine. He fought in Korea and Vietnam. He served in all kinds of other places. He married a Frenchwoman. Her name was Josephine. They got along. They had two boys. He died thirty years ago.”
“Did he have a happy life?”
“He was a Marine. Happy was not in the field manual. Sometimes he was satisfied. That was about as good as it got. But he was never unhappy. He felt he belonged. He had a structure he could rely on. I don’t think he would have chosen anything different. He kept on birdwatching. He loved his family. He was glad he had it. We all knew that. Sometimes we thought he was crazy. He wasn’t sure of his birthday. Now I understand why. Yours was July, and his was originally June. He would remember that, because of the birthday cards. I guess sometimes he got confused. Although he did fine with the name. I never heard him slip. He was always Stan.”
They talked a while longer. Reacher asked about the motel, and their theoretical relative Mark, but Stan had no information beyond a vague old family story about some other distant cousin getting rich during the postwar boom, and buying real estate, and then having a cascade of offspring, all kinds of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Presumably Mark was one of them. Stan said he didn’t know, and didn’t want to. He said he was happy with his photo albums, and his memories.
Then he said he needed to nap for an hour. That was how it went, he said, with his kind of insomnia. He took hour-long naps whenever he could. Reacher shook his ice cold hand once more and let himself out of the house. Dawn was coming. The morning sun was not far away. Burke and Amos were sitting together, in Amos’s car, on the curb, at the entrance to the alley. They saw him step out. Burke buzzed his window down. Amos leaned over to listen. Reacher checked the sky again, and bent down to talk.
He said, “I need to go to Ryantown.”
Burke said, “The professor won’t be there for hours.”
“That’s why.”
Amos said, “I need to think about Carrington.”
“Think about him in Ryantown. It’s as good a place as any.”
“Do you know something?”
“We should be looking for Elizabeth Castle just as much as Carrington himself. They’re very romantic. They counted their morning coffee break as their second date. They’re almost certainly together.”
“Sure, but where?”
“I’ll tell you later. First I want to go to Ryantown again.”
Chapter 45
They went in Amos’s unmarked car. She drove, and Burke sat neatly beside her. Reacher sprawled in the back. He told them everything Stan had told him. They asked how he felt. It was a short conversation. He said nothing had changed, except a very minor historical detail. His father had once been called by a different name, way back long ago, when he was a kid. First he was Bill, then he was Stan. Same guy. Same bomb waiting to go off. But disciplined. If you did the right thing, he left you alone. A good fighter, and brave as a lunatic.
He loved his family.
A birdwatcher all his life.
Often with the naked eye, for a bigger picture.
“Did your mother know?” Amos asked.
“Great question,” Reacher said. “Probably not. It turned out she had secrets of her own. I think neither of them knew. I think they allowed for things like that. A clean slate. No questions. Maybe that’s why they got along.”
“She must have wondered why he had no parents.”
“I guess.”
“Do you wonder now?”
“A little bit. Because of the birthday cards. That has a certain flavor. It feels like an obscure department of a government agency. It takes care of things while you’re away. It makes sure your rent gets paid. Or else they were in prison. I would have to know the return address.”
Burke said, “Are you going to try to find out?”
“No,” Reacher said.
On their right the sky was streaked with dawn. The car was filled with low golden light. Amos found the turn to Ryantown. The gentle left, through the orchards. The sun burned around behind them, until it was low and dead center in the rear windshield. Amos shaded her eyes from the mirror, and came to a stop at the fence.
“Five minutes,” Reacher said.
He got out of the car and stepped over the fence. He walked through the orchard. The dawn light was on his back. His shadow was infinitely long. He stepped over the next fence. The Ryantown city limit. The darker leaves, the damper smell. The sunless shadows.
He walked down Main Street, like before, between the thin trees, on the tipped-up stones, past the church, past the school. After that the trees grew thinner, and the sun crept higher. Dappled sunbeams twinkled in. The world was new.
He heard voices up ahead.
Two people talking. Lightly, and happily. About something pleasant. Maybe the sunbeams. If so, Reacher agreed. The place looked great. Like an ad for an expensive camera.
He called out, “Hey guys, officer on the floor, coming in, make yourselves decent and stand by your beds.”
He didn’t want to embarrass them. Or himself. There were a number of things that could go wrong. She could be naked. He could have his leg off.
He waited a minute. Neither thing happened. He walked down to the four-flats and found Carter Carrington and Elizabeth Castle standing side by side on the ghost of the road, halfway to the stream. They were staring at him. They were both fully dressed. Albeit in a casual manner. He was in a muscle shirt and athletic pants. She was in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt that didn’t quite meet them. Beyond them were two mountain bikes, leaning on trees. Fat tires, and strong racks on the back, for heavy packs. Beyond the bikes a two-person tent was pitched, on the gritty dirt where the mill foreman’s living room used to be.
Carrington said, “Good morning.”
“You too.”
Then no one spoke.
“It’s always good to see you,” Carrington said.
“You too.”
“But is this purely a coincidence?”
“Not exactly,” Reacher said.
“You were looking for us.”
“Something came up. Turned out to be nothing. It’s all good now. But I thought I should drop by anyway. To say goodbye. I’m moving on”
“How did you find us?”
“For once I listened to the front of my brain. I guess I remembered how it felt. For me once or twice, and maybe for you guys now. Just when you think it’s passing you by, boom, you meet someone. You do all the sappy things you thought you were never going to get a chance to do. You invent a new anniversary every couple of hours. You celebrate the thing that brought you together. Some people do really weird stuff. You do Stan Reacher. You already told me you talk about him on dates. You were last seen at the county offices. You were tracing Stan’s birth record. You wanted to do it properly, every step of the way. Rigorously, and meticulously, like a person should. To make it yours. It’s of sentimental value. You got the last known address. Elizabeth already knew where it was, because she and I worked it out together, on her phone. So you went to find it. You took the heritage tour. Because that’s what people do.”