THEY BOTH MADE it down the hallway to see him leave. The old man worked on the oxygen long enough to get himself up out of his chair, and then he wheeled the cylinder slowly ahead of him, partly leaning on it like a cane, partly pushing it like a golf trolley. His wife rustled along in front of him, her skirt brushing both doorjambs and both sides of the narrow passageway. Reacher followed behind them, with the leather folder tucked up under his arm. The old lady worked the lock on the door and the old man stood panting and gripping the handle of the cart. The door opened and sweet fresh air blew in.
“Any of Victor’s old friends still around here?” Reacher asked.
“Is that important, Major?”
Reacher shrugged. He had learned a long time ago the best way to prepare people for bad news was by looking very thorough, right from the start. People listened better if they thought you’d exhausted every possibility.
“I just need to build up some background,” he said.
They looked mystified, but like they were ready to think about it, because he was their last hope. He held their son’s life in his hands, literally.
“Ed Steven, I guess, at the hardware store,” Mr. Hobie said eventually. “Thick as thieves with Victor, from kindergarten right through twelfth grade. But that was thirty-five years ago, Major. Don’t see how it can matter now.”
Reacher nodded, because it didn’t matter now.
“I’ve got your number,” he said. “I’ll call you, soon as I know anything.”
“We’re relying on you,” the old lady said.
Reacher nodded again.
“It was a pleasure to meet you both,” he said. “Thank you for the coffee and the cake. And I’m very sorry about your situation.”
They made no reply. It was a hopeless thing to say. Thirty years of agony, and he was sorry about their situation? He just turned and shook their frail hands and stepped back outside onto their overgrown path. Picked his way back to the Taurus, carrying the folder, looking firmly ahead.
He reversed down the driveway, catching the vegetation on both sides, and eased out of the track. Made the right and headed south on the quiet road he’d left to find the house. The town of Brighton firmed up ahead of him. The road widened and smoothed out. There was a gas station and a fire-house. A small municipal park with a Little League diamond. A supermarket with a large parking lot, a bank, a row of small stores sharing a common frontage, set back from the street.
The supermarket’s parking lot seemed to be the geographic center of the town. He cruised slowly past it and saw a nursery, with lines of shrubs in pots under a sprinkler which was making rainbows in the sun. Then a large shed, dull red paint, standing in its own lot: Steven’s Hardware. He swung the Taurus in and parked next to a timber store in back.
The entrance was an insignificant door set in the end wall of the shed. It gave onto a maze of aisles, packed tight with every kind of thing he’d never had to buy. Screws, nails, bolts, hand tools, power tools, garbage cans, mailboxes, panes of glass, window units, doors, cans of paint. The maze led to a central core, where four shop counters were set in a square under bright fluorescent lighting. Inside the corral were a man and two boys, dressed in jeans and shirts and red canvas aprons. The man was lean and small, maybe fifty, and the boys were clearly his sons, younger versions of the same face and physique, maybe eighteen and twenty.
“Ed Steven?” Reacher asked.
The man nodded and set his head at an angle and raised his eyebrows, like a guy who has spent thirty years dealing with inquiries from salesmen and customers.
“Can I talk to you about Victor Hobie?”
The guy looked blank for a second, and then he glanced sideways at his boys, like he was spooling backward all the way through their lives and far beyond, back to when he last knew Victor Hobie.
“He died in ‘Nam, right?” he said.
“I need some background.”
“Checking for his folks again?” He said it without surprise, and there was an edge of weariness in there, too. Like the Hobies’ problems were well known in the town, and gladly tolerated, but no longer exciting any kind of urgent sympathy.
Reacher nodded. “I need to get a feel for what sort of a guy he was. Story is you knew him pretty well.”
Steven looked blank again. “Well, I did, I guess. But we were just kids. I only saw him once, after high school.”
“Want to tell me about him?”
“I’m pretty busy. I’ve got unloading to see to.”
“I could give you a hand. We could talk while we’re doing it.”
Steven started to say a routine no, but then he glanced at Reacher, saw the size of him, and smiled like a laborer who’s been offered the free use of a forklift.
“OK,” he said. “Out back.”
He came out from the corral of counters and led Reacher through a rear door. There was a dusty pickup parked in the sun next to an open shed with a tin roof. The pickup was loaded with bags of cement. The shelves in the open shed were empty. Reacher took his jacket off and laid it on the hood of the truck.
The bags were made of thick paper. He knew from his time with the pool gang that if he used two hands on the middle of the bags, they would fold themselves over and split. The way to do it was to clamp a palm on the comer and lift them one-handed. That would keep the dust off his new shirt, too. The bags weighed a hundred pounds, so he did them two at a time, one in each hand, holding them out, counterbalanced away from his body. Steven watched him, like he was a side-show at the circus.
“So tell me about Victor Hobie,” Reacher grunted.
Steven shrugged. He was leaning on a post, under the tin roof, out of the sun.
“Long time ago,” he said. “What can I tell you? We were just kids, you know? Our dads were in the chamber of commerce together. His was a printer. Mine ran this place, although it was just a lumberyard back then. We were together all the way through school. We started kindergarten on the same day, graduated high school on the same day. I only saw him once after that, when he was home from the Army. He’d been in Vietnam a year, and he was going back again.”
“So what sort of a guy was he?”
Steven shrugged again. “I’m kind of wary about giving you an opinion.”
“Why? Some kind of bad news in there?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” Steven said. “There’s nothing to hide. He was a good kid. But I’d be giving you one kid’s opinion about another kid from thirty-five years ago, right? Might not be a reliable opinion.”
Reacher paused, with a hundred-pound bag in each hand. Glanced back at Steve. He was leaning on his post in his red apron, lean and fit, the exact picture of what Reacher assumed was a typical cautious small-town Yankee businessman. The sort of guy whose judgment might be reasonably solid. He nodded.
“OK, I can see that. I’ll take it into account.”
Steven nodded back, like the ground rules were clear. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-eight,” Reacher said.
“From around here?”
Reacher shook his head. “Not really from around anywhere.”
“OK, couple of things you need to understand,” Steven said. “This is a small small suburban town, and Victor and I were born here in ‘48. We were already fifteen years old when Kennedy got shot, and sixteen before the Beatles arrived, and twenty when there was all that rioting in Chicago and L.A. You know what I’m saying here?”
“Different world,” Reacher said.
“You bet your ass it was,” Steven said back. “We grew up in a different world. Our whole childhood. To us, a real daring guy was one who put baseball cards in the wheels of his Schwinn. You need to bear that in mind, when you hear what I say.”
Reacher nodded. Lifted the ninth and tenth bag out of the pickup bed. He was sweating lightly, and worrying about the state of his shirt when Jodie next saw it.
“Victor was a very straight kid,” Steven said. “A very straight and normal kid. And like I say, for comparative purposes, that was back when the rest of us thought we were the bee’s knees for staying out until half past nine on a Saturday night, drinking milk shakes.”
“What was he interested in?” Reacher asked.
Steven blew out his cheeks and shrugged. “What can I tell you? Same things as all the rest of us, I guess. Baseball, Mickey Mantle. We liked Elvis, too. Ice cream, and the Lone Ranger. Stuff like that. Normal stuff.”
“His dad said he always wanted to be a soldier.”
“We all did. First it was cowboys and Indians, then it was soldiers.”
“So did you go to ‘Nam?”
Steven shook his head. “No, I kind of moved on from the soldier thing. Not because I disapproved. You got to understand, this was way, way before all that longhair stuff arrived up here. Nobody objected to the military. I wasn’t afraid of it, either. Back then there was nothing to be afraid of. We were the U.S., right? We were going to whip the ass off those slanty-eyed gooks, six months maximum. Nobody was worried about going. It just seemed old-fashioned. We all respected it, we all loved the stories, but it seemed like yesterday’s thing, you know what I mean? I wanted to go into business. I wanted to build my dad’s yard up into a big corporation. That seemed like the thing to do. To me, that seemed like more of an American thing than going into the military. Back then, it seemed just as patriotic.”
“So you beat the draft?” Reacher asked.
Steven nodded. “Draft board called me, but I had college applications pending and they skipped right over me. My dad was close to the board chairman, which didn’t hurt any, I guess.”
“How did Victor react to that?”
“He was fine with it. There was no issue about it. I wasn’t antiwar or anything. I supported Vietnam, same as anybody else. It was just a personal choice, yesterday’s thing or tomorrow’s thing. I wanted tomorrow’s thing, Victor wanted the Army. He kind of knew it was kind of, well, staid. Truth is, he was pretty much influenced by his old man. He was four-F in World War Two. Mine was a foot soldier, went to the Pacific. Victor kind of felt his family hadn’t done its bit. So he wanted to do it, like a duty. Sounds stuffy now, right? Duty? But we all thought like that, back then. No comparison at all with the kids of today. We were all pretty serious and old-fashioned around here, Victor maybe slightly more than the rest of us. Very serious, very earnest. But not really a whole lot out of the ordinary.”
Reacher was three-quarters through with the bags. He stopped and rested against the pickup door. “Was he smart?”
“Smart enough, I guess,” Steven said. “He did well in school, without exactly setting the world on fire. We had a few kids here, over the years, gone to be lawyers or doctors or whatever. One of them went to NASA, a bit younger than Victor and me. Victor was smart enough, but he had to work to get his grades, as I recall.”
Reacher started with the bags again. He had filled the farthest shelves first, which he was glad about, because his forearms were starting to burn.
“Was he ever in any kind of trouble?”
Steven looked impatient. “Trouble? You haven’t been listening to me, mister. Victor was straight as an arrow, back when the worst kid would look like a complete angel today.”
Six bags to go. Reacher wiped his palms on his pants.
“What was he like when you last saw him? Between the two tours?”
Steven paused to think about it. “A little older, I guess. I’d grown up a year, it seemed like he’d grown up five. But he was no different. Same guy. Still serious, still earnest. They gave him a parade when he came home, because he had a medal. He was real embarrassed about it, said the medal was nothing. Then he went away again, and he never came back.”
“How did you feel about that?”
Steven paused again. “Pretty bad, I guess. This was a guy I’d known all my life. I’d have preferred him to come back, of course, but I was real glad he didn’t come back in a wheelchair or something, like a lot of them did.”
Reacher finished the work. He butted the last bag into position on the shelf with the heel of his hand and leaned on the post opposite Steven.
“What about the mystery? About what happened to him?”
Steven shook his head and smiled, sadly. “There’s no mystery. He was killed. This is about two old folks refusing to accept three unpleasant truths, is all.”
“Which are?”
“Simple,” Steven said. “Truth one is their boy died. Truth two is he died out there in some godforsaken impenetrable jungle where nobody will ever find him. Truth three is the government got dishonest around that time, and they stopped listing the MIAs as casualties, so they could keep the numbers reasonable. There were what? Maybe ten boys on Vic’s chopper when it went down? That’s ten names they kept off the nightly news. It was a policy, and it’s too late for them to admit to anything now.”
“That’s your take?”
“Sure is,” Steven said. “The war went bad, and the government went bad with it. Hard enough for my generation to accept, let me tell you. You younger guys are probably more at home with it, but you better believe the old folk like the Hobies are never going to square up to it.”
He lapsed into silence, and glanced absently back and forth between the empty pickup and the full shelves. “That’s a ton of cement you shifted. You want to come in and wash up and let me buy you a soda?”
“I need to eat,” Reacher said. “I missed lunch.”
Steven nodded, and then he smiled, ruefully. “Head south. There’s a diner right after the train station. That’s where we used to drink milk shakes, half past nine Saturday night, thinking we were practically Frank Sinatra.”
THE DINER HAD obviously changed many times since daring boys with baseball cards in the wheels of their bicycles had sipped milk shakes there on Saturday nights. Now it was a seventies-style eaterie, low and square, a brick facade, green roof, with a nineties-style gloss in the form of elaborate neon signs in every window, hot pinks and blues. Reacher took the leather-bound folder with him and pulled the door and stepped into chilly air smelling of freon and burgers and the strong stuff they squirt on the tables before wiping them down. He sat at the counter and a cheerful heavy girl of twenty-something boxed him in with flatware and a napkin and handed him a menu card the size of a billboard with photographs of the food positioned next to the written descriptions. He ordered a half-pounder, Swiss, rare, slaw and onion rings, and made a substantial wager with himself that it wouldn’t resemble the photograph in any way at all. Then he drank his ice water and got a refill before opening the folder.