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.
She said, “They were probably renters. Most people were. The landlords paid the taxes. We’ll have to find them somewhere else. Were they farmers?”
“I don’t think so,” Reacher said. “I don’t remember any stories about having to go outside in the freezing dawn to feed the chickens before walking twenty miles through the snow to school, uphill both ways. That’s the kind of thing farmers tell you, right? But I never heard that.”
“Then I’m not sure where you should start.”
“The beginning is often good. The register of births.”
“That’s in the county offices, not the city. It’s a whole different building, quite far from here. Maybe you should start with the census records instead. Your father should show up in two of them, when he was around two years old and twelve years old.”
“Where are they?”
“They’re in the county offices, too, but a different office, slightly closer.”
“How many offices have they got?”
“A good number.”
She gave him the address of the particular place he needed, with extensive turn-by-turn directions how to get there, and he said goodbye and set out walking. He passed the inn where he had spent the night. He passed a place he figured he would come back to for lunch. He was moving south and east through the downtown blocks, sometimes on worn brick sidewalks easily eighty years old. Even a hundred. The stores were crisp and clean, many of them devoted to cookware and bakeware and tableware and all kinds of other wares associated with the preparation and consumption of food. Some were shoe stores. Some had bags.
The building he was looking for turned out to be a modern structure built wide and low across what must have been two regular lots. It would have looked better on a technology campus, surrounded by computer laboratories. Which was what it was, he thought. He realized in his mind he had been expecting shelves of moldering paper, hand-lettered in fading ink, tied up with string. All of which still existed, he was sure, but not there. That stuff was in storage, three months away, after being copied and catalogued and indexed on a computer. It would be retrieved not with a puff of dust and a cart with wheels, but with a click of a mouse and the whir of a printer.
The modern world.
He went in, to a reception desk that could have been in a hip museum or at an upscale dentist’s. Behind it was a guy who looked like he was stationed there as a punishment. Reacher said hello. The guy looked up but didn’t answer. Reacher told him he wanted to see two sets of old census records.
“For where?” the guy asked, like he didn’t care at all.
“Here,” Reacher said.
The guy looked blank.
“Laconia,” Reacher said. “New Hampshire, USA, North America, the world, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe.”
“Why two?”
“Why not?”
“What years?”
Reacher told him, first the year his dad was two, and then the next census ten years later, when his dad was twelve.
The guy asked, “Are you a county resident?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Funding. This stuff ain’t free. But residents are entitled.”
“I’ve been here a good while,” Reacher said. “At least as long as I lived anywhere else recently.”
“What is the reason for your search?”
“Is that important?”
“We have boxes to check.”
“Family history,” Reacher said.
“Now I need your name,” the guy said.
“Why?”
“We have targets to meet. We have to take names, or they think we’re inflating the numbers.”
“You could make up names all day long.”
“We have to see ID.”
“Why? Isn’t this stuff