Then in the summer the county came by and fixed what it could see. In the fall the farmer threw up this fence, and from that point onward it was a done deal. But good luck ever selling that parcel. The title search won’t come back pretty.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “Maybe I’ll see you later.”
He hitched up on the fence, and swung his legs over, and stepped down in the orchard.
“Wait,” the guy said. “I’ll come with you.”
“You sure?”
“Who will know?”
“Live free or die,” Reacher said. “I saw it on your license plate.”
The guy stepped up on the bottom rail of the fence and from there performed a maneuver similar to Reacher’s. They walked together past shiny green eye-level apples, all of them bigger than baseballs, some of them bigger than softballs, stumbling now and then on uneven ground, where maybe forty years earlier the clandestine winter cleanup had been a little hasty. A hundred yards later they arrived at the second fence, where ahead of them were trees of a different kind, not decorous or orderly or smelling sweetly of ripe fruit, but rank weeds, basically. They were thinner and unhealthier dead ahead, because there they were growing through where the old road resumed, without the benefit of either a bulldozer or planting. Therefore dead ahead would be the practical way in. No machete required. Or at least less pushing and shoving. The guy with the ponytail agreed. He was looking at it eight years later, but it was still the best option.
“How long before we see anything?” Reacher asked.
“Right away,” the guy said. “Look down. You’re walking on the old road. Nothing has been done to it, except by nature, and weather.”
Which was plenty. They climbed the fence and pushed through thin trunks and halfhearted bushes, over terrain broken up by sixty years of rain and roots, with cobblestones thrust upward and turned over and rolled aside. Soon they were in an inner ring, like the hole in a donut, where the trees were thin everywhere, because the ground was bad everywhere. The road itself could be traced ahead, curving toward where Reacher could hear water. The stream. Maybe the mill was down there. Built next to it, or even over it.
The guy with the ponytail started pointing things out. First up on the left was a rectangular foundation the size of a single garage. The church, the guy said. Facing away from everything else, as if from temptation and wickedness. Next up on the right was the same kind of thing. The nub of a stone foundation, just inches high, mostly mossy and covered, crisply enclosing an area of early and vigorous growth, because it had been a crawl space, with no cobblestones, or flagstones, or stones of any other kind. Just beaten earth, which after a couple of rains was raring to go. This was the schoolroom, the guy said. Better than you might expect. All the kids could read and write. Some of them could think. Teachers were respected then.
“Were you a teacher?” Reacher asked.
“For a time,” the guy said. “In an earlier life.”
The mill was where the road met the stream. It had been built half in and half out of the water. All that was left was a complex matrix of blocky foundations made of mossy stone, half overgrown by damp riverbank species. One of the foundations was solid and the size of a chimney. One was solid and the size of a room. Perhaps to support heavy machinery. Cauldrons, and crucibles, and ladles. The guy showed Reacher a drain in the floor, open to the water below.
The workers’ housing was across the street, in two buildings laid out in a line. Just the foundations remained. Both would have had a central lobby with stairs, with left-hand and right-hand apartments up and down. Two four-flats. A total of eight residences. Ryantown, New Hampshire. Population, possibly less than thirty.
The guy said, “The Reacher address would have been the ground floor apartment on the extreme right-hand end. Nearest the mill. Traditionally the foreman lived there. Your grandfather, perhaps.”
“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.”