people lying flat on the grass. No one looked wrong. No one stood out. No police anywhere.
Up ahead on the street beyond the gardens beyond the building was a white panel van. Parked at the curb. Diametrically opposite the Subaru. The other side of the square. It had ice blue writing on the side. Every letter had a loaf of snow on top. An air conditioning repairman. Reacher walked on. Two minutes, Burke had said. A wild overestimate. It was going to be closer to fifty seconds. So far four people had passed him by on the narrow winding path, almost cheek to cheek, and four people had looked at him, from static positions on benches and lawns. Three others had paid him no attention. Eyes closed, or in a dream.
He went up the steps and in through the door. The lobby had the same red and white stone inside as outside. Granite, he thought. In the same ornate style. He found the stair to the basement. He came out in a big underground room with shelves like the spokes of a wheel. The reference section. Just like old Mr. Mortimer had promised. They get anything, he had said.
There was a woman at a desk. She was half hidden behind a computer screen. Maybe thirty-five. Long black hair, in a cascade of tiny curls. She looked up and said, “Can I help you?”
“The birdwatching club,” Reacher said. “Someone told me you have the old records.”
The woman pattered on her keyboard.
“Yes,” she said. “We have those. What years?”
Reacher had never known Stan when he wasn’t a birdwatcher. There was no before and after. But neither was there in the way Stan had talked about it. He had sounded like he had been a birdwatcher forever. Which was plausible. A lot of people started a lifelong hobby at a very young age. He could have joined the club right then. But he wouldn’t have been trusted to write the minutes. Not as a kid. He wouldn’t have been taken seriously by the hobby magazine. He wouldn’t have been elected secretary. Not until much later. So as a starting point Reacher gave the woman four consecutive years, from when Stan was fourteen, up to when he left home to join the Marines.
“Take a seat,” she said. “I’ll bring them to you.”
He sat down at a study carrel, one of many pushed together in the center of the room. Three minutes later the woman brought him the records. Which was three months faster than Elizabeth Castle could have gotten him a property file. He decided if he ever saw her again he would point that out.
The records were in four large ledgers with maroon marbled covers, stained and faded by time. Each book was an inch and a half thick, and the edges were marbled, too, in curling, feathery patterns. Inside, the pages were numbered, and lined, and faded, and brittle, and covered in neat fountain-pen handwriting, gone watery and pale with age.
He asked, “Should I be wearing white cotton gloves?”
“No,” the woman said. “That’s a myth. Generally does more harm than good.”
She walked back to her desk. He opened the first ledger. It continued from where the last ledger must have left off. The year Stan was thirteen. The first page of the new book jumped right in with the minutes of the next meeting. It was held in the back room of a downtown restaurant. Stan Reacher was not listed as present. Much time was taken up debating whether to change the club’s name. Currently it was The Society of Laconia Birdwatchers. A faction thought The Laconia Audubon Society would be better. More upscale and scientific. More professional, less amateur. Much discussion ensued but no recommendation was made.
Stan Reacher was not present at the next meeting, either. It seemed to have wasted a lot of time with a guy banging on about restating the club’s fundamental purpose, which in his opinion should be accurately maintaining a comprehensive register of competent binocular repairers. This, he felt, would bring maximum value to the members. Reacher was glad Stan hadn’t been present. He would have needed a lot more patience as a kid than he ever displayed as an adult.
He put the first ledger aside, and tried the second. It was an identical book. He opened it at random, in the middle. Where he found a handwritten essay about hummingbird migration. It was labeled as a Report on Proceedings, and it was written,