“This is Mr. Reacher,” Carmen said.
Ellie turned to look at her.
“He’s my friend,” Carmen said. “Say hello to him.”
Ellie turned back.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hey, Ellie,” Reacher said. “School O.K.?”
Ellie paused. “It was O.K.”
“Learn anything?”
“How to spell some words.”
She paused again, and then tilted her chin upward a fraction.
“Not easy ones,” she said. “Ball and fall.”
Reacher nodded gravely.
“Four letters,” he said. “That’s pretty tough.”
“I bet you can spell them.”
“B-A-L-L,” Reacher said. “F-A-L-L. Like that, right?”
“You’re grown up,” Ellie said, like he had passed a test. “But you know what? The teacher said four letters, but there’s only three, because the L comes twice. Right there at the end.”
“You’re a smart kid,” Reacher said. “Now hop in the back and let your mom in out of the heat.”
She scrambled past his left shoulder and he caught the smell of elementary school. He had attended maybe fifteen different places, most of them in different countries and continents, and they all smelled the same. It was more than thirty years since he had last been in one, but he still remembered it clearly.
“Mom?” Ellie said.
Carmen slid in and shut the door. She looked flushed. Heat, sudden exertion, sudden brief happiness, Reacher didn’t know.
“Mom, it’s hot,” Ellie said. “We should get ice cream sodas. From the diner.”
Reacher saw Carmen about to smile and agree, and then he saw her glance back at her pocketbook and remember the lone dollar stashed inside it.
“From the diner, mom,” Ellie said. “Ice cream sodas. They’re best when it’s hot. Before we go home.”
Carmen’s face fell, and then it fell a little farther when she caught up to the end of Ellie’s sentence. Home. Reacher stepped into the silence.
“Good idea,” he said. “Let’s get ice cream sodas. My treat.”
Carmen glanced across, dependent on him and unhappy about it. But she put the car in drive anyway and pulled back through the crossroads and turned left into the diner’s lot. She came around and parked in the shade tight against its north wall, right next to the only other car in the place, a steel blue Crown Victoria, new and shiny. Must be a state trooper’s unmarked, or maybe a rental,
Reacher thought.
The diner was cold inside, chilled by a big old-fashioned air conditioner that vented down through the roof. And it was empty, apart from a group Reacher took to be the Crown Victoria’s occupants, a trio of ordinary indoor types at a window, two men and a woman. The woman was medium blond and pleasant looking. One guy was small and dark and the other was taller and fair. So the Crown Vic was a rental, not a cop car, and these guys were maybe some kind of a sales team heading between San Antonio and El Paso. Maybe they had heavy samples in the trunk that prevented them from flying. He glanced away and let Ellie lead him toward a booth at the opposite end of the room.
“This is the best table,” she said. “All the others have torn seats, and they’ve sewed them up, and the thread is kind of thick and it can hurt the back of your leg.”
“I guess you’ve been in here before,” Reacher said.
“Of course I have,” she giggled, like he was crazy. Two rows of tiny square teeth flashed at him. “I’ve been in here lots of times.”
Then she jumped up and scooted sideways over the vinyl.
“Mommy, sit next to me,” she said.
Carmen smiled. “I’m going to use the rest room first. I’ll be right back. You stay here with Mr. Reacher, O.K.?”
The kid nodded gravely and Mr. Reacher sat himself down opposite her and they looked at each other quite openly. He wasn’t sure what she was seeing, but he was seeing a living version of the photograph from her mother’s wallet. Thick corn-colored hair tied back in a ponytail, incongruous dark eyes wide open and staring at him rather than at the camera’s lens, a little snub of a nose, a serious mouth closed in a rather earnest way. Her skin was impossibly perfect, like pink damp velvet. “Where did you go to school?” she asked. “Did you go here too?” “No, I went to lots of different places,” he said. “I moved around.” “You didn’t go to the same school all the time?” He shook his head. “Every few months, I went to a new one.” She concentrated hard. Didn’t ask why. Just examined the proposition for its benefits and drawbacks.
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