‘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 pick-up 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 iced water and got a refill before opening the folder.
He concentrated on Victor’s letters to his folks. There were twenty-seven of them in total, thirteen from his training postings and fourteen from Vietnam. They bore out everything he’d heard from Ed Steven. Accurate grammar, accurate spelling, plain terse phrasing. The same handwriting used by everybody educated in America between the twenties and the sixties, but with a backward slant. A left-handed person. None of the twenty-seven letters ran more than a few lines over the page. A dutiful person. A person who knew it was considered impolite to end a personal letter on the first page. A polite, dutiful, left-handed, dull, conventional, normal person, solidly educated, but no kind of a rocket scientist.
The girl brought him the burger. It was adequate in itself, but very different from the gigantic feast depicted in the photograph on the menu. The slaw was floating in whitened vinegar in a crimped paper cup, and the onion rings were bloated and uniform, like small brown automobile tyres. The Swiss was sliced so thin it was transparent, but it tasted like cheese.