Which was more or less empty. Reacher got there and pulled the door and found a well scrubbed space with nothing much in it, except used-up bottles of stuff that could have been six months old. He put the bag on the middle shelf and went back to the living room to wait. There were family photographs on the walls, grouped and clustered like in a magazine. Senior among them were three ornate frames holding black and white images gone coppery with age. The first showed a literal GI standing in front of the house, with what Reacher guessed was his new bride alongside him. The guy was in a crisp khaki uniform. A private soldier. Probably too young to have fought in World War Two. Probably did a three-year hitch in Germany afterward. Probably got called up again for Korea. The woman was in a flowery dress that puffed out to calf length. Both of them were smiling. The siding behind them shone in the sun. The dirt at their feet was raw.
The second photograph showed a year-old lawn at their feet, and a baby in their arms. Same smiles, same bright siding. The new father was out of uniform and in a pair of high-waisted miracle-fiber pants and a white shirt with short sleeves. The new mother had swapped out the floral dress for a thin sweater and pedal pushers. The baby was mostly wrapped up in a shawl, except for its face, which looked pale and indistinct.
The third photograph showed the three of them about eight years later. Behind them foundation plantings covered half the siding. The grass at their feet was lush and thick. The guy was eight years less bony, a little thicker in the waist, a little heavier in the shoulders. His hair was slicked back, and he was losing some of it. The woman was prettier than before, but tired, in all the ways women were, in photographs from the 1950s.
The eight-year-old girl standing in front of them was almost certainly Maria Shevick. Something about the shape of her face and the directness of her gaze. She had grown up, they had grown old, they had died, she had inherited their house. That was Reacher’s guess. He was proved right by the next group of pictures. Now in faded Kodak colors, but in the same location. Same patch of lawn. Same length of wall. Some kind of a tradition. The first showed Mrs. Shevick maybe twenty years old, next to a much straighter and much leaner Mr. Shevick, also about twenty years old, their faces sharp and young and hawkish with shadows, their smiles wide and happy.
The second in the new sequence showed the same couple with a baby in their arms. It grew up in leaps and bounds, left to right across the next row down, into a toddler, then a girl about four, then six, then eight, while above her the Shevicks cycled through 1970s hairstyles, big and bushy, above tight tank tops and puffy sleeves.
The next row down showed the same girl become a teenager, then a high-school graduate, then a young woman. Then a woman who got older as the Kodak got newer. She would be nearly fifty now, Reacher figured. Whatever that generation was called. The early kids of the early boomers. Got to be called something. Everyone else was.
“There you are,” Mrs. Shevick said, behind him.
“I was admiring your photographs,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“You have a daughter.”
“Yes,” she said again.
Then Shevick himself came in. The blood had been cleaned off his lip. His scrapes were shiny with some kind of a yellow potion. His hair was brushed.
He said, “Let’s eat.”
There was a small table in the kitchen, with contoured aluminum edges, and a laminate top now dulled and faded by decades of time and wiping, but once bright and sparkly and atomic. There were three matching vinyl chairs. Maybe all bought way back when Maria Shevick was a little girl. For her first grown-up dinners. Knife and fork and please and thank you. Now many years later she told Reacher and her husband to sit down, and she put the sandwiches from the deli bag on china plates, and the chips in china bowls, and the sodas in cloudy glass tumblers. She brought cloth napkins. She sat down. She looked at Reacher.
“You must think us very foolish,” she said. “To have gotten ourselves in this situation.”
“Not really,” Reacher said. “Very unlucky, perhaps. Or very desperate. I’m sure this situation is a last resort. You sold your TV. Plus many other things, no doubt. I assume you took out a loan on the house. But it wasn’t enough. You had to find alternative arrangements.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m sure there were good reasons.”
“Yes,” she said again.
She said nothing more. She and her husband ate slowly, one small bite at a time, one chip, one sip of soda. As if savoring the novelty. Or worrying about indigestion. The kitchen was quiet. No passing traffic, no street sounds, no commotion. There was old subway tile on the walls, and wallpaper where there wasn’t, with flowers on it, like Mrs. Shevick’s mother’s dress, in the very first photograph, but paler and less boldly delineated. The floor was linoleum, pitted long ago by stiletto heels, now rubbed almost smooth again. The appliances had been replaced, maybe back when Nixon was president. But Reacher figured the countertops were still original. They were pale yellow laminate, with fine wavy lines that looked like heartbeats on a hospital machine.
Mrs. Shevick finished her sandwich. She drained her soda. She dabbed up the last fragments of her potato chips on a dampened fingertip. She pressed her napkin to her lips. She looked at Reacher.
She said, “Thank you.”
He said, “You’re welcome.”
“You think Fisnik can’t ask for another thousand dollars.”
“In the sense of shouldn’t. I guess that’s different from won’t.”
“I think we’ll have to pay.”
“I’m happy to go discuss it with the guy. On your behalf. If you like. I could make a number of arguments.”
“And I’m sure you would be convincing. But my husband told me you’re only passing through. You won’t be here tomorrow. We will. It’s probably safer to pay.”
Aaron Shevick said, “We don’t have it.”
His wife didn’t answer. She twisted the rings on her finger. Maybe subconsciously. She had a slim gold wedding band, and a token diamond next to it. She was thinking about the pawn shop, Reacher figured. Probably near the bus depot, on a cheap street. But she would need more than a wedding band and a small solitaire, for a thousand bucks. Maybe she still had her mother’s stuff, upstairs in a drawer. Maybe there had been random inheritances, from old aunts and uncles, pins and pendants and retirement watches.
She said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Maybe he’ll be reasonable. Maybe he won’t ask for it.”
Her husband said, “These are not reasonable people.”
Reacher asked him, “Do you have direct evidence of that?”
“Only indirect evidence,” Shevick said. “Fisnik explained the various penalties to me, right back at the beginning. He had photographs on his phone, and a short video. I was made to watch it. As a consequence, we have never been late with a payment. Until now.”