Blue Moon

Shevick started to say, “When I was,” and then he stopped and changed it to, “When I tripped and fell, he was passing by, and he helped me up. Then I found I couldn’t walk, so he helped me along. He isn’t following me. Or escorting me. He’s here because I’m here. You can’t have one without the other. Not right now. Because I hurt my knee. Simple as that.”

“You said it was complicated, not simple.”

“We should go inside,” Shevick said.

His wife stood still for a moment, and then turned and led the way. The house was the same on the inside as it looked from the outside. Old, well cared for, but not recently. The rooms were small and the hallways were narrow. They stopped in the living room, which had a loveseat and two armchairs, and outlets and wires but no TV.

Mrs. Shevick said, “What’s complicated?”

“Fisnik didn’t show,” Shevick said. “Normally he’s there all day. But not today. All we got was a phone message to come back at six o’clock.”

“So where’s the money now?”

“I still have it.”

“Where?”

“In my pocket.”

“Fisnik is going to say we owe them another thousand dollars.”

“This gentleman thinks he can’t.”

The woman looked at Reacher again, and then back at her husband, and she said, “We should go get you cleaned up.” Then she looked at Reacher again and pointed toward the kitchen and said, “Please put the lunch in the refrigerator.”

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.”