Echo Burning

Reacher’s window. The school yard was ringed by a wire hurricane fence like a dog pound, and the gate was an inexact hinged rectangle made of galvanized tubing and faced with the same wire.
    She stared past him at the school door. The bus came laboring down from the north and stopped on its own side of the road, parallel to the Cadillac, facing the other direction. The schoolhouse door opened and a woman stepped out. She moved slow and looked tired. The teacher, Reacher guessed, ready to end her day. She saw the bus and waved to the children. They spilled out in a long stream. Seventeen of them, nine girls and eight boys, he counted. Ellie Greer was seventh in line. She was wearing a blue dress. She looked damp and hot. He recognized her from her photograph and by the way Carmen moved beside him. He heard her catch her breath and scrabble for the door handle.
    She skipped around the hood and met her daughter outside the car on the beaten earth strip that passed for a sidewalk. She scooped her up in a wild hug. Spun her around and around. Her little feet windmilled outward and her blue lunch box swung and hit her mother on the back. Reacher could see the child laughing and tears in Carmen’s eyes. They came back around the rear of the car clutched tight together. Carmen opened the door and Ellie scrambled straight into the driver’s seat and stopped dead when she saw him. She went instantly silent and her eyes went wide.
    “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