Chapters (57)
- Cover
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Forty-Eight
- Forty-Nine
- Fifty
- Praise for Linwood Barclay
- Also by Linwood Barclay
- About the Publisher
Annabelle shook her head. “No, but all I really did was say hi. I guess what I’m asking is, if he jumped off, or even slipped, would he survive?” She glanced back toward the mainland. “Out there?”
Joe shook his head. “Water’s cold. You find him fast enough, yeah, maybe.” He reached into his pocket for his cell phone. “I’ll give the coast guard a heads-up, just in case.”
Ten
Katie Montrose hadn’t planned on becoming friends with the serial killer across the street. She just got lucky.
Two weeks earlier, at three in the morning, Katie lay awake, staring at the ceiling. She’d managed to fall asleep, briefly, around midnight, but within an hour her eyes were wide open and all the problems she seemed able to handle during the day suddenly felt, at this hour, overwhelming.
Her troubles were many, and varied.
First, there was her mother. She’d had another fight with her about getting an appointment to take her driver’s test. Her mother was adamant there was no need for Katie to get a license. The island was more than ten days into this insane experiment with these goofy little self-driving shitboxes, and Mom had really drunk the company Kool-Aid. Greatest thing since sliced bread, her mom said. It’ll be like everyone has their own private taxi, except way, way cooler.
Blah blah blah.
Okay, Katie got where her mom was coming from. They were all still grieving. Her dad had died because he’d fallen asleep at the wheel, and her mom didn’t want harm to come to anyone else in the family. But she wasn’t being realistic. Arrival-type cars for everyone were years away. Katie needed her license now. And she was not going to fall asleep at the wheel. She would never drive a car if she believed, even for a second, that she might nod off.
The second thing keeping her awake was Ms. Sugarman, Katie’s history teacher, and, as it turned out, an incredible pain in the ass. She was of the opinion that Katie’s essay on the Emancipation Proclamation was somewhat on the thin side, all because it contained several sentences like this: “Of all the various proclamations that had been proclaimed over the years, the Emancipation Proclamation was the one that was most acclaimed, as well as proclaimed.”