BooksBarbecue
Back Look Both Ways
Chapters (57)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Foreword
  4. Prologue
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Twenty-Four
  29. Twenty-Five
  30. Twenty-Six
  31. Twenty-Seven
  32. Twenty-Eight
  33. Twenty-Nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-One
  36. Thirty-Two
  37. Thirty-Three
  38. Thirty-Four
  39. Thirty-Five
  40. Thirty-Six
  41. Thirty-Seven
  42. Thirty-Eight
  43. Thirty-Nine
  44. Forty
  45. Forty-One
  46. Forty-Two
  47. Forty-Three
  48. Forty-Four
  49. Forty-Five
  50. Forty-Six
  51. Forty-Seven
  52. Forty-Eight
  53. Forty-Nine
  54. Fifty
  55. Praise for Linwood Barclay
  56. Also by Linwood Barclay
  57. About the Publisher

She’d been staring at the ceiling since shortly after three. Had she prepared enough media packets? Would the catering company come through? Media types, she knew from her work back on the mainland, went wild when they saw free snacks. They were locusts. You’d think they hadn’t eaten in weeks. Give them some take-out containers and they’d carry it home with them.

But it wasn’t just the catering that had her worried. Was the ferry running on time? How high were the winds? Was there rain in the forecast? Fog? That’d be all she’d need. A thick blanket of fog that would keep the ferry on the mainland. Before she’d gone to bed she’d checked her app and things looked good, but anything could happen overnight. What was it they said about weather forecasters? Was there any job where you could be wrong fifty percent of the time and not get fired? But if the ferry was on time, Sandra believed everything would fall into place. A delay would screw up the entire day.

And so would half a dozen other things, now that she thought about it. Would the audio-visual tech stuff come off without a hitch? The computer stuff scared her because she had to trust it all to someone else. She’d hired a Garrett Island AV firm to set things up and they’d done half a dozen run-throughs to make sure everything worked. Still . . . Sandra was the first to admit she was something of a techno-moron. Sure, she could wield her iPhone like she was Billy the Kid and the phone was a six-shooter, but setting up a big screen and making sure it was going to interface or whatever the hell the word was with the presentation on the laptop, well, that was not her area of expertise. Putting blind faith in others went against her nature. It was one of the reasons she didn’t like to fly. If she had no idea how to operate a 747, how could she determine with any certainty that the pilot knew what to do? Fortunately, when it came to finding people with talents she lacked, the island was not a bad place to be. It catered to the well-off—even if plenty of the people who lived here year-round were not exactly in the top one percent—and it was pretty common for organizations like Apple or Google or Amazon to hold conferences and retreats here. So, over the years, the island had attracted and developed a support system for that kind of clientele.