BooksBarbecue
Back Whistle
Chapters (73)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Prologue
  4. Part IAnnie
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Part IIHarry
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-One
  27. Part IIIAnnie
  28. Twenty-Two
  29. Twenty-Three
  30. Twenty-Four
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Part IVHarry
  40. Thirty-Three
  41. Thirty-Four
  42. Thirty-Five
  43. Thirty-Six
  44. Thirty-Seven
  45. Thirty-Eight
  46. Thirty-Nine
  47. Forty
  48. Forty-One
  49. Forty-Two
  50. Forty-Three
  51. Forty-Four
  52. Forty-Five
  53. Forty-Six
  54. Forty-Seven
  55. Forty-Eight
  56. Part VAnnie
  57. Forty-Nine
  58. Fifty
  59. Fifty-One
  60. Fifty-Two
  61. Fifty-Three
  62. Fifty-Four
  63. Fifty-Five
  64. Fifty-Six
  65. Fifty-Seven
  66. Fifty-Eight
  67. Fifty-Nine
  68. Sixty
  69. Sixty-One
  70. Acknowledgments
  71. About the Author
  72. Also by Linwood Barclay
  73. About the Publisher

Annie went to her phone to see how long Google Maps calculated it would take to do that journey on a bicycle: twenty-two hours. And that was probably an estimate of how long it would take an adult to ride that distance. On a decent bike. Not a kid on a crappy bicycle found in the back of a junk shop.

There was no way.

Even if she accepted the premise that Charlie could actually ride his bike all the way to Lucknow, someone his age traveling along one of the interstates would attract attention. Charlie would get picked up. Annie would be notified. He would have to take secondary roads to avoid detection, and that would take even longer.

So there was no way he could be there yet.

In which case, Annie thought, she would be able to catch up with him. If he’d left in the middle of the night, he had a good twenty- to eighteen-hour head start, but in her SUV, she could be where he was in a couple of hours.

Except which route did he take? Sherpa offered only a couple of choices to get to her destination in a hurry, but there were a hundred less direct ways to go. Charlie could have taken any one of them.

If she went straight to Lucknow, the odds were good she’d be there well ahead of Charlie. She’d check out the train store, and if he wasn’t there, she’d start doubling back, intercept him on the most likely route at the end of his travels.

Unless, of course, she was just wrong about all of it.

Suppose Charlie wasn’t even headed to Lucknow? Annie had rolled the dice and come to the conclusion that that was his intended destination because of the sticker on the bottom of a toy train. What had persuaded her was the manner in which that information had been delivered to her. The train spinning around and around that track on the floor of her studio, going so fast that the cars were scattered, one ending up at her foot with the address of Choo-Choo’s Trains in full view.

It had to be a message. How else could she interpret it? Annie was already convinced there was something very special—and not in a good way—about these trains Charlie had found in that shed. Annie had already seen things she could not explain. So when that address presented itself, she was ready to see it for what it was.

An invitation.

So now here she was on I-90 east, having put Syracuse in her rearview mirror, driving into the night, struggling to keep her eyes open.