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

She’d slept poorly the night before. Finnegan’s death had hit her hard, and she’d spent much of the night staring at the ceiling. She clearly had fallen asleep at some point. Otherwise, she would have heard Charlie get up and try to slip out of the house. She’d have caught him in the act.

So it was little wonder that in the early hours of the next morning, she was having trouble concentrating on the road ahead. Twice her eyes closed for an instant, the SUV drifting toward the shoulder. Luckily, it was one of the newer models that sent a vibration through the steering wheel when a driver wandered off course.

Despite wanting to get to Lucknow as quickly as possible, Annie knew she wasn’t going to be much help to her son if she ran her car into the ditch and killed herself. On top of that, the car was down to less than a quarter tank. Once she had passed Herkimer, she promised herself she’d stop at the next service center along that stretch of the New York Thruway. She didn’t have long to wait.

She hit her blinker and exited. She parked, went inside and hit the bathroom, then bought herself a large coffee, black. Maybe that would keep her awake. She got back in the car, pulled ahead to the pumps, and filled the car up with premium unleaded. When she got back behind the wheel, she took a sip of her coffee, and keyed the ignition. But she had only driven a few car lengths when she began to feel woozy. She steered over to the far side of the lot, put the car in park, and took another drink from her take-out cup.

Could be the coffee wasn’t going to do the trick.

While she debated whether to surrender to sleep, even for the shortest of naps, she got out her phone and did a search on “Lucknow.” For a while now, she’d been thinking that the name of the town rang a bell, that it was known for something, but she couldn’t recall what. But she thought it had to be some time ago, when she was younger and paying as much attention to the six o’clock news as she was to her parents telling her what to do with her life.

Only a few hundred stories came up.

All of them were, in one way or another, about the “Lucknow Disaster,” a catastrophic accident almost two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Annie scrolled through a few stories that laid out the basics of what had happened but zeroed in on a story from the New York Times that had been written in only the last few months.

Under the headline lucknow explosion fallout continues after 23 years was a lengthy story by a reporter named Carol Hannigan. It began: