Chapters (73)
- Cover
- Dedication
- Prologue
- Part IAnnie
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Part IIHarry
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Part IIIAnnie
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Part IVHarry
- 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
- Part VAnnie
- Forty-Nine
- Fifty
- Fifty-One
- Fifty-Two
- Fifty-Three
- Fifty-Four
- Fifty-Five
- Fifty-Six
- Fifty-Seven
- Fifty-Eight
- Fifty-Nine
- Sixty
- Sixty-One
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Also by Linwood Barclay
- About the Publisher
She clicked on the photo. It was of one of the bedrooms she’d already seen a picture of in the listing, but it was all dressed. A single bed with a Spider-Man bedspread. A set of shelves with books and half a dozen rubber dinosaurs. Three framed Harry Potter movie posters on the wall. A large window afforded a beautiful view of green fields and trees and what looked to be, in the distance, a set of railroad tracks.
Jesus, Annie thought. Charlie will love this.
She clicked on reply and wrote a note to Finnegan that read, in its entirety, You are a crafty son of a bitch. She hit send. The email had no sooner whooshed away than she decided to send a quick follow-up: How on earth did you find this place?
While she waited for him to get back to her, she rose from the kitchen table and went up to the bedroom she once shared with John and began sorting through what she would take. When she was done choosing her own clothes, she’d sort out what she needed to take for Charlie.
Now that so much of the decision-making was done, Annie felt there wasn’t a moment to waste. We are gettin’ out of Dodge, she thought.
But there were things to do. Tell the neighbors she was going to be away. Have the mail held. Not that there was ever much. All her bills either arrived by email or were automatically paid. About the only thing she couldn’t control were unexpected FedEx or DHL deliveries of foreign-language editions of her books. She never knew when they were coming, or who they might be coming from, so there was no way to intercept them. She could ask one of the neighbors to check the front stoop every couple of days to see whether anything was sitting there.
When she went to meet Charlie at the end of the school day, she said, “How would you feel if I pulled you out of school a week early?”
The last day of school before the beginning of the summer break was the end of the following week.
“Why?” Charlie asked, stepping on every crack in the sidewalk as they made their way home.
“You know how I’ve been talking about us taking a break from the city? Out in the country. Maybe upstate?”
“Yeah?”
“I found a place. Well, Fin did.”
“Are there buildings there?”
“Are there buildings?”
Charlie nodded.
“Of course there are buildings. And we’d be living in a big house. Probably bigger than our house here.”
“But you said it was in the country. I didn’t think there were buildings in the country.”
“You’ve been in the country before. Like when we went to Cape Cod.”
He looked at her like she was short a few marbles. “That was Cape Cod. Not the country.”