The Twenty-Three Read online

  LINWOOD BARCLAY

  THE

  TWENTY-

  THREE

  For Neetha

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ONE

  DAY 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

  DAY TWO

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  SIXTY-FOUR

  SIXTY-FIVE

  SIXTY-SIX

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Also by Linwood Barclay

  Copyright

  THE

  TWENTY-

  THREE

  ONE

  I know I won’t be able to get them all. But I hope I’ll be able to get enough.

  DAY ONE

  TWO

  PATRICIA Henderson, forty-one, divorced, employed at the Weston Street Branch of the Promise Falls Public Library system as a computer librarian, was, on that Saturday morning of the long holiday weekend in May, among the first to die.

  She was scheduled to work that day. Patricia was annoyed the library board chose to keep all of the town’s libraries open. They were slated to close on the Sunday, and on the Monday, Memorial Day. So, if you’re going to close Sunday and Monday, why not close for the Saturday, too, and give everyone at the library the weekend off?

  But no.

  Not that Patricia had anywhere in particular to go.

  But still. It seemed ridiculous to her. She knew, given that it was a long weekend, there’d be very few people coming into the library. Wasn’t this town supposed to be in the midst of a financial crisis? Why keep the place open? Sure, there was a bit of a rush on Friday as some customers, particularly those who had cottages or other weekend places, took out books to keep them occupied through to Tuesday. The rest of the weekend was guaranteed to be quiet.

  Patricia was to be at the library by nine, when it opened, but that really meant she needed to be there by eight forty-five a.m. That would give her time to boot up all the computers, which were shut down every night at closing to save on electricity, even though the amount of power the branch’s thirty computers drew overnight was negligible. The library board, however, was on a “green” kick, which meant not only conserving electricity, but making sure recycling stations were set up throughout the library, and signs pinned to the bulletin boards to discourage the use of bottled water. One of the library board members saw the bottled water industry, and the bins of plastic bottles it created, as one of the great evils of the modern world, and didn’t want them in any of the Promise Falls branches. “Provide paper cups that can be filled at the facility’s water fountains,” she said. Which now meant that the recycling stations were overflowing with paper cups instead of water bottles.

  And guess who was pissed about that. What’s-his-name, that Finley guy who used to be mayor and now ran a water bottling company. Patricia had met him the first—and, she hoped, last—time just the other evening at the Constellation Drive-in. She’d taken her niece Kaylie and her little friend Alicia for the drive-in’s final night. Kaylie’s mom—Patricia’s sister, Val—had lent her their minivan, since Patricia’s Hyundai was too cramped for such an excursion. God, what a mistake that turned out to be. Not only did the screen come crashing down, scaring the little girls half to death, but then Finley showed up, trying to get his picture taken giving comfort to the wounded.

  Politics, Patricia thought. How she hated politics and everything about it.

  And thinking of politics, Patricia had found herself staring at the ceiling at four in the morning, worried about next week’s public meeting on “Internet filtering.” The debate had been going on for years and never seemed settled. Should the library put filters on computers used by patrons that would restrict access to certain Web sites? The idea was to keep youngsters from accessing pornography, but it was a continuing quagmire. The filters were often ineffective, blocking material that was not adult oriented, and allowing material that was. And aside from that, there were freedom-of-speech and freedom-to-read issues.

  Patricia knew the meeting would, as this kind of meeting always did, devolve into a shouting match between ultraconservatives who saw gay subtext in Teletubbies and didn’t want computers in the library to begin with, and ultra-left-wingers who believed if a kindergartner wanted to read Portnoy’s Complaint, so be it.

  At ten minutes after five, when she knew she wasn’t going to get back to sleep, she threw back the covers and decided to move forward with her day.

  She walked into the bathroom, flicked on the light, and studied her face in the mirror.

  “Ick,” she said, rubbing her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. “ABH.”

  That was the mantra from Charlene, her personal trainer. Always Be Hydrating. Which meant drinking at least seven full glasses of water a day.

  Patricia reached for the glass next to the sink, turned on the tap to let the water run until it was cold, filled the glass, and drank it down in one long gulp. She reached into the shower, turned on the taps, held her hand under the spray until it was hot enough, pulled the long white T-shirt she slept in over her head, and stepped in.

  She stayed in there until she could sense the hot water starting to run out. Shampooed and lathered up first, then stood under the water, feeling it rain across her face.

  Dried off.

  Dressed.

  Felt—and this was kind of weird—itchy all over.

  Did her hair and makeup.

  By the time she was in her apartment kitchen, it was six thirty. Still plenty of time to kill before driving to the library, a ten-minute commute. Or, if she decided to ride her bike, about twenty-five minutes.

  Patricia opened the cupboard, took out a small metal tray with more than a dozen bottles of pills and vitamins. She opened the lids on four, tapped out a calcium tablet, a low-dose aspirin, a vitamin D, and a multivitamin, which, while containing vitamin D, did not, she believed, have enough.

  She tossed them all into her mouth at once and washed them down with a small glass of water from the kitchen tap. Moved her upper body all around awkwardly, as though her blouse were made of wool.

  Patricia opened the refrigerator and stared. Did she want an egg? Hard-boiled? Fried? It seemed like a lot of work.
She closed the door and went back to the cupboard and brought down a box of Special K.

  “Whoa,” she said.

  It was like a wave washing over. Light-headedness. Like she’d been standing outside in a high wind and nearly gotten blown over.

  She put both hands on the edge of the counter to steady herself. Let it pass, she told herself. It’s probably nothing. Up too early.

  There, she seemed to be okay. She brought down a small bowl, started to pour some cereal into it.

  Blinked.

  Blinked again.

  She could see the “K” on the cereal box clearly enough, but “Special” was fuzzy around the edges. Which was pretty strange, because it was not exactly a tiny font. This was not newspaper type. The letters in “Special” were a good inch tall.

  Patricia squinted.

  “Special,” she said.

  She closed her eyes, shook her head, thinking that would set things straight. But when she opened her eyes, she was dizzy.

  “What the hell?” she said.

  I need to sit down.

  She left the cereal where it was and made her way to the table, pulled out the chair. Was the room spinning? Just a little?

  She hadn’t had the “whirlies” in a very long time. She’d gotten drunk more than a few times over the years with her ex, Stanley. But even then, she’d never had enough to drink that the room spun. She had to go back to her days as a student at Thackeray for a memory like that.

  But Patricia hadn’t been drinking. And what she was feeling now wasn’t the same as what she’d felt back then.

  For one thing, her heart was starting to race.

  She placed a hand on her chest, just above the swell of her breasts, to see if she could feel what she already knew she was feeling.

  Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-tha-thump.

  Her heart wasn’t just picking up the pace. It was doing so in an irregular fashion.

  Patricia moved her hand from her chest to her forehead. Her skin was cold and clammy.

  She wondered whether she could be having a heart attack. But she wasn’t old enough for one of those, was she? And she was in good shape. She worked out. She often rode her bike to work. She had a personal trainer, for God’s sake.

  The pills.

  Patricia figured she must have taken the wrong pills. But was there anything in that pill container that could do something like this to her?

  No.

  She stood, felt the floor move beneath her as though Promise Falls were undergoing an earthquake, which was not the sort of thing that happened often in upstate New York.

  Maybe, she thought, I should just get my ass to Promise Falls General.

  Gill Pickens, already in the kitchen, standing at the island, reading the New York Times on his laptop while he sipped on his third cup of coffee, was not overly surprised when his daughter, Marla, appeared with his ten-month-old grandson, Matthew, in her arms.

  “He wouldn’t stop fussing,” Marla said. “So I decided to get up and give him something to eat. Oh, thank God, you’ve already made coffee.”

  Gill winced. “I just killed off the first pot. I’ll make some more.”

  “That’s okay. I can—”

  “No, let me. You take care of Matthew.”

  “You’re up early,” she said to her father as she got Matthew strapped into his high chair.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he said.

  “Still?”

  Gill Pickens shrugged. “Jesus, Marla, it’s only been a little over two weeks. I didn’t sleep all that well before, anyway. You telling me you’ve been sleeping okay?”

  “Sometimes,” Marla said. “They gave me something.”

  Right. She’d been on a few things to help ease the shock of her mother’s death earlier that month, and learning that the baby she’d thought she lost at birth was actually alive.

  Matthew.

  But even if her prescriptions had allowed her to sleep better than her father some nights, there was still a cloud hanging over the house that showed no signs of moving off soon. Gill had not returned to work, in part because he simply wasn’t up to it, but also because child welfare authorities had allowed Marla to take care of Matthew only so long as she was living under the same roof as her father.

  Gill had felt a need to be present, although he wondered how much longer that would be necessary. All the evidence suggested Marla was a wonderful, loving mother. And the other good news was her acceptance of reality. In the days immediately following Agnes’s jump off Promise Falls, Marla maintained the belief that her mother was actually alive, and would be returning to help her with her child.

  Marla now understood that that was not going to happen.

  She filled a pot with hot water from the tap, set it on the counter instead of the stove, then took a bottle of formula she’d made up the day before from the refrigerator and placed it in the pot.

  Matthew had twisted himself around in the chair to see what was going on. His eyes landed on the bottle and he pointed.

  “Gah,” he said.

  “It’s coming,” Marla said. “I’m just letting it warm up some. But I have something else for you in the meantime.”

  She turned a kitchen chair around so she could sit immediately opposite Matthew. She twisted the lid on a tiny jar of pureed apricots and, with a very small plastic spoon, aimed some at the baby’s mouth.

  “You like this, don’t you?” she said, glancing in her father’s direction as he scanned his eyes over the laptop screen. He appeared to be squinting.

  “Need glasses, Dad?”

  He looked up. Gill suddenly looked very pale to her. “What?”

  “You looked like you were having trouble looking at the screen.”

  “Why are you doing that?” he asked her.

  Matthew swatted at the spoon, knocked some apricots onto his chair.

  “Why am I doing what?” Marla asked.

  “Moving around like that.”

  “I’m just sitting here,” she said, getting more apricot onto the spoon. “You want to bring that bottle over?”

  The pot with the bottle in it was sitting immediately to the right of the laptop, but Gill appeared unable to focus on it.

  “Is it funny in here?” he asked, setting down his mug of coffee too close to the edge of the island. It tipped, hit the floor, and shattered, but Gill did not look down.

  “Dad?”

  Marla got out of the chair and moved quickly to her father’s side. “Are you okay?”

  “Need to get Matthew to the hospital,” he said.

  “Matthew? Why would Matthew have to go to the hospital?”

  Gill looked into his daughter’s face. “Is something wrong with Matthew? Do you think he has what I have?”

  “Dad?” Marla struggled to keep the panic out of her voice. “What’s going on with you? You’re breathing really fast. Why are you doing that?”

  He put a hand on his chest, felt his heart beating through his robe.

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” he said.

  But he did not. Instead, he dropped to the floor.

  Hillary and Josh Lydecker had been frantic for four days.

  They had not seen their son, twenty-two-year-old George Lydecker, since late Tuesday. Now here it was Saturday morning, and they still had no idea where he was.

  Early Wednesday morning the family was supposed to have flown out to Vancouver to visit Josh’s relatives. When George left the house Tuesday evening, he had promised to be home early so that he could get in at least a few hours of sleep before the taxi came for everyone.

  His parents were not shocked when he failed to get home at a decent hour, but they were surprised he didn’t make it home at all. It would have been just like George to show up at the house as the rest of his family was putting their bags into the cab, grinning stupidly, weaving slightly, saying something like, “Told ya I’d be here.”

  But that had not happened.

  George had always been t
heir wild child—their daughter, Cassandra, sixteen, was a perfect angel, at least so far—with a reputation for getting into trouble, most recently at Thackeray College, where he had, among other things, turned a professor’s Smart car onto its roof (no real damage done, but still) and put a baby alligator into Thackeray Pond. He drank too much, even by the standards of college-age boys, and often acted impulsively without considering the consequences. He thrived on risk. Back when he was in his teens, he was caught twice wandering the halls of his high school in the middle of the night when the facility was supposedly all locked up.

  “What has he done?” Hillary kept asking her husband. “What has that damn fool done?”

  Josh Lydecker kept shaking his head. For the first two days, he kept saying, “He’ll show up. He will. The dumbass is sleeping it off somewhere, that’s all.”

  But by day three, even Josh had come to believe that something serious had happened.

  The morning of the first day, Hillary had called all of George’s friends, including Derek Cutter, to see if anyone had seen him. She got George’s sister, Cassandra, to spread the word via social media so that everyone they knew could be on the lookout for George.

  Nothing.

  By the afternoon, Hillary wanted to bring in the Promise Falls police. Josh had objected at first, still believing George would turn up. He was also worried that whatever was delaying George’s return might not be something they wanted the police to know about. Although he did not share this thought with his wife, it occurred to him that maybe George and his buddies were celebrating the end of the Thackeray school year by engaging the services of prostitutes. Maybe they’d gone to Albany and were doing God knew what.

  But Hillary called the police anyway.

  They took down all the relevant information. But a young man who liked to party hard, who had a history of mischief, was not exactly a high priority for the local police. And it wasn’t as though they had nothing to do. There’d been some crazy shoot-out at a Laundromat the other day, and it hadn’t even been a week since some nutcase had blown up the drive-in on the outskirts of Promise Falls and killed four people.

  Whoever’d done that was still out there.

  The Lydeckers had not just sat around doing nothing the last four days. They’d been out every day, driving around town, going out to the college, popping into local bars, checking back in with George’s friends. They felt they had to be doing something.