Never Saw It Coming

by Linwood Barclay

  “What do you mean, not time?”

  “There’s not time to get every place in person. I can get it done here faster, get the work done.”

  “Thomas, what work?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I’ll have to check and see if it’s okay to tell you.”

  I let out a long sigh, ran my hand over the top of my head. I was exhausted. I decided to change the subject.

  “You remember Julie McGill? From school?”

  “Yes,” Thomas said. “What about her?”

  “She came to the funeral. She asked about you. Asked me to say hi.”

  Thomas looked at me, expectantly. “Are you going to say it?”

  “What?” Then I got it. “Hi. If you’d come to the service, she could have said it to you herself.” He didn’t react to that. His refusal to attend was still a sore point with me. “Was she in your class?”

  “No,” he said. “She was a year ahead of me, and a year behind you.” Thomas paused. “She lived at 34 Arbor Street, which is a two-story house with the door in the middle and windows on each side and three windows on the second floor and the house is painted green and there’s a chimney on the right side and the mailbox has flowers stenciled on it. She was always nice to me. Is she still pretty?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Her hair’s still black but it’s short now.”

  “Does she still have a bod?” He asked this without a hint of lasciviousness, like he wanted to know whether she was still driving a Subaru.

  “I would say yes,” I said. “Did you guys . . . did you have a thing?”

  “A thing?” He really didn’t know.

  “Did you go out?”

  “No,” he said. I could have guessed. Thomas had never had a steady girlfriend, and had only gone on dates a handful of times that I could remember. His odd, inward nature didn’t help, but I was never all that sure he cared about girls to begin with. Back when I was hiding skin mags under the mattress, Thomas was already amassing his huge map collection.

  “But I liked her,” Thomas said. “She rescued me.”

  I cocked my head, trying to recall. “That time, with the Landry twins?”

  Thomas nodded. He’d been walking home from school when Skyler and Stan Landry, a couple of bullies with the combined IQ of a bucket of primer, had blocked his path and taunted him about how he talked to himself in class. They were starting to push him around when Julie McGill showed up.

  “What’d she do?”

  “She yelled at them to leave me alone. Stood between them and me. Called them cowards. And something else.”

  “What else?”

  “Fuckheads.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “It was kind of embarrassing, a girl standing up for you,” Thomas said. “But they’d have beat me up good if she hadn’t come by. Is there going to be any dessert?”

  “Huh? Uh, I don’t know. I think I saw the end of a container of ice cream in the freezer there.”

  “Could you bring it up to me? I’ve been down here longer than I planned and I need to get back.” He was already on his feet.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  “I saw something,” Thomas said.

  “What?”

  “I saw something. On the computer. I think it would be okay for you to have a look at it. I don’t think it would violate any security clearance or anything.”

  “What is it?”

  “You should just take a look at it. It would take too long to explain.”

  “Can you give me a hint?” I asked.

  And he said again, “You should take a look at it.” He paused. “When you bring up the ice cream.”

  Five

  I went up to Thomas’s room five minutes later. There was a tub of vanilla in the freezer and I was just barely able to scrape out enough for one small serving, which was fine, because I didn’t have much of an appetite.

  I should have known better than to think I could reason things out with Thomas about how he spent his days. My parents had tried for years without success. I was a fool to think I could accomplish anything different. My brother was who he was. He’d always been this way and there was every reason to believe he always would.

  The signs came early. At least some of them. The fascination with maps revealed itself when he was around six. At the time, my parents thought it was pretty cool. When guests came over they’d show off Thomas the way parents of a child piano prodigy would make him play something by Brahms. “Pick a country,” Dad would say to visitors. “Any country.”

  My parents’ friends, not really sure what it was Thomas did, would finally come up with one. “Argentina,” they might say. And then Thomas, a pencil and notepad in hand, would sketch out the country. Add some dots for cities and label them. Write in the names of neighboring nations. Then he’d hand it over for perusal.

  The thing was, our visitors generally didn’t know Argentina from Arkansas, and didn’t have a clue whether the map they’d been handed was accurate, so Dad would pull an atlas off the shelf, open it to Argentina, and say, “Look at that! Will ya look at that? Can you believe it? He even got the city of Mendoza in just the right spot. Kid’s going to be a cartographer or something, I guarantee it.”

  If Thomas minded being offered up as a parlor trick, he never voiced an objection. At the time, he just seemed like a very gifted baby brother. Somewhat withdrawn, shy, but no indication that he was troubled in any serious way.

  That would come soon enough.

  My parents were proud as could be of him. Me, not so much. At least not on family vacations, when Mom would pack everyone’s bag and Dad would load them into the trunk and we’d hit the road for Atlantic City or Florida or Boston. Mom had no sense of direction and had a terrible time reading the road maps the gas stations gave out, although she was a genius at folding them back up perfectly.

  So Dad would read the map. When people today talk about the dangers of sending text messages while driving, I want to laugh. My father, had there been smartphones back then, could have tapped out Moby Dick while navigating the Buffalo bypass. He’d have Mom fold the map to a manageable size, drape it over the top of the steering wheel, and glance down every couple of seconds as we roamed across America.

  Until Thomas got to be seven.

  “I’ll read the map, Dad,” he offered.

  Dad ignored him at first, but Thomas persisted. Finally Dad figured, what the hell, let the kid think he was being useful. But Thomas wasn’t playing some game. He wasn’t pretending to navigate, the way some children, long before they know how to read, will rhyme off words when they open the pages of a book.

  Thomas only had to glance at it for a few seconds before he said something like, “Just stay on 90 for another ten miles then get off and go east on 22.”

  “Let me have a look at that,” Dad said, taking the map back and studying it over the steering wheel.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. “The kid’s right.”

  Thomas was always right when it came to reading maps.

  I’d try to snatch them from him, figuring that, as the elder sibling, I should be the navigator. It tore me apart to see my father consulting my baby brother for assistance.

  “Raymond!” my father would shout at me. “Leave your damn brother alone and let him do his job! He knows what he’s doing.”

  I’d look at Mom, hoping for some sort of support. “You have things you’re good at, too,” she’d say to me. “But Thomas is really good at this.”

  “What am I good at?” I asked.

  She had to think. “You’re a really good drawer. Maybe you could draw some pictures of the places we visit on our trip. That would be fun.”

  How patronizing was that? We had a camera. What the hell purpose was served by my providing artistic renderings of the tourist attractions we visited? How was that supposed to help? Insulted, I reached into the case where I kept paper and pencils and safety scissors that I brought along to entertain my
self on these trips and handed her an untouched sheet of black construction paper.

  “That’s the Carlsbad Caverns,” I told her. We had been there the day before. “You can frame it when we get home.”

  There was a hint of things to come, where Thomas was concerned, during a summer trip to a lodge in southern Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half southeast of Pittsburgh, when I was eleven and Thomas was nine. It was a stately old resort built on the side of a mountain; looking back, the place puts me in mind of the Overlook Hotel from the Stephen King movie The Shining, but there wasn’t blood flowing out of the elevators or a dead woman in a bathtub or some little kid pedaling a Big Wheel flat out down the hallways. There was mini-golf, and a pool, and bingo nights, and cookies and lemonade on the porch every afternoon at four. It was a fun week, but the most memorable part of the vacation was the drive home, when Dad decided to deviate from the route Thomas had prepared for him.

  Thomas had spent several days—ignoring Mom’s pleas that he come for a swim or play horseshoes—figuring out that we needed to take 99 north up through Altoona, and while we started out intending to go that way, Mom decided she wanted to go home by way of Harrisburg, just in case there was any good shopping there, and that meant going east on 76. It would take us quite a few miles out of our way.

  “You can’t do that!” Thomas said from the back seat once he got wind of this. “We have to take 99!”

  “Your mother wants to go to Harrisburg, Thomas,” Dad said. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “I spent all week planning the route!” He was starting to cry.

  “Why don’t you start plotting out a different route home from Harrisburg?” Mom suggested. “That would be fun.”

  “No! We have to go the way the map says,” Thomas insisted.

  “Listen, son, we’re just going to—”

  “No!”

  “Jesus, Ray? Get out some games or something and play with your brother. Where’s the Mad Libs book?”

  But now Thomas had undone his seat belt and gotten up on his knees on his seat, and was starting to bang his head against the window.

  Dad said, “What the f— “

  “Thomas!” Mom shouted.

  I grabbed for him but he pushed me away. He kept banging his head against the window. A small smear of blood appeared on the glass.

  Dad swung the car over onto the shoulder. Mom jumped out, nearly losing her footing on the gravel, and opened the back door. She wrapped her arms around my brother, pulling his bruised and bloodied head to her breast.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re going to take 99. We’re going to go home just the way you said.”

  * * *

  I didn’t like going into Thomas’s room. Entering his domain made me uncomfortable in the same way the decorated hall did, only more so. Maps were stuck to the wall everywhere and scattered across the floor. The one set of bookshelves spilled over with various editions of atlases, old AAA TripTiks with the spiral binding (did anyone use those anymore?), large cardboard tubes with maps Thomas had ordered off the Internet, hundreds of printouts of maps he’d studied online. Satellite shots of cities I couldn’t instantly recognize.

  It was hard to find the single bed pushed up against one wall, it was so buried with paper. It was like vandals had gone on a rampage at the National Geographic headquarters. I wondered how many fire codes were being violated. Between this room and the map-plastered hall, all someone had to do was wander through with a lit candle and this place would go up in smoke in seconds.

  I seriously had to think about that.

  Thomas was seated at his computer. He had one keyboard and three flat-screen monitors arrayed in front of him, each showing a different browser. On the screens were three images of the same street—left, middle, and right-side views. At the top of each screen was the Web site address: whirl360.com.

  I had to admit, it was a pretty amazing Web site. Ten years ago I couldn’t have imagined anything like this.

  Once you were there, you basically had the world at your fingertips. You picked a spot anywhere on the globe and initially viewed the location from above, either in a traditional map form, or in satellite mode, as though you were suspended in the sky. You could zero in right down to the roof vents on the skyscrapers.

  Cool enough.

  But it got so much better.

  You could click on a specific street, and see it. Really see it. Like you were standing there, right in the middle of it. With each click of the mouse you progressed several yards ahead. When you clicked and held, you could move to the left or right, or all the way around for a 360-degree view. If something in a store window or a restaurant caught your eye, you could zoom in on it. Read the daily special—“Liver and onions $5.99”—if you wanted.

  It was the kind of site I found myself on occasionally. The year before, on a trip to Toronto, I’d visited a friend from my college days who lived just south of Queen Street in the Beach, a trendy neighborhood in the city’s east end. In his e-mail, he told me to come by the house; then we’d head to an Italian restaurant that was only a short walk away.

  I went on Whirl360, did the walk from his place up to Queen, then explored a couple of blocks in each direction. Only found two restaurants. I looked them up online, found the one billing itself as Italian, studied their online menu, and knew before I got there I was going to have the lobster ravioli.

  So I could appreciate the fascination, understand how for someone like Thomas, the arrival of this kind of technology was a dream come true. Like a Star Trek fan waking up one morning to find out he was actually living on the USS Enterprise.

  The street Thomas was currently fixated on was unknown to me. It was narrow, just enough room for one lane of traffic, with cars parallel parked down the right side. I was guessing maybe someplace in Europe.

  I set the ice cream next to the phone. Thomas had his own line up here that our parents had put in back when Internet hookup was over the phone. Thomas spent so much time on the Net that our parents were missing calls and couldn’t place any, so installing a second line meant Thomas could be on as long as he wanted. Now, with Wi-Fi in the house, Thomas didn’t have much need for the phone, and about the only calls he got were from telemarketers.

  He glanced at the ice cream and said, “No chocolate sauce?”

  “We’re out,” I said. I hadn’t actually looked. “Where’s this?”

  “Salem Street.”

  “Salem Street where?”

  “Boston. In the North End.”

  “Oh, okay, yeah, of course. I thought you were spending all your time lately in Paris.”

  “I get around,” Thomas said. I didn’t know whether he meant to be amusing, but I laughed. “You see anything weird?” he asked.

  I looked. People, their faces blurred—that seemed to be a Whirl360 protocol, to blur faces that could be seen head-on, as well as license plates—were walking along the street. There were cars. Some street signs I couldn’t make out.

  “No,” I said.

  “See this silver SUV here?” He pointed. It was visible on the right screen, a profile shot.

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “Look what he’s done. He’s backed into this car, this blue one. You can just see where he’s hit the blue car’s headlight.”

  “Can you magnify it?” I asked.

  Thomas clicked a couple of times. The image of the SUV’s rear bumper and the blue car’s front end got bigger, but blurrier.

  “I think you might be right,” I said.

  “You can see it, right?”

  “Yeah. So just at the moment the Whirl360 people were driving around with their picture car, they got a shot of this guy backing into the blue car. Son of a gun. They caught an accident in progress, and you just found it. That it?”

  “I bet the SUV driver didn’t even know he did it,” Thomas said, spooning some ice cream into his mouth.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “I’m gonna watch some TV. Want to join
me? We’ll order up a movie or something. Something with authentic locations that won’t annoy you.”

  “We need to report this,” Thomas said. “The owner of the blue car needs to know who did this.”

  “Thomas, honestly. First of all, they blur all the license plates, so there’s no way you could ever find out who owns the SUV, or the blue car. And second, this picture, this image of this street, has probably been up here for months, even a couple of years. I mean, you’re talking about some minor damage that happened God knows how long ago. The blue car’s owner got that fixed a year back, for all we know. He might not even own that car anymore. This is not some live stream, you know. These are snapshots in time.”

  Thomas didn’t say anything.

  “What?” I said. “Talk to me.”

  “It’s not right to stand by and do nothing,” he said.

  “We’re not—Jesus, it’s not like you just saw the SUV run some guy down. This is exactly what I’m talking about, Thomas. You’re spending too much time up here. You need to get out. Come down and watch a movie. Dad got this great TV. Wide screen, HD. It’s going to waste down there.”

  “You go,” he said. “I’ll be down in a little while. You pick a movie and we’ll watch it.”

  I went downstairs and turned on the television, then hit the right buttons on the collection of remotes so I could connect to a movie service.

  I came across a film, only a couple of years old, made in New Zealand, called The Map Reader.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. “Hey, Thomas! There’s a movie here you’ll love. About a kid who loves maps!”

  “Sure thing,” he said. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  He didn’t come down. After waiting fifteen minutes, I turned off the TV without watching anything, went into the kitchen, and drank Dad’s very last beer.

  Six

  Nine months earlier, Allison Fitch lifts her head an inch off the pillow on her pullout couch and looks at the digital clock readout on the DVD player on the other side of the small living room. Nearly noon. She tries to remember to close the blinds when she gets home from a late shift so the sun won’t wake her in the morning, but unless you tape black paper to the entire window, or got some of those heavy curtains that block out everything, you really can’t keep the rays out.